STUDY

There has been a lively inquiry after the primeval man. Wanted, a man
who would satisfy the conditions of the miocene environment, and yet
would be good enough for an ancestor. We are not particular about our
ancestors, if they are sufficiently remote; but we must have something.
Failing to apprehend the primeval man, science has sought the primitive
man where he exists as a survival in present savage races. He is, at
best, only a mushroom growth of the recent period (came in, probably,
with the general raft of mammalian fauna); but he possesses yet some
rudimentary traits that may be studied.

It is a good mental exercise to try to fix the mind on the primitive man
divested of all the attributes he has acquired in his struggles with
the other mammalian fauna. Fix the mind on an orange, the ordinary
occupation of the metaphysician: take from it (without eating it) odor,
color, weight, form, substance, and peel; then let the mind still dwell
on it as an orange. The experiment is perfectly successful; only, at the
end of it, you haven't any mind. Better still, consider the telephone:
take away from it the metallic disk, and the magnetized iron, and the
connecting wire, and then let the mind run abroad on the telephone.
The mind won't come back. I have tried by this sort of process to get a
conception of the primitive man. I let the mind roam away back over
the vast geologic spaces, and sometimes fancy I see a dim image of him
stalking across the terrace epoch of the quaternary period.

But this is an unsatisfying pleasure. The best results are obtained by
studying the primitive man as he is left here and there in our era,
a witness of what has been; and I find him most to my mind in the
Adirondack system of what geologists call the Champlain epoch. I suppose
the primitive man is one who owes more to nature than to the forces of
civilization. What we seek in him are the primal and original traits,
unmixed with the sophistications of society, and unimpaired by the
refinements of an artificial culture. He would retain the primitive
instincts, which are cultivated out of the ordinary, commonplace man.
I should expect to find him, by reason of an unrelinquished kinship,
enjoying a special communion with nature,--admitted to its mysteries,
understanding its moods, and able to predict its vagaries. He would be a
kind of test to us of what we have lost by our gregarious acquisitions.
On the one hand, there would be the s