the first men who appeared on earth, or at least like them. The life the men of the mammoth-period must have led at Abbeville or Torquay, shows on the face of it reasons against its being man's primitive life. These old stone-age men are more likely to have been tribes whose ancestors while living under a milder climate gained some rude skill in the arts of procuring food and defending themselves, so that afterwards they were able by a hard struggle to hold their own against the harsh weather and fierce beasts of the quaternary period.

How long ago this period was, no certain knowledge is yet to be had. Some geologists have suggested twenty thousand years, while others say a hundred thousand or more, but these are guesses made where there is no scale to reckon time by. It is safest to be content at present to regard it as a geological period lying back out of the range of chronology. It is thought by several eminent geologists that stones shaped by man, and therefore proving his presence, occur in England and France in beds deposited before the last glacial period, when much of the continent lay submerged under an icy sea, where drifting icebergs dropped on what is now dry land their huge boulders of rock transported from distant mountains. This cannot be taken as proved, but if true it would immensely increase our estimate of man's age. At any rate the conclusive proofs of man's existence during the quaternary or mammoth period do not even bring us into view of the remoter time when human life first began on earth. Thus geology establishes a principle which lies at the very foundation of the science of anthropology. Until of late, while it used to be reckoned by chronologists that the earth and man were less than 6,000 years old, the science of geology could hardly exist, there being no room for its long processes of

building up the strata containing the remains of its vast successions of plants and animals. These are now accounted for on the theory that geological time extends over millions of years. It is true that man reaches back comparatively little way into this immense lapse of time. Yet his first appearance on earth goes back to an age compared with which the ancients, as we call them, are but moderns. The few thousand years of recorded history only take us back to a præhistoric period of untold length, during which took place the primary distribution of mankind over the earth and the development of the great races, the formation of speech and the settlement of the great families of language, and the growth of culture up to the levels of the old world nations of the East, the forerunners and founders of modern civilized life.

Having now sketched what history, archæology, and geology teach as to man's age and course on the earth, we shall proceed in the following chapters to describe more fully Man and his varieties as they appear in natural history, next examining the nature and growth of Language, and afterwards the development of the knowledge, arts, and institutions, which make up Civilization.

CHAPTER II.

MAN AND OTHER ANIMALS.

Vertebrate Animals, 35-Succession and Descent of Species, 37-Apes and Man, comparison of structure, 38-Hands and Feet, 42-Hair, 44-Features, 44-Brain, 45-Mind in Lower Animals and Man, 47.

To understand rightly the construction of the human body, and to compare our own limbs and organs with those of other animals, requires a thorough knowledge of anatomy and physiology. It will not be attempted here to draw up an abstract of these sciences, for which such handbooks should be studied as Huxley's Elementary Physiology and Mivart's Elementary Anatomy. But it will be useful to give a slight outline of the evidence as to man's place in the animal world, which may be done without requiring special knowledge in the reader.

That the bodies of other animals more or less correspond in structure to our own is one of the lessons we begin to learn in the nursery. Boys playing at horses, one on all-fours and the other astride on his back, have already some notion how the imagined horse matches a real one as to head, eyes, and ears, mouth and teeth, back and legs. If one questions a country lad sitting on a stile watching the hunters go by, he knows well enough that the huntsman and his horse, the hounds and the hare they

are chasing, are all creatures built up on the same kind of bony scaffolding or skeleton, that their life is carried on by means of similar organs, lungs to breathe with, a stomach to digest the food taken in by the mouth and gullet, a heart to drive the blood through the vessels, while the eyes, ears, and nostrils receive in them all in like manner the impressions of sight, hearing, and smell. Very likely the peasant has taken all this as a matter of course without ever reflecting on it, and even more educated people are apt to do the same. Had it come as a new discovery, it would have set any intelligent mind thinking what must be the tie or connexion between creatures thus formed as it were on one original pattern, only varied in different modes for different ends. The scientific comparison of animals, even when made in the most elementary way, does at once bring this great problem before our minds. In some cases, more exact knowledge shows that the first rough comparison of man and beast may want correction. For instance, when a man's skeleton and a horse's are set side by side, it becomes plain that the horse's knee and hock do not answer, as is popularly supposed, to our elbow and knee, but to our wrist and ankle. The examination of the man's limb and the horse's leads to a further and remarkable conclusion, that the horse's fore- and hind-leg really correspond to a man's arm and leg in which all the fingers and toes should have become useless and shrunk away, except one finger and one toe, which are left to be walked upon, with the nail become a hoof. The general law to be learnt from the series of skeletons in a natural history museum, is that through order after order of fishes, reptiles, birds, beasts, up to man himself, a common type or pattern may be traced, belonging to all animals which are vertebrate, that is, which have a backbone. Limbs may still be recognised

though their shape and service have changed, and though they may even have dwindled into remnants, as if left not for use, but to keep up the old model. Thus, although a perch's skeleton differs so much from a man's, its pectoral and ventral fins still correspond to arms and legs. Snakes are mostly limbless, yet there are forms which connect them with the quadrupeds, as for instance, the boa-constrictor's skeleton shows a pair of rudimentary hind-legs. The Greenland whale has no visible hind-limbs, and its fore-limbs are paddles or flippers, yet when dissected, the skeleton shows not only remnants of what in man would be the leg-bones, but the flipper actually has within it the set of bones which belong to the human arm and hand. It is popularly considered that man is especially distinguished from the lower animals by not having a tail; yet the tail is plainly to be seen in the human skeleton, represented by the last tapering vertebræ of the spine.

All these are animals now living. But geology shows that in long-past ages the earth has been inhabited by species different from those at present existing, and yet evidently related to them. In the tertiary period, Australia was distinguished as now by its marsupial or pouched animals, but these were not of any present species, and mostly far larger; even the tallest kangaroo now to be seen is a puny creature in comparison with the enormous extinct diprotodon, whose skull was three feet long. So in South America there lived huge edentate animals, now poorly represented by the sloths, anteaters and armadillos, to be seen in our Zoological Gardens. Elephants are found fossil in the miocene deposits, but the species were all different from those in Africa and India now. These are common examples of the great principle now received by all zoologists, that from remote geological antiquity