BIOLOGY OF MAN 1171 



rollings and pressures like those which they may naturally undergo ? 

 Hence a controversy of many years, as yet not fully ended, since 

 each has reason on its side: but tending for us, as happens for the 

 heirs of many other controversies, to a working compromise ; in 

 which all alleged "eoliths" are critically examined, yet in which at 

 least the fittest and best adapted seem to survive. This controversy, 

 and indeed all else of earliest and later tool-using and tool-making 

 development, is thus central to the ecology of early man; even 

 vividly ancestral to our own industrial age, the more since with 

 flints in active usage man could hardly but strike fire. Enough 

 however if we see here something of the beginnings of man's rise 

 beyond Pithecanthropus and other precursors, and of the ways in 

 which these are being investigated. There is, however, for biologists 

 more in all this than archaeology and pre-history ; for here arise and 

 for our own human kin and kind, many of the questions we are wont 

 to ask as evolutionists. Thus is it not here that hand and brain 

 must have attained not only a new, but an enduring discipline and 

 impulse to work together, which at this epoch would obviously 

 be of great survival value, albeit with Promethean dangers; — and 

 with what progress beyond instinct, and ordinary life-habits too, 

 to more and more of active intelligence, and more daring initiative ? 

 Here is a main emergence-epoch, alike for discovery and for inven- 

 tion, indeed that from which our own science and industry may 

 best date their fundamental beginnings. And what a new field for 

 human selection, and this both natural and artificial, and even 

 sexual too, with survival of the triply fittest accordingly. We feel 

 and follow the fascination of evolutionary questions from germs and 

 worms to birds and flowers; but here may we not think and work 

 our way more fully and intimately even towards these, by thus 

 identifying ourselves with our own human kin, in and through their 

 early beginnings ? 



More questions as to man of course arise, and yet more again 

 from the inseparable inquiry into his social beginnings; but here 

 enough to indicate the interest of such inquiries, and the practica- 

 bility of advancing them. Not merely from books and museums; 

 these are invaluable as records and as storehouses: yet of best use 

 as sign-posts, sending us on towards direct experience and fresh 

 inquiry. But how can this be obtained? Just as after a good nature- 

 study lesson, and then before it too, the pupils run out, even from 

 the picture-book, and into the wild, so set them questing over the 

 stubble, and after the plough, for implements for their school 

 museum. And into what school may not rough flints be imported, 

 for a practical work-play class to shape and use them ? Such super- 

 Montessori courses are indeed beginning. And as from college the 

 nature-student is encouraged to go yet further and more carefully 

 over an extending region, as up through forest and over moors to 



