All living forms have not been preserved in the fossil series, the chances of preservation being few and far between ... [even primitive man] burying or burning his dead.
This is just what we ourselves claim. It is just as possible that the future may have in store for us the discovery of the giant skeleton of an Atlantean, thirty feet high, as of the fossil of a pithecoid “missing link”; only the former is more probable.
Section III. The Fossil Relics of Man and the Anthropoid Ape.
A. Geological Facts Bearing On The Question Of Their Relationship.
The data derived from scientific research as to “primeval man” and the ape lend no countenance to theories deriving the former from the latter. “Where, then, must we look for primeval man?”—still queries Mr. Huxley, after having vainly searched for him in the very depths of the Quaternary strata.
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 palæontologist? Time will show.[1609]
It will—undeniably—and thus vindicate the Anthropology of the Occultists. Meanwhile, in his eagerness to vindicate Mr. Darwin's Descent of Man, Mr. Boyd Dawkins believes that he has all but found the “missing link”—in theory. It was due to Theologians more than to Geologists that, till nearly 1860, man had been considered as a relic no older than the Adamic orthodox 6,000 years. As Karma would have it, though, it was left to a French Abbé—Bourgeois—to give this easy-going theory even a worse blow than had been given to it by the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes. Everyone knows that the Abbé discovered and brought to light good evidence that man was already in existence during the Miocene period, for flints of undeniably human making were excavated from Miocene strata. In the words of the author of Modern Science and Modern Thought: