THE NEW STONE AGE 
in later times the Great Mother Goddess, patroness of fer- 
tility and growth and bounteous harvests. Primitive man 
thought of her as having the power both to give life and to 
take it. Usually he associated with her in his worship her 
Divine Son, the latter very often one of those ‘‘dying 
gods” just ‘mentioned. The Mother Goddess in those 
early times was commonly represented by crude images in 
which, to judge from later analogy, she was induced to 
dwell through the action of spells or prayers. It is of one of 
her more developed manifestations that the prophet Jere- 
miah speaks when he rebukes the people for burning i in- 
cense and pouring out drink offerings to the ‘“‘queen of 
heaven.” 
We used to think that mankind everywhere had passed 
through the same successive stages of development, first 
the hunting, then the pastoral, and finally the agricultural. 
We now know that this was not the case. Man began as 
a hunter and food gatherer, certainly, and in that condi- 
tion he remained for much the greater part of his exist- 
ence, until, in fact, a very recent era in his history. But 
he did not develop next into a herdsman ora shepherd. On 
the contrary, he be- 
came a primitive 
farmer or gardener, or 
rather his women did, 
while he himself re- 
mained a hunter, a 
fisherman, a tool Fic. 72. Prehistoric stone hatchet from a 
maker, and a fighter. Swiss lake village. The stone blade inserted 
in a sleeve of staghorn greatly reduced the 
The development of liability of the wood to split. After Keller 
planting resulted, of 
course, in attaching man to the soil, to definite localities, 
and finally to specific plots of ground to an extent never 
found among savages in the pure hunting stage. Still 
clinging closely to the edges of the forest—for cutting down 
or even girdling trees with a stone hatchet was by no 
means an easy task (Fig. 72)—the primitive farmer finally 
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