als. It is true
that the remains of apes are also very rare, and we may well suppose
that the superior intelligence of man led him to avoid that extensive
destruction by flood or in morass which seems to have often overwhelmed
other animals. Yet, when we consider that, even in our own day, men are
not unfrequently overwhelmed by volcanic eruptions, as in Java and
Japan, or carried away in vast numbers by floods, as in Bengal and
China, it seems impossible but that ample remains of Miocene and
Pliocene man do exist buried in the most recent layers of the earth's
crust, and that more extended research or some fortunate discovery will
some day bring them to light.

_The Probable Birthplace of Man._

It has usually been considered that the ancestral form of man originated
in the tropics, where vegetation is most abundant and the climate most
equable. But there are some important objections to this view. The
anthropoid apes, as well as most of the monkey tribe, are essentially
arboreal in their structure, whereas the great distinctive character of
man is his special adaptation to terrestrial locomotion. We can hardly
suppose, therefore, that he originated in a forest region, where fruits
to be obtained by climbing are the chief vegetable food. It is more
probable that he began his existence on the open plains or high plateaux
of the temperate or sub-tropical zone, where the seeds of indigenous
cereals and numerous herbivora, rodents, and game-birds, with fishes and
molluscs in the lakes, rivers, and seas supplied him with an abundance
of varied food. In such a region he would develop skill as a hunter,
trapper, or fisherman, and later as a herdsman and cultivator,--a
succession of which we find indications in the palaeolithic and
neolithic races of Europe.

In seeking to determine the particular areas in which his earliest
traces are likely to be found, we are restricted to some portion of the
Eastern hemisphere, where alone the anthropoid apes exist, or have
apparently ever existed.

There is good reason to believe, also, that Africa must be excluded,
because it is known to have been separated from the northern continent
in early tertiary times, and to have acquired its existing fauna of the
higher mammalia by a later union with that continent after the
separation from it of Madagascar, an island which has preserved for us a
sample, as it were, of the early African mammalian fauna, from which not
only the anthropoid