The Chimpanzee is a native of West and Central Equatorial Africa. “There are various races or varieties of Chimpanzee, and all of them show a degree of black pigmentation. In one variety the skin becomes totally black; in another, pigmentation of the face and of other parts, is delayed until late in life; in others the face never becomes absolutely black.”—“Man, a History of the Human Body,” by Dr. Arthur Keith.
In the Cro-Magnons evolution had at last produced a race of real men—men with well moulded heads, with large, competent brains, with a straight facial angle, with well formed jaws and teeth and chin, with manly eyes looking out beneath an intellectual brow and lighting up a face whose whole contour was rugged but thoroughly human.
Other races came upon the scene, and there was a mingling of races and a clashing of cultures; but the Cro-Magnons, though they declined in numbers, persisted, and became, as is believed, one of the lineal ancestral races of modern man.
The geographical centre of the European distribution of the Cro-Magnon people was at Dordogne, in southwestern France, and in the present inhabitants of Dordogne, of Brittany, and of other districts in France are found essentially the same skull formation, features and complexion as were characteristic of this remarkable type of prehistoric man. Of this unique racial continuity, Prof. Ripley, in his learned work on “The Races of Europe,” says: “It is, perhaps, the most striking instance known of a persistency of population unchanged through thousands of years.”
Fig. 29.—The Skeleton of Man and of the Four Anthropoid Apes.
From Haeckel’s “Evolution of Man.” From left to right the order of the skeletons is as follows: Gibbon, Orang, Chimpanzee, Gorilla, Man.
The evolution of animal life was paralleled by the rise of an equal diversity of forms in the vegetable world. From the Monera—organisms so lowly that it cannot be determined whether they are plant or animal—life diverged in opposite directions, producing, on the one hand, the plant, on the other, the animal. Organisms that could feed on inorganic matter assumed a stationary character and became the ancestors of the plants. Creatures that required organic food developed powers of locomotion to facilitate the search for sustenance, and of these were born the varied forms of earth’s animal population. From the first microscopic plants, vegetable life proceeded to seaweed, to mosses, to ferns, to the pine and the yew, to the vines, the fruit-bearing and flowering plants that crowd the forests and beautify the gardens of the world.
The truth of this wonderful story of evolution, of the progressive improvement of living forms with the advance of time, is proved by several lines of evidence. One of these lines of evidence is found in the fossil remains of the life of earlier times. Fossils are relics of forms that lived in the long ago. Dying, they were buried in sediment by the hand of time, and to-day they are found in rock formations, where they have been preserved from the destructive power of the ages. Now, if living things have developed in an increasing variety of forms as time has gone on, and if the stratified rocks of the earth’s crust, as they have grown from age to age, have kept a record of these living things, these testimonies of the rocks must prove the gradual unfoldment of the world’s life. Such precisely is the case. The earlier rocks are poor in fossils, because in the earlier ages the world was poor in life; but in the succeeding rocks, there is a larger deposit of fossils; and the rocks of every progressively later age show an ever increasing wealth of fossil remains.
