238 EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 



modern life warns us that there is a limit to in 

 tellectual evolution. Now there is no proof 

 whatsoever that men, intellectually as great as 

 any of those mentioned by him, did not exist in 

 pre-historic days, or were not to be found among 

 the very races whose stray representatives we seek 

 to reproduce from a few scattered bones. All 

 recent discoveries prove more and more conclu 

 sively that the earliest human remnants are those 

 of men with the same qualities of mind and body 

 that we ourselves possess. The degree of ma 

 terial culture amid which we find them tells us 

 but little of their intellectual powers. Greece 

 was only in the beginning of her material develop 

 ment when she produced perhaps the greatest of 

 all purely secular poets, Homer and his peers. 

 Such too are the conclusion which a more ad 

 vanced knowledge of archeology is gradually 

 forcing upon men, even though the prepossessions 

 of materialistic evolution still hamper many from 

 forming independent conclusions. In the Smith 

 sonian report for 1916 Sir Arthur Evans says: 



The investigations of a brilliant band of prehistoric archaeol 

 ogists, with the aid of representatives of the sister sciences 

 of geology and paleontology, have brought together such a 

 mass of striking materials as to place the evolution of human 

 art and appliances in the last Quarternary period on a far 

 higher level than had ever been suspected previously. Fol 

 lowing in the footsteps of Lartet, and after him Riviere and 

 Piette, Profs. Cartailhac, Captan, and Boule, the Abbe Breuil, 

 Dr. Obermeier and their fellow investigators have revolution 

 ized our knowledge of a phase of human culture which goes 



