All we can say is, that when we first catch sight of languages, they are already developed into the present distinct types, arguing, as in the case of physical types, either for distinct miraculous creations, or for such an immensely remote ancestry as to give time for the fixation of separate secondary types before the formation of language. Thus, if we confine ourselves to the most perfect and advanced, and apparently therefore most modern form of language of the foremost races of the world, the inflectional, we find two types, the Semitic and Aryan, constructed on such totally different principles that it is impossible for one to be derived from the other, or both to be descended from a common parent. The Semitic device of expressing shades of meaning by internal flexion, that is, by ringing the changes of vowels between three consonants, making every word triliteral, is fundamentally different from the Aryan device for attaining the same object by fusing roots and added particles into one new word in which equal value is attached to vowels and consonants. We can partly see how the latter may have been developed from the agglutinative, but not how the stiff and cramped Semitic can have been derived either from that or from the far more perfect and flexible type of the Aryan languages. It has far more the appearance of being an artificial invention implying a considerable advance of intellectual attainment, and therefore of comparatively recent date. In any case we may safely accept the conclusion that there is nothing in language which assists us in tracing back human origins into geological times, or indeed much further than the commencement of history. We are reduced, therefore, to geological evidence, and this gives us nothing better than mere probabilities, or rather guesses, as to the original centre or centres of human existence upon the earth. The inference most generally drawn is in favour of the locality where the earliest traces of human remains have been found, and where the existence of the nearest allied species, the apes and monkeys, can be carried back furthest. This locality is undoubtedly Eur-Africa, that is the continent which existed when Europe and Africa were united by one or more land connections. And in this locality the preference must be assigned to Western Europe and to Africa north of the Atlas; in fact to the portion of this ancient continent facing the Atlantic, and Western Mediterranean, then an inland sea. Thus far Central and South-Western France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Algeria have afforded the oldest unequivocal proofs of the existence of man, and of the coexistence of anthropoid apes. Accordingly Darwin inclined to the view that North Africa was probably the scene of man's first appearance, and the latest authority on the subject, Brinton, in his _Races and Peoples_, gives at length reasons for assigning this to somewhere in Eur-Africa.