e rock-shelter
and the cave are the homes which men seek from the advancing cold. As
these are relatively few in number, fixed in locality, and often of
large dimensions, the individualism of the earlier times is replaced by
collective life. Sociologists still dispute whether the clan arose
by the cohesion of families or the family arose within the clan. Such
evidence as is afforded by prehistoric remains is entirely in favour
of the opinion of Professor Westermarck, that the family preceded the
larger group. Families of common descent would now cling together and
occupy a common cavern, and, when the men gathered at night with the
women for the roasting and eating of the horse or deer they had hunted,
and the work of the artist and the woman was considered, the uncouth
muttering and gesticulating was slowly forged into the great instrument
of articulate speech. The first condition of more rapid progress was
instinctively gained.

Our story of life has so often turned on this periodical lowering of the
climate of the earth that it is interesting to find this last and most
important advance so closely associated with it that we are forced
once more to regard it as the effective cause. The same may be said of
another fundamental advance of the men of the later Palaeolithic age,
the discovery of the art of making fire. It coincides with the oncoming
of the cold, either in the Mousterian or the Magdalenian. It was more
probably a chance discovery than an invention. Savages so commonly make
fire by friction--rubbing sticks, drills, etc.--that one is naturally
tempted to regard this as the primitive method. I doubt if this was the
case. When, in Neolithic times, men commonly bury the dead, and put some
of their personal property in the grave with them, the fire-kindling
apparatus we find is a flint and a piece of iron pyrites. Palaeolithic
man made his implements of any kind of hard and heavy stone, and it
is probable that he occasionally selected iron ore for the purpose.
An attempt to chip it with flint would cause sparks that might fall on
inflammable material, and set it alight. Little intelligence would be
needed to turn this discovery to account.

Apart from these conjectures as to particular features in the life
of prehistoric man, it will be seen that we have now a broad and firm
conception of its evolution. From the ape-level man very slowly mounts
to the stage of human savagery. During long ages he seems to have ma