128 ANIMAL LIFE AND HUMAN PROGRESS 



Concerning every find of the remains of Man which are of 

 any considerable antiquity it is notorious that a prehmin- 

 ary warfare, conducted upon remarkably uniform lines, has 

 been waged between two opposite schools. The one school, 

 determined upon the recent origin of Man, has ever sought 

 to discredit the find in some way or other, and the opposing 

 school has laboured hard to establish both the humanity 

 and the antiquity of the fragments brought to light. The 

 Neanderthal type of humanity was branded as being no repre- 

 sentative of any ancestor of Man, since it was undoubtedly 

 pathological ; it was the skull of a lunatic, it was the skull 

 of a recently deceased Cossack — anything so long as it 

 was not the skull of a normal, but very distinct, type of 

 humanity contemporaneous with the geological evidences of 

 its provenance. 



We know now the universal, and undoubtedly well- 

 founded, opinion regarding Neanderthal Man. Concerning 

 the Piltdown individual there is still being fought the very 

 same battle — obscured and passed over in consequence of 

 the times in which we live — but nevertheless a battle just as 

 keenly contested as that waged over other evidences of the 

 antiquity of Man. 



There is a school which regards Eoanthropus with perfect 

 composure as a not very outlandish type of humanity, such 

 as might be expected at the very base of the Pleistocene 

 period ; there are even some who, so to speak, would feel no 

 shock at the discovery in the same Pleistocene bed of his silk 

 hat and umbrella. On the other hand, there are some who, 

 staggered at the undoubted antiquity of the remains, cannot 

 bring themselves to picture the creature as other than 

 grotesquely apish ; even there is a strong school of those who, 

 with a strange mixture of caution and temerity, regard the 

 jaw of this type of humanity as being that of an actual ape, 

 accidentally come into association with the skull of a real 

 Man. For these last, though one can well appreciate the 

 experiences that lead to their scientific caution, it is difacult 

 to sympathise with their utterly unscientific credulity. It is 

 just to strain at the gnat of the antiquity of Man as a zoological 



