With regard to this skull Professor Huxley, writing in 1863, says:
"There can be no doubt that, as Professor Schaaffhausen and Mr. Busk have stated, the skull is the most brutal of all known human skulls, resembling those of the apes not only in the prodigious development of the superciliary prominences and the forward extension of the orbits, but still more in the depressed form of the brain-case, in the straightness of the squamosal suture, and in the complete retreat of the occiput forward and upward, from the superior occipital ridges."
The above rapid sketch of a few of the more outstanding discoveries, bearing on the antiquity of man, shows that the science of anthropology had as yet only attained a footing in the minds of a few thoughtful men, who had been able to divest themselves of hereditary prejudices. Professor Huxley, writing in 1894, in his preface to the re-publication of Man's Place in Nature, thus writes:
"Among the many problems which came under my consideration, the position of the human species in zoological classification was one of the most serious. Indeed, at that time, (circa 1857) it was a burning question in the sense that those who touched it were almost certain to burn their fingers severely. It was not so very long since my kind friend Sir William Lawrence, one of the ablest men whom I have known, had been well-nigh ostracized
