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of that continent--edentates predominating, for example, in South America, and marsupials in Australia.

Many observers had noted that recent strata everywhere show a fossil fauna more nearly like the existing

one than do more ancient strata; and that fossils from any two consecutive strata are far more closely related

to each other than are the fossils of two remote formations, the fauna of each geological formation being,

indeed, in a wide view, intermediate between preceding and succeeding faunas.

So suggestive were all these observations that Lyell,

the admitted leader of the geological world, after reading Darwin's citations, felt able to drop his own crass explanation of the introduction of species and adopt

the transmutation hypothesis, thus rounding out the doctrine of uniformitarianism to the full proportions in which Lamarck had conceived it half a century before. Not all paleontologists could follow him at once, of course; the proof was not yet sufficiently demonstrative for that; but all were shaken in the seeming security

of their former position, which is always a necessary stage in the progress of thought. And popular interest in the matter was raised to white heat in a twinkling.

So, for the third time in this first century of its existence, paleontology was called upon to play a leading

role in a controversy whose interest extended far beyond

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the bounds of		staid truth-seeking science. And
the	controversy waged		over	the age of the earth had
not	been more	bitter,	that	over catastrophism not more

acrimonious, than that which now raged over the question of the transmutation of species. The question had implications far beyond the bounds of paleontology, of course. The main evidence yet presented had been

drawn from quite other fields, but by common consent the record in the rocks might furnish a crucial test of the truth or falsity of the hypothesis. "He who rejects this view of the imperfections of the geological record," said Darwin, "will rightly reject the whole theory."

With something more than mere scientific zeal, therefore, paleontologists turned anew to the records in the

rocks, to inquire what evidence in proof or refutation might be found in unread pages of the "great stone book." And, as might have been expected, many

minds being thus prepared to receive new evidence, such evidence was not long withheld.

FOSSIL MAN

Indeed, at the moment of Darwin's writing a new

and very instructive chapter of the geologic record was being presented to the public--a chapter which for the first time brought man into the story. In 1859 Dr.

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Falconer, the distinguished British paleontologist, made a visit to Abbeville, in the valley of the Somme, incited by reports that for a decade before bad been sent out from there by M. Boucher de Perthes. These

reports had to do with the alleged finding of flint implements, clearly the work of man, in undisturbed gravel-

beds, in the midst of fossil remains of the mammoth and other extinct animals. What Falconer saw there

and what came of his visit may best be told in his own words:

"In September of 1856 I made the acquaintance

of my distinguished friend M. Boucher de Perthes,"

wrote Dr. Falconer, "on the introduction of M. Desnoyers at Paris, when he presented to me the earlier

volume of his Antiquites celtiques, etc., with which I thus became acquainted for the first time. I was then fresh

from the examination of the Indian fossil remains of the valley of the Jumna; and the antiquity of the human race being a subject of interest to both, we conversed freely about it, each from a different point of

view. M. de Perthes invited me to visit Abbeville, in order to examine his antediluvian collection, fossil and geological, gleaned from the valley of the Somme. This I was unable to accomplish then, but I reserved it for a future occasion.

"In October, 1856, having determined to proceed to

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Sicily, I arranged by correspondence with M. Boucher de Perthes to visit Abbeville on my journey through France. I was at the time in constant communication with Mr. Prestwich about the proofs of the antiquity of the human race yielded by the Broxham

Cave, in which he took a lively interest; and I engaged to communicate to him the opinions at which I should arrive, after my examination of the Abbeville collection. M. de Perthes gave me the freest access to his

materials, with unreserved explanations of all the facts of the case that had come under his observation; and having considered his Menchecourt Section, taken with

such scrupulous care, and identified the molars of elephas primigenius, which he had exhumed with his own

hands deep in that section, along with flint weapons, presenting the same character as some of those found in the Broxham Cave, I arrived at the conviction that they were of contemporaneous age, although I was not

prepared to go along with M. de Perthes in all his inferences regarding the hieroglyphics and in an industrial interpretation of the various other objects which

he had met with."[4]

That Dr. Falconer was much impressed by the collection of M. de Perthes is shown in a communication

which he sent at once to his friend Prestwich:

"I have been richly rewarded," he exclaims. "His

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collection of wrought flint implements, and of the objects
of every description associated with them, far
exceeds everything I expected to have seen, especially
from a single locality. He has made great additions,
since the publication of his first volume, in the second,
which I now	have by me. He showed me flint hatchets
which HE HAD DUG UP with his own hands, mixed INDISCRIMINATELY
with molars	of elephas primigenius. I examined
and identified plates of the molars and the
flint objects which were got along with them. Abbeville
is an out-of-the-way place, very little visited; and
the French savants who meet him in Paris laugh at
Monsieur de	Perthes and his researches. But after devoting
the greater	part of a day to his vast collection,
I am perfectly satisfied that there is a great deal of fair
presumptive	evidence in favor of many of his speculations
regarding the remote antiquity of these industrial
objects and	their association with animals now extinct.
M. Boucher's hotel is, from the ground floor to garret, a
continued museum, filled with pictures, mediaeval art,
and Gaulish	antiquities, including antediluvian flint-knives,
fossil-bones, etc. If, during next summer,
you should happen to be paying a visit to France, let
me strongly	recommend you to come to Abbeville. I
am sure you	would be richly rewarded."[5]

This letter aroused the interest of the English geologists,

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and in the spring of	1859 Prestwich and Mr.
(afterwards Sir John) Evans made a visit to Abbeville
to see the specimens	and	examine at first hand	the
evidences as pointed	out	by Dr. Falconer. "The	evidence
yielded by the valley of		the Somme," continues
Falconer, in speaking of		this visit, "was gone	into with
the scrupulous care and severe and exhaustive analysis
which are characteristic		of Mr. Prestwich's researches.
The conclusions to which		he was conducted were	communicated
to the Royal Society	on May 12, 1859, in his
celebrated memoir, read on May 26th and published
in the Philosophical	Transactions of 1860, which, in addition
to researches made in the valley of the Somme,
contained an account	of similar phenomena presented
by the valley of the	Waveney, near Hoxne, in Suffolk.
Mr. Evans communicated to the Society of Antiquaries
a memoir on the character and geological position of
the 'Flint Implements in		the Drift,' which appeared in
the Archaeologia for	1860. The results arrived		at by

Mr. Prestwich were expressed as follows:

"First. That the flint implements are the result of design and the work of man.

"Second. That they are found in beds of gravel, sand, and clay, which have never been artificially disturbed.

"Third. That they occur associated with the remains of land, fresh-water, and marine testacea, of

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species now living, and most of them still common in the same neighborhood, and also with the remains of various mammalia--a few species now living, but more of extinct forms.

"Fourth. That the period at which their entombment took place was subsequent to the bowlder-clay

period, and to that extent post-glacial; and also that

it was among the latest in geological time--one apparently anterior to the surface assuming its present

form, so far as it regards some of the minor features."[6]

These reports brought the subject of the very significant human fossils at Abbeville prominently before

the public; whereas the publications of the original discoverer, Boucher de Perthes, bearing date of 1847, had

been altogether ignored. A new aspect was thus given to the current controversy.

As Dr. Falconer remarked, geology was now passing through the same ordeal that astronomy passed in the age of Galileo. But the times were changed since the day when the author of the Dialogues was humbled before the Congregation of the Index, and now no Index Librorum Prohibitorum could avail to hide from eager human eyes such pages of the geologic story as Nature herself had spared. Eager searchers were turning the

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leaves with renewed zeal everywhere, and with no small measure of success. In particular, interest attached just at this time to a human skull which Dr. Fuhlrott had discovered in a cave at Neanderthal two or three years before--a cranium which has ever since been famous as the Neanderthal skull, the type specimen of what modern zoologists are disposed to regard as a distinct species of man, Homo neanderthalensis. Like others of the same type since discovered at Spy, it is

singularly simian in character--low-arched, with receding forehead and enormous, protuberant eyebrows.

When it was first exhibited to the scientists at Berlin by Dr. Fuhlrott, in 1857, its human character was doubted by some of the witnesses; of that, however, there is no present question.

This interesting find served to recall with fresh significance some observations that had been made in

France and Belgium a long generation earlier, but whose bearings had hitherto been ignored. In 1826

MM. Tournal and Christol had made independent discoveries of what they believed to be human fossils

in the caves of the south of France; and in 1827 Dr. Schmerling had found in the cave of Engis, in

Westphalia, fossil bones of even greater significance. Schmerling's explorations had been made with the utmost care, and patience. At Engis he had found

human bones, including skulls, intermingled with those of extinct mammals of the mammoth period in a way

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that left no doubt in his mind that all dated from the same geological epoch. He bad published a full account of his discoveries in an elaborate monograph issued in 1833.

But at that time, as it chanced, human fossils were under a ban as effectual as any ever pronounced by canonical index, though of far different origin. The oracular voice of Cuvier had declared against the authenticity of all human fossils. Some of the bones brought him for examination the great anatomist had pettishly pitched out of the window, declaring them

fit only for a cemetery, and that had settled the matter for a generation: the evidence gathered by lesser workers could avail nothing against the decision rendered

at the Delphi of Science. But no ban, scientific or canonical, can longer resist the germinative power of a fact, and so now, after three decades of suppression, the truth which Cuvier had buried beneath the weight

of his ridicule burst its bonds, and fossil man stood revealed, if not as a flesh-and-blood, at least as a skeletal

entity.

The reception now accorded our prehistoric ancestor by the progressive portion of the scientific world amounted to an ovation; but the unscientific masses,

on the other hand, notwithstanding their usual fondness for tracing remote genealogies, still gave the men

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of Engis and Neanderthal the cold shoulder. Nor were all of the geologists quite agreed that the

contemporaneity of these human fossils with the animals whose remains had been mingled with them had been

fully established. The bare possibility that the bones of man and of animals that long preceded him had been swept together into the eaves in successive ages, and in some mysterious way intermingled there, was clung to

by the conservatives as a last refuge. But even this small measure of security was soon to be denied them, for in 1865 two associated workers, M. Edouard Lartet

and Mr. Henry Christy, in exploring the caves of Dordogne, unearthed a bit of evidence against which no

such objection could be urged. This momentous exhibit was a bit of ivory, a fragment of the tusk of a mammoth, on which was scratched a rude but unmistakable outline portrait of the mammoth itself. If all

the evidence as to man's antiquity before presented was suggestive merely, here at last was demonstration; for the cave-dwelling man could not well have drawn the picture of the mammoth unless he had seen that animal, and to admit that man and the mammoth had

been contemporaries was to concede the entire case.

So soon, therefore, as the full import of this most instructive work of art came to be realized, scepticism as

to man's antiquity was silenced for all time to come.

In the generation that has elapsed since the first

drawing of the cave-dweller artist was discovered, evidences

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