178 WARFARE IN THE HUMAN BODY 



itself suggests sudden steps in all phenomena what- 

 soever, and in the presence of such a protoplasmic cerebral 

 tool, or catalyst, as the early discovery of cannibalism, I 

 find no difficulty whatever in considering it as the last 

 great cause of a sudden critical change in man. Alien as 

 such methods of thought may seem to pure specialists in 

 anthropology, they may prove suggestive to those of the 

 opinion that analogous phenomena are found in all planes 

 of evolutionary progress. Universal cannibalism must at 

 the least be accepted, if accepted at all, as a possible instru- 

 ment of rapid critical change, seeing that both as an elimi- 

 nant and an integrator no more powerful machinery can be 

 imagined. To say that its discovery as a motive for tribal 

 integration may have been the work of some solitary old 

 male genius, or the visionary 'glimpse, by some extruded 

 exceptionally endowed youth, of a means of common 

 safety, imparted by him to his young brother and thence 

 to his mother who urged it on her man whose savage 

 passions were already failing, may seem extravagant, but 

 the notion will not appear so absurd if we remember that 

 the thought of a relatively lofty brain is often the heritage 

 of the best in succeeding generations, the common property 

 of the herd in those that succeed, and that in the end it 

 may be indistingishable from criminal and atavistic con- 

 cepts. It may, and must, have been an infraction of 

 custom, but, though for the ordinary man in any era there 

 is little to choose between the habitual criminal and the 

 habitual genius, necessity reinforced the suggestion, and 

 made havoc of established law. Yet such new co-ordination 

 would not be carried to its logical conclusion without the 

 revolt of the more conservative element. It is, indeed, 

 a peculiar and somewhat melancholy commentary on the 

 perpetually recurring phenomena of social and human 



