Excerpt from Opening of the Lewis Brooks Museum at the University of Virginia, June 27th, 1878: Address on Man's Age in the World Now while it is by no means the absurd theory which it is popularly thought to be; while it is largely supported by the analogies Of nature; no conscientious advocate Of Evolution will say that it is more than a belief. Not one solitary case has been made out. There is not an animal living, or an animal form in the geological strata, whose pedigree has ever been positively carried across the barrier of species. I have not the slightest idea, however, of discussing on this occasion the doctrine of Evolution it would extend my remarks far too much to go into that subject. As bearing, nevertheless, on my main theme, the Appearance of Man on the Earth, I am compelled to touch the subject in a very general way. If Man was developed from the lower animals, his age, of course, is inconceivable. In that case we should have to trace man back through a long line of ancestors until, somewhere in the Tertiary strata, we reached the common trunk from which the anthropoid and pithecoid types bifurcated. N 0 such forms have, however, been found, earlier than the close of the Quaternary, and the human skeletons of this date - the Oldest human skeletons - are precisely like the human Skeletons of to-day, with the same general frame and the same cerebral capacity. Nor have any human implements been found in the Tertiary strata. Certain incised bones were found some ten years ago in the Pliocene strata Of France, at St. Prest, and similarly marked bones were found about the same time in the Val d' Arno, in Italy, by Prof. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.