THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE FROM 1836 TO 1886. 509 



hierarchy of the universe. At the very beginning of our fifty years, 

 Boucher de Perthes was already enthusiastically engaged in grubbing 

 among the drift of Abbeville for those rudely-chipped masses of raw 

 flint which we now know as palaeolithic hatchets. Lyell and others 

 meanwhile were gradually extending their ideas of the age of our race 

 on earth ; and accumulations of evidence, from bone-caves and loess, 

 were forcing upon the minds of both antiquaries and geologists the 

 fact that man, instead of dating back a mere trifle of six thousand 

 years or so, was really contemporary with the mammoth, the cave- 

 bear, and other extinct quaternary animals. The mass of proofs thus 

 slowly gathered together in all parts of the world culminated at last 

 in Lyell's epoch-making " Antiquity of Man," published three years 

 after Darwin's " Origin of Species." Colenso's once famous work on 

 the Pentateuch had already dealt a serious blow from the critical side 

 at the authenticity and literal truth of the Mosaic cosmogony. It wa3 

 the task of Lyell and his coadjutors, like Evans, Keller, and Christy 

 and Lartet, to throw back the origin of our race from the narrow lim- 

 its once assigned it into a dim past of immeasurable antiquity. Boyd 

 Dawkins, James Geikie, Huxley, Lubbock, De Mortillet, and Bour- 

 geois have aided in elucidating, confirming, and extending this view, 

 which now ranks as a proved truth of paleontological and historical 

 science. 



Darwin's " Descent of Man," published some years later, was an 

 equally epoch-making book. Lubbock's " Prehistoric Times," sent 

 forth in 1865, and " Origin of Civilization," in 1870, had familiarized 

 men's minds with the idea that man, instead of being " an archangel 

 ruined," had really started from the savage condition, and had gradu- 

 ally raised himself to the higher levels of art and learning. Tylor's 

 " Early History of Mankind," followed a little later by his still more 

 important work on "Primitive Culture," struck the first note of 

 the new revolution as applied to the genesis of religious concepts. 

 McLennan's " Primitive Marriage " directed attention to the early na- 

 ture and relations of the tribe and family. Wallace's essay on the 

 " Origin of Human Races," and Huxley's valuable work on " Man's 

 Place in Nature," helped forward the tide of naturalistic explanation. 

 And by the time that Darwin published his judicial summing up on 

 the entire question of man's origin, the jury of scientific opinion 

 throughout the world had pretty well considered its verdict on all the 

 chief questions at issue. 



The impetus thus given to the sciences which specially deal with 

 man, has been simply incalculable. Philology has been revolutionized. 

 Language has told us a new story. Words, like fossils, have been made 

 to yield up their implicit secrets. Prehistoric archaeology has assumed 

 a fresh and unexpected importance. The history of our race, ever 

 since tertiary times, and throughout the long secular winters of the 

 glacial epoch, has been reconstructed for us from drift and bone-cave, 



