A VERY OLD MASTER. in 



behind him. Already he has invented the bow with its flint-tipped 

 arrow, the neatly chipped javelin-head, the bone harpoon, the barbed 

 fish-hook, the axe, the lance, the dagger, and the needle. Already he 

 had learned how to decorate his implements with artistic skill, and to 

 carve the handles of his knives with the figures of animals. I have 

 no doubt that he even knew how to brew and to distill ; and he was 

 probably acquainted with the noble art of cookery as applied to the 

 persons of his human fellow-creatures. Such a personage can not rea- 

 sonably be called primitive ; cannibalism, as somebody has rightly 

 remarked, is the first step on the road to civilization. 



No, if we want to get at genuine, unadulterated primitive man, we 

 must go much further back in time than the mere trifle of 250,000 

 years, with which Dr. Croll and the cosmic astronomers so generously 

 provide us, for pre-Glacial humanity. We must turn away to the im- 

 measurably earlier fire-split flints which the Abbe Bourgeois un- 

 daunted mortal ! ventured to discover among the Miocene strata of 

 the calcaire de Beauce. Those flints, if of human origin at all, were 

 fashioned by some naked and still more hairy creature, who might 

 fairly claim to be considered as genuinely primitive. So rude are they 

 that, though evidently artificial, one distinguished archaeologist will 

 not admit they can be in any way human ; he will have it that they 

 were really the handiwork of the great European anthropoid ape of 

 that early period. This, however, is nothing more than very delicate 

 hair-splitting ; for what does it matter whether you call the animal 

 that fashioned these exceedingly rough and fire-marked implements a 

 man-like ape or an ape-like human being ? The fact remains quite un- 

 altered, whichever name you choose to give to it. When you have 

 got to a monkey who can light a fire and proceed to manufacture him- 

 self a convenient implement, you may be sure that man, noble man, 

 with all his glorious and admirable faculties cannibal or otherwise 

 is lurking somewhere very close, just round the corner. The more we 

 examine the work of our old master, in fact, the more does the con- 

 viction force itself upon us, that he was very far indeed from being 

 primitive that we must push back the early history of our race not 

 for 250,000 winters alone, but perhaps for two or three million years, 

 into the dim past of Tertiary ages. 



But if pre-Glacial man is thus separated from the origin of the race 

 by a very long interval indeed, it is none the less true that he is sepa- 

 rated from our own time by the intervention of a vast blank space, 

 the space occupied by the coming on and passing away of the Glacial 

 Epoch. A great gap cuts him off from what we may consider as the 

 relatively modern age of the mound-builders, whose grassy barrows 

 still cap the summits of our southern chalk-downs. When the great 

 ice-sheet drove away palaeolithic man the man of the caves and the 

 unwrought flint axes from Northern Europe, he was still nothing 

 more than a naked savage in the hunting stage, divinely gifted for art 



