MENTAL EVOLUTION OF MAN 227 



So it is with the dweUings of men, and the significance 

 of the changes displayed by such things. The cave 

 was a natural shelter for primitive man as well as for 

 the wolf, and it is still used by men to-day. Where it 

 did not exist, a leafy screen of branches served in its 

 stead ; even now there are human beings, like the 

 African pygmy and the Indian of Brazil, who are little 

 beyond the orang-outang as regards the character of 

 the shelter they construct out of vegetation. From 

 such crude beginnings, on a par with the lairs and 

 nests of lower animals, have evolved the grass huts of 

 the Zulu, the bamboo dwelHng of the Malay, the igloo 

 of the Arctic tribes, and the mud house of the desert 

 Indians. The modern palace and apartment are 

 merely more complex and more elaborate in material 

 and architectural plan, when compared with their primi- 

 tive antecedents. 



Baskets, clay vessels, and other household articles 

 testify in the same way to an evolution of the mental 

 views of the people making them. The means of trans- 

 portation are even more demonstrative. The wagon 

 of the early Briton was like a rough ox-cart of the 

 present day, evolved from the simple sledge as a begin- 

 ning. In its turn it has served as a prototype for all 

 the conveyances on wheels such as the stage-coach and 

 the modern Pullman. The history of locomotives, 

 employed in the first chapter to develop a clear con- 

 ception of what evolution means, takes its place here 

 as a demonstration of the way human ideas about 

 traction have themselves evolved so as to render the 

 construction of such mechanisms possible. 



The primitive savage swimming in the sea found 



