252 EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 



earliest pre-historic days, show that: "Not an evo- 

 lution but a degeneration has been going on for 

 countless ages, and what we see in the buried re- 

 mains no less than in the jungles of the Far East 

 is not the gradual rise from a semi-simean or a 

 pithecoid type, but on the contrary a progressive 

 deterioration from an ideal, pre-Australian, pre- 

 Neanderthal form of high-brow features, a cast 

 of man almost European in his appearance." 4 As 

 specific evidence are cited the facts that the negrito 

 is less simean than the Australian; the negrillo, 

 than the modern African; the primitive Indones- 

 ian, than the modern Malayan; the p re-Mongolian 

 Ai'no, than the modern Japanese. Yet these 

 "primitive" races themselves have fallen from a 

 higher state. We have already alluded to the 

 conviction that was forcing itself even upon Her- 

 bert Spencer's mind, that most, if not all, the 

 savage races of today are degenerates from a 

 superior stage of culture. 



The summary conclusion which history inevi- 

 tably leads us to form is that primitive man was 

 able to develop his material civilization in the 

 course of time only because he did not begin as a 

 savage, while the present savage cannot rise to 

 civilization unaided, and through all the course of 

 history has never been known to do so, simply be- 

 cause he is a savage, which primitive man was not 

 and, morally speaking, could not have been. Had 



4 Philo Laos Mills, "Creation Versus Evolution," p. 10. 



