tter brains and given a process of
discriminate sifting which would consistently offer rewards to alertness
and foresight, to kin-sympathy and parental care, there seems no great
difficulty in imagining how Man would evolve. We must not think of an
Aristotle or a Newton except as fine results which justify all the
groaning and travailing; we must think of average men, of primitive
peoples to-day, and of our forbears long ago. We must remember how much
of man's advance is dependent on the external registration of the social
heritage, not on the slowly changing natural inheritance.

Looking backwards it is impossible, we think, to fail to recognise
progress. There is a ring of truth in the fine description AEschylus gave
of primitive men that--

first, beholding they beheld in vain, and, hearing, heard not, but,
like shapes in dreams, mixed all things wildly down the tedious
time, nor knew to build a house against the sun with wicketed sides,
nor any woodwork knew, but lived like silly ants, beneath the
ground, in hollow caves unsunned. There came to them no steadfast
sign of winter, nor of spring flower-perfumed, nor of summer full of
fruit, but blindly and lawlessly they did all things.

Contrast this picture with the position of man to-day. He has mastered
the forces of Nature and is learning to use their resources more and
more economically; he has harnessed electricity to his chariot and he
has made the ether carry his messages. He tapped supplies of material
which seemed for centuries unavailable, having learned, for instance,
how to capture and utilise the free nitrogen of the air. With his
telegraph and "wireless" he has annihilated distance, and he has added
to his navigable kingdom the depths of the sea and the heights of the
air. He has conquered one disease after another, and the young science
of heredity is showing him how to control in his domesticated animals
and cultivated plants the nature of the generations yet unborn. With all
his faults he has his ethical face set in the right direction. The main
line of movement is towards the fuller embodiment of the true, the
beautiful, and the good in healthy lives which are increasingly a
satisfaction in themselves.

[Illustration: _Photo: British Museum (Natural History)._

SIDE-VIEW OF A PREHISTORIC HUMAN SKULL DISCOVERED IN 1921 IN BROKEN HILL
CAVE, NORTHERN RHODESIA

Very striking are the prominent eyebrow ridges and the broad