their memories became vague, it did not follow that their
recollections had carried them back to the beginnings of their
lives. Indeed, it is contrary to all experience to believe that
any man remembers all the things he has once known, and the
observed fallaciousness and evanescence of memory would thus tend
to substantiate rather than to controvert the idea that various
members of a tribe had been alive for an indefinite period.

Without further elaborating the argument, it seems a justifiable
inference that the first conception primitive man would have of
his own life would not include the thought of natural death, but
would, conversely, connote the vague conception of endless life.
Our own ancestors, a few generations removed, had not got rid of
this conception, as the perpetual quest of the spring of eternal
youth amply testifies. A naturalist of our own day has suggested
that perhaps birds never die except by violence. The thought,
then, that man has a term of years beyond which "in the nature of
things," as the saying goes, he may not live, would have dawned
but gradually upon the developing intelligence of successive
generations of men; and we cannot feel sure that he would fully
have grasped the conception of a "natural" termination of human
life until he had shaken himself free from the idea that disease
is always the result of the magic practice of an enemy. Our
observation of historical man in antiquity makes it somewhat
doubtful whether this conception had been attained before the
close of the prehistoric period. If it had, this conception of
the mortality of man was one of the most striking scientific
inductions to which prehistoric man attained. Incidentally, it
may be noted that the conception of eternal life for the human
body being a more primitive idea than the conception of natural