4 



The Part played by Infancy 105 



of man, during the greater part of which he did 

 not know enough to make history. We see man 

 existing here on the earth, no one can say how 

 long, but surely many hundreds of thousands of 

 years, yet only during just the last little fringe of 

 four or five thousand years has he arrived at the 

 point where he makes history. Before that, some 

 thing was going on, a great many things were going 

 on, while his ancestors were slowly growing up to 

 that point of intelligence where it began to make 

 itself felt in the recording of events. This agrees 

 with Wallace s suggestion of a long period of psychi 

 cal change, accompanied by slight physical change. 

 Well, in the spring of 1871, when Darwin s 

 &quot; Descent of Man &quot; came out, just about the same 

 time I happened to be reading Wallace s account 

 of his experiences in the Malay Archipelago, 

 and how at one time he caught a female orang 

 outang with a new-born baby, and the mother died, 

 and Wallace brought up the baby orang-outang 

 by hand ; and this baby orang-outang had a kind 

 of infancy which was a great deal longer than that 

 of a cow or a sheep, but it was nothing compared 

 to human infancy in length. This little orang 

 outang could not get up and march around, as 

 mammals of less intelligence do, when he was first 

 born, or within three or four days ; but after three 



