The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 9

here; we are offering suggestions. The fabulous stage of’a child’s imagination may give us some inkling of what went on in ihe mind of man when he crept close to the beasts. One may understand with a lesser effort how tribes following herds of wild

. cave, in France.

is 5

Fig. 338. A spirited sketch of a bison in the Niaux

cave.

Such representations undoubtedly were used in hunting-magic. spear points have been drawn, piercing the bison’s lungs.

Cartailhac and V Abbé H. Breuil in “* L’ Anthropologie.’’)

cattle may have developed a proprietary sense, protecting them from wolves and other hunters and penning them into convenient valleys, and how the dog, playing much the same réle towards man as the jackal does to the lion, may have grown imperceptibly to companionship. It is the

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THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

Fig. 337. Paleolithic and Modern Savage Art.

Two clay figures of bison, about 2 feet long. in the Tuc d’ Audoubert (From le Comte de Begouen in ‘‘ L’ Anthropologie.’’)

CHAPTER 2

most natural thing in the world now for men to drink the milk of their cattle, but there was a time when it must have seemed a strange, unnatural thing, a “ beastly ” thing to do. Our ancestor in that past had no trained observation, no lucid language, no logical method of thought ; he thought experimentally in images and myths. In the fantasies of children and dreamland, the species recapitulates its mental growth ; in traditional mythology we have the mental fossils of man’s intellectual evolution.

Moreover in these Neolithic communities of cultivators which appear on the dawn of history, the stars and the seasons, the fact of the year, have been discovered. An immensely clumsy astronomy has come into existence. Pyramids, obelisks, great standing stones, are being used to measure the altitude of the sun and determine the cardinal points of the year, from which the propitious times for seed-time and harvest may be deduced. We may hazard the opinion that in some level land open to sun and stars, where a periodic inundation was the vitalizing power upon the soil, men first observed the midday shadows growing shorter or longer as the floods drew near.

Speculation apart, the facts remain that in the Neolithic phase we begin to recognize the development of settled human societies, with the main features that we still trace in our present communities. ‘The central fact of social life has become the altar; the directive force is the priest. Tabu, that is to say primitive moral control, and magic, which is primitive science, are now grouped about the directive priesthood, and an elaborate astronomy, fraught with worship, links the plough and the labouring beast and the sacrifice upon the altar with the constellations. On these stellar and mystical co-ordinations the uncertain prosperity of community and individual is understood to depend. There is a great fear of disturbing the order of things by any strange act or any negligence. If things go wrong, then someone must have sinned against tradition. The sinner must atone for his sin in order that the majestic order of seed-time and harvest should continue.

Three (From