singularly simian in character--low-arched, with receding forehead
and enormous, protuberant eyebrows. When it was first exhibited to the
scientists at Berlin by Dr. Fuhlrott, in 1857, its human character was
doubted by some of the witnesses; of that, however, there is no present
question.

This interesting find served to recall with fresh significance some
observations that had been made in France and Belgium a long generation
earlier, but whose bearings had hitherto been ignored. In 1826 MM.
Tournal and Christol had made independent discoveries of what they
believed to be human fossils in the caves of the south of France; and
in 1827 Dr. Schmerling had found in the cave of Engis, in Westphalia,
fossil bones of even greater significance. Schmerling's explorations
had been made with the utmost care, and patience. At Engis he had
found human bones, including skulls, intermingled with those of extinct
mammals of the mammoth period in a way that left no doubt in his mind
that all dated from the same geological epoch. He bad published a full
account of his discoveries in an elaborate monograph issued in 1833.

But at that time, as it chanced, human fossils were under a ban as
effectual as any ever pronounced by canonical index, though of far
different origin. The oracular voice of Cuvier had declared against the
authenticity of all human fossils. Some of the bones brought him for
examination the great anatomist had pettishly pitched out of the window,
declaring them fit only for a cemetery, and that had settled the matter
for a generation: the evidence gathered by lesser workers could avail
nothing against the decision rendered at the Delphi of Science. But no
ban, scientific or canonical, can longer resist the germinative power of
a fact, and so now, after three decades of suppression, the truth which
Cuvier had buried beneath the weight of his ridicule burst its bonds,
and fossil man stood revealed, if not as a flesh-and-blood, at least as
a skeletal entity.

The reception now accorded our prehistoric ancestor by the progressive
portion of the scientific world amounted to an ovation; but the
unscientific masses, on the other hand, notwithstanding their usual
fondness for tracing remote genealogies, still gave the men of Engis
and Neanderthal the cold shoulder. Nor were all of the geologists quite
agreed that the contemporaneity of these human fossils with the animals
whose remains had been mingled with them had been ful