Page:Antiquity of Man as Deduced from the Discovery of a Human Skeleton.djvu/35

Rh Any such demonstration would be received with complacent indifference by the school of "Conjectural Biology." It records a "Homo alalus" (Dumb-man) of Miocene age, and a "Homo pithecanthropus" (Ape-man), existing as far back as the Eocene period. There is no labourer at the true and firm foundations of zoology who would more honestly welcome unquestionable evidences of such transitional forms revealed by those Tertiary formations than myself.

The testimony of the Abbé Bourgeois was but coolly received by those who might have been expected most warmly to welcome it, when he pronounced a formation in which flint tools had been found as of Miocene age. Such evidence was superfluous to the Transmutationist.

The deposits at Saint-Prest were, however, referred by more competent geologists to an early post-Tertiary period—"au quaternaire inférieure."

The nodules of flint stated to be found in the "Middle Miocene" at "Thénay, dans la Beauce (Loir-et-Cher)," and submitted to the Anthropological Congress at Paris by the Abbé, were not received by experts as satisfactory proofs of man’s work.

Incised markings on cetaceous bones (Balænotus), from a formation in Italy held to be of Pliocene age, are inter-