Origin of Civilisation.--Every inhabited country, we are assured by
ethnologists, was once peopled by savages; the stone age everywhere
came before the age of metals. Antecedent to every civilisation that
has sprung up on the earth is this dim period, the period of the cave
dwellers and afterwards of the lake dwellers. There can be no
chronology nor any exact knowledge of these early men who lived by
hunting, with stone weapons, animals which are now extinct. How from
his earliest and most helpless state man came in various ways to help
himself; how he discovered fire, how he improved his weapons and
invented tools, how he learned to tame certain of the animals on
which he had formerly made war, and instead of wandering about the
world came to settle in one place and till the soil, and how family
life came to be instituted, and the father as well as the mother to
act as guardian to the children; all that is a vast history, which
must be read in its own place. Immense, indeed, were the labours
early man had to undergo, in wrestling his way up from a life like
that of the brutes to a life in which his own distinctive nature
could begin to display itself.

It was from the savage state that civilisation was by degrees
produced. The theory that man was originally civilised and humane,
and that it was by a fall, by a degeneration from that earliest
condition, that the state of savagery made its appearance, is now
generally abandoned. There may be instances of such degeneration
having taken place; but on the whole, the conviction now obtains that
civilisation is the result of progressive development, and was the
result man conquered for himself by his age-long struggles with his
environment. That development did not take place in all lands alike.
In some it proceeded faster than in others, and its advances were due
oftener to propagation from without, than to unaided growth from
within; as one race came in contact with another new ideas were
aroused of the possibilities of life in various directions. In some
lands the development has scarcely taken place at all. There remain
to this day races who are judged to be still in the primitive
condition. Not all savage tribes are thought to be in that condition.
The bushmen of Australia, the Andaman Islanders, and others,[1] are
found to be in such a state in point of habits and acquirements that
they must be considered as races which have fallen from a higher
position, and present