126 Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. [sbss. 
scenes had many of the elements of true sport, and being essential 
to our existence, were of daily occurrence. Moreover, from the 
standpoint of modern ethics, our method put the combatants 
on something like a footing of equality, or at least gave our prey a 
fair chance of escape. We cultivated physical and manly qualities 
by the natural exercise of the senses, and personal prowess was the 
distinguishing prerogative of our heroes. Thus we acquired the 
experience, skill, strength, agility and courage of practised athletes 
— qualities which left no room for cowardice. With us ‘brain 
power ’ passed almost directly from the generator to the muscles 
of the administrator; with you it has to pass through a complicated 
system of accumulators and distributors, liable to various degrees of 
leakage, and it is this leakage which often sucks dry the life-blood 
of your civilisation. Finally, the permanence of your civilisation 
remains to he tested by the touchstone of time. For civilisations, 
like the genera and species of the organic world, have their life- 
histories determined by laws as fixed and definite as those that 
govern the resultant of the parallelogram of forces. To cosmic 
evolution, under which our race and civilisation to a large extent 
flourished, you have superadded altruism, which means the sur- 
vival of the weak as well as of the strong. But altruism will 
continue to he a living force among civilised communities only so 
long as present and prospective food supplies hold out. For, 
after all, the essential problem of your social existence is to 
procure food for an ever-increasing population. Whenever these 
necessaries of life become inadequate to meet the demands of the 
inhabitants of this globe, then your boasted civilisation comes to 
the end of its tether, and the only solution of the crisis will he to 
reduce your numbers by a recurrence — sauve qui jpeut — to the 
cosmic law of £ the survival of the fittest.” 
DESCRIPTION OF PLATES. 
I. A flint implement in the British Museum found, with a skeleton of an 
elephant, near Gray’s Inn Lane, London, about the close of the seventeenth 
century. Reproduced from plate i. of Guide to the Antiquities of the Stone 
Age in the British Museum. 
II. Specimens of flint tools illustrating the progressive skill of the Palaeo- 
lithic cavemen of France, chiefly from the Lartet and Christy Collection, now 
