196 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



These words have no obscure significance, and when we regard 

 the character of the one who wrote them, his cautious methods of 

 research, and the long deliberation he was wont to give to all such 

 questions, then they become doubly important. 



Recognizing clearly the existence of these lower and earlier stages 

 in man, it has been one of the most difficult problems to solve the 

 first steps toward his society and family relations. Prof. John Fiske, 

 in his " Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy," Jias given for the first time a 

 rational explanation of the origin and persistence of family relations, 

 and thence communal relations, and, finally, society. 



Never before has there been presented so clear an idea of man's 

 physical changes, and the effects of natural selection in seizing upon 

 attendant or correlated nervous changes, as in the work of this 

 author. 



Prof. Fiske says: "Civilization originated when in the highest 

 mammals variations in intelligence became so much more important 

 than variations in physical structure that they began to be seized 

 upon by natural selection, to the relative exclusion of the latter." 1 



Starting from the researches of Sir Henry Maine, Lubbock, and 

 others, he finds social evolution must have originated after families 

 temporarily organized among the higher mammals had become per- 

 manently organized. But how this step was effected has been an 

 insoluble problem. Bagehot, in his remarkable work on " Physics and 

 Politics," says : " It is almost beyond imagination how man, as we 

 know man, could by any sort of process have gained this step in 

 civilization." Darwin supposes that men were originally weak and 

 inoffensive creatures, like the chimpanzee, and were compelled to band 

 together to make up in combined strength what they lacked as in- 

 dividuals. 



That man, for his age, is a weak animal physically, there can be 

 no doubt. Fiske shows that "increase of intelligence in complexity 

 and specialty involves a lengthening of the period during which the 

 nervous connections involved in ordinary adjustments are becoming or- 

 ganized." From these conditions arose the phenomena of infancy, and 

 he shows that with increase of intelligence infancy becomes longer. 

 In the human race it is longer than in any other mammal, and much 

 longer in civilized man than in the savage. 



In the orang-outang the infant does not begin to walk till it is a 

 month old, and in performing this act it holds to various objects for 

 support, as in the human infant. Previous to that time it reposes 

 on its back, and becomes absorbed in gazing at its hands and feet. 

 Now, still lower down among the monkeys, at the age of one month 

 the young are fully matured so far as walking and prehension 

 are concerned. It is shown, furthermore, that where infancy is very 

 short, parental feeling maybe intense for a while, but soon dies out, 



1 " Connie Philosophy," vol. ii., p. 340. 



