274 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



progress. I would refer you to the very remarkable collection of the 

 data of sociology by Mr. Herbert Spencer, which contains a mass of 

 information useful on one side or the other, in getting towards the 

 truth. Then I would refer you to the highly interesting contributions 

 which have been made by Prof. Max Miiller and by Mr. Tylor to the 

 natural history of religions, which is one of the most interesting chap- 

 ters of anthropology. In regard to another very important topic, the 

 development of art and the use of tools and weapons, most remarkable 

 contributions have been made by General Lane Fox, whose museum at 

 Bethnal Green is one of the most extraordinary exemplifications that 

 I know of the ingenuity, and, at the same time, of the stupidity of the 

 human race. Their ingenuity appears in their invention of a given 

 pattern or form of weapon, and their profound stupidity in this, that 

 having done so, they kept in the old grooves, and were thus prevented 

 from getting beyond the primitive type of these objects and of their 

 ornamentation. One of the most singular things in that museum is the 

 exemplification of the wonderful tendency of the human mind when 

 once it has got into a groove to stick there. The great object of 

 scientific investigation is to run counter to that tendency. 



Great progress has been made in the last twenty years in the direc- 

 tion of the discovery of the indications of man in a fossil state. My 

 memory goes back to the time when anybody Who broached the notion 

 of the existence of fossil man would have been simply laughed at. It 

 was held to be a canon of paleontology that man could not exist in a 

 fossil state. I don't know why, but it was so; and that fixed idea acted 

 so strongly on men's minds that they shut their eyes to the plainest 

 possible evidence. Within the last twenty years we have an astonish- 

 ing accumulation of evidence of the existence of man in ages antecedent 

 to those of which we have any historical record. What the actual date 

 of those times was, and what their relation is to our known historical 

 epochs, I don't think anybody is in a position to say. But it is beyond 

 all question that man, and not only man, but what is more to the 

 purpose intelligent man, existed at times when the whole physical con- 

 formation of the country was totally different from that which char- 

 acterizes it now. Whether the evidence we now possess justifies us 

 in going back further or not, that we can get back as far as the epoch 

 of the drift is, I think, beyond any rational doubt, and may be re- 

 garded as something settled. But when it comes to a question as to 

 the evidence of tracing back man further than that — and recollect the 

 drift is only the scum of the earth's surface — I must confess that to my 

 mind, the evidence is of a very dubious character. 



Finally, we come to the very interesting question — as to whether, 

 with such evidence of the existence of man in those times as we have 

 before us, it is possible to trace in that brief history any evidence of 



