Chapter 123

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In the first volume of the lately published Introduction à l’Étude des Races Humaines, by M. de Quatrefages, there is proof that since the Post-Tertiary Period and even before that time—since many Races were already scattered during that Age on the face of the Earth—man has not altered one iota in his physical structure. And if man was surrounded for ages by a fauna that altered from one period or cycle to another, which died out, which was reborn in other forms—so that now there does not exist one single animal on Earth, large or small, contemporary with the man of that period—if, then, every animal has been transformed save man himself, this fact goes to prove not only his antiquity, but that he is a distinct Kingdom. Why should he alone have escaped transformation? Because, says de Quatrefages, the weapon used by him, in his struggle with Nature, and the ever-changing geological conditions and elements, was “his psychic force, not his physical strength or body,” as in the case of animals. Give man only that dose of intelligence and reason with which other mammalia are endowed, and with his present bodily organization he will show himself the most helpless of creatures of Earth. And as everything goes to prove that the human organism with all its characteristics, peculiarities and idiosyncrasies existed already on our Globe in those far distant geological periods when there was not yet one single specimen of the now-existing forms of mammalia, what is the unavoidable conclusion? Why this: Since all the human races are of one and the same species, it follows that this species is the most ancient of all the now-living mammalia. Therefore it is the most stable and persevering of all, and was already as fully developed as it is now when all the other mammalia now known had not made even their first approach to appearance on this Earth. Such is the opinion of the great French Naturalist, who gives thereby a terrible blow to Darwinism.