aves or cities in America,
compared with the Tibetan and Puranic stories of the seven lotus-leaves
of ['S]veta-dvipa, the first continental home of the race; the _Hacha de
cobre_ of the Miztecs and the ever-turning spear of jade of the Japanese
story of the place where the gods first descended on earth; or the whole
question of the origin of the Zodiac. These things, and a host of
others, need a different explanation--all the more since the more we are
learning of them the more we find that they enclose facts of which the
hypothetical "savage children" could not, _ex hypothesi_, have been
aware--some facts indeed which our very latest modern science is only
now learning.[43-*]

But while dissenting now wholly from this theory (of "coincidentalism")
one cannot but hold in all respect those who in their time held it. It
is the duty of the savant to make the best logical use he can of what he
has, and he cannot be criticised for not using finer scales than the
time affords. And this theory was needed as an answer to the
absurdities, brought out in utter disregard of physical possibilities,
postulating off-hand migrations and filiations and evolutionary advances
totally impossible within the periods allowed for their completion, and
utterly without parallel in any known part of the world or page of
history. And yet, when this theory had its birth, the most of
Christendom was still enthralled by the Ussherian chronology of the
creation and history of the whole divine universe, which simply did not
have room in it for all these things to happen naturally and
connectedly.

And if it is urged that present science had already say a generation
ago, a second's time we might say in the life of humanity, begun to
emancipate our ideas of time and evolution, still it is the fact that
that increase in breadth of vision has so far applied to every known
thing but man himself. The old belief that gave the world 6000 years of
life, at least put thinking man at its beginning; the modern nightmare
gives us a world for hundreds of millions of years without _thought_,
and makes human civilization an ephemeral episode of a few seconds of
universal duration. Disregarding, one is forced to say wilfully, the
fact that every single one of their own arguments in favor of anthropoid
descent for man would equally support a theory that the anthropoids are
debased offshoots of human stocks,[45-*] biology still demands such a
lapse of time for its phy