These are at present our alternative sketches: the genesis of theism, and the genesis of evolution. After the argument in previous pages, it is unnecessary here to discuss their relative degrees of probability. If we believe in a personal spiritual Creator, the first becomes easy and natural, as it is also that which best accords with history and tradition. If, on the contrary, we reject all these, and accept as natural laws the postulates of the evolutionists which we have already discussed, we may become believers in the latter. The only remaining point is to inquire as to which explains best the actual facts of humanity as we find them. This is a view of which much has been made by evolutionists, and it therefore merits consideration. But it is too extensive to be fully treated of here, and I must content myself with a few illustrations of the failure of the theory of derivation to explain some of the most important features presented by even the ruder races of men. One of these is the belief in a future state of existence beyond this life. This belongs purely to the spiritual nature of man. It is not taught by physical nature, yet its existence is probably universal, and it lies near the foundation of all religious beliefs. Lartet has described to us the sepulchral cave of Aurignac, in which human skeletons, believed to be of Post-glacial date, were associated with remains of funeral feasts, and with indications of careful burial, and with provisions laid up for the use of the dead. Lyell well remarks on this, "If we have here before us, at the northern base of the Pyrenees, a sepulchral vault with skeletons of human beings, consigned by friends and relatives to their last resting-place if we have also at the portal of the tomb the relics of funeral feasts, and within it indications of viands destined for the use of the departed on their way to a land of spirits; while among the funeral gifts are weapons wherewith in other fields to chase the gigantic deer, the cave-lion, the cave bear, and woolly rhinoceros--we have at last succeeded in tracing back the sacred rites of burial, and more interesting still, a belief in a future state, to times long anterior to those of history and tradition. Rude and superstitious as may have been the savage of that remote era, he still deserved, by cherishing hopes of a hereafter, the epithet of 'noble,' which Dryden gave to what he seems to have pictured to himself as the primitive condition of our race."[BF] [BF] "Antiquity of Man," p. 192 In like manner, in the vast American continent, all its long isolated and widely separated tribes, many of them in a state of lowest barbarism, and without any external ritual of religious worship, believed in happy hunting-grounds in the spirit-land beyond the grave, and the dead warrior was buried with his most useful weapons and precious ornaments.