VIII THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN NORTH AMERICA 449 
link” is a reproach to the doctrine of evolution; yet with 
strange inconsistency they refuse to accept evidence which in 
the case of any extinct or living animal, other than man, would 
be at least provisionally held to be sufficient, but follow in the 
very footsteps of those who blindly refused even to examine 
into the evidence adduced by the earlier discoverers of the 
antiquity of man, and thus play into the hands of those who 
can adduce his recent origin and unchangeability as an argu- 
ment against the descent of man from the lower animals. 
Believing that the whole bearing of the comparative anatomy 
of man and of the anthropoid apes, together with the absence 
of indications of any essential change in his structure during 
the quaternary period, lead to the conclusion that he must 
have existed, as man, in Pliocene times, and that the inter- 
mediate forms connecting him with the higher apes probably 
lived during the early Pliocene or the Miocene period, it is 
urged that all such discoveries as those described in the 
present article are in themselves probable and such as we have 
a right to expect. If this be the case, the proper way to treat 
evidence as to man’s antiquity is to place it on record, and 
admit it provisionally wherever it would be held adequate 
in the case of other animals ; not, as is too often now the case, 
ignore it as unworthy of acceptance or subject its discoverers 
to indiscriminate accusations of being either impostors them- 
selves or the victims of impostors. Error is sure to be soon 
detected, and its very detection is often a valuable lesson. 
But facts once rejected are apt to remain long buried in 
obscurity, and their non-recognition may often act as a check 
to further progress. It is in the hope of inducing a more 
healthy public opinion on this interesting and scientifically 
important question that this brief record of the evidences of 
man’s antiquity in North America has been compiled. 
