[1] See upon this an excellent pamphlet by F. J. Gould, History, the Supreme in the Instruction of the Young (Watts & Co.).

[2] A compact and inspiring book to be noted here is Fairgrieve’s Geography and World Power. Another very suggestive book is Andrew Reid Cowan’s Master Clues in World History.

[3] For a convenient recent discussion of the origin of the earth and its early history before the seas were precipitated and sedimentation began, the student should consult Professor Burrell’s contribution to the Yale lectures, The Evolution of the Earth and Its Inhabitants (1918), edited by President Lull.

[4] Here in this history of life we are doing our best to give only known and established facts in the broadest way, and to reduce to a minimum the speculative element that must necessarily enter into our account. The reader who is curious upon this question of life’s beginning will find a very good summary of current suggestions done by Professor L. L. Woodruff in President Lull’s excellent compilation The Evolution of the Earth (Yale University Press). Professor H. F. Osborn’s Origin and Evolution of Life is also a very vigorous and suggestive book upon this subject, but it demands a fair knowledge of physics and chemistry. Two very stimulating essays for the student are A. H. Church’s Botanical Memoirs. No 183, Ox. Univ. Press.

[5] Theophrastus, quoting Xenophanes.

[6] There is a discussion of fossils in the Holkham Hall Leonardo MS.

[7] An admirable recent book, short and written in a style intelligible to the general reader, is Arthur Holmes, The Age of the Earth. He gives a good summary of this most interesting discussion, and sustains the maximum estimate of 1600 million years.

[8] It might be called with more exactness the Survival of the Fitter.

[9] See Evans, The Sudden Appearance of the Cambrian Fauna. (Proc. of XIe Congrès Geolog. Inst., 1910) for a discussion of this.

[10] Phanerogams.

[11] Deciduous trees.

[12] This, says Mr. R. I. Pocock, has to be qualified. There were Carboniferous spiders with spinnerets, though they may have used the silk only for egg cases. And he thinks that the Carboniferous myriapods point to ground beneath the trees.

[13] See Sir R. Ball’s Causes of the Great Ice Age, and Dr. Croll’s Climate and Time. These are sound books to read still, but the reader will find many of their conclusions modified in Wright’s The Quaternary Ice Age, which is a quarter of a century more recent.

[14] Dr. Marie Stopes, Monograph on the Constitution of Coal.

[15] See article “Cephalopoda” in the Encyclopædia Britannica for its anatomy.

[16] And here the genius of a great humorous artist (E. T. Reed) obliges us to add a footnote to clear away a common misconception. He was the creator of a series of fantastic pictures, Prehistoric Peeps, which have had a deserved and immense vogue, and it was his whim to represent primitive men as engaged in an unending wild struggle with great Plesiosaurs and the like. His fantasy has become a common belief. As we shall see, millions of years elapsed between the vanishing of the last great Mesozoic reptile and the first appearance of man upon this earth. Early man had as contemporaries some monstrous animals, as we shall note, but not these extreme monsters.

In these opening six chapters we have been much indebted, in addition to the books already named in the text or in footnotes, to Ray Lankester’s Extinct Animals, Osborne’s Age of Mammals, Jukes Browne’s, Lyell’s and Pirsson and Schuchert’s textbooks of geology, and the collections and catalogues of the Natural History Museum at South Kensington. H. R. Knipe’s From Nebula to Man and his Evolution in the Past have also been very useful and suggestive. These two books are full of admirable illustrations of extinct monsters by Miss G. M. Woodward and Mr. Bucknall. There are good figures also in Extinct Monsters and Creatures of Other Days by H. N. Hutchinson.

[17] They secrete a nutritive fluid on which the young feeds from glands scattered over the skin. But the glands are not gathered together into mammæ with nipples for suckling. The stuff oozes out, the mother lies on her back, and the young browse upon her moist skin.

[18] Die Alpen in Eiszeitalters, vol. iii.

[19] “Graphic Projection of the Pleistocene,” “Climatic Oscillations,” in Bulletin of Geological Soc. Am., vol. xxvi.

[20] In this and the next chapters the writer has used Osborn’s Men of the Stone Age, Sollas’ Ancient Hunters, Dr. Keith’s Antiquity of Man, W. B. Wright’s The Quaternary Ice Age, Worthington Smith’s Man, the Primeval Savage, F. Wood Jones’ Arboreal Man, H. G. F. Spurrell’s Modern Man and his Forerunners, O. T. Mason’s Origins of Invention, Parkyn’s History of Prehistoric Art, Salomon Reinach’s Repertoire de l’Art Quaternaire, and various of the papers in Ray Lankester’s Science from an Easy Chair.

[21] Darwin’s Descent of Man.

[22] In Conquest for February, 1920, Mr. R. I. Pocock published a very useful criticism of this section as it stood in the first version of the Outline. It has been carefully modified in accordance with his views. In addition, we take the liberty of quoting the following:

“It was formerly held, I believe, that, so far as habits are concerned, the transitional steps in man’s descent were to be traced from an active arboreal monkey to the equally active arboreal gibbon, and thence to the less active, but still mainly arboreal, orang-utang; from the latter to the half arboreal, half terrestrial chimpanzee, thence, through the mainly terrestrial gorilla, to wholly terrestrial man. In other words, the stages of man’s evolution were a series of structural modifications resulting from the gradual dropping of the ancestral habit of living in trees in favour of life on the ground. But such a conception leaves unexplained the great differences between monkeys and gibbons in arboreal and terrestrial activity. Were it correct, we should expect the gibbons to show a transition between monkeys and other apes in their method of moving through trees and on the ground. They show no such transition. It is necessary, therefore, to formulate another theory.

“Since all the active climbing monkeys have well-developed tails, and since the tail tends to shorten or disappear in species of less active habits which live, like the monkey of Gibraltar, on rocky hillsides, the absence of the tail in apes suggests very forcibly that their ancestor had to a great extent given up living in trees. Moreover, the short broad foot of the apes, their ability to stand and walk erect, their peculiar way of climbing, all point to the conclusion that they are descended, not from a truly arboreal ape, but from an ape which had already taken to terrestrial life, with partly bipedal, partly quadrupedal progression; an ape which, while still retaining the power to ascend trees for purposes of feeding and escaping from carnivorous foes, was, at best, probably a slow, inactive climber, certainly not an arboreal leaper like a monkey. A large ape of that mode of life, with hands and feet not very different from those of a chimpanzee or gorilla, but with stronger legs and shorter arms, is my conception of the ancestor of existing apes and of man. And the progenitor of that hypothetical ancestor was probably a big ground monkey.”

[23] Among the earlier pioneers of the latter view was Mr. Harrison, a grocer of Ightham in Kent, one of those modest and devoted observers to whom British geology owes so much. At first his “Eoliths” were flouted and derided by archæologists, but to-day he has the scientific world with him in the recognition of the quasi-human origin of many of his specimens. With him we must honour Mr. W. J. Lewis Abbott, a jeweller of St. Leonards, whose intimate knowledge of stone structure has been of the utmost value in these discussions. See “Occ. Papers,” No. 4, of the Royal Anthropl. Inst., for a description by Sir E. R. Lankester of one of the better formed of these early implements.

[24] Some writers suppose that a Wood and Shell age preceded the earliest Stone Age. South Sea Islanders, Negroes, and Bushmen still make use of wood and the sharp-edged shells of land and water molluscs as implements.

[25] For some interesting suggestions on the origin of flint implements see Elliot Smith’s presidential address to the Anthropl. Sect. of the Brit. Assn., 1912.

[26] Sollas’ Ancient Hunters, p. 40.

[27] We follow Penck.

[28] For sixpence and postage the reader can get from the British Museum, South Kensington, a very fully illustrated pamphlet A Guide to the Fossil Remains of Man, showing the Piltdown material in great detail.

[29] Three phases of human history before the knowledge and use of metals are often distinguished. First there is the so-called Eolithic Age (dawn of stone implements), then the Palæolithic Age (old stone implements), and finally an age in which the implements are skilfully made and frequently well finished and polished (Neolithic Age). The Palæolithic period is further divided into an earlier (sub-human) and a later (fully human) period. We shall comment on these divisions later.

[30] From Chelles and Le Moustier in France.

[31] Osmond Fisher, quoted in Wright’s Quaternary Ice Age.

[32] Social Origins, by Andrew Lang, and Primal Law, by J. J. Atkinson. (Longmans, 1903.)

[33] This first origin of fire was suggested by Sir John Lubbock (Prehistoric Times), and Ludwig Hopf, in The Human Species, says that “Flints and pieces of pyrites are found in close proximity in palæolithic settlements near the remains of mammoths.”

[34] But compare Sollas’ Ancient Hunters. Elliot Smith (Primitive Man, Proceedings Brit. Acad., vol. vii) says they approach the Neanderthal type.

[35] What is known of the Tasmanian Old Stone men is to be found in Roth and Butler’s Aborigines of Tasmania. See also footnote on the Tasmanian language to Chapter XIII.

[36] The opinion that the Neanderthal race (Homo Neanderthalensis) is an extinct species which did not interbreed with the true men (Homo sapiens) is held by Professor Osborn, and it is the view to which the writer inclines and to which he has pointed in the treatment of this section; but it is only fair to the reader to note that many writers do not share this view. They write and speak of living “Neanderthalers” in contemporary populations. One observer has written in the past of such types in the west of Ireland; another has observed them in Greece. These so-called “living Neanderthalers” have neither the peculiarities of neck, thumb, nor teeth that distinguish the Neanderthal race of pro-men. The cheek teeth of true men, for instance, have what we call fangs, long fangs; the Neanderthaler’s cheek tooth is a more complicated and specialized cheek tooth, a long tooth with short fangs, and his canine teeth were less marked, less like dog-teeth, than ours. Nothing could show more clearly that he was on a different line of development. We must remember that so far only western Europe has been properly explored for Palæolithic remains, and that practically all we know of the Neanderthal species comes from that area (see Map, p. 89). No doubt the ancestor of Homo sapiens (which species includes the Tasmanians) was a very similar and parallel creature to Homo Neanderthalensis. And we are not so far from that ancestor as to have eliminated not indeed “Neanderthal,” but “Neanderthaloid” types. The existence of such types no more proves that the Neanderthal species, the makers of the Chellean and Mousterian implements, interbred with Homo sapiens in the European area than do monkey-faced people testify to an interbreeding with monkeys; or people with faces like horses, that there is an equine strain in our population.

[37] R. I. Pocock.

[38] See Osborn in his Men of the Old Stone Age. But see Wright’s Quaternary Ice Age for a different view of the Magdalenian Age.

[39] See, for example, H. G. F. Spurrell, Modern Man and His Forerunners, end of Chapter III.

[40] Upon this question W. J. Sollas’ Ancient Hunters is very full and suggestive.

[41] From the cave of Mas d’Azil.

[42] But our domestic cattle are derived from some form of aurochs—probably from some lesser Central Asiatic variety.—H. H. J.

[43] “The various finds of human remains in North America for which the geological antiquity has been claimed have been thus briefly passed under review. In every instance where enough of the bones is preserved for comparison, the evidence bears witness against the geological antiquity of the remains and for their close affinity to or identity with the modern Indians.” (Smithsonian Institute, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 33. Dr. Hrdlicka.)

But J. Deniker quotes evidence to show that eoliths and early palæoliths have been found in America. See his compact but full summary of the evidence and views for and against in his Races of Man, pp. 510, 511.

[44] “Questioned by some authorities,” says J. Deniker in The Races of Man.

[45] A good account of Palæolithic and Neolithic man is to be found in Rice Holmes’ Ancient Britain, 1907. Otis T. Mason’s Origins of Invention also illuminates this period.

[46] The deposits at Susa show neolithic remains perhaps more than 20,000 years old. See Montelius Congrès Internat. d’Anthrop. Prehist., 1906, p. 32. Sir Arthur Evans says the neolithic age began in Crete more than 14,000 years ago.—G. Wh.

[47] See Peisker, Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. I, for some interesting views upon domestication.—E. B.

[48] Native copper is still found to-day in Italy, Hungary, Cornwall, and many other places.

[49] This view of the origin of bronze is that of Dr. Gowland, The Metals Antiquity (Huxley Lecture, 1912). But Lord Avebury quotes the verbal opinion of the late Lord Swansea against this view, and sets it aside without further argument.

[50] Ridgeway (Early Age of Greece) says a lump of tin has been found in the Swiss pile-dwelling deposits.

[51] Tin was known as a foreign import in Egypt under the XVIIIth Dynasty; there is (rare) Mycenæan tin, and there are (probably later, but not clearly dated) tin objects in the Caucasus. But it is very difficult to distinguish tin from antimony. There is a good deal of Cyprus bronze which contains antimony; a good deal which seems to be tin is antimony—the ancients trying to get tin, but actually getting antimony and thinking it was tin.—J. L. M.

[52] In connection with iron, note the distinction of ornamental and useful iron. Ornamental iron, a rarity, perhaps meteoric, as jewellery or magical stuff, occurs in east Europe sporadically in the time of the XVIIIth Dynasty. This must be distinguished from the copious useful iron which appears in Greece much later from the North.—J. L. M.

[53] People were probably healthier and longer lived in the Bronze than in the Neolithic age. The disparity of stature between male and female was much less.—G. Wh.

[54] Lord Avebury. For a good account of Avebury, Stonehenge, and the traces of a well-developed social system in England before the coming of the Keltic peoples, see Hippesley Cox, The Green Roads of England.

[55] Caesar de Bello Gallico says the Britons tabooed hare, fowl and goose.—G. Wh.

[56] All Old World peoples who had entered upon the Neolithic stage grew and ate wheat, but the American Indians must have developed agriculture independently in America after their separation from the Old World populations. They never had wheat. Their cultivation was maize, Indian corn, a new-world grain.

[57] Poultry and hens’ eggs were late additions to the human cuisine, in spite of the large part they now play in our dietary. The hen is not mentioned in the Old Testament (but note the allusion to an egg, Job vi, 6) nor by Homer. Up to about 1300 B.C. the only fowls in the world were jungle denizens in India and Burmah. The crowing of jungle cocks is noted by Glasfurd in his admirable accounts of tiger shooting as the invariable preliminary of dawn in the Indian jungle. Probably poultry were first domesticated in Burmah. They got to China, according to the records, only about 1100 B.C. They reached Greece via Persia before the time of Socrates. In the New Testament the crowing of the cock reproaches Peter for his desertion of the Master.

[58] Later Palæolithic bone whistles are known. One may guess that reed pipes were an early invention.

[59] In addition to authorities already cited, we have used for this and the following chapters Lord Avebury’s Prehistoric Times, Schrader and Jevons’ Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples, and A. H. Keane’s Man Past and Present.

[60] Among other books we have used Jukes Browne’s Building of the British Isles.

[61] The Quaternary Ice Age.

[62] Our treatment of this chapter is written for the general reader and is broad and general. But the student who wishes to go more thoroughly into the development of the civilized mentality out of the elements of the primitive human mind should read and study very carefully that very illuminating book, Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious (English translation by Beatrice M. Hinckle), and especially the opening two chapters. That book is a most important contribution to the mental history of mankind.

[63] J. J. Atkinson’s Primal Law.

[64] See Sir J. G. Frazer, Belief in Immortality.

[65] Glasfurd’s Rifle and Romance in the Indian Jungle, 1915.

[66] For some interesting suggestions here see Sigismund Freud, Totem and Taboo, Resemblances between the Psychic Life of Savages and Neurotics.

[67] Ludwig Hopf, in The Human Species, calls the later Palæolithic art “masculine” and the Neolithic “feminine.” The pottery was made by women, he says, and that accounts for it. But the arrowheads were made by men, and there was nothing to prevent Neolithic men from taking scraps of bone or slabs of rock and carving them—had they dared. We suggest they did not dare to do so.

[68] But Cicero says relegere, “to read over,” and the “binding” by those who accept religare is often written of as being merely the binding of a vow.

[69] Bateman, Ten Years’ Digging in Celtic and Saxon Gravehills, quoted by Lord Avebury in Prehistoric Times, p. 176.

[70] Cabot in Labrador, by Grenfell and others. Macmillan, New York.

[71] Quoted in Ency. Brit., vol. ix, p. 850.

[72] This is not a good name, and may perhaps drop out of use later. Blumenbach chose a particular skull as the “type” of this race and it happened to be a skull from the Caucasus.—G. S.

[73] The skull shape of the Lombards, says Flinders Petrie, changed from dolichocephalic to brachycephalic in a few hundred years. See his Huxley Lecture for 1906, Migrations, published by the Anthropological Institute. Ripley is the great authority on the other side.

[74] My Diaries, under date of July 25, 1894.

[75] “Sunstone” culture because of the sun worship and the megaliths. This is not a very happily chosen term. It suggests a division equivalent to palæolithic (old stone) and neolithic (new stone), whereas it is a development of the Neolithic culture.

[76] Megalithic monuments have been made quite recently by primitive Indian peoples.

[77] For some interesting suggestions in this matter, see W. H. R. Rivers, “Sun Cult and Megaliths in Oceana” (American Anthropologist (N.S.), vol. xvii). Hose and MacDougall, The Pagan Tribes of Borneo, contains some very interesting parallelisms between the culture of modern Borneo and the prehistoric culture of southern Europe. See also Dr. W. Warde Fowler’s “Ancient Italy and Modern Borneo” in the Journal of Roman Studies (1916).

[78] Sir Arthur Evans suggests that in America sign-language arose before speech, because the sign-language is common to all Indians in North America, whereas the languages are different. See his Anthropology and the Classics.—G. M.

Samuel Butler (Note Books) suggests that language was “originally confined to a few scholars.”—G. Wh.

[79] See article “Grammar” in the Encyclopædia Britannica.

[80] Sir H. H. Johnston gives this estimate in his Comparative Study of the Bantu and Semi-Bantu Languages.

[81] Greek—ox-ford.

[82] Ratsel (quoted in the Ency. Brit., art. “Caspian”).

[83] Encyclopædia Britannica, article “Japan.”

[84] The four characters indicating “Affairs, query, imperative, old,” placed in that order, for example, represent “Why walk in the ancient ways?” The Chinaman gives the bare cores of his meaning; the Englishman gets to it by a bold metaphor. He may be talking of conservatism in cooking or in bookbinding, but he will say: “Why walk in the ancient ways?” Mr. Arthur Waley, in the interesting essay on Chinese thought and poetry which precedes his book, 170 Chinese Poems (Constable, 1918), makes it clear how in these fields Chinese thought is kept practical and restricted by the limitations upon metaphor the linguistic structure of Chinese imposes. See also Hirst, Ancient History of China, ch. vii.

[85] See Farrand, The American Nation, and E. S. Payne, History of the New World called America, and note footnote to § 1 of this chapter.

[86] These are discussed compactly, but with very special knowledge, by Sir Harry Johnston in his little book on The Opening up of Africa, in the Home University Library. The student who finds this subject of philological history interesting, should read the introduction to the same writer’s Comparative Study of the Bantu and Semi-Bantu Languages.

[87] The Polynesians appear to be a later eastward extension of the dark whites or brown peoples. See again § 4 of chap. xiii.

[88] “The Keltic group of languages, of which it has been said that they combined an Aryan vocabulary with a Berber (or Iberian) grammar.” Sir Harry Johnston. See also Sir John Rhys, The Welsh People, Mac Neilh’s Phases in Irish History, and various articles by Prof. Stewart Macalister in the Irish Monthly (1917-1919).

[89] See Schrader (translated by Jevons), Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples, p. 404. But though the word Aryan was undoubtedly in its original application the name only of the Indo-Iranian people, it has been used in modern discussion for more than half a century in the wider sense. A word was badly wanted for that purpose, and “Aryan” was taken; failing “Aryan” we should be obliged to fall back on “Indo-Germanic” or “Indo-European,” terms equally open to objection and ugly and clumsy to employ.

[90] But these may have been an originally Semitic people who learnt an Aryan speech.

[91] On this point see Perry, An Ethnological Study of Warfare, vol. lxi., Mem. Manchester Lit. and Phil. Soc., and also published separately 1917.—G. Wh.

[92] Fools, I think, were not wits, but deformed idiots, whom the company teased and laughed at. Certainly so in Roman and mediæval times. They do not occur in the Hellenic Age, except at courts in Asia Minor; but they must have been present in pre-Hellenic kingdoms; cf. end of Iliad I., where the gods laugh consumedly not at Hephaestus’ wit, but at his lameness. The idealized Fool of Shakespeare is, like the idealized Hermit of the romances, the invention of later days.—G. M

[93] The Aryans developed their languages and their ballads and epics between 10,000 B.C. and the historical period. Very much later in time, probably within the last 3,000 years, the nomadic Mongolian peoples of Asia began to develop their Ural-Altaic speech, under similar conditions, by similar poetic uses. Later we shall note the presence of bards at the court of Attila the Hun.

[94] It is suggested in the text that blind men became bards: Myres says that bards were (artificially) blinded to stop them from going elsewhere—the tribe wanted to keep them. The poetic touch is that “the Muses” blind the poet. Not a bit of it. (Homer, being a blind bard, describes things by sound—the twanging arrow, the far-thundering sea, the noise of the chariot going through the gate. He is audile, not visual.)—E. B.

But in this matter note the adjectives in the passage quoted here from the Iliad; they are all visual.—G. H. M.

Mr. L. Lloyd, of the experimental station at Cheshunt, tells me he has seen in Rhodesia the musician and singer of a troupe of native dancers who had been blinded by his chief to prevent him leaving the village.—H. G. W.

[95] G.M.

[96] The Iliad describes what Chadwick calls a Heroic Age: i.e. a time when the barbarians or nomads are breaking up an old civilization. Men are led by chiefs who live by plunder and conquest and make themselves kingdoms. The tribe is broken up; instead comes the comitatus of casual men who attach themselves to a particular chief, as Phœnix or Patroclus to Achilles. Religion is broken up, being by origin local. Hence there is almost no religion in the Iliad or the Nibelungenlied. Almost no magic. No family life. Tremendous booty, and la carrière ouverte aux talents with a vengeance.—G. M.

[97] Some Aspects of Hindu Life in India. Paper read to the Royal Society of Arts, Nov. 28, 1918.

[98] No Greek heroes, in Homer or the heroic tradition, ever get drunk. In the comic tradition they do, and of course centaurs and barbarians do.—G. M.

[99] Babylonian expedition of the University of Pennsylvania.

[100] H. R. Hall, Ancient History of the Near East, says it has been found in Palestine.—S. H.

The late Mr. Aaron Aaronson found a real wild wheat upon the slopes of Mt. Hermon. See Bulletin 274, Plant Indus. Bureau, U. S. Dept. of Agriculture; and Stapf in Suppl. to the Jour. of the Board of Agri., Lond., vol. xvii, No. 3.—E. J. R.

[101] We shall use “Mesopotamia” here loosely for the Euphrates-Tigris country generally. Strictly, of course, as its name indicates, Mesopotamia (mid rivers) means only the country between those two great rivers. That country in the fork was probably very marshy and unhealthy in early times (Sayce), until it was drained by man, and the early cities grew up west of the Euphrates and east of the Tigris. Probably these rivers then flowed separately into the Persian Gulf.