food, even if his massive jaw enabled him to dispose of
the food in question without recourse to the adventitious aids of knife
and fork. For the matter of that, if our knowledge made it possible to
correlate these rare finds of bones more exactly with the innumerable
flint implements ascribable to this period (and, indeed, not without
analogies among the spoil from the Piltdown gravels), it might turn out
that even the equivalent of knife and fork was not wanting to the Early
Pleistocene supper-party, or, at any rate, that the human hand was
already advanced from the status of labourer to the more dignified
position of superintendent of the tool.

The Middle Pleistocene Epoch belongs to the men of the Neanderthal type.
Some thirty specimens, a few of them more or less complete, have come
down to us, and we can form a pretty clear notion of the physical
appearance of the race. Speaking generally, we may say that it marks a
stage of progress as compared with the Piltdown type; though, if the
jaw, heavy and relatively chinless as it is, has become less simian, the
protruding brow-ridge lends a monstrous look to the face, while the
forehead is markedly receding--a feature which turns out, however, to be
not incompatible with a weight of brain closely approaching our own
average. Whether this type has disappeared altogether from the earth, or
survives in certain much modified descendants, is an open question. The
fact remains that during the last throes of the Glacial Epoch this
rough-hewn kind of man apparently had Northern Europe as his exclusive
province; and it is by no means evident what _Homo Sapiens_, the
supposed highly superior counterpart and rival of _Homo
Neanderthalensis_, was doing with himself in the meantime. Moreover, not
only in respect of space does the population of that frozen world show
remarkable homogeneity; but also in respect of time must we allow it an
undisputed sway extending over thousands of years, during which the race
bred true. The rate of progress, whether reckoned in physical terms or
otherwise, is so slow as to be almost imperceptible. A type suffices for
an age. Whereas in the life-history of an individual there is rapid
development during youth, and after maturity a steadying down, it is the
other way about in the life-history of the race. Man, so to speak, was
born old and accommodated to a jog-trot. We moderns are the juveniles,
and it is left for us to go the pace.

Yet Late Pleis