When at last, a specially brilliant fellow hit upon the idea of throwing
raw meat into the hot ashes before eating it, he added something to the
sum total of human knowledge which made the cave-man feel that the
height of civilization had been reached.

Nowadays, when we hear of another marvelous invention we are very proud.

"What more," we ask, "can the human brain accomplish?"

And we smile contentedly for we live in the most remarkable of all ages
and no one has ever performed such miracles as our engineers and
our chemists.

Forty thousand years ago when the world was on the point of freezing to
death, an unkempt and unwashed cave-man, pulling the feathers out of a
half-dead chicken with the help of his brown fingers and his big white
teeth--throwing the feathers and the bones upon the same floor that
served him and his family as a bed, felt just as happy and just as proud
when he was taught how the hot cinders of a fire would change raw meat
into a delicious meal.

"What a wonderful age," he would exclaim and he would lie down amidst
the decaying skeletons of the animals which had served him as his dinner
and he would dream of his own perfection while bats, as large as small
dogs, flew restlessly through the cave and while Prehistoric man lived
through at least four definite eras when the ice descended far down
into the valleys and covered the greater part of the European continent.

The last one of these periods came to an end almost thirty thousand