158 EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 



at all hazards, and so eolithic man was invented, 

 as the first in the chain of missing links. No 

 remnants of him were ever found, but he was 

 known to have existed. For proof we were 

 shown rough flint chippings said to have been 

 made by early Tertiary man and to correspond 

 to the first periods of dawning reason. Real 

 science has since shown in the person of Abbe 

 Breuil 5 how these fragments, known as "eoliths," 

 are broken off in the ordinary process of nature 

 by the settling of the strata. De Lapparent calls 

 them silex tallies par eux-memes. And so another 

 fair dream of the evolutionist, Rutot's discredited 

 eolithic theory, is dispelled and with it should go 

 the still more purely fanciful Homosimius pre- 

 cursor. Since it is admitted on all hands that 

 these stones can be and are produced by purely 

 geological means, it is obviously unscientific to 

 ascribe them to an imaginary earliest savage ape- 

 man. Yet the temptation is too strong, and so 

 we still find him introduced to us by Scott Elliot 

 with an innocent "suppose" which in popular lit- 

 erature at once becomes superfluous: 



Suppose that Homosimius precursor, which is the correct Dame 

 for Oligocene man [notice how the existence of an ape-man at 

 this period is taken for granted] had ventured on the rocks 

 at low tide and is busy with his eoliths, crouching on all fours. 

 He catches sight of some dangerous beast about to attack him. 

 Homosimius at once stands up as well as he could, which in 

 itself would alarm the animal, and throws two or three stones 



""L'Anthropologie," Vol. XXI, p. 385. 



