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appeared some years since in the Leisure Hour,* Principal 
Dawson, of Montreal, showed how marvellously the past and 
present condition of the various tribes of the New World 
illustrated and cleared up most of the difficulties surrounding 
the study of pre-historic man in the Old World. 
There we find, still existing contemporaneously, stone, 
bronze, and iron ages; there we find, side by side, a com- 
paratively high civilisation and utter savagery ; there we find 
how pertinaciously the use of stone implements may survive, 
and how little trace is left of extinct tribes of considerable 
refinement after a few hundred years. 
Relative to the Cro-magnon skulls, he says:—['These 
remains] “ tell us that primitive man had the same high cerebral 
organisation which he possesses now, and we may infer the 
same high intellectual and moral nature, fitting him for com- 
munion with God, and headship over the lower world. ‘They 
indicate, also, like the mound-builders who preceded the 
North-American Indian, that man’s earlier state was the best, 
and that he had been a high and noble creature, before he 
became a savage. It is not conceivable that their high de- 
velopment of brain and mind could have spontaneously 
engrafted itself in a mere brutal and savage life. These gifts 
must be remnants of a noble organisation, degraded by moral 
evil. They thus justify the tradition of a golden and Hdenic 
age, and mutely protest against the philosophy of progressive 
development as applied. to man.” + 
He thus sums up: “ We are now prepared, by the help of 
American analogies, to give a common-sense answer to the 
much-agitated question of the primitive barbarism of man 
and the origin of civilisation. Sacred history and the mate- 
rialistic archeology of the day concur in the belief that man, 
at first, was destitute of the arts. But from this point they 
diverge. The former teaches that man without arts was pure 
and holy, and in unison with his Maker, and that, falling from 
this condition, one part of mankind simply sank into bar- 
barism, the other (the main body) grasped at arts and civili- 
sation, introduced by great inventors as a substitute for, or in 
connexion with, a higher spiritual life. 
The latter (i.e., Materialism), knowing no God and no 
spiritual nature in man, supposes him at first a mere 
animal, in whom the life of intellect and of higher tastes and 
* Entitled The Old World and the New; American Illustrations of 
European Antiquities. 
f Bi 702, 
