NATION-MAKING.

All theories as to the primitive man must be very uncertain.
Granting the doctrine of evolution to be true, man must be held to
have a common ancestor with the rest of the Primates. But then we do
not know what their common ancestor was like. If ever we are to have
a distinct conception of him, it can only be after long years of
future researches and the laborious accumulation of materials,
scarcely the beginning of which now exists. But science has already
done something for us. It cannot yet tell us our first ancestor, but
it can tell us much of an ancestor very high up in the line of
descent. We cannot get the least idea (even upon the full assumption
of the theory of evolution) of the first man; but we can get a very
tolerable idea of the Paulo-prehistoric man, if I may so say--of man
as he existed some short time (as we now reckon shortness), some ten
thousand years, before history began. Investigators whose acuteness
and diligence can hardly be surpassed--Sir John Lubbock and Mr.
Tylor are the chiefs among them--have collected so much and
explained so much that they have left a fairly vivid result.

That result is, or seems to me to be, if I may sum it up in my own
words, that the modern pre-historic men--those of whom we have
collected so many remains, and to whom are due the ancient, strange
customs of historical nations (the fossil customs, we might call
them, for very often they are stuck by themselves in real
civilisation, and have no more part in it than the fossils in the
surrounding strata)--pre-historic men in this sense were 'savages
without the fixed habits of savages;' that is, that, like savages,
they had strong passions and weak reason; that, like savages, they
preferred short spasms of greedy pleasure to mild and equable