File:The American Museum journal (c1900-(1918)) (17538216534).jpg

Title: The American Museum journal
Identifier: americanmuseumjo17amer (find matches)
Year: c1900-(1918) (c190s)
Authors: American Museum of Natural History
Subjects: Natural history
Publisher: New York : American Museum of Natural History
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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Cro-Magnon Man. After restoration by Professor J. H. McGregor from prehistoric skull found in 1868 in a grotto in the little hamlet of Cro- Magnon, near Les Eyzies, France. Cour- tesy of Charles Scrib- ner's Sons The Dawn of History A DRAMA IN THREE ACTS i By T. D. A. C O C K E R E L L Professor of Zoology, University of Colorado Introduction to Act I.—We com- monly divide the human period into the historic and prehistoric. The historic is considered to be that which is re- corded in the books,—that concerning which tradition exists, unbroken in the main to the present day. Discoveries of ancient records and writings thus ever tend to press back the date of the beginning of known history, to dispel the mists which hide remote antiquity from us. There is, however, another way of re- garding this matter, and the historic may be separated from the prehistoric without reference to the condition of the records, or even to their existence. There was, strictly speaking, no history as long as man lived in primitive ways, without appreciable progress and with- out noteworthy deeds. The years rolled by for man as they did for the beasts; as they still do for the wild man of the remoter forests of the Amazon. The ages saw evolutionary progress; but history proper, the marking of time by salient events, did not exist. At long intervals inventions and discoveries did indeed punctuate the centuries, but they were so rare that they produced no connected effect on the human mind, no sense of progress. At length more rapid advance was made, and it was possible in a lifetime to realize that the past and future were not alike, to sense the flow of historic events. The lines below, describing the killing of the first mammoth, attempt to describe the birth of this new age and the new way of regarding human affairs. Written after reading Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn's Men of the Old Stone Age. 299

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