72 Primitive Man. 



• consequence of the disappearance of forests, to take to the 

 ground, and if he became human at this period, then the 

 earhest groups of mankind would follow in the same direc- 



.tions. Natural science cannot obviously explain this change. 

 It may be said, I think, that it was not a necessary process 



• of development ; nor was it the inevitable result of a particular 

 environment. The change from brute to man was a mental 

 and psychological revolution which lies for the most part out- 

 side the province of science. We are not wrong surely in try- 

 ing to understand how and when it happened, but a very little 

 reflection will show that the essential mystery of it is beyond 

 human comprehension. When our human precursor crossed 

 the limit of humanity, the earliest pygmies would travel, some 

 towards the Andamans and New Guinea, others to the Congo 



.and farther south. 



As Europeans, we are most interested in those earliest 

 human beings who came North-West. The first certain 



; signs of man in Europe are in the various interglacial periods. 

 We always find him at first in company with a " corpulent " 



Jauna of elephants, rhinoceros, and hippopotami. All of 

 these, like the anthropoid apes, lived in the warm forests of 

 the pliocene. These animals seem to have invaded Europe 



•.from the south, crossing by a bridge of land which then 



-united Tunis, Sicily, and Italy, or perhaps by Gibraltar. 

 Man seems to have accompanied them, and on our hypothesis 

 would have travelled by the southern shore of the Mediter- 

 ranean through Egypt to Tunis or Gibraltar. 



Of all these earliest traces of mankind, the human skull 



'found at Piltdown and the lower jaw at Mauer, near Heidel- 

 berg-, are certainly the most primitive, that is the most ape- 

 like and the least human. The tools found at Piltdown in 

 Sussex, and those discovered at Soria in Spain, are perhaps 



the most archaic and rudest examples of human workman- 

 ship (excepting eoliths). But the animals whose bones have 



'been found in the gravel-beds at Piltdown throw a certain 

 amount of light on the age of that deposit. They are, some 

 of them, pliocene, others pleistocene, but a few are still living 



;as wild species in Europe. 



If one compares the lists of these animals from Piltdown, 



