124 Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. [sess. 
no longer possible to live a roaming life, now gathering fruits 
and seeds, and now hunting wild animals, they fell somehow 
into the way of cultivating special plants and cereals, and rearing 
certain animals in a state of domestication. Whether this new 
departure was a product of the intelligence of the descendants 
of the Palaeolithic people of Europe, or derived from new 
immigrants into the country, is a debatable question. At any 
rate, the expedient was eminently successful. It was in reality 
the starting-point of Neolithic civilisation, and henceforth there 
was a rapid increase in the population. They cultivated a variety 
of fruits, wheat, barley and other cereals ; they reared oxen, sheep, 
goats, pigs, horses and dogs ; they became skilled in the ceramic 
art, and in the manufacture of cloth by spinning and weaving wool 
and fibrous textures ; they ground stone implements so as to give 
them a sharp cutting edge ; in hunting the forest fauna of the 
period they used, in addition to spears, lances and daggers, the 
bow and arrow; they built houses, both for the living and the 
dead — thus showing that religiosity had become an active and 
governing principle among them. But of the artistic taste and 
skill of their predecessors they had scarcely a vestige, and what- 
ever they did by way of ornament consisted mainly of a few 
scratches, arranged in some simple geometrical pattern. The 
fundamental principles of the two civilisations are really so 
divergent that the Neolithic can hardly be regarded as a local 
development of the latest phase of that of the Palaeolithic period 
in Europe. The probability is that, while the isolated colonies 
of reindeer hunters were still in existence, people of the same 
stock were elsewhere passing through the evolutionary stages 
which connected the two civilisations together. 
The far-reaching consequence of securing food supplies by means 
of agriculture and the domestication of animals led to more 
sedentary and social habits. The existence of large communities 
concurrent with the development of various trades and professions 
was but a matter of time, the outcome of which is now a vast 
system of international commerce. Already the greater portion of 
the earth capable of being cultivated is converted into gardens and 
fields, whose choice productions are readily conveyed to all the large 
cities of the globe. Flesh diet is abundant, but it is no longer 
