s more
than half-way on the road to its domestication. But in so far as he
mistook the will for the accomplished deed, he was not getting the value
out of his second horse; or, to drop metaphor, the scientific reason as
yet lay dormant in his soul. But his dream was to come true presently.

The Neolithic Period marks the first appearance of the 'cibi-cultural'
peoples. The food-seekers have become food-raisers. But the change did
not come all at once. The earlier Neolithic culture is at best
transitional. There may even have been one of those set-backs in culture
which we are apt to ignore when we are narrating the proud tale of human
advance. Europe had now finally escaped from the last ravages of an
Arctic climate; but there was cruel demolition to make good, and in the
meantime there would seem, as regards man, to have been little doing.
Life among the kitchen-middens of Denmark was sordid; and the Azilians
who pushed up from Spain as far as Scotland did not exactly step into a
paradise ready-made. Somewhere, however, in the far south-east a higher
culture was brewing. By steps that have not yet been accurately traced
legions of herdsmen and farmer-folk overspread our world, either
absorbing or driving before them the roving hunters of the older
dispensation. We term this, the earliest of true civilizations,
'neolithic', as if it mattered in the least whether your stone implement
be chipped or polished to an edge. The real source of increased power
and prosperity lay in the domestication of food-animals and food-plants.
The man certainly had genius and pluck into the bargain who first
trusted himself to the back of an unbroken horse. It needed hardly less
genius to discover that it is no use singing charms over the
seed-bearing grass in order to make it grow, unless some of the seed is
saved to be sowed in due season. Society possibly brained the
inventor--such is the way of the crowd; but, as it duly pocketed the
invention, we have perhaps no special cause to complain.

By way of appreciating the conditions prevailing in the Later Neolithic
Age, let us consider in turn the Lake-dwellers of Switzerland and the
Dolmen-builders of our Western coast-lands. I was privileged to assist,
on the shore of the Lake of Neuchatel, in the excavation of a site where
one Neolithic village of pile-dwellings had evidently been destroyed by
fire, and at some later date, just falling within the Stone Age, had
been replaced by another.