SOCIAL EVOLUTION AS A BIOLOGICAL PROCESS 269 



Should we follow back the recorded history of any 

 people now civilized, we would always find evidence of 

 ceaseless change ; and the writings of ancient historians 

 like Herodotus and Caesar and Tacitus give a great deal 

 of information about the barbarous conditions from 

 which civihzation evolved. 



But much more is known that materially amplifies 

 the account of human progress based upon documents 

 alone. The student of existing human races early learns 

 that social structure is a very varied thing. The natives 

 of northern Africa now live in a semi-civilized state 

 which is very like that of medieval England. In 

 Siberia and the American Southwest are tribes that 

 correspond socially with the barbarians of Europe de- 

 scribed by Greek and Roman writers. The American 

 Indians discovered by the earliest colonists, the Poly- 

 nesians of a century ago, and the Fuegians of recent 

 decades provide counterparts of the ancient stone- 

 wielding iDeople who were the savage ancestors of Euro- 

 pean barbarians. Hence the comparative study and 

 classification of modern races establishes a scale of 

 social grades which corresponds with the order of their 

 historic succession, just as in a larger way the complete 

 series of comparative anatomy from Amoeba to man 

 displays the order of evolution from unicellular be- 

 ginnings to the present culminating types. Savagery, 

 barbarism, and civilization are the three major terms 

 of this social scale, but by no means are they discon- 

 tinuous, for many intermediate forms of organization 

 occur which are transitional from one major type to a 

 higher one. 



In human social evolution the starting point is not so 



