am treating of, the man some few thousand years before history
began, and not at all, at least not necessarily, the primitive man--
was identical with a modern savage, in another respect there is
equal or greater reason to suppose that he was most unlike a modern
savage. A modern savage is anything but the simple being which
philosophers of the eighteenth century imagined him to be; on the
contrary, his life is twisted into a thousand curious habits; his
reason is darkened by a thousand strange prejudices; his feelings
are frightened by a thousand cruel superstitions. The whole mind of
a modern savage is, so to say, tattooed over with monstrous images;
there is not a smooth place anywhere about it. But there is no
reason to suppose the minds of pre-historic men to be so cut and
marked; on the contrary, the creation of these habits, these
superstitions, these prejudices, must have taken ages. In his
nature, it may be said, pre-historic man was the same as a modern
savage; it is only in his acquisition that he was different.

It may be objected that if man was developed out of any kind of
animal (and this is the doctrine of evolution which, if it be not
proved conclusively, has great probability and great scientific
analogy in its favour) he would necessarily at first possess animal
instincts; that these would only gradually be lost; that in the
meantime they would serve as a protection and an aid, and that pre-
historic men, therefore, would have important helps and feelings
which existing savages have not. And probably of the first men, the
first beings worthy to be so called, this was true: they had, or may
have had, certain remnants of instincts which aided them in the
struggle of existence, and as reason gradually came these instincts
may have waned away. Some instincts certainly do wane when the
intellect is applied steadily to their subject-matter. The curious