rganisation.
Others remained in the islands, and we seem to have remnants of them
in the Kalangs, Veddahs, etc. But these islands have been repeatedly
overrun by higher races, and the primitive life has been modified.

Comparing the most isolated of these relics of early humanity, we obtain
many suggestions about the life of that remote age. The aboriginal
Tasmanians, who died out about forty years ago, were of great
evolutionary interest. It is sometimes said that man is distinguished
from all other animals by the possession of abstract ideas, but the very
imperfect speech of the Tasmanians expressed no abstract ideas. Their
mind seems to have been in an intermediate stage of development. They
never made fire, and, like the other surviving fragments of early
humanity, they had no tribal organisation, and no ideas of religion or
morality.

The first effect of the Ice-Age on this primitive humanity would be to
lead to a beginning of the development of racial characters. The pigment
under the skin of the negro is a protection against the actinic rays
of the tropical sun; the white man, with his fair hair and eyes, is a
bleached product of the northern regions; and the yellow or brown skin
seems to be the outcome of living in dry regions with great extremes
of temperature. As the northern hemisphere divided into climatic zones
these physical characters were bound to develop. The men who went
southward developed, especially when fully exposed to the sun on open
plains, the layer of black pigment which marks the negroid type. There
is good reason, as we shall see to think that man did not yet wear
clothing, though he had a fairly conspicuous, if dwindling, coat
of hair. On the other hand the men who lingered further north, in
South-western Asia and North Africa, would lose what pigment they
had, and develop the lighter characters of the northerner. It has been
noticed that even a year in the arctic circle has a tendency to make
the eyes of explorers light blue. We may look for the genesis of
the vigorous, light-complexioned races along the fringe of the great
ice-sheet. It must be remembered that when the limit of the ice-sheet
was in Central Germany and Belgium, the climate even of North Africa
would be very much more temperate than it is to-day.

As the ice-sheet melted, the men who were adapted to living in the
temperate zone to the south of it penetrated into Europe, and the long
story of the Old Stone Age opened. It