ards his physical endowment.
Now in theory one must admit that it might be otherwise. If Eugenics
were to mature on its purely scientific side, there is no reason why the
legislator of the future should not try to make a practical application
of its principles; and the chances are that, of many experiments, some
would prove successful. But that conscious breeding was practised in
prehistoric times is out of the question. The men of those days were one
and all what we are ourselves--nature's mongrels, now broken up into
varieties by casual isolation, and now by no less casual intermixture
recompounded in a host of relatively unstable forms. Whatever progress,
therefore, may have occurred in this respect has been unconscious. Man
cannot take the credit for it, except in so far as it is indirectly due
to that increase and spread of the race which have been promoted by his
achievements in the way of culture.

The barest outline of the facts must suffice. For the Early Pleistocene,
apart from the Java fossil, _Pithecanthropus erectus_, a veritable
'missing link', whom we may here disregard as falling altogether outside
our world of Europe, there are only two individuals that can with
certainty be referred to this distant period. These are the Piltdown and
the Heidelberg specimens. The former consists of a fragmentary
brain-case, thick-boned and narrow-fronted, but typically human in its
general characters, and of the greater part of a lower jaw, which, as
regards both its own elongated and curiously flanged structure, and that
of the teeth it contained, including an enormous pointed canine, is
conversely more appropriate to an ape-like being than to a man. The
latter consists only of a lower jaw, of which the teeth, even the
canines, are altogether human, whereas the jaw itself is hardly less
simian than that of the Sussex skull. If we add the Java example to the
list of very primitive forms, it is remarkable to note how, though
differing widely from each other, all alike converge on the ape.
Nevertheless, even in Pithecanthropus, the brute is passing into the
man. We note the erect attitude, to be inferred from his thigh-bone, and
the considerably enlarged, though even so hardly human, brain. The
Piltdown individual, on the other hand, has crossed the Rubicon. He has
a brain-capacity entitling him to rank as a man and an Englishman. Such
a brain, too, implies a cunning hand, which doubtless helped him greatly
to procure his