VII 
THE ANTIQUITY AND ORIGIN OF MAN? 
Indications of Man’s Extreme Antiquity—Antiquity of Intellectual Man— 
Sculptures on Easter Island—North American Earthworks—The 
Great Pyramid—Conclusion. 
Many now living remember the time (for it is little more than 
twenty years ago) when the antiquity of man, as now under- 
stood, was universally discredited. Not only theologians, 
but even geologists, then taught us that man belonged 
altogether 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 pre- 
possessed were even scientific men with this idea—which yet 
rested on purely negative evidence, and could not be sup- 
ported by any arguments 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, 
confirming each other, were rejected by a great scientific 
Society as too improbable for publication, only because they 
proved (if they were true) the coexistence of man with extinct 
animals.” 
1 This formed part of the author’s address to the Biological Section of the 
British Association at Glasgow in 1876. 
2 In 1854 (?) a communication from the Torquay Natural History Society 
confirming previous accounts by Mr. Godwin-Austen, Mr. Vivian, and the 
Rev. Mr. M‘Enery, that worked flints occurred in Kent’s Hole with remains of 
extinct species, was rejected as too improbable for publication. See Lubbock’s 
Prehistoric Times, 2a ed., p, 306. 
