sort of generalized human type which may be called Pleistocene man, a common undeveloped form, which did not begin to specialize that is to evolve the existing varieties-until the several Pleistocene groups reached their present zoological domains. We know from the study of extinct and existing animal forms how, for instance, the Camel family, which probably originated in North America, is now represented by such allied species as the guanaco, vicuna and llama in South America, and the baktrian and Arabian camel in Asia. It was the same with the human family, which, originating in Malaysia, is now represented all over the world by four main varieties with their endless sub-varieties; Negroes or Blacks in the Sudan, South Africa, and Oceania (Australia); Mongol or Yellow in Central, North and East Asia; Amerinds (Red or Brown) in the New World; and Caucasians (white and also Dark) in North Africa, Europe, Irania, India, western Asia aad Poly nesia. "The four main divisions of mankind are thus seen to have been evolved independently in their several zones from Pleistocene ancestral groups of somewhat uniform physical type and all sprung from a common Pliocene prototype. This view of human origins at once removes the greatest difficulty hitherto presented by the existing varieties, which, being sprung separately in separate areas from a common parent stem, need no longer be derived one from another—white from black, yellow from red, and so on-a crude notion which both on physiological and geographic grounds has always remained an inscrutable puzzle to serious students of mankind. To suppose that some highly specialized group, say, originally black, migrating from continent to continent, became white in one region and yellow in another, is a violent assumption which could never be verified and is opposed to the natural relations. Such a group passing from its proper zone to another essentially different environment must inevitably have died out long before it had time to become acclimatized. The fundamental racial characters are the result of slow adaptation to their special surroundings. They are what climate, soil, diet, heredity, natural selection, and time have made them, and are of too long standing to be effaced or blurred except by miscegenation, a process which assumes the existence of other specialized forms, and as above seen is rendered possible by primordial unity. "By common descent and separate local development is further explained the surprising resemblance which is everywhere presented both by the earliest remains and the earliest works of primitive Man. Such are the fossil or semi-fossil skulls found in Europe, Egypt, Mongolia, and the New World, and the stone instruments occurring in vast quantities in Britain, France, Belgium, North and South Africa, India, North and South America from British Columbia to Terra del Fuego. Certain Australian skulls seem cast in the same mould as the above mentioned Neanderthal, while rude stone instruments brought from the most distant lands are so alike in form and character that they might have been made by the same hands. On the Banks of the Nile objects of European type have been discovered, and others collected in Somaliland might have been dug out of the drift deposits of the Seine, the Thames or the ancient Solent (Sir John Evans). The Pleistocene or Quarternary epoch, as represented by those objects of primitive culture, ranged over a vast period of time which has been conveniently divided into two great epochs, the Palæo lithic or Old Stone, and the Neolithic or New Stone Age, these being so named from the material chiefly used by primitive peoples in the manufacture of their weapons and other implements. The distinction between the two periods, which are not to be taken as time sequences since they overlap in many places, is based essentially on the different treatment of the material, which during the immeasurably longer Old Stone Age was at first merely chipped, flaked, or otherwise rudely fashioned, but in the New more carefully worked and polished. Evidence is, however, now accumulating to show that progress was continuous throughout the whole of the first cultural era, which thus tended in favorable localities such as South France, the Riviera, and North Africa to merge imperceptibly in the second, so that it is not always possible to draw any clear line between the Old and the New Stone Age. In one respect the former was towards its close even in advance of the latter, and quite a 'Pralaeolithic School of Art' was developed during a long inter-or post-glacial period of steady progress in the sheltered Vizere valley of Dordogne, South France. Here were produced some of those remarkable stone, horn and even ivory scrapers, gravers, harpoons, ornaments and statuettes with carvings on the round, and skilful etchings of seals, fishes, reindeer, harnessed horses, mammoths, snakes, and man himself, which also occur in other districts."* *There is much archæological evidence of the Old and New Stone Ages and of the abodes and occupations of a race that dwelt upon the earth during both these periods-which together cover not less than three hundred thousand years-but its introduction is not essential to our purposes and, while intensely interesting and instructive to some, might prove tiresome to others. For these reasons much of the record of prehistoric Man is omitted. After these two Stone Ages came the Metal Ages which, while covering many thousands of years, were of shorter duration than the Stone Ages. Later still came what we might very properly designate as "the Age of Letters" or pictorial writings such as the rock carvings of Upper Egypt. All these comprise that transitional period, dim memories of which lingered on well into historic times. These were ages of popular myths, folk-lore, demi-gods, eponymous heroes, traditions of actual happenings, and philosophic theories on Man and his surroundings. From the vast materials thus supplied poems were afterwards written, new religions were founded, and later lawgivers came into exist ence. In China early historians still remembered the even more remote "Age of the Three Rulers," when people subsisted on wild fruits, uncooked food, drank the blood of other animals, lived in caves and wore for clothing the skins of wild beasts (New Stone Age). "Then came beneficent rulers who introduced orderly government, organized society on the basis of marriage and family, invented nets and snares for fishing and hunting, taught the people to rear domestic animals and till the land, established markets for the sale of farm produce, explained the medicinal properties of plants, studied astrology if not astronomy, and appointed 'the Five Observers of the Heavenly Bodies' (our Prehistoric Age)," says Keane. The back-ground of sheer savagery lying behind all later cultural development is thus everywhere revealed. The "Golden Age of the poets fades with the Hesperides and Plato's Atlantis into the region of the fabulous." The general use of letters is conspicuously the most characteristic feature of strictly historic times. This use of letters enabled the race to perpetuate everything worth preserving and has proven the most useful and fruitful of human inventions. Knowledge thus became cumulative and human progress was greatly accelerated. Our modern systems of writing have evolved from pictorial representations of things and ideas. Following picture writing-so characteristic of early civilization in Egypt and elsewhere-came crude signs and symbols representing words which were first used in combination with pictures. Gradually the signs of words came more and more into use as the pictures fell into disuse. The Chinese early developed a very elaborate sign system in their script. Articulate sound-signs (letters), as in our own alphabet, is the recent perfecting of these various methods of recording ideas. Between these two extremesthe pictograph and the letter-there are various intermediary forms such as the rebus, the full syllable, etc.; these are largely preserved in both the Egyptian and Babylonian systems, and help to show how the pure phonetic systems were finally reached. This must have been accomplished at least six thousand years ago—probably ten thousand since its first invention since various archaic phonetic scripts are found widely diffused over the archipelago (Crete, Cyprus, Asia Minor) in Mykaenean and Pre-Mykaenean time. The hieroglyphic and cuneiform systems from which they originated were unquestionably much older, since the rock inscriptions of Upper Egypt are pre-dynastic-prior to all historic records -while the Mesopotamia city of Nipper already possessed half-pictorial, half-phonetic documents some six or seven thousand years before the New Era. In this connection Keane says: "From the pictorial and plastic remains recovered from those two earliest seats of the higher cultures it is now placed beyond doubt |