90 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



ARCHEOLOGY. 



PREHISTORIC MAN IN AMERICA. 



BY PROF. EDWARD S. MORSE. 



No subject in recent times has developed a larger or more active class of 

 workers, or can lay claim to a more voluminous series of publications, than that 

 pertaining to prehistoric man. Every nation working in science has added to its 

 contributors, and these contributors have generally been drawn from a class al- 

 ready trained in methods of scientfiic search. 



So rapid has been the growth of the study of prehistoric man, that ever^ 

 student recalls its infancy and its advance to a vigorous science. He remembers 

 the dread experienced at tlie thought of impeaching the clearly defined record of 

 Genesis, and he recalls with impatience how long it was before the evidence 

 which had been gathering for a century could command a hearing. Collections 

 had been slowly accumulating, though lying dormant and dusty on museum 

 shelves, and their records, unpublished, suddenly came into notice, and with a 

 prodigality of material and data in numberless hands, the elements were ready 

 out of which rose the new science of archaeology. 



So fully imbued were men's minds with the idea of the recent and historical 

 origin of the human race, that no possible interest could be excited in what pur-' 

 ported to be the evidences of a preadamite people. In vain did archaeologists 

 offer their evidences of the high antiquity of man. Their discoveries were treated 

 with incredulity, and their arguments rejected as worthless. A memoir read by 

 Mr. Vivian before the Geological Society of London was considered too improba- 

 ble for publication. The massive authority of Cuvier, who denied the possibility 

 of man's existence anterior to those animals which live to-day, prevented the ac- 

 ceptance of Dr. Schmerling's remarkable discoveries in the Belgium caves. 



Unquestioned acceptance of the Mosaic cosmogony has not only prevented 

 the earlier development of this science, but it has caused the loss of a mass of 

 evidence which can never be restored. Discoveries have been suppressed, false 

 interpretations have been put upon others, valuable material has been ignored or 

 lost, and in one way and another the study of man's early existence has been 

 thwarted up to very recent years. 



The sudden and wonderful growth of the study of man's high antiquity has 

 been wholly due, not to the evidences — for these had been despairingly thrust be- 

 fore the learned societies to be again and again rejected — but to the rapid ac- 

 ceptance of those rational views which recognize man's origin from the animals 

 before him. 



