"... In each great region of the world the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It is therefore probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are now man's nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere. But it is useless to speculate on this subject; for two or three anthropomorphous apes, one the _Dryopithecus_ of Lartet, nearly as large as a man, and closely allied to _Hylobates_, existed in Europe during the Miocene Age; and since so remote a period the earth has certainly undergone many great revolutions, and there has been ample time for migration on the largest scale. "At the period and place, whenever and wherever it was, when man first lost his hairy covering, he probably inhabited a hot country; a circumstance favorable for the frugivorous diet on which, judging from analogy, he subsisted. We are far from knowing how long ago it was when man first diverged from the catarrhine stock; but it may have occurred at an epoch as remote as the Eocene Period; for that the higher apes had diverged from the lower apes as early as the Upper Miocene Period is shown by the existence of the _Dryopithecus_." With this speculation of Darwin the reader should compare the state of our knowledge to-day regarding the descent of man, as presented in the first and last chapters of this volume. The most telling argument against the Lamarck-Lyell-Darwin theory was the absence of those missing links which, theoretically, should be found connecting Man with the anthropoid apes, for at that time the Neanderthal race was not recognized as such. Between 1848 and 1914 successive discoveries have been made of a series of human fossils belonging to intermediate races: some of these are now recognized as missing links between the existing human species, _Homo sapiens_, and the anthropoid apes; and others as the earliest known forms of _Homo sapiens_: