than any weapon or implement at present in use among
the lowest savages. Yet with it, I doubt not, some naked black fellow by
the banks of the Thames has hunted the mammoth among unbroken forest
two hundred thousand years ago and more; with it he has faced the angry
cave bear and the original and only genuine British lion (for everybody
knows that the existing mongrel heraldic beast is nothing better than a
bastard modification of the leopard of the Plantagenets). Nay, I have
very little doubt in my own mind that with it some aesthetic ancestor has
brained and cut up for his use his next-door neighbour in the nearest
cavern, and then carved upon his well-picked bones an interesting sketch
of the entire performance. The Du Mauriers of that remote age, in fact,
habitually drew their society pictures upon the personal remains of the
mammoth or the man whom they wished to caricature in deathless
bone-cuts. The other paper-weight is a polished neolithic tomahawk,
belonging to the period of the mound-builders, who succeeded the Glacial
Epoch, and it measures the distance between the two levels of
civilisation with great accuracy. It is the military weapon of a trained
barbaric warrior as opposed to the universal implement and utensil of a
rude, solitary, savage hunter. Yet how curious it is that even in the
midst of this 'so-called nineteenth century,' which perpetually
proclaims itself an age of progress, men should still prefer to believe
themselves inferior to their original ancestors, instead of being
superior to them! The idea that man has risen is considered base,
degrading, and positively wicked; the idea that he has fallen is
considered to be immensely inspiring, ennobling, and beautiful. For
myself, I have somehow always preferred the boast of the Homeric Glaucus
that we indeed maintain ourselves to be much better men than ever were
our fathers.

BRITISH AND FOREIGN

Strictly speaking, there is nothing really and truly British; everybody
and everything is a naturalised alien. Viewed as Britons, we all of us,
human and animal, differ from one another simply in the length of time
we and our ancestors have continuously inhabited this favoured and foggy
isle of Britain. Look, for example, at the men and women of us. Some of
us, no doubt, are more or less remotely of Norman blood, and came over,
like that noble family the Slys, with Richard Conqueror. Others of us,
perhaps, are in the main Scandinavian, and date