Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/525

Rh hierarchy of the universe. At the very beginning of our fifty years, Boucher de Perthes was already enthusiastically engaged in grubbing among the drift of Abbeville for those rudely-chipped masses of raw flint which we now know as palæolithic hatchets. Lyell and others meanwhile were gradually extending their ideas of the age of our race on earth; and accumulations of evidence, from bone-caves and loess, were forcing upon the minds of both antiquaries and geologists the fact that man, instead of dating back a mere trifle of six thousand years or so, was really contemporary with the mammoth, the cave-bear, and other extinct quaternary animals. The mass of proofs thus slowly gathered together in all parts of the world culminated at last in Lyell's epoch-making "Antiquity of Man," published three years after Darwin's "Origin of Species." Colenso's once famous work on the Pentateuch had already dealt a serious blow from the critical side at the authenticity and literal truth of the Mosaic cosmogony. It was the task of Lyell and his coadjutors, like Evans, Keller, and Christy and Lartet, to throw back the origin of our race from the narrow limits once assigned it into a dim past of immeasurable antiquity. Boyd Dawkins, James Geikie, Huxley, Lubbock, De Mortillet, and Bourgeois have aided in elucidating, confirming, and extending this view, which now ranks as a proved truth of paleontological and historical science.

Darwin's "Descent of Man," published some years later, was an equally epoch-making book. Lubbock's "Prehistoric Times," sent forth in 1865, and "Origin of Civilization," in 1870, had familiarized men's minds with the idea that man, instead of being "an archangel ruined," had really started from the savage condition, and had gradually raised himself to the higher levels of art and learning. Tylor's "Early History of Mankind," followed a little later by his still more important work on "Primitive Culture," struck the first note of the new revolution as applied to the genesis of religious concepts. McLennan's "Primitive Marriage" directed attention to the early nature and relations of the tribe and family. Wallace's essay on the "Origin of Human Races," and Huxley's valuable work on "Man's Place in Nature," helped forward the tide of naturalistic explanation. And by the time that Darwin published his judicial summing up on the entire question of man's origin, the jury of scientific opinion throughout the world had pretty well considered its verdict on all the chief questions at issue.

The impetus thus given to the sciences which specially deal with man, has been simply incalculable. Philology has been revolutionized. Language has told us a new story. Words, like fossils, have been made to yield up their implicit secrets. Prehistoric archæology has assumed a fresh and unexpected importance. The history of our race, ever since tertiary times, and throughout the long secular winters of the glacial epoch, has been reconstructed for us from drift and bone-cave,