Cro-Magnon Man. After 

 restoration by Professor 

 J. H. McGregor from 

 prehistoric skull found 

 in 1868 in a grotto in 

 the little hamlet of Cro- 

 Magnon, near Les 

 Eyzies, France. Cour- 

 tesy of Charles Scrib- 

 ner's Sons 



The Dawn of History 



A DRAMA IN THREE ACTS i 

 By T. D. A. C O C K E R E L L 



Professor of Zoology, University of Colorado 



Introduction to Act I. — We com- 

 monly divide the human period into the 

 historic and prehistoric. The historic 

 is considered to be that which is re- 

 corded in the books, — that concerning 

 which tradition exists, unbroken in the 

 main to the present day. Discoveries 

 of ancient records and writings thus 

 ever tend to press back the date of the 

 beginning of known history, to dispel 

 the mists which hide remote antiquity 

 from us. 



There is, however, another way of re- 

 garding this matter, and the historic 

 may be separated from the prehistoric 

 without reference to the condition of 

 the records, or even to their existence. 

 There was, strictly speaking, no history 

 as long as man lived in primitive ways, 

 without appreciable progress and with- 



out noteworthy deeds. The years rolled 

 by for man as they did for the beasts; 

 as they still do for the wild man of the 

 remoter forests of the Amazon. The 

 ages saw evolutionary progress; but 

 history proper, the marking of time by 

 salient events, did not exist. At long 

 intervals inventions and discoveries did 

 indeed punctuate the centuries, but 

 they were so rare that they produced 

 no connected effect on the human mind, 

 no sense of progress. At length more 

 rapid advance was made, and it was 

 possible in a lifetime to realize that the 

 past and future were not alike, to sense 

 the flow of historic events. The lines 

 below, describing the killing of the first 

 mammoth, attempt to describe the 

 birth of this new age and the new way 

 of regarding human affairs. 



Written after reading Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn's Men of the Old Stone Age. 



299 



