Tentative Men 211 



I travail in pain for him, 

 My creatures travail and wait; 

 His couriers come by squadrons, 

 He comes not to the gate. 



This at any rate is clear: that when we think of 

 the length of the pedigree, of the millions of years 

 through which the lineage stretched, of the sifting 

 out of side-tracks, we feel the unutterable vulgarity 

 of saying "Man sprang from a monkey." The scien- 

 tific statement is that Hominids sprang from a stock 

 common to them and to the Anthropoid Apes. 



What happened before the separation of the 

 humanoid from the anthropoid stems continued to 

 happen afterwards. Many are called, but few are 

 chosen. The sifting process continues, without haste, 

 without rest. We know of the shadowy figures that 

 hold the stage for a little and are gone — the tentative 

 men — the vague Pithecanthropus the Erect, per- 

 haps half a million years ago, "human in stature, 

 human in gait, human in all his parts, save his brain" ; 

 the Heidelberg Man, Palceanthropus heidelbergensis, 

 perhaps 400,000 years ago, a very strong fellow if 

 he used the eoliths found beside him, but we only 

 know his lower jaw ; the Piltdown Man, of the Sussex 

 Weald, Eoanthropus dawsoni, a remarkable mixture 

 of ape-like and man-like characters. Everyone admits 

 that our knowledge of these forms is vague, but there 

 seems little doubt that they represent tentative men — 

 Hominidae but not Homo. We are reminded again of 

 Emerson's lines : 



