engaged in a process of development, and its
present members do not stand on the same height. Now the question is, to
what beginning can we trace backward the development of mankind, and to
what succeeding stages of development from this present condition? And do
we find in these earliest periods, and on these lowest stages, points that
are connected with still earlier conditions and organizations, and
especially points which could genealogically join together mankind and the
animal kingdom? Three sciences, still young, favorite children of the
present generation, participate in investigating this realm, namely,
_archaeology_, _comparative ethnology_, and _comparative philology_.

_Archaeology_ leads us back to far-off times. It is a fact that,
chronologically speaking, man lived in the glacial period--according to
French scientists, even before it; and that, palaeontologically speaking,
man and {89} mammoth lived at the same time, and, according to a discovery
made some thirty years ago at Denise in Middle France, probably even man
and another older and defunct form of pachydermata, the elephas
meridionalis, in North America man and the mastodon. The reader may compare
the discoveries regarding the age of mankind, as they are described most
recently by Sir Charles Lyell in his work upon this subject, in the
publications of the Anthropological Congress at Brussels in the year 1873,
and in those of the fourth General Assembly of the German Society for
Anthropology, Ethnology and Primitive History, at Wiesbaden, in the year
1873.

Now, to be sure, from the oldest human _tools_ and _utensils_ that are
found, we can expect still less than from the oldest human bones that they
will throw direct light upon the answer to the question of the _origin_ of
man. For where man not only uses tools, but _manufactures_ the same for
use, a wide breach already exists between man and animal. Manufactured
articles, therefore, can only throw some light on the history of the
development of the already existing human race. And even this light is less
clear than we perhaps expected in view of the first interesting
prehistorical discoveries. It is true, all these discoveries show us an
ascent from the simplest and roughest forms to the more perfect; from the
split but unpolished stone to the polished, and from stone to bronze and
iron. But a progress of the human races in manufacturing and using
articles, from the simple and rough form to the m