372 Address of A. R. Wallace at the Glasgow Meeting. 
some portion of my address to matters more immediately con- 
nected with the special study to which that department is 
devoted. 
As my own knowledge of, and interest in, Anthropology, is 
confined to the great outlines, rather than to the special details 
of the science, I propose to give a very brief and general sketch 
of the modern doctrine as to the Antiquity and Origin of Man, 
and to suggest certain points of difficulty which have not, I 
think, yet received sufficient attention. 
Many now present remember the time (for it is a little more 
than twenty years ago) when the antiquity of man, as now 
understood, was universally discredited. Not only theologians, 
but even geologists, then taught us that man belonged alto- 
gether to the existing state of things; that the extinct animals 
of the Tertiary period had finally disappeared, and that the 
earth’s surface had assumed its present condition before the 
human race first came into existence. So prepossessed were 
even scientific men with this idea—which yet rested on purely 
negative evidence, and could not be supported by any argu- 
ments of scientific value—that numerous facts which had been 
presented at intervals for half a century, all tending to prove 
the existence of man at very remote epochs, were silently 
ignored ; and, more than this, the detailed statements of three 
distinct and careful observers were rejected by a great scientific 
society as too improbable for publication, only because they 
proved (if they were true) the co-existence of man with extinct 
animals |* 
amined in Switzerland—refuse heaps in Denmark—an tht k 
whole series of remains have been discovered carrying ba¢ 
the history of mankind from the earliest historic periods t0 
*In 1854 (?) a communication from the Torquay Natural History Society a: 
ing previous accounts by in-Austen, Mr. Vivian, and the oar 
McEnery, that worked flints occurred in Kent’s Hole with remains of estat 
cies, was cted as too improbable for publication. 
