PDF - Wallace Online

420 TROPICAL NATUREprotoplasm up to the highest development of the humanintellect. Yet this is really what we have seen in the lastsixteen years. Formerly difficulties were exaggerated, and itwas asserted that we had not sufficient knowledge to ventureon any generalisations on the subject. Now difficulties are setaside, and it is held that our theories are so well establishedand so far-reaching that they explain and comprehend allnature. It is not long ago (asI have already remindedyou) since facts were contemptuously ignored, because theyfavoured our now popular views; at the present dayitseems to me that facts which oppose them hardly receivedue consideration. And as opposition is the best incentiveto progress, and it is not well even for the best theories tohave it all their own way, I propose to direct your attentionto a few such facts, and to the conclusions that seem fairlydeducible from them.Indications of Man's Extreme AntiquityIt is a curious circumstance that, notwithstanding theattention that has been directed to the subject in every partof the world, and the numerous excavations connected withrailways and mines, which have offered such facilities forgeological discovery, no advance whatever has been made fora considerable number of years in detecting the time or modeof man's origin. The Palaeolithic flintweaponsfirst discoveredin the north of France more than thirty years agoare still the oldest undisputed proofs of man's existence ;and amid the countless relics of a former world that havebeen brought to light, no evidence of any one of the linksthat must have connected man with the lower animals hasyet appeared.It is, indeed, well known that negative evidence ingeology is of very slender value; and this is, no doubt,generally the case. The circumstances here are, however,peculiar, for many converging lines of evidence show that,on the theory of development by the same laws which havedetermined the development of the lower animals, man mustbe immensely older than any traces of him yet discovered.As this is a point of great interest we must devote a fewmoments to its consideration.