nd title of primitive man. In reality, however,
the very facts which I have here been detailing serve themselves to show
how extremely far our hero was from being truly primitive. You can't
speak of a distinguished artist, who draws the portraits of extinct
animals with grace and accuracy, as in any proper sense primordial.
Grant that our good troglodytes were indeed light-hearted cannibals;
nevertheless they could design far better than the modern Esquimaux or
Polynesians, and carve far better than the civilised being who is now
calmly discoursing about their personal peculiarities in his own study.
Between the cave men of the pre-Glacial age and the hypothetical hairy
quadrumanous ancestor aforesaid there must have intervened innumerable
generations of gradually improving intermediate forms. The old master,
when he first makes his bow to us, naked and not ashamed, in his Swiss
or French grotto, flint scalpel in hand and necklet of bear's teeth
dropping loosely on his hairy bosom, is nevertheless in all essentials a
completely evolved human being, with a whole past of slowly acquired
culture lying dimly and mysteriously behind him. Already he had invented
the bow with its flint-tipped arrow, the neatly chipped javelin-head,
the bone harpoon, the barbed fish-hook, the axe, the lance, the dagger,
and the needle. Already he had learnt how to decorate his implements
with artistic skill, and to carve the handles of his knives with the
figures of animals. I have no doubt that he even knew how to brew and to
distil; and he was probably acquainted with the noble art of cookery as
applied to the persons of his human fellow creatures. Such a personage
cannot reasonably be called primitive; cannibalism, as somebody has
rightly remarked, is the first step on the road to civilisation.

No, if we want to get at genuine, unadulterated primitive man we must go
much further back in time than the mere trifle of 250,000 years with
which Dr. Croll and the cosmic astronomers so generously provide us for
pre-Glacial humanity. We must turn away to the immeasurably earlier
fire-split flints which the Abbe Bourgeois--undaunted mortal!--ventured
to discover among the Miocene strata of the _calcaire de Beauce_. Those
flints, if of human origin at all, were fashioned by some naked and
still more hairy creature who might fairly claim to be considered as
genuinely primitive. So rude are they that, though evidently artificial,
one distinguished archa