A VERY OLD MASTER 119 



No, if we want to get at genuine, unadulterated primi- 

 tive man we must go much further back in time than the 

 mere trifle of 250,000 years with which Dr. CroU and the 

 cosmic astronomers so generously provide us for pre-Glacial 

 humanity. We must turn away to the immeasurably 

 earlier fire-split flints which the Abbe Bourgeois — un- 

 daunted mortal ! — ventured to discover among the Miocene 

 strata of the calcairc de Beaiice. Those Hints, if of human 

 origin at all, were fashioned by some naked and still more 

 hairy creature who might fairly claim to be considered as 

 genuinely primitive, ^o rude are they that, though evi- 

 dently artificial, one distinguished archa}ologist will not 

 admit they can be in any way human ; he will have it that 

 they were really the handiwork of the great European 

 anthropoid ape of that early period. This, however, is 

 nothing more than very delicate hair-splitting; for what does 

 it matter whether you call the animal that fashioned these 

 exceedingly rough and fire-marked implements a man-like 

 ape or an ape-like human being ? The fact remains quite 

 unaltered, whichever name you choose to give to it. When 

 you have got to a monkey who can light a tire and proceed 

 to manufacture himself a convenient implement, you may 

 be sure that man, noble man, with all his glorious and 

 admirable faculties — cannibal or otherwise — is lurking 

 somewhere very close just round the corner. The more we 

 examine the work of our old master, in fact, the more does 

 the conviction force itself upon us that he was very far 

 indeed from being primitive — that we must push back the 

 early history of our race not for 250,000 winters alone, but 

 perhaps for two or three million years into the dim past of 

 Tertiary ages. 



But if pre-Glacial man is thus separated from the 

 origin of the race by a very long interval indeed, it is none 

 the less true that he is separated from our own time by 



