THE CANNIBAL IN EVOLUTION 157 



ancient type in the masses of a race, a subject not remote 

 from us, is rendered easier to understand. For in their 

 brains lie quiescent the memory and actual cerebral 

 machinery which once more may be set working by some 

 great stimulus. War could not be the passionate relief 

 in action that it is to many, if its memories were not 

 graven deep even in the peaceful. So now, perhaps, in 

 the night-horrors of children or their elders, there may 

 be some dim relic of ancestral fear, which many childish 

 tales partially awaken. Such a view is in tone with the 

 general purpose of this paper. The ogre or giant who 

 eats children is thus a reality to them, for their ancestors 

 dwelt for unnumbered centuries among such fearful 

 possibilities. The very character of women, with their 

 powerful, but half-hidden, insistence on success, could 

 thus perhaps be traced, without the idea seeming over- 

 fantastic, to the times of ancient famine when their 

 children had, perhaps, to fear most their natural pro- 

 tector, even, it may be, the mother herself. It is, indeed, 

 far from unlikely that it was the women who urged on 

 their father and husband to the capture and slaughter 

 of his enemies, and his own fear, as I hope to show, may 

 be held up as the one great cause of his sullen co-operation 

 with his sons in such expeditions, enforced and enjoined 

 upon him, though it may have been, by some favourite 

 woman who was apprehensive of disaster to her young 

 offspring. 



To return from these relevant deductions to the 

 parental jealousy complex still showing itself in modern 

 times, it seems that many such ancient social states must 

 have perpetuated themselves in mental complexes which 

 still influence human action. They are but examples 

 of the ceaseless working of energy ever and ever in weaker 



