A MONTHLY MAGAZINE

Devoted to the Science of Religion, the Religion of Science, and the Extension of the Religious Parliament Idea.

THER

HERE has been much discussion concerning the locality where man first originated, and the common opinion among a great many naturalists points towards the sunken continent in the Indian Ocean. It seems to have included Australia on the east and covered the Sunda Islands reaching to Madagascar on the West. Presumably it connected Asia and Africa with New Zealand. It has been called Lemuria as the supposed home of the Lemurian or monkey tribe.

We will let the theory pass as probable, although we think that it will be difficult to designate any definite locality as the place of the origin of man, for it seems that a change of surroundings may repeatedly have taken place and this would have favored a higher development, new conditions demanding new adaptations and eliciting thereby new faculties. Lemuria must have been large enough and its geography varied enough to have been a territory in which the first man-ape could have appeared, while the higher development of the race seems to have taken place farther north in Central Europe.

The human race must at any rate have existed in the Antarctic Continent or Lemuria before the separation of Australia from Asia. In the Museum at Sidney there is a slab containing imprints of human feet which according to Professor Klaatsch's opinion bear all evidences of having been made by primitive man. A sandstone ledge of the same formation shows traces of a bird long since extinct. The same anthropologist has found in his recent trip to Warrnambool, in the state of Victoria in Australia, a great number of stone tools and implements, human and animal fossils dating back to the paleolithic period.

It has been pointed out that Australia is a unique and isolated continent which harbors a number of intermediate species. It contained the lowest known human race which, however, has died out since the arrival of the white man. The wild dog called dingo, the duckbill, the kangaroo and other marsupialians are living there now.

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Man and dingo are the only creatures who represent the higher mammals, and we may therefore assume that they are late arrivals. The Australian race was the lowest of all known mankind, ranging even beneath the African negro. While not very ferocious they possessed scarcely any civilization and belonged still to the paleolithic period. They did not yet understand how to polish stones,

nor to make the simplest kind of pottery.

Dr. Schötensack of Heidelberg, who assumes that mankind originated in or near the Indo-Australian Archipelago, claims that the Antarctic continent fulfilled all conditions for the development of the human race from lower forms. There were no beasts of prey to contend with, and man had there a chance to develop his type without let or hindrance. There were plenty of herbivorous animals of low intelligence which invited him to develop into a hunter and to change his nature into that of an omnivorous which distinguishes man from the apes. The country is partly wooded and partly

SKULL OF ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN.

Showing the protruding brows. After the original in the Museum
of Ethnology in Leipsic. (Weltall und Menschheit, II, 337.)

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prairie-land and so encouraged the upright walk. The hollow trees. contained plenty of honey, and the Australian bee lacks a sting. It is further peculiar that the dog, at all times closely allied to man, was his only companion on the Australian continent.

While favorable conditions are often productive of good results. we would point out that the highest development is generally not obtained by them alone, but by a change from favorable to unfavorable. Favorable conditions develop new varieties with certain free exuberance, and give them a chance to establish new qualities, while

unfavorable conditions put individuals to the test and select those that are fittest to survive. While the lower types of mankind may have been developed in a Southern climate, it seems almost certain

PROFILE VIEW OF CRANIUM OF PRIMITIVE TYPES.
Lenormant, Histoire ancienne de l'orient, I, 138.

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that a selection of the fittest has been made in the rougher regions of the north, and this supposition seems to be borne out by the fact that so far decidedly all the higher types of primitive man have been

OLD MAN'S SKULL FOUND AT CRO-MAGNON.
After Broca's Conférence sur les Troglodytes de la Vezère. (Le-
normant's Histoire ancienne de l'orient, I, 145.)

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discovered in central Europe, while of the very lowest there are not a few (viz., the Neanderthal man and those represented by the relics of Spy and Krapina) that find a most primitive counterpart