Man in the Tertiaries: An Address Before the Section of Anthropology of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Philadelphia, Sept. 4, 1884

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Printed at the Salem Press, 1884 - 15 pages
 

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Page 12 - His structural superiority consists solely in the complexity and size of the brain. A very important lesson is derived from these and kindred facts. The monkeys were anticipated in the greater fields of the world's activity by more powerful rivals. The ancestors of the ungulates held the fields and the swamps, and the Carnivora, driven by hunger, learned the arts and cruelties of the chase. The weaker ancestors of the quadrumana possessed neither speed nor weapons of...
Page 11 - the mammals of the lower eocene exhibit a greater percentage of types that walk on the soles of their feet, while the successive periods exhibit an increasing number of those that walk on the toes, while the hoofed animals and Carnivora of recent times nearly all have the heel high in the air, the principal exceptions being the elephant and bear families.
Page 9 - ... types as we recognize them in the Patagonians, Tasmanians, Australians, Bushmen, Veddahs and others, and precisely where we might expect to find them. If either supposition is true the earlier traces of these people are forever buried beyond recovery. In the face of all this destruction and effacement must be reckoned also the prejudices of man himself, which have caused the loss of precious material, or of opportunities which can never be regained. Ancient skeletons have been exhumed only to...
Page 4 - Fortified by this barrier, science repelled for a time all evidences brought forward to show that man's remains were synchronous with those of extinct mammals, and the authors of these evidences were treated with neglect and even ignominy. The assaults of this barrier are now historic. The final and triumphant vindication of Perthes, Schmerling and others, and the consequent overthrow of Cuvier's massive authority in this matter, are familiar to every student of archaeology. No sooner had the Cuvierian...
Page 4 - Dawkins1 in a similar line of argument assumes that "man, the most highly specialized form in the animal kingdom, cannot be looked for until the lower animals by which he is now surrounded made their appearance. We cannot imagine him to have been living in the eocene age when animal life was not sufficiently differentiated to present us with living genera of placental mammals. Nor is there any probability of his having appeared on the earth in the miocene, because of the absence of placental mammals...
Page 14 - The river-drift meu are found impartially scattered from tropical India through Europe to North America. If their distribution was by the northern approaches of the continent, it must have been in pre-glacial times, because, as Dawkins shows, an ice-barrier must have spanned the great oceans in northern latitudes. It seems an almost fruitless speculation, to inquire into the manner of their dispersion, yet one is tempted to surmise that if they originated in the tropics, then submerged continents...
Page 4 - Cuvier in the declaration that man being the last and highest creation, and intimately associated with the present fauna, could never have been contemporary with the extinct species of mammals found in the quaternary beds. Fortified by this barrier, science repelled for a time all evidences brought forward to show that man's remains were synchronous with those of extinct mammals, and the authors of these evidences were treated with neglect and even ignominy. The assaults of this barrier are now historic....
Page 8 - Chief among the agencies in destroying the evidences of man have been the glacial floods, and these, if the glacialists are right, have occurred, one, during the earlier pliocene, and the other at the beginning of the quaternary. To these overwhelming and annihilating ice torrents, grinding, sweeping and inundating the north temperate zone, must be attributed the almost complete obliteration of records we hold most precious. And in their gradual recedence no less destructive agencies were at work...
Page 4 - ... matter, are familiar to every student of archaeology. No sooner had the Cuvierian barrier against quaternary man been demolished, than smaller barriers of precisely the same nature were erected against tertiary man. Gaudry, while admitting the authenticity of the worked flints, discovered by the Abbe Bourgeois in the miocene of Thenay, could not admit that they were those of man, because he says, "There was not in the middle of the miocene epoch a single species now extant. Considering the question...
Page 15 - So long, however, as forms are found, in the lowest beds of the tertiaries, having the remotest affinity to his order, we must not cease our care in scanning unbiassed, even the rocks of this horizon, for traces of that creature who until within a few short years was regarded as five thousand, eight hundred and some odd years old, and who despite of protest and prejudice has asserted his claim to an antiquity so great and a dispersion so profound that thus far no tendency to a convergence of his...

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