and, as we seek in
vain, in our physical structure and the course of its development, for
any indication of an origin independent of the rest of the animal world,
we are compelled to reject the idea of "special creation" for man, as
being entirely unsupported by facts as well as in the highest degree
improbable.

_The Geological Antiquity of Man._

The evidence we now possess of the exact nature of the resemblance of
man to the various species of anthropoid apes, shows us that he has
little special affinity for any one rather than another species, while
he differs from them all in several important characters in which they
agree with each other. The conclusion to be drawn from these facts is,
that his points of affinity connect him with the whole group, while his
special peculiarities equally separate him from the whole group, and
that he must, therefore, have diverged from the common ancestral form
before the existing types of anthropoid apes had diverged from each
other. Now, this divergence almost certainly took place as early as the
Miocene period, because in the Upper Miocene deposits of Western Europe
remains of two species of ape have been found allied to the gibbons, one
of them, Dryopithecus, nearly as large as a man, and believed by M.
Lartet to have approached man in its dentition more than the existing
apes. We seem hardly, therefore, to have reached, in the Upper Miocene,
the epoch of the common ancestor of man and the anthropoids.

The evidence of the antiquity of man himself is also scanty, and takes
us but very little way back into the past. We have clear proof of his
existence in Europe in the latter stages of the glacial epoch, with many
indications of his presence in interglacial or even pre-glacial times;
while both the actual remains and the works of man found in the
auriferous gravels of California deep under lava-flows of Pliocene age,
show that he existed in the New World at least as early as in the
Old.[224] These earliest remains of man have been received with doubt,
and even with ridicule, as if there were some extreme improbability in
them. But, in point of fact, the wonder is that human remains have not
been found more frequently in pre-glacial deposits. Referring to the
most ancient fossil remains found in Europe--the Engis and Neanderthal
crania,--Professor Huxley makes the following weighty remark: "In
conclusion, I may say, that the fossil remains of Man hitherto
discovered do not