24 Sir S. H. Soivorth — Antiquity of Man. 



these caves in a way which makes it clear they were contemporary. 

 This was the view of M. Marcel de Serres, to whom the question 

 was remitted for examination by the French Academy, and who 

 had the human bones analyzed, when they were found to have 

 parted with their animal matter to as great a degree as those of 

 the hyfenas which accompanied them, to be equally brittle, and to 

 adhere as much to the tongue, and were quite different in these 

 respects from some bones from an ancient Gaulish cemetery with 

 which they were compared by M. Ballard, a chemist of Montpelier. 



Cuvier's authority, however, was supreme in France on these 

 questions, and he was immovable. I quoted in the previous paper 

 the pronouncement he made in 1830 in the last edition of his 

 famous " Discours," reaffirming his scepticism as to man having 

 been contemporary with the extinct animals. Two years later 

 he died. 



In concluding this first stage of the inquiry I would complete 

 it by quoting a passage from Mortillet : — " Le grand Cuvier, le pere 

 de la paleontologie, a reconnu et proclame que I'homme fossile 

 n'exista pas ! , , , Toujours le principe d'autorite qui vient barrer 

 le chemin au libre examen, , , , C'est que chez Georges Ouvier, 

 a cote du savant de premier ordre, k cote de I'homme de genie 

 dont la France et le raonde entier s'honorent, il y avait I'ardent 

 bibliste, L'illustre professeur du Museum, creant une science 

 nouvelle, etait double d'un mediocre conseiller d'etat se posant en 

 defenseur de ce qu'alors, comme k present, on nommait I'ordre moral. 

 Mais que pese et que doit peser le sentiment interesse de Cuvier 

 devant la voix supreme de faits bien constates." ("Le Pre- 

 historique," pp. 10-11.) 



The death of Ouvier did not stop the inquiries into the early 

 existence of man, which now took a more definite shape and were 

 especially pressed home by Schmerling. In 1833 Schmerling pub- 

 lished his famous " Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles decouverts 

 dans les cavernes de la province de Liege," In this work he seems 

 to me to have established beyond all possible doubt the contem- 

 poraneousness of man and the extinct animals, and he contests the 

 a priori prejudice of De Luc and Cuvier, who denied the existence 

 of fossil human bones. In regard to the main question he writes — 

 and it would be impossible to write more wisely : — " We admit that 

 we are completely ignorant of the precise period when man first 

 appeared on the earth. History seems here to abandon us, and we 

 are lost in the obscurities of mythology and of different cosmogonies ; 

 but if antiquity has left us no positive documents on the subject, it 

 yet informs us of a certain intellectual progress in our race. No one 

 doubts that men were once in a state of ignorance in which they 

 approached the brute creation, only caring for the supply of their 

 immediate wants. History only gives us vague, uncertain, and 

 even contradictory notions on the origin of the early peoples, but 

 it seems impossible to doubt that man was the witness of the terrible 

 revolutions which succeeded each other before historic times, . . . 

 It is in the great book of Nature that we ought to search for light 



