VII 



Indications of Man's Extreme Antiquity Antiquity of Intellectual Man 

 Sculptures on Easter Island North American Earthworks The 

 Great Pyramid Conclusion. 



MANY now living remember the time (for it is little more than 

 twenty years ago) when the antiquity of man, as now under- 

 stood, was universally discredited. Not only theologians, 

 but even geologists, then taught us that man belonged 

 altogether to the existing state of things ; that the extinct 

 animals of the Tertiary period had finally disappeared, and 

 that the earth's surface had assumed its present condition, 

 before the human race first came into existence. So pre- 

 possessed were even scientific men with this idea which yet 

 rested on purely negative evidence, and could not be sup- 

 ported by any arguments of scientific value that numerous 

 facts which had been presented at intervals for half a century, 

 all tending to prove the existence of man at very remote 

 epochs, were silently ignored ; and, more than this, the 

 detailed statements of three distinct and careful observers, 

 confirming each other, were rejected by a great scientific 

 Society as too improbable for publication, only because they 

 proved (if they were true) the coexistence of man with extinct 

 animals. 2 



1 This formed part of the author's address to the Biological Section of the 

 British Association at Glasgow in 1876. 



2 In 1854 (?) a communication from the Torquay Natural History Society 

 confirming previous accounts by Mr. Godwin-Austen, Mr. Vivian, and the 

 Rev. Mr. M'Enery, that worked flints occurred in Kent's Hole with remains of 

 extinct species, was rejected as too improbable for publication. See Lubbock's 

 Prehistoric Times, 2d ed., p. 306. 



