172 WARFARE IN THE HUMAN BODY 



not possessed by every philosopher of the present day, 

 has vanished from the face of the earth, leaving no 

 descendants and few traces of his existence. Such a 

 problem cannot be disposed of easily. At the least it 

 must excite the suspicion that his place was occupied by 

 the ancestors of those who at one stage of civilization 

 practised cannibalism, and in all devoted infinite energy 

 to organized warfare. Vegetarianism is not likely to 

 have been practised by those with teeth not peculiarly 

 or typically adapted to such food, and it therefore seems 

 quite possible that Neanderthal man was wiped out by 

 swarms of a less advanced but more military race of 

 cannibals. These speculations have at any rate the 

 support afforded by such factors of evolution being in 

 action even now, and if the hypothesis is correct, they 

 must have been operating from a date some time after 

 the anthropoid stock had divided into the lost species 

 and that which even yet exists and, in many parts of the 

 earth, still indulges in man-eating. 



When considering the past effects of war upon the 

 human races it may be urged that the typical soldier, 

 even now, is the finest type of all-round man. This 

 will no doubt seem a hard saying to those morbid 

 intellectuals who overrate conscious mentation. Never- 

 theless, many who are prejudiced by the possession of 

 an under-exercised body, and an over-exercised cerebral 

 cortex, will probably agree that the all-round type of able 

 and athletic man is the finest form of humanity. Not 

 a few of those who belong to the higher intellectual order 

 must often lament their own overgrowths and correlated 

 incapacities when they contemplate his simple, healthy, 

 and beautiful efficiency. It may be true that progress 

 did not stop when fighting ceased to be the greatest factor 



