the killing of game of which he was in no more need than his vegetarian
cousins, the anthropoid apes? Why should there have been progress where
the environment provided no stimuli therefore, in other words, why
should primitive man have moved forward where indulgent nature allowed
him to stand still?

If we believe, with Darwin and other students, that our primitive
ancestors emerged from somewhere within the warm zones, we cannot avoid
the difficulty of reconciling that supposition with the theory that
civilisation is in the first instance the result of a stimulating
environment. If on the other hand, we surmise that _homo sapiens_
originated in the colder parts of the world we still have to account for
the fact that his further progress was made not in those parts but in
warmer latitudes where a genial climate afforded no apparent provocation
for continued effort in the way of invention and general development.

It would seem that the innate tendency to conservatism latent in man,
the disposition to leave things as they are and to stick to the familiar
devil rather than fly to unknown gods, is in itself sufficient to
account for those lapses in mass-achievement and those long periods of
stagnation which mark the course of mankind everywhere. We see how Egypt
hovered for centuries on the brink of the discovery of the alphabet but
never attained thereto. The exponents of the so-called "pulsatory
hypothesis" can hardly claim that a change in the climate will explain
the fact seeing that the neighbouring people were able to accomplish
this great feat under very similar climatic conditions. We see how China
developed a wonderful civilisation while the Western world lay steeped
in barbarism, and then went to sleep till now. The size of that great
country made possible always the friction between people coming from
widely separated localities, which we believe to be conducive to