124: PKEADAMITE MAN. 



thesis had been exhausted that the real views of geologists 

 relative to man's antiquity were made public. In this way it 

 was assumed that caves had been inhabited by a succession 

 of tenants ; that man had not only dwelt in them, but been 

 buried in them; that streams had flowed through those re- 

 cording caves or along those bone-revealing drifts, mingling 

 together the remnants of different species at different times. 

 The simple truth is, that English social feeling, until within 

 the last few years, imposed the alternative either of silence 

 on the expression of the belief in man's geological antiquity, 

 or excommunication. The period of outspokenness on the 

 matter may be said to have dated from 1858, when the 

 systematic investigation took place of the Brixham cave, near 

 Torquay, already referred to. 



The first point that would perhaps strike an investigator 

 of the evidence just set forth is the paucity of actual human 

 remains in comparison with the frequency of articles of pre- 

 sumed human handiwork. Bony remnants are confessedly 

 few ; and only one example of a perfect human skeleton has 

 been found under circumstances that point to prehistoric 

 existence that skeleton discovered in a cave at Neanderthal, 

 near Dusseldorf, in 1857.* The more this topic is reasoned 

 upon, however, the more consistent is it found to be with 

 what, according to theory, should have been. The arrow- 

 heads, knives, hatchets, and other results of human handiwork 

 prepared by any individual man at the time when every one 

 may be assumed to have made his own, must have amounted 

 in the course of an entire life to a bulk altogether dispropor- 

 tionate to the bulk of the bones of a human skeleton. Then, 

 inasmuch as the tools and other proofs of handiwork were 

 made of flint or jade both stones on which time has no effect, 

 whereas bones easily crumble to earth when not buried under 

 special circumstances in this again we perceive a reason ex- 



* The skeleton is supposed to have been complete before some parts 

 were accidentally destroyed in the process of excavation. 



