A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



fit only for a cemetery, and that had settled the matter 

 for a generation : the evidence gathered by lesser work- 

 ers could avail nothing against the decision rendered 

 at the Delphi of Science. But no ban, scientific or 

 canonical, can longer resist the germinative power of a 

 fact, and so now, after three decades of suppression, 

 the truth which Cuvier had buried beneath the weight 

 of his ridicule burst its bonds, and fossil man stood re- 

 vealed, if not as a flesh-and-blood, at least as a skeletal 

 entity. 



The reception now accorded our prehistoric ances- 

 tor by the progressive portion of the scientific world 

 amounted to an ovation; but the unscientific masses, 

 on the other hand, notwithstanding their usual fond- 

 ness for tracing remote genealogies, still gave the men 

 of Engis and Neanderthal the cold shoulder. Nor 

 were all of the geologists quite agreed that the con- 

 temporaneity of these human fossils with the animals 

 whose remains had been mingled with them had been 

 fully established. The bare possibility that the bones 

 of man and of animals that long preceded him had been 

 swept together into the caves in successive ages, and in 

 some mysterious way intermingled there, was clung to 

 by the conservatives as a last refuge. But even this 

 small measure of security was soon to be denied them, 

 for in 1865 two associated workers, M. Edouard Lartet 

 and Mr. Henry Christy, in exploring the caves of Dor- 

 dogne, unearthed a bit of evidence against which no 

 such objection could be urged. This momentous ex- 

 hibit was a bit of ivory, a fragment of the tusk of a 

 mammoth, on which was scratched a rude but unmis- 

 takable outline portrait of the mammoth itself. If all 



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