their
train represents a labour-saving device. The Mousterian had learned how
to break up his flint-nodule into flakes, which simply needed to be
trimmed on one face to yield a cutting edge. The Acheulean had been
content to attain this result more laboriously by pecking a pebble on
both faces until what remained was sharp enough for his purpose. Here,
then, we are confronted with that supreme condition of progress, the
inventor's happy thought. One of those big-brained Neanderthal men, we
may suppose, had genius; nature, the liberator, having released some
latent power in the racial constitution. Given such a culture-hero, the
common herd was capable of carrying on more or less mechanically for an
aeon or so. And so it must ever be. The world had better make the most
of its geniuses; for they amount to no more than perhaps a single one in
a million. Anyway, Neanderthal man never produced a second genius, so
far as we can tell; and that is why, perhaps, his peculiar type of
brow-ridge no longer adorns the children of men.

Before we leave the Mousterians, another side of their culture deserves
brief mention. Not only did they provide their dead with rude graves,
but they likewise furnished them with implements and food for use in a
future life. Herein surely we may perceive the dawn of what I do not
hesitate to term religion. A distinguished scholar and poet did indeed
once ask me whether the Mousterians, when they performed these rites,
did not merely show themselves unable to grasp the fact that the dead
are dead. But I presume that my friend was jesting. A sympathy stronger
than death, overriding its grisly terror, and converting it into the
vehicle of a larger hope--that is the work of soul; and to develop soul
is progress. A religious animal is no brute, but a real man with the
seed of genuine progress in him. If Neanderthal man belonged to another
species, as the experts mostly declare and I very humbly beg leave to
doubt, we must even so allow that God made him also after his own image,
brow-ridges and all.

The presence of soul in man is even more manifest when we pass on to the
Late Palaeolithic peoples. They are cave-dwellers; they live by the
chase; in a word, they are savages still. But they exhibit a taste and a
talent for the fine arts of drawing and carving that, as it were,
enlarge human existence by a new dimension. Again a fresh power has been
released, and one in which many would seem to have partici