EARLY CIVILIZATIONS 3 



Iron Age, according to the use of stone, bronze and iron 

 implements. 



PREHISTORIC MAN. If therefore we would begin the history 

 of science at the very beginning, we must turn far backward in 

 imagination to a time when the human race was barely superior 

 to the beasts that perish. Absorbed in a fierce struggle for exist- 

 ence, the passing generations had little history and left behind 

 them no permanent records. In one respect nevertheless mankind 

 stood far above the beasts; namely, in possessing the power of 

 language, by which they could not only communicate more readily 

 one with another, but also convey to their descendants through 

 oral tradition something of whatever they might possess of accu- 

 mulated knowledge. Eventually, though slowly, the generations 

 began to leave behind them more enduring records, at first 

 crude and fragmentary, in the form of tools, cairns, and other 

 monuments, or in drawings, paintings, or carvings, on ivory or 

 rocks or trees, or on the walls of caverns, which should serve 

 to inform or instruct other men. Finally, but still slowly, and 

 especially out of this so-called "picture-writing," grew the art of 

 writing, which furnished a means of keeping permanent records 

 of the past and a new and more perfect way of communication 

 between living men and races of men. We who have ourselves 

 witnessed some of the consequences of improvements in the arts 

 of communication between men and nations, such as have recently 

 been effected by steam transportation and telegraphy and teleph- 

 ony, can to some extent realize how much the introduction of the 

 rudiments of the art of writing may have meant in the progress of 

 prehistoric and primitive mankind. 



THE SCIENCE OF MANKIND. ANTHROPOLOGY. The various 

 steps in the evolution of mankind and in the earliest development 

 of civilization and the arts form the subject matter of one of the 

 youngest of the sciences, anthropology, to works upon which 

 the reader is referred who would pursue these matters further. 

 One of the earliest and still one of the most interesting of these, 

 Man's Place in Nature, by Huxley, is now a classic. Another, 

 also somewhat out of date but still very valuable, entitled 



