during the last hundred years, run up and down it. The English rat--not
the pleasantest of our domestic creatures--has gone everywhere; to
Australia, to New Zealand, to America: nothing but a complicated
rat-miracle could ever root him out. Nor could a common force expel the
horse from South America since the Spaniards took him thither; if we
did not know the contrary we should suppose him a principal aboriginal
animal. Where then, so to say, are the rats and horses of the primitive
civilisation? Not only can we not find them, but zoological science
tells us that they never existed, for the 'feebly pronounced,' the
ineffectual, marsupials of Australia and New Zealand could never have
survived a competition with better creatures, such as that by which
they are now perishing. We catch then a first glimpse of patriarchal
man, not with any industrial relics of a primitive civilisation, but
with some gradually learnt knowledge of the simpler arts, with some
tamed animals and some little knowledge of the course of nature as far
as it tells upon the seasons and affects the condition of simple
tribes. This is what, according to ethnology, we should expect the
first historic man to be, and this is what we in fact find him. But
what was his mind; how are we to describe that?

[3] See the very careful table and admirable discussion in Sir John
Lubbock's Pre-Historic Times.

I believe the general description in which Sir John Lubbock sums up his
estimate of the savage mind suits the patriarchal mind. 'Savages,' he
says, 'unite the character of childhood with the passions and strength
of men.' And if we open the first record of the pagan world--the poems
of Homer--how much do we find that suits this description better than
any other. Civilisation has indeed already gone forward ages beyond the
time at which any such description is complete. Man, in Homer, is as
good at oratory, Mr. Gladstone seems to say, as he has ever been, and,
much as that means, other and better things might be added to it. But
after all, how much of the 'splendid savage' there is in Achilles, and
how much of the 'spoiled child sulking in his tent.' Impressibility and
excitability are the main characteristics of the oldest Greek history,
and if we turn to the east, the 'simple and violent' world, as Mr.
Kinglake calls it, of the first times meets us every moment.

And this is precisely what we should expect. An 'inherited drill,'
science says, 'makes