Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/216

204 afford no suitable measure. These facts have, in recent years, given a different direction to opinion as to the manner in which the great groups of mankind have become distributed over the areas where they are now found; and difficulties once considered insuperable become soluble when regarded in connection with those great alterations of the outlines of land and sea which are shown to have been goings on up to the very latest geographical periods. The ancient monuments of Egypt, which take us back perhaps seven thousand years from the present time, indicate that when they were erected the neighboring countries were in a condition of civilization not very greatly different from that which existed when they fell under the dominion of the Romans or Mohammedans hardly fifteen hundred years ago; and the progress of the population toward that condition can hardly be accounted for otherwise than by prolonged gradual transformations, going back to times so far distant as to require a geological rather than an historical standard of reckoning.

Man, in short, takes his place with the rest of the animate world, in the advancing front of which he occupies so conspicuous a position. Yet for this position he is indebted not to any exclusive powers of his own, but to the wonderful compelling forces of Nature which have lifted him, entirely without his knowledge, and almost without his participation, so far above the animals of whom he is still one, though the only one able to see or consider what he is.

For the social habits essential to his progress, which he possessed even in his most primitive state, man is without question dependent on his ancestors, as he is for his form and other physical peculiarities. In his advance to civilization he was insensibly forced, by the pressure of external circumstances, through the more savage condition, in which his life was that of the hunter, first to pastoral and then to agricultural occupations. The requirements of a population gradually increasing in numbers could only be met by a supply of food more regular and more abundant than could be provided by the chase. But the possibility of the change from the hunter to the shepherd or herdsman rested on the antecedent existence of animals suited to supply man with food, having gregarious habits, and fitted for domestication, such as sheep, goats, and horned cattle; for their support the social grasses were a necessary preliminary, and for the growth of these in sufficient abundance and naturally suitable for pasture was required. A further evasion of man's growing difficulty in obtaining sufficient food was secured by aid of the cereal grasses, which supplied the means by which agriculture, the outcome of pastoral life, became the chief occupation of more civilized generations. Lastly, when these increased facilities for providing food were in turn overtaken by the growth of the population, new power to cope with the recurring difficulty was gained through the cultivation of mechanical arts and of thought, for which the needful leisure was for the first time obtained