94 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



add to the stores of plant-food in the surface-soil, which may be used 

 by plants of a different habit that are not deep feeders. 



The physiological peculiarities of the different botanical groups of 

 plants must, however, be better understood before we can fully explain 

 the influeuce of one crop upon another that succeeds it. That the 

 special formula manures, so widely advertised in this country, and 

 which are claimed to pi-ovide, in due proportion, the constituents re- 

 quired by a particular crop, are based on false assumptions, is abun- 

 dantly shown in the Rothamsted field-experiments ; but we can not 

 now discuss the fallacy in detail. 



The experiments with animals at Rothamsted must form the sub- 

 ject of a separate article. 



->- 



WHO WAS PRIMITIVE MAE"? 



Br Professor GEANT ALLEN. 



WHEN Sir Charles Lyell's " Antiquity of Man " and Mr. Darwin's 

 two great works first set all the world thinking about the ori- 

 gin of our race, there was a general tendency among scientific men 

 and the public generally to take it for granted that the earliest known 

 men, those whose remains we find in the river-drift, were necessarily 

 " missing links " between the human species and its supposed anthro- 

 poid progenitors. People naturally imagined that these very ancient 

 men must have been hairy, low-browed, semi-brutal savages, half-way 

 in development between the goi'illa and the Australian or the Bush- 

 man. Striking word-pictures painted the palaeolithic hunter for us as 

 an evolving ape ; and we all acquiesced in the pictures as truthful and 

 accurate. With the progress of discovery, however, another phase of 

 the question has come uppermost, and anthropologists have now for 

 some time inclined with marked distinctness to the exactly opposite 

 view. As we examined more and more closely the relics of the cave- 

 men, for example, it became clear that their works of art were those 

 not merely of real human beings, but of human beings considerably in 

 advance of many existing savages. Professor Boyd Dawkins, who 

 knows more about the cave-men than any one else in Britain at least, 

 unhesitatingly states his opinion that they were in all important re- 

 spects the equals of the modern Esquimaux, whom he indeed regards as 

 their probable lineal representatives. Any one who has closely exam- 

 ined the remains recovered from the French caves can not fail largely 

 to fall in with this view, so far at least as regards the high level of 

 palaeolithic art. In fact, it is daily becoming clear that the antiquity 

 of man is something even deeper and more far-reaching in its implica- 

 tions than Lyell himself at first imagined. For while on the one hand 

 geologists are inclining more and more to the opinion that pala?olithic 



