234 LECTURE IX. 



structure upon tlie foundation of facts — a structure wMcli may 

 brave botli tlie attacks of criticism and tlie serpent tooth of 

 hatred. In proportion as error is easy, so is our admiration 

 sincere for such men as devote their industry and their minds 

 to throw hght into the Egyptian darkness. 



It is my object to lead you at once into the remotest anti- 

 quity known to us, and I shall treat in this lecture of fossil 

 man. Not of fanciful stone-forms, or skeletons of unknown 

 animals ; not of that petrified horseman, designed upon a block 

 of sandstone at Fontainebleau, and about which they quarrelled 

 in Paris forty years ago ; not of the salamander of Oeningen, 

 which Scheuchzer took to be the remains of a four years old 

 child, and under a portrait of which a theologian wrote the 

 touching lines — " Melancholy skeleton of a poor sinner, soften 

 the stony heart of the present generation ! " I shall say 

 nothing of such mistakes, but shall treat of real and undoubted 

 human remains, found associated with extinct species of ani- 

 mals, and petrified animal bones, in strata whose great age is 

 undoubted. 



I have here indicated the limitation which the expression 

 " petrified" or " fossil" must undergo, if it is to be correctly 

 appHed. The question is not whether human bones are more 

 or less penetrated by solutions of petrifying salts, or more or 

 less deficient in organic matter ; the question, on the contrary, 

 is whether the primitive man saw animals difierent from such 

 as now exist in our country ; whether he hunted other beasts 

 than such as inhabit our forests ; whether he dwelt upon a sur- 

 face which has changed since the historical period ; whether 

 he survived convulsions, which destroyed a number of animals. 



Until a recent period, this question was unconditionally 

 answered in the negative. Cuvier laid it down, that the 

 occurrence of human remains along with bones of extinct 

 animals was unproved ; that the facts adduced rested upon 

 error; that the petrified Guadaloupe skeletons were recent 

 formations ; and that fossil human bones would not be found 

 associated with those of extinct animals. As is usually the 

 case when some great authority lays down a law, so it was 

 here. The facts discovered, here and there, were neglected. 



