BIOLOGY OF MAN 1183 



one. Rice-growing is, of course, a modern introduction into the 

 plain of Lombardy; but after a time the peasants got dissatisfied 

 with the property-laws and other regulations, and petitioned their 

 Parliament accordingly. Their demands puzzled deputies and lawyers 

 alike, as something unheard of; till suddenly a senator who had 

 lived in China exclaimed: "Dio mio! These people are asking for 

 Chinese institutions!" The peasants, of course, had never thought 

 of that ; yet their rice had taught them. 



Further Inquiries Needed. — Such concrete outlme examples 

 of this evolutionary natural history of man, this human ecology, 

 have twofold suggestiveness ; on one hand towards unifying studies 

 usually too isolated, yet on the other towards further special 

 inquiries. For since The Golden Bough has told us so much for the 

 human significance of corn, yet all arising around its homely cultiva- 

 tion and uses, so we may well ask from oriental scholarship the 

 like study of rice, and throughout its wider developments. The 

 Song of Hiawatha, with his maize-plant, so familiar to many of us 

 from childhood, has thus been a simple example of the needed and 

 world-wide story of civilising origins and developments. Here, then, 

 has been the long endeavour of Le Play and his disciples, from 

 Tourville and Demolins onwards; and though some of their broad 

 surveys and bold generalisations need revision, these have been of 

 path-breaking service; while their methods and classifications, 

 though still needing clearer order and fuller elaboration, are plainly 

 in advance of most of those still prevalent, whether for earliest or 

 modern times. Return for simplest, yet fundamental, example to 

 the progresses of the tool, and also with it ; as from rudest flints and 

 fires up to the marvels of our international exhibitions; of which it 

 is here significant to recall that the inspiring projector of the latter 

 was Boucher de Perthes, the first interpreter of the former! And 

 that their first competent classifier and organiser, dominant of them 

 all till now, was Frederic Le Play; since also and independently 

 inspired by interest in the evolution of occupations and their tools, 

 and of man's life and ways through better use of them. 



Such evolutionary presentments of man's progress have thus 

 their interest for the biologist. As comparative and human anatomy, 

 palaeontology and archaeology have come together, so next plant 

 and animal ecology; and our human advances have not only their 

 analogies with these, when even viewed and specialised on apart, 

 but their fertile interactions, as in cultivation, and in domestication. 

 In fact, are not anthropologist and biologist here substantially at one ? 



WOMAN IN EARLY PROGRESS, AND ONWARDS 



Continuing the ecological outlines of our previous section into a 

 sketch of the origins of prehistoric Civilisations, we noted the 



