Chapter 1640

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It thus stands to reason that Science would never dream of a Pre-Tertiary man, and that de Quatrefages’ Secondary man makes every Academician and F.R.S. faint with horror because, to preserve the ape-theory, Science must make man Post-Secondary. This is just what de Quatrefages has twitted the Darwinists with, adding, that on the whole there were more scientific reasons for tracing the ape from man than man from the anthropoid. With this exception Science has not one single valid argument to offer against the antiquity of man. But in this case modern Evolution demands far more than the fifteen million years of Croll for the Tertiary period, for two very simple but good reasons: (a) no anthropoid ape has been found before the Miocene period; (b) man’s flint relics have been traced to the Pliocene and their presence suspected, if not accepted by all, in the Miocene strata. Again, where is the “missing link” in such case? And how could even a Palæolithic savage, a “man of Canstadt,” evolve into a thinking man from the brute dryopithecus of the Miocene in so short a time? One sees now the reason why Darwin rejected the theory that only 60,000,000 years had elapsed since the Cambrian period. “He judges from the small amount of organic change since the commencement of the glacial epoch, and adds that the previous 140 million years can hardly be considered as sufficient for the development of the varied forms of life which certainly existed toward the close of the Cambrian period.” (Ch. Gould, Mythical Monsters, p. 84.)