Note 5 — Chapter I

It would be foreign to the object of this work to enter upon a discussion of the antiquity of man in Europe. Were we to follow the example of several writers on the antiquities of America, we might present a resumé of the splendid achievements of science in determining the approximate age of man, as an inhabitant of different portions of the old world, but such condensed accounts at best are unsatisfactory and often detrimental to science because of their very slenderness. The evidences of man’s antiquity being far more remote than the generally accepted historic period, antedating its beginning by several thousand years, no doubt exist. The discoveries in the Liége caverns, in the caves of Languedoc and in the cave of Engihoul in Belgium; in the Neanderthal and Engis caves; at Abbeville and Amians; the valley of the Somme; the basin of the Seine; of the Thames; and of the lake dwellers of Switzerland, as well as the shell-heaps of Denmark, point to an antiquity which half a century ago it would have been heresy to have dreamed of. We have but to refer to the admirable work of Sir Charles Lyell: The Antiquity of Man (Phil., 1863), and to the well-known works of Lubbock, Tylor, Vogt, and others. A good treatment of the subject in brief will be found in Foster: Pre-Historic Races of the U. S. (1873), and a pointed and popular reference to it in Bryant’s History of the U. S., vol. I. N. Y., 1876.