Chapter 1687

[←1675]

Those who feel inclined to sneer at that doctrine of Esoteric Ethnology, which pre-supposes the existence of Men in the Secondary age, will do well to note the fact that one of the most distinguished Anthropologists of the day, M. de Quatrefages, seriously argues in that direction. He writes: “There is then nothing impossible in the idea that he [man] ... should have appeared upon the globe with the first representatives of the type to which he belongs by his organization.” (The Human Species, p. 153.) This statement approximates most closely to our fundamental assertion that man preceded the other mammalia.

Professor Lefèvre admits that the “labours of Boucher de Perthes, Lartet, Christy, Bourgeois, Desnoyers, Broca, De Mortillet, Hamy, Gaudry, Capellini, and a hundred others, have overcome all doubts, and clearly established the progressive development of the human organism and industries from the miocene epoch of the tertiary age.” (Philosophy Historical and Critical, Pt. II, p. 499, Chapter II, On Organic Evolution. “Library of Contemporary Science.”) Why does he reject the possibility of a Secondary-age man? Simply because he is involved in the meshes of the Darwinian Anthropology. “The origin of man is bound up with that of the higher mammals”; he appeared “only with the last types of his class”! This is not argument, but dogmatism. Theory can never excommunicate fact. Must everything give place to the mere working hypotheses of Western Evolutionists? Surely not!