A WONDEKFUL ANIMAX. 97 



evolution, and it is certain tliat wo shall not sec another 300,000 

 years, or anything- like it. 



The fatal disease to which we shall owe our extermination is 

 civilization — that civilization which is as recent a feature in our 

 racial history as any event of yesterday in the lifetime of the 

 individual ; and by civilization I do not mean the missionary 

 process of clapping a naked savage into a top hat and frock coat 

 and making him a member of a County Council — imposed civiliza- 

 tion of that sort kills at once, witness the sudden extinction of 

 the aboriginal Tasmanians. It is that gradual and self-evolved 

 civilization, which comes inevitably to every nation sooner or later, 

 and which is no less surely destructive, though immeasurably slower 

 than the other. The Apahuai Indians, with whom I sojourned 

 in Central America, offer an excellent illustration of this con- 

 temporaneously. Their tribes, nomadic by nature and habit from 

 time immemorial, are now just beginning to split up into sections, 

 whereof one goes on wandering through the forests and prairies, 

 while the other settles down into pueblos or villages and evinces 

 a tendency to form agricultural communities ; and every year these 

 communities receive an accession from the nomads— the first step 

 on the downward path ! And this deadly symptom, civilization, 

 is of course the direct product and outcome of man's fatal ad- 

 vantage, his aggrandization of brain — that which has made him 

 is wreaking his undoing. It is curious to note the frequency with 

 which this fatality of advantage occurs in the animal world. The 

 development of the hood of the cobra must at the outset have been 

 of use to it in the struggle for existence, yet its weight and 

 expanse now prove often a positive bane, and cause it to fall a 

 prey to creatures from which it might otherwise escape ; and 

 the enormous dimensions to which the tusks of some of the 

 old mammoths attained must certainly have conduced ultimately 

 to their extinction. The sabre-toothed tiger, again, the most 

 specialized carnivore that ever existed, could not at last close its 

 mouth on the teeth to which it ovved its initial superiority over 

 the rest of its kind. So, too, one might adduce as parallel instances 

 the brilliancy of certain birds, the plumes of the bird of paradise, 

 the neck of the giraffe, and many other examples of the disad- 

 vantageous exaggeration of a development originally and within 

 moderate limits of the greatest utility to the possessor. And so 

 it will be with that awful and ever-increasing high pressure and 

 tension under which we live, owing to the ceaseless and insatiable 

 goading of this hypcrtrophied brain of ours. That the pace at 

 ■which we now live kills is simply a truism and requires no 



