Prehistoric Man: Researches into the Origin of Civilisation in the Old and the New World.

Abstract

DR. DANIEL WILSON claims the merit of having introduced the useful term prehistoric, first employed (he says) in 1851, in his “Prehistoric Annals of Scotland.” There its meaning was limited to races preceding the oldest historical nations of Northern Europe. But in the first edition of his “Prehistoric Man,” published in 1862, it had become a general term for tribes ancient or modern in chronology, as to whom written history fails to afford information, and who are only known through archæology. The adoption of the word by Sir John Lubbock in the title of his “Prehistoric Times,” published in 1865, and its incorporation into the name of the “Congress of Prehistoric Archæology,” which held its first meeting at Neuchâtel in 1866, brought it into general currency.

Prehistoric Man: Researches into the Origin of Civilisation in the Old and the New World.

By Daniel Wilson, LL.D. Third Edition. (Macmillan and Co., 1876.)