160 COMPARATIVE ARCHEOLOGY. 
facts and conclusions had no chance of being considered on 
their merits. It is somewhat amusing to find that Sir Charles 
Lyell, who paid a visit to Schmerling in 1833, was among 
those who then regarded his work with some scepticism. 
Thirty years later, however, Sir Charles made the amende 
honorable to the Belgian savant for not then giving the weight 
to his opinions that they were entitled to. The following is 
the concluding sentence of a long apology :—‘* When these 
circumstances are taken into account, we need scarcely 
wonder not only that a passing traveller failed to stop and 
scrutinise the evidence, but that a quarter of a century should 
have elapsed before even the neighbouring professors of the 
University of Liége came forth to vindicate the truthfulness 
of their indefatigable and clear-sighted countryman.’’— 
Antiquity of Man, p. 69. 
While opinions founded on these anthropological re- 
searches were on the verge of passing from the stage of specu- 
lation to that of reality, the civilized world was profoundly 
agitated by the appearance of Charles Darwin’s book on the 
Origin of Species (1859), in which he advocated that the suc- 
cessive generations of living organisms (including man), by 
which the continuity of species was perpetuated on the globe, 
had been evolved from pre-existing forms by ordinary 
biological processes, which he called Natural selection. Four 
years later Sir Charles Lyell’s book on the antiquity of man 
appeared. The array of facts and well-reasoned hypotheses 
set forth in these volumes placed anthropology on a conspicu- 
ous pedestal among the Natural sciences. After the cloud 
of scepticism, with which the earlier discoveries had been 
received in scientific circles, had passed away, anthropology 
found a footing at the British Association meetings, at first 
as a department of the Biological Section; but subsequently 
(1884) it was found expedient to devote a full section to the 
deliberaticn of its attractive and rapidly accumulating evidence 
on the antiquity of man and human civilization. 
The evidential materials which fall to be considered under 
the science of anthropology naturally arrange themselves into 
two classes. One consists of the fragmentary remains of the 
bodies of former races, chiefly portions of skeletons which by 
