Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/107

Rh and Neanderthal skulls, seem to me to prohibit any cautious reasoner from affirming the latter to have been necessarily of distinct races.

'The marked resemblances between the ancient skulls and their modern Australian analogues, however, have a profound interest, when it is recollected that the stone axe is as much the weapon and the implement of the modern as of the ancient savage; that the former turns the bones of the kangaroo and of the emu to the same account as the latter did the bones of the deer and the urus; that the Australian heaps up the shells of devoured shellfish in mounds which represent the "refuse-heaps" or "Kjokkenmöddings," of Denmark; and, finally, that, on the other side of Torres Straits, a race akin to the Australians are among the few people who now build their houses on pile-works, like those of the ancient Swiss lakes. 'That this amount of resemblance in habit and in the conditions of existence is accompanied by as close a resemblance in cranial configuration, illustrates on a great scale that what Cuvier demonstrated of the animals of the Nile valley is no less true of men; circumstances remaining similar, the savage varies little more, it would seem, than the ibis or the crocodile, especially if we take into account the enormous extent of the time over which our knowledge of man now extends, as compared with that measured by the duration of the sepulchres of Egypt.

'Finally, the comparatively large cranial capacity of the Neanderthal skull, overlaid though it may be by pithecoid bony walls, and the completely human proportions of the accompanying limb-bones, together with the very fair development of the Engis skull, clearly indicate that the first traces of the primordial stock whence man has proceeded need no longer be sought, by those who entertain any form of the doctrine of progressive development, in the newest tertiaries; but that they may be looked for in an epoch more distant from the age of the Elephas primigenius than that is from us.'

The two skulls which form the subject of the preceding comments and illustrations have given rise to nearly an equal amount of surprise for opposite reasons; that of Engis because being so unequivocally ancient, it approached so near to the highest or Caucasian type; that of the Neanderthal, because, having no such decided claims to antiquity, it departs so widely from the normal standard of humanity.