For many and weighty reasons we hold the monophyletic hypothesis to be the more correct, and we therefore assume a _single primæval home_ for mankind, where he developed out of a long since extinct anthropoid species of ape. Of the five now existing continents, neither Australia, nor America, nor Europe can have been this primæval home, or the so-called “Paradise,” the “cradle of the human race.” Most circumstances indicate southern Asia as the locality in question. Besides southern Asia, the only other of the now existing continents which might be viewed in this light is Africa. But there are a number of circumstances (especially chorological facts) which suggest that the primæval home of man was a continent now sunk below the surface of the Indian Ocean, which extended along the south of Asia, as it is at present (and probably in direct connection with it), towards the east, as far as further India and the Sunda Islands; towards the west, as far as Madagascar and the south-eastern shores of Africa. We have already mentioned that many facts in animal and vegetable geography render the former existence of such a south Indian continent very probable. (Compare vol. i. p. 361.) Sclater has given this continent the name of Lemuria, from the Semi-apes which were characteristic of it. By assuming this Lemuria to have been man’s primæval home, we greatly facilitate the explanation of the geographical distribution of the human species by migration. (Compare the Table of Migrations XV., and its explanation at the end.) We as yet know of no fossil remains of the hypothetical primæval man (Homo primigenius) who developed out of anthropoid apes during the tertiary period, either in Lemuria or in southern Asia, or possibly in Africa. But considering the extraordinary resemblance between the lowest woolly-haired men, and the highest man-like apes, which still exist at the present day, it requires but a slight stretch of the imagination to conceive an intermediate form connecting the two, and to see in it an approximate likeness to the supposed primæval men, or ape-like men. The form of their skull was probably very long, with slanting teeth; their hair woolly; the colour of their skin dark, of a brownish tint. The hair covering the whole body was probably thicker than in any of the still living human species; their arms comparatively longer and stronger; their legs, on the other hand, knock-kneed, shorter and thinner, with entirely undeveloped calves; their walk but half erect.