THE CANNIBAL IN EVOLUTION 147 



plastic and changed with relative rapidity. The evidence 

 seems quite ample which tends to prove great stability 

 of type after the middle or late Pleistocene era, and such 

 stability shows to all who believe in environmental in- 

 fluence, or in natural selection, that since then there has 

 been no great fundamental change of moulding factors. 

 Some, indeed, imagine that what is called civilization has 

 been such a factor. This is practically assumed by 

 most who hold that " modern " man is historically modern. 

 But, as any change seems great to individuals who are 

 disturbed, it is natural for most to come rapidly to the 

 conclusion that great past political and social changes may 

 have had, and perhaps must have had, an evolutionary 

 effect even if comparatively recent. Yet as most changes 

 are now but new orientations in thought, which do not 

 lead to the destruction of established physical types, 

 and as such factors of selection as ill-health, defective 

 mentation, and so forth, have continually operated from the 

 dawn of life, no vital factors can be discovered working at 

 the present time which suggest the new and rapid evolution 

 of a cranial type. If such factors worked, one or more of 

 them must have disappeared. Since the ancient complex 

 of imagination, fear and regret has ceased to picture the 

 happy golden ages of the past as a restful paradise compared 

 with the dim uncertain paths of the future, even the most 

 conservative only employ their imagination in construct- 

 ing ideal scenes in a blissful state of ordered feudalism, and 

 for very many it has become a habit to picture them- 

 selves as the apex and acme of possible mankind. So 

 indeed it was in the past, for even if the poets of Greece 

 and Rome looked backward to the Saturnia regna, as 

 the tribes of Central Australia do to Alcheringa, they 

 would yet maintain that they had reached a summit of 



