4 
THE PALAEOLITHIC AGE EXAMINED. By N. Whitley^ 
C.E., Hon. Sec. of the Boy at Institution of Cornwall. 
Introduction. 
T HE most prominent characteristic of the present age is its great intel- 
lectual activity and power ; and in no other line of thought has this 
peculiar feature been so fully manifested as in the rapid advance of scientific 
discovery, and in its practical application to the physical enjoyment and 
intellectual pleasure of human life : the man of fifty years surveying this 
progress feels as if he were a Methuselah in the ripe manhood of the gathered 
knowledge of five hundred years. But the pace is so hard, the competition 
for leadership so keen, that even in the sober realities of science, the 
imagination has often run ahead of the judgment ; and theories have been 
built up on the slenderest fragments of unverified facts. To some extent 
this imperfect perception of the future must of necessity arise from the 
mode of scientific inquiry, where thought is pushed forward from the known 
into the dim region of the unknown. It has been notably so in the 
progress of geological discovery as it passed through all its various phases 
from the dreams of an Oriental cosmogony into the fixed principles of a 
noble science, on which it is now so firmly established by the labours of 
such men as Murchison, Prestwich, and Lyell. 
The younger science of anthropology growing into early manhood, in its 
youthful energy is now rushing into the field with a courage, a power, 
and a recklessness of theory, as if it were resolved to storm all the garrisons 
of human thought, and force the dictum of the fiery spirits by whom it is 
officered on those who do not submit to its sway ; and whom it delights to 
designate as the “lingering stragglers in the march of science,” unable 
to “ carry their vision backwards into the dim past,” “ and unconscious 
of the cogency of the evidence on which the great antiquity of man is 
founded.” 
This assumption of infallible truth and scornful rejection of all opposing 
evidence, cannot but clog and retard a branch of scientific inquiry which, if 
established, must ultimately be built on well-tested and ascertained facts. 
Science cannot be built on dogmatic assertions ; it cannot rest on a faith which 
