98 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



different specific forms ; but there never was a point in the series at 

 which one might definitely put down one's finger and say, " Here the 

 man -like ape became a complete man." All that we can do is to de- 

 cide that the ancestors of modern man at such and such a given date 

 had progressed just so far in their way toward the existing highest type. 



Professor Boyd Dawkins, in his recent work on " Early Man in 

 Britain," and in his discourse at the last meeting of the British Asso- 

 ciation, has so clearly summed up the results of all the latest investiga- 

 tions as to palaeolithic man that it will only be necessary here briefly 

 to recapitulate the views he has enunciated. He divides the men of 

 the Pleistocene period in Europe and Asia into two successive classes, 

 the earlier or river-drift men, and the later or cave-men. The drift of 

 the Thames, Somme, and other rivers is the earliest geological stratum 

 in which we find unquestionable evidence of the existence of man. 

 The evidence in point consists entirely of chipped flint instruments of 

 the very rudest type, incomparably ruder than anything produced by 

 the very lowest of modern savages. Man at that period was clearly a 

 rough and perhaps almost solitary hunter, using rude triangular stone 

 implements. Moreover, we have evidence of that homogeneous con- 

 dition which betokens an early stage of evolution, in the fact that im- 

 plements of precisely the same sort are found all over Europe, Asia, 

 and Africa. The primaeval hunter who chased the stag in Africa had 

 brethren who chased the fallow deer in Spain and Italy, and others 

 who chased the various wild beasts among the jungles of India. Over 

 the whole Eastern hemisphere, so far as we can judge, man was then a 

 single homogeneous race, living everywhere the same life, and pro- 

 ducing everywhere the same rude and primitive weapons. 



The drift-men were succeeded, in Northern Europe at least, by an- 

 other and higher development of humanity, the cave-men. How far 

 they may have differed physically from their predecessors of the Drift 

 period we have no sufficient means of judging ; but the analogy of 

 other human varieties would lead us to suspect that they presented 

 some marked signs of advance ; for we know that among all existing 

 races there is a pretty constant ratio between social development and 

 physical peculiarities. At any rate, the cave-men were apparently far 

 more advanced in the rudiments of culture than the drift-men, espe- 

 cially toward the end of the cave period, during which they made 

 continuous advances in the arts of life. Their weapons, though still 

 chipped (instead of being ground, like those of the neolithic Europe- 

 ans and the modern savages), were more varied in shape and better 

 worked than the rude triangular hatchets of the drift. They manu- 

 factured, in their last stage, excellent barbed harpoons of good designs. 

 They made fish-hooks and needles of bone with some degree of finish. 

 They employed ruddle for personal decoration, and collected fossil 

 shells, which they drilled and strung as necklaces. Moreover, they 

 had a remarkable talent for imitative art, producing spirited sketches 



