226 SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN MIND 



and to develop speech and those mechanical arts 

 whereby he obtained homes and tools and weapons. 



Since the days of Darwin, discoveries have been 

 made whereby the existence of modern races has been 

 pushed back into more remote times than were 

 formerly thought conceivable. We know that twenty- 

 five thousand years ago the cave-men artists were 

 decorating their walls with spirited likenesses of the 

 bison and wild boar. At Neanderthal in 1856, and 

 at Spy in 1886, still older remains have come to light, 

 showing the existence of more primitive forms of man ; 

 and in 1893 bones were discovered in Java which 

 most authorities hold to be those of a being inter- 

 mediate in structure between the anthropoid apes and 

 the earliest known forms of men. 



Whether man descends from any existing form of 

 ape is uncertain. But if not a lineal descendant, he 

 is at least a distant cousin. More variable forms may 

 have preceded all those now extant, and have been 

 their common ancestors. The separate shoots that 

 rise above the visible plain of history may spring 

 from a common root-system, buried in the dark ground 

 of the irrecoverable past. 



As Copernicus removed the earth from its position 

 at the centre of the Universe, so Darwin took man from 

 his cold pedestal of isolation as a fallen angel, and 

 forced him to recognize his kith and kin in St Francis's 

 little brothers, the birds. As Newton proved that 

 terrestrial forces hold sway in the heights of heaven 

 and the depths of space, so Darwin showed that the 

 familiar variation and selection by which man moulds 

 his flocks and herds may explain the development 

 of species and the origin of man himself. Organic 



