Comparative philology has recently shown that human speech is polyphyletic in origin; that we must distinguish several (probably many) different primitive tongues that were developed independently. The evolution of language also teaches us (both from its ontogeny in the child and its phylogeny in the race) that human speech proper was only gradually developed after the rest of the body had attained its characteristic form. It is probable that language was not evolved until after the dispersal of the various species and races of men, and this probably took place at the commencement of the Quaternary or Diluvial period. The speechless ape-men or Alali certainly existed towards the end of the Tertiary period, during the Pliocene, possibly even the Miocene, period.
The third, and last, stage of our animal ancestry is the true or speaking man (Homo), who was gradually evolved from the preceding stage by the advance of animal language into articulate human speech. As to the time and place of this real "creation of man" we can only express tentative opinions. It was probably during the Diluvial period in the hotter zone of the Old World, either on the mainland in tropical Africa or Asia or on an earlier continent (Lemuria—now sunk below the waves of the Indian Ocean), which stretched from East Africa (Madagascar, Abyssinia) to East Asia (Sunda Islands, Further India). I have given fully in my History of Creation, (chapter 28) the weighty reasons for claiming this descent of man from the anthropoid eastern apes, and shown how we may conceive the spread of the various races from this "Paradise" over the whole earth. I have also dealt fully with the relations of the various races and species of men to each other.
SYNOPSIS OF THE CHIEF SECTIONS OF OUR STEM-HISTORY.
FIRST STAGE: THE PROTISTS.
Man's ancestors are unicellular protozoa, originally unnucleated Monera like the Chromacea, structureless green particles of plasm; afterwards real nucleated cells (first plasmodomous Protophyta, like the Palmella; then plasmophagous Protozoa, like the Amoeba).
SECOND STAGE: THE BLASTAEADS.
Man's ancestors are round coenobia or colonies of Protozoa; they consist of a close association of many homogeneous cells, and thus are individuals of the second order. They resemble the round cell-communities of the Magospherae and Volvocina, equivalent to the ontogenetic blastula: hollow globules, the wall of which consists of a single layer of ciliated cells (blastoderm).
THIRD STAGE: THE GASTRAEADS.
Man's ancestors are Gastraeads, like the simplest of the actual Metazoa (Prophysema, Olynthus, Hydra, Pemmatodiscus). Their body consists merely of a primitive gut, the wall of which is made up of the two primary germinal layers.