fairy-stories and begin in the old way:

"Once upon a time there was a man."

This man lived hundreds of thousands of years ago.

What did he look like?

We do not know. We never saw his picture. Deep in the clay of an ancient
soil we have sometimes found a few pieces of his skeleton. They were
hidden amidst masses of bones of animals that have long since
disappeared from the face of the earth. We have taken these bones and
they allow us to reconstruct the strange creature who happens to be
our ancestor.

The great-great-grandfather of the human race was a very ugly and
unattractive mammal. He was quite small. The heat of the sun and the
biting wind of the cold winter had colored his skin a dark brown. His
head and most of his body were covered with long hair. He had very thin
but strong fingers which made his hands look like those of a monkey. His
forehead was low and his jaw was like the jaw of a wild animal which
uses its teeth both as fork and knife.

[Illustration: PREHISTORIC MAN.]

He wore no clothes. He had seen no fire except the flames of the
rumbling volcanoes which filled the earth with their smoke and
their lava.

He lived in the damp blackness of vast forests.