THE ANTIQUITY OF CIVILIZED MAN ^ 



By A. H. Saycb 



Many years ago Professor Huxley remarked to me : " If you wish 

 to clarify your ideas, you can not do better than give a lecture." The 

 remark made a deep impression on me, and the truth of it has been 

 abundantly verified by my subsequent experience. Our conclusions 

 are not infrequently derived from premises which have l^een for- 

 gotten or never fully thought out. We are apt to assume that facts 

 or ideas familiar to ourselves are equally well known to the rest of 

 the world, and the attempt to explain them to others makes us realize 

 how far this often is from the case. Each of us lives to a large ex- 

 tent in an intellectual world of his own, and it is not until we have 

 to make it clear to others that we discover how much of it is over- 

 shadowed or rendered misty by familiarity. 



It is not, however, the individual only whose ideas need clarifying. 

 Science, as we know, is progressive, and the successive stages in its 

 progress are each marked by a general atmosphere of its own. As- 

 sumptions are made upon evidence which is undefined or ill defined, 

 but which is taken for granted as was animism by primitive man. I 

 am old enough to remember the time when layman and scholar alike 

 assumed that the appearance of man upon this globe was a thing of 

 yesterday. The geologists, it is true, had already begun to accustom 

 the more intelligent portion of the public to the conception of a long 

 period of existence for the earth itself, but so far as man was con- 

 cerned, his history was still limited by the dates in the margins of 

 our Bibles. Even to-day the old idea of his recent appearance still 

 prevails in quarters where we should least expect to find it and so- 

 called critical historians still occupy themselves in endeavoring to 

 reduce the dates of his earlier history. In fact, his extremely mod- 

 ern character had become so fundamental a part of our stock of 

 beliefs that it is difficult to realize with what a shock the announce- 

 ment came upon the ordinary educated world when as a schoolboy I 

 listened to Sir Charles Lyell's famous address to the British Asso- 



1 The Huxley Memorial Lecture for 1930. Reprinted by pernilssiou from the Journal 

 of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 60, July to 

 December, 1930. 



102992—32 34 515 



