CH. xxi.] GENESIS OF MAN, INTELLECTUALLY. 205 



little save a more marked sociality from the dry opitfiecus and 

 other extinct half-human apes. We may represent primitive 

 man as an animal in whom, physical and psychical changes 

 having hitherto proceeded pari passu, intelligence had at 

 length arrived at a point where variations in it would sooner 

 be seized on by natural selection than variations in physical 

 structure. When among primates possessed of such an intel 

 ligence, the family groups temporarily formed among all 

 mammals began to become permanent, then we must say that 

 there began the career of humanity as distinguished from 

 animality. For countless ages our ancestors probably were 

 still but slightly distinguished from other primates, save that 

 their increasing intelligence, their use of weapons, and their 

 habits of combination, rendered them more than a match for 

 much larger and stronger animals. In the later Pliocene times 

 these primitive men may have cbme to bear some resem 

 blance to the lowest contemporary savages. Human remains 

 and relics of the still later glacial period supply clear proof of 

 such a resemblance ; yet the absence of any improvement in 

 weapons and implements for many ages longer shows that as 

 yet there was but little capability of progress. Of the career 

 of mankind during the eight hundred thousand years which 

 would seem to have elapsed since the era of the cave bear 

 and woolly rhinoceros, 1 we possess many vestiges. But every- 



1 In assigning this conjectural date, I follow the theory which connects the 

 great glacial epoch with that notable increase in the eccentricity of the earth s 

 orbit which, as calculated by Mr. Croll, began about 950,060 years B.C., and 

 lasted 200,000 years. But while the fact of this great increase of eccen 

 tricity is, I presume, well established, and while it can hardly fail to have 

 wrought marked climatic changes, it is by no means proved that the glaciation 

 of Europe and North America was produced solely or chiefly by tins circum 

 stance ; and accordingly I do not care to insist upon the chronology which I 

 have adopted in the text. Nor is it necessary for the validity of my argu 

 ment that it should be insisted on. What we do know is, that men existed 

 both in Europe and in North America at the beginning of the glacial period ; 

 that this extensive dispersal implies the existence of the human race for a 

 long time previous to this epoch ; and that thus we obtain a dumb antiquity 

 in comparison with which the whole duration of the voice of historic tradition 

 shrinks to a mere point of time. And this is all that my argument requires. 



