r4 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



period, is something which has come and gone at very 

 different dates in different parts of the world ; " * and that the 

 same remark may be taken, in perhaps a smaller measure, to 

 apply to the Neolithic age ; still, when we remember what 

 enormous lapses of time these ages may be roughly taken to 

 represent, I think it is a most remarkable fact that, during the 

 many thousands of years occupied by the former, the human 

 mind should have practically made no advance upon its 

 primitive methods of chipping flints ; or that during the time 

 occupied by the latter, this same mind should have been so 

 slow in arriving, for example, at even so simple an invention 

 as that of substituting horns for flints in the manufacture of 

 weapons. In my next volume, where I shall have to deal 

 especially with the evidence of intellectual evolution, I shall 

 have to give many instances, all tending to show its extra- 

 ordinarily slow progress during these aeons of prehistoric time. 

 Indeed, it was not until the great step had been made of sub- 

 stituting metals for both stones and horns, that mental 

 evolution began to proceed at anything like a measurable 

 rate. Yet this was, as it were, but a matter of yesterday. So 

 that, upon the whole, if we have regard to the human species 

 generally — whether over the surface of the earth at the present 

 time, or in the records of geological history, — we can no longer 

 maintain that a tendency to improvement in successive 

 generations is here a leading characteristic. On the contrary, 

 any improvement of so rapid and continuous a kind as that 

 which is really contemplated, is characteristic only of a small 

 division of the human race during the last few hours, as it 

 were, of its existence. 



On the other hand, as I have said, it is not true that 

 animal species never display any traces of intellectual improve- 

 ment from generation to generation. Were this the case, as 

 already remarked, mental evolution could never have taken 

 place in the brute creation, and so the phenomena of mind 

 would have been wholly restricted to man : all animals would 

 have required to present but a vegetative form of life. But, 



• John Fiske, Excursions of aji Evolutionist, pp. 42, 43 (1884). 



