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THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 



jaw found in the Mauer sands by Schoeten- 

 sack in 1908, which I am incHned to follow 

 BonarelU in regarding as the remains of a 

 special genus, Palcennthropus; and the genus 

 Eoanthropus found by Dawson near Piltdown 

 in England in 1912. 



The small fragments of these three most 

 primitive members of the human family 

 afford us tantalizingly imperfect glimpses of 

 man in the making, and have not unnaturally 

 supplied the material for some of the most 

 liveh' controversies in the whole history of 

 anthropology. There are still wide diver- 

 gencies of opinion in respect to almost every 

 aspect of the problems raised for discussion 

 by these relics. 



Recent years have witnessed the extinc- 

 tion of the bitter animosities which, in the 

 sixties and seventies of last century, were 

 inevitably excited by the mere suggestion 

 that man was descended from the apes. 

 The fact of man's descent is no longer ques- 

 tioned, but the intense theological emotions 

 of fifty years ago have now given place to 

 profound differences of opinion concerning 

 the interpretation of the details of the techni- 

 cal evidence as to how man and human insti- 

 tutions were evolved. Every human frag- 

 ment and scrap of man's handiwork that has 

 been preserved to us from the Old Stone age 

 has become a nucleus around which the liveli- 

 est discussions have centered. The anato- 

 mist who investigates the features of the hu- 

 man remains, the archaeologist who explains 

 the significance of the implements and culture, 

 the zoologist and palaeontologist who deal 

 with the associated fauna, and the geologist 

 who interprets the circumstances under which 

 the remains are found, all take their share in 

 these discussions; and as the conclusion 

 arrived at by each of the.se investigators has 

 an intimate bearing upon the results obtained 

 by workers in the other fields, there is ample 

 scope for differences of opinion to arise. Per- 

 haps the most difficult problems of all are 

 those which have been raised by the attempts 

 to determine the changes of temperature and 

 climate and the comings and goings of the 

 various mammals, and to associate them with 

 man in the different stages of his chequered 

 career in Europe. 



During the last forty years many books 

 have been written in Pkirope to expound and 

 interpret these highly (iomplex prol)lems; 

 and during recent years the growth of interest 

 in such (juestions has been shown \)y a great 



increase in the number of such works, in 

 England, France, Italy, Germany and else- 

 where. Incidentally this has revealed wide 

 discrepancies in the interpretations of the 

 facts by different writers, which in many 

 cases no doubt have been due to the particu- 

 lar angle from which the observer has viewed 

 the evidence, whether it has been from the 

 standpoint of the anatomist, the archaeolo- 

 gist, the palaeontologist or the zoologist, 

 respectively, but perhaps even more to the 

 influence of the individual circumstances of 

 each writer. 



To those of us who have been involved in 

 this sea of contending factions the news that 

 Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn was pre- 

 paring a comprehensive survey of the whole 

 field of controversy was received With especial 

 interest and expectation. For not only is 

 Professor Osborn a leading authority on the 

 past history of mammals — a subject which 

 is so intimately interwoven with the records 

 of the men of the Old Stone age — but also 

 he is a scientist who for many years has taken 

 a broad view of the problems of vertebrate 

 evolution. Moreover, as president of the 

 American Museum of Natural History, he 

 commanded the expert advice of specialists 

 in every one of the multitudinous branches of 

 science that are involved in the study of early 

 man and his achievements. For no one man 

 can possibly speak with authority upon every 

 aspect of so vast a theme. Expectation was 

 raised by the news that these complex prob- 

 lems were to be dealt with by a competent 

 investigator, who was far removed from the 

 influence of all those factors that tend to 

 warp the judgment of writers living amidst 

 the turmoil and the conflict of opinions in 

 Europe. 



In his "Men 6f the Old Stone Age" Pro- 

 fessor Osborn has given us perhaps the most 

 complete review of all the facts of the case 

 that has appeared in any language within a 

 similar compass. He has dealt very fully 

 with the question of the climatic conditions 

 under which early man Uved in Europe; and 

 in his treatment of the problems of the Glacial 

 epoch and of chronology, which are perhaps 

 the most highly controversial of the multitude 

 of thorny topics with which his book deals, 

 he has fallen into line with other American 

 writers and gone the whole way with James 

 Geikie and Penck. In the rest of the book 

 he has dealt equally fully with every aspect 

 of the subject, the history of the discoveries. 



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