72 THE GENETIC AND 



And how fanciful are the short-sighted hypotheses 

 which there blossom forth from the mixed mass of 

 facts, chaotically flung together. Only think of the 

 disputes over the stone age, bronze age, and iron age ; 

 think of the motley discussions as to the varieties of 

 skull-conformation and their significance ; on the races 

 of man, the migrations of peoples and the like. Most 

 of these very intricate historical problems are far more 

 buried in obscurity, and the hypotheses to explain 

 them dispense far more largely with any basis of facts, 

 than is the case with our phylogenetic hypotheses ; for 

 these are more or less " objectively " based on the facts 

 of comparative anatomy and ontogenesis. 



But no one of these historical hypotheses is so daring, 

 so little " certainly proved," as the group of very vari- 

 ous and contradictory hypotheses which have been put 

 forward as to the antiquity and first appearance of the 

 human species ; and Virchow asserts positively " The 

 pleistocene man is an universally accepted fact. The 

 tertiary man is, on the other hand, a problem, though 

 indeed a problem which is already under substantial 

 discussion ! " As if the distinction between the 

 tertiary and quarternary periods were not itself a 

 geological hypothesis, and as if the significance of 

 the fossil animal-remains, which play the largest 

 part in it, did not also rest on mere hypotheses 

 which escape all certain proof! "Where, then, is the 



