och. Now these men knew how to keep a good fire
burning within their primitive shelter; their skill in the chase
provided them with a well-assorted larder; their fine strong teeth were
such as to make short work of their meals; lastly, they were clever
artisans and one may even say artists in flint and greenstone, not only
having the intelligence to make an economic use of the material at their
disposal, but likewise having enough sense of form to endow their
implements with more than a touch of symmetry and beauty. All this we
know from what they have left behind them; and the rest is silence.

And now let us imagine ourselves possessed of one of those time-machines
of which Mr. H. G. Wells is the inventor. Transported by such means to
the Europe of that distant past, could we undertake to beat the record
of those cave-men?

Clearly, all will depend on how many of us, and how much of the
apparatus of civilization, our time-machine is able to accommodate. If
it were simply to drop a pair of us, naked and presumably ashamed, into
the midst of the rigours of the great Ice Age, the chances surely are
that the unfortunate immigrants must perish within a week. Adam could
hardly manage to kindle a fire without the help of matches. Eve would
be no less sorely troubled to make clothes without the help of a needle.
On the other hand, if the time-machine were as capacious as Noah's Ark,
the venture would undoubtedly succeed, presenting no greater difficulty
than, let us say, the planting of a settlement in Labrador or on the
Yukon. Given numbers, specialized labour, tools, weapons, books,
domesticated animals and plants, and so forth, the civilized community
would do more than hold its own with the prehistoric cave-man, devoid of
all such aids to life. Indeed, it is tolerably certain that, willingly
or unwillingly, our colonists would soon drive the ancient type of man
clean out of existence.

On the face of it, then, it would seem that we, as compared with men of
Glacial times, have decidedly 'progressed'. But it is not so easy to say
off-hand in what precisely such progress consists.

Are we happier? As well ask whether the wild wolf or the tame dog is the
happier animal. The truth would seem to be that wolf and dog alike can
be thoroughly happy each in its own way; whereas each would be as
thoroughly miserable, if forced to live the life of the other. In one of
his most brilliant passages Andrew Lang, after contrasting the