plintered them, and would then have used the sharp fragments. From this
step it would be a small one to break the flints on purpose, and not a
very wide step to fashion them rudely. The later advance, however, may
have taken long ages, if we may judge by the immense interval of time
which elapsed before the men of the neolithic period took to grinding
and polishing their stone tools. In breaking the flints, as Sir J.
Lubbock likewise remarks, sparks would have been emitted, and in
grinding them heat would have been evolved; thus the two usual methods
of 'obtaining fire may have originated.' The nature of fire would have
been known in many volcanic regions where lava occasionally flows
through forests."

It becomes a difficult task to determine how far animals exhibit any
traces of such high faculties as _abstraction_, _general conception_,
_self-consciousness_, _mental individuality_. There can be no doubt, if
the mental faculties of an animal can be improved, that the higher
complex faculties such as abstraction and self-consciousness have
developed from a combination of the simpler ones; this seems to be well
illustrated in the young child, as such faculties are developed by
imperceptible degrees. These high faculties are very sparingly possessed
by the savage; as Buchner[57] has remarked, how little can the
hard-worked wife of a degraded Australian savage, who uses very few
abstract words and cannot count above four, exert her self-consciousness
or reflect on the nature of her own existence. If there exist a class of
people so inferior in their mental faculties as these, it is not
difficult for us to understand how the educated animal who possesses
memory, attention, association, and even some imagination and reason,
can become capable of abstraction, &c., in an inferior degree even to
the savage. It certainly cannot be doubted that an animal possesses
mental individuality--as when a master returns to a dog which he has not
seen for years, and the dog recognizes him at once.

One of the chief distinctions between man and animals is the faculty of
language. Let us look at this for a moment. "The essential differences,"
says Prof. Whitney, "which separate man's means of communication in kind
as well as degree from that of the other animals is that, while the
latter is instinctive, the former is in all its parts arbitrary and
conventional. No man can become possessed of any language without
learning it; no animal (that