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 Quaternary 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 



