Virginian-pilot. (Norfolk, Va.) 1898-1911, 1900-12-30
THE ORIGIN OF MAN.
Scientists Claim He Existed Mil
lions Of Years Ago.
Facts Upon Which Their Theory Is Based
Siberia Said to BE the Cradle of the nu-
man Race-cossils Discovered in That
Region.

In endeavoring to determine in what
pareloilar part of the world the human
race developed, for the readers of The
Nineteenth Century, Samuel Wadding-
ton hnds 1t necessarily. first, to consider
It's antiquity; and though he speaks as
man OF letters and not as an original
investigator of those scientific prob
iems, his attempt to show that man
oates back no more than million
years is no without considerable force
FROM the fact that no human. bones
nave been found which clearly precede
the quartcrnary period it has been sup
posed that the race could not well be
more than hundred thousand years
o,u. !5ut Lyell has remarked upon the
SHiS ular disappearance of bones which
are comparatively modern. Thousands
OIL Dutch and Spanish soldiers persisted
III the Luke of Haarlem only three cen
turles ago. Yet when the Dutch Gov
eminent drained that body of water in
1898 not solitary skeleton could be
discovered there. although fragments
OF ShlpS We're eXhumed. If in so short
a period as this bones can be resolved
INTO their original elements. how nearly
hopeless 1t is TO seek for those belong
ing 10 an era thousands or millions of
years earlier. The argument drawn
from such failure. therefore, is ex-
tremely weak. especially since stone
implements and chips left in the pro-
cess of manufacturing them have been
discovered in deposits that appear to
antedate the glacial epoch, which ex-
tended from about 100000 to $4,000
years ago.
THEORIES ADVANCED.
Darwin thought 1t possible that prim-
Tive man existed in the earliest of the
three divisions of the tertiary period.
the eocene and Wallace is confident
that Sucl was the case. Huxley touch
ing upon the ancestors of man rather
than man himself, declared that they
should be looked for in an age as far
removed from the mammoth as that
the latter Is from the present time.
scientists as we'll as progressive the
ologians now believe in the evolution of
man from a slightly lower form of ami
mai but anthropologists are not in
clined to think that the human race is
derived directly from any existing
species of ape. The acknowledgements
notion is That the modern ape repre-
sents collateral branch merely, and
the divergence of man from the parent
stock is assigned to the middle stage of
the tertiary, the miocene, or the
eocene. Now, Dana estimates the in
terval which has elapsed since tho be-
ginning of the tertiary at about one
twentieth of all the geologic time.
while others believe that the earth has
peen IN Il condition TO sustain life for
from 20,OOO,OOo TO loO.0OO0OO years. The
opening of the eocene. then, is thus
carried back between 1000 600 and s.
O0U,0(6 years. This calculation is by no
means final and definite. but 1t discred-
it's the 100,000year basis almost as
much as it does Archbishop Ushers
quaint chronology.
CLIMATE HAD INFLUENCE.
Having thus disposed of the question
as to the time when man made his de-
but ON this planet, the Nineteenth Cen
fury writer cites Sir Archibald Geikc
and other biologists regarding the eli
mate of Central Europe and Asia
million or more years ago. Even in the
Arctic regions during the miocene the
mildness OF the temperate zone pre-
vailed. There were dense forests