204 FOSSIL MEN. 



which can be traced back the rudiments of their arts, 

 their science, their literature, and not a little of 

 their religion. Here, again, America has preserved 

 the oldest and most unchanged type of humanity, 

 even if in many cases much degraded. 



NOTE. As confirmatory of some of the views stated in this 

 chapter, I have much pleasure in quoting the following, from 

 the address of Dr. Tylor, F.E.S., at the Meeting of the British 

 Association in 1879 : " There appears no particular reason to 

 think that the relics from the drif b-beds or bone-caves repre- 

 sent man as he first appeared on the earth. The contents of 

 the caves especially bear witness to a state of savage art, in 

 some respects fairly high, and which may possibly have some- 

 what fallen off from an ancestral state in a more favourable 

 climate. Indeed, the savage condition generally, though rude 

 and more or less representing early stages of culture, never 

 looks absolutely primitive, just as no savage language ever 

 has the appearance of being a primitive language. What the 

 appearance and state of our really primaeval ancestors may 

 have been seems too speculative a question, until there shall 

 be more signs of agreement between the anthropologists, who 

 work by comparison of actual races of man toward a hypo- 

 thetical common stock, and the zoologists, who approach the 

 problem through the species adjoining the human." Other 

 points in this address, and in recent papers by Dawkins and 

 others, received when these pages were in type, may be no- 

 ticed in an appendix. 



