The 'Antiquity of Man' came out in February 1863, some three years after the 'Origin of Species.' For some time speculation had been active over the strange hatchets which Boucher de Perthes had recently unearthed among the Abbeville drift--shapeless masses of chipped flint rudely fashioned into the form of an axe, which we now call palæolithic implements, and know to be the handicraft of preglacial men. But until Lyell's authoritative work appeared the unscientific public could not tell exactly what to think of these curious and almost unhuman-looking objects. Lyell at once set all doubts at rest; the magic of his name silenced the derisive whispers of the dissidents. Already, in the previous year, the first fasciculus of Colenso's famous work on the Pentateuch had dealt a serious blow from the ecclesiastical and critical side at the authenticity and historical truth of the Mosaic cosmogony. Lyell now from the scientific side completely demolished its literal truth, as ordinarily interpreted, by throwing back the primitive origin of our race into a dim past of immeasurable antiquity. In so doing he was clearing the way for Charles Darwin's second great work, 'The Descent of Man;' and by incorporating in his book Huxley's remarks on the Neanderthal skull, and much similar evolutionary matter, he advertised the new creed in the animal origin of our race with all the acquired weight of his immense and justly-deserved European reputation. As a matter of taste, Lyell did not relish the application of evolutionism to his own species. But, with that perfect loyalty to fact which he shared so completely with Charles Darwin, as soon as he found the evidence overwhelming, he gave in. By that grudging concession he immensely strengthened the position of the new creed. 'I plead guilty,' he writes to Sir Joseph Hooker, 'to going farther in my reasoning towards transmutation than in my sentiments and imagination, and perhaps for that very reason I shall lead more people on to Darwin and you, than one who, being born later, like Lubbock, has comparatively little to abandon of old and long-cherished ideas, which constituted the charm to me of the theoretical part of the science in my earlier days.' And to Darwin himself he writes regretfully. 'The descent of man from the brutes takes away much of the charm from my speculations on the past relating to such matters.' This very reluctance itself told powerfully in favour of Charles Darwin's novel theories: there is no evidence more valuable to a cause than that which it extorts by moral force, in spite of himself, from the faltering lips of an unwilling witness.