e clumsier and more stupidly fierce among him were killed soonest and
oftenest; the finer hand, the quicker eye, the bigger brain, the better
balanced body prevailed; age by age, the implements were a little better
made, the man a little more delicately adjusted to his possibilities. He
became more social; his herd grew larger; no longer did each man kill
or drive out his growing sons; a system of taboos made them tolerable
to him, and they revered him alive and soon even after he was dead, and
were his allies against the beasts and the rest of mankind. (But they
were forbidden to touch the women of the tribe, they had to go out and
capture women for themselves, and each son fled from his stepmother and
hid from her lest the anger of the Old Man should be roused. All the
world over, even to this day, these ancient inevitable taboos can be
traced.) And now instead of caves came huts and hovels, and the fire was
better tended and there were wrappings and garments; and so aided, the
creature spread into colder climates, carrying food with him, storing
food--until sometimes the neglected grass-seed sprouted again and gave a
first hint of agriculture.

And already there were the beginnings of leisure and thought.

Man began to think. There were times when he was fed, when his lusts and
his fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon the squatting-place
and dim stirrings of speculation lit his eyes. He scratched upon a bone
and found resemblance and pursued it and began pictorial art, moulded
the soft, warm clay of the river brink between his fingers, and found a
pleasure in its patternings and repetitions, shaped it into the form of
vessels, and found that it would hold water. He watched the streaming
river, and wondered from what bountiful breast this incessant water
came; he blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he might snare it
and spear it as it went down to its resting-place amidst the distant
hills. Then he was roused to convey to his brother that once indeed he
had done so--at least that some one had done so--he mixed that perhaps
with another dream almost as daring, that one day a mammoth had been
beset; and therewith began fiction--pointing a way to achievement--and
the august prophetic procession of tales.

For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations that
life of our fathers went on. From the beginning to the ripening of that
phase of human life, from the first clumsy eolith of rude