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

THE PRESENT PHASE OF HUMAN ASSOCIATION

Whatever were the precise steps man took, or whatever elaborate mental suppressions and elaborations made it possible for him to take them, the fact remains that in a period of five hundred thousand years or less, and mainly through the efficacy of this internal conflict, this system of suppressions, in making co-operation possible, Homo sapiens ceased, over favourable areas of the world, to be a casually living animal like all the rest of the vertebrata, and became an economic animal, foreseeing, domesticating, cultivating, storing and toiling as no other animal species had ever done. Tradition, the new invention of Nature, guided and controlled him and gave him an unprecedented security. It guided and controlled him, but never completely subjugated him.

He was subdued to toil but he developed no instinct for toil. The history of his social development until the dawn of our own time is largely the history of an intricate interplay of the desire to evade and thrust off the incidence of toil, with the traditions, training and suppressions that made submission possible. So intricate is that moral and economic drama, even in outline, that it can be dealt with satisfactorily only in a separate work, at least as extensive as this present summary of The Science of Life. For that it must be reserved.

And settlement and civilization were not the lot of all the species. In suitable regions it became settled, but over great areas of land where the grass was intermittent it roved with its cattle, and became nomadic. And in forests, tropical uplands and mountain regions it developed minor systems of living, minor traditions and mythologies. Tradition never attained complete uniformity or complete stability. The nomad reacted upon the agriculturalist and the agriculturalist on the nomad. They swapped stories and imitated methods. ‘They never ceased from interaction and interbreeding. Ofthis interplay The Outline of Fistory tells more fully than we can do here.

Obscure and difficult as the story of social development still is, there can be no question of the immense survival value of nearly every phase in the process of settlement, Man, from being a not very abundant species, sparsely diffused, began to multiply extremely in the regions best adapted to primitive cultivation. The human population of the world, which before may have been no more than a few score thousand,

(From Baldwin Spencer's

soon mounted far beyond the million mark in the great alluvial areas. We have already said something in Book 5 of the effect of climatic fluctuations on the phases of man’s early development. The time is almost at hand when it will be possible to correlate the broad movements of human population both in the old and new worlds with the extensions and retreats northward and

Fig. 339. A drawing by a modern Australian native of a kangaroo hunt.

By a curious convention, the animal’s interior anatomy ts shown.

“ Wanderings in Wild Australia,” Macmillan & Co., Ltd.)

southward of forest and desert conditions. The way in which the Aryans came down on the earlier Aegean and Semitic civilizations, otherwise so inexplicable, becomes understandable when we realize that the forests and their way of life were coming with them. Fluctuations of the grass on the steppe lands drew and drove the Nomads, accumulated energy for centuries and then sent it trekking. Agriculture adapted to

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