Page:Prehistoric Britain.djvu/48

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PREHISTORIC BRITAIN

Another work, which called forth almost as much hostile criticism as the Origin of Species, was Huxley's Mans Place in Nature, published in 1863. In this little volume the author finally shattered the hypothesis which assigned man's origin and civilization to a sui generis code outside the ordinary laws of the organic world.

It was not, however, till after the publication of Lyell's Antiquity of Man (1863) that anthropology took its place among the great departments of scientific knowledge.

In my recent lectures on Palæolithic Man in Europe, 1912 (p. 101), I thus summed up the immediate results which followed the publication of Lyell's book:

"Henceforth a new impetus was given to the study of the science of anthropology by the conviction that the meanest traces of man's early career were actually more important materials for a history of humanity than all the treasures that had been collected from the ruins of the greatest empires of the historic world. The wide morphological gap between man and the other animals still living suggested a correspondingly long period for man's development, in the course of which it was expected that some evidence of the stages through which he had passed might have become stereotyped in the geological records. Where to find and how to interpret such materials were now the chief problems at issue; and to their solution the