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THE COMING OF MAN

THE COMING OF MAN

BY

JOHN M. TYLER

PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF BIOLOGY
AMHERST COLLEGE

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BOSTON

MARSHALL JONES COMPANY

1923

COPYRIGHT • 1923 • BY
MARSHALL JONES COMPANY

THE PLIMPTON P R E S S • N O K W O O D • M A S S A CH U S ETT S
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

LIBRARY

N. C. state College

PREFACE

IT seems needless to write a preface to a book which is
merely and altogether an introduction, a small book on a
great subject.

We are beginning to appreciate the importance of the story
of man's slow and endless ''coming." To select and chronicle
a few of the most conspicuous successive stages of his ascent
and to sketch their essential characteristics is far from easy.
To discover the meaning of the changes and processes involved
in his ascent is like searching for buried treasures. Con-
densed histories of the growth of the United States during a
few centuries fill a dozen or more large volumes. We must at-
tempt to compress the whole biological history of animal and
human life into one booklet. The attempt seems absurd.

We will begin by enumerating- the most prominent stages,
the land marks, of human evolution, the rise of one function
after another to preeminence in the animal body. We will
not attempt to construct a genealogical tree of the animal
kingdom; but only to note the appearance, advance or cul-
mination of organs or powers which gave their possessors
marked advantage and temporary or permanent success.
We will try to introduce the reader to a few typical familiar
forms, which appear to have been stranded near the high-
water mark of the tide of life in some long-passed time, and
thus make him acquainted with the leading characters or
actors of their place and day. We cannot attempt to give a de-
tailed description of the anatomy of these unconscious heroes
of the great drama; but only to notice their deeds, efforts,
struggles and achievements. At best our sketch can be only a
rude outline devoid of all shading and of many important fea-
tures: we hope that it is true substantially and not misleading.

y * iS^

vi PREFACE

Having glanced at some of the chief actors we will look at
the stage-setting, their surroundings and environment, their
relations to the great world in which they were feeling their
way. Was their situation, perhaps, not altogether unlike our
own to-day? Can we draw any useful inferences from their
successes or failures? Above all what constituted fitness to
survive and progress, and can we derive from their experience
any suggestions as to what are the elements or marks of fitness
under present conditions? Do the unintelligent efforts and
experiments of our "humble fellows" of times passed, give us
a reasonable ground of hope in a brighter future? These are
the vital, all-important questions.

The book is intended to be an introduction in a more literal
sense. The references at the foot of many pages and the
bibliography are intended to lead the reader to an acquaint-
ance with a few of the thinkers and writers who have thrown
light on special subjects. If he will follow these suggestions,
he will be led far in excellent company into wide and fascinat-
ing fields of research and discovery.

Finally, the book is written especially for those who have
never found time or inclination to study our benighted ances-
tors and predecessors, and their magnificent and truly heroic
achievements. Not able to talk, or suffering from the malady
of thought, they ''lost themselves" in their work. Certainly
''they wrestled hard as we do now." If it can persuade a few
thoughtful souls to wonder at the amoeba, to become interested
in the highly significant hydra, to admire clams and worms,
to marvel at the strange experiments of reptiles, and gain a
fellow-feeling for the plodding primitive mammal, the sleek
cat and "aspiring ape," it will not have been written in vain.

If I am not mistaken, no less a thinker than the keen, stern,
powerful theologian Jonathan Edwards, a loving observer of
the beauties of nature in his j^ounger days, has told us that
supreme virtue consists in love for being in general.

PAGE
V

I

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

Preface

I. The Coming of Life

bacteria, protozoa and the cell, amoeba,
plants and animals. coelenterates, organs
and tissues. worms. the building of a body,
annelids. the rise of muscle and sense-organs.

II. The Coming of a Backbone ig

EXTERNAL PROTECTIVE SKELETON OF MOLLUSKS.
THE CLAM. SQUIDS. EXTERNAL LOCOMOTIVE SKELE-
TON OF ARTHROPODS. INSECTS. SMALL SIZE.
METAMORPHOSIS. VERTEBRATES AND THE INTERNAL
LOCOMOTIVE SKELETON. BONE, MUSCLE AND BRAIN.
SHARKS AND GANOIDS.

III. The Rise of Land Life 31

GANOIDS AND LIFE IN FRESH WATER. EMERGENCE
ON LAND. AMPHIBIA. RISE OF TEMPERATURE.
DECREASE IN NUMBER OF EGGS. CARE OF YOUNG.
REPTILES, BULK AND POWER. BIRDS AND SWIFT-
NESS. MAMMALS AND SUCKLING OF YOUNG. PRI-
MATES AND ARBOREAL LIFE. HAND AND BRAIN.

IV. The Coming of Savage Man 41

CLIMATIC CHANGES AND FORCED MIGRATIONS. DE-
SCENT FROM THE TREES. APE-MAN. THE IRANIAN
PLATEAU AND ROUTES OF EMIGRATION. NORTHERN
EUROPE DURING THE GLACIAL PERIOD. FAMILY
AND SOCIAL LIFE. BURIAL OF DEAD. WONDER AND
THOUGHT. THE CRO-MAGNON RACE.

V. The Dawn of Civilization 53

INDUSTRIES. DOLMENS. RISE OF AGRICULTURE.
TAMING OF THE SAVAGE. TRIBAL LIFE AND TRIBAL
CONSCIENCE. SOCIAL LIFE, FOLKWAYS AND MORALS.
PRIMITIVE RELIGION. CULTS AND MYSTERIES. THE
GODDESS.

VI. The Rise of Personality 64

TRADE, commerce, MIGRATIONS. THE COMING OF
the ARYANS. THE ACHAEANS. CULTS AND THEO-
RIES. DIVERSITY OF GIFTS AND TENDENCIES. DI-
VERGENCE. THE RISE OF THE HERO. PERSONALITY
AND LOYALTY.

vii

vlli CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

VII. The Logic of Evolution 71

CELLS, TISSUES, AND ORGANS. ERA OF DIGESTION
AND REPRODUCTION. RISE OF THE MUSCULAR
SYSTEM. THE LOCOMOTIVE SKELETON. LOCO-
MOTION, SENSE-ORGANS AND BRAIN. CARE OF
YOUNG. EDUCABILHY. V7EAKNESS AND V^ITS.
MAN, MORALS AND RELIGION. SUCCESSIVE DYNAS-
TIES IN EVOLUTION. REVOLUTIONS AND OUT-
BREAKS. REVERSAL OF LOGICAL SEQUENCE AND
DEGENERATION. A LIBERAL HUMAN EDUCATION.

VIII. Nature and man 83

SEAT OF control IN THE BODY. DIRECTIVITY.

neo-darwinians and neo-lamarckians. na-
ture AS FINAL ARBITER. OUR ABUSE AND EX-
PLOITATIONS OF NATURE. IS NATURE MORAL,
IMMORAL OR UNMORAL.? DANGERS OF COMPLEXITY.
ASYMMETRY. CRIPPLES AND ^REVERSED CRIPPLES."

IX. Man and Environment 97

ADAPTATION. SURROUNDINGS. ENVIRONMENT. IM-
PORTANCE OF RELATIONS. EVOLUTION OF DIS-
COVERY. NEEDS. ARTIFICIAL ENVIRONMENT.

X. The Survival of the Fittest 106

CRITERIA OF FITNESS. VERTEBRATES VS. MOL-
LUSKS. AMPHIBIA VS. SHARKS. MAMMALS VS.
REPTILES. PRIMATES AND APE-MAN VS. CARNIVORA.
DOMINANCE AND FITNESS. SOCRATES AND CALLI-
CLES. LIFE AND DISTANT ENDS. NATURE VS.
DOMINANCE. ADVENTURE.

XI. Perfect Health 119

the tyranny of the weakest part, — and of
the strongest part. symmetry and health,
a healthy nervous system. healthy-minded-
ness. interests. values. natural devel-
opment of the child. value of play instincts,
adolescence. nature and development of
youth. the adult. danger of specializa-
tion and over-adaptation. young old men.
contagion of health.

Bibliography 136

Index 145

THE COMING OF MAN

THE COMING OF MAN

THE COMING OF LIFE

IT was very long ago, far longer than we can possibly
conceive. The everlasting hills were not yet born, the
continents hardly sketched. We may stimulate our
imagination to attempt the task by putting it in a somewhat
different form.

Let us take a measuring rod a little more than eight feet
long; let every inch correspond roughly to 100,000 years.
The uppermost tenth of an inch representing 10,000 years
would cover the whole historical period, the epochs of the dis-
covery of metals, and overlap the New Stone Age. One inch
carries us far back in Palaeolithic time. Osborn places the
appearance of pithecaifthropus, the ape-man, at about
500,000 B. c, fi.ve inches from the top of our scale. ^ The be-
ginning of the Cenozoic period, or Age of ]Mammals, the last
and shortest of the gfeat geological periods, some 3,000,000
years, carries us down two and one-half feet. The Mesozoic
period, the Age of Reptiles, occupying 9,000,000 years, would
require ninety inches and cover nearly the whole of our rod,
on which all human history occupied a part of one-tenth of
an inch. The Palaeozoic period was, perhaps, twice as long
as the Mesozoic, about 18,000,000 years.
'This is Schuchert's reckoning, giving a total of some

1 24:41. (i>-/ = Number in Bibliography: 4i = Page of Book.)

H. 85.

I

2 "THE COMING OF MAN

30,000,000 years to geologic time. The amount was considered
by him very conservative, and by most geologists as quite
inadequate.^ It is a minimum. The weight of evidence
seems to favor a length of from 90,000,000 to 120,000,000
years; some would make it much greater.

Into this ancient world life stole very quietly and without
observation. Our most primitive forms of life, and they have
already advanced far, are the bacteria.^ They are exceedingly
minute, thousands together would not cover the comma on a
page of print. They seem to be composed of a substance
which we may call protoplasm. Many are too small to be
visible under the highest powers of our microscopes; and
we still know comparatively little of the finer structure of
even the higher and larger forms.

They show great variety in size, form and structure.
Usually they resemble spheres or short rods; some approach
the lowest unicellular animals, the protozoa; others are scarcely
distinguishable from the lowest plants, the protophyta. They
form a group showing great variety, are exceedingly gener-
alized, and the persistent survival or development of such
a host of forms is the highest testimonial to the dour vitality
of the stock.

Wherever life is possible there we find bacteria, in the
sea, in hot springs, in the frozen north, on mountain-rocks,
almost everywhere in the uppermost four or five feet of the
soil, in the bodies of plants and animals. They fit into every
crack and cranny in the world. Some flourish in light and
air, to others these are harmful or destructive. They ask
very little from nature, take whatever she offers and thrive."*

They are admirably adapted to live in an inorganic world
or on dead material. Plants and animals die. Under the
influence of the bacteria the proteins of their bodies are
changed over into ammonia, and finally into nitrates, fit food
for plants; other compounds are similarly handled. They

2 H. 85.

2 2: 26. no.

* G. 80.

"fHE COMING OF LIFE 3

form the essential link in the round of organized material
stored up by the plant; eaten, used, and cast out by the
animal; and changed again into plant food by these micro-
scopic chemists. But they are not limited to this kind of food-
material.

One of the greatest triumphs of modern science is the fixa-
tion, combination and utilization of atmospheric nitrogen, a
stubborn inert material which refuses, or is very slow, to
combine with other elements. The bacteria solved this prob-
lem millions of years ago; in root-tubercles, and in the soil
they are carrying on the same work to-day bare-handed, not
in great laboratories. It is probable that carbon, either in
the form of coal or charcoal, may be oxidized by certain of
the soil bacteria. Carbon, at any ordinary temperature, seems
even more inert than nitrogen. They are said to be able to
oxidize paraffine and other resistant compounds. All this
marvellous work of chemical analysis and synthesis goes on
in or around the bodies of minute bacteria whose only re-
agents are such as the protoplasm can manufacture in and
for itself. Every one is a marvellous synthetic laboratory,
building up more complex compounds out of simpler ones,
the work which modern chemists find most fascinating and
difficult.

Their chief reagents in this synthetic work are the enzymes
which are capable of bringing about changes in various sub-
stances without becoming a part of the final product. They
seem to produce combinations without remaining in them;
hence are not used up, but theoretically may be used in-
definitely. A small amount of enzyme can do a large amount
of work and synthesize a great amount of material. They
are strange complex substances about which we still know
very little; but the bacteria produce them in great variety and
use them for many purposes.

Says Osborn: "In their power of finding energy or food in
a lifeless world, the bacteria known as prototrophic, or ' prim-
itive feeders,' are not only the simplest known organisms but
it is probable that they represent the survival of a primordial

4 "fHE COMING OF MAN

stage of life chemistry. These bacteria derive both their
energy and their nutrition directly from inorganic chemical
compounds; such types were thus capable of living and
flourishing in the lifeless earth before the advent of continu-
ous sunshine and long before the first chlorophyllic stage
(algse) of the evolution of plant-life." They are anything
but structureless, but we still know very Iktle concerning their
structure. They are far from homogeneous. We find granules
of different shapes, sizes, and behavior toward stains; net-
works and strands of various character. Vacuoles play an
important part. We will return to this subject in our glance
at protozoa.

The bacteria may have remained for ages the highest forms
of life. They cover a wide range of structure, complexity and
development. They laid the first and lowest yet discovered
tiers in the foundations of life. They still form an essential
link in its maintenance. They have done their part well and
thoroughly. Nature could afford to spend milHons of years
in their development. From them lines of inconceivable pos-
sibilities radiate.

The Protozoa. Here again we find great variety, a host of
forms showing a long development, great adaptability and
wide distribution. We select for our example the amoeba, an
exceedingly common form which has attracted and held the
interest of all observers since its. first discovery. Though
far larger than the average bacterium, the amoeba is still
minute — from %oo to Yooo of an inch in diameter. It is
a single cell, consisting of nucleus and cytoplasm, two quite
distinct portions developed and differentiated out af the proto-
plasm of some ancient and far simpler and primitive bacterium.
The nucleus is a small body, staining deeply and showing the
presence of a very peculiar substance, chromatin. This sub-
stance is apparently present in many bacteria in small granules,
"a diffused nucleus"; in others it seems to be almost equally,
distributed through the protoplasm.

The cytoplasm of the amoeba is a translucent, granular

"fHE COMING OF LIFE 5

semifluid substance about as viscid as mucilage or cold
molasses. It is not surrounded by any rigid cell-membrane
and can put out rootlike or rounded projections, pseudopodia.
It can withdraw these or can " flow " into one of them and
thus move. The secret of this power of contractility, how a
little mass of semifluid substance can continually change the
tension of different portions and '' squeeze " itself into new
forms, is still an exceedingly difficult question.

It distinguishes its food before it comes in contact with it
and hence seems to possess the sense of smell. It possesses
a power which we must call consciousness. It responds to a
variety of stimuli, in certain situations it seems to experiment
by a sort of '' trial and error " and to '' feel its way."

The engulfed particle of food, alga or bacterium, is sur-
rounded by a droplet or vacuole of acid fluid and is dis-
solved, digested; whatever is insoluble goes to the surface
and is discharged. The dissolved nutriment is either burned
up to furnish energy or stored up in granules, '^ oil-globules,"
or other forms; some of it passes into the nucleus and is here
changed to cytoplasm or nuclear substance; here, and also in
the cytoplasm, " dead matter " is changed into living sub-
stance, the constantly recurring miracle of life. The products
of combustion and the waste substances of the body are dis-
charged or excreted at the surface of the cell. Here also
oxygen is absorbed, and respiration takes place. The amoeba
is a vortex or whirlpool on the face of nature continually
taking in, building up materials, using them in a great variety
of ways, oxidizing or disintegrating them again and cast-
ing them out. But it is a very enduring permanent whirl-
pool outlasting the everlasting hills.

The amoeba grows. When it has reached a certain size,
it divides into two new and young amoebae, and there is no
old amoeba left to die. It seems to elude and outwit death
and to be potentially immortal, especially if the nucleus is
rejuvenated — as is usually the case among the protozoa —
by an act of fusion or conjugation of two individuals, the
promise of sex.

6 T^HE COMING OF MAN

We wondered at the synthetic and analytic processes going
on in the bacteria. The amoeba can depend on the bacteria
and algae for a rich and constant supply of highly organized
food, a storehouse of potential energy. They relieve it of a
certain amount and kind of work. But the chemistry of
the amoeba is anything but simple. It builds a great variety
of substances; net-works, fluid vacuoles, granules, threads
and masses of the most diverse materials. It requires a long
list of reagents which it manufactures for itself, it uses these
to make an array of substances which it distributes or combines
for a great variety of purposes.. What guides, combines all
these forces and processes into the Hfe of one individual feel-
ing and acting amoeba? We have no idea. That is one of
the secrets of life.

The greatest asset of both bacterium and amoeba is their
small size. If of two spheres, one has twice the diameter
of the other, the larger one will have eight times the mass,
but only four times the surface. If they have the same in-
ternal structure, the same will be true of every granule and
vacuole. Mass measures expenses for combustion, etc.; ex-
ternal surface measures the amount of oxygen absorbed, and
of carbonic acid and excrete fluids discharged. The inner
surface of vacuoles increases the amount of digestive and
other fluids secreted, though perhaps somewhat less exactly.
Hence the possible intake or income of the animal is meas-
ured by its surfaces, the expense by the mass to be main-
tained.

All the complexity of the structure of our internal organs,
especially of our digestive, excretory and respiratory systems,
represent an attempt, so to speak, to increase to the utmost
the organic surface with the smallest increase of size and
waste. Increase in size and bulk of any animal is a costly
and dangerous experiment. The microscopic size of protozoa,
and the ultra-minuteness of the bacteria, means relatively
large incomes and small expenses. There is a relatively
large or enormous balance to devote to reproduction. Hence
the enormously rapid reproduction and increase of these forms.

"tHE COMING OF LIFE 7

We must never think of the amoeba as a simple, homoge-
neous body of uniform substance. It is quite the reverse of
this in its granules of nutriment in the most diverse grades of
assimilation; in its " formed materials," and its reagents; in
its structural arrangements and " cell-organs." It is a whole
chemical and physical laboratory whose work we have only
begun to understand and appreciate. It is a hive of varied
industries. In some respects it is far more wonderful than
the body of higher animals, where all this work is distributed
and writ large. Its wondrous adaptability enables it to occupy
and possess every chink and corner of the world and to meet
every emergency. We cannot but feel that such beings have
come to stay, that they will surely succeed in the struggle for
survival, and existence. They can hold their own.

We find among the higher protozoa, especially among the
tlagellata, groups or colonies of cells; some fixed, some rolling
or whirKng through the water. Usually the cells are all
practically alike; but in volvox certain of them are entirely
devoted to reproduction. The protozoa are forth-putting,
building something more than single, solitary cells. This
looks promising, as if something quite different, larger and
possibly higher might come out of it.

We find consciousness in the amoeba. Huxley once said
that the appearance of consciousness, as the result of the ir-
ritation of brain particles, is as inexplicable as the appear-
ance of the djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the story.
And it looks as if the consciousness of the amoeba might be
more like the djin which the fisherman saw slowly emerge
from the jar which he had drawn from the sea. It may ex-
pand. But in this part of our first chapter our whole living
world contains only bacteria, protozoa and algae. All we
dare say is that this looks decidedly new, and as if there
might be something in it.

Protoplasm is certainly " a quite peculiar juice." It looks
as if it might be a bundle of unrealized possibilities. Says
Bergson: ''The resistance of inert matter was the obstacle
that had first to be overcome. Life seems to have succeeded

8 "fHE COMING OF MAN

in this by dint of humility, by making itself very small and
very insinuating, bending to chemical and physical forces, con-
senting even to go a part of the way with them, like the switch
that adopts for a while the direction of the rail it is endeavor-
ing to leave. Of phenomena in the simplest forms of life, it
is hard to say whether they are still physical and chemical or
whether they are already vital. Life had to enter thus into
the habits of inert matter, in order to draw it little by little,
magnetized, as it were, to another track. The animate forms
that first appeared were therefore of extreme simplicity.
They were probably tiny masses of scarcely differentiated
protoplasm, outwardly resembling the amoeba observable to-
day, but possessed of the tremendous internal push that was
to raise them even to the highest forms of life. ... It suc-
ceeded in inducing an increasing number of elements, ready
to divide, to remain united. By the division of labor it
knotted between them an indissoluble bond. . . . Life is
tendency, and the essence of a tendency is to develop in the
form of a sheaf creating, by its very growth, divergent direc-
tions among which its impetus is divided. This we observe
in ourselves, in the evolution of that special tendency which
we call our character."

Life is always sending its children out into the world to
seek a kingdom; to be fruitful and multiply and fill and pos-
sess the earth. It is still sending out its groups of bacteria, of
weeds, of insect pests, — usually small forms of intense vi-
tality, of great adaptability, if not already adapted, to a wide
range of climate and other conditions. Civilization often gives
them new opportunities and they seize upon and make the
most of them, and threaten to overwhelm us.

The first or a very early great divergence, or setting out of
these pioneer adventurers, resulted in the establishment of the
two great organic kingdoms, plants and animals. We have
only lately begun to notice the experiments of bacteria and
similar forms in producing coloring matters, pigments, of va-
rious hues and chemical structure. Coloring matters may
have played a larger role in life and development than we

fHE COMING OF LIFE g

have yet suspected, for these ancient experimenters were great
utilizers of what at our first glance seems to us as mere by-
products, as they probably once were. Their present use and
value in the life of the organism is still but slightly understood.
One of these substances is chlorophyl, the green matter in
the leaves of plants by means of which they utilize the energy
of the light in the sun's rays to break up carbon dioxide and
build up starch. This is only one step in the process by
which the plant stores up food and potential energy and passes
it over to the animal.

Chlorophyl is one of the most conspicuous characteristics
of plant life, but probably not the most fundamental. We
have noticed that the bacteria are surrounded by a cell-wall or
membrane. They cannot, like the amoeba, engulf solid par-
ticles, but live on fluid materials absorbed from the surround-
ing water. They do not need to go in search of their nourish-
ment, nor to recognize it when absorbed. They can remain
stationary, or float.

In higher plants living on the land the water and dissolved
substances are gained by a subterranean root-system. The
chlorophyl is in the leaves exposing a very large amount of
surface to the light and air. Root and leaf surfaces are con-
nected by a stout elastic wooden trunk through which cur-
rents of sap flow upward and downward. The plant wastes
no energy in locomotion, its expenses are very small, its
income is steady and large; it has a large surplus balance to
expend in growth and reproduction. A highly successful
plant, like one of our weeds, can grow rapidly in comparatively
dry and poor soil, seeds abundantly, tolerates changes of
climatic and other conditions, and flourishes where our more
delicate plants would die.

The cell-wall of cellulose, the fluid nourishment, the pres-
ence of chlorophyl are the chief characteristics of plants; yet
no one of these is peculiar to them; the ability to use CO. and
salts as building material for starch and protein is certainly
peculiar to them, however; every one can be found in some
animals. But in plants they are all combined in one highly

10 THE COMING OF MAN

successful organism, characterized by tendencies even more
than by details of structure.

We left our protozoa as little groups or colonies of cells,
all alike except that in a few cases, as in volvox, certain cells
have been set apart for reproduction. That much can be
realized at a not much higher stage is proved by the very in-
teresting group of sponges, at which we cannot afford to cast
even a glance. We pick up our thread of development with
the coelenterates. These include our common sea-anemones
and their near relations, the coral animals, which have con-
tributed so much to the upbuilding and extension of coast
and mainland; also the jelly-fishes. The group shows con-
siderable variety of structure and attainment. Most of them
are sessile polj^s; the jelly-fishes are usually floating rather
than actively swimming forms. The general plan of the group
is well shown in our common fresh water hydra, which has
preserved many primitive characters.

The green hydra is a small vase-shaped or tubular animal
about a quarter of an inch in length; the brown hydra may be
twice as large. It differs from the rest of the hydroid polyps
in not being permanently attached but moving over the stone
or stick, or swimming or floating in the water from place to
place. This exceptional habit seems primitive. In its struc-
ture it reminds us of a lady's shopping-bag, covered with silk
and lined with velvet. The opening into the bag corresponds
to the mouth of hydra, the cavity is for digestion, the silk
and velvet materials to two layers of cells enclosing the diges-
tive cavity or archenteron. The mouth is surrounded by a
ring of tentacles armed with nettle-cells for stinging and par-
alyzing its prey. During the breeding season we find on the
outside of the animal a little swelling, a reproductive organ
producing eggs or spermatozoa.

The fundamental structural characteristics of hydra, and
of all coelenterates, are a body composed of two layers of
cells, ectoderm and entoderm, surrounding a primordial di-
gestive cavity, the archenteron, which in jelly-fishes sends out

"The coming of life u

tubes or branches to carry the more or less dissolved nutri-
ment to all parts of the body. Respiration and excretion are
maintained through the exposed surfaces of the cell-layers.

The protozoa showed us what could be accomplished by the
single cell. Then cell-colonies appeared; and in volvox cells
set apart purely for reproduction, the first need and function
is to have cells devoted entirely and solely to its performance.
It insured the survival of the species, as digestion maintained
the survival of the individual. These are the two absolutely
essential functions and therefore the first to be provided with
special organs. The ccelenterates show us a stage where these
two organs have attained their simplest and most primitive
forms and structure. We might say that the plant almost at-
tained but never outgrew this stage. There is a good sug-
gestion in the name given by the older naturalists to this
stage of animal life, zoophytes or plant-animals.

These are not the only contributions which the ccelenterates
made to the building of the body of higher animals. They
developed quite a variety of tissues, groups of cells whose
form and structure are adapted to the performance of a special
function, but these cell-groups are not yet arranged and united
in an organ having a special shape. An organ usually consists
of several tissues; so a coat, corresponding to an organ, is
made of several materials, cloth, thread, etc., arranged in
a shape fitted to the wearer.

In the ccelenterates we find muscular and nervous tissues,
generally in a rudimentary form. It begins to look as if these
might some day take shape in exceedingly interesting organs.
We find sensory cells each with its fine hair responding to
delicate vibrations in the water or exposing a very large sur-
face to chemical stimuli of various kinds. They are the
promise of organs of hearing, smell, and taste. Little patches
of pigment are sensitive to light and feel it, in a crude way,
the direction of its source. They continually stimulate the
cells of the growing and developing nervous tissue. Even in
hydra this has formed a plexus beneath the skin, a sort of

12 "fHE COMING OF MAN

cobweb of cells and fibers enveloping the body. This is a
well-formed and slightly organized and molded tissue, we might
almost call it an- organ.

We may safely say that the protozoa have developed cells,
the units of structure whose combination made possible the
rise of higher forms. The ccelenterates have developed these
cells farther, have differentiated them by division of labor;
have builded the two absolutely essential organs, and have
furnished some most important tissues whose grouping, com-
bination, arrangement and shaping will make the efficient or-
gans of higher types.

Here again as in bacteria and protozoa we find a small
amount of realization and attainment, and a great bundle of
vast but vague possibilities; their vagueness is a symptom of
the far higher new achievements which they were to attain.
They paved the way to greater and swifter, or at least less
wearisomely slow, advance. Or one might say that they laid
deep and solid foundations, and gathered an abundance of
material, so that their descendants might erect a fortress-
palace of strength and beauty. Despise not the day of small
things, greater things will come in time; and our wealth of
time is inexhaustible.

Worms. A wise old German professor used to say with
whimsical exaggeration: '^ Study worms. If you know them
thoroughly, you will understand the whole animal kingdom.
If you do not study them carefully, you will never know any-
thing about zoology." He was right. In worms the possi-
bilities of lower animal life begin to emerge from vagueness, to
unfold and take form. We used to say: '' All things are
possible with God and in Austria"; we might add ''and among
worms." Still they belong to the great apostolic succession
of layers of foundations. Most of their forms are buried
beyond hope of recovery.

They do not form a well-marked type, kingdom or group;
they are an assemblage of relics of a lost past. The study
of the group is like looking into our grandmother's china closet

"THE COMING OF LIFE 13

or exploring the attic of an old house. We see only samples
or fragments of departed greatness, of which most has long
since been destroyed. Our systematic zoologists left among
worms all forms for which they could find no place elsewhere.
These relics and nondescripts became isolated through the
extinction of long series of connecting links. Many have
strayed far and show few traces of their original home and
ancestry. Others have been deformed by parasitism, the last
refuge of weak and defeated animals.

But there is a deeper reason for their vast range of varia-
tion and adaptation. Give to a number of isolated savages
who have never seen a hut all the materials for a house; and
let every man build uncontrolled, as he will. Every one builds
busily. The results are marvellous in their variety and ec-
centricity. Most of the buildings fall almost immediately in
hopeless ruin. A few erect rudiments of a decent shelter.
Or you may compare the period when the worms formed the
vanguard and pioneers of animal development to the period
of the Judges in Hebrew history: when " there was no king
in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own
eyes."

The worms had inherited two layers of cells and two organs
and a sacklike body. The wall of this body corresponded
practically to a bit of skin covering a piece of the lining of
the intestine. All structures between these two layers of our
body were yet to come. They had the tissues out of which
the other organs were to be builded. Their problem and task
was to frame the other organs, and then combine them in one
tough, strong mobile body adapted to all the conditions of
life. In this experiment there were no hereditary achieve-
ments to guide them. The world of life must have been a
marvellous sight during the era of the earliest worms. Most
of the earliest experiments must have failed and disappeared
quickly.

Traces of an early stage of vermian development have
persisted in the flat worms or platyhelminthes, especially in
the turbellaria, small worms oval or elliptical in outline;

14 "fHE COMING OF MAN

markedly depressed, that is flattened in a dorso-ventral direc-
tion. We might, perhaps, venture to imagine that some very
primitive coelenterate ancestor, akin to a jelly-iish (or a
ctenophore) swam or crawled at the sea-bottom and moved by
the musclar tissue, orginally fibers growing out of and be-
tween the cells of the two layers of the body. This muscular
tissue increased and formed a thick mass and in time layers
whose fibers run in all directions through the body. These
muscles serve two main and distinct purposes. The inner
layers are attached to and control the digestive sack. The
outer layers are used for the locomotion of the body. These
two sets' of layers are used independently and become more
and more distinct. The space between the two is occupied
by a spongy mass of parenchym, perhaps orginally musclar,
perhaps connectile.

In this spongy mass the tubular reproductive organs spread
and branch. Here they are safely protected. In our modern
flat worms they are exceedingly highly developed and very
complex; more so than in any later or higher animal. The
thickened skin or integument makes more and more difficult
the discharge c^f the steadily increasing nitrogenous waste
products of cjombustion in the muscles and elsewhere. Hence
we find two tubes, often with* many branches, serving as ex-
cretory organs. There is as yet no circulatory system, for
the fluid in the spongy mass of parenchym allows of easy
diffusion of nutriment and oxygen to all parts of the body
and oi waste products from them to the excretory tubes, es-
pecially in a small animal. The exchange of carbon-dioxide
for oxygen can still take place through the skin; there are
no special gills.

The mouth is sometimes in the middle of the under surface
of the body, sometimes near the front end. Over the mouth
or oesophagus is a nerve-center or ganglion and from this,
chords containing cells and fibers extend backward. The
sense-organs consist of sensory hairs distributed over the body
and clustered in sacklike depressions, otolith vesicles. We find
pigment eyes, of various stages of development in different

fHE COMING OF LIFE 15

species, distributed around the front margin of the body or
limited to the front end. The central position of the mouth
and the distribution of the eyes, as well as the shape of the
body, in certain forms seems to point backward toward some
sort of radiate ancestor, though the general structure is bi-
lateral, like that of our own bodies. But these insignificant
worms seem to represent a stage where important structural
changes and progress were taking place.

We have only glanced at flat worms as representing in some
respects a very primitive vermian stage. We must neglect all
the intermediate stages between them and the highest worms,
as well as the large number of divergent and aberrant forms.
We will not even attempt to condense into a few pages of
brief, incomplete and inadequate outline the history of the
most important changes in the building of the animal body,
whose accomplishment must have required millions of years.
Our sketch reduces itself to a couple of glimpses, not at all to a
moving picture, of animal evolution.

We pass at a leap to the very highest worms, the annelids,
of which the earth worm is a fair example, though the char-
acteristics of the group are brought out far more clearly and
adequately in the " clam-worms " of the marine mud-flats.
Here we shall find the somewhat feeble and crude attempts of
the flat worms realized in a definite practical and efficient
form and structure.

The body of the annelid is segmented, composed of a longi-
tudinal series of rings allowing great flexibility and freedom
of locomotion. Almost every ring has a pair of lateral, fin-
like projections which enable the animal to swim or creep
rapidly. Their possibilities will unfold in the appendages of
insects.

The body is composed of two parallel concentric tubes, one
within the other. The smaller tube, the intestine, opens at
the front and hind ends of the body by becoming continuous
with the outer tube. The opening in front is the mouth, that
at the rear the anal opening. We will call the outer tube the
body wall. It is composed of the skin and two layers of

i6 I' HE COMING OF MAN

muscles; the fibers of one running longitudinally, those of the
other transversely. These muscles can lengthen, shorten or
bend the body as it writhes through the water. They also give
complete protection to the delicate internal organs. The lin-
ing of the digestive tube secretes the digestive fluids and ab-
sorbs the digested food. As the food passes through it in a
more or less continual stream its different parts have begun
to differentiate to suit the different stages of digestion. The
tube is far more efficient than the mere sack. Around this
tube also are layers of muscular fibers.

The space between the two tubes is the perivisceral cav-
ity or coelom where delicate vital organs can be packed away.
Here we find comparatively simple reproductive organs.
Many eggs are still produced but this is not the whole business
of life as in flat worms. We find a pair of excretory tubules
in each segment to remove the steadily increasing nitrogenous
waste. The earth worm still breathes through the outer
surface; the more active clam-worm has little feathery
or tubular gills on its fins. We find a complete system
of blood-vessels to insure delivery of nutriment and
oxygen to all p^rts of the body and removal of waste. The
perivisceral cavity is filled with a colorless fluid, perhaps
much like our lymph. All the essentials of the body of a very
powerful and efficient animal have here been realized to a
large extent. The general plan of structure and arrangement
will be retained in higher forms though with much improve-
ment in details.

A quite complex nervous system has been already attained.
In every ring or segment of the body we find a nerve center
or ganglion controlling the muscles of that segment. These
are connected in a chain along the ventral surface sending
forward on each side of the oesophagus bundles of fibers, com-
missures, to an evidently superior or supreme center in the
first segment. The long cylindrical body is thus unified and
brought under one control. This chief supra-cesophageal
ganglion innervates the principal sense-organs. The mouth
has the sense of taste, and here or hard by is located the

fHE COMING OF LIFE 17

sense of smell; the chief means of recognition of food.
Tentacles form exquisite organs of touch and very possibly
of other senses. The cells with fine hairs, which we found
in ccelenterates are still abundant, and may be accessible to
a variety of stimuli. Little sacks lined with similar hairs,
otolith-vesicles, are probably organs of feeling delicate vibra-
tions in the water, and giving warning of the nearness of foe
or food. They are on the way to become organs of hearing.

We have found the eye as a pigment speck in flat worms
and probably in primitive ccelenterates. In some of the flat
worms such pigment specks have sunk below the surface
and light is allowed to enter only along a single line of direc-
tion. The skin covering the aperture is transparent and if it
thickens gradually into the form of a lens, and the pigmented
surface becomes more delicately and fully innervated, we have
an organ which is no longer merely photoscopic, light per-
ceiving, but also eidoscopic, forming images of external ob-
jects. At least one annelid, alciope, has attained such a truly
visual eidoscopic eye giving an image of objects within a very
narrow range of vision.

We cannot overestimate the importance of the development
of a visual eye. It may be crude and near-sighted, but " among
the blind, the one-eyed man is king." Among higher types
of animals an eye with some means of forming an image is
universal. Eyes, otolith vesicles or ears, tentacles and other
sense organs are all situated at the front end of a vigorous
cylindrical animal writhing its way through the water. Here
the watch and lookout for food and danger must be maintained.
All these sense-organs are innervated from the supra-oesoph-
ageal ganglion which is continually pelted with stimuli from
all sides and sources. It is growing fast but is hardly suf-
ficient for the work and demands thrown upon it. The an-
nelid can hardly be said to possess a true head and brain, but
if it keeps its front end foremost and does not drift it will
surely develop one. To adopt the expression of the stock-
market it is very " long in futures."

These annelids, and probably others somewhat like them,

i8 tHE COMING OF MAN

revolutionized the animal kingdom and marked out a far-
stretching line of advance. They alone were not the an-
cestors of all higher forms. Others are equally interesting
and progressive, one is tempted to say aspiring. Sagitta, the
" arrow-worm," could tell an equally fascinating story. Pos-
sibly or probably worms superior to both these have disap-
peared and left in the rocks no trace of their soft bodies. But
several forms of these highest worms were tending and strug-
gling and writhing in a very interesting direction.

Let us choose any one of these highest worms which has
the muscular locomotive body with a front end possessing
crude visual eyes and good ganglion. Let us imagine him as
having a pharynx or muscular lining of the mouth which he
can protrude, and that this pharynx is armed with a couple or
more of sharp, pointed, claw-like horny teeth. Let us turn
such forms, and there are at least some of them still surviv-
ing, loose in an ocean swarming with less active unarmed lower
worms and coelenterates. They will live like kings and ovm
the world. No unarmed form can stand before them. The
world of coelenterates and flat worms was one of comparative
peace. Two jelly-fishes cannot fight if they would; two an-
nelids might, and their descendants will. The struggle of
brute with brute for supremacy has begun or is near at hand.
Only the most vigorous, tough, athletic, vigilant and wary
can hope for success. The worms are entering or approach-
ing this arena and the gladiatorial shows will continue for
millions of years. Something magnificent must surely come
of it. Even if we are descended from worms, they were
glorious worms!

II

THE COMING OF A BACKBONE

PEERING backward into the dawn of geological history,
where even the palaeontologist can help us but little,
we see dimly a vast ocean peopled with a swarm of
worms and coelenterates, as well as all sorts of still lower
life. The age of pacifists, of universal flabbiness and peace, is
passing fast. It was high time to begin the development of
some sort of skeleton. Three different types of skeleton were
possible. Different descendants of worms experimented on
these three lines and thus became ancestors of the highest
groups of animals: vertebrates, arthropods and mollusks.
These three ancestral, pioneer worms parted company ages
ago, and all unconsciously went out into the world to seek
their fortunes. The vertebrate ancestor developed an internal
locomotive skeleton which was to culminate in a backbone.
The arthropods are represented by insects, spiders and crabs.
Their ancestor secreted an external horny skeleton, chiefly
for locomotion, partly for protection.

The primitive molluscan ancestor was apparently an un-
segmented worm crawling slowly and lazily over the bottom
where small food was abundant. Here, where life teems,
some sort of protective skeleton seems almost the rule. There
are shelled protozoa, coral-animals and sessile well protected
worms. The skin takes easily and naturally to producing
such a skeleton, and very likely it developed rapidly. He
crawled slowly on the bottom, and his mode of life gradually
molded his whole structure.

We will first glance at the clam, the extreme logical con-
clusion and in a way the consummate flower of molluscan

19

20 tHE COMING OF MAN

development. We will not weary ourselves with dry details
of anatomical structure; we seek chiefly the tendency and
results of his experiment and line of advance, his gains and
losses. The ancestral clam developed a shell composed of
two valves which extended downward and completely cov-
ered the sides of the body. It burrowed in the mud or sand
until well out of reach of any large foes — if any such should
ever arise — where he was safe even from nibbling worms
and boring irritating animalcules. Against all forms of pain
and discomfort he offers an even more impregnable defence.
He has little muscle, except enough to close the shell, less
nerves, and his supra-cesophageal ganglion is minute. Most
irritations are unnoticed; severe or sharp pain is probably
impossible.

Some morbid soul may think that a being to whom pain is
impossible cannot know happiness or pleasure. The clam
distinguishes his food, and his senses are continually tickled
by a stream of appetizing particles floating down his throat.
Fear and worry are certainly unknown to him. If unalloyed
comfort is the goal of evolution, the process should have ended
with the clam.

The criterion of fitness, according to Mr. Darwin's theory,
is survival due to conformity to environment. This the bi-
valve mollusks have attained, and without any great effort or
struggle. They were already ancient forms when the first
mammals appeared some millions of years ago. They have
lasted well. They have a large surplus income to devote to
reproduction. The eggs are small because the young can be
born in a very simple stage and still shift for themselves.
The infantile danger period is short. They have been fruit-
ful and multiplied.

Many animals have found a temporary environment of
abundance and comparative peace, to which they have closely
conformed, and have therefore prospered. But when condi-
tions changed, they were the first to suffer and disappeared.
The clam has accommodated itself to life in a strip of shore
where sea and land meet. As long as sea and land endure

"THE COMING OF A BACKBONE 21

they will meet in shores. He has apparently conformed to
a vast, favorable, unchanging, everlasting environment.

Our sketch of the clam has given us but a partial and one-
sided view of molluscan history. The clam represents only
one of three great subdivisions or classes of the whole sub-
kingdom. The second class of mollusks, the gasteropods, in-
cludes the recent forms having a single spiral or conical shell,
or having the foot in the form of a creeping disk. They gen-
erally crawl on the sea-bottom. They have spread into
brackish and even into fresh water. Some of them have used
the sack or chamber which contained the gills as a sort of lung,
have breathed air and emerged on land. Our snails are
descended from such forms. Some have taken possession of
cracks and fissures in the rocks, or have worked their way
deep into the mass of fragments under limestone cliffs.
Slugs are snails which have given up the cumbrous shell as
no longer needed for protection.

All these forms are most at home in damp or wet localities.
They still betray their origin from aquatic ancestors. It
need not surprise us that some of the air-breathing mollusks
returned to the water again, and became pond-snails.

Some of the marine gasteropods have lost the shell, so the
sea-slugs, nudibranchs. But even among the more typical
gasteropods some have returned from the crawling life of
primitive mollusks to the swimming habit of still more prim-
itive ancestors. The most noteworthy of these are the ptero-
pods. They have either greatly lightened or completely lost
the shell, have changed the broad creeping disk into a pair of
winglike fins by means of which some are said to dart through
the water much as butterflies glide through the air. One
group of these pteropods has retained a light shell. Its mem-
bers feed on the small plants and animals which swarm in the
ocean. They also attained an exceedingly wide and stable en-
vironment and have held their place since the beginning of
palaeozoic time.

The second division has given up the shell, and its mem-
bers lead a carniverous hawklike life feeding on their shelled

22 TH£ COMING OF MAN

relations. Pteropods swarm in the northern parts of the ocean,
and form quite a large part of the food of whales as well as
of fish. Thus the clams possess an immense territory of shore
and the pteropods the almost boundless surface of tlie colder
oceans, an unequalled distribution which they hold almost
without competitors.

Both clam and pteropod live on microscopic food, which is
constant in supply and easily obtained. They hold a some-
what humble and unostentatious, but most important place in
Nature's vast household, corresponding in a way to the in-
sects and smaller vertebrates on land.

It was left to the cephalopods, the third great class of mol-
lusks, to attempt a more ambitious role. They also forsook
the crawling life of their more primitive ancestors for some
reason unknown to us. Perhaps they gained larger and bet-
ter food in this way; possibly in the severe competition on the
bottom they were forced to the change of habit by stronger
and better adapted opponents.

They invented or stumbled upon a very ingenious mode of
locomotion by taking water into the so-called mantle-cavity
and then spurting it out between the lobes of the foot in a
powerful jet. Modern squids and cuttlefish have united these
lobes in a tube, the siphon. By this peculiar method they
move with marvellous rapidity, darting through the water like
the swiftest fishes. At the front end of the body around the
mouth they have developed a circle of long arms bearing rows
of suckers so that they can grasp and hold firmly anything
which comes within their reach. Many modern forms have
a beak like that of a parrot with which they can bite directly
through the body of an ordinary fish.

The swift locomotion developed the muscular and nervous
systems to an extent unknown among other mollusks. They
have large eyes and organs like ears, and a well developed
and distinct head. Their brain is large and complex and sur-
rounded by a sort of cranium. Their shells grew continually
lighter. In the squid the external protective armor has been
completely cast off. Theirs is no defensive campaign. Only

THE COMING OF A BACKBONE 23

rudiments of the old skeleton remain as a sort of a quill which
has sunk beneath the skin and gives to the body some of
the support furnished by our backbone. It was a bold and
difficult experiment and was for a time marvellously suc-
cessful. The cephalopods were the rulers or vikings of the
early palaeozoic seas. No form could begin to compete with
them in size and strength. They ruled supreme.

The vertebrates came upon the scene. Sharks and ganoids
were equally swift and had far more efficient jaws. The
cephalopods held their place with marvellous pertinacity.
Far down in Mesozoic times we find the shells of the ammon-
ites very abundant. Possibly the extinction of this great
group was due to climatic changes rather than to competition.
Certainly the ammonites disappeared. Nautilus is their last
surviving near relation. The squids and octopi alone remain
of a host of related ancient groups. It is a hopelessly def-eated
form, a sad relic of decayed power and greatness.

Most of our recent squids are of only moderate size. But
the body of architeuthis, the giant-squid, is more than eight
feet long; while the arms are over thirty feet in length and as
thick as a man's thigh; the suckers are as large as coffee-cups.
They have been reported from Labrador and Newfoundland,
Iceland, Japan, and are apparently deep-water forms of al-
most universal distribution.

A struggle in which squids have been worsted and devoured
by fish or even by sperm-whales is a very homely or vulgar
sort of tragedy. But let us look a little closer. The ancestor
of the squid forsook or refused the crawling life and became
free-swimming. This is a step which through the development
of muscles, nerves, sense-organs and brain leads to progress.
Even sense-organs and brain are stimulated and fostered by
muscular locomotion. The goal of early evolutionary progress
seems to be first brute strength and toughness, then quick-
ness and agility of motion and flexibility of body. We shall
see that the vertebrate arose from insignificant beginnings
mainly because of its constant exercise of its muscles. The
squid played the great game according to its best rules, just

24 "fHE COMING OF MAN

so far as was possible to him. He failed through no fault of
his own. He was doomed to failure by his earliest molluscan
ancestors. He could rid himself of his shell, but the short,
clumsy unsegmented body was fastened indelibly upon him
by heredity. From this he could never escape. This is the
tragic chapter of molluscan history. It seems to me worthy
of that name.

Arthropoda. The external skeleton of the arthropods has
the double advantage that it can be used either for protection
or locomotion. In barnacles it is as completely protective as
in the clam; in most crabs, and in many beetles, it serves very
largely the same purpose; in spiders and many insects, like
flies and wasps, it is almost purely locomotive. The value of
so wide a range of adaptability is evident.

The arthropods form a series extending and completing the
annelid line of development. The body consists of the two
concentric tubes, the intestine and. body wall, with a peri-
visceral cavity between them; the nervous system has the
same type, a ganglion in every ring of the well segmented
body. Both have on some or most of the segments of the
body a pair of appendages; fins in annelid, jointed legs or
their modifications in the arthropod. The insects have added
^o pairs of wings in connection with their terrestrial or

^ g^rial life.

2 "o The insects have grouped the segments of the annelids in

SSliree body-regions: head, thorax and abdomen, and have
•^folded each region for a special function or purpose. The
c§bdomen is usually composed of from nine to eleven segments,
P^d is the chief seat of digestion, excretion, circulation, respi-
i;^tion and reproduction, the organs of vegetative life. To the
^iree segments of the thorax, two pairs of wings and three
pairs of legs are attached. These segments are very closely
united, and in bees and flies are fused in one globular mass.
The head consists of six, or possibly more, completely fused
segments. The appendages of three of these behind the mouth
have been changed into as many pairs of jaws, or still further

"THE COMING OF A BACKBONE 25

modified to form piercing or sucking mouth-parts. Three
preoral segments carry the large facetted eyes, and a pair of
antennae; organs of feeling, often also of smell and hearing.
Originally every segment had its nerve-center or ganglion. In
insects the ganglia of the three preoral segments of the head
are fused in what we must call a brain sending its nerves to
antennae and to genuine visual eyes. The antennae are very
sensitive organs; the eyes are often very complex giving clear
and sharp vision of objects at some distance. The insect is
well aware of what is godng on about it.

Insects evidently live on a distinctly higher plane of life
than any of the forms which we have previously studied.
Coelenterates are stationary or scarcely more than floating
and drifting animals, and we can hardly speak of muscular
and nervous systems. Lower worms crawled slowly but de-
veloped steadily muscle and nerve. Insects devote only about
half oi their body to the vegetative organs. The thorax is
purely locomotive, and the front half of the head entirely
sensory and nervous. This is progress which almost amounts
to a revolution. Hence in all insects we find very highly de-
veloped instincts, and some intelligence in bees and wasps,
which have also developed a high grade of social life. In-
sects are a very promising group; we naturally expect great
things of them.

They were Nature's precocious children, made rapid prog-
ress, and had advanced far in early palaeozoic time. Their
development culminated with the appearance of bees and
wasps in Mesozoic or early Cenozoic time. Since that time
their progress seems to have ceased. This is a strange fact,
which demands careful attention.

The external locomotive skeleton is admirably fitted to an
animal of small size. To encase an animal of the size of a
dog in such firm armor would surely hinder locomotion; it
would be difficult to frame the joints, and the successive moults
required to meet the growth of the body would be impossible.
We have seen the great advantages of small size; it has also
its marked limitations. The small insect could never hope to

26 fHE COMING OF MAN

compete directly with the large and powerful vertebrate.
More important still small size seems to be usually correlated
with short hfe. The life of the full-grown insect rarely
exceeds a few months and is, as a rule, much briefer
than this. The larger vertebrates live for several or many
years.

A brief span of life is not productive of intelligence born of
long, oft repeated, but varying emergencies and experiences.
There is little opportunity for the individual to learn thereby.
In the rapidly recurring and succeeding generations successful
habits, or mental peculiarities quickly become fixed, and are
handed down practically unchanged as inherited instincts.
There is little stimulus or opportunity for mental growth in
an animal whose whole experience is limited to a few months
of easy and enjoyable summer. The whole subject of instinct
and intelligence, their resemblance and differences, compen-
sating advantages and disadvantages, especially their origin,
forms a field of most fascinating study, into which we will not
attempt to enter.

We can only glance at the early individual development of
insects. Excepting a very few of the most primitive, they all
attain their adult form through a metamorphosis most marked
and complete in the highest and latest forms. The butterfly
is born a caterpillar, the bee a sort of grub, the fly a maggot.
The advantage of the metamorphosis is evident. We have
seen that every egg must contain enough nourishment to feed
the embryo until it reaches a stage where it can shift for itself,
and the simpler the animal at birth, the shorter the embryonic
life, and the less nourishment required in the egg.

Out of a given amount of surplus material to be devoted to
reproduction, a few large eggs or many smaller ones can be
formed. It is a great advantage to the species that the eggs
should be as numerous as possible, and that to gain this advan-
tage the young are born in as simple and incomplete a form
and as quickly as possible. Hence the butterfly is born in a
caterpillar stage, and must gather, assimilate and store up

fHE COMING OF A BACKBONE 27

sufficient nourishment to complete the growth and develop-
ment from the larval to the adult stage.

If the metamorphosis or series of changes from larva to
adult is comparatively easy it requires no long resting stage;
even if great and difficult, it may be distributed along the
successive moults, or all be condensed in the cocoon or rest-
ing stage of the so-called complete metamorphosis. This ex-
plains the voracity and destructiveness of insect larvae. It
does not surprise us to find that the most destructive insect
pests are usually the smallest, like the plant lice, for example.
Where limited locomotion or sessile life is added to small
size, as in the scale-bugs, the insect becomes a veritable
scourge.

Insects disappoint us. Their good qualities and powers
are many and marked; their limitations are equally clear and
in time seem to have put an end to progress. The external
skeleton gives good returns for a long time, but leads to
standstill in the end. Life must and did produce something
capable of surer and less limited progress.

The Vertebrate. The internal locomotive skeleton.

The ancestors of vertebrates or backboned animals, the prim-
itive chordata, neglected all the advantages of protective armor,
and placed the skeleton inside the body as near its axis as the
large vegetative organs permitted. The primitive skeleton
was a rod of spongy tissue which, for lack of a better name,
we call cartilage. It is sheathed by a layer of fibrous con-
nectile tissue, which in time gave place to true cartilage.
This sheath sends projections upward to arch over the dorsal
nerve-cord and downward around the great blood vessels.
Sheath and arches furnish attachment for two heavy bands or
masses of muscles running lengthwise on each side of the body.
These may at first have produced a writhing motion, but later
they pulled the tail-fin right and left alternately and sculled
the body through the water.

The head is large with eyes, ears and nasal capsules. The

28 " "THE COMING OF MAN

eyes have the possibility of sight at long range. Smell and
hearing are keen. The first chordata seem to have lived
on minute food, sifting it out of the water with their gill-sack.
Then jaws were developed armed with rows of sharp and
pointed teeth. The sense-organs are innervated from a brain
containing, even in the most primitive forms, the nervous
material of some five segments, later of probably nine and
even more. Powerful muscles and a large brain characterize
this group from the earliest times. The revolution prophesied
in worms has been accomplished. They swim far and swiftly,
continually meeting new experiences and dangers throughout
the years of a long life. Surely some of their descendants
will become intelligent.

Such changes take time and can come about only very
slowly. Millions of years must have elapsed before a form
somewhat like amphioxus could have changed even into the
most ancient shark. Cartilage had to be discovered, invented,
hit upon and improved — express it as you will. It could arise
only under strain in the fibers of the dorsal fin-rays; it
gradually extended downward on the arches over the nervous
chord, thence into the sheath of the notochord. We wonder
that the process was ever carried to a successful issue. They
looked like anything but promising forms.

But replacing fibrous tissue by cartilage was only the first
step. The only bone in a primitive shark was in the minute
scales or denticles of the skin. How some ancient ancestor
had succeeded in developing bone, in many respects the most
marvellous tissue in our bodies, is beyond my comprehension
or imagination. He did it.

Bone also worked its way downward from the surface along
the rays and spinal arches, as cartilage had preceded it; and
finally replaced the cartilage. In time vertebras were shaped
and the animal had a backbone. We might say that ver-
tebrates built three skeletons in order to gain the beginnings of
a backbone, a marvellous series of changes.

We may glance at the structure of a shark as a very prim-
itive form of vertebrate animal. We notice the long cylin-

THE COMING OF A BACKBONE 29

drical body tapering to the solidly muscular tail with its cu-
rious fin. All the vital organs are well developed and ex-
ceedingly compact. We notice the well marked head, the
strange position of the mouth, the keen sense-organs, and
the large brain. Indeed the brain looks larger than the needs
of a shark require.

We find only two pairs of lateral appendages, the fore and
hind fins used mostly for steering. This is a sharp contrast to
the many pairs of appendages of the arthropods, every pair
admirably adapted to a special purpose. We will return to
this fact later. We find a skeleton in which the ancient noto-
chord is being crowded upon by the cartilaginous sheath.
This sheath may be infiltrated and stiffened with carbonate
of lime, forming calcified cartilage, but no true bone. The
skin feels like sand-paper; it is covered with minute pointed
scales or denticles composed of bone covered with a layer of
enamel. The scales covering the skin of the jaws have en-
larged greatly and become triangular teeth, of which there
are several or many rows.

The dog-fish is an admirably framed and fashioned animal:
powerful, agile, swift and enduring in locomotion, tough and
vigorous, with keen sense-organs and no mean brain. It
roams everywhere; especially over the sea-bottom, where food
is most plentiful and the struggle fiercest, and is continually
meeting new conditions and emergencies. Its eggs are very
large, yet it is extremely common. Evidently even the young
are well able to care for themselves. No wonder that th§
fishermen hate and curse it, it is the highest tribute to its
many virtues.

Almost or quite as old as the sharks are the ganoid fishes
represented by the sturgeons, garpikes and a great host of
fossil forms. In the structure of the notochord and sheath
they shov7 us all stages up to bony vertebrae. They differ
from sharks in one important respect: they have an air-blad-
der, a sack connected with the mouth by a tube through which
air can be drawn. They have the possibility of using the
air-bladder as a lung, and some of them have realized and

30 fHE COMING OF MAN

utilized this to a fair degree. The brain looks smaller than
the shark's, but it is well formed and may be more compact
and highly differentiated. We shall see the importance of the
ganoids in the next chapter.

Ill

THE RISE OF LAND LIFE

EARLIEST Palaeozoic time seems to have been charac-
terized by seas of wide area. Its deposits are largely
limestones laid down in fairly deep water. The earli-
est known foot print of a terrestrial vertebrate is in sediment
belonging to the upper devonian period; the animal had al-
ready emerged on land, perhaps during the lower devonian
period, when the land began to rise, and shallow water, or
bays and rivers were extensive.

The weight of geological evidence seems to favor the view
that both sharks and ganoids developed in fresh water out
of some more primitive immigrant ancestor from the sea.^
Here there is still much uncertainty. But we may be fairly
confident that the ganoid stock at least was chiefly represented
in the rivers of the rising continents in early devonian times.
The ganoide, sturgeon, garpike, and others, show wide variety
of form and structure. They differed greatly in the form
and thickness of their scaly defensive armor. I believe that
we may safely imagine that the well defended forms would
hold the channels of the rivers and the lagoons, while those
with least defensive armor would be driven into the shallower
waters and swamps.

The climate of this period seems to have been semi-arid,
seasons of pouring rain and floods alternating with drought.
Under such circumstances the air-bladder capable of inhal-
ing atmospheric air would have been of great and steadily in-
creasing use and value, especially in the headwater marshes,
where in the hot summers the gases of decaying vegetation

1 H. 462.

31

32 "THE COMING OF MAN

would have fouled the water. It slowly became a lung. In
these marshy pools overgrown during the wet season with
all sorts of weeds and plant-life, the paddle-like fins would
have been of little service to forms hovering or crawling along
the bottom; they became jointed and changed into legs, and
gradually the amphibious animal emerged more and more and
ventured out on the land.

Much still remained to be done before the body was fully
shaped in all its parts. The blood-system had to be enlarged
and modified in connection with air-breathing. The lungs
became more complex and spongy, offering a larger respiratory
surface. In the thick growth of ferns and club-mosses the
eyes were for a time of less use than the sense of smell, and
the higher development of this sense reacted on the brain.
The skeleton of a form supported by four legs, rather than
floating or swimming in the water, gained increased strength
and stiffness. In backbone and skull and elsewhere cartilage
was replaced by bone under the stimulus of new strains.
The muscular system of shoulder and thigh became heavier
and more complex, that of the trunk began to lighten.

Perhaps the most important change of all was the rise of
temperature in the body. In the better conducting medium
of the water the heat produced within escaped rapidly and
was lost. The temperature of the body of a fish can be only
slightly higher than that of the surrounding water and varies
accordingly. Heat radiates into air far less rapidly, hence
the temperature of the body gradually rises. It is still
variable in amphibia and modern reptiles, in mammals and
birds it will become constant and high.

All chemical changes go on more rapidly as temperature
rises, but all organs are not equally affected. The more un-
stable the material of the tissue, the greater the quickening
of the changes. Cartilage and bone are slightly stimulated,
muscle far more; the markedly protoplasmic structures like
nerve-centers and glands w^ill be stimulated most of all, and
their development will be hastened proportionately.

Life on land brought new difficulties and dangers but also

"THE RISE OF LAND LIFE 33

release and escape from old limitations into a host of new
possibilities. Says Lull: ''The sea is so changeless and the
range of its conditions so small that evolution within it is
not stimulated as it is on land." ^ Life is far more complex.
The animal is continually pelted with new stimuli and expe-
riences; hence the large size and accompanying long life of
the individual, the storing up of the results of these experi-
ments in the growing, changing impressible brain. Not yet,
but some day, the land-vertebrate will become intelligent.

But life on land and in the air initiated changes of greater
importance though of far slower realization than any which
we have yet noticed. The development of the muscular and
nervous systems is accompanied by a more rapid combustion
of food material; they are expensive luxuries. Hence, as we
have seen, the surplus devoted to reproduction, enormous in
parasites, very large in sessile or slow moving forms, is fast
sinking to a minimum. Yet speed and muscular and nervous
energy will increase still more rapidly from this time on.

This rapid decrease of surplus for reproduction is a danger
signal; it suggests or threatens race suicide. We remember
that the number of eggs must be inversely proportional to their
size; and the size of the egg is determined chiefly by the
amount of nutriment required to support the embryo until
it can shift for itself. This again is determined by the
complexity of the animal and the conditions accompanying its
birth. If a form is born in water, like a fish or tadpole, it
can almost float to its food. It swims by vibrations of the
tail, and thus requires only the action of masses of simple
trunk muscles stimulated and controlled by a very simple
nerve-center. The animal born on land must walk to its food.
This demands a considerable development of complex sets
of muscles controlled by a correspondingly complex brain.
This again demands a steadily lengthening period during
which the embryo must be supported, boarded as it were.

In one word every egg of an animal born on land must be
far larger than of one born in the water. The young of am-

2 H : 479-

34 T^HE COMING OF MAN

phibia are born in the water, those of all higher animals on
land. The eggs of the amphibian are far larger and less
numerous than those of the average fish; but far smaller than
those of reptiles. The decrease in the number of eggs is
alarming. Fish produce eggs by thousands or even millions,
amphibia by hundreds, reptiles perhaps by tens, birds and
mammals by still smaller units.

This condition can be remedied and its dangers averted
only by a steadily increasing and best possible care of the
young. We find little of this in most reptiles, much in birds;
in all higher mammals the eggs are carried in the body of the
mother until birth, and the care of the young is continued
for a steadily increasing infantile period after birth, which
in higher mammals and man is followed by a period of child-
hood. Em.ergence on land revolutionized vertebrate life; evo-
lution in the face of limitations and opposition often becomes
revolution. The ice formed during a long hard winter blocks
the channel and holds back the gathering flood. Either the
ice gives way or the water seeks and ploughs out a new channel
to its goal.

We have left our amphibians far behind and must return
to them and their descendants. The mud-puppy of our lakes
gives us a good example of a primitive amphibian; the newt or
salamander of a far more advanced form. Frogs and toads
represent a late, greatly modified and very peculiar
branch.

From some primitive amphibian the reptiles diverged in
all directions. The primitive reptiles were creeping forms,
sometimes dragging the body on the ground. But the legs soon
strengthen and lengthen as in lizards. The reptiles soon out-
grew the difficulties of land life, found abundant food and
easy place. They were very precocious and advanced rapidly.
During Mesozoic time there were running, striding and even
flying forms. The huge, well-armed dinosaurs ruled the
world, and it seemed as if no other form could ever compete
with them. It was a marvellous class of vertebrates with a
fascinating history into- which we have no time to enter.

"THE RISE OF LAND LIFE 35

Their defeat or senescence, failure and practical disappear-
ance is still hard to understand.

From some not very primitive reptile, birds are descended.
If swiftness of locomotion is the goal of animal development, it
culminated in birds. Coordinated with and stimulated by
their swift loaomotion is the high development of the sense-
organs in the head, the look-out of the flying-machine. The
eyes are enormous, the sense of smell is exceedingly keen;
song suggests well tuned ears. The body is compact and
light to the last degree. The light stiff skeleton is a marvel-
lous piece of engineering architecture. The back-bone, com-
pletely ossified, stiffens the body for flight. The bones of
the shoulder girdle are admirably modelled and arranged to
meet the strain of the heavy muscles which produce the down-
stroke of the wings. The head is lightened by replacing
jaws and teeth by a horny beak, the tail shortened corre-
spondingly. The heaviest organs in the short trunk are lo-
cated as far as possible just beneath the line of support, join-
ing the sockets of the bones of the wings. The weight of
the body is lessened by reducing the least useful portions of
the vegetative organs. The respiratory organs are arranged
so as to supply oxygen to all parts of the body with the
smallest weight and least strain on the heart.

The scales of reptiles have mostly become feathers, mar-
vellous structures, combining lightness, elasticity, durability,
and protection against cold and wet. The combination of
great energy and food-combustion with the warm covering
gives the body a constant temperature some ten degrees Fahr-
enheit above that of higher mammals. There are no sweat
glands to reduce it. We expect a very high development of
the brain. Here we are somewhat disappointed. In intel-
ligence, at least, the higher mammals seem decidedly superior.

The eggs of birds relatively to the weight of the adult body
are much larger than those of reptiles. But the young are
usually born entirely incapable of caring for themselves and
are tended, fed and protected by the parents for several
weeks. They are few in number; in certain shore-birds only

36 "THE COMING OF MAN

one or two at a season, yet these birds often appear in vast
flocks at their remote, solitary and inaccessible nesting places.
To reach these breeding-grounds long migrations are often
necessary, an important subject into which we cannot enter.
The bird will always be an object of fascination both for its
attainments and its limitations. Structurally and anatomi-
cally as a flying-machine, it is unsurpassed and seems unsur-
passable. It disappoints us, perhaps because it is a finished
product. It seems to have reached its culmination. Perhaps,
as a bird, it is as nearly complete and perfect, as it well can
be.

Mammals are in many ways less interesting than birds.
There is nothing spectacular or even very striking in their
history. They have always been plodding, slowly progressive
forms.

The skeleton is entirely ossified and well molded and
framed, but heavier than in birds. The vital organs are, as
a rule, in no way superior to those of birds. Their slower
locomotion makes exceeding keenness of sense — except per-
haps of smell — less important. Their temperature is lower
by some ten degrees Fahrenheit, as we have already seen.

They started with a covering of scales like those of primi-
tive reptiles, from which they seem to be descended. These
scales have been retained as a covering for the body in a few
forms; and still persist on the tail of some rodents, as the rat.
In primitive forms the legs are stout but short, as in most
recent reptiles. They laid eggs like reptiles, and this habit
is still retained by echidna and platypus in New Zealand.
Could we have seen these primitive animals running or shuf-
fling over the ground, we could not have considered them very
promising. Appearing in the Cretaceous period at the end
of Mesozoic time they long remained completely outclassed
by the reptiles and began their period of rapid development
and rise to supremacy only in Cenozoic time.^

^ We may yet return to the older view that, they had appeared in
Triassic times.

tHE RISE OF LAND LIFE 37

The feathers of birds are modified scales; the hairs of
mammals originated as sensory organs, somewhat Hke the
" whiskers " of a cat.* There were perhaps three of them
protruding from beneath each scale. These sensory hairs in-
creased in importance, perhaps under the stimulus of a cool-
ing climate, multiplied and became a coat, while the scales
gradually disappeared. The original use of these hairs is
hard to determine. They may have been of use in the crannies
and dark corners whither the mammals took refuge when
hunted by the reptiles.

The next group of mammals after the egg-laying mono-
tremes, like platypus, was that of the marsupials. Here the
female carries the eggs and embryos in the uterus- without any
placenta or organic connection between mother and young.
This embryonic and foetal period is very brief.. The young are
born in an immature condition and are carried and suckled
in a marsupium or pouch until able to care for them-
selves.

Placental mammals seem to have quickly outgrown the mar-
supial stage. In them a foetal membrane has put out pro-
jections which interlock with similar projections from the
lining of the uterus of the mother forming the placenta. Hence
oxygen and nutriment can diffuse through the thin membranes
separating the blood-vessels of the mother from those of the
young. Its foetal stage can now be* greatly lengthened and
birth delayed.

The Eocene, the earliest period of Cenozoic or Tertiary
time, shows us placental mammals already distributed in their
chief orders. It appears to have been preceded by a colder
epoch at the close of Mesozoic, and this may have contributed ^^
to the downfall of reptiles whose most highly developed forms ^
have now disappeared. From this time on placental mam-
mals multiply and become more diversified. Insectivorous
forms lead over to true carnivora; rodents, represented to-day
by rabbits, squirrels and mice, have appeared. We find un-
gulates, like cattle, deer and horses, with hoofs, and with

*V. 85

38 "THE COMING OF MAN

teeth adapted to a browsing or a grazing diet. They have
lengthened their legs and become swift and wary. Every
one of these and other orders adapted itself to its own place,
food and conditions, and met and solved the problem of the
struggle for existence in its own way.

The primates, including monkeys and apes as well as man,
are represented in Eocene deposits by forms akin to the
lemurs or '' half-apes " whose center and chief home is now
in Madagascar. They may have originated in the north-
western part of North America. From this region one branch
went southward and gave rise to the South American mon-
keys with prehensile tails and a rather poorly developed
hand. A second branch migrated into Asia, and from these
the catarrhini or old-world apes are descended. At the head
of the apes stand the anthropoids: the gibbon, the orang, the
chimpanzee and the gorilla. Every one of them approaches or
resembles man in some respect more closely than does any other
of them, and every one differs from him in certain important
characteristics.

The most important and influential characteristics of all
the anthropoids is their arboreal character. The squirrel runs
up the trunk of a tree or along its branches holding by its
claws. The primates are larger forms. They stand on one
branch and grasp another above them with their hands. They
are genuine climbers, differentiating hand and arm sharply
from foot and leg. They have not closely adapted their teeth
to any one kind of food as nearly all other groups of mam-
m.als have done, but are practically omnivorous. This char-
acteristic was a great advantage to their descendant man,
to whom almost any kind of food was welcome.

We can hardly imagine a better school for the training
of our primate ancestor than arboreal life. He had to train
arm and hand to a great variety of very different and pre-
cise movements. Wallace tells us that the orang in the tropi-
cal forest can swing himself from branch to branch and tree
to tree as fast as the hunter can follow it on the ground below.
This is the best training possible at this stage for the de-

rH£ m^E OF LAND LIFE 39

velopment of the brain. It is a sort of course of manual train-
ing in the use of eye and hand.

In leaping from tree to tree eye and brain must see, meas-
ure and recognize exactly the direction, distance and strength
of the branch and the right point to be grasped. The body
must be hurled in exactly the right direction with the proper
amount of force. Hand and arm must be extended so as to
grasp the right point at the critical time. All this series
of observations and complex movements is probably, or may
be, worked out and completed with little conscious thought.
But the capacity for executing the movement has crystallized
out of a long series of experiments, and demands an exceed-
ingly complex brain for its performance. We do not won-
der that the anthropoid brain shows us a clear ground plan
of the brain of man with all its centers represented, though
often very incompletely.

The process of evolution began with organs of digestion
used mainly to supply material for reproduction. The whole
aim of life seemed to be to increase and multiply, to exist and
survive. Then muscles crept in as means of getting food
and escaping danger. These occur at first as heavy masses of
trunk muscles giving at best only writhing locomotion. Then
appendages appear at first mere unjointed fins like paddles.
Then jointed appendages arise, at first weak, short and clumsy,
then strengthening and lengthening with steady increase of
freedom and precision in the movements of different parts,
especially of the distal parts as evolution shifts its field from
the stout heavy clumsy fundamental muscles of the trunk and
shoulder to the numerous small and fine muscles of hand and
finger. The ape has learned to use the hand as a whole
grasping organ, it was left to man to develop the vast variety
of movements and their combinations so characteristic of the
skilled artisan or technician.

Every increase in muscle means and demands a corres-
ponding enlargement of the nervous system. Increased num-
ber of finer muscles and combinations of more precise move-
ments demands a larger number of more complex centers

40 "THE COMING OF MAN

brought under the control of the seeing, combining and con-
trolling brain. Training of the hand and finger under the di-
rection of the eye means mental development. The brain of
an anthropoid is an organ of vast complexity which bristles
with possibilities. The ape is no longer a mere reflexive or
instinctive machine. He learns by experience and has far
more than a dawning intelligence. He has achieved much, he
is still indefinitely far from anything approaching complete
attainment.

Arboreal training can do little more for him. Complete
adaptation to arboreal life might make him a sloth. It is
high time he was promoted to a different school with more
difficult problems better suited to awaken his dawning powers.
But " there's the rub." That school must be on the ground
which is in possession of the keen, swift, athletic, gladiatorial
well-armed carnivora. He is weak, defenceless, unfitted for
swift locomotion on the ground. The chances are all against
him. Why should he descend? Nature seems to have blun-
dered. She has given the weapons, skill and strength to the
brute; the better brain with all its possibilities is in the head
of a weakling. She ought to have kept them both combined
in one individual or group. Now they are hopelessly sep-
arated. The outlook is certainly anything but encouraging.

IV
THE COMING OF SAVAGE MAN

SAYS Lull of modernized or now existing mammals:
" They are all creatures of high potentiality, and,
where they became extinct, were rather the victims of
circumstance than creatures which died bcause of lack of
adaptability: although certain groups seem to have run a
natural course and their extinction was heralded by evidences
of racial senility."

" As the archaic forms were characterized by lack of pro-
gressive brain and teeth and feet, so the modernized races
were distinguished by the possession sometimes of one (pri-
mates), sometimes of two (elephants), again by all three
(horses) of these destiny controlling organs, but in general
the modernized animals were progressive, highly adaptable
forms. ^ We might say they were " educable."

They seem to have originated in a circumpolar region which
in early Cretaceous days enjoyed a warm, equable climate.
The flora of the coast of Greenland was subtropical, and a
temperature like that of Cuba to-day spread over Spitzbergen
and Alaska also. Through early Cenozoic or Tertiary time
there was a gradual cooling of climate and corresponding
southward migration of higher plants and mammals.

Among these were our primates of whom Lull says : " It
is only in the brain and such correlated modifications as men-
tal development entails that the primates may justly lay claim
to superiority, for in other respects they are as humble and gen-
eralized a group, with very few exceptions, as the mammalian
class contains." ^

1 H. 560.
2 H : 642.

4t

42 "THE COMING OF MAN

We may well imagine these primates as slowly crowded out
of northern Europe and Asia. The Alps in Europe, the Black
and Caspian Seas, with the Caucasus mountains between,
barred the farther escape southward. Between these western
barriers and the great eastern Himalaya elevation lay Western
Turkestan and the uplands of the Iranian plateau. Even here
the increasing coolness and dryness of Miocene and early
Pliocene times were causing forest to give place to ever widen-
ing stretches of open grassland. The tropical and most of the
semitropical trees have been driven farther southward. It
is no longer a suitable home for arboreal forms depending
upon trees for home and refuge, and fruits for a good part
of their food.

Most of the anthropoids continued the southward retreat.
Gorilla and chimpanzee v/ent into Africa; the orangs entered
India and thence the long Malay Peninsula to what are now
islands in the Indian Ocean. The gibbons seem to have lagged
behind in this southward march.

Following these immigrants was one group which had ap-
parently lingered still farther behind. They may have come
from farthest north. They had been the last to retreat,
had been toughened by the cooling chmate, hardened and
trained by the diminishing supply of the most easily obtained
and attractive food. Either caught in some dwindling forest
region or open park-land or tempted by the richer supply
of food on the ground, they began to venture to come down
from the trees; to search for roots and bulbs, berries and
similar fruits, insects and their larvae, and the small animals
living along the streams. It was a hazardous experiment;
but they made it, somewhat from inclination, far more by com-
pulsion. Thus we may imagine or guess that the final and
for them irrevocable step was accomplished.

It was anything but a safe or promising venture for an
arboreal form. The ground belonged to the carnivora; pow-
erful lithe forms, with sharp claws and teeth, of speed and
skill in stalking and springing upon their prey. The anthro-
poid had led a safe peaceful life, and had remained without

"THE COM'ING OF SAVAGE MAN 43

weapons or armor. Against their strength and wiles he could
pit only his few brains and poor wits. His bare hands availed
him little or nothing. It would have seemed to any intelligent
onlooker a hopeless struggle. The remaining trees must have
been a welcome refuge long after they ceased to furnish a
permanent dwelling place.

The legs gradually lengthened and strengthened with the
habit of walking. The arms shortened somewhat; the hands
were used for a variety of new purposes. They were the
only tools of our anthropoid ancestor. The eyes were always
watching for every dim and remote sign of attack, the ear
intent to catch the faintest warning of approach of danger.
This was a new schooling, very different from the manual
training or gymnastics of arboreal life. The tests were ex-
ceedingly severe; only those who ''took honors" survived.

Whether the orang ever intentionally throws down handy
missiles at his enemies may still be doubted. It is hardly
beyond his skill or intelligence. Our ancestor must soon have
learned to throw a handy stone or use a convenient stick
against smaller enemies. To have used a sharp stick for
digging would have required an intelligence no greater than
that of the young gorilla to-day. If he is learning to eke
out the weakness of his hands by addition of stick or stone,
he has started on the endless road of tool-using and device, of
discovery and invention.

At Trinil, in central Java, Dubois discovered somewhat scat-
tered remains which appear to have belonged to one indi-
vidual to which he gave the name of pithecanthropus erectus,
or the erect ape-man, and which seems to stand midway be-
tween man and the apes. The remains consisted of two molar
teeth, a thigh-bone, and the top of a skull. The cranium is
low, the forehead exceedingly retreating, giving but very small
space for the frontal lobes of the brain. The brain-cast, made
from the cranial cavity, shows, according to Dubois, that the
speech area is about twice as large as in certain apes and only
one-half as large as in man. In size the brain stands some-
what above midwav betv^een the highest recent apes and the

44 "^HE COMING OF MAN

lowest existing men. The thigh-bone shows that pithecanthro-
pus could have stood and walked erect quite comfortably.
There has been and still is much difference of opinion as to
the exact position of this interesting being. Opinion was
long divided nearly equally between those who considered
it as the highest ape and others who held it to be the very low-
est man.

Whether we think that pithecanthropus was approaching
or had already passed the threshold of manhood depends much
upon where we draw the line between ape and man, a line
largely artificial and as difficult to fix as the day and hour
when the youth becomes of age; and what .human characteris-
tics we select to mark it. In his erect posture and some other
physical traits he seems already to have attained manhood,
mentally he was probably inferior to even the lowest savage
races of to-day.

Says Osbom: '^ Certainly Java was then a part of the
Asiatic continent and herds of great mammals roamed freely
over the plains from the foot-hills of the Himalaya Moun-
tains to the borders of the ancient Trinil River while simi-
lar apes inhabited the forest. At this time the orang may
have entered the forests of Borneo, which are at present its
home." ^

We have seen that the anthropoid apes went southward into
the Malay Peninsula or turned westward and then southward
into Africa. The Negritos, the most primitive human peoples,
are found to-day in India and the islands of the Malay Archi-
pelago; v/hile another branch became the pigmies of the forests
of central Africa. The negroid tribes seem to have followed
the same courses. It was the line of least resistance leading
to lands where food was abundant, climate kindly and life
easy. To this environment and its modes of life and few de-
mands they cheerfully conformed.

Migration from the Iranian Plateau is open in all directions.^

^24:77.
H. 676.
4 55 •■ 18. 184.

"THE COMING OF SAVAGE MAN 45

At a far later date Hamitic and Semitic tribes went south-
westward toward northern Africa; the Semites making
Arabia their home and center of radiation, the ancestors of
the Hamitic people going farther and settling along the
southern shore of the Mediterranean. These regions were
highly favored during the moist and cool glacial period of
the Pleistocene epoch, when large parts of the Sahara desert
blossomed like a rose and supported a numerous population.

Not very much later, if at all, people began to follow the
great river route up the valleys of the Euphrates and its
branches into Asia Minor. This region also offered great ad-
vantages being a border land between northern and southern
florae, and offering many choice specimens of both, especially
of fruits and nuts.

There was a third route which apparently became of im-
portance only at a far later date in prehistoric times. It was
the most northerly of all, and led westward around the north-
ern end of the Caspian Sea, the foot-hills of the Caucasus, the
northern shore of the Black Sea, and up the Danube Valley
into the heart of Europe. It is now a broad zone of grass-
land or steppe, much like our western prairies. Whether it
was forested during the height of the moist glacial period
seems still uncertain. In that case the southern boundary line
of the forest has retreated northward since that time. It
was apparently the least attractive and last route to be fol-
lowed. It is crossed by great rivers pouring southward from
Russia into the Caspian and Black Seas, and every river
valley formed a branch route. Hence Russia and Poland
furnish many interesting remains of early prehistoric days
while the story of later epochs is left in the remains of the
Danube valley and its extensions northward.

The history of the development of pithecanthropus or some
similar form into a human being worthy of the name is still
shrouded in darkness which will only gradually be dispelled
by farther discoveries in ill-explored western Asia and India.
We pass from the Iranian plateau to the far better explored
countries of Europe.

46 fHE COMING OF MAN

Man arrived in Europe at some time during the glacial
period or great Ice Age.^ In Pleistocene times a somewhat
colder climate and high degree of humidity resulted in heavy
snow-fall and the formation of great glaciers. These covered
Scotland and Scandinavia, crowding well southward in Eng-
land, and as far as the Harz mountains in Germany. The
Alpine glaciers stretched northward leaving in central Europe
only a narrow band of unglaciated territory.

The habitable portions of northern Europe at this time
were France and southern England in the west, Russia in the
east, and a narrow zone connecting the two. We remember
that parts, at least, of the Sahara desert were well watered at
this time, and that one or more land-bridges crossed the Medi-
terranean from south to north. Accordingly we find remains
of African animals, e. g., rhinoceros and hippopotamus, min-
gling with those of northern forms. This leads us to suspect
that the first m.en may have arrived in Europe by the same
route.

We must not think of the long glacial period as one of un-
interrupted cold and ice. We find it broken into a series of
alternating glacial and interglacial epochs ending with the
final glacial retreat. During the interglacial epochs the cli-
mate was usually mild, sometimes warmer than to-day. The
arrival of man in northern Europe during the long and warm
second interglacial epoch is proven by the discovery of a
human jaw, near Heidelberg, and possibly by some very ancient
fragments found in England. Of the life, habits and attain-
ments of these earliest immigrant adventurers we know prac-
tically nothing.

During the third interglacial epoch Palaeolithic man had
evidently taken full possession of France and southern Eng-
land, which then formed one province or region unbroken by
the English Channel, which is of later origin. The remains
of the Neanderthal race are found in other parts of Europe
also and are probably still more widely spread.

What and how much did this primitive savage bring with

^24:34. 40.

"THE COMING OF SAVAGE MAN 47

him into Europe one or two hundred thousand years ago?
First and most important he brought with him at least a crude
form of family life. We can only glance at this attainment
which, more than any other has revolutionized life. The
reader is urged to study carefully the works of Fiske and
Drummond on this subject.

The earliest mammals laid eggs but suckled their young.
Even in marsupials, embryonic and foetal life are short, but
the young are born in a very incomplete stage and are carried
for a time, nourished and protected in the marsupial pouch.
In lower and smaller mammals the embryonic and foetal pe-
riods are still comparatively short. In larger and higher
forms they are longer until in the human being they occupy
nine months, and birth is followed by a steadily lengthening
period of infancy when the young are defended and suckled by
the mother. But in the highest forms of mammals, distinct
in the anthropoid apes, less clear as we pass to lower forms,
a third period of care and nurture is added, that of childhood.
Thus the mother is burdened with the protection and care not
merely of one or two young, but of a family of babies and
children of different ages.^

In the case of the rodents all three periods are short
and the small young can be hidden away. The young of the
carnivora are fairly safe because few enemies dare approach
the den where they are hidden. In ungulates the period of
gestation is lengthened, but females and young are frequently
or usually protected by the males of the herd. In the anthro-
poid apes the mother and young are sometimes protected by
the arboreal life, or by the herding habit, or by both. The
more powerful, venturesome male gorilla seems directly to
guard and protect the female.

In all higher mammals the strain on the female is becom-
ing unbearable and threatens her existence and thus race-
suicide in a little different mode. There is only one way
out. Some of the burden must be borne by the male. In

«R.
30

48 fHE COMING OF MAN

rodents and many carnivora we find what may be called a
maternal family, from which the male is excluded. From
apes upward the genuine female-plus-male family is and must
be on the increase.

Havelock Ellis says that Nature takes the female under
her protection.^ He seems to be right. But we might add
that in mammals and many other forms the males, if of no
use in protecting the female and young, are encouraged and
stimulated to fight and kill each other off and thus save feed-
ing useless mouths.

The form of the family is still uncertain. Promiscuity could
hardly have been prevalent. Polygamy seems improbable un-
der the conditions. The question is still under discus-
sion. But Westermarck's plea for primitive monogamy is
very convincing, and seems to be generally gaining accep-
tance.®

The advantages of family life are so many and clear that we
need and can notice only a very few of them. First, and
not yet sufficiently emphasized, is the prolongation of im-
maturity and possibility of full development. Living anthro-
poids seem to mature about the age of six or eight years.
Certain curious facts in the growth of the child lead us to
suspect that our latest arboreal ancestors matured between
seven and nine. Southern and primitive races still mature
much earlier than those who have wandered into northern
climates and been held back by its hardships.

The child matures slowly under the most favorable con-
ditions for his physical and mental welfare. In our devo-
tion to the study of heredity we have too much neglected to
put proper emphasis on nurture, early environment. The soil
and culture is almost as important as the seed in producing
a good harvest. If the seed be a human germ-cell packed
full of diverse mental possibilities and tendencies inherited
from different strains and times, early nurture can accom-

7 60

* U. 34.

rHE COMING OF SAVAGE MAN 49

plish far more than we suspect, and even infantile neglect
may be dangerous or fatal.

The child has the advantages of the experience of his
parents and of past generations. The family must have been
the cradle, if not the birthplace, of articulate speech which
has so much broadened and clarified human thought and con-
ceptions. In the close bond of family life mutual competition
is replaced by mutual helpfulness. A large amount of en-
ergy, hitherto worse than wasted, is now utilized for the com-
mon good. The child by his dependence educates the parents
even more than they educate him. The family is the small-
est human unit; and it remains the unit of every larger stage
of society. The fundamental and essential moral and intel-
lectual training and progress are, and must always be, the
work of the family. There will always be a sort of natural
selection of families as well as of individuals. The most
firmly united and best regulated families will in the end " out-
populate " inferior ones. With all these advantages and pos-
sibilities we can hardly fail to believe that the family, if not
fully established in early palaeolithic time, must have made
rapid progress during the period.

Weak and defenceless man has survived amid larger, more
powerful and better armed antagonists. He is now hunting
them as well as they him. He has spread over the accessible
world and made himself at home in all climates and condi-
tions. His racial vitality is exceedingly high. He flourished
and multiplied and spread even during the great ice-age
which wrought wide extermination among the larger and
higher mammals. His physical changes, except in length of
leg and arm, have been very slight; yet he is evidently very
adaptable as well as conservative. He has succeeded far bet-
ter than we feared or dared to expect.

Let us glance at Neanderthal man in France during the
warm Chellean period perhaps 100,000 years ago.^ He has
all the human physical characteristics, though his forehead is

^24. 117.

50 THE COMING OF MAN

decidedly retreating compared with that of later races. The
changes from this time on are to be chiefly in the highest
centers of the brain. He leads a hunting or collecting life.
He has learned to chip a flint nodule into an almond shaped
axe. The implements of his ancestors were probably mainly
of wood and later of bone supplemented by an angular bit of
rock. He now recognizes the superiority of flint, and the
eoliths show us his long series of experiments in learning to
flake and shape this useful but refractory material into a
well-shaped, symmetrical tool. He makes a variety of tools,
borers, scrapers, etc. Some day his descendants will make
machines'.

He lived in open camps or villages during the warmer sea-
sons or epochs; and took shelter in grottoes, under over-
hanging ledges or in mouths of caves when the cold returned;
he is social. Here we find the bones of animals killed in the
hunt and his implements mixed with the ashes of his fires.

Already or a little later he buried his dead, depositing with
them parts of animals, apparently as food for a journey, axes,
strings or masses of shells often brought from a considerable
distance. ^^ The shells suggest that he had the savage love
of adornment and of making himself conspicuous.

His care of the dead, his depositing in the grave food and
choice possessions which he would gladly have kept, had
he dared or wished to retain them, show that he has far
outgrown the purely animal plane, mentally as well as physi-
cally. He believes that something of the dead outlasts the
body, and might return to plague him. The fact of this cult
is evident, its explanation is another matter. The growth of
a belief and confidence in the existence of a spiritual world is
the great thing.

He was beginning to think hard in a very dull stupid way
about a great variety of matters. He returned from the hunt
and lay before the fire. Hunger reminded him of the hard
experiences of the day, its failures, blunders or wounds. He
planned a new mode of attack for to-morrow. He dozed, and

loU. 8i.

rHE COMING OF SAVAGE MAN 51

his dreams being wiser than his thoughts, as seems often
the case with primitive people, and sometimes with us, re-
mained to goad and stir his mind. He awaked and gazed at
the fire. It was a strange creature, devouring fuel, licking
up the drops of water on the hearth, sending smoke and sparks
skyward. He could not understand it; it teased, puzzled, and
burned him.

Nature was full of enigmas, rain and hail, frost and ice,
storm and lightning, sunshine and moon, accidents, diseases
and death. There must be in it more of a something like his
own inner self, which knew what he was doing and would
punish him for certain acts and might help him, if he did
others. He was not yet at home in it.

There were many things about which he could think, and
probably talk; far more about which he could only wonder,
for the world was full of mysteries. We have ceased to won-
der, but the wise old Greeks knew that wonder was the mother
of wisdom. And all the time in the harsh climate and home
of fierce beasts Nature, " no fairy godmother," was always
buffeting him and goading him to use his few wits to the ut-
most.

The hundred or m.ore millennia of lower Palaeolithic time
rolled slowly away. Upper Palaeolithic time covering the final
retreat of the glaciers ushered in a new people and race which
seem.s to have very largely replaced the Neanderthal folk.
The new Cro-Magnon race was of a different physical and
mental type and represented the noble savage. It is the
wonder and admiration of all students of prehistory. They
were tall, agile and vigorous, with high foreheads and strong
features, and would have made fine models for the sculptors
of to-day.^^

Apparently they had entered Europe from the east, per-
haps by the most northerly route. They produced a school of
painters v/ho covered the walls of caves with drawings and
paintings representing animals with a lifelikeness and spirit
not excelled by the most successful modern painters. Was

11

13. 272.

52 "fHE COMING OF MAN

the motive joy in the work? Probably to some extent, and
this added to its beauty. But the painting was probably
expected to give them some occult, magical power over the
animals represented. They were a remarkable race with an
equally remarkable art.

The Ice Age wore away. The tundra with its mosses and
shrubs gave place to meadow and forest. The reindeer, the
chief food of the Cro-Magnon hunters, went eastward and
northward, and gave place to the forest stag. The hunters
of the reindeer became fewer in number, and were succeeded
by an inferior lot, apparently of fisherfolk along the streams.
The long Palaeolithic period had ended.

\

V

THE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION

SIGNS of the approach of Neolithic culture begin to
appear in northern Europe about 8000 b. c; possibly
as early as 10,000 b. c. The important part of the
period extended from about 6000 b. c, or a Httle earlier,
until about 2500 b. c. At its very dawn this region enjoyed a
very favorable and mild climate, and peoples poured north-
ward and westward. The Mediterranean race spread from
the sea from which it took its name into France and England.
Broad-headed people appear in the highlands bordering the
Rhine and Rhone and in the foot-hills of the Alps. Primi-
tive tribes seep from Russia and Poland into Germany. Later
a wave or tide of immigration seems to have poured up the
Danube valley. All these people finally met and mingled in
Central Europe.^

Very early we find them making pottery, and beginning
to smooth or polish at least the edge of some of their stone
axes. Generally they use less brittle material than flint.
They seem to have experimented on various sorts of often
rare rocks and minerals, and finally to have become quite
expert practical mineralogists. They made baskets and nets,
and learned to weave cloth of an excellent quality.^ They
lived in half underground huts; later, as at Grosgartach and
the Lake Dwellings, in very comfortable wooden houses.
They raised wheat and barley and other grains. They had
domesticated animals: dogs, sheep, cattle and swine. The
savage has become civilized. If we could have spent a sum-

^55- 36- i6i.
^55' 131

53

54 ^H£ COMING OF MAN

mer in a Swiss lake-dwelling, we should have found our-
selves comparatively at home, with much to enjoy and admire.

During the later part of the period in northern and western
Europe we find m.arked progress in the care of the dead.^
Dolmens consisting at first of five or six great stones are
erected. In the doorv/ay a hole is left open, apparently for
the ingress and egress of the soul. The dead seem not to be
feared, as they are by most very primitive peoples. The
dolmens are enlarged and improved until they become dwell-
ing places for a large company of the departed. Often they
are surrounded by circles and radiating alignm.ents of tall
menhirs or standing-stones. At the very end of the period we
find the dead deposited in small, completely subterranean
vaults, or sometimes cremated; while the great stone circles
are becoming temples rather than burial places. People are
evidently thinking, clarifying and changing their views and
opinions.

The key and explanation of all this progress seems to lie
fundamentally in the introduction of agriculture and in im-
provement in cultivating the ground. This change took place
earlier to the southward and eastward than in northern Europe.
The beginning of the Neolithic period in Crete is set by Evans
at about 12,000 b. c, de Morgan seems to have discovered still
older Neolithic remains at Susa.

The rise of agriculture, the real basis of civilization, is a
long process, we can sketch its history only in rude outline
basing our description largely upon observation of savage
or half-civilized tribes to-day.*

The savage is as much collector as hunter, accepting gladly
whatever Nature gives him. The man hunts large game with
good or bad success. Meanwhile his wife and children range
and scour the surrounding area for berries and fruits, bulbs
and tubers; frogs, fish, reptiles and large insects; all sorts of
" greens/' and whatever is edible. If she finds any ripened

^55- 123.

* 56-58.

35. 102. 223.

"THE DAWN OF CIVILIZA'TlON 55

grain or grass, she will surely beat out the seeds and carry
them home with her. Here some of the seeds and smaller
bulbs fall to the ground and are lost, but sprout and spring
up in the rich soil around the hut. Some wise woman noticed
this, pulled away some of the smothering weeds, and possibly
loosened the soil with, her digging stick.

This is the beginning of the garden, far older than the
farm, for ploughing has not yet been thought of, and hoe-
culture is woman's work. As population increased, and game
became scarcer and warier, she had to furnish more and more
of the food. Her labors were* increased, but her importance
and value in the family and community increased even more.
Her knowledge of plants made her the first herbalist and
botanist, the first physician; her knowledge of the virtues
and harmful properties of certain roots and herbs gave her
an uncanny power. She has founded agriculture and given it
a high position and value.

The great danger is that the man and the children in
hard seasons will eat up her scanty supply of seed grain or
the young growing roots, and thus put an end to the experi-
ment. There are signs that here the priest, medicine-man or
shaman took her part, and laid the terrors of taboo, the for-
bidden thing, on all interference with her efforts. If the
priests, the '' see-ers " and only independent thinkers, and
the women made alliance, the men could only yield. ^ The
garden grew apace. Before the end of the period the plough
was introduced and pulled by cattle, held and guided by the
man. Now the man is becoming a farmer. The economic
importance of this revolution cannot be overestimated.

It had other deeper and higher influences and results. It
slowly and gradually bound man to the soil, made him do
many things which he preferred not to do. His reward
and wealth were proportional to his patience, industry and
skill. He is no longer foot-free to roam and wander as he
will. He is being tamed and house- and home-broken. He

56 tHE COMING OF MAN

begins to own more things than a few flint tools. He goes
into partnership with Nature and is no longer a pauper, de-
pendent on her rich or scanty gifts. He is gaining worth
and dignity. He has been promoted, if he could appreciate it,
to an entirely new grade and school of education.

He has a family and a home, and his home is in a neighbor-
hood or village, and he cannot escape from it. In many things
he must do as his neighbors do, talk and think like them.
The erection of great stone monuments and the founding and
maintaining of lake-dwellings are the work of men who have
learned to cooperate in obedience to leaders and governors;
and apparently the chief leaders were the priests and the old
men of the tribe.

The Neolithic period was mainly one of peace, certainly not
of the continual war and blood-shed which has been asserted
of it. Weapons are few and scarce except among hunting
tribes. It was a period of conservatism and yet of steady
advance, for the two are not incompatible.

It seems safe to believe that in Neolithic tribes, like all
peoples in a similar stage of development, the tribal conscience
ruled supreme. The essential characteristic of the tribal con-
science is the view that the whole tribe must accept the re-
sponsibility for offences of every individual member against
individuals of other tribes or the gods. It is illustrated by
the sin of Achan and rout of the Hebrews at Ai; in the offence
of Agamemnon against the priest of Apollo, punished by a
pestilence sweeping through the Greek host; by the rela-
tions of the red men to the whites in America; and in a host
of other cases showing its wide spread, if not universality, in a
certain stage of social development.

If the tribe is responsible for the deeds of its individuals,
it must and will control individual thought and action. In-
dividual freedom is reduced to a minimum. The laws of
taboo prescribed by the priests and the inviolability of ancient
custom laid down by the old men constitute nearly the whole
of the tribal code. It is like teaching an awkward squad of
dull recruits to keep step or mark time. Neolithic man

fHE DAWN OF CIVILIZA'flON 57

marched in lockstep. The " cake of custom " hardened over
life.«

All this had to be, and could not well be otherwise. If men
and women were to live and walk together in communities
larger than the single family, they must agree. Insubordina-
tion meant anarchy and social disintegration. Freedom of
thought and action must wait until certain fundamentals and
essentials had become thoroughly established. For thou-
sands of years this steady and unremitting pressure was main-
tained and did its work. It resulted in tribal citizenship prob-
ably based on community of blood and descent; in social or-
der, cooperation and harmony; in a sort of government. It
tamed and civilized the savage and prepared him for a still
higher stage.

The growth and development of social life is perhaps the
most interesting fact in the history of the life of higher ani-
mals. The tendency to keep together is deep-rooted. We
find insects and their larvae, not to mention lower forms, mov-
ing in swarms, fish live and migrate in schools, partly be-
cause of the unequal distribution of food, though even here
we suspect, or recognize a feeling of and for kind. A dim
feeling of comfort or enjoyment in companionship has led to
a gregarious life.

In birds and mammals the tendency to flock or herd to-
gether is a most important element in survival and progress.
This is so wide-spread that solitary mammals, Hke some car-
nivora, seem to be the exception. Usually they group to-
gether for mutual aid and protection, as Kropotkin has shown. "^
The survival value of this instinct can hardly be over-
estimated. It has double value as it continually replaces
mutual competition, struggle and enmity, by mutual coopera-
tion, and helpfulness, ending in friendship and love. It has
been, perhaps, the strongest factor in humanizing man. He
has discovered and formed larger and larger units of coopera-
tion.

^55- 211.

58 fHE COMING OF MAN

Mutual helpfulness replaces injurious competition first in
the family, then gradually in neighborhood, village, clan and
tribe. To-day we find great nations, whose vast energies
and resources have led through fierce competition for trade
and commerce to a long and annihilating war, struggling to-
ward a world-order of peace and mutual respect and helpful-
ness permeating and uniting all the peoples of the globe. The
cry of the age is: "We must get together." It is only the
dawning vision of something long foreshadowed and sure to
come.

The necessity of cooperation is rooted deep in human na-
ture and structure. All Palaeolithic men may have been able
to sharpen a stick in the fire equally well, only a few could
chip a symmetrical flint axe or shave a bone dagger, the joy
of the hunter's heart and eye. Still fewer could engrave and
ornament it. Division of labor was only just beginning to
enable every man to find his place and do with joy the work
which he was fitted to do best. It shows far more marked
results before the end of the Neolithic era. We find centers
of mining and manufacture of flint implements; work shops
of pottery, weaving and other handicrafts; manufacture of
jewelry from amber and other substances. This means mu-
tual interdependence between more and more distant areas,
trade-routes arise and bring new patterns, influences and
ideas.

Cooperation was fostered or compelled by the introduction
of amculture and increase of population. The agriculturist
lives in a village and has neighbors. They work together
to rear compact lake-villages or great stone monuments and
circles. They must keep step with one another; they cannot
walk together unless they agree.

In these villages folk-v/ays arise and become habits.
Habits crystallize in customs; and the " cake of cutsom "
hardens around the individual and the social unit.^ The
custom satisfies som.e need or meets some emergency. It
springs at first from a dim feeling rather than from clear in-

s 62.

tHE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION 59

tellectual device. It is accepted on probation and is at first
liable to change. It is tested by a process of trial and error;
and what is at first mainly a dim faith is corrected and justi-
fied or condemned by experience. Huxley said he believed in
justification not by faith but by experiment. The savage,
an investor in " futures " like us all, believed in testing by
experiment step by step the promising suggestions of his
faith. He accepted the provisional hypothesis which worked.

This is only one side of a sublime process of human growth
and development, probably it is only the lower rough sur-
face of the fabric. The greatest asset of weak, defenceless,
curious, prying man was his needs; just as his greatest pos-
session was his possibilities, his " futures," his Castles in
Spain. He has long been prying into surrounding nature,
now he is beginning to turn his attention inward on himself.
Our " benighted ancestor " made full use of his discoveries in
both fields. We will return to this subject in our next chap-
ter.

Out of all this defencelessness and feeling of need, prying
curiosity, social mode and form of life and its necessary im-
plications, out of a dim faith and endless experiment and
broadening and deepening experience, rose a body of ways and
customs which set in tribal law and tribal conscience. Some
things may be done; many must not be done under any prov-
ocation or circumstance. They are taboos, forbidden; the
individual dare not even think of rebelling. Viewed from this
standpoint the resulting system of Mores becomes a code of
morals or ethics. It was hardly the outgrowth of careful
thought; largely, as to-day, not so much a matter of logic as
of a certain good taste or instinct developed almost uncon-
sciously out of millennia of experience. However we may re-
gard man's attainments at this time as small or large, and I
believe that we have generally decidedly understimated them,
they were certainly full af possibility and promise.

The development of primitive religion is still a field for
surmise rather than sure and definite statement.^ Through

9 63-71.

6o tHE COMING OF MAN

needs and fears, wonder, observation and hard experience man
came to believe in beings or forces, call them spirits if you
will, who kept watch of him and punished severely, the for-
bidden act of trespass; some of whom might be willing to
help him while others could be placated. Cult and ritual for
appeasing the angry and helping the kindly spirits grew very
similarly to the growth of Mores and morals. Morals and
religion advanced together, man cooperating with his gods.
We may call them demons, if we will leave out the necessary
implication of evil and malice usually implied in this word.
Their character like that of man varied from extremes of evil
to those of preponderating good.

Professor Murray has well pictured the primitive ritual and
belief of the ancient Greeks before the arrival of Achaeans or
genuine Hellenes. These ancient Pelasgi, if we may call them
so, worshipped spirits or demons in indefinitely vast numbers
but with no individual names; represented, if at all, by em-
blems or symbols very rarely in human bodily form. Of these
demons of calamity, disease, death, madness; of fertility and
other forms of beneficence, there were " thousands upon thou-
sands, from whom man can never escape or hide." ^^

Men had become tillers of the ground. Their life was still
precarious. " Their food depended on the crops of one tiny
plot of ground. All the while they knew almost nothing of
the real causes that made crops succeed or fail. They only
felt sure it was a matter of pollution, or unexpiated defile-
ment. It is this state of things that explains the curious
cruelty of agricultural works, v/hich like most cruelty had its
roots in terror, terror of the breach of taboo — the For-
bidden Thing.''

Neolithic man, with his new discoveries and industries, had
given new hostages to fortune, and a new and wider scope of
application to the old doctrine of taboo and of tribal re-
sponsibility. This strengthened the hold of the priest or ma-
gician on the hopes, fears, and faith of his people. The law
is going deeper as well as wider. There arises an individual

10 6(5.

"THE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION 61

feeling of pollution and of the need of expiation which will
blaze out in the oldest Greek tragedies as almost a veritable
sense of sin. We might almost say that a sense of morality
toward the spirit world is now appearing in a religion pre-
viously almost or quite unmoral. We may easily overesti-
mate the extent and power of the change, but we can hardly
be mistaken in recognizing its dawn and the vast germinal
possibilities of this dim feeling or conception.

In agriculture and throughout nature, seedtime was fol-
lowed by harvest, fall, and winter's gloom and death. Then
in the next spring there was a return, a rebirth or a resur-
rection. If the seed failed to come up, if the blade withered
or was blighted, it was because the vegetation spirit or demon
had failed to reappear or had been reborn weak or sickly, and
all this because some one had broken taboo, had touched the
forbidden thing. This must be prevented at all cost, they
must help the spirit. Hence there must be every year a time
of purification, or renovation, when the old garments and uten-
sils and everything which could carry the pollution of death
were cast off or cleansed.^ ^

All these conclusions, and some others of equal importance
to which we will return later, are expressed or symbolized in
the great Dromena, festivals, mysteries, or whatever you may
call these rites of pre-Homeric Greece. Then for a time,
they are partially, though never totally, eclipsed by the bril-
liant beauty of the Olympian religion with its glorious temples,
statues, and other works of art.

There was vastly more vitality in the ancient crude symbols
and chaos of conceptions than in the ordered and artistic
Olympian hierarchy with its marvellous rpnresentations o^ the
gods in human or superhuman form and beauty.^ ^ Even its
art and Hterature could not save it. It had lost its mysticism.
The old Neolithic religion, handed down by peasants and
artisans reoccupied the field, transformed sometimes almost
beyond recognition like the Ugly Duckling of the fairy tale.

11 66

12 64-66

62 tHE COMING OF MAN

It returned triumphant through sheer power of unlimited vi-
tahty and adaptability. Plato draws his finest illustrations
from its mysteries, out of which, also, the Greek drama arose.
Paul quotes from them or from a similar stratum of belief.

Some of the many sources of its vitality are obvious. It
was rooted in the firm conviction of the existence of a spirit-
ual world toward and into which its every rootlet was forcing
its way and from which it drew nourishment and power. We
might better change the illustration and say that it was
slowly developing a spiritual eye which peered into a higher
world and developed in keenness and clearness of vision in
response to the higher pulsations. By patient experiment
and experience, which produced a hope that could not make
ashamed and a faith in which hope and experiment combined,
it was feeling its way into spiritual knowledge. It knew
nothing of practical science or of material cause and effect.
But its world pulsated with the universal life. It recognized
the law of forbidden things and the sure penalty of law-
breaking. It had a tribal conscience and recognized the need
of purification. It had the promise, at least, of individual con-
science and consciousness of sin.

Its symbol was the mystery which lifted only a corner
of the veil and left an abundant opportunity for wonder, im-
agination, thought, and mysticism, which was entirely lacking
in the perfect statue and the finished creed. It made man,
through its sympathetic magic, a coworker with his divinities
or demons in gaining the answer to an intense desire or
prayer acted by all the members of the community with all
their united might, the utterance of his whole being and life,
instead of expressed merely in words. Such a system or chaos
overflows with sublime possibilities.

The introduction of agriculture had produced another most
important change in religious views and ritual. In tillage
the earth brought forth and gave birth to the crops which
furnished their chief food supply, and probably, in their view,
to animals and men also; just as the human mother gives
birth to the child. Hence there was a wide-spread belief in

"THE DAWN OF CIVILIZA'TlON 63

a cult of an earth divinity, of course female, or in a goddess or
demon of fertility. She is sometimes or usually accom-
panied by a male partner, companion or son, but he occupies
a lower place.

This cult of the goddess seems to have been a marked
feature of Neolithic religion. ^^ We find it in the remains of
the Minoan period in Crete: Isis and her companion god
Osiris were prominent in Egypt. The cult was wide-spread
throughout Asia Minor: Diana, or better Artemis of the Ephe-
sians, Ma in Anatolia, the great goddess of the Hittites, are
a few examples. Pumpelly found a female idol at Anau. The
cult dots, if it does not cover, the migration route. In Greece
we find Demeter, and in " Pelasgic Athens " Athena always
held the highest place. We find deeply buried traces of a simi-
lar goddess cult in most parts of northern Europe. The cult
of the goddess probably belongs to the close of the Neolithic
period, as the belief in innumerable nameless demons repre-
sents the early Neolithic or Palaeolithic stage. Laugh con-
ceitedly, if you can and will, at these " superstitions " of our
benighted ancestors. They were permeated with an intense
vitality. They are still crude in form and will be refashioned
and better expressed as man grows in wisdom and reverence.
The substance is already present; the elements and possibili-
ties of a grand religion. It is a growth of hundreds of mil-
lennia. You can change or modify or reexpress it. You can-
not uproot it. It has become imbedded in the fibers of man's
brain, a part of his life-blood.

Plutarch seems to have been nearer the truth than some
modern observers and students when he wrote " Pass over
the earth, you may discover cities without walls, without
literature, without monarchs, without palaces and wealth;
where the theater and school are unknown; but no man ever
saw a city without temples and gods, where prayers and oaths
and oracles and sacrifices were not used for obtaining pardon
or averting evil."

13 ^Q. 70. Chap. V.
55- 218.

VI
THE RISE OF PERSONALITY

NEOLITHIC civilization had apparently sprung up in
more or less compact and isolated tribes of agri-
culturists, where life v/as simple and quiet, and
where there was generally comparative equality of possession
and uniformity of Hfe. Here it lasted longest. Its typical
development went on somewhat aside from the great routes of
trade and migration, as in large parts of France and England,
in Scandinavia and the extensions of the Danube valley. It
rose and culminated far earlier in Asia than in Europe.

But even in Europe increase of wealth and difference of
power and condition, trade, commerce and the spread of ideas,
the mingling of peoples and cultures in its central valley,
above all the increase and spread of knowledge, diicovery and
initiative, were continually undermining tribal custom and
control. It was fast becoming outgrown.

The same changes had gone faster and farther in the
great thoroughfare of migration and trade running westward
along the northern face of the Caucasus Mountains and shores
of the Caspian and Black Seas from Central Asia into the
grasslands of southern Russia.^ Here isolation was impos-
sible. Here we find fortified villages when they had hardly
appeared in northern Europe. Agriculture flourished, but
much of the country was even better fitted to the raising
of cattle and sheep. Here apparently the horse had been
domesticated not far from 2000 b. c. The population was
mixed and diversified.

Along the southern borders of this great fertile and popu-

^8i. Chap. IX.

64

THE RISE OF PERSONALItT 65

lous region were cities in close trade communication with Crete
and later with Greece. The most western of these trading-
posts was Troy. The Black Sea and its rivers were ancient
trade-routes carrying northward the wares and ideas of more
favored and advanced southern lands. Southwestern Russia
and the Balkans came very early under the sway of Mediter-
ranean stimuli and influences.

Here agriculture and cattle-raising sprang up early. Civil-
ization progressed rapidly, and the cake of custom had less
opportunity to harden. There was far less uniformity, isola-
tion was impossible, tribal characteristics were less marked.
There were wealth and inequality of possession. Change was
comparatively rapid. Individual leadership and initiative
were at a premium. It was a land of restless adventurers com-
pared with the more stolid peasants of northern Europe.

Here was the ancient home of the Aryans; extending far to
the eastward, its northern extent is still uncertain. A com-
mon language was used all over its wide unbroken area, doubt-
less with many dialects. It had to express the needs and
thoughts of many conditions and cultures, was used in trade
and commerce. Those who spoke it were in communication
with many men, cities and lands, it was in a sense cosmopoli-
tan, flexible and adaptable. Before the end of Neolithic times
its sphere of influence had probably reached far beyond the
borders of the old Aryan homeland.

Not very far from 2000 b. c, the people were swarming out
from their old home. The eastern Aryans went into Persia
and on into India. Aryan names soon appear in Asia Minor.
The western Aryans invaded Greece and spread over Europe.
We have an excellent picture of the Achaean leaders in Homer's
chieftains. They were fighters and adventurers, boastful and
loud mouthed, running over with animal life and spirits, great
talkers and story-tellers not overhampered by respect for
truth, good mixers and magnetic leaders. They hated toil and
work. These adventurers were freebooters; open, generous,
frank, kindly when not opposed, rough and cruel as a parcel
of schoolboys when angered.

66 "THE COMING OF MAN

Their coming among the Neolithic settlements of Greece
must have been like the arrival of a party of cowboys in a
community of pacificists. They '' painted the town red."
Resistance was hopeless, submission usually quick. They
probably exacted from the people not very much more of
toil and labor than had been demanded before, and were
excellent watchdogs. Their heroes married the daughters of
the rulers of the land and became kings. The changes were
quick, thorough and not altogether for the worse.

These roving bands of emigrants from the Aryan home-
land were composed mostly of the young and vigorous. They
had left behind them the old men, the lawgivers of the tribe,
and guardians of its traditions. They had broken and cast off
all the old tribal fetters and restraints and enjoyed their free-
dom to the full. Their leader was a young adventurous
fighter like themselves. The source of his authority was his
prowess and success as champion and ability to lead. Dour
gigantic Ajax, swift and athletic Achilles, and shrewd resource-
ful Ulysses listen patiently to wise wordy old Nestor, and do
as they will. Their only law was the word of the leader, and
his power depended on his right arm and the loyalty of his
followers.

The city states, which sprang up somewhat later all over
Greece, prospered or failed largely according to the power,
ability and wisdom of the individual irresponsible ruler. He
is the outstanding feature and characteristic of the Bronze and
early Iron Ages, and loyalty to him is the chief virtue of his
followers. Tribal rule and tribal conscience have seemingly
disappeared, vanished with an outgrown past.

They had left the mother-goddess behind in the homeland,
very possibly even there her cult and worship had long since
declined. Their conception of divinity was quite naturally
a war god hurling thunderbolts or wielding a magic hammer.
His moral endowments were of secondary importance. The
goddess of the conquered land seems often to have been mar-
ried to their own god. They were exceedingly liberal in
matters of theology, and freely admitted new divinities to

"THE RISE OF PERSON ALI'TT 67

their Olympian council. The result was the glorious and
scandalous Olympian religion. In the end the religion of
the ancient mysteries proved to have more vitality and ade-
quacy. It survived in the writings of poets and philosophers,
while the Olympian religion waned.

Greek civilization was undoubtedly a blend of Achaean and
ancient autocthonous Pelasgic elements; and it is uncertain
which contribution was the larger. Is it mere coincidence
that the city-state called Pelasgic Athens always maintain-
ing the cult of a goddess Athena, struggling toward democracy,
a city unsung and hardly named by Homer, was the chief seat
and center of the highest, finest and best thought and life
of Greece?

A very similar conquest on a much larger scale was being
carried on in Northern Europe by the Celts resembling the
Achseans in temper and spirit as if they were twin-brothers.
They seem tor have swarmed out still earlier and in greater
numbers. Before the close of the Neolithic period we find
signs of their culture in the Rhine valley. During the Bronze
Age they seem to have overwhelmed England and northern
France. They conquered Bohemia and parts of southern Ger-
many and went down into northern Italy. In the early Iron
Age they raided still farther, but were pushed back finally
by the Romans in the south and the Teutons in the north
and ground between the upper and the nether mill-stones.

The story of the dawn of history seems to be mainly a
chronicle of similar migrations, raids, invasions and conquests:
every new invader crowding the preceding ruling race down
into the mass of common people. This results in new blends
and variations which were later to express themselves in na-
tional characteristics. But the process was slow, and the sub-
jected people were usually left for a long time unchanged in
their deeper character by the new super-imposed stratum.^

In every case there resulted a ruling class and a subject,
half-enslaved or peasant mass holding obstinately to their be-
liefs, customs and Mores over against those of their con-

2 82. 83. 40,

68 "THE COMING OF MAN

querors. The two may gradually mingle and even fuse, or
they may long remain as distinct as oil and water. The con-
servative mass has on its side the weight of numbers, of more
rapid increase, of endurance and stability. In the end it will
maintain itself and win recognition. This struggle of the mass
of the people for its place and rights, and toward a real and
workable democracy seems to be the important feature of
political history.

The individual played a very subordinate part in the rise
of Neolithic culture and civilization. It was a tribal move-
ment in lock-step and there could be no straggling from the
ranks. There was uniformity and monotony. Different tribes
differed comparatively little from one another. It was a
stage of civilizing the savage by compelling him to till the
ground, common to all civilized peoples, though different tribal
units may have advanced with different degrees of rapidity
according to innate endowment and surrounding conditions.
It was a great tidal wave of human advance impelled by world
forces, and creeping slowly and relentlessly with a broad and
comparatively even front.

In the Bronze and earlier Iron Ages there was great diver-
sity. Every people or city-state tried its own peculiar experi-
ment under its own leader. Egypt, Greece, different parts of
Europe, go every one its own way to a certain extent; and
near neighbors may differ markedly. We are living not in the
age of the " totem," but of the " hero ": ^ not of reactionary
old men but of revolutionary, adventurous young leaders who
care little for the past, and rule under new conditions. The
experiment is largely one devised or shaped by the individual
leader, and its trend and results are less the expression of
deep and universal human tendencies, and more that of his
individual thought and will. The advance or deterioration
depends largely upon him and the weight of responsibility
begins to make itself felt. The advance, if it be so, begins to
show the variety and uncertainties of modern so-called prog-
ress. It is more rapid but less sure in its form and direction.

"THE RISE OF PERSONALItT 69

All the time the great problems of life are increasing in num-
ber and complexity until they seem insoluble.

We lose our way in this strife and turmoil which seems to
have no direction or meaning. But one fact of vast impor-
tance stands out clear in all the welter and confusion: and
that is the rise of something far higher than mere individuality,
namely personality. Do you ask " What is personality? "
It cannot be laid bare by the scalpel, discovered by the
microscope, or weighed in any physical balance. It is more
than a bundle of tropisms or instincts or even a seeing mind.
The vocabulary of the zoologist seems inadequate to express
it fully, if at all. It seems quite new and unexpected, but
it has been coming ever since Palaeolithic days, — or perhaps
far earlier.

It is suggested in Henley's lines:

'' It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul." ^

The ship is heavily freighted, rolls clumsily in a stormy
sea, and often refuses to answer the helm. The crew, and he
is captain and crew at the same time, is always ready to
mutiny and requires a firm hand and stout heart. He is an
adventurer in uncharted waters, sailing to a remote harbor.
Will he make port?

He is responsible to himself and to other persons for the
success of his voyage. If he fails by his own fault, he feels
remorse, not merely regret but a new feeling of which he
cannot rid himself. He has rights to maintain and duties
to perform. He has a certain, if limited, power of choice and
hence of freedom. Above all he must guide and control him-
self lest he lose his position and become slave to some lower
self, for an enslaved person is an absurd misnomer, a contra-

*84. 56.

70 "fHE COMING OF MAN

diction of terms. The depths of his own being astonish or
awe him. All this he knows, and can forget or neglect.

Most of all, he is still very incompletely personalized. He
is on the way to a fully developed personality. As ever before
his possibilities may be infinite, but his realized attainments
on this new plane of life are few and small. Man is still
coming, he has not yet arrived, — even in these great United
States of America.

Said Huxley: '^ Man now stands as on a mountain-top far
above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from
his grosser nature by reflecting here and there a ray from the
infinite source of truth. And thoughtful man once escaped
from the blinding influences of tradition and prejudice will
find in the lowly stock whence man has sprung the best
evidence of the splendor of his capacities, and will discern in
his long progress through the past a reasonable ground of
faith in his attainment of a nobler future." ^

The air on the mountain-top is rarefied and the light daz-
zling; the language of its inhabitants sounds somewhat foreign
to us. We leave man as a person to and with the psychologist
and philosopher, and return to our '' humble fellows " in the
valley, where we are more at home.

VII
THE LOGIC OF EVOLUTION

WE cannot fail to notice that life is continually rising
from lower to higher planes, and that it shows new
powers and new meaning from stage to stage. The
upward road seems to pass from table-land to table-land, and
the transition to be a sudden and rapid ascent. This is prob-
ably not the case. We might compare these transitions to
the changes at the melting and boiling points in a mass of ice.
The rise of temperature may be continuous, but the form and
behavior of the mass becomes entirely different and new at
certain critical points.

The progress from a bacterium to an amoeba and thence to
a group of cells is great, but we cannot dwell upon it. The
second stage is that of the sacklike coelenterate, whose cells
are arranged in two layers. It has a digestive cavity, gains a
fair amount of food, uses comparatively little for fuel, hence
reproduces rapidly. All the surplus goes to the reproductive
organs. There are nervous and muscular tissues, and some
feeling and locomotion. But these functions play a very small
part in the life of the animal. Temporary survival of the
individual, existence and continuance of the species is prac-
tically all it asks.

The fiat worm shows us a transition to something higher.
It still lives to eat and reproduce. The digestive system has
improved, the reproductive organs are exceedingly highly
developed and very complex. But muscles, or rather masses
of muscular fibrils, nerves and nerve-centers and sense organs
have appeared. The animal is moving and feeling its way.

Certain results of this change are apparent in the highest

71

72 I'HE COMING OF MAN

worms, the annelids. Here well marked muscular fibrils line
the body-wall, sheathe the intestine and enclose the perivisceral
cavity. The digestive system is fast attaining its definite
general form, though it will improve greatly in details. The
reproductive system receives a smaller surplus and is simpler.
Circulatory, excretory and respiratory organs have arisen in
service of muscle. Sensory organs pay, and are continually
stimulated as the animal glides through the water. They and
the chief ganglion are improving rapidly. We have been
speaking of nerves and muscles, we ought to speak of one
neuro-muscular system. Every added muscular fiber demands
the addition of a nerve-fibril, and of one or more nerve-cells
in the nervous arc. Every improvement of the sense-organs
demands and stimulates the rise of new cells in what is fast
becoming a brain. Muscle is the leading partner and drags
or pushes all the organs to a higher stage.

In some or many annelids we find two or more claw-like
horny teeth at the mouth. These are very efficient weapons.
The period of universal peace between leading forms is past,
the gladiatorial struggle has begun, a quite new phase of Hfe.
Survival can continue only through exercise of the muscles,
strength and agility, a keen lookout of the sense-organs and
guidance of the developing brain. The annelid represents the
culmination of millions of years of unceasing experiments of
our progressive vermian ancestors; the aberrant forms mark
a few of the partial successes. The failures, and they seem
almost innumerable, have disappeared and left no trace.

Certain points of attachment of muscular fibrils, or the
whole skin, secrete a solid support or defence; a skeleton ap-
pears. The external protective skeleton of mollusks was
vastly productive of ease, comfort, safety, placid enjoyment
survival and success, of all that makes life worth living with
stagnation '^ thrown in." The external, chiefly locomotive,
skeleton of arthropods was simple, easy to build, admirably
suited to small animals, light, resistent, useful in a variety of
ways. Arthropods were precocious and their development was
rapid.

rHE LOGIC OF EVOLUTION 73

The internal, almost purely locomotive skeleton of verte-
brates was exceedingly difficult and slow of development.
It required a long series of none too successful experiments
before it was completely attained. It resulted in a marvel-
lously adapted support for the well molded, powerful muscles
of large animals, giving swiftness, agility, and tireless locomo-
tion. Jaws and teeth furnish unequaled weapons. The sense
organs are large and keen, adequate to great speed over a

wide range. The nerve-cells of many segments are drawn
into the capacious brain. They have fulfilled the promises of
annehds.

The large size of the vertebrate is correlated with long life,
with varied but oft-repeated experiences of the individual.
He forms instincts; he has at least the promise of intelligence.
The lower vertebrate is mainly a locomotive engine of offensive
warfare, his world is an arena of fighting, devouring brutes,
a not altogether pleasant spectacle. But we find plenty of
movement and numberless experiments.

The amphibian has crawled out on land; a poor, clumsy
crawling animal, whose short feeble legs can scarcely lift it
from the ground. But it walks, and every step is a series
of muscular movements demanding close and accurate control
in special nerve-centers, while the direction of locomotion is
determined by the brain in response to the reports of the
higher sense-organs. There is some variety in the use of the
two pair of appendages. Somehow the brain, the great cen-
tral switchboard of the nervous system, manages to distribute
these stimuli to the proper muscles in adequate intensity. Its
problems and responsibihties are steadily increasing. The ap-
pendages lengthen and strengthen, become adapted to locomo-
tion on land or in the air; the internal locomotive skeleton has
been practically completed, its possibilities pretty well ex-
hausted; reptiles, birds and mammals have appeared.

Reptiles tried a vast series of experiments in framing a
vertebrate body. Some are of huge bulk, others small. The
snakes gave up the appendages, returned to the primitive writh-
ing method of locomotion and carried it practically to perfec-

74 "fHE COMING OF MAN

tion. Some reptiles swam with paddles, others flew with bat-
like wings. Some ran on four legs or strode on two, using the
front pair somewhat Hke hands. They became at home on
land, in water, and in the air. They conquered and possessed
the world partly by brute force, partly by speed and agility.
They showed the possibilities of a marvellously developed mus-
cular system guided by a very economically constructed brain.

From flat worms upward progress has been focused chiefly
on the muscular system. Its development has dragged with
or after it that of all the other systems, even of nerves, sense-
organs and brain. Keen sense-organs have been a great asset
but mainly as a part of the steering apparatus. Thus far
the race has been to the swift and the battle to the strong, as
was to be expected. The bird carried the tendency to its
logical conclusion. It became a flying-machine; and this
aerial adaptation has left its stamp on every organ of the body.
In swiftness of locomotion, in keenness of sense especially of
sight, the hawks and carnivorous birds hold the record.

It is a somewhat disappointing story. Millions of years of
painful struggle and combat, and infinite experiment, and the
result is something less efficient than an automobile with eyes
instead of lamps or an aeroplane careering through the air.
It reads like Falstaff's bill at the inn. We say: " One half-
penny worth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack! " If
movement was all we wanted, there was plenty in the delirious
electrons.

There is nothing particularly striking or interesting in prim-
itive mammals. In breadth of experiment, in adaptation and
general development they seem to lag behind birds and rep-
tiles. They are certainly not precocious. Their energy of
evolution seems to be turned aside, drawn off, in some direction
hard to follow. They have the advantage over reptiles of
maintaining a constant comparatively high temperature of the
body. This stimulated the activity and development of the
organs somewhat in proportion to the complexity and in-
stability of their chemical composition, especially of the proto-

THE LOGIC OF EVOLUnON 75

plasmic nerve-centers and glands. But birds have a still
higher temperature.

We have already seen that the development of the neuro-
muscular system, the lengthening of the embryonic period and
accompanying increase in size of the eggs have greatly
diminished their number and made the care of eggs and young
of an importance which cannot be overestimated. The bird
deposits its eggs in a nest ; in all but the very lowest mammals
the mother carries them in her body.

The period of gestation and infancy is continually lengthen-
ing and the strain on the female increases correspondingly.^
Something pointing toward or approaching family life ap-
pears far down in the history of placental mammals. The
chief instincts and the dawning intelligence seem to center
around the young. The plays of lower mammals educate
both mother and offspring.

The earliest of even the placental mammals were apparently
comparatively stupid. But care of young and the continual
harrying by their reptilian overlords was a school of severe
but steady and sure training. Says Lull of the '' archaic "
mammals: " Their brain was singularly old-fashioned, gen-
erally small, but always relatively undeveloped in comparison
with that of modernized mammals of equivalent bulk, espe-
cially in the part wherein the intelligence lay. Hence it is
not surprising that the career of these forms was brief and
that with rare exceptions they have suffered racial death and
vanished as utterly as did the dinosaurs before them." ^

Brain and intelligence are rising to leadership in the neuro-
muscular partnership. The dominance of muscular bulk, ar-
rangement and power, even of weapons of offence or defence,
is beginning to pass away. Everything points toward a new
and thorough revolution. All our " modernized " mammals
possess some or considerable intelligence and learn by expe-
rience. They are educable.

2 H. 549.

76 fHE COMING OF MAN

But steady and rapid development of brain and thought is
emphasized and made supreme in one line, that of the primates.
We need not repeat their history. They were apparently de-
feated forms kept in order and confined to their arboreal ref-
uge by stronger competitors. The effects of this training, the
use of hand and eye in arboreal life, have already been em-
phasized; they appear in the systems of manual training in
our schools to-day. The millennia of primate training in the
school of arboreal life were not wasted.

The comparatively weak and defenceless anthropoid de-
scended from the trees, and pitted his few and feeble wits
against brute strength and cosmic force. The result of the
struggle was man. His weakness compelled him to be watch-
ful and wary, cautious, prying, curious. It compelled him to
eke out his feeble muscles by the discovery, manufacture and
use of tools. Physically he is tough, enduring, adaptable; a
cosmopolitan species ; mentally he is growing keen, observing,
thoughtful. There is something human about him, but some-
thing more is needed to make him genuine man.

" Nature," says Osborn, " deals in transitions rather than
in sharp lines." We studied the rise of the discovery and
recognition of spirit, and hence of religion, in Palseolithic man;
of the rapid rise of morals to supremacy in Neolithic days;
and of personality in the Bronze epoch. The exact date is of
small importance. Those powers became prominent at those
times. A more careful and accurate study would place their
emergence earlier; their " embryonic development " was vastly
more ancient. The fact to be emphasized is that it is just
those qualities which have raised him to the mountain top
far above his humble fellows," have transfigured him; that
he is incurably moral and religious. If he neglects or stifles
them, he degenerates into something worse than a beast. To
call some men beasts is to slander lower animals.

Morals arose under the stimulus of social environment and
neighborly pressure: religion through the dread and fear of
invisible buffeting pov/ers. But in describing the school we
must not forget the pupil. There can be no genuine morality

"THE LOGIC OF EVOLUTION 77

and religion except of persons, possessing a certain amount of
freedom of choice and hence of responsibihty, feeling within
themselves the categorical imperative of duty, and responding
to a " power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness."
Could man have ever discovered morals and religion, if he had
not already felt within himself the stirrings of personality how-
ever dimly recognized? The present high-water mark of
evolution is a very incomplete personality with its immeas-
urable possibilities and promises.

The stages in human evolution are well marked and distinct.
The first is the protozoan stage of single cells or colonies with
no tissues or organs. Second is the almost vegetative stage
when digestion and reproduction are the dominant functions.
The third is the muscular or locomotive stage when strength,
swiftness and agility, keen sense-organs and weapons of of-
fence and defence seem to be the goal of evolution. Fourth
comes the dominance of keenness of perception and the rise
of inteUigence. This, however, ought properly to be considered
as a transition between the dominance of brute force and weap-
ons and the complete rule of mind expressed in person-
ality.

Every stage ushers in something new and unexpected.
Jelly-fish, reptile or bird, and man live very different lives,
every one in a world of its own. Is it any exaggeration to
speak of " creative evolution "? Yet the new stage was
somehow and somewhere, concealed in the old; was prophesied
or foreshadowed by it, is in a sense its only logical outcome.
It is just what we ought to have foreseen and expected.

The stages of digestion, of locomotion and of personality
may be compared to three great dynasties in the history of
the animal kingdom. Every function or power holds the throne
as long as it is capable of improvement more rapid and
profitable than that of any other system. A digestive sys-
tem always remains comparatively simple; a sack or tube
with a certain number of glands is all that is needed. Its use
is limited, its possibilities are soon exhausted.

Muscle and skeleton are far more complex, capable of great

78 "THE COMING OF MAN

variety in amount, form, structure and grouping. Their
capacities for experiment and improvement are many, great
and not easily exhausted. The dynasty held the throne for
ages. The era of personality has only begun. We know not
what we shall be. But the possibilities of mental evolution
are unlimited; they may be infinite. The dynasty of person-
ality is secure and permanent. No other system or power in
the body can dispute its place and right.

Every lower dynasty needed, stimulated, and thus ushered
in the reign of the next higher power; and then became sub-
servient to it.^ Every higher power begins its career as serv-
ant of the lower; then evolution becomes revolution, and the
yoke of the lower is thrown off. The reign and dominance
of the higher does not stop or hamper the development of the
lower function; it maintains and improves it, while it con-
trols and may limit it. The digestive system attains its high-
est development not during its period of supremacy, but in
its service of muscle and brain.

The same is true of the muscles. They are not as bulky
and powerful in man as in many lower animals. But they
are numerous, complex and varied. Of course, all our mus-
cles have their place and use. But man's chief advantage lies
not in the size of his heavy fundamental muscles of back and
shoulder or thigh, but in the fine accessory muscles of his
fingers guided by the exceedingly complex accessory brain-
centers. These contribute the fine complex movements. An
ape would make hard work of playing a violin. It is hardly
accurate to speak of " arrest of the body " in man, though its
day of supremacy is past. It becomes continually finer, bet-
ter adapted to higher uses and nobler ends discovered by the
thinking brain.

Yet, outside of certain centers in the brain, the organ of
mind, the bodily changes between higher apes and man are
few and hardly noticeable. Physically man remains one
cosmopolitan species under all stimuli to variation. His in-
telligence has increased by leaps and bounds. Whether his

3 T. 57.

"tHE LOGIC OF EVOLVriON 79

moral development has kept pace with his intellectual is, we
hope, an open question.

As every higher power was needed for the complete use
and development of the lower, the sequence of dynasties was
quite natural and logical. The higher ought and had to arise
except where there was arrest or failure of development. The
only logical goal of even zoophytic development was mind,
and the worm foreshadowed the coming of man. All these
powers are potentially in the amoeba, and his potentialities,
not his attainments, are his best assets and highest values.
Their worth can be determined only when they are unfolded
or actually realized. The lower stage is incomplete, conceals
far more than it reveals. It can be appreciated and properly
valued only in the light of the higher, which reveals its mean-
ing and to which it is a stepping-stone. " Origins prove noth-
ing," as William James said. The finished statue, not the
rough-hewn block tells the story.

The lower organ or function once firmly established and
supreme in the body does not readily and easily yield its
control and gracefully abdicate in favor of the higher power
of greater possibilities. There is always a struggle for su-
premacy between the lower and older, and the younger and
better. The final revolution succeeds only in the face
of bitter opposition. The struggle is anything but brief, we
always ought to carry all the good, we must carry much that
must be outgrown, into the future. The old dynasty must not
be banished as a whole but assimilated in due subordination
to the higher. Here is the rub. Hence many or most fail
altogether to attempt the revolution; never break loose from
the old, outworn, motives, habits and modes of life; remain
permanently on the lower plane.

Man and animals can at least attempt to reverse this nat-
ural and logical sequence of dominant functions, and exploit
in the service of the lower whatever of the higher has been
attained by their progressive ancestors. The free-moving
form can become sessile or parasitic. This spells degenera-
tion of all organs, except the reproductive, or more usually

8o "fHE COMING OF MAN

extinction; the sacrifice of the higher with Httle permanent
gain and usually loss to the lower. In higher forms of ani-
mals, degeneration, as a rule, does not result in existence in
meaner form or on a lower plane, but comparatively quick ex-
tinction.

If we are convinced that this sequence of dominant func-
tions is a fact, that always in the successive ancestral stages
leading from amoeba to man, higher and higher functions have
risen to dominance; that attempts to reverse the sequence
have ended in failure and, as a rule, in extinction; we shall
be convinced also that future man will be more and more com-
pletely controlled by the highest powers and ends toward which
this sequence points. We shall recognize that our business
is the enthronement of rightness and righteous personality
and that all else is of secondary importance; that we live not
in a gladiatorial or primarily economic, but in a moral and re-
ligious world befitting man. Rightness of will and effort is
the provisional goal of human effort and progress. This in-
volves not so much the remaking of surrounding conditions
as the remaking of man himself.

But man is not pure spirit, and the past lives in him. The
tiger refuses to die, and the ape is immortal. His higher
powers of memory, association and imagination, and the burn-
ing focus of attention, strengthen the hold of appetites and
gratifications and future rewards and punishments are as
if nonexistent. Every upward step in attainment of comfort
in art and in science, every new discovery opens new fields
not of carefree enjoyment but of struggle.

It is a struggle not so much for existence as for life. Ape-
man descended from the trees to give battle to the hostile
powers of the animal kingdom and the natural world. He
has overcome his competitors and bends the forces of nature
to his will. Now he is his own worst enemy. The king is in
rebellion against the king, and abdication is impossible save
by suicide. Rex regis rebelUs.

We have noticed that higher mammals are educable and
glanced at the graded school of training of primates and man.

rHE LOGIC OF EVOLUTION 81

Is the chief characteristic of protoplasm its educability?
Huxley has told us in a remarkably brilliant and sane essay
that Nature is the great educator, and framed her bill of
compulsory education long before man arrived on the globe.
Life and experience are the great teachers, and the world is
the school of this grand system from which we are never
graduated. He says: " That man, I think, has had a liberal
education who has been so trained in youth that his body is
the willing servant of his will, and does with ease and pleas-
ure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose
intellect is a clear cold logic engine with all its parts of
equal strength and in smooth working order, ready like a
steam engine to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the
gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose
mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and funda-
mental truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations;
one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose
passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the
servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all
beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and
to respect others as himself. Such a man, and no other, I
conceive, has had a liberal education, for he is as completely
as a man can be in harmony with Nature. He will make the
best of her, and she of him. They will get on together rarely,
she as his ever beneficent mother, he as her mouth-piece, her
conscious self, her minister and interpreter. Education has
two great ends to which everything else must be subordinated.
The one of these is to increase knowledge; the other is to de-
velop the love of right and the hatred of wrong. With wis-
dom and uprightness a nation can make its way worthily, and
beauty will follow in the footsteps of the two, even if she be
not specially invited." ^.

Future generations will care little about the number of our
automobiles, aeroplanes and telephones or of stories in our
sky-scrapers, for the size of our cities, ships and fortunes,
the number of horse-power developed from our rivers and

82 THE COMING OF MAN

coal-fields. They will regard with some wonder and pity the
crudeness of our laws and institutions. They will smile at
our systems of science and philsophy, as we smile at those of
past centuries. They will ask: '' What permanent contri-
bution did your age and nation make to human life and prog-
ress, and to the development of a higher and better per-
sonality and humanity? " Our answer to this question will
fix our place in history. By it we shall be judged, and justi-
fied or condemned. Shall we be remembered with little Judea
and Greece or be forgotten gladly like great Assyria and other
exploiters?

VIII
NATURE AND MAN

PERSONALITY marks the present high-water mark of
a flood of life sweeping steadily onward. Man has not
yet arrived, very possibly he never will. He is com-
ing. Man represents the apical bud, the growing point, of
the luxuriantly branching tree of animal life. But most of
its branches bend downward, a host have died.

The meaning of evolution is to be sought in the direction
of its tendencies expressed and partially realized in its high-
est forms, not in bacterium or protozoan. '^ Origins prove
nothing." Says Bergson: "A perfect definition applies only
to a completed reality; now vital properties are never com-
pletely realized, though always on the way to become so.
They are not so much states as tendencies." ^ Life is dynamic,
not static, it is always changing, " doing things."

We have paid no attention to the vegetable world or to
the inorganic realm of chemistry and physics. In the great
universe, man is quantitively hardly more than an atom, a
'' thinking reed." His strength has always grown by hard
exercise and daily use just because of his weakness and de-
fencelessness. We live in a universe of whirling, seething
forces; at the same time universe of order and law. Human
life has a quality value and worth distinct from and superior
to them all. It stands out sharply outlined against the back-
ground of Nature. Life is a guiding, directing, controlling
power. Where is the throne or hiding-place of this elusive
force?

We begin with the amoeba. Where is the seat and what

83

84 I'HE COMING OF MAN

the nature of its control of its parts? What determines
" diminution of surface-tension " or the contractihty of the
ectoplasm in the protrusion of a pseudopodium; and what re-
verses the process in its withdrawal? What is ^' responsible "
for the cooperation of fibers, granules and other particles in
its momentary hfe? Control is a fact; but we cannot explain
it.

Why do the separated cells of a pulverized and sifted calc-
sponge recombine and rearrange themselves in the old shape
and form,? There is energy of guidance and control hover-
ing over and immanent in the multitude of cells. More we
dare not say.^

In the development and growth of the bones of mammals,
in our thigh-bone for instance, what controls and directs the
work of the myriad of osteoblasts and osteoclasts continually
adding material to the ends of the terminal knobs or condyles,
and gnawing it away along their lower surface, changing
what had been a knob into a part of the shaft? The rival
hosts cooperate in fashioning and lengthening the bone as the
artist shapes a model, adding clay here, scraping it off there.
Such miracles are being performed in and around us every
moment. We are too busy to notice them, much more to
ever think of them.

What combines the working of all the organs of the body,
every one doing its own share and amount of the work? Seek
its seat in the nervous system, if you will. But as Bergson
says: '' A nervous system with neurones placed end to end
in such a wise that, at the extremity of each, manifold ways
open in which manifold questions present themselves is a
veritable reservoir of indetermination." Where is the oper-
ator for the great telephonic switch-board? '^ The role of
life is to insert some indetermination into matter." ^ We are
searching for a seat of control.

These strange substances, hormones, produced at one point,
set free under some stimulus, traversing the body like tor-

-Qo. go.
3 1. 126.

NA'TURE AND MAN 85

pedoes, exploding only in some particular, often remote tissue,
and producing a needed result, only add to our amazed per-
plexity instead of relieving it. Mr. Darwin once said that
the sight of a peacock's tail made him sick. Most of us are
less sensitive.

An army is far more than a mob of individuals; it is in-
dividuals plus, or in a very real sense multiplied by, discipline,
organization, command, authority. A republic is not merely
square miles of territory and millions of inhabitants; it is
these and organization through and by a central government.
The state may be an abstraction but it is very real one,
against which it is fatal to rebel. It can condemn the rebel;
say to him: go and be hanged, and he straightway mounts the
scaffold. Otherwise it is a poor contemptible state. Anal-
ogies may suggest, though they prove nothing.

Said Whitman in a very interesting article on the '' Inade-
quacy of the Cell-Theory ": "That organization precedes cell-
formation and regulates it, rather than the reverse, is a con-
clusion that forces itself upon us from many sides." '^ Years
ago Huxley wrote in his vigorous English: ''They (the cells)
are no more the producers of the vital phenomena than the
shells scattered along the sea-beach are the instruments by
which the gravitative force of the moon acts upon the ocean.
Like these, the cells mark only where the vital tides have
been, and how they have acted " — possibly a somewhat ex-
treme statement of a truth demanding emphasis.

The development of every fertilized germ-cell into an adult,
introduces the same problem of directivity. Says Wilson:
'' What Hes beyond our reach at present, as Driesch has very
ably urged, is to explain the orderly rhythm of development
— the coordinary power that guides development to its pre-
destined end. We are logically compelled to refer the power
to the inherent organization of the germ, but we neither know
nor can conceive what that organization is." ^ Again, " The
cells are local centers of a formative power pervading the

* 103.

^104:59. and 432.

86 THE COMING OF MAN

growing mass as a whole, and the physiological autonomy of
the cells falls into the background."

If we were not altogether wrong in the conclusion of our
last chapter that the whole process of evolution bears all
the marks of a certain natural logic, if there is clearly direction
in the current of life, there must be here also some guiding,
controlling energy above or behind the competing individuals
and groups. A river forces its way through barriers and
seems to make its own channel. Yet the lines of the river
system are determined in the end by the natural physical and
geological features of its drainage-basin. How far is the
course of the current of evolution determined or modified by
surrounding conditions, by Nature, how far by inherent ten-
dencies?

The courses of the different balls in a charge of grape-
shot fired from a cannon are evidently due to two sets of
forces — 1. their initial velocity and the direction of aim,
2. the deflecting power of resisting objects or forces — or the
different balls might roll rapidly down a steep mountain side.
In the first case velocity and direction of course would be
determined largely by initial impulse; in the last by the at-
traction of the earth and by the inequalities of its surface.
If we lay great weight on initial tendencies, inherent in the
germ, we shall lay less stress on the guidance and control of
Natural Selection; if the directive tendency of the germ is small
or weak, the burden and '^ responsibility " of natural selec-
tion must increase in similar proportion.

Years ago the botanist Nageli propounded an ingenious and
elaborate theory of evolution, as dependent almost entirely on
inherent initial tendency. Natural selection played a very
subordinate part. His theory seems one-sided.

Let us glance at the view of an extreme, perhaps somewhat
old-fashioned neo-Darwinian. The seat and center of the
controlling energy lies in the continuous chain of germ-cells
stretching from protozoan to man ; always buried and shielded
deep in the body of the parent beyond the reach of external
agencies or the habits and acts of their bearers, except in so

NA'TURE AND MAN 87

far as these may effect the general health and nourishment
of the whole germ-cell or of some of its particles in a general
way. Variation comes about through the shuffling and deal-
ing of the granules in connection with the maturing and con-
jugation of the germ-cells. Its direction is not affected by en-
vironment or by habits and behavior of the parent.

The variations which actually arise may be entirely unde-
termined^ perhaps in all directions equally. Of these radiat-
ing individuals natural selection allows some to live and kills
off the rest, and thus determines the direction of evolution
of the species.

If the variation in such a series of generations is mostly
along one line or in only a few directions, it is guided more or
mostly by the tendencies of the germ-cells, and the work of
natural selection is correspondingly lightened.

Says the neo-Lamarckian: ''The animal body is one and
control is one pervading the body and all its cells, even
germ-cells must be to some extent, at least, included under this
control. The germ-cells cannot have that independent and
exclusive autonomy postulated by the neo-Darwinian.
Bcdily variations cannot go on without producing correspond-
ing changes in the germ-cells, in some degree." How this
energy reaches the germ-cells is no clearer than how osteo-
blasts and osteoclasts are controlled, or how the arrangement
of cells in an embryo is brought about. The fact of control
is a different matter from the explanation of how it is brought
about.

Both schools are beginning to see that each holds certain
points which the other would like to see fully proven; each
has its difficulties and hmitations. A compromise or higher
synthesis will probably replace both. Both agree that the di-
rection of the individual life experiment is determined very
largely by heredity, the energy inherent in the germ-cell.
Neither will deny that the final control of the grand strategy
of the evolution of life as a whole and its direction is in
large part the result of the process of natural selection. For
this in the end controls the survival and permanence of cer-

88 fHE COMING OF MAN

tain lines of development while it weeds out and discards a
host of others.

Here nature has the last word. Man can become her part-
ner, and she will make him ruler over many things; but he
is responsible to her and to God for his use of the power del-
egated to him. She demands a strict accounting, and every
day is a day of judgment. She is a stern mistress, a hyper-
calvinist.

We are all experimenters. Nature sets the test, lays down
the rules, assigns the marks, awards the prize and there
seems to be no appeal. Our bodily and mental structure and
functioning, our laws, our deepest convictions, our social ways,
our moral codes and ends are all being slowly but surely tested
in her great experimental laboratory of life. Much of our
discomfort and pain is due to our neglect and reckless dis-
regard or criminal ignorance of what really constitutes con-
formity to Nature's ways and laws ; it is her premonitory warn-
ing of her threatened fatal box on the ear.

In one word, man, good and bad and imperfect as he is, is
the result of a process of selection of those living beings who
are best conformed to, and embody and express in life, the
laws of nature. Huxley's liberally educated man " is as com-
pletely as a man can be in harmony with her. He will make
the best of her and she of him. They will get on together
rarely, she as his ever beneficent mother, he as her mouth-
piece, her conscious self and interpreter."

Speaking of " natural knowledge " he goes on to say:
" There are blind leaders of the blind, and not a few of them,
who can see nothing in the bountiful mother of humanity but
a sort of comfort grinding machine. According to them, the
improvement of natural knowledge always has been, and al-
ways must be, synonymous with no more than the improve-
ment of the material resources and the increase of the grati-
fications of men. Natural knowledge is, in their eyes, no real
mother of mankind, bringing them up with kindness, and, if
need be, with sternness in the way they should go, and in-
structing them in all things needful for their welfare, but

NATURE AND MAN 89

a sort of fairy-godmother, ready to furnish her pets with
shoes of swiftness, swords of sharpness, and omnipotent Alad-
din's lamps, so that they may have telegraphs to Saturn, and
see the other side of the moon, and thank God they are
better than their benighted ancestors." ^

If Huxley were alive to-day, I believe that he would speak
in still more vigorous English, but with less urbanity. Man
is still in his nonage, scarcely more than a child. Occidental
man, most of all here in America, is a spoiled child.

In our use of the gifts of a bountiful nature, we resemble
a parcel of spoiled and ill-mannered children who have broken
into their mother's well-stocked preserve closet where she has
put aside a rich supply of good things against a day of thanks-
giving and a winter of need. They have stuffed themselves,
destroyed what they could not devour, wasted nearly all,
quarreled with one another, and have left ruin behind them.
They are bitter in their out-cries against any and every neigh-
bour who refuses to allow them similarly to misuse his prop-
erty.

They will emerge dirty, nauseated, ill-tempered, an un-
pleasant sight and neighborhood nuisance. They all unite
in blaming their mother for not having secured the door and
brought them up better. They need a sound spanking, a cold
bath, a large dose of physic, and school early to-morrow morn-
ing.

Is not this a just picture of the ways and doings of our gen-
eration which culminated in the war? We wonder that our
children give so little heed to our wisdom, preaching and teach-
ing. Yet, here we are talking about Nature whom we have
abused, and who might well and justly vent her wrath on us.
Perhaps it is as well to make her defendant and to act as
judge and jury before we appear at her bar.

Is Nature good or bad, moral, unmoral, or immoral? It
is hard to say. We look at man, her child, "her conscious
self, mouthpiece and interpreter." Is he good or bad? He
seems to be both; sometimes rising to sublime heights of hero-

90 ^HE COMING OF MAN

ism, sometimes sinking into a bottomless pit of meanness,
stupidity, folly and sin. Goodness and badness seem to form
strata or streaks in his character, both alternately coming to
the surface. He is always putting down or yielding to mutiny
or rebellion waged by his worse self. Here we call it the
problem of moral evil, against which generations of the most
profound thinkers have bruised head and heart. If man
spends much of his time and most of his energy in such bat-
tles, need we be surprised if Nature also shows some conflict-
ing features and forces? We may yet discover some rays of
light on this dark question, but they will be feeble and dim.

If you wish a clear view of Nature in her fairer aspects,
read Huxley's essays on '' Liberal Education " and " Natural
Knowledge." I know of no more unsparing judgment of her
shortcomings and perversity than his " Evolution and Ethics."
I cannot pretend to harmonize or judge between the two pre-
sentations. Both are somewhat one-sided and extreme; each
rests on undeniable facts; they supplement each other. The
reader must judge for himself.

But even if we accept the severest arraignment of Nature
and the catalogue of her manifold sins and transgressions, a
word may still be said in her defence; perhaps her child, man
still in his nonage, is at least partly responsible for the sins
which he lays at her door. Is he not somewhat spoiled, ill-
tempered and irresponsible? Let us accept squarely and
honestly our just share of the blame, and manfully take our
punishment and medicine.

Does Nature teach ruthless competition and treading down
of others? Does not the social or gregarious life of nearly
all birds and mammals equally teach cooperation and mutual
helpfulness? '^ Perhaps even we are far enough advanced to
have outgrown certain methods of action and training un-
avoidable and even helpful on a lower stage, but now an abuse.
Perhaps the outgrowing of certain brutal or childish things is
what we are here for, and what Nature demands of her " con-

'F.

NA'TURE AND MAN 91

scious self." Above all let us always seek her last ruling and
interpretation of her laws.

When all has been said there remains much for man to do.
Many of her methods can be improved. There is much which
must be opposed or curbed. If the desert is to blossom as
the rose, many thorns and briers must be uprooted from the
soil. We must also remember that she is continually stimu-
lating our growth in strength by compelling us to wrestle
with or against her; and the game is often rough.

We must understand her and her ways; and without sym-
pathy understanding is impossible. We may learn to marvel
at her beauty, even if we cannot always and altogether admire
her character. We can appreciate Nature only as we know
and understand ourselves; and most of us are too busy or
idle to devote much time to the study of either. Somehow we
must live and get on with her for, to mis-quote Hiawatha:

^' Though he bend her, he obeys her.
Though he draw her, yet he follows."

We have said that good and bad in man lie in alternating
layers or streaks; there is much good in the worst, too much
of bad in the best. This is partly due to the presence of out-
worn tendencies which ought to have been outgrown, partly
to lack of health and vigor, partly to weakness and ignorance,
partly to sheer perversity and original or acquired sin.

Much of it springs from a still deeper root. Man is an ex-
ceedingly complex being. He is like a craftsman who has so
many tools that most of them grow rusty and dull for lack of
use.

We will take only one illustration as sample. Our mind
manifests itself in intelligence, feeling and will. In the
healthy mind these are all highly and symmetrically developed,
but this is a rare case. We find cold-blooded intellectualists,
who feel little and accomplish less. Some of them are " see-
ing cripples." We find weak, " sentimentalists," oil-films on
shallow pools; also obstinately self-willed people of narrow

92 THE COMING OF MAN

intellect and no feeling, completely blind. Head and heart
rarely balance.

This is due partly to heredity increased by early nurture
or neglect and the environment of youth and maturity, partly
to our own negligence or perversity. The result is lack of
symmetry, balance and control; of Engkrateia, inward
strength.

Burn sulphur, niter and charcoal separately and you get
mainly a bad odor. Combine them thoroughly in proper pro-
portion, put them in a gun-barrel, ram down a bullet; then take
care how you aim. Something will happen.

We very rarely see the result of high, symmetrical, complete
development of all the powers of the mind in a single indi-
vidual, like Socrates or Lincoln. There is nothing about them
which sticks out conspicuously and attracts our notice; their
greatness is concealed by their symmetry. Long after their
death we begin to appreciate them. They form what Heine
has called '' the apostolic succession of great souls, the only
people in the world who ever see anything as it is," and who
understand its meaning. These men show us what man can be
and will be. They live, and are more than irrefutable argu-
ments for immortality: they are samples and illustrations of
it. They cannot die, though they may belong to the noble
army of martyrs. Nature will some day produce a race of
such men, if there is any logic in evolution. She will not be
balked.

We are all more or less crippled by our weakest spot, our
undeveloped or disused powers. They avenge themselves on
us for our neglect by remaining mainly to plague us. But
some of us reserve for ourselves an even worse fate. Said
Zarathustra to the cripples on the bridge who begged him to
heal them: " It is the smallest thing to me, since I have been
amongst men, to see one person lacking an eye, another an
ear, and a third a leg; and that others have lost the tongue or
the nose or the head."

" I see and have seen worse things, and divers things so
hideous that I should neither like to speak of all matters, nor

NA'TURE AND MAN 93

even keep silent about some of them: namely men who lack
everything, except that they have too much of one thing —
men who are nothing more than a big eye or a big mouth, or
a big belly, or something else big, — reversed cripples I call
such men."

'' And — I could not trust mine eyes, but looked again and
again, and said at last ' That is an ear ! An ear as big as a
man! ' I looked still more attentively — and actually there
did move under the ear something that was pitiably small and
poor and slim. And in truth this immense ear was perched
on a small thin stalk — the stalk, however, was a man. A
person putting a glass to his eyes could even recognize further
a small envious countenance, and also that a bloated soullet
dangled at the stalk. The people told me, however, that the
big ear was not only a man, but a great man, a genius. But
I never believed the people when they spake of great

men."

'' Verily, my friends, I walk amongst men as amongst the
fragments and hmbs of human beings! A seer, a purposer,
a creator, a future itself, and a bridge to the future — and alas !
also, as it were, a cripple on this bridge: all that is Zara-
thustra."

" Not the height, it is the declivity that is terrible! " ^

Man is the blind giant of the will guided, but not completely
or directly controlled, by the seeing cripple of the intellect
perched upon his shoulder. In partnership they will go far
and accomplish much. But do not most of us go through life
scarred, maimed, crippled or '^ reversed cripples "? Man
will surely come; he is coming, he has certainly not yet ar-
rived.

The evolution of man resolves itself finally into a series of
discoveries, of his finding more and more in a Nature which
is trebly or tenfold masked, and of which we still know very
little. The whole process is a tendency or urge toward higher
and finer powers still only crudely expressed even by man.

For millions of years on this old earth Nature busied her-

102.

94 "fHE COMING OF MAN

self with chemical and physical problems. Then life and con-
sciousness appeared in microscopic particles asking at first
only existence. The whole trend of Nature's forces seemed to
be toward a being which could digest and reproduce. All
else seems subsidiary or by-product.

Gradually the world becomes an arena of struggling, fight-
ing brutes developing a tough, powerful body with keen sense
organs and sharp weapons. The forces of Nature seem to
combine in one grand resultant, compelling the highest ani-
mals to follow this Hne of march, every other road leads to
degeneration or extinction.

Man became a thoroughly social being living in families,
villages and tribes, where mutual competition is replaced by
mutual helpfulness and affection. He is in a fair way to be-
come a highly intelligent, rational, moral and religious, spirit-
ual being. This is a revolution; old things are passing away,
all things are becoming new; but the change is very recent,
the revolution has only begun. Its completion is the only logi-
cal, rational, natural result of the whole history of animal
life; otherwise life is a " story told by an idiot, full of sound
and fury, signifying nothing;" a ^' march from the inane to
the inane."

Nature, still maintaining physical power and vigor, has un-
masked herself, and shows a very stout countenance set on
righteousness. But man is still in a very immature nonage
and learns exceedingly slowly. He halts between two courses
or worlds, an outgrown past and an unattained future. In
developing personality Nature had to loosen the curb of her
rein and leave man to learn by hard experience how to con-
trol himself. He learns very slowly. His hardest work is to
put down his own mutiny and rebellion against his better
self.

Nature has set her vigorous, energetic, highly endowed child
free to choose and act for himself, has made him her partner,
in a sense her vice-regent; has given him all things freely to
use and enjoy. Like many other heirs to wealth for which
they have not toiled, man turns ungratefully, abuses and ex-

NA'TURE AND MAN 95

ploits the free gifts of Nature, and would make her his slave;
an exceedingly dangerous experiment.

She has not abrogated her laws of the great game. Hered-
ity has insured that the best attainments of his ancestors shall
go to the child, also some of his weaknesses. If a man per-
sists in squandering this entailed estate, he, not Nature, is
responsible for the loss; and his children may justly curse him.
Nature is not to blame, and the law of heredity is on the whole
and in the long run beneficent.

Natural selection for which, as for heredity, Nature is re-
sponsible, has certainly resulted in a marvellous line of sure
and comparatively steady progress. It sifts and selects un-
sparingly and with ever higher standards for survival. It has
always demanded the seemingly impossible; it will probably
continue to do so. After a period of prolonged prosperity,
when survival has been comparatively easy and variation wide,
there must always follow a period of the severest selection of
a saving remnant. We can only gird our loins to meet the
test or go down before it.

We may well face the fact that, as Huxley has said, " the
avoidance of pain and discomfort is no proper object of
life." Nature's school and training is not for carpet-knights.
We may yet discover that life is not a scheme for the great-
est possible ease and luxury, but an adventure in endurance
resulting in experience, wisdom, and a well-founded hope, a
Marathon race. This doctrine is exceedingly old-fashioned,
old as the life which began before the everlasting hills were
born.

The frontiersman of progress does not expect all the lux-
uries of an old artificial civilization. His reward is an abound-
ing life overflowing with the glow of health, and a youthful
civilization close to Nature. On him she smiles. They " get
on rarely together," and he falls in love with her in spite
of her imperfections and waywardness. She is good enough
for him.

I hold no brief for Nature. She can defend herself. But
her highest ways are past finding out, and we cannot search

96 "THE COMING OF MAN

for them too carefully. We are to blame for many of the
worst cruelties and crimes imputed to her. Let us be fair
and just toward her. We may find kindness and divine beauty
behind her masks and disguises.

IX

MAN AND ENVIRONMENT

MAN is Nature's mouthpiece and interpreter, the con-
scious expression of what is best in her, as well
as of some which is not so good and must be out-
grown. Nature is very slowly and patiently educating, guid-
ing and moulding him as she has all his humbler ancestors.
The individual, the species, or the larger group which fails
to obey her laws and conform to her ways is slowly but surely
weeded out. Only those which meet the requirements of her
tests survive. If we neglect or resist her training we go down
and out. The penalty of disobedience and non-conformity is
death.

Conformity means literally taking the form of the impress
of environment, like wax under the pressure of the seal or
clay in the hands of the potter. Every part of our body
bears the impress and stamp of the conditions under which it
arose. Our cells are bathed in lymph like unicellular organ-
isms in a primeval ocean. Our trunk was constructed by
writhing worms. Our backbone in its various forms during
successive stages of development points to changing conditions
and habits of ancient vertebrate life. Legs and arms, jointed
appendages, tell of emergence on land; every bone and joint
is the solution of problems of physics and engineering. Our
hands were shaped and finished in an arboreal gymnasium;
our feet modified to suit life on the ground. Our nervous
system tells the same story. Man is a walking museum of
palaeontology, every part bearing the impress of conditions at
the time of its origin. The same may be said of every ani-
mal. Says Weissman : " When you take away all the ad-

97

98 t'hje; coming of man

aptations from a whale, there is not much left." The story
of evolution is a history of successful adaptations.

In every age and stage of our evolution some organ has had
its special time for rapid change and improvement. Then the
pressure or urge passes over to some other part, as we have
seen in our study of the sequence of dominant functions.
The essential features of the organ now set and become rela-
tively fixed; all further changes are slight. Nearly all the
organs of the human body have acquired fairly definite form
and structure, and have changed but slightly during the last
million years. Changes now are mostly limited to the " silent
areas " of the cerebral cortex. There is a time for everything
and '' opportunity knocks but once." Yet it is all one process,
" the history of the ever-advancing victory of spirit over mat-
ter," as von Baer said.

We have spoken of conformity to environment as if it were
merely a stamp impressed upon receptive and passive material.
This is not correct. The adaptation consists in a reaction of
the living being, stimulated by external forces. The reaction
or response to the stimulus differs according to the character
of the responding animal or man and hence may vary greatly.
I may give the same kick to a stone, a sheep or a bull-dog;
the response will be quite different. The more highly de-
veloped and complex the animal, the more varied and less pre-
dictable its response. Sloth, squirrel and ape are all adapted
to an arboreal environment, but they have reacted very dif-
ferently; all three have conformed but in different ways and
to different degrees, the sloth apparently the most completely
of all.

There is such a thing as over-adaptation where the animal
or man has so completely adapted itself to one set of condi-
tions that change and readaptation to a new environment is no
longer possible. If its environment changes, as it always does,
or if it is compelled to seek a new environment, it is at a dis-
advantage and probably disappears. Large size usually shows
that conditions in a certain age and place have been favor-
able and adaptation complete. If climate and food-supply

MAN AND ENVIRONMENT 99

change, the largest forms usually suffer first and most severely.
This has been an important factor in the extinction of many
dominant groups; so, probably, of reptiles. Through over-
specialization and adaptation to one part or aspect of nature,
they have lost touch and conformity with the whole. This

means ruin.^

Surroundings crowd, urge, stimulate, draw or attract in vary-
ing degrees and in different directions according to the ani-
mal on which they act. The resulting reaction or response
depends upon both variables.

We may say that in higher animals and man, environment
is very largely a matter of relation of the individual to his
surroundings. If I am entirely outside of any relation, direct
or indirect, to a certain object in my surroundings, it can
form no part of my environment in any proper sense of the
word. Here three elements, all variable, are concerned: ob-
jects and forces of the external world, man or animal, and
the relation between the two. Hence we all live in one world
but every man has or forms, to a certain extent, his own
environment. Under similar surroundings, different men have
different environments. From one almost compelling set of
surroundings Judas went down to Gehenna, and Peter went up
to the throne. Each had his own environment and went to his
own place. Surroundings and environment are anything but
synonymous words; very much, if not all, hinges on the re-
lation.

Some elements appear fairly constant in all environments,
e. g., air, water, light. We are just beginning to appreciate
the importance of climate, differing indeed, in different re-
gions and changing from time to time. One element is con-
tinually shifting, due to the rise of new forms of life and
the disappearance of old ones. The rise of sharks compelled
all weaker, perhaps hitherto dominant forms to seek refuge.
The same may be said of reptiles, whose disappearance gave
mammals a wider opportunity. Man of the species Simia de-

1 H. 113. 177. 228.
19-

100 "fHE COMING OF MAN

structor has wrought much ruin in the world, as Homo sapiens
he may help to restore and transfigure it. The relation of
animal to animal and of man to man, a relation continually
changing, is the most important element in biological history.

The first step in conformity is discovery.^ When we dis-
cover an object, we bring it into relation to our sense-organs
or mind. We focus our attention upon it and discover new
possible relations which may satisfy some pressing need.
Then we proceed to experiment, and frame and establish some
new relation; and we may call this an invention.

The amoeba is always groping in the surrounding water.
It is remarkable how early the animal began to develop sense-
organs. The higher worms possess them all, though crude and
incompletely developed. The ear starts as an organ for feel-
ing vibrations in the water, and ends as an open doorway for
the entrance of all the highest and finest, as well as lower,
sentiments and appeals. We can take heed how and what we
hear. The eye, at first a mere light-perceiving speck, aids
in perceiving the direction of the source of light, and ends
by forming images of surrounding objects. Imagine the furor
in some learned society of annehds, when Alciope announced
and maintained that he could see and distinguish the form of
an object almost an inch distant. And these sense-organs
stimulate and develop the brain, until it — or the immanent
mind — becomes a sense-organ itself discovering values and
ideals, beauty, truth, goodness and God; all of which he has
discovered, none of which he could make. They make him,
if he so wills or allows. These are all in the margin of his
environment as soon as discovered. What and how close his
relation is to be to any or all of these, seems to be left to him.
We are apt to forget how large a part discovery plays in evo-
lution. Man combines and relates the results of his dis-
coveries; he makes comparatively little. All his so-called
laws are expressions or descriptions of objects and relations
which he has discovered.^

2T. 41.
2 1 :229.

MAN AND environment: loi

This sensitiveness to and discovery of new objects and con-
ditions gave nature a new opening of attack in higher ani-
mals and most of all in man; it opened new environments in
a world of ancient objects and forces. Environment is evi-
dently something very different from a mass of surroundings,
all lumped together; it is not simply a resultant of forces;
it is to every man a new relation to a new combination.

Surroundings are mostly the raw material out of which
every living being consciously or unconsciously, with or with-
out understanding, will or purpose, selects, or accepts certain
portions and out of these constructs its own environment ac-
cording to its own inherited structure and tendencies or ac-
quired character. This is his unique experiment by which he
stands or falls.

A man may be known and measured by his environment, for
it is " the company he keeps." His position in the hierarchy
of life may be fairly accurately measured by it. It broadens,
deepens and towers in proportion to his development. The
lower animal changes his environment by his powers of lo-
comotion, moving from dangerous to advantageous surround-
ings; man accomplishes much the same result by shifting the
focal point of his attention.

Certain parts of our environment seem irrevocably fixed for
at least some of us, so that we cannot escape them. So cli-
mate. The slum or a city palace is forced upon many children
so that they cannot escape. Neither is desirable; good and
brave men have risen from both. Early parental influence
and education may be, and often are, fatal to full and nor-
mal development. But these can and should be improved if
as many as possible are to be fitted to survive; man has
changed all these, and can and will improve them. Man mi-
grated northward into Europe. Its cold harsh climate had
direct invigorating effects. Its indirect effects were still more
important. He needed shelter; he discovered it in the mouth
of a cave or under an over-hanging cliff; then he built a hut.
He was chilled, and discovered fire and learned to use it.
He covered and protected himself with skins of animals. He

102 ^HE COMING OF MAN

was weak and defenceless, he used a pebble or sharp stone
as a weapon, and learned to shape an axe and other tools.
Population increased and game became scarce; he became an
agriculturist. Society arose and new needs with it. There
is interdependence and mutual aid and cooperation. Man has
become a moral being; and has discovered a spiritual world
which alone can satisfy his spiritual needs.

Man's greatest, most valuable and essential assets and pos-
session are probably not his attainments, for these are small;
not his Castles in Spain, for these are remote; they are his
ever-present bitter needs. ^ From them spring discovery, in-
vention, progress. As soon as these are satisfied, we die. It
is as well we should. Nature does not spoil her children as
fond parents do.

Man selected certain materials furnished by Nature and has
given them a form answering to his needs. From a pauper
dependent on her gifts he has become a partner, possibly a
leading partner, with her. Here and there he is trying to
make her his servant. He has framed a new environment,
built up between himself and her as a defence against her
slings and arrows, and as a means of farther utilization of
her bountiful gifts. This environment is to some small ex-
tent natural, but very largely artificial, the work of his hands.
He, not Nature, has framed it; it is his experiment. Without
it, sometimes with it, he remains a savage. It increases in
amount, complexity, advantages, opportunities and dangers
with the progress of civilization.

But while he has been fashioning and building it, and be-
come more and more dependent upon it, it has steadily changed
and molded him for better and worse. He adds arts and
sciences unattainable without it. But the artificial environ-
ment tends to master and enslave him. He craves not only
the supply of his natural, but of a host of artificial needs, some
of which are or may be excellent. He craves luxuries satisfy-
ing every appetite, desire and whim; life has become strangely,
intolerably dull, he must have artificial stimulants and all

* loi :6o.

MAN AND ENVIRONMENT 103

kinds of amusements. All these tyrannize over him. He is
becoming the slave of things.

Nature is idealized as a fairy godmother, or valued as a
mass of exploitable material. Science is encouraged not so
much as a means of truth as a provider of comforts and lux-
uries, and an ally in despoiling nature. He has barred out
nature so far as he can; becomes weak and unhealthy in mind
and body. Complete conformity to artificial environment and
repletion have cost him his vigor and powers of endurance.
He glories in his over-specialization and seems in a fair way
to become a '' reversed cripple." Men have invented and
made — we might almost say created — vast military, politi-
cal or economic machines and trusted in them. The machine
catches and crushes them in its wheels and then breaks dov/n
because of its weight and complexity. Is not this the his-
tory of every ancient " successful " civiHzation? Why should
we be an exception?

Can we fail to notice the same tendency in all social life
with its opportunities for mutual help and improvement, and
wealth of enjoyment, its training in manners, which are or
should be a branch of morals; its correction of our individual
one-sidedness and weaknesses and egoism; its power of public
opinion; its conventions, fashions, tyranny, futility and empti-
ness? We make the political machine, it rules us, and we wor-
ship it. This looks like either fetichism or " graft," or both.

In all such cases we allow the " cake of custom " to thicken
and harden around us and tearfully mourn that we cannot
break it.^ The confession, if true, explains, justifies and
seals our doom.

'' We wrestle in our present state
With bonds ourselves have forged and call it fate."

There is, as Huxley has well said, a natural and an artificial
system of education. Our artificial system should prepare us
to receive gladly and use wisely the education of nature and
life. Is it suited to teach men and women how to live, to

5 T. 201.

104 "tHE COMING OF MAN

meet life's opportunities and emergencies, to fit as many as
possible to survive? Does it also tend toward over-speciali-
zation and narrow, one-sided development? Is it broad and
human, or almost entirely professional or vocational in its
aims and results? Is it producing strong and wise leaders
and training us to be their loyal followers? We will leave all
these questions to those who have specialized in education.

Our artificial social environment is of almost compeUing
importance. We cannot escape it; how can we best use its
advantages and opportunities and avoid its evils? Let us hold
fast to the fact that our environment consists not altogether
in surrounding objects and conditions, but also, and even more,
in our relation to these. The same object at different times
varies greatly in importance to me, according to my moods and
its nearness or remoteness. Yet that which is near at hand
is usually not appreciated, and the obvious, the axiomatic, in
life, is always forgotten or neglected.

Let us glance at one or two illustrations. Two men find
themselves in a company of average men and women. One
of them is sympathetic, hearty, overflowing with health and
humor; the other more intellectual, critical, somewhat in-
clined to dyspepsia. The first finds the company of his fel-
lows intelligent, kindly, agreeable; the second finds them just
the opposite. Each reports honestly and truthfully his ex-
perience and observation. Each has seen and drawn out a
different side of the same people, and has contributed of his
own. From the same company each has framed his own so-
cial environment. Each has selected, expected, found at-
tracted and encouraged that which he was fitted to call out.
The material was the same, the use different.

One new relation may change a man's whole life and thought.
I was walking the street one dark, chilly, winter day. A young
fellow called out to me cheerily: " Good morning. A fine
day!'' I wondered what ailed him. A moment later a friend
explained the mystery, telling me that the young man had
just brought a trying pursuit and courtship to a happy end-
ing. Nothing had changed in or about the boy or girl. They

MAN AND ENVIRONMENr 105

were just what they were twenty-four hours earlier. But one
new relation had been formed. He would not have been so
gay, or the sky so bright, if she had promised and honestly
tried to be a sister to him. We trust the new relation re-
sulted in permanent mutual encouragement and uplift.

The content of the book is insignificant to the page in a
library. Another has few books, and little time for reading,
yet lives in and by them. One man is lifted, thrilled, and
strengthened by music, painting, the beauty of smiling valley,
of clouds and sunsets or the grandeur of the mountains; an-
other, hving in their midst, is practically unaffected by them.
They form the surroundings of both, the environment of one.

Two men read a page of poetry or science. One is inspired
by the '' splendor of truth," which was Plato's definition of
beauty; the other remains cold and dead. The passage is
really as foreign to him as if written in an unknown tongue.
No man can be a hero to his valet, or anybody else, if hero-
ism is foreign to the spectator's environment. The environ-
ment of a reversed cripple can hardly be other than hell or a
'^ fool's paradise."

Improvement of surroundings seems to mean removal of
barriers to progress and increase of opportunity. But these
do not reach the root of the difficulty; this lies in the individual
will and purpose. To treat only surroundings or even the in-
tellect for weakness or perversity of will is much like pre-
scribing external applications for deep-seated disease.

This fact has been emphasized by many or all great think-
ers. Plato said that many men must be improved before
they can be educated. Another great thinker has said, '' The
law is weak." Possibly the best any of us can do is to see
to it that we encourage and call out the best that is in our
neighbors, not the worst; and contribute to the common
stock only the best that is in us, keeping the rest for home
consumption. Most of us can still improve our minds. If
you would know how, ask the psychologist. If we could co-
operate in this effort, we might find that even society is much
better and less blame-worthy than we have thought.

X

THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

WHAT constitutes fitness? There can hardly be a
more important question. Our answer to it will
color our view of the whole theory of evolution and
of life.

One or two characteristics of fitness are fundamental, neces-
sary, and evident at the outset. The fittest must be pro-
gressive. However great its attainments, if it halts in its
progress, it will surely be surpassed and left behind by some
steadily advancing form, and progress must be continued
through a long series of generations, hence the fittest must
be tough, vigorous, tenacious of life. But a host of forms
seem able to meet these two requirements.

How can we sift them? We might accept the great line of
progress marked out by the logic of evolution. But it is
safer and more profitable to notice the facts furnished by ge-
ology and palaeontology. We will attempt to catch a glimpse
of our globe at various stages of evolution, and see what
forms are competing for the prize of survival and leadership in
the struggle for life. As we pass from stage to stage, we can
mark the success or failure of the experiments tried by the
most promising competitors in preceding stages.

There was life on the globe long before the beginning of
Palaeozoic time. The " everlasting hills " have slowly risen,
grown old, worn down and disintegrated, often almost dis-
appeared, since bacteria and many less primitive forms came
on the stage. Life antedates and outlasts them all. But the
earliest forms of life were mostly soft-bodied and left no trace.
The few earliest remains teach us little. We catch our first

1 06

^HE SURVIVAL OF fHE FirrESt 107

glimpse somewhat before the beginning of Palaeozoic time.
Our chronology is none too definite, our view distant and dim.

At this time a very large part of the globe was covered by
a vast primeval ocean. The continents were hardly outlined.
North America seems to have consisted mainly of a V-shaped
mass of land with its apex near Lake Superior and its arms
stretching, one toward Labrador, the other toward Alaska, to
the east and west of Hudson's Bay. The eastern and western
edges or rims of the continent were marked by uplifts in the
region of the present Appalachian and Cascade ranges.
We do not know how much life there was upon the land. Our
ancestors seem to have been living in the primeval ocean; if
they were then living in fresh water, it would not greatly af-
fect our conclusions.

Mollusks were well represented in nearly or quite all their
great divisions. Clams, safely ensconced, slumbered in the
mud. Other forms with spiral shells crawled on the sea-
bottom. Cuttlefish, somewhat like our present squids, but
with their bodies protected by a light shell, swam freely every-
where. They seem to have lacked the parrot-beak of modern
forms. This lack was no serious defect; they could swallow
any of their competitors whole.

Crustacea, now represented by crabs and lobsters, crept or
swam, had jointed legs, and facetted eyes, and were somewhat
protected by a coat of Hght plate armor mainly used for the
attachment of muscles.

Swimming in the water above, possibly banished to fresh-
water, were animals perhaps as large and as dangerous as small
earthworms. They were kept away from the rich feeding-
grounds of the seabottom by crabs and mollusks. They lived
on the minute forms of life which they could sift from the
water. These were the primitive chordata, ancestors of the
vertebrates. Fascinating worms were abundant, and prob-
ably other interesting forms. These we must neglect. They
do not concern us and have mostly died out.

Can we pick the winner? Which of these competitors is
the fittest, most likely to survive and hold first place. We

io8 "THE COMING OF MAN

must judge entirely by what we have before us; all later
time is supposed to be in the future. The free-swimming
chordate form is already distanced and hopelessly beaten.
What possible chance has he? The crab is a fairly protected
moving animal whose jointed legs and eyes promise a higher
organization and successful future.

The cuttlefishes have everything their own way. They
can swim swiftly, have sufficient protection, and abundance of
food and rapid reproduction. They possess all the natural
advantages in environment, are lords of the rich sea-bottom,
nine points of the law; and they have size and strength to
maintain possession, which should constitute the tenth. But
let us not fail to pay homage to our friend the clam, '' re-
clining semi-somnolent " in safety, peace and quiet joy. He
has already attained perfection.

We are hard-headed, practical scientists, we know nothing
of the future. We judge by what we see, and by the teach-
ings of the past. Some form of mollusk must be the fittest,
there is hope for the crustacean, for the chordata defeat and
our pity.

We revisit the earth millions of years later not far from
the close of Palaeozoic time. The land forming the eastern
portion of the United States oscillates not far from sea-level.
The great cephalopod mollusks still teem. They have
changed form slightly, but little in structure. Crustacea have
taken on a more modern appearance. Spiders and insects have
appeared on land.

The marked change and progress has been in the descend-
ants of the insignificant chordata. Sharks have appeared
with fairly developed internal locomotive skeleton offering
attachment to heavy bands of muscles, with paired fins, stout
jaws armed with pointed teeth, with large sense organs and
no mean brain.

There are ganoid fishes, like our garpikes and sturgeons,
superior to the sharks in some respects. They have an air-
bladder which can be, and often is, used as a lung. Some are
mail-clad, others unprotected. They are driving their weaker

"THE SURVIVAL OF "THE FU'rES'T 109

brethren far up the streams into the pools and marshes.

Here the air dissolved in the water is foul ; they use the gills
less and the air-bladder or lung more. In the water, filled with
roots and stems of weeds, the paddle-like fins become jointed
and are used partly as legs. Finally during the recurring pe-
riods of drought, they will crawl out on land, somewhat like
the salamanders of to-day.

Which will survive and make the next great upward step?
The cuttlefish is still hearty and vigorous, but has made
little, if any progress. The insect has improved on the crab.
The future evidently belongs to the vertebrates, descended
from the distanced and defeated primitive chordate. The
ganoid is promising, the shark is a conspicuous and marvellous
engine of speed and destruction. A salamander, driven out
on land, crawling among great club-mosses and weeds is not an
inspiring spectacle.

We come down to early Mesozoic time. The eastern por-
tions of North America are now well above tide-water, but long
bays extend far into the land. Back from the shore, marsh
and dry upland alternate. Sharks and ganoids still persist
as well as cephalopods. But the amphibian has descendants
with whom these could never compete. Reptiles are every-
where prominent and dominant. They swim in the seas and
appear to be exterminating the surface-seeking ganoids. On
the land they run on four legs or stride on two. They own
the rich jungles and rivers with their banks or broad valleys
and bordering uplands. Some of them fly with bat-Hke wings.
Others are of huge bulk defended by coats of mail. Life is
easy and food abundant. Our present reptiles give but a
poor conception of the size and power, swiftness and strength
of these ancient forms. Birds are flying through the air,
though, perhaps, still somewhat reptilian in appearance. We
see a few small, scaly mammals, not one of them a match for
the reptiles.

Once more which is the fittest? Later forms have not yet
arrived to give us the answer to our riddle. The reptiles
offer a great variety of conspicuous forms, some one of which

no tHE COMING OF MAN

ought to succeed. Birds fulfill certain conditions of fitness
better. We remember that the whole process of evolution
down to this time has tended to the production of muscular
forms with well framed skeletons possessing swift locomo-
tion. The bird is a high-pressure engine of marvellous swift-
ness, with hot blood, keen sense-organs and a good or ex-
cellent brain. The bird is certainly of a far finer and higher
type than the reptile. What chance has the small plodding
mammal?

We are in Tertiary or Cenozoic time. The exit or disap-
pearance of the higher reptiles is as striking as their entrance
to the stage; only the inferior have survived. Birds, like
seme precocious children, have not ^fulfilled the promise
of their youth. The prize will surely fall to some mam-
mal.

There are splendid carnivora, cats or tigers, with powerful,
sleek, agile, athletic bodies and long saber-like canine teeth.
The herbivorous horses and deer have developed long slender
legs, and have taken to flight. The rodents have sought refuge
in holes in the ground or on the trees. In the trees we see
lemurs or apes, our " furry arboreal ancestors with pointed
ears." The cats are having their day. They deserve it.
But in Quaternary, Psychozoic time the descendant of lemur
and ape reigns unchallenged and supreme. Even the cat can-
not hold its ground before the wits, traps, and missiles of
man.

It is a strange story. If we have pictured to ourselves the
struggle for existence as a mere battle of brute with brute,
where the fittest were always the strongest and biggest, we
have erred completely. In fact the race is never to the swift
nor the battle to the strong. Nature herself in the long run
repudiates the strictly gladiatorial theory of the struggle for
existence. So repeated and constant an outcome must have
some explanation.

One important fact has been already noticed. The external
protective skeleton of the mollusk was simple, easy to build,
gave immediate tangible advantage, and developed rapidly but

rHE SURVIVAL OF "THE FlT'TESr m

allowed brief progress. The internal locomotive skeleton of
chordata was difficult, slow of development and in conferring
advantages, but full of almost endless possibilities of loco-
motion, sense and brain. Its advantages revealed themselves
only after long and wearisome experimenting. The mollusk
was shovelling gold out of a pocket, the vertebrate working a
fissure vein where the ore, poor at the surface, grew richer as
it went deeper.

We remember that the amphibian under great difficulties
and disadvantages was on his way to warm blood, a better
brain and freer life. These all came very slowly, without
observation. The disadvantages seemed at first greater than
the gains. The same . is true of mammalian structure and
habit in general and particularly of primates.

It is evident that we cannot distinguish too sharply and em-
phatically between dominance and fitness. The dominant
forms, hulking reptiles or sleek cats, are those which are reap-
ing to the full the use of some power already attained at the
expense or to the neglect of some higher, deep-seated power,
as yet very incompletely developed and offering few tangible
gains, but of far greater capacity. They gain present pros-
perity at the expense of all future progress. Such prosperity
and dominance must be brief. The experiment can end only
in bankruptcy and failure. Reptile and cat must in time yield
to the brainier form, but not in one year or millennium. If we
focus our attention on any one point of time alone, present or
past, if we are near-sighted, the dominant form will surely
appear to us to be the fittest, although its doom is sure and
downfall near.

The fittest is the form which maintains and improves the
best attainments of its ancestors and puts its chief develop-
mental energy into the organs of highest capacity and pos-
sibihties. It lives up to and expresses the last term of the
logic of evolution. But such organs, or similar institutions,
are necessarily complex and of slow growth. At first the re-
wards of progress are small, the disadvantages and cost of their
development are evident and not few. The fittest usually

112 "THE COMING OF MAN

seems to be making a losing bargain, while the dominant is
conspicuous and his success dazzling.

Why did any of our ancestors choose a path which sacrificed
present ease and comfort to future attainment? They had
no choice. Stronger and better armed ganoids forced the prim-
itive amphibian ancestor up-stream, and climatic changes
drove him out on land. Reptiles taught primitive mammals
to be watchful and wary. Morally speaking the carnivora,
or possibly reptiles, boosted our primate ancestor into arboreal
Hfe.

Nature's system of education is very simple. She puts the
progressive form under conditions where it must die or form
habits and environment, which will insure exercise of the
higher powers and the development of the highest organs.
Many shrink back, balk or fail and die. Some, perhaps only
a saving remnant, survive and attain the next higher stage.
Here again the same process is repeated.

Such a system of education is severe and unsparing. Our
ancestors were well fed and contented in the water, they were
driven out on land. They had just begun to enjoy life on
the ground when they were driven into the trees, whence they
were later driven down again. Nature's fairy wand is the
spur of necessity. She treated all our ancestors much as Poor
Joe in Bleak House complained that Detective Bucket had
treated him: ^' He always kept a-chivying of me and a-tell-
ing me to move on."

The chivying process seems necessary. When a group of
animals has remained for a time under conditions where
struggle and effort are unnecessary, further development seems
impossible for them. Life acts like wet plaster. As long as
you stir it vigorously, you can mold it as you will. Set it
down and it soon hardens into a useless mass.

The pressure of adversity does more than prevent individu-
als or groups from straying from the right path and to con-
fine them to the line of progress. We have already noticed
in the case of man that his deepest needs have often or usually
been his best assets. A certain amount of hardship and ad-

"THE SURVIVAL OF "THE FlTtESr 113

versity is essential to complete development. It has been
well said that the surroundings which are most favorable to
progress are those which offer the greatest number and variety
of stimuli which will continually call into action all the powers
of the individual. A life of ease means lack of stimuli to ac-
tion, hence the full development of but few powers. Power
and efficiency come only through vigorous exercise, and
strength through struggle. Nature sifts out the weak-willed as
well as the weak-bodied.

The obstacles may be so great that it is almost or quite im-
possible for the average form to overcome them and survive,
in this case few are spared. But progress comes only through
the steady testing and training of the growing power and com-
pelling it to accomplish to-day what was impossible a year
or millennium ago.

" Suffering and hardship do not, as a rule, abate the love
of life; they seem on the contrary to give it a larger zest.
The sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and
struggle are what excite and inspire us; the hour of triumph
is what brings the void." ^

Yet Nature's severity is really kindness. She is really con-
tinually spurring her favorites to a higher and keener enjoy-
ment. Idleness is unbearable to the healthy, lack of all hard-
ship unendurable to the strong. Normal exercise of any organ
always brings pleasure; the higher the power exercised the
higher the joy. This is one reason why the motives peculiar
to each higher plane of life supersede and dominate those of
the lower.

Why has no form ever enjoyed dominance for a time and
then added the higher power and become also fit? Why did
not some ancient cat develop tooth and claw as long as these
were highly profitable and then devote its energy to develop-
ing a thinking brain? Fortunately no cat ever did this, other-
wise learned societies would have met on the back fence and
you and I have been spared the malady of thought. There
are many reasons. Only a very prophetic cat could have fore-

1 126:47.

114 "fHE COMING OF MAN

seen any advantage in such a change. If it could have awak-
ened to a dim feeling of such a need, it would have been too
late for it to turn back.

Nature seems to say to every group of animals: " Try
whatever experiment you will, along any line. But once
started you must keep to that line and discover its logical re-
sult." That is the " law of the jungle." A wise, if illiterate,
minister said that the most important text in the Bible was:
^' They got a-going, and they couldn't stop." The fittest is
always the parent, never the child of the dominant.

Dominance and progress are mutually incompatible in the
same species. You can very easily fail of both, you can
choose between them, you cannot have both. Fitness may in
the end triumph, it probably or surely will, you will not live
to see it. This seems true of animals and men. The logic
of evolution applies to man just as well as to cats and apes.

Man, like the animal, must cultivate steadily and at all
cost the powers which raise him above all lower stages. He
must find higher and more difficult exercises and worthier
forms, expressions and habits than his ancestors attained,
otherwise there is no progress. He must cultivate above all
others the powers which have the broadest and highest ca-
pacities and possibilities. These must be united in one sym-
metrical person controlled by these highest rational powers.
Such are the moral and religious powers which have raised
man to his present lofty position, and have indefinite capacity
for future development.

Socrates is being entertained at a banquet in the house of
Gorgias. The conversation turns first on rhetoric, then on
justice and life. Callicles has exhorted Socrates to practice
the art of dealing with realities, and that which shall gain him
a reputation for common sense; to emulate not the men who
waste their time in probing useless questions concerning truth
and justice, but rather those who possess means and reputa-
tion and all other good things of life. He has assured Soc-
rates that the end of all his work will be sentence in the
courts and death by the vote of his fellow-citizens. One after

"THE SURVIVAL OF tHE Fir^ESr 115

another Socrates silences his opponents and closes the dis-
cussion with a statement of his own belief:

" So, bidding farewell to those things which most men count
honors, and looking onward to the truth, I shall earnestly en-
deavor as far as may be in goodness and thus live and thus,
when the time comes, die. . . . The best way of life is to
practice justice and every other virtue and so to live and so
to die. This way, then, we will follow, and we will call on all
other men to do the same; not that way which you believe in
and call upon me to follow for that way, Callicles, is worth-
less."

Callicles and Socrates differed in their standards of value.
There are many molluscan or carnivorous systems of phi-
losophy abroad to-day. But their defenders fail to give due
credit to the original discoverers and practitioners of their
school. Socrates' language sounds strange and foreign to
them. It is not up to date. But were their systems not dis-
proved as inadequate by human experiment and experience be-
fore the close of Palaeolithic time? It is the old story: So-
crates standing for fitness, Callicles for dominance.

Callicles was a shrewd prophet. Socrates was condemned
to death and refused to listen to his friends who had bribed the
jailer to let him escape. He could hear the pleading of the
laws, '' ringing in his ears like the music of the flutes of
the Corybants and nothing else." He drank the hemlock
cheerfully, and died the gentleman that he always had been.

Says Wundt concerning the goal and ends of life according
to the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle: " The end and goal
of life is a harmoniously developed soul whose powers are not
divided into hostile camps but every one subject to the whole;
all guided by the highest power, the Reason, which alone has
absolute value and worth in itself. . . . Thus arises a har-
monious soul, a personality complete in itself. Only he who
has attained this stage possesses all the virtues even the
highest, wisdom, the virtue of the rational aspects of the
soul." 2 But Greek literature, art and philosophy are all

ii6 'THE COMING OF MAN

"back-numbers." We have already quoted Huxley's defini-
tion of a liberally educated man.

Says William James, the Pragmatist: " In all ages the man
whose determinations are swayed by reference to the most
distant end has been held to possess the highest inteUigence.
The tramp who lives from hour to hour; the Bohemian whose
engagements are from day to day; the bachelor who builds
for a single life; the father who acts for another generation;
the patriot who thinks of a whole community and many gen-
erations; and finally the philosopher and saint whose cares
are for humanity and eternity — these range themselves in an
unbroken hierarchy."^

James' patriot, to say nothing of philosopher and saint,
seems to me to have caught and been persuaded of a vision
and promise so grand, dim, distant, hazy and uncertain in
outline, to be investing so largely in uncertain because distant
" futures," that he must be walking far more by faith than
by sight. But we will let that pass. Any description of a
great life is always cold, inadequate and unsatisfactory. We
are really stirred by the idea of fitness only when we see it
incarnated and embodied in a Lincoln or Socrates or any one
of Heine's " apostolic succession of great souls."

But these men have a far higher use. Nature trained man
to the discovery and practice of fitness largely through tribal
pressure and compulsion. Then she set him free to follow his
own conscience as a moral person, who cannot be forced into
the highest stage of progress. He can be drawn or attracted
by loyalty to a hero worthy of the name.

The dominant forms pass away, the fittest endure, strive
and progress. Nature seems to look upon the dominant as a
necessary but temporary nuisance and evil of which she makes
the best use she can. She turns such to account by making
them police the road or stimulate and exercise the fit. Then
she weeds them out and kills them off. No dominant form is
ever the ancestor of anything higher, or of any descendant
worth our attention. No one of our ancestors has ever been

3 127:101.

rHE SURVIVAL OF tHE Fir^ESt 117

dominant. It is not in our heredity, it is always an acquired
character. In most of the views and theories not to mention
practices, of to-day dominance and fitness are regarded as
synonyms. They are really antitheses, mutually incompatible.

All our mammalian ancestors, and birds and mammals gen-
erally, have been social forms giving mutual aid. Is Huxley
speaking the truth when he says: '' The practice of that which
is ethically best — what we call goodness or virtue — involves
a course of conduct which in all respects is opposed to that
which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence " ?

Says Thomson: "In thinking of the 'process of Natural
Selection it is of real importance to recognize, with Darwin,
that the phrase ' struggle for existence ' is used ' in a wide
and metaphorical sense,' including much more than an inter-
necine scramble for the necessaries of Hfe, — including indeed
all endeavors for preservation and welfare. Not only of the
individual, but the offspring as well. ... It is much more than
a long-drawn-out series of family quarrels ending in more
room and food for a few surviving members: it may often be
more justly described as an endeavor after well-being. And
what may have been primarily self-regarding impulses be-
come replaced by others which are distinctively species main-
taining, the self failing to find realization apart from its
family and its kindred." " The reason why we are so much
concerned with getting away from an ultra-Darwinian picture
of Nature is not merely because it seems to us inaccurate, but
because the libellous conception projected from human society
upon Nature has been brought back again to society as a guide
and sanction of human conduct, even as an ethical and polit-
ical ideal." ^

And yet during the building up of the neuro-muscular sys-
tem by worms and early vertebrates, there was much of the
gladiatorial struggle and competition to the death. There are
undeserved misery, pain, suffering and injustice still. We
cannot deny it. We are here to remove or at least mitigate
them. Let us assume honestly and squarely our share of the

*K. 164.

ii8 fHE COMING OF MAN

blame even if we can hardly pronounce Nature innocent.
There is something wild, untamed in us both. We must get
on together, as best we can. But let us never forget that in
the end and long run Nature is always on the side of fitness.^
Is it, perhaps, the old story of Gareth and Lynnette?

Nature is masked, and life is an enigma, always a struggle,
frequently a death-grapple in the dark. It is altogether too
big and grand for our understanding. Every attempt to re-
duce it to a scheme is doomed to failure. Perhaps it was so
intended and planned. It always has been and always will
be an investment in futures, an adventure; and we would not
have it otherwise. In the end, in spite of her jeers, pricks
and buffets, Nature is for us, not against us. This is enough.
Impavidi progrediamur. Gentlemen-adventurers all.

Says Bergson: " All the living hold together, and all yield
to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on
the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity,
in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside
and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge,
able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formi-
dable obstacles, perhaps even death." ^

5 T. 228.
^I 271.

XI

PERFECT HEALTH

A TEACHER of philosophy once said that Aristotle
after hearing and contributing to the endless fas-
cinating discussions in Plato's Academy came away
with a passion for the obvious. There is nothing dazzling
about obvious truths any more than there is about fitness.
Hence we are quite apt to forget both. But they are always
worth thinking about. Indeed a passion for the obvious is
one aspect of genius. Aristotle declared that it was obvious
that a certain amount of wealth was better than poverty, and
that health was better than disease.

Health is evidently the first prerequisite to fitness. This
also is a truism. It is equally evident that perfect health is
very rare. Statistics collected during the Civil War showed
that only about one-third of the men drafted for service were
fit to bear arms, and many of these proved unable to endure
the hardships and strain of a soldier's life. Probably not
one in ten was what an athlete would call fit. Nearly all
showed minor weaknesses.

All of us remember certain red-letter days in our lives. We
awoke in the morning from a refreshing sleep. The air
seemed to tingle with energy, we were eager to begin the day's
work; and what a day it was! Work became play and went
on rapidly, easily, successfully. Difficulties and hard prob-
lems only stimulated instead of depressing us. Obstacles
which had blocked our paths dwindled and disappeared. It
was our mountain top of vision, and we went in its strength
many days. Fears cast no shadows, we saw everything clear
and in due perspective.

119

JS^'

120 THE COMING OF MAN

It is difficult to estimate the value of such a day. Was it
five or twenty-five times as great as our average? It was our
day of as nearly perfect health as is possible for us. Such
days are few and rare.

No physician could have told us why the next day was dull.
The physical change was probably slight, and may have af-
fected a very small part of our bodies: a Hmited slight in-
flammation, a very little uneasiness, a local weakness or strain,
a slight general lassitude or weariness. It was only a slight
indisposition, but it cut down the zest and value of our work
far below our average. Our health was still good, but not
perfect.

The trained athlete is well aware of these facts. A very
slight breach of training would not perceptibly injure his
health, but it might easily cost him the race. He must be at
the top-notch of condition. It is obvious that a slight physical
betterment may double our efficiency.

Our strength and endurance are measured largely by our
weakest organ or part, like the weakest Knk in a chain. If
our lungs furnish only fifty per cent, of the needed oxygen,
good muscles cannot do their full amount of work, and will
probably degenerate. If our feeble stomachs can digest only
'' educator " crackers and broth, where is the fuel for the mi-
croscopic neuro-muscular engines? We need a trained athletic
digestive system as the foundation of health and greatness.

We must say the same of every organ. Temporary weak-
ness of any smallest part is immediately telegraphed to the
nerve-centers and depresses the tone of the whole body. This
universal tyranny of the weakest part is probably most severe
in individuals of highest culture and greatest refinement.
When the deacon built a shay whose weakest part was just as
strong as the rest, he made a very serviceable as well as durable
machine. All this is obvious.

We are slowly learning the supreme importance of propor-
tion and symmetry in the human body. The old-fashioned
gymnast was a monstrosity, with overhanging shoulders, bulg-
ing arms and shipwrecky legs. He looked like a triangle walk-

PERFECT HEALrn 121

ing on its apex. The modern athlete would furnish a model
for a Greek statue. Proportion, symmetry and harmony are
the foundation and essence of both strength and beauty.

Our American maxim, "You can't have too much of a
good thing," is obviously untrue. Said the genial and wise
old writer of Ecclesiastes: ''Be not righteous overmuch,
wherefore :.houldst thou destroy thyself? Be not overmuch
wicked, neither be thou foolish, why shouldst thou die before
thy time? " The wise old Greeks said: '' Too much of noth-
ing.'' Symmetry and proportion giving strength and beauty
are necessary for the mind as well as the body. Mentally
many of us are monstrosities, cripples or " reversed cripples."

What constitutes a healthy nervous system? What would
be its most marked characters, if we could discover so rare
a jewel? Its end and purpose, quite obviously, is to secure
that every incoming stimulus shall call forth from some muscle
or muscles an adequate response, one suited to the emergency.

A fly alights on my nose or head, stimulating my skin. His
tickling is disagreeable and his presence undesirable. It is
not necessary to think much about him. Almost unconsciously
I wave my hand, and he departs. I may do far more; smite
at him and excite myself by addressing winged words as he
sails gaily away. I have wasted valuable energy.

Our whole day's work is no more nor less than a series of
responses to stimuli coming from without or within. The suc-
cess "of the day's work is measured by the adequacy of the
responses, for which, and usually not for the stimulus, we are
responsible. The stimulus is merely an occasion.

I awake in the morning, and the first horrible responsibility
of the day confronts me. I must get up. Just how or why I
do it, I do not know. I find myself on the floor. The chilly
air stimulates me to dress; the pangs of hunger call me to
breakfast, and the bell to my work. So it goes all day long,
stimulus and response.

We are continually pelted by stimuli, like rich men besieged
by begging letters. To respond to every one means nervous
bankruptcy and insanity. Our first question must be: is it

122 tHE COMING OF MAN

really worth while to do anything about it? Pick out of a
college class of one hundred men the ten who appear the lazi-
est, and you will have nearly all the best trained athletes.
Most of us, by lively hustling, waste enough nervous energy
in one day to last us a week; and then wonder what it was all
about. Hustling is conspicuous but not therefore fit. There
is "power in repose." We hurry and worry; and these, ac-
cording to the Arab proverb, are the Devil. Don't waste the
time of a strong man who tells you he has plenty to spare.
Try that experiment on the man who has none; you will do
far less harm. A healthy nervous system is first of all eco-
nomical. There is in it nothing of the hair-trigger releasing
an explosion at the slightest touch; nor is it like a sponge
giving out only under pressure. " Too much of nothing."

Continual responses smooth grooves of least resistance in
our nervous system until all its energy tends to pour out along
these paths. Hence arise habits which we have formed or al-
lowed to grow. William James has spoken of them far bet-
ter than I can.^ The only genuine gentleman is the man who
could not be anything else. This too is obvious.

The different centers in our nervous systems may be com-
pared to the local centers or switch-boards of the telephone
system of a great city, all connected at one center. It might
better be compared to the system of control and communica-
tion, the organization, of a great army whose soldiers would
correspond to our muscular fibrils. There are headquarters
for companies, regiments, brigades and divisions. Behind and
above all are the headquarters of the general in supreme com-
mand, a chief of staff. So we find in our bodies a hierarchy
of centers of different levels, a " reservoir of indetermination,"
all having their final seat of control in the thinking mind.^

It is a long circuit for impulses through this highest center.
Many or most never reach it, but are shifted or arrested
farther down. In this highest region there is opportunity for
delay, for mutual inhibition or conflicting impulses. There

1 127.

2 135 Chaps. II. V.

PERFECT HEAL'TH 123

are always several or many outlets for an outgoing impulse,
leading to very different responses in word or deed. Time
and occasion must be taken into account; it is sometimes best
to wait a little. Many or most of the impulses are discarded,
or neglected and straightway forgotten; some are perceived,
recognized and stored up in the memory until time and occa-
sion are ripe. There is much sifting and selection; and we
may well take heed what and how we hear, feel and re-
member. When the response comes, it often seems a com-
posite result of many stimuli, no one of which alone would
have called it forth in its final form. Here are the place, op-
portunity and necessity for the control of the marvellous sys-
tem by a perfectly healthy mind.

Now our phraseology changes. We no longer speak merely
of vibrations or material impulses, but somehow in correla-
tion with these we recognize that mind has appeared on the
stage. Aladdin has rubbed his lamp. We are intelligent,
feeling and willing beings; and these powers or aspects gov-
ern our actions. Physical health demands the highest and
most harmonious development of all our organs. One weak
spot may destroy the efficiency of the whole body. Must
not the same be true of the mind? This gives room for al-
most infinite variety of possibilities.

We say that our first need is to see things exactly and
clearly as they are. This is well and easily said, and it does
not seem to demand too much from a healthy vision. But it
is not easy, though it may be natural. We all see through the
variegated glasses of heredity and early environment and edu-
cation. Every object of practical interest is seen through the
glass of prejudice, and the prejudices of the ignorant are mild
and harmless compared with those of the trained specialist.
We see it from our own standpoint, rarely in its true perspec-
tive, and relations with the whole; never from all sides and
in its place in time, " sub specie ceternitatis.'' The blind spots
in our mortal eyes, due to defects of inheritance, training, dis-
use or misuse and degeneration, render many of its finest
points invisible. The same object or event has a totally

124 "^^^ COMING OF MAN

different appearance, meaning, value and interest for different
men and women, and for the same man at two o'clock of a
restless night and an hour after breakfast the next morning.
Finally, the great thing is to see men, women, and especially
boys and girls, not only as they are but as they may become.
Without this vision men and people perish.

We hear much, and cannot think too much, of the psychology
of interest.^ Interest is focussed and absorbed attention;
and focussed attention means will, purpose, and action along
the line of the absorbing, controlling interest. The object of
interest, has great value in our eyes, though others may not
share our estimate. Most of us have some hazy, more or
less distorted sense of values. Few of us have any fixed in-
telligent scale by which we measure values of different degrees
and especially of different quality and kind. That which is of
highest value and therefore of most intense interest and closest
attention becomes the end of life.

The Westminster Catechism took it for granted that man
has a chief end. This view is now a back-number, though we
may return to it. Our denial or forgetfulness of it has dis-
advantages. The architecture of our life, if we have any, is
of the Queen Anne style, mostly additions and departures;
and the same defect mars our minor efforts. To change our
illustration, our course even in fairest weather is that of a
boat carrying much sail, beating against the wind. The zig-
zag seems to be our line of beauty, as '' jazz " is our ideal of
melody.

This sense of values was a characteristic of the Hebrew and
Greek mind. The whole '' wisdom literature " is a study of
values. It underlies all the teaching of the Master. His
great question is: " What shall it profit a man? " The hero
of his most striking parables is the man who knows a really
good thing when he discovers it, a unique pearl, a hidden
treasure. He was a dealer in futures and loved such. The
same is true of the wisdom of Greek philosophy, art and litera-
ture, with its marvellous clearness, wholeness and sanity of

^ id2. 114. 188.

PERFECT HEALTH 125

view, its perspective and sense of symmetry and proportion, its
appraisals and appreciations in art, literature and life. But
why waste time on Hebrew or Greek thought? We are pure-
blood, modern, nordic Aryans.

Evidently the foundation of perfect sanity or mental health
is a high harmonious development of all our mental and
physical powers; a well proportioned, beautiful, strong body
with a sound mind whose fundamental character is a wisdom
which is a sure touchstone of values in ends and means. How
this can be attained, what is the source of such wisdom, or the
path to her house is another question.

A shrewd old country doctor used to say to a young mother:
^' Madam, don't forget that Nature has made that baby about
right. Don't you spoil it." All babies are not made and
born all right. Many fail to measure up to Nature's standards
and die, others are killed off during the first year. The con-
stitution of the baby is an hereditary endowment and weak or
strong accordingly. " Our constitution is an entailed estate
which must pass to our heirs with all its worth and encum-
brances." If the children are to be healthy, training must
begin with the parents.

What does Nature demand of the baby? If he eats, digests,
sleeps, breathes and grows well he is doing his whole duty.
We test him mainly by the steadiness of his growth in weight.
Soon he begins to sit up and to kick, and his shoulder muscles
swing his arms like flails. There is implanted in him a ten-
dency to use every organ just as soon as it is mature enough
to be stimulated by exercise to further growth. When it has
had exercise enough, it and he tire. The early use of the
heavy fundamental muscles of trunk, shoulder and thigh
stimulates general health and strength. It stimulates also the
develoDment of the fundamental nerve-centers, and fortifies
the whole nervous system against weakness and collapse.
Here the foundations of health and strength are laid deep and
strong. The baby and young child are chiefly animal. Let
them be healthy animals in a healthy environment.

126 "THE COMING OF MAN

The kindergarten period is predominantly sensory, but may
easily be made too much so. The young child enjoys run-
ning and will soon begin to climb, possibly in honor of his
arboreal ancestors. All this is natural and developmental.
Sensation, imagination and imitation mingle in varied amounts
in the activities of this period.

Between seven and twelve the social but competitive games
appear. Boys and girls play in groups, but every one usually
plays for himself. Tag and other running games are the
earliest. These still involve the use of the heavier muscles
and exercise the largest amount of muscular tissue with the
smallest expenditure of nervous energy. These exercises
stimulate the growth of heart, lungs and all the visceral organs
without over-taxing the very immature brain. If one organ
is undersized, it has to work the hardest to meet the require-
ments of the game and receives the most exercise and stimulus.
Then the child tires and rests. No one can fail to notice in
healthy children how rapidly periods of most vigorous exercise
alternate with change of play or complete rest. The body
grows fast and symmetrically, and the child waxes strong.

Play still furnishes the best mental training. Watch a game
of tag. The sense-organs are all alert. The attention is well
focussed. The will is being trained. The child must size up
the situation, and grasp the opportunity once for all. He can-
not stand shivering on the brink of action. Thinking, willing
and doing are united. The same movement is repeated until
perfected, and with undiminished interest. The child forgets
himself and loses shyness and self-consciousness in the game.
As he grows older, the opportunity for skill, thought, plan and
strategy, constantly increases. He is learning far more than
the rudiments of the art and science of success in life.

Here he must act on his own initiative. There is no one
to keep telling him just what to do or more frequently what
not to do. He is placed more nearly in the position of the
boy on the old-fashioned farm, who had to help himself out
of every emergency as best he could. The heaviest losses in
our modern education lie along these lines.

PERFECT HEALTH 127

The kindergarten period is one of comparative peace. Now
the child is learning to get on with his fellows. He is finding
how much he can claim and when and how much he must
yield; and how to yield good-naturedly. It is no easy lesson
in this day of small families. Yet it must be learned, or he
will grow up to sorrow. A somewhat robust friend of mine is
apt to explain the weaknesses and defects of certain adults by
saying sadly: " They did not play enough with bad boys on
the village street when they were young-" There is usually a
grain of truth even in such a heresy. The result of the ex-
perience is worth far more than it costs, even if the price is
sometimes tears and bloodshed or a black eye.

Here the boy and girl receive their first lessons in the grand-
est art or science of life, that of making many firm friend-
ships. If they do not learn to make them now, they probably
never will.

The conception of fair and unfair play is almost the first
genuine and spontaneous moral distinction which the child
makes. He is still very hazy in his ideas as to rights of prop-
erty and far from clear in his theories as to the necessity of
truthfulness. But he is sure that the boy who does not play
fair or cheats is mean, which is his word for total depravity.
This germ has marvellous possibilities, if fostered and cul-
tivated. If you despise or neglect it, if you attempt to re-
place it by your own adult system of ethics, the boy and girl
lose faith in their own conceptions of morality, they can
neither understand nor appreciate yours; they are left without
any system which appeals to them, and their last state is
worse than their first. Indeed they have fallen from a high
estate. Despise not the day of small things.

We must carry the spirit of play through adult Hfe. Joy,
like sunlight, promotes health. The work from which the play
element is absent can never be of the highest order. Art is
like play in that it is its own reward. Opportunity is an even
larger and higher word than duty, and opportunity must be

enjoyed.

About ten or eleven new instincts begin to emerge. We

128 "THE COMING OF MAN

name only one, the collecting instinct. This leads to the close
study of nature and of many realms of human activity. All
these studies broaden life and increase its joy.

We must hasten on to the close of school life to the last
part of the period of adolescence in the study of which Hall
has done so fine pioneer work. Boy and girl have attained
nearly their adult size and proportions after alternating periods
of increase of height and girth. They feel the rising tide of
vigor and power. They are still far from adult endurance,
when the tissues have toughened and hardened. One great
danger is the exhausting over-excitement of too intense social
life. Here again moderation.

The games of the period are equally characteristic. They
are group games played with sides, each of which represents
a gang, class, school or town. They demand high physical
development, self-control, quickness, endurance; more com-
plex movements, the use of finer muscles and of higher centers
in the brain. Strategy counts heavily. The boy plays with
his head, and is a practical psychologist; recognizing the
strong and weak points in physique, temper, character and v/it
of every opponent. Not a movement or gesture escapes
him.

He is a member of a team and learns to submit to criticism,
training, discipline. We intellectuals may well grant that there
must be some reason for the preference by captains of industry
of young men who have excelled in athletics. It is a very
suggestive phenomenon. The chief sin of big business is that
it absorbs the men whom we need as teachers and preachers
to educate the generation which will make the America of
twenty years hence.

The attainment of full growth and muscular power, the large
heart and lungs, the well oxygenated blood, the activity and
young vitality of all the tissues, give buoyancy and courage,
a sense of power and longing for entire freedom and revolt
against control. A new world opens before the boy as fresh
and fair as on the morning of creation, a new life boundless
in opportunity, endless in scope and time. He is sure that

PERFECT HEALTH 129

plodding parents and teachers cannot understand him or the
glories of life. Unfortunately he is usually right.

He must gird his loins and go whither he will; must taste
of every experience, is willing to meet both joy and pain with
'' frolic welcome." He has not yet been saddened by expe-
rience or disillusioned by disappointment, nor trained to en-
durance.

Nature is loosing her leading strings and setting him free
to forge his own character. In old times the adolescent ran
away to sea, now we send him to college. Here, beyond the
benevolent watch of neighbors, he begins to experiment in
life, to make his blunders, to find himself, his strong and weak
points, and to grow into a man.

Authority has only a superficial hold upon him, tradition
still less. The influences of early home training rooted deep
in his subconscious life are exceedingly powerful for good,
sometimes for evil. Yet he cannot or will not stand alone.
Individual judgment and conscience develop very slowly. To
understand him and his actions under certain conditions you
must study the psychology of the mob.

He is a mixture of contradictions, an enigma to himself and
us. He might well say: '' My name is legion for we are
many." In the ferment of youth all that is trifling and worth-
less comes to the surface, the strong and sweet are hidden be-
neath the froth.

He has no trace of a conception of the meaning and value
of time, lives in the present moment, cannot play a waiting
game. If the sun shines to-day, it will always be cloudless;
if the maid of his adoration has frowned, he is in despair; she
will never smile again. He betrays all his momentary conceits
and foolishness; his deep humiliation over his blunders, fail-
ures and sins he keeps to himself.

Nature puts a shell around chicken-embryos to prevent med-
dling intrusion with her vital processes. She puts a similar
shell around the adolescent. His confidence is reserved for
friends of his own age. On the whole it is best so, our med-
dHng fingers might mar the process. He must fight his own

130 "THE COMING OF MAN

battles. If his father will help him, let the father renew his
youth; it will not hurt him.

It is the epoch of the reign not of cold judgment but of the
heart out of which are the issues of life. Feelings and emo-
tions are racial, crystallized out of ages of human experience,
sifted, tried and tested. Opinions, and most of our theories,
are individual, of yesterday, and will be forgotten to-morrow.
Trust his feelings. Deal honestly and squarely, play fair with
him; and the harder you apply curb and spur, the better he
will like you in the end. He is searching for a leader, and
usually, like St. Christopher, he will begin by following the
strongest. In time he will find his hero and king.

He is overflowing with loyalty. He has probably been con-
verted at fourteen or sixteen, the years of rapid increase in
girths and lung-capacity, marking rapid increase in vitality
and vigor. Give him a virile Christianity, and you have the
stuff of a hero and martyr. If he is healthy, he is an idealist.

He is a fine target for criticism. We can hardly fail to
hit and probably wound him, if that is what we wish; though
he will probably not show it, and our missiles may
rebound. If we wish to correct him we must look back a
few years, remember and confess some of our own vast igno-
rance, a few choice specimens of our blunders and follies, our
perversity and stupidity, not to mention sins and transgres-
sions. Then he may listen to us. If we are too superior, we
cannot meet him on his own ground of experience. If he has
little respect for us and our opinions, the fault may be partly
ours. This, again, seems quite obvious.

At his best he is a very attractive and exasperating, crude,
immature, inexperienced irresponsible young barbarian, re-
minding us of the primitive Achaean or Celt. As the Irish
woman said of her son: " 'Twixt the plague of his living
and the fear of his dying I have no peace in life." We enjoy
the vigor and boldness of his thought and expression; the
freshness and freedom of his argument or assertion untram-
meled by logic, facts or experience. He will have experience.

PERFECT HEAL'TH 131

he is having it. Let us rejoice in his courage. We cannot
help liking him. On the whole, he has a fairly healthy mind
in a very healthy body. '^ Eden isn't quite done yet," as Mark
Tapley said to Martin Chuzzlewit, but under proper cultiva-
tion it is a field of great promise.

Has not Nature done her full share by implanting com-
pelling instincts and tendencies? Has she not started boy
and girl on the road to fitness? If they complete the line of
development marked out by her in play-instincts, will they
not come to something pretty fine and grand? Is failure, if
it comes, due to Nature or to bad nurture, or the clumsiness
of artificial education, the emptiness and staleness of artificial
environment? Environment is largely forced upon the child,
in spite of himself and Nature. Let us be men enough not
to try to throw on Nature the blame for our own weakness,
faults and sins; that is childish.

Our young friend revisits us at thirty. Physically he looks
as vigorous as at twenty and with more endurance. As an
athlete his powers have probably culminated. Whether this
is necessary, I dare not say. He loses more hours and days
from his work through slight indisposition, brief acute attacks
of indigestion, bronchitis, and similar ailments. Nature is
seeking out his weakest point and attacking it, soon she will
lay siege. His body is passing its prime. It holds its highest
level for only a few years. The effect on his elan and morale
is not good. Dr. Johnson probably exaggerated somewhat
when he said: '' Sir, a sick man is always a scoundrel "; it
is not always true.

He has found his place and calling, and is successful in his
work: doctor, lawyer, merchant, or chief. We are proud of
him. He is a master in his craft and knows his business.
Too often he has focussed his attention steadily on this point.
His bundle of interests has shrunken accordingly. He no
longer cares for art, music, literature, or general science, or
for questions outside of his own calling. His sympathies have
narrowed. He reminds us somewhat of a horse driven in

132 fHE COMING OF MAN

blinders along a dusty road with green fields and flowers on
both sides invisible to him. He is growing near-sighted from
watching his steps.

He has found the world different from his youthful expecta-
tions. Now he knows it as it is and can smile at his youthful
dreams and illusions. He is a realist accepting the world.
He conforms resolutely to the actual. Specialization is neces-
sary, every one must do his bit. The more minute the spe-
ciality, the narrower and more complete and absorbing the
specialization, the greater the rewards. The '' bit " is not big
enough to allow breadth and symm.etry of development.
Mentally the man now reminds us of the old-fashioned gym-
nast trained to use only a few muscles, and perform a few
striking tricks or feats on one piece of apparatus amid the
applause of the spectators. He is on the road to dominance,
a highway " paved with good intentions." He is in danger
of becoming a torso, a cripple; or an even worse monstrosity,
a " reversed cripple." He may yet be forced to plead the old
excuse : " As thy servant was busy here and there, the man
was gone." This danger besets every calling.

We cannot all do all things. Every one must do his little
part, and contribute only his best. Every man must spe-
cialize in his work. But even in work, and especially in
leisure — which, according to Aristotle, is the end of all labor,
— no part or power of body or mind can say to any other
part: " I have no need of thee." The neglected, disused or
misused, part weakens and is likely to become diseased. It
remains the weakest spot and will tyrannize over us and drag
us down.

We are all of us victims of over-adaptation to a narrow and
artificial, unnatural environment. Through over-adaptation
we become passive creatures and creations of present surround-
ings, and environment, not their masters and moulders. The
artificial fashions and conventions of every era pass quickly
away.

Biologically this has spelled, sometimes temporary domi-
nance to a few, always degeneration and failure in the end.

PERFECr HEALTH 133

Our present standards are obviously purely economic, regard-
less of any not immediate future. But even the economist
may grant to the biologist that it would be well if this arrest
of growth, over-speciaHzation, decay of powers, and asymmetry,
should be postponed as long and mitigated as far as possible.

There is a large grain of truth in Osier's theory; William
James tells us that old-fogeyism begins earlier than most of
us think, usually about twenty-five.* As a rule, the longer
the period of development, and the later the attainment of
maturity, the higher is the adult form. Precocity in develop-
ment is a dangerous symptom. The height of a man's at-
tainments depends largely upon how long he can continue to
grow. Hence the value of young men who persist in boyish
immaturity and seem unable to find themselves. They re-
mind us of the generalized form from which, rather than from
the specialized, the higher stage always springs- Specialized
forms are barren, and over-specialized are unhealthy and de-
cadent.^ This is the biological rule for species, and it seems
equally appHcable to individuals. The only powers on which
one can afford to specialize are the highest manifestations of
the spirit, and a proper healthy development of these ought to
imply the use of all the lower powers.

There are always some very healthy young men who re-
fuse to allow their vocations to limit their sympathies and in-
terests and thus stop development. They maintain their
health and grow long after others have begun to deteriorate.
They Hve and flourish in enjoyment of more than youthful
vigor, of the endurance of maturity and the wisdom of old
age, until they are cut down untimely at four-score or later,
irrefutable arguments for immortality. They always retain
their youthful courage, enthusiasm and idealism. Experience
has made them wise, and they have attained a steady, in-
domitable, infectious hopefulness impossible to youth. They
are obstinate believers in the fine and good which they dis-
cover and call forth in men and in a goodly world.

4 142. 32. 46. I. 133-

5 142. 72.

134 'fHE COMING OF MAN

Their humor is a symptom of long experience well used,
of shrewd, broad views, kindly amused sympathy and right
perspective; in one word, of wisdom. They seem to think
that the chief reward of Hfe, if not its chief end, is the joy
of living. Somehow they find or make it exceedingly attrac-
tive, even if their " success " in life may not equal that of
men who through exploitation and over-adaptation have at-
tained dominance.

They are especially attractive to youth. We found it good
to be with them, for virtue and healing went out from them.
Their strength is " as the shadow of a great rock in a weary
land." There is always something infectious about them, and
people press to them to be infected; though they rarely preach,
and never have been caught setting an example.

Is it possible that such men ^ are the real leaven of society,
rather than the reformers, example-setters, teachers and
preachers, educators, legislators and even the saints and phi-
losophers? Are they the ones who bring in the dawning en-
vironment of a healthier and better world with which legis-
lators and statesmen, and even practical men must reckon?
Are they the coming men?

It does not seem impossible when we remember that when
law had proved inadequate and weak, and philosophy could
not lift men, and thinkers had become discouraged, a Jewish
carpenter threw one perfectly healthy, symmetrical and infec-
tious life into human society, which spread and seems destined
to turn this old world of ours right-side-up. If his audacious
experiment does not succeed it is hard to imagine what can.
It must succeed. Man is surely coming, though he has not
yet arrived.

Let us not mistake dominance for fitness. We live in a
world of space, extension, form and size. Here bigness counts.
Of the extension, form and size of mind and life I cannot
conceive. We live also in a world of time, duration and du-
rability, hence of qualitative characters and values. We can-
not afford to leave time out of account as some of us seem

®E. g. Doctor Edward Hitchcock.

PERFECT HEALTH 135

to do. Here quality outranks bigness and a small, enduring
minority with time on its side will win in the end; especially
if the minority is an apostolic succession of great infectious
souls. Nature also is on the side of those fittest, and will
not be denied.

Nature obviously urges us to be healthy, fully-developed,
symmetrical, strong and beautiful in mind and body. A wise
old classical teacher used to explain with enthusiasm to suc-
cessive classes of young barbarians that in Hebrew, Greek
and Latin, salvation meant restoration to, and maintenance of,
perfect health; that health, haleness, wholeness and holiness
are all akin in root and synonymous. Perhaps he was quite
right. It looks so. Salvete et valete.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GENERAL

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B. Darwin, C. H., Descent of Man, London, 1871

C. Wallace, A. R., Darwinism, London, 1889

D. Huxley, T. H., Evidences as to Man's Place in Nature, New

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E. Huxley, T. LI., Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews, New

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F. Kropotkin, P. A,, Mutual Aid, a Factor in Evolution, New

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G. Osborn, H. P., Origin and Evolution of Life, New York,

1917
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T. Smyth, N., Through Science to Faith
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Psychology, New York, 1916

136

BIBLIOGRAPHT 137

V. Wilder, H. H., History of the Human Body, New York, 1909
W. Wilder, H. H., Man's Prehistoric Past, New York, 1923
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CHAPTER I. THE COMING OF LIFE. See G. M. H.

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2. Conn, H. W., The Story of Germ^Life, New York, 1913

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5. Jennings, H. S., Biology, New York, 1914

6. Jennings, H. S., Behavior of the Lower Organisms, New
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CHAPTER II. THE COMING OF A BACKBONE, AND CHAPTER III,
THE RISE OF LAND LIFE. ScC H.

10. Cockerell, T. D., Zoology, New York, 1920

11. Borraddale, L. A., Manual of Elementary Zoology, London,
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12. Shull, A. P., Prinicples of Animal Biology, New York,
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13. Woodruff, L. L., Foundations of Biology, New York. 1Q22

14. Newman, H. H., Vertebrate Zoology, New York, 1920
Or any textbook of Zoology

CHAPTER IV. THE COMING OF SAVAGE MAN.

See H. R. U. V. See H.

15. Osborn, H. F., Age of Mammals, New York. 1910

16. Loomis, F. B.., Adaptation of Primates, Amer. Nat. Vol.
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17. Barren, J., " Probable Relations of Climatic Changes to
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IV

138 BIBLIOGRAPHT

18. Berry, E. W., " Environment of Ape-Man," Sci. Mon., N.
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19. Jones, F. W., Arboreal Man, New York, Chap. XXXI, p.
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20. Keith, A., Ancient Types of Man, New York, 191 1

21. Haddon, A, C, Wanderings of Peoples, Cambridge, 191 1

22. Haddon, A. C, Races of Men and their Distrihitiion, New
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22i. Keane, A. H., Ethnology, Cambridge, 1901

24. Osborn, H. F., Men of the Old Stone Age, New York, 191 5

25. Sollas, W. J., Ancient Hunters, 2d Ed., London, 191 5

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28. Heineman, T. R., Psychic and Economic Results of Man's
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29. Bagehot, W., Physics and Politics, New York, 1873

30. Drummond, H., Ascent of Man, New York, 1894

31. Westermarck, E. A., History of Human Marriage, London,
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CHAPTER V. THE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION.

A. RACES

40. Ripley, W. L., Races of Europe, New York, 1899

41. Sergi, G., The Mediterranean Race, London, 1901

42. Klassen, K., Die Volker Ewopas zur jungeren Steinzeit,
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43. Deniker, J., The Races of Man, New York, 1900, cf. 23

BIBLIOGRAPHT 139

B. STONE MONUMENTS. See U.

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50. Windle, B. C. A., Remains of Prehistoric Age in England,
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51. Cartailhae, E., La France Prehistoriqiie , Paris, 1889

C. GENERAL

55. Tyler, J. M., The New Stone Age in Northern Europe, New
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140 BIBLIOGRAPHT

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71. Frazer, J. G., The Golden Bough, 3rd Ed., London, 1914,
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CHAPTER VI. RISE OF PERSONALITY.

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CHAPTER VIII. A,. CONTROL IN ORGANISM

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BIBLIOGRAPHT 141

94 Jenkinson, J. W., Experimental Embryology, Oxford, 1909,
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B. NATURE

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97. Wallace, A. R., Contributions to the Theory of Natural
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1921, p. 67

102. Nietzsche, F., Complete works, (O. Levy Ed.) 2d Ed. New
York, 1910, Vol. XI, Thus Spake Zarathustra, pp. 166, 171

103. Journal of Morphology, Vol. VHI, pp. 649, 607

104. Wilson, E. B., The Cell, New York, 2d Ed., 1904

CHAPTER IX. MAN AND ENVIRONMENT.

See A. C. H. L. M. Q.
91, 96-98

1 10. Romanes, G. J., Darwin and After Darwin, 4th Ed., Chicago,

1910

111. Baldwin, J. M., Development and Evolution, New York, 1902

112. Lock, R. H., Recent Progress in the Study of Variation,
Heredity and Evolution, New York, 1916

113. Henderson, L. J., The Fitness of the Enzironmcnt, New

York, 191 3

114. Art, Adaptation, in Hastings, /. A. Encyclopedia of Reli-
gion and Ethics

142 BIBLIOGRAPHT

115. Conklin, E. G., Heredity and Environment in the Develop-
ment of Men, Princeton, 191 5

116. Herbert S., First Principles of Evolution, London, 1913

CHAPTER X. SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.

See A. C. H. J. L. M.

N. P. 97, no, under Natural Selection

125. Wundt, M., Griechische Weltanschaung, Leipsic, 1910

126. James, W., Will to Believe

127. James, W., Psychology, New York, 1893, p. loi

CHAPTER XI. PERFECT HEALTH. Sce 126, I27

135. Tyler, J. M., Growth and Education, Boston, 1907, Bibliog-

raphy

136. Burk, F. L. and C. F., The Study of the Kindergarten
Problem, San Francisco, 1899

137. Burk, F. L., The Kindergarten Child, Physically, N. E. A.

1899, 570. cf. 1051

138. Hall, G. S., Contents of Children's Minds on Entering School,

Pedagog, Sem. 1891, Vol. 139

139. Hall, G. S., Adolescence, New York, 1904

140. Hall, G. S., Youth, New York, 1906

141. Gulick, L. H., The Efficient Life, New York, 1907

142. James, W., TaJks to Teachers, New York, 1905

INDEX

INDEX

Adolescence, 128

Adversity, 112

Agriculture, Rise of, 55, 65

Aladdin's Lamp, 7, 123

Alciope, 17

Amoeba, 4

Ammonites, 23

Amphibia, 32, 73

Annelids, 15, 72

Apes, 38, 40, 76

Arboreal Life, Results of, 38

Archenteron, 10

Arthropoda, IQ, 24, 72

Aryans, 65, 125

Athletes, 120, 122

Baby, Life of, 125

Bacteria, 2

Bergson, (Quoted), 7, 83, 84,

Birds, 35, 74, 109

Bone, 28, 84

Brain, 25, 28, 39, 75, 78

Bronze Age, 67

Carnivora, (Cats), 47, 110
Cartilage, 28
Cells, 4, 11
Cellulose, 9
Cenozoic, 37
Celts, 67

Cephalopods, 22, 108
Chellean Period, 49
Chlorophyl, 9
Chordata, 27, 107
Chromatin, 4
Circulation, 14
Clam, 19

Coelenterates, 10, 71
Coelom, 16
Complexity of Man, 91

Conformity to Environment, 97
Conversion, 130
Conscience, Tribal, 56
Cooperation, Growth of, 58
Cretaceous Period, 36, 41
Cripples, Reversed, 92-3, 132
Cro-Magnon Race, 51
Ctenophores, 14
Cuttle-fish, 22, 107
Custom, Cake of 57, 58

Dead, Care of, 50, 54
Devonian Period, 31
Dinosaurs, 34
Direction in Evolution, 83
Discovery, 100
Dog-fish, 29
Dolmens, 54
118 Dominance and Fitness, 111, 116, 134

Dominant Functions, 77
Drummond, 47
Dubois, 43

Ear, 17

Echidna, 36

Ectoderm, 10

Education, natural, 81, 112

artificial, 103
Eggs, Size of, 2)2)^ 35
Ellis, 48

Ends and Values, 124
Entoderm, 10
Environment, 97, 101, 131

artificial, 102
Enzymes, 3
Evolution; and Revolution, 78; Logic

of, 71; Direction in, 83
Eye, 17, 25, 100

Family, 47, 49
145

146

INDEX

Fishes; 27, Ganoids, 29-31, Sharks,

28, 108
Fittest, Survival of, 111, 116, 134
Flageliata, 7
Folk-ways, 58

Games, 126, 128
Ganoids, 29-31
Gasteropods, 21
Glacial Period, 46
Gladiatorial Theory, 110
Goddess, Cult of, 63, 66
Greek Civilization, 67
Grosgartach, 53
Gymnasts, 120, 132

Habits, 58, 122
Hairs, 37
Hall. 128

Hamitic Migrations, 45
Hand, 38, 39
Health, 119
Heine, (Quoted), 92
Henley, (Quoted), 69
Heredity, 95
Heroes, Age of, 68
Hormones, 84
Hunting, (Collecting), 54
Huxley, (Quoted), 7, 70, 81, 85, 88,
95, 117

Insects, 24
Intelligence, 75
Interests, 124
Iranian Plateau, 42, 44
Iron Age, 68

James, (Quoted), 113, 116, 133

Java, 43

Johnson, (Quoted), 131

Kindergarten, 126

Lake Dwellings, 53
Land-Life, Rise of, 31
LuU, (Quoted), 33, 41

Mammals, 36, 74

Marsupials, 37, 47

Mass vs. Surface, 6

Mesozoic Era, 1, 36, 109

Metamorphosis, 26

Migrations; of Apes, 42, of Negroes

44, of Hamites and Semites, 45
Mind, 122

Mollusca, 19, 72, 107
Momentum of Evolution, 114
Murray, on Primitive Religion, 60
Muscle, 14, 16, 20, 39, 78
Mysteries, 61

Nageli, 86

Natural Selection, 86

Nature, 88, 94, 112, 116, 118, 131, 135

Neanderthal Man, 46, 49

Needs, 102, 112

Negritos, 44

Negros, 45

Neo-Darwinians, 86

Neo-Lamarckians, 87

Neolithic Period, 53, 64

Nietzsche, (Quoted), 92

Nitrogen, Fixation of, 3

Nucleus, 4

Olympic Religion, 62
Osborn (Quoted), 3, 44, 76
Otolith Vesicles, 17
Over-Adaptation, 98, 103, 132

Palaeolithic Period, 51
Palaeozoic Era, 1, 107
Parenchym, 14
Periods, Geologic, 1
Perivisceral Cavity, 16
Personality, 69, 83
Pigmies, 44
Pithecanthropus, 43
Plants, 8, 9
Plato, 115
Platyhelminthus, 13
Platypus, 36
Play, 126
Pleistocene, 46

INDEX

HI

Plutarch, (Quoted), 63
Precocity, 110
Primates, 38, 41
Progress, 106, 114
Proportion, 120
Protoplasm, 2
Protophyta, 2
Protozoa, 2, 4
Psychozoic Time, 110
Pteropoda, 21

Relations to Surroundings, 99
Religion, 59, 62, 66
Reproduction, 10, 14, 33
Reptiles, 34, 74, 109
Reversed Cripples, 93, 132

Schuchert, (Quoted), 1

Semites, 45

Sense-organs, 14, 16, 25, 29, 100

Sequence of Functions, 71, 79

Sharks, 23, 28, 29, 108

Skeleton, 19, 23, 2.7, 28, 32

Social Life, 57

Socrates and Callicles, 114

Specialization, 132

Squids, 23, 107

Stages in Human Evolution, 77

Stimuli, 121

Struggle for existence, 79

Surroundings and Environment, 99,

105
Symmetry, 91, 120

Taboo, 59

Thomson, (Quoted), 117

Totem, 68

Tribal Conscience, 56

Tribes, 56

Ungulates, 47

Vacuoles, 4

Values, 124

Variation, 87

Vertebrates, 19, 23, 27, 73

Volvox, 7, 10

von Baer, (Quoted), 98

Weakest Part, 120
Weissman (Quoted), 97
Westermarck, (Quoted), 48
Whitman, 79, 85
Wilson, (Quoted), 85
Woman, Neolithic, 55
Wundt, (Quoted), 115

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