Abstract
MR. J. REID Mora, with an admirable sense of propriety, took as the text of his Huxley Memorial Lecture for 1939 before the Imperial College of Science and Technology on May 4 certain questions posed by T. H. Huxley in his famous book “Man's Place in Nature”. There Huxley asked: “Where, then, must we look for primeval man? Was the oldest Homo sapiens Pliocene or Miocene, or yet more ancient?” Readers of Mr. Reid Moir's lecture in its published form (“The Earliest Men”. By J. Reid Moir. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd. Pp. 32. Is. net) will appreciate the choice as lecturer on this occasion of an investigator of man's origins, who through his association with Edwin Ray Lankester is directly linked with Huxley, and also by his own researches has contributed so much of the material which must be taken into account by everyone who ponders the problems thus formulated by Huxley so long ago. The evidence of man's skeletal remains, as well as of his artefacts, which has been laboriously collected, pieced together and interpreted by numerous investigators since Huxley's day, ably summarized and surveyed by Mr. Reid Moir, may seem formidable enough in its detailed mass, but it is still far from offering a final solution of man's origins. Nevertheless it makes it possible to adumbrate a generalized formula, from which it may be that a concrete answer eventually will emerge. If in the meantime Mr. Reid Moir's technological and aesthetic arguments may seem a little overweighted in the period and degree of man's development they demand, and his credence in Miocene man a thought too readily conceded, none can deny that in his life work he has abundantly shown faith in that of which his powers of observation and reason have convinced him-the belief in the power of truth ultimately to prevail, which Huxley urged upon the youth of his time.
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Earliest Man. Nature 143, 816 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/143816a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/143816a0