elsewhere. But it is useless to speculate on this subject, for an ape nearly as large as a man existed in Europe during the Upper Miocene period; and since so remote a period the earth has certainly undergone many great revolutions, and there has been ample time for migration on the largest scale." Man's progenitors therefore, like this ape, may have been Europeans, yet Europe, no less than Africa or Asia, has hitherto utterly failed to furnish any fossil remains, either of the immediate, or of the remote, progenitors of man.

"The fossil remains of man hitherto discovered," says Prof. Huxley, "do not seem to me to take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form, by the modification of which he has, probably, become what he is.

Where then must we look for primeval man? Was the oldest Homo sapiens pliocene, or miocene, or yet more ancient? In still older strata do the fossilized bones of an ape more anthropoid, or a man more pithecoid than any yet known await the researches of some unborn paleontologist? Time will show."

So be it dies declarabit. But, meantime this doctrine of man's derivation from an unknown ape, in an undiscovered continent, rests—by the 1 "Descent of Man," vol. i. p. 199.

admissions of its advocates-not on knowledge, but on the want of knowledge. Absolutely powerless to derive man from the ape, it is not less powerless to derive the cardinal ape from the primordial form. And yet it is in the name of Science that we are presented with this paraded pedantry of Nescience, and are asked to believe that "IN THE DIM OBSCURITY of the Past, we can SEE "1 the unreal nonentities, the airy nothings, required by the "theoretic conception," as they "must have" existed-" once upon a time" ! 2

1 "Descent of Man," vol. ii. p. 389.
2 Vide Appendix, Note F.

CHAPTER XII.

MEN.

"In every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world!"-Carlyle.

"Mens cujusque, is est quisque.”—Cic., Somn. Scip., 8.

“We are the miracle of miracles,—the great inscrutable mystery of God. We cannot understand it, we know not how to speak of it; but we may feel and know, if we like, that it is verily so."-Carlyle.