Note 155 — Chapter II
Reading edition
Sir John Lubbock, alluding to the changes that have transpired in the condition of man from his first appearance in America, says: “But even if we attribute to these changes all the importance which ever has been claimed for them, they will not require an antiquity of more than three thousand years. I do not, of course, deny that the period may have been very much greater, but in my opinion, at least, it
need
not be greater.”—
Pre-Historic Times
, p. 234, London, 1865.
Dr. Foster, after giving many of the reputed proofs of man’s antiquity here, sums up the argument in the following language: “The evidence, it must be confessed, rests, in most cases, upon the testimony of a single observer, and besides, there has not been a recurrence of ‘finds’ in the same deposit (except in the gravel beds of Colorado and Wyoming, which require further investigation to command an unqualified belief), as in the valley of the Somme and in the European caves, which is so conclusive as to the existence of man as contemporary with the great Pachyderms.”—Foster’s Pre-Historic Races, p. 71.