BIOLOGY OF MAN 1187 



also for further uses, e.g. as primitive net, to catch the fish on its 

 passage from streamlet into pool. Tough bark fibres would twist into 

 strings, and so even to cords, whence again a start towards net- 

 weaving, and in time to finer weaving ; and even on another line of 

 developments, towards pottery. The flint piercer for skins could be 

 well replaced by a long pointed bone-splinter, with its roughly 

 broken end jdelding a notch, and even catch, for the coarse thread — 

 in fact a needle, even to its incipient eye. Seeds of the best wild 

 grasses (the future wheat and other cereals) lost in the winnowing 

 would grow up in the richly manured soil round the cave-mouth 

 or shelter, and thus be best worth gathering; and so, too, for kale, 

 beans, and fruits; whence again, as Karl Pearson so well pointed out 

 in early essays (republished in his Chances oj Death) , there began the 

 woman's garden, which next became the initiative for our agricul- 

 tural fields. She, too, with her children, would spare and domesticate 

 the young lamb or calf that had followed the slain mother's body 

 they had dragged into camp. Again, only the long life-toil of grinding 

 the corn-grains could give the patience needed to polish a flint 

 implement. In short, then, while the palaeotechnic hunting culture 

 essentially needed and evoked man's prowess and concentrated his 

 interests, woman was meantime, in her quiet motherly way, working 

 out the essentials of that neotechnic culture which in time, as she 

 gradually disciplined youth to it, drove back that of the mighty 

 hunters; indeed, inevitably so, through its advances in arts, in 

 knowledge, and in steadiness of their application, in and through 

 agriculture above all; and of course with the far greater population 

 thus maintained, and less irregularly nourished too. Excellent 

 though be all manner of game-food — venison, etc. — it bears a poor 

 chance, taken all the year round, against porridge and corn-cakes, 

 and especially with milk, as by and by butter and cheese. 



Again, what hunter, or for that matter what boy or man of us 

 all, would eat wild olives, or even now cultivated ones, save in 

 extreme hunger? Who but woman would gather them green, steep 

 out their bitterness in water changed day by day for three weeks, 

 and then salt them for winter's supply? Who but she, with her 

 mortar and pestle for corn-breaking, her quern for grinding, would 

 pound the ripe olives, and so extract their oil, and then serve it in 

 her salads of raw leaves? And next store it, and use it in cooking, 

 with immense gain to alimentation, still fundamental throughout 

 lands too warm and dry for milk-pastures. No wonder, then, that 

 the greatest of past cultures, which has been fundamental to ours 

 and in so many ways is still beyond it, kept up her name with 

 honour — as Pallas Athena. Of course, as we generalise many women 

 into "Woman", so likewise in Pallas was commemorated woman's 

 intuitions, so full of civilisation-values for man's spirit, and also 

 other of her inventions as well, as notably "Arachne's", of weaving. 



