In 1723 Jussieu addressed the French Academy on _The Origin and
Uses of Thunder-stones_. He showed that recent travellers from
various parts of the world had brought a number of weapons and
other implements of stone to France, and that they were
essentially similar to what in Europe had been known as
"thunder-stones." A year later this fact was clinched into the
scientific mind of France by the Jesuit Lafitau, who published
a work showing the similarity between the customs of aborigines
then existing in other lands and those of the early inhabitants
of Europe. So began, in these works of Jussieu and Lafitau, the
science of Comparative Ethnography.
But it was at their own risk and peril that thinkers drew from
these discoveries any conclusions as to the antiquity of man.
Montesquieu, having ventured to hint, in an early edition of his
_Persian Letters_, that the world might be much older than had
been generally supposed, was soon made to feel danger both to
his book and to himself, so that in succeeding editions he
suppressed the passage.
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