They must either have been chipped by man, or, as Mr. Boyd Dawkins supposes, by the dryopithecus or some other anthropoid ape which had a dose of intelligence so much superior to the gorilla or chimpanzee, as to be able to fabricate tools. But in this case the problem would be solved and the missing link discovered, for such an ape might well have been the ancestor of Palæolithic man.[1610]
Or—the descendant of Eocene man, which is a variant offered to the theory. Meanwhile, the dryopithecus with such fine mental endowments is yet to be discovered. On the other hand, Neolithic and even Palæolithic man having become an absolute certainty, and as the same author justly observes:
If 100,000,000 years have elapsed since the earth became sufficiently solidified to support vegetable and animal life, the Tertiary period may have lasted for 5,000,000; or for 10,000,000 years, if the life-sustaining order of things has lasted, as Lyell supposes for at least 200,000,000 years—[1611]
why should not another theory be tried? Let us carry man, as a hypothesis, to the close of Mesozoic times—admitting argumenti causâ that the (much more recent) higher apes then existed! This would allow ample time for man and the modern apes to have diverged from the mythical “ape more anthropoid,” and even for the latter to have degenerated into those that are found mimicking man in using “branches of trees as clubs, and cracking cocoa-nuts with hammer and stones.”[1612] Some savage tribes of hillmen in India build their abodes on trees, just as the gorillas build their dens. The question, which of the two, the beast or the man, has become the imitator of the other, is scarcely an open one, even granting Mr. Boyd Dawkins' theory. The fanciful character of this hypothesis, is, however, generally admitted. It is argued that while in the Pliocene and Miocene periods there were true apes and baboons, and man was undeniably contemporaneous with the former of these times—though, as we see, orthodox Anthropology still hesitates, in the teeth of facts, to place him in the era of the dryopithecus, which latter—
Has been considered by some anatomists as in some respects superior to the chimpanzee or the gorilla ... [1613]
yet, in the Eocene there have been no other fossil primates unearthed and no pithecoid stocks found save a few extinct lemurian forms. And we find it also hinted that the dryopithecus may have been the “missing link,” though the brain of the creature no more warrants the theory than does the brain of the modern gorilla. (See also Gaudry's speculations.)
Now we would ask who among the Scientists is ready to prove that there was no man in existence in the early Tertiary period? What is it that prevented his presence? Hardly thirty years ago his existence any farther back than six or seven thousand years was indignantly denied. Now he is refused admission into the Eocene age. Next century it may become a question whether man was not contemporary with the “flying dragon,” the pterodactyl, the plesiosaurus and iguanodon, etc. Let us listen, however, to the echo of Science.
Now, wherever anthropoid apes lived it is clear that, whether as a question of anatomical structure, or of climate and surroundings, man, or some creature which was the ancestor of man, might have lived also. Anatomically speaking, apes and monkeys are as much special variations of the mammalian type as man, whom they resemble bone for bone, and muscle for muscle, and the physical animal man is simply an instance of the quadrumanous type specialized for erect posture and a larger brain[1614].... If he could survive, as we know he did, the adverse conditions and extreme vicissitudes of the Glacial period, there is no reason why he might not have lived in the semi-tropical climate of the Miocene period, when a genial climate extended even to Greenland and Spitzbergen.[1615]
When most of the men of Science who are uncompromising in their belief in the descent of man from an “extinct anthropoid mammal;” will not accept even the bare tenability of any other theory than an ancestor common to man and the dryopithecus, it is refreshing to find in a work of real scientific value such a margin for compromise. Indeed, it is as wide as it can be made under the circumstances, i.e., without immediate danger of getting knocked off one's feet by the tidal wave of science-adulation. Believing that the difficulty of accounting—
For the development of intellect and morality by evolution is not so great as that presented by the difference as to physical structure[1616] between man and the highest animal—