68 THE RISE OF MAN. 



the human race originated, was a continued era of hard 

 times. There was no other shelter than the caves acci- 

 dentally formed by nature. Food was scarce and difficult 

 to procure, while the struggle with wild animals, especially 

 the mammoth and the bear, must have taxed the energy 

 of a primitive community to the utmost. 



Civilization may be characterized as man's mastery 

 of hard times ; its aim is to continue good times, and so 

 it preserves the unfit and allows their qualities, by what 

 Weismann has called panmixia, to continue as typical fea- 

 tures of the race. In this way the brain capacity of man 

 shows a very insignificant advance since the time of sav- 

 agery, for the higher a civilization and the prosperity of 

 a community ranges, the easier it will be for lower types 

 of mankind to survive. 



Dr. Woodruff says : 



u ln whatever direction we seek, we are sure to find 

 remarkably clear evidence that man's brain developed to 

 its maximum size long before the dawn of civilization by 

 the process of natural selection in an environment which 

 eliminated the least intelligent in each generation, and 

 that civilization always checks the process. 



' ' Our pre-glacial ancestor, in that tropical climate 

 which extended nearly to the pole, may have had so little 

 trouble in getting food that it was the active and agile in- 

 telligent ones best fitted to escape the enemies of the 

 times, who were the best adjusted to the environment and 

 who survived in greater numbers. Now what a change 

 occurred in the very slow and gradual approach of the long 

 cold 1 What a struggle began with a wiping out of species 

 which could not find fit variations adjusted to the change, 

 and what a mortality there must have been among our 

 most stupid ancestors, and therefore what a rapid evolution 

 of brain when the most intelligent survived, and no others, 

 in each generation. 



"Like the protozoon, man was at first a jack-of-all- 



