46 



Origin and Primal Condition of Man. 



period of many thousands of years before the earliest re- 

 corded history. This evidence, though long doubted, has 

 at length sufficed to convict all candid inquirers, and as it 

 exists in many distinct lines, and has been attained by 

 investigators working independently in many different 

 departments of study; by comparison of the formation 

 and growth of language, by a careful study of ancient 

 monuments, by a comparison of the various races of men 

 in their ethnological characteristics, and finally by the 

 discovery of fossil remains of man, and of his tools and 

 weapons in geological formations, so imbedded and over- 

 laid by later deposits as to prove them to be of remote 

 antiquity. All this evidence, in so many different depart- 

 ments, has at length been accepted as irrefragable. The 

 Duke of Argyll, in his Essay on Primeval Man, remarks that 

 those who have most thoroughly studied this subject are 

 most fully convinced of man's great antiquity and most 

 inclined to extend its duration. ~No one now estimates 

 the existence of man upon earth at less than ten thousand 

 years, while many writers state it at fifty or sixty thousand, 

 and Moore in his Pre-glacial Man even suggests an anti- 

 quity running back 400,000 years, holding that man ex- 

 isted in the preglacial period, which period seems by 

 Croll's tables of the eccentricity of the earth's orbit in 

 different geological ages to have been thus remote from us 

 in time. This, however, is by no means a view of man's 

 antiquity which is generally held. 



With regard now to the unity of man or the diversity 

 of species of mankind, no decision can yet be considered 

 certain and entitled to universal acceptance. Agassiz in- 

 sists that the different races of men are in fact distinct 

 species, and cannot have originated from a common 

 ancestor. On the other hand, Lyell, though adopt- 

 ing substantially the Darwinian theory of genesis by 

 variation and natural selection, says : " I see no valid 



