196 THE WHENCE AND THE WHITHER OF MAN 



lected the mammal, a small, feeble being, hiding in 

 holes and ledges, and continually hard put to it Jo 

 escape becoming a mouthful for some huge reptile. 

 And yet the persecution, the impossibility of contend- 

 ing by brute strength, may have forced the mammal 

 into the line of brain-building and placental develop- 

 ment. The early development of mammals appears 

 to have been slow. Paleontology proves that they 

 were long surpassed by reptiles and birds. But the 

 little mammal had the future. The battle was to go 

 against the strong. 



Once again. The arboreal life of higher mammals 

 would seem to be most easily explained by the view 

 that they were driven to it by stronger carnivorous 

 mammals having possession of the ground. Brain 

 was good, for it planned escape from enemies. But 

 it did not give its possessor immediate victory over 

 muscle, tooth, and claw in the tiger. That was to 

 come far later with the invention of traps and guns. 

 Brain gave its possessor a sure hold of the future, and 

 just enough of the present to enable it to survive by 

 a hard struggle. And the same appears to have been 

 true of primitive man. 



Thus all man's ancestors have had to lead a life of 

 continual struggle against overwhelming odds and of 

 seeming defeat. It was a life of hardship, if not of 

 positive suffering. The organ which was to give them 

 future supremacy, whether it was backbone, placenta, 

 or brain, could in its earlier stages aid them only to a 

 hardly won survival. The present apparently, and 

 really as far as freedom from discomfort and danger is 

 concerned, always belongs to forms hopelessly doomed 

 to degeneration or stagnation. Crabs, not primitive 



