90 THE THRESHOLD OF EVOLUTION 



ing boughs above their heads and a platform under their feet 

 as their fathers had done. They remember that last wet night 

 when their father had been restless and had kicked about till 

 Bill and Tom had been kicked off the stage and were now 

 hobbling about with lame legs or sore heads as a result, and 

 which had made Bill start thinking and trying to imagine 

 how they could prevent the next kick out. Thus it dawned 

 on their imagination that if they made a network of boughs 

 round the stage they would wake before they were kicked out. 



When dad saw this new invention, for he who looks on 

 sees most, he set to thinking also, and ultimately realised 

 that if he barricaded round his trees Jones or Smith would 

 make a noise climbing over the fence when they came to steal 

 that leg of mutton that was hanging to one limb of the tree, 

 or the cabbages he had so carefully grown at the foot of his 

 arboreal residence. For now both man and animals had in- 

 creased and multiplied, and the earth having become cooler 

 there was not the prodigious vegetation of the earlier stages 

 of its tropical existence. Food was therefore becoming scarce, 

 and as civilisation advanced and the age of Abel the huntsman 

 and shepherd gave place to the age of Cain the husbandman, 

 the latter invented stone implements and other civilised 

 methods of warfare and so became a greater murderer than 

 man has ever been before; besides now that the husbandman 

 has started civilisation towns grew up and with them private 

 ownership of property, and the temptation to murder and rob, 

 which had not existed before, became a new departure in the 

 evolution of man's progression towards perfection as a sinner. 

 So this age of Cain marks the progress from the age of Abel, 

 or the age of pastoral life, to the age of Cain or the age of 

 Stone implements ; so the Bible in describing this age of Evolu- 

 tion tells us that Abel was a shepherd and Cain a husbandman. 



So man passes from agriculture to civilisation, from the 

 club to the stone age, from a nomadic race of shepherds 

 and huntsmen to a race of gardeners and farmers and villagers, 

 and so at the same time as the southern races, the children of 

 Cain are evolving the rudiments of idolatry and civilisation, 

 of skill, manufacture, art and architecture, which are to trans- 

 form the camps of the huntsman into the villages of the clan, 

 the nomadic races who are the children of Abel are evolving 

 higher forms of moral rectitude, obedience, discipline and 



