Anthropological Society, 1873), the skulls and the remaining parts of the skeleton show more indications of a lower formation the older they are. He especially calls attention to a certain bone of the roof of the skull—the Os interparietale or the so-called Os Incæ—which has only recently been recognized as a characteristic of a lower formation of skulls, standing nearer to that of animals. As late as the summer of 1873, two human skeletons were found at Coblenz in a volcanic sand, of which Schaaffhausen says: "No less than eight anatomic marks of a lower formation, which probably have not heretofore been found together, indicate the great age of these remains." With all these traces of a difference between the former and the present state of the physical condition of man, the differences between the type of man and that of the animal are still great enough to leave wide open the possibility of the origin of man through some other means than that of gradual development. On the other hand, it is more or less in favor of the evolution idea, that so far such old remains of man have been found in places which certainly can not have been the cradle of mankind, and that those parts of the earth which we would naturally suppose to be the first dwelling place of the earliest human genera have been little or not at all investigated. And also the hypothesis of Häckel, that the cradle of mankind was a land between Africa and Asia, now sunk in the sea, and called Lemuria, can be neither proved nor denied. Such vague possibilities have indeed not the least scientific value.
In considering these contradictory results of geological investigation, we dare not overlook three points: First, our knowledge of the crust of the globe is still
very fragmentary, and does not yet extend over the whole globe. Further, it lies in the nature of the case that the strata in mountain formations can only give a very incomplete picture of the whole variety of the real organic life which may have populated the earth and the sea. What a poor picture of the present plant and animal life would be offered, for instance, by the soil of our continents, the slime, sand, and pebbles of our coasts and of the bottoms of our lakes and seas, if we had to construct from them alone the fauna and flora of the present! A third, but purely hypothetical, consideration is rendered of importance particularly by Darwin and Häckel; namely, that the forms of transition without doubt existed for a shorter period than those forms whose organization has established itself in fully developed species.
Thus far we have directed our attention to inquiring how the organic individuals were originated—and have throughout observed a successive development; next, we have questioned geology—and here also have observed a progress in the appearance of the species, but have received at the same time contradictory answers to the question whether this progress presents itself as a gradual development of one species from another or as a sudden appearance. So the reasons for and against the evolution theory almost balance one another; and it is not improbable that the hypothesis of an origin of species through development will have to share its authority with the hypothesis of a descent of species through heterogenetic generation, as well as with the hypothesis of a primitive generation of lower organisms, still repeating itself at a later time. Thus for the origination of
groups lying nearer together, we have the evolution theory; for the other groups, and especially for the origination of types where no transitions to other types can be traced, the theory of the heterogenetic or primitive generation recommends itself; and both theories thus far are of a purely hypothetical nature.
But there is still a third realm, which is just as open to our observation as the history of the development of organisms and as geology, and of which we can also ask, whether it does not open for us an indirect way to the knowledge of the origin of species, and especially of man—a knowledge which we can no longer approach in the direct way of observation. This realm is natural history and the history of the development of the human race. For mankind also is engaged in a process of development, and its present members do not stand on the same height. Now the question is, to what beginning can we trace backward the development of mankind, and to what succeeding stages of development from this present condition? And do we find in these earliest periods, and on these lowest stages, points that are connected with still earlier conditions and organizations, and especially points which could genealogically join together mankind and the animal kingdom? Three sciences, still young, favorite children of the present generation, participate in investigating this realm, namely, archæology, comparative ethnology, and comparative philology.
Archæology leads us back to far-off times. It is a fact that, chronologically speaking, man lived in the glacial period—according to French scientists, even before it; and that, palæontologically speaking, man and
mammoth lived at the same time, and, according to a discovery made some thirty years ago at Denise in Middle France, probably even man and another older and defunct form of pachydermata, the elephas meridionalis, in North America man and the mastodon. The reader may compare the discoveries regarding the age of mankind, as they are described most recently by Sir Charles Lyell in his work upon this subject, in the publications of the Anthropological Congress at Brussels in the year 1873, and in those of the fourth General Assembly of the German Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Primitive History, at Wiesbaden, in the year 1873.
Now, to be sure, from the oldest human tools and utensils that are found, we can expect still less than from the oldest human bones that they will throw direct light upon the answer to the question of the origin of man. For where man not only uses tools, but manufactures the same for use, a wide breach already exists between man and animal. Manufactured articles, therefore, can only throw some light on the history of the development of the already existing human race. And even this light is less clear than we perhaps expected in view of the first interesting prehistorical discoveries. It is true, all these discoveries show us an ascent from the simplest and roughest forms to the more perfect; from the split but unpolished stone to the polished, and from stone to bronze and iron. But a progress of the human races in manufacturing and using articles, from the simple and rough form to the more artificial, lies so much in the nature of the case, and is so taken for granted with every conception of the origin of man, even with that contradictory to Darwinism, that from this simplicity of
the earliest tools we can not at all conclude that there was a condition of mankind lying near that of animals; and especially we can draw only general and uncertain conclusions as to that which makes man man, as to the spiritual and moral qualities of those prehistoric men. Moreover, in discoveries belonging to the very oldest, we come upon drawings and engravings from which we recognize the man of those primitive times as a creature whose life was not entirely taken up in the animalic struggle for existence, but was already adorned with those ideal pursuits and enjoyments which we are accustomed to ascribe to the height of civilization. Examine, for instance, the drawing of a mammoth on a mammoth tooth of Dordogne, which the French scientists Lartet and Christy have reprinted in their Reliquiæ Aquitanicæ (1868), and which Sir Charles Lyell has copied in his "Age of the Human Race." How much spirit and life in this primitive work of art! Or read what Fraas, in the "Journal of the German Society for Anthropology," March, 1874, reports about the picture of a grazing reindeer, engraved on a knife handle made of the horns of a reindeer, which was lately found in the cave of Thayngen near Schaffhausen, and which surpasses in beauty all rough drawings thus far found. The whole bearing of the animal—the muscles of the legs and the head, the form of the many-branched antlers, with the wide-spread eyes, the representation of the hair upon the body and under-jaw—all disclose a real artist among those savages.