Chap. XXIL] TO HUMAN INTELLIGENCE 415 



as in reference to the hypothetical man " created in the 

 full maturity of his faculties." 



An endowment like Articulate Speech, when once started 

 — whether by some hidden and unknown process of natural 

 development, or as a still more occult God-sent gift to Man 

 — was by its very nature almost certain to have led its pos- 

 sessors by degrees along an upward path of cerebral devel- 

 opment. How slow and tardy the process has been we are 

 now beginning dimly to perceive, by reason of those re- 

 searches which have made known to us the great antiquity 

 of the Human Race and the far remote period of Man s 

 appearance upon this Earth. 



Anterior to historical epochs, the Men who were the 

 contemporaries of the great Mammoths, whose remains are 

 found in the Post-Tertiary Drift, those of the Bone-Caves, 

 those of the Shell-heaps and the Peat-bogs, as well as those 

 of the Cromlech period and the Early Lake-dwellings, lived 

 for untold ages in a state of simplicity and barbarism far 

 greater than that which still continues among many of the 

 savage and semi-savage races covering so large a propor- 

 tion of the Earth's surface. 



Progress, in the early stages of human history, was 

 necessarily so slow as to have seemed almost absent, even 

 if we mark time by centuries. Gradually, however, as a 

 nomad life gave place to a more complex communal life, 

 the advantages of co-operation would show themselves in 

 many ways. The commencement of a developing Social 

 Organization necessarily entails a greater diversity in 

 the relations of man with man, which would naturally 

 become reflected in their Language, and proportionately 

 increase the area of their thought-processes, by giving 

 birth to new exercises, or, at all events, by greatly strength- 

 ening certain previously embryonic mental processes. 



