Ebook Prehistoric Man in America

Introduction to the Waverley Novels, were fashioned by the water into a fantastic resemblance of cups, saucers, basins and the like. The children said they were made by the fairies, the shepherds asserted they belonged to an extinct race of dwarfs, and the philosophers took them into their hands, examined them, shook their heads and looked wise. Nor is there any unanimity of Opinion on the birthplace of the first man or parent of the human race. Sir Charles Lyell, a great authority in his day, was of the opinion that man's first appearance was in the tropics, or in the torrid zone from whence he slowly drifted into colder regions. Scott Elliott tells us in Prehistoric Man and His Story, that the first man was probably born in the meeting place of three continents — east and north of Suez, west of India, and south of Russia, while Henry F. Osborn in the preface to his Men of the Old Stone Age, say that: it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived 011 the African continent than elsewhere. But the eminent anthropologist Prof. Sergi and the distinguished paleolithic scholar, Cope, insist that man's first home was in South America. Then to impart additional interest to this lively controversy Professor H. R. Howland tells us that wherever and whenever man was born, he and his successors were left handed; and he made this state ment on the authority of the Book of Judges. All of which reminds us of the justice of Andrew Lang's observation that too often popular science is nothing more than an expenditure of rhetoric on erroneous conclusions. When these writers cannot agree among themselves but put forth assumptions, theories, hypotheses and speculations that con?ict with our intuitions and common sense, we know enough to know that this is not science but something baseless and false. We accept as true that which is prov ed to be true but we demand of those who bring against the supernatural origin of man objections from science to prove, first of all, that that which they call science is genuine science, not simply an induction, an hypothesis, a theory, a conception.