202 THE BRITISH NATURALIST. [December 



same sympathy which they felt for all the members of the tribe, true 

 paternal sentiment could not exist. One of the most powerful 

 stimulants of man's higher nature was thus lacking, and may at least in 

 part explain the slow evolution of the Pliocene Anthropoids. 



During the succeeding ice age the area in which they could exist 

 was much restricted, and for many thousands of years the climatic 

 conditions of the earth were much less favourable to human develop- 

 ment than they had been in Tertiary times ; nevertheless, despite 

 great changes in the fauna and flora, men survived till the end of the 

 glacial epoch, and when that drew to a close, followed the retreating 

 ice sheets and spread over such parts of the earth as could be inhabited 

 by men ignorant of the use of metals, and whose most formidable 

 weapons were rude flint-headed arrows. Sociality was still maintained 

 by external pressure, nor need we doubt that palaeolithic man retained 

 a large amount of that imitativeness which is so characteristic of apes 

 and children, yet, though this latter quality should have ensured the 

 preservation of any useful invention, and thereby facilitated human 

 advancement, the upward movement was extremely slow, and we may 

 suspect that some retarding influence was at work. It seems probable 

 that articulate language was, as yet, only slightly developed, and that 

 not until definite speech had superseded vague cries and gestures was 

 any further elevation possible. After the lapse of many centuries this 

 characteristically human faculty was attained, and the method of 

 polishing stone implements having also been discovered, Neolithic man 

 occupied a position of indisputable pre-eminence in the animal kingdom. 

 Unlike his Tertiary progenitors, who, with jagged tree branches or 

 rough stones, had, even when acting in concert, scarcely maintained 

 the struggle for existence with their pithecoid or carnivorous competi- 

 tors, Neolithic man, armed with a sharp-cutting axe, a well-balanced 

 spear and keen-tipped arrows, was able, single-handed, to hold his own 

 against any other animal. Individualistic tendencies, which to his 

 Tertiary or Palaeolithic ancestors would have been fatal, could at 

 length find free development, and the family, as we now understand it, 

 became possible. The deep-seated social instincts which had been 

 transmitted through thousands of generations were not, however, 

 annihilated, but modified. Families, though able to exist apart, would 

 often find it to their advantage to act and, sometimes, to live together — 

 hence would spring one form of tribal organization. But such tribal 

 organization would only be possible if there was a considerable amount 

 of mutual forbearance amongst the members of its constituent families. 

 Those individuals who did not care to practise such" forbearance would 

 leave, or be expelled from the tribe, and there would thus be instituted 

 a rude moral code. Some faint foreshadowing of this had no doubt 

 appeared at a much lower level amongst Palaeolithic men, but it was 



