Discoveries of the fossil remains of man are rare for many reasons. (1) Land animals rarely leave their remains in the sediment of sea and lake. (2) There is small chance of the sediment containing the fossils of recently arrived animals--more especially of man, the latest arrival--being lifted above the water level because of the slow movements of the earth’s crust. (3) Only those animal remains that are buried in localities where they will be impregnated with certain mineral salts will be preserved. (4) They must be able to resist those destructive agencies (especially erosion by water) that disintegrate the rock in which they are embedded if they are to come down to us as evidence. (5) Only a small part of the earth as yet has been searched, and nearly all the fossil discoveries have been accidental. For these reasons the geological record in respect to fossil evidences is far from complete. Yet from time to time new discoveries are filling in the gaps in the record. Anthropologists present us with evidences of pre-historic races that were far lower than the lowest savage of today. Some of the evidences of man’s existence tens of thousands of years ago were known before Darwin set the world astir with his revolutionary discovery, and the old school geologists, like Hugh Miller, who had not been entirely weaned from scriptural literalism were sadly puzzled in regard to the evidences of these “pre-Adamites.” Fossils have been found showing several gradations or stages in development intermediate between man and his pre-human ancestor--evidences which, if they do not completely bridge the chasm, stand as ruined pillars, broken arches, isolated spans of the bridge over which man was many hundreds of thousands of years in crossing. The first skull discovered (sixty years ago) of the Neanderthal men was so entirely different from other pre-historic skulls that one scientist declared it was a mal-formation; but other fossils were found later that proved the peculiarities to be racial characteristics. These men, who lived in Europe down to thirty thousand years ago, were squat, bent-kneed, thick-skulled, almost chinless, and with ridge-like projections over deep-set eyes. In skull development they were lower than any savage of today. Older than the Neanderthal race, and lower in the human scale, were the Heidelberg men, said to have been the first really human beings of whom we have fossil evidences. Judging from the age of the fossil beds they existed from 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. Thirty years ago were found some of the fossil remains of a creature in Java, some forty feet below the surface, that show characters intermediate between the gorilla and the Neanderthal man; “the lowest human cranium yet described, very nearly as much below the Neanderthal as this is below the normal European.” This creature was named Pithecanthropus Erectus (erect ape-man).