Several of the pre-Glacial sketches show us
lank and gawky savages with the body covered with long scratches,
answering exactly to the scratches which represent the hanging hair of
the mammoth, and suggesting that man then still retained his old
original hairy covering. The few skulls and other fragments of
skeletons now preserved to us also indicate that our old master and his
contemporaries much resembled in shape and build the Australian black
fellows, though their foreheads were lower and more receding, while
their front teeth still projected in huge fangs, faintly recalling the
immense canines of the male gorilla. Quite apart from any theoretical
considerations as to our probable descent (or ascent) from Mr. Darwin's
hypothetical 'hairy arboreal quadrumanous ancestor,' whose existence may
or may not be really true, there can be no doubt that the actual
historical remains set before us pre-Glacial man as evidently
approaching in several important respects the higher monkeys.
It is interesting to note too that while the Men of the Time still
retained (to be frankly evolutionary) many traces of the old monkey-like
progenitor, the horses which our old master has so cleverly delineated
for us on his scrap of horn similarly retained many traces of the
earlier united horse-and-donkey ancestor. Professor Huxley has admirably
reconstructed for us the pedigree of the horse, beginning with a little
creature from the Eocene beds of New Mexico, with five toes to each hind
foot, and ending with the modern horse, whose hoof is now practically
reduced to a single and solid-nailed toe.
Pages:
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147