Dr Hodgkin on the Progress of Ethnology. 127 



existence coeval with that of many animals of every class, but 

 he has refuted every pretended evidence which has been pro- 

 duced of his earlier existence. 



Let us proceed to a later age, yet still remote from our 

 own. 



The investigation of works evidently artificial, and scattered 

 over a wide extent of the earth's surface, has led to the detec- 

 tion of human osseous remains, accompanied by the produc- 

 tions of art, which sufficiently prove, that, at the time, and in 

 the place, at which those bones were animated, human skill 

 was extremely low. With little or no exception, these bones 

 themselves, or the articles that accompany them, prove that 

 the men to whom they belonged must have materially difi*ered 

 from the present inhabitan|s. They are also, in many in- 

 stances, beyond the reach of historic information, but they are 

 not on this account beyond the reach of research. We put 

 together with care and expense the remains of an elk or a 

 bear ; and why should we not do the same for our own species ! 



The mere investigation of the skeleton can do much, and 

 may do more ; and further light is doubtless to be obtained 

 by a careful comparison of the rude productions of art which 

 will be found with such human remains of the less civilised 

 races of man which may either now exist, or have been but 

 recently exterminated. 



So wide a diffusion of traces of the existence of man of 

 the kind to which I am now alluding, of which the numerous 

 tumuli scattered over the plains and downs of the South of 

 England, and which, by conjecture rather than by proof, are 

 referred to the times of the Druids ; and similar traces in 

 France, Germany, and Siberia, carry us back to a period which 

 the ethnologist would do w^ell to study as a whole, and, in the 

 defect of written record or authenticated tradition, to gather 

 all the scattered facts which the examination of such relics 

 may have brought to light. Till this be done, almost any at- 

 tempt to assign to them an origin distinct from that of any of 

 the present families on the face of the globe, must be rejected, 

 not merely as anti-scriptural, but as purely speculative. In- 

 deed, we are already possessed of a few facts, which, so far 

 from favouring the idea of a wide diffusion of an uncivilised 



