180 E. J. Salisbury 
to offer a more valuable analogy with respect to general principles. 
We have here moreover the material for following the whole course 
of evolution from the primitive and crude efforts of prehistoric man 
through all the vicissitudes of increasing complexity and simplifica¬ 
tion up to modern times. The implement inherits its form by 
tradition from one generation to the next, whilst each age impresses 
its environment upon it. 
Samuel Butler evidently regarded man’s implements in a similar 
light but attached even more importance to them as the chief 
avenue of man’s evolution (.Lucubratio Ebria , 1865). To him the stage 
of man’s organisation was measured by the number and variety of 
these extra-limbs at his disposal. Hence too the rich man was more 
highly organised than the poor man because of the variety of 
mechanisms at his command. 
When the earliest stone implements are examined we are at once 
struck by the absence of clearly separable types. It is true these 
“eoliths” present various forms, but they bear comparatively little 
evidence of human workmanship and their differences depend rather 
on the character of the original stone selected than on its subsequent 
modification. There can be little doubt that these earliest implements 
served a variety of purposes, their very lack of differentiation 
rendering this possible. The eoliths are as it were the “Protista” of 
man’s implements with many and various potentialities, some, though 
not all, of which we find realised in the increasing differentiation of 
succeeding epochs. 
In the implements of the Strepy and Chellaean periods, pro¬ 
bably contemporary with Piltdown Man and the presence of the 
Hippopotamus and Rhinoceros in Europe, human handiwork is 
much more pronounced, though here again there is but little differen¬ 
tiation. So slight is this indeed that we should probably hesitate to 
regard them as distinct species were we dealing with biological 
entities. Here then we find emphasised the first fundamental 
principle, namely, that specific rank, which is after all an artificial 
aggregate of convenience, cannot have the same value in a group 
exhibiting little division of labour, as in one of highly organised units. 
There is more difference in the absolute sense between the multi¬ 
tudinous types of modern table knives than between the variations 
in the stone implements of the Chellaean and Acheulaean epochs, 
yet the distinctions of the former are unlikely to lead to any striking 
new advances in the evolution of the knife, still less to any entirely 
new implement. So far as we can judge they have no survival value. 
