l series of events. Among Polynesians of to-day the dances still
retain the rhythmic beat of the war-tread measure, and many of the motions
of the arms are more or less conventionalized imitations of the act of
striking with a club, or hurling a spear, and other acts. To such elements
many other things have been added, but the fact remains that our own
formal dances, as well as the sun-dance of the Indian and the mad whirl of
the Dervish, are modern products which have truly evolved.

* * * * *

When we turn to science and philosophy and other intellectual attainments
of modern civilized peoples, it is easier to see how evolution has been
accomplished, because we possess a wealth of written literature which
explains the way that human ideas have changed from century to century. In
these cases there can be no question that such evidences provide accurate
instruments for estimating the mental abilities of the writers who
produced them. We shall take up the higher conceptions of mankind at a
later juncture, so at this point we need only to note that even these
mental possessions, like household culture and even the physical
structures of a human body, have changed and differentiated to become the
widely different interpretations of the world and supernature that are
held by the civilized, barbarous, and savage races of to-day.

As we look back over the facts that have been cited, and as we contemplate
the large departments of knowledge about human psychology, mental
development, and racial culture which these few details illustrate, we
come to realize how securely founded is the doctrine that even the human
mind with all its varied powers has grown to be what it is. Indeed, it is
solely due to his mental prowess that man has attained a position above
that of any lower animal. And yet every human organ and its function can
be traced to something in the lower world; it is a difference only in
degree and not in category that science discovers. The line connecting
civilized man with the savage leads inevitably through the ape to the
lower mammalia possessing intelligence, and on down to the reflex organic
mechanisms which end with the _Amoeba_. It is a long distance from the
mechanical activities of the protozooen to the processes of human thought;
yet the physical basis of the latter is a cellular mechanism and nothing
more, developed during a single human life in company with all other
organs