Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/108

98 different specific forms; but there never was a point in the series at which one might definitely put down one's finger and say, "Here the man-like ape became a complete man." All that we can do is to decide that the ancestors of modern man at such and such a given date had progressed just so far in their way toward the existing highest type.

Professor Boyd Dawkins, in his recent work on "Early Man in Britain," and in his discourse at the last meeting of the British Association, has so clearly summed up the results of all the latest investigations as to palæolithic man that it will only be necessary here briefly to recapitulate the views he has enunciated. He divides the men of the Pleistocene period in Europe and Asia into two successive classes, the earlier or river-drift men, and the later or cave-men. The drift of the Thames, Somme, and other rivers is the earliest geological stratum in which we find unquestionable evidence of the existence of man. The evidence in point consists entirely of chipped flint instruments of the very rudest type, incomparably ruder than anything produced by the very lowest of modern savages. Man at that period was clearly a rough and perhaps almost solitary hunter, using rude triangular stone implements. Moreover, we have evidence of that homogeneous condition which betokens an early stage of evolution, in the fact that implements of precisely the same sort are found all over Europe, Asia, and Africa. The primæval hunter who chased the stag in Africa had brethren who chased the fallow deer in Spain and Italy, and others who chased the various wild beasts among the jungles of India. Over the whole Eastern hemisphere, so far as we can judge, man was then a single homogeneous race, living everywhere the same life, and producing everywhere the same rude and primitive weapons.

The drift-men were succeeded, in Northern Europe at least, by another and higher development of humanity, the cave-men. How far they may have differed physically from their predecessors of the Drift period we have no sufficient means of judging; but the analogy of other human varieties would lead us to suspect that they presented some marked signs of advance; for we know that among all existing races there is a pretty constant ratio between social development and physical peculiarities. At any rate, the cave-men were apparently far more advanced in the rudiments of culture than the drift-men, especially toward the end of the cave period, during which they made continuous advances in the arts of life. Their weapons, though still chipped (instead of being ground, like those of the neolithic Europeans and the modern savages), were more varied in shape and better worked than the rude triangular hatchets of the drift. They manufactured, in their last stage, excellent barbed harpoons of good designs. They made fish-hooks and needles of bone with some degree of finish. They employed ruddle for personal decoration, and collected fossil shells, which they drilled and strung as necklaces. Moreover, they had a remarkable talent for imitative art, producing spirited sketches