Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/575

 About these cave-men there is necessarily much less information than there is about those of the Neolithic period; comparatively few skulls have been found which were in a state that admitted of restoration; and, among these few, there are great differences.

With regard to the antiquity of man, Sir John Lubbock, after carefully examining the views of many eminent geologists, comes to the conclusion that man certainly existed in Western Europe during the period of the mammoth and the Rhinoceros tichorhinus, and that the presumption is that he also existed in Pliocene and even in Miocene times; but the proofs of that—the remains of the earliest representatives of our race—are to be sought, he thinks, in warm, almost in tropical climates.

From the manners and customs of modern savages much light may be thrown upon the early condition of prehistoric man. After considering the condition and progress of the Hottentots, Veddahs, Australians, South-Sea Islanders, Esquimaux, and others. Sir John Lubbock remarks that, in reading any account of the savage races at present existing in the world, "it is impossible not to admire the skill with which they use their weapons and implements, their ingenuity in hunting and fishing, and their close and accurate powers of observation." By all these qualities we may suppose prehistoric man to have been distinguished in at least an equal degree. The habits and customs of existing savages, however, while presenting many points in common with each other, present also many points of divergence, arising from independent development; and such was no doubt also the case in the most ancient times: the degrees of civilization even in the stone age would differ much.

It is evident that man when he first spread over the surface of the earth must have been in a condition represented by the lowest type of savage. Then by slow degrees, by imitation, and by the teaching of experience, the capacity of lodging and clothing himself, and of improving his simple implements, would 'develop and expand, until man, physically one of the weakest and most unprotected of all animals, would, to quote from our author, "by dint of that subtile force which we term mind," make himself independent of nature, careless of the inclemency of the seasons, skillful to force from the stubborn soil the food which suited him, or the ores from which to forge the weapons which gave him power; till at last, "monarch of all he surveyed," he could cope in his native coverts with the shaggy lion, and be more than a match for the fierce wild-bull, and overtake in the chase the fleet stag or bounding antelope.

The wild man, like the wild beast, is always timid, always suspicious, always on the watch; and the condition of the savage woman is still more cruel. "She shares," says Sir John Lubbock, "all the sufferings of her mate, and has also to bear his ill-humor and ill-usage. Even the possession of beauty, far from being an alleviation, is only