WHO WAS PRIMITIVE MAN? 95 



man was as old as or older than the last glacial period, anthropologists 

 on the other hand are inclining more and more to the opinion that this 

 pre-glacial and inter-glacial man was really quite as human and quite as 

 capable of civilization as any race now living, except perhaps a few of 

 the most cultivated European stocks. Instead of being the " missing 

 link," our cave-man turns out to be a mere average savage, living a 

 rude and unintelligent life, to be sure, but quite capable, so far as re- 

 gards his faculties, of becoming as civilized as the Sandwich-Islanders 

 have become within our own memory. 



It is, of course, obvious that these facts may be easily turned by 

 opponents of Darwinism into powerful arguments against the theory 

 of man's evolution from a lower form. " Here we accept all your 

 facts," says the defender of the fixity of species ; " we allow that man 

 has inhabited the earth for as long a period as you choose, say 200,000 

 years ; and, when we go down to the very beginning of that period, 

 what do we meet with ? A missing link ? An evolving ape ? No ; 

 nothing of the sort ; a man exactly the same as the man of the present 

 day. However far back we push our researches in the past, we find 

 either no man at all, or else the same man that we now know. Your 

 theory of evolution is disproved by the very facts which you were 

 wont to allege in its favor. We used at first to argue against your 

 facts, because we did not see in what direction they really pointed : 

 nowadays we allow them all, and we find in them the very best bul- 

 wark of our own belief." 



This argument, or something very like it, has lately been employed 

 with great effect by Dr. Mitchell, of Edinburgh, in his able and inter- 

 esting work, " The Past in the Present." The Scotch archaeologist 

 there shows good grounds for supposing that the cave-men and the 

 river-drift men were really, in faculties and potentialities, the equals 

 of most existing savages, if not even of our own average English 

 population. He gives excellent reasons for the belief that while we 

 have advanced very greatly in social organization and in material 

 comfort since that early date, we may have advanced very little, if 

 at all, in brain-power or in potentiality of thought. There are still 

 isolated communities in out-of-the-way parts of Scotland which use 

 hand-made pottery of the rudest primeval type, and spin with stone 

 whorls of the prehistoric pattern ; while their works of imitative art 

 are ruder and more unlike the originals they depict than anything 

 ever attempted by the earliest known men. Yet these people, as Dr. 

 Mitchell rightly observes, are fully the equals in intelligence and 

 moral feeling of their contemporaries in the great manufacturing 

 centers. Hence we must not confound mere material backwardness 

 with lowness of type or intellectual deficiency. It is probable, nay, 

 almost certain, that the ordinary cave-man was superior in ingenuity 

 and mental power to nine out of ten among our modern savages, and 

 quite equal to the fair run of our own laboring classes. 



