I

■■■■

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

•S Mr. WELLS has also written the fol¬ lowing novels :

LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM

KIPPS

MR. POLLY

THE WHEELS OF CHANCE

THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

ANN VERONICA

TONO BUNGAY

MARRIAGE

BEALBY

THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HAR¬ MAN

THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH

THE SOUL OF A BISHOP JOAN AND PETER THE UNDYING FIRE THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART

<J The following fantastic and imagina¬ tive romances :

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS THE TIME MACHINE THE WONDERFUL VISIT THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU THE INVISIBLE MAN THE SEA LADY THE SLEEPER AWAKES THE FOOD OF THE GODS THE WAR IN THE AIR THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET THE WORLD SET FREE MEN LIKE GODS

And numerous Short Stories published in several different collections

€J A Series of books upon Social, Reli¬ gious and Political questions : ANTICIPATIONS (1900)

MANKIND IN THE MAKING FIRST AND LAST THINGS NEW WORLDS FOR OLD A MODERN UTOPIA THE FUTURE IN AMERICA AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD WHAT IS COMING ?

WAR AND THE FUTURE IN THE FOURTH YEAR GOD THE INVISIBLE KING RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZA¬ TION

WASHINGTON AND THE HOPE OF PEACE

t| And two little books about children’s play, called :

FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS

€J A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind

H. G. WELLS

Written originally with the Advice and Editorial Help of

Dr. ERNEST BARKER, SIR H. H. JOHNSTON, SIR E. RAY LANKESTER, and PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY

And Illustrated by J. F. HORRABIN

/

THE DEFINITIVE EDITION Revised and Rearranged by the Author

( With Several New Illustrations)

CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD

«

London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne

I

First published September 1920 Reprinted February 1921. Definitive Edition January 1923. Reprinted February 1924.

D5 I

w v5y

J^2

Printed in Great Britain

Human^*es

INTRODUCTION

“A philosophy of the history of the human race, worthy of its name, must begin with the heavens and descend to the earth, must be charged 'with the conviction that all existence is one — a single conception sustained from begin¬ ning to end upon one identical laic.”-— Friedrich Ratzel.

THE Outline of History, of which this is a fourth edition, freshly revised and rearranged, is an attempt to tell, truly and clearly, in one continuous narrative, the whole story of life and man¬ kind so far as it is known to-day. It is written plainly for the general reader, but its aim goes beyond its use as merely in¬ teresting reading matter. There is a feel¬ ing abroad that the teaching of history considered as a part of general education is in an unsatisfactory condition, and particu¬ larly that the ordinary treatment of this “ subject ” by the class and teacher and examiner is too partial and narrow. But the desire to extend the general range of historical ideas is confronted by the argument that the available time for instruction is already con¬ sumed by that partial and narrow treatment, and that therefore, however desirable this extension of range may be, it is in practice impossible. If an Englishman, for example, has found the history of England quite enough for his powers of assimilation, then it seems hopeless to expect his sons and daughters to master universal history, if that is to consist of the history of England, plus the history of France, plus the history of Germany, plus the history of Russia, and so on. To which the only possible answer is that universal history is at once something more and something less than the aggregate of the national histories to which we are accustomed, that it must be approached in a different spirit and dealt with in a different manner. This book seeks to justify that answer. It has been written primarily to show that history as one whole is amenable to a more broad and comprehensive handling than is the history of special nations and periods, a broader handling that will bring it within the normal limitations of time and energy set to the reading and education of an ordinary citizen. This outline deals with ages and races and nations, where the ordinary history deals with reigns and pedi¬ grees and campaigns ; but it will not be found to be more crowded with names and dates, nor more difficult to follow and under¬ stand. History is no exception amongst the sciences ; as the gaps fill in, the outline

simplifies ; as the outlook broadens, the clustering multitude of details dissolves into general laws. And many topics of quite primary interest to mankind, the first appearance and the growth of scientific knowledge for example, and its effects upon human life, the elaboration of the ideas of money and credit, or the story of the origins and spread and influence of Christianity, which must be treated fragmentarily or by elaborate digressions in any partial history arise and flow completely and naturally in one general record of the world in which we live.

The need for a common knowledge of the general facts of human history throughout the world has become very evident during the tragic happenings of the last few years. Swifter means of communication have brought all men closer to one another for good or for evil. War becomes a univer¬ sal disaster, blind and monstrously destruc¬ tive ; it bombs the baby in its cradle and sinks the food-ships that cater for the non- combatant and the neutral. There can be no peace now, we realize, but a common peace in all the world ; no prosperity but a general prosperity. But there can be no common peace and prosperity without common historical ideas. Without such ideas to hold them together in harmonious co-operation, with nothing but narrow, selfish, and con¬ flicting nationalist traditions, races and peoples are bound to drift towards conflict and destruction. This truth, which was apparent to that great philosopher Kant a century or more ago — it is the gist of his tract upon universal peace — is now plain to the man in the street. Our internal policies and our economic and social ideas are pro¬ foundly vitiated at present by wrong and fantastic ideas of the origin and historical relationship of social classes. A sense of history as the common adventure of all mankind is as necessary for peace within as it is for peace between the nations.

The writer will offer no apology for making this experiment. His disqualifications are manifest. But such work needs to be done by as many people as possible, he was free to make his contribution, and he was greatly

VI

INTRODUCTION

attracted by the task. He has read sedul The Rev. C. P. Hard, Mr. Homer B. Hulbert, ously and made the utmost use of all the Dr. Fritz Holm, Mr. Paul Hutchinson, Mr. E. help he could obtain. There is not a chapter Impey, Mr. Walter Ingleby, Prof. A. C. Lane, that has not been examined by some more Mr. J. H. Leviton, Mr. L. W. C. Lorden, Sir competent person than himself and very Frederick Maurice, Mr. J. Scudder McLain, Mr. carefully revised. He has particularly to H. Comyn Maitland, Mr. Karsten Meyer, Mr. thank his friends Sir E. Ray Lankester, Sir E. D. Nauman, Mr. M. L. Phares, Mr. William H. H. Johnston, Professor Gilbert Murray, Platt, Mr. J. W. Riches, Mr. F. Gordon Roe, and Mr. Ernest Barker for much counsel and Mr. Alden Sampson, Mr. Neville H. Smith, direction and editorial help. Mr. Philip Mr. C. Snell, Mr. P. J. Thomas, Mr. W. H. Guedalla has toiled most efficiently and Thompson, Mr. William Y. Tyndall, Mr. kindly through all the proofs. Mr. A. Alii- M. Timur, Mr. A. J. Vogan, Mr. W. A. Voss, son, Professor T. W. Arnold, Mr. Arnold Mr. G. F. Wates, and one or two corre- Bennett, the Rev. A. H. Trevor Benson, spondents -With illegible signatures, have Mr. Aodh de Blacam, Mr. Laurence Binyon, made valuable suggestions since the publi- the Rev. G. W. Broomfield, Sir William Bull, cation of the second edition. Pamphlets Mr. L. Cranmer Byng, Mr. A. J. D. Campbell, against the Outline by Mr. Gomme and Dr. Mr. A. Y. Campbell, Mr. L. Y. Chen, Mr. Downey and an article or so by Mr. Hilaire A. R. Cowan, Mr. 0. G. S. Crawford, Dr. Belloc have also been useful in this later W. S. Culbertson, Mr. R. Langton Cole, revision. The comments of scores of un- Mr. B. G. Collins, Mr. J. J. L. Duyvendak, named critics are also embodied in this Mr. 0. W. Ellis, Mr. G. S. Ferrier, Mr. David present reprint ; their influence varying from Freeman, Mr. S.N.Fu, Mr. G. B. Gloyne, Sir the shifting of a comma to the recasting of Richard Gregory, Mr. F. H. Hayward, Mr. a section. Of course none of these helpers Sydney Herbert, Dr. Fr Krupicka, Mr. H. are to be held responsible for the judgments, Lang Jones, Mr. C. H. B. Laughton, Mr. B. I. tone, arrangement or writing of this Outline. Macalpin, Mr. G. H. Mair, Mr. F. S. Marvin, In the relative importance of the parts, in the Mr. J. S. Maybew, Mr. B. Stafford Morse, moral and political implications of the story, Professor J. L. Myres, the Hon. W. Ormsby- the final decision has necessarily fallen to Gore, Sir Sydney Olivier, Mr. R. I. Pocock, Mr. the writer. The problem of illustrations J. Pringle, Mr. W. H. R. Rivers, Sir Denison was a very difficult one for him, for he had Ross, Dr. E. J. Russell, Dr. Charles Singer, had no previous experience in the production Mr. A. St. George Sanford, Dr. C. 0. Stally- of an illustrated book. In Mr. J. F. Horrabin brass, Mr. G. H. Walsh, Mr. G. P. Wells, he has had the good fortune to find not Miss Rebecca West, and Mr. George Whale only an illustrator but a collaborator. Mr. have all to be thanked for help, either by Horrabin has spared no pains to make this reading parts of the MS. or by pointing out work informative and exact. His maps and errors in the published parts, making sug- drawings are a part of the text, the most gestions, answering questions or giving vital and decorative part. Some of them advice. represent the reading and inquiry of many

Numerous other helpful correspondents laborious days, have pointed out printer’s errors and minor The index is the work of Mr. Strickland slips in the serial publication which preceded Gibson of Oxford. Several correspondents the book edition, and they have added have asked for a pronouncing index and many useful items of information, and to accordingly this has been provided, those writers also the warmest thanks are The writer owes a word of thanks to that due. Major C. F. Atkinson, Miss Emily living index of printed books, Mr. J. F. Cox R. Allen, Mr. James Angus, Mrs. Earl H. of the London Library. He would also like Ballou, Mr. C. M. Anton Belaiew, Capt. N. T. to acknowledge here the help he has received Belaiew, Mr. John Breck, Mr. R. Broom, Mr. from Mrs. Wells. Without her labour in C. D. Buck, Mr. W. J. Clennell, Mr. Henry typing and ro-typing the drafts of the various Coates, Mr. J. A. Corry, Mr. Archibald Craig, chapters as they have been revised and Mr. W. V. Cruden, Mr. Lewis C. Dawes, Mr. amended, in checking references, finding A. H. Dodd, Mr. Chas. E. Edgerton, Dr. suitable quotations, hunting up illustrations, Robert Eisler, Mr. W. W. Ellsworth, Mr. Earl and keeping in order the whole mass of N. Findley, Mr. George A. Foster, Mr. T. B. material for this history, and without her Goldsmith, Mr. Henry W. Goodrich, Mr. F. E. constant help and watchful criticism, its Green, Dr. Isidor Green wald, Mr. F. S. Hare, completion would have been impossible.

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

SCHEME OF CONTENTS

BOOK 1

THE MAKING OF OUR WORLD

PAGE

CHAPTER I. The Earth in Space fV • : j	and Time .	3
CHAPTER II. The Record of the	Rocks
§ 1. The first living things .	PAGE 5	§ 2. How old is the world ? .	8
CHAPTER III. Natural Selection	and the Changes of Species .	8
CHAPTER IV. Life and Climate
§ 1. Life and water	11	§ 4. The sun a steadfast star	16
$ 2. The earliest animals	12	§ 5. Changes from within the earth	16
§ 3. Why life must change con¬		§ 6. Life may control change	17
tinually ....	14
CHAPTER V. The Age of Reptiles
§ 1. The age of lowland life .	18	§ 4. An age of hardship and death .	21
§ 2. Flying dragons	20	§ 5. The first appearance of fur and
§ 3. The first birds	21	feathers ....	23
CHAPTER VI. The Age of Mammals
§ 1. A new age of fife .	24	5 3. An age of brain growth .	27
§ 2. Tradition comes into the world	24	§ 4. The world grows hard again	27
	BOOK	II

THE MAKING OF MAN

CHAPTER VII. Sub-Men and Men

§ 1. Man supposed to be descended § 3. The Heidelberg sub-man . . 34

from a walking ape . .31 § 4. The Piltdown sub-man . . 35

§ 2. First traces of man-like crea¬ tures ..... 34

CHAPTER VIII. The Neanderthal Men, an Extinct Race. (The Early Palaeolithic Age)

§ 1. The world 50,000 years ago . 35 § 3. The last Palaeolithic men . 40

§ 2. The daily life of the first men . 38 ^4. The Rhodesian skull . . 40

vij

viii SCHEME OF THE OUTLINE

CHAPTER IX. The Later Postglacial Paleolithic Men, the First True Men. (Later Paleolithic Age)

§ 1. The coming of men like our¬	PAGE	§ 2. Hunters give place to herdsmen	I’AGE 48
selves .....	41	§ 3. No sub-men in America .	49
CHAPTER X. Neolithic Man in Europe
§ 1. The age of cultivation begins .	49	§ 4. Primitive trade	55
§ 2. Where did the Neolithic culture		§ 5. The flooding of the Mediter¬
arise ? . .	51	ranean valley .	55
§ 3. Everyday Neolithic life .	51
CHAPTER XI. Early Thought
§ 1. Primitive philosophy	57	§ 4. Stars and seasons	59
§ 2. The Old Man in religion	58	§ 5. Story-telling and myth-making .	60
§ 3. Fear and hope in religion	58	§ 6. Complex origins of religion	61
CHAPTER XII. The Races of Mankind
§ 1 . Is mankind still differentiating ?	63	§ 3. The Brunet peoples .	68
§ 2. The main races of mankind .	65	§ 4. The peoples of America	70
CHAPTER XIII. The Languages of	Mankind
§ 1. No one primitive language	70	§ 6. The Chinese languages	73
§ 2. The Aryan languages	71	§ 7. Other language groups	74
§ 3. The Semitic languages .	72	§ 8. A possible primitive language
§ 4. The Hamitic languages .	72	group .....	75
§ 5. The Ural-Altaic languages	73	§ 9. Some isolated languages .	76

BOOK III

THE DAWN OF HISTORY

CHAPTER XIV. The First Civilizations

§ 1. Early cities and early nomads	79	§ 2e,	The Chaldean empire .	83
§ 2a. The Sumerians	81	§ 3.	The early history of Egypt .	84
§ 2b. The empire of Sargon the First	82	§4.	The early civilization of India	88
§ 2c. The empire of Hammurabi	82	§5.	The early history of China .	88
§ 2d. The Assyrians and their empire ....	83	§ 6.	While the civilizations were growing ....	90

CHAPTER XV. Sea Peoples and Trading	Peoples
§ 1. The earliest ships and sailors .	92	§ 4. Early traders ....	96
§ 2. The iEgean cities before history	93	§ 5. Early travellers	97
§ 3- The first voyages of exploration	95
CHAPTER XVI. Writing
§ 1. Picture writing	98	§ 3. Alphabet writing	100
§ 2. Syllable writing	100	§ 4. The place of writing in human
		life ...•••	101
CHAPTER XVII. Gods and Stars,	Priests	and Kings
§ 1. The priest comes into history .	102	§5. How Bel-Marduk struggled
§ 2. Priests and the stars	104	against the kings	107
§ 3. Priests and the dawn of		§ 6. The god-kings of Egypt	109
learning ....	105	§ 7. Shi Hwang-ti destroys the books	111
§ 4. King against priest	106

SCHEME OF THE OUTLINE

CHAPTER XVIII. Serfs, Slaves, Social Classes, and Free Individuals

§1.	The common man in ancient	PAGE	§ 5. Classes hardening into castes	PAGE 117
	times .....	112	§ 6. Caste in India ....	119
§2.	The earliest slaves .	113	§ 7. The system of the Mandarins .	119
§3.	The first “ independent ” persons	114	§ 8. A summary of five thousand
§4.	Social classes three thousand		years .....	120
	years ago ....	115

BOOK IV

JUDEA, GREECE, AND INDIA

CHAPTER XIX. The Hebrew Scriptures and the Prophets

§ 1. The place of the Israelites in § 3. The Jews a people of mixed

history .....	125	origin ....	•	131
§ 2. Saul, David, and Solomon	129	§ 4. The importance of the Hebrew
		prophets ....	•	132
CHAPTER XX. The Aryan-speaking Peoples in Prehistoric Times
§ 1. The spreading of the Aryan -		§ 2. Primitive Aryan life		136
speakers ....	134	§ 3. Early Aryan daily life	•	139
CHAPTER XXI. The Greeks and	the Persians
§ 1. The Hellenic peoples	142	§ 5. The rise of the Persians in the
§ 2. Distinctive features of Hellenic		East ....		149
civilization . . . .	143	§ 6. The story of Croesus		152
§ 3. Monarchy, aristocracy, and de¬		§ 7. Darius invades Russia		153
mocracy in Greece .	145	§ 8. The battle of Marathon		156
§ 4. The kingdom of Lydia	149	§ 9. Thermopylae and Salamis .		157
		§ 10. Plataea and Mycale		160
CHAPTER XXII. Greek Thought	in Relation to Human Society
§ 1. The Athens of Pericles	162	§ 4. Aristotle and the Lyceum	.	167
§ 2. Socrates ....	165	§ 5. Philosophy becomes unworldly	.	168
§ 3. Plato and the Academy .	166	§ 6. The quality and limitations	of
		Greek thought	.	168

CHAPTER XXIII. The Career of Alexander the Great

§ 1. Philip of Macedonia . .171 § 6. The successors of Alexander . 184

§ 2. The murder of King Philip . 174 § 7. Pergamum a refuge of culture . 185

§3. Alexander’s first conquests . 176 §8. Alexander as a portent of

§ 4. The wanderings of Alexander . 180 world unity . . . .186

§ 5. Was Alexander indeed great ? 181

CHAPTER XXIV. Science and Religion at Alexandria

§ 1. The science of Alexandria . 187 § 3. Alexandria as a factory of

§ 2. Philosophy of Alexandria . 191 religions . . . . .192

§ 4. Alexandria and India . .194

CHAPTER XXV. The Rise and Spread of Buddhism

§ 1. The story of Gautama . .194 §5. Two great Chinese teachers . 203

§ 2. Teaching and legend in conflict 196 § 6. The corruptions of Buddhism . 206

§ 3. The gospel of Gautama Buddha 198 § 7. The present range of Buddhism 206

§ 4. Buddhism and Asoka . . 199

*

X

SCHEME OF THE OUTLINE

BOOK V

THE RISE AND COLLAPSE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

CHAPTER XXVI. The Two Western Republics

PAGE PAGE

§ 1. The beginnings of the Latins . 209 § 6. The Second Punic War . . 222

§ 2. A new sort of state . . 213 § 7. The Third Punic War . . 226

§ 3. The Carthaginian republic of § 8. How the Punic War under¬ rich men . . . .219 mined Roman liberty . . 227

§ 4. The First Punic War . . 219 § 9. Comparison of the Roman re-

§ 5. Cato the Elder and the spirit public with a modern state . 228

of Cato ..... 221

CHAPTER XXVII. From Tiberius Gracchus to the God Emperor in Rome

§ 1. The science of thwarting the § 4. The era of the adventurer

common man . . . 231 generals ..... 236

§ 2. Finance in the Roman state . 233 § 5. The end of the republic . . 238

§ 3. The last years of republican § 6. The coming of the Princeps . 240

politics ..... 234 § 7. Why the Roman republic failed 242

CHAPTER XXVIII. The Gesars between the Sea and the Great Plains of

the Old World

§ 1. A short catalogue of emperors 244 § 5. The Western (true Roman)

§ 2. Roman civilization at its zenith 247 Empire crumples up . . 259

§ 3. Limitations of the Roman mind 252 § 6. The Eastern (revived Hellenic)

§ 4. The stir of the great plains . 253 Empire ..... 263

BOOK VI

CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM

CHAPTER XXIX. The Beginnings, the Rise, and the Divisions of Christianity

§ 1, Judea at the Christian era . 269

.§ 2. The teachings of Jesus of

Nazareth . . . .270

§ 3. The new universal religions . 275

§4. The crucifixion of Jesus of

Nazareth . . . .276

§ 5. Doctrines added to the teach¬ ings of Jesus .... 277

§ 6. The struggles and persecutions

of Christianity .... 280

§ 7. Constantine the Great . . 282

§ 8. The establishment of official

Christianity .... 283

§ 9. The map of Europe, a.d. 500 . 285

§ 10. The salvation of learning by

Christianity .... 287

CHAPTER XXX. Seven Centuries in Asia

§ 1. Justinian the Great . .289

§ 2. The Sassanid empire in Persia 290 § 3. The decay of Syria under the

Sassanids . . . .291

§ 4. The first message from Islam . 294

§ 5. Zoroaster and Mani . . 294

(CIRCA 50 B.C. TO A.D. 650)

§ 6. Hunnish peoples in central Asia

and India .... 295

§ 7. The great age of China . . 297

§ 8. Intellectual fetters of China . 299

§ 9. The travels of Yuan Chwang . 303

CHAPTER XXXI. Muhammad and Islam

§ 1. Arabia before Muhammad . 306

§ 2. Life of Muhammad to the

Hegira . 307

§ 3. Muhammad becomes a fighting

prophet . 309

§4. The teachings of Islam . .312

§ 5. The caliphs Abu Bekr and Omar 313 § 6. The great days of the Omayyads 316 § 7. The decay of Islam under the

Abbasids ..... 320

§ 8. The intellectual life of Arab

Islam . 321

SCHEME OF THE OUTLINE

xi

CHAPTER XXXII. Christendom and the Crusades

PAGE

§ 1. The Western world at its lowest

ebb ..... 324

§ 2. The feudal system . . . 325

§ 3. The Frankish kingdom of the

Merovingians . . . .327

§ 4. The Christianization of the

western barbarians . . . 328

§ 5. Charlemagne becomes emperor of the West .... 331

§ 6. The personality of Charlemagne 333 § 7. The French and the Germans

become distinct . . . 334

§ 8. The Normans, the Saracens, the Hungarians, and the Seljuk Turks .

§ 9. How Constantinople appealed to Rome .- . . .

§ 10. The Crusades §11. The Crusades a test of Chris¬ tianity ..... § 12. The Emperor Frederick II §13. Defects and limitations of the papacy ..... § 14. A list of leading popes .

BOOK VII

THE MONGOL EMPIRES OF THE LAND WAYS AND THE NEW EMPIRES OF THE SEA WAYS

CHAPTER XXXIII. The Great Empire op Jengis Khan and his Successors.

(The Age of the Land Ways)

§ 1. Asia at the end of the twelfth

century ..... 357

§ 2. The rise and victories of the

Mongols . . . .359

§ 3. The travels of Marco Polo . 302

§ 4. The Ottoman Turks and Con¬ stantinople . • . . . 365

§ 5. Why the Mongols were not

Christianized .... 308

CHAPTER XXXIV. The Renascence of Gives Place to Sea Ways)

§ 1. Christianity and popular educa¬ tion ..... 373

§ 2. Europe begins to think for itself 377 § 3. The Great Plague and the dawn

of communism . . . 380

§ 4. How paper liberated the human

mind ..... 382

§ 5. Protestantism of the princes and

Protestantism of the peoples . 383

§ 6. The reawakening of science . 380

§ 5a. Kublai Khan founds the Yuan dynasty ..... § 5b. The Mongols revert to tribalism § 5c. The Kipchak empire and the Tsar of Muscovy

§ 5d. Timurlane .... § 5e. The Mongol empire of India . § 5f. The Mongols and the Gipsies .

Western Civilization. (Land Ways

§ 7. The new growth of European towns ..... § 8. America comes into history § 9. What Machiavelli thought of the world ....

§ 10. The republic of Switzerland § 11a. The life of the Emperor Charles V

§ 11b. Protestants if the prince wills it § 11c. The intellectual under-tow

BOOK VIII

THE AGE OF THE GREAT POWERS

CHAPTER XXXV. Princes, Parliaments, and Powers

§ 1. Princes and foreign policy . 411

§2. The Dutch republic . . 412

§ 3. The English republic . . 414

§ 4. The break-up and disorder of Germany ....

§ 5. The splendours of Grand Mon¬ archy in Europe

PAGE

336

340

341

345

346

348

351

368

368

368

369

370 372

390

393

398

400

401 406 406

419

420

xii SCHEME OF THE OUTLINE

CHAPTER XXXV {continued)

PAGE

§ 6. The growth of the idea of Great § 9. Britain dominates India .

Powers ..... 424 § 10. Russia’s ride to the Pacific

§ 7. The crowned republic of Poland § 11. What Gibbon thought of the

and its fate .... 426 world in 1780

§ 8. The first scramble for empire § 12. The social truce draws to an

overseas .... 428 end .....

CHAPTER XXXVI. The New Democratic Republics of America and France

§ 1. Inconveniences of the Great

Power system . . . 440

§ 2. The thirteen colonies before

their revolt . . . .441

§ 3. Civil war is forced upon the

colonies ..... 444

§ 4. The War of Independence . 446

§ 5. The constitution of the United

States ..... 447

§ 6. Primitive features of the United

States constitution . . 451

§ 7. Revolutionary ideas in France § 8. The Revolution of the year

1789 .

§ 9. The French “ crowned repub¬ lic ” of ’89-’91

§ 10. The Revolution of the Jacobins § 11. The Jacobin republic, 1792-4 § 12. The Directory §13. The pause in reconstruction and the dawn of modern Socialism ....

CHAPTER XXXVII. The Career of Napoleon Bonaparte

§ 1. The Bonaparte family in § 4. Napoleon I Emperor, 1804-

Corsica ..... 473 1814 . . . . .

§ 2. Bonaparte as a republican § 5. The Hundred Days .

general . . . . . 473 § 6. The map of Europe in 1815

§ 3. Napoleon First Consul, 1799-

1804 . 475

CHAPTER XXXVIII. The Realities and Imaginations of the Nineteenth

Century.

§ 1. The mechanical revolution . 488

§ 2. Relation of the mechanical to

the industrial revolution . 492

§ 3. The fermentation of ideas, 1848 495 § 4. The development of the idea of

Socialism .... 496

§ 5. Shortcomings of Socialism as a

scheme of human society . 499

§ 6. How Darwinism affected religious

and political ideas . . 502

§ 7. The idea of Nationalism . . 506

§ 8. The Great Exhibition of 1851 508

§ 9. The career of Napoleon III § 10. Lincoln and the Civil War in America ....

§11. The Russo-Turkish War and the Treaty of Berlin §12. The (second) scramble for over¬ seas empire .... §13. The Indian precedent in Asia § 14. The history of Japan §15. Close of the period of overseas expansion ....

§16. The British Empire in 1914 .

CHAPTER XXXIX. The Catastrophe of Modern Imperialism

§1.	The armed peace before	the
	Great War		530
§2.	Imperial Germany .	•	531
§3	The spirit of Imperialism	in
	Britain and Ireland	#	536
§4.	Imperialism in France, Italy,
	and the Balkans	a	541
§5.	Russia a Grand Monarchy	•	542

§ 6. The United States and the Imperial idea . . . .

§ 7. The immediate causes of the Great War ....

§ 8. A summary of the Great War up to 1917

§ 9. The Great War from the Russian collapse to the armistice .

PAGE

429

432

433 436

454

456

457 460 465 468

469

478

482

484

509

513

518

518

524

525

528

528

543

545

548

553

SCHEME OF THE OUTLINE

CHAPTER XL. The Effort to Reconstruct the World Begins

• PAGE

§ 1. The political, economic and so¬ cial disorganization caused by the Great War . . . 558

§ 2. The Bolsheviks . . .561

§ 3. President Wilson at Versailles 565 § 4. Summary of the first Covenant

of the League of Nations . 571

§ 5. A general outline of the treaties

of 1919 and 1920 . . .573

PAGE

§ 6. The “ Next War ” . . . 575

§ 7. Processes of readjustment in the

British Empire . . .578

§ 8. Processes of readjustment in Europe and French political conservatism .... 580

§ 9. President Harding and the idea

of an Association of Nations . 581

CHAPTER XLI. The Next Stage of History

§ 1. The possible unification of men’s

wills in political matters . 583

§ 2. How a Federal World Govern¬ ment may come about . . 585

Chronological Table and Time Charts

§ 3. Some fundamental character¬ istics of a modern world state 586 § 4. What this world might be were

it under one law and justice . 587

§ 5. The stages beyond . . . 590

. 593

Index

609

LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

Life in the Early Palaeozoic ......

Time Chart from earliest life to present age

Life in the Later Palaeozoic Age .....

Australian Lung Fish .......

Some Reptiles of the Later Palaeozoic Age.

Astronomical Variations affecting Climate ....

Some Mesozoic Reptiles .......

Later Mesozoic Reptiles .......

Pterodactyls and Archaeopteryx ......

Hesperornis .........

Some Oligocene Mammals .......

Miocene Mammals ........

Early Pleistocene Animals, contemporary with EarliestsMan Time Diagram of the Glacial Ages .....

The Sub- Man Pithecanthropus ......

Europe and Western Asia 50,000 Years Ago (Map)

Neanderthal Man ........

Early Stone Implements .......

Australia and the Western Pacific in the Glacial Age (Map) Cro-magnon Man ........

Europe and Western Asia in the Later Palaeolithic Age (Map) Reindeer Age Articles . . . . . . .

A Reindeer Age Masterpiece ......

Reindeer Age Engravings and Carvings ....

Diagram of the Estimated Duration of the True Human Periods Neolithic Implements .......

Pottery from Lake Dwellings ......

Hut Urns ..........

A Menhir of the Neolithic Period .....

Bronze Age Implements .......

Diagram showing the Duration of the Neolithic Period Heads of Australoid Types ......

Bushwoman .........

Negro Types .........

Mongolian Types ........

Caucasian Types ........

Europe, Asia, Africa 15,000 Years Ago (Map)

The Swastika .........

Relationship of Human Races (Diagrammatic Summary)

Possible Development of Languages .....

6

7

9

12

13

15

19

20 21 22

25

26

31

32

33

37

38

39

40

42

43

44

45

46

47 50

52

53 60 61 62

65

66 66 67

67

68 60 69

XV

-

xv i MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

page

The Cradle of Western Civilization 6000 to 4000 b.c. (Map) ... BO

Sumerian Warriors in Phalanx .......... 82

Assyrian Warrior (temp. Sargon II) ......... 84

Time Chart 6000 b.c. to a.d. .......... 85

Egyptian Hippopotamus Goddess ...... ... 86

The Cradle of Chinese Civilization (Map)' ........ 89

Boats on Nile, 2500 b.c. ........... 93

Egyptian Ship on Red Sea, 1250 b.c. ........ 94

iEgean Civilization (Map) ........... 95

A Votary of the Snake Goddess ......... 96

American Indian Picture-Writing ......... 99

Egyptian Gods — Set, Anubis, Typhon, Bes . . . . . . .104

Egyptian Gods— Thoth-lunus, Hathor, Chnemu ....... 105

An Assyrian King and his Chief Minister . . . . . . . .107

Pharaoh Chephren . . . . . . . . . . . .109

Pharaoh Rameses III as Osiris (Sarcophagus relief) . . . . . .110

Pharaoh Akhnaton . . . . . . . . . . . .111

Egyptian Peasants (Pyramid Age) . . . . . . . . .114

Brawl among Egyptian Boatmen (Pyramid Age). . . . . . .115

Egyptian Social Types (from Tombs) . . . . . . . .116

The Land of the Hebrews (Map) ......... 126

Aryan-speaking Peoples 1000-500 b.c. (Map) . . . . . • .135

Combat between Menelaus and Hector . . . . . . • .139

Archaic Horses and Chariots . . . . . . . . . .140

Hellenic Races 1000-800 b.c. (Map) ......... 143

Greek Sea Fight, 550 b.c. ........... 144

Athenian Warship, 400 b.c. .......... 145

Median and Second Babylonian Empires (in Nebuchadnezzar’s Reign) (Map) . 151

Scythian Types ............ 151

The Empire of Darius (Map) . . . . . . . . . .155

Wars of the Greeks and Persians (Map) ........ 157

Athenian Foot-soldier ........... 158

Persian Body-guard (from Frieze at Susa) ........ 160

The World according to Herodotus (Map) ........ 161

Athene of the Parthenon . . . . . . . . . . .165

Philip of Macedon ............ 172

Growth of Macedonia under Philip (Map) ........ 173

Macedonian Warrior (Bas-relief from Pella) . . . . . . .175

Campaigns of Alexander the Great (Map) . . . . . • • .178

Alexander the Great . . . . . . . . . . . .182

Break-up of Alexander’s Empire (Map) . . . • • • • .183

Seleucus I ............ 184

Later State of Alexander’s Empire (Map) . . • • • • • .185

The World according to Eratosthenes, 200 b.c. (Map) ..... 188

The Known World, 250 b.c. (Map) ......... 190

Isis and Horus ....... ... 193

MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS xix

PAGE

Italy, 1861 {Map) ............ 510

Bismarck . . . . . . . . . . . . . .511

The Balkans, 1878 {Map) . 513

The U.S.A., showing Dates of the Chief Territorial Extensions {Map) . . . 515

Abraham Lincoln ............ 517

Comparative Maps of Asia under different projections . . . . .519

The British Empire in 1815 {Map) ......... 521

Africa in the Middle of 19th Century {Map) ....... 522

Africa, 1914 {Map) ............ 523

Japan and the East Coast of Asia {Map) ........ 527

Overseas Empires of European Powers, 1914 {Map) ...... 529

Emperor William II ........... 533

Ireland {Map) ............. 539

The Balkan States, 1913 {Map). ......... 542

The Original German Plan, 1914 {Map) ........ 547

The Western Front, 1915-18 {Map) . . . . . . . . . 549

Time Chart of the Great War, 1914-18 ........ 554-5

President Wilson ............ 568

M. Clemenceau ............. 568

Mr. Lloyd George ............ 568

Germany after the Peace Treaty, 1919 {Map) ....... 572

The Turkish Treaty, 1920 {Map) . . . . . . . . .574

The Break-up of Austria-Hungary {Map) ........ 575

Lord Carson ............. 579

President Harding . . . . . . . . . . . .581

Time Chart 1000 b.c.-300 b.c. . . . ' . . . . . . . 602

,, ,, 400 b.c.-a.d. 300 ..... .... 603

„ „ a.d. 200-a.d. 900 ...... ... 604

„ ,, a.d. 800-a.d. 1500 ......... 605

„ „ a.d. 1220-a.d. 1920 ......... 606-

.1

BOOK I

THE MAKING OF OUR WORLD

B

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

I

THE EARTH IN SPACE AND TIME

THE earth on which we live is a spin¬ ning globe. Vast though it seems to us, it is a mere speck of matter in the greater vastness of space.

Space is, for the most part, emptiness. At great intervals there are in this emptiness flaring centres of heat and light, the “ fixed stars.” They are all moving about in space, notwithstanding that they are called fixed stars, but for a long time men did not realize their motion. They are so vast and at such tremendous distances that their motion is not perceived. Only in the course of many thousands of years is it appreciable. These fixed stars are so far off that, for all their immensity, they seem to be, even when we look at them through the most powerful telescopes, mere points of light, brighter or less bright. A few, however, when we turn a telescope upon them, are seen to be whirls and clouds of shining vapour which we call nebulae. They are so far off that a move¬ ment of millions of miles would be imper¬ ceptible.

One star, however, is so near to us that it is like a great ball of flame. This one is the sun. The sun is itself in its nature like a fixed star, but it differs from the other fixed stars in appearance because it is beyond comparison nearer than they are ; and because it is nearer men have been able to learn something of its nature. Its mean distance from the earth is ninety- three million miles. It is a mass of flaming matter, having a diameter of 866,000 miles. Its bulk is a million and a quarter times the bulk of our earth.

These are difficult figures for the imagina¬ tion. If a bullet fired from a Maxim gun at the sun kept its muzzle velocity unimpaired, it would take seven years to reach the sun.

And yet we say the sun is near, measured by the scale of the stars. If the earth were a small ball, one inch in diameter, the sun would be a globe of nine feet diameter ; it would fill a small bedroom. It is spinning round on its axis, but since it is an incandes¬ cent fluid, its polar regions do not travel with the same velocity as its equator, the surface of which rotates in about twenty- five days. The surface visible to us con¬ sists of clouds of incandescent metallic vapour. At what lies below we can only guess. So hot is the sun’s atmosphere that iron, nickel, copper, and tin are present in it in a gaseous state. About it at great distances circle not only our earth, but cer¬ tain kindred bodies called the planets. These shine in the sky because they reflect the light of the sun ; they are near enough for us to note their movements quite easily. Night by night their positions change with regard to the fixed stars.

It is well to understand how empty is space. If, as we have said, the sun were a ball nine feet across, our earth would, in proportion, be the size of a one-inch ball, and at a distance of 323 yards from the sun. The moon would be a speck the size of a small pea, thirty inches from the earth. Nearer to the sun than the earth would be two other very similar specks, the planets Mercury and Venus, at a distance of a hun¬ dred and twenty-five and two hundred and fifty yards respectively. Beyond the earth would come the planets Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, at distances from the sun of 500, 1,680, 3,000, 6,000, and 9,500 yards respectively. There would also be a certain number of very much smaller specks, flying about amongst these planets, more particularly a number called the

4

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

asteroids circling between Mars and Jupiter, and occasionally a little puff of more or less luminous vapour and dust would drift into the system from the almost limitless emptiness beyond. Such a puff is wThat we call a comet. All the rest of the space about us and around us and for unfathomable dis¬ tances beyond is cold, lifeless, and void. The nearest fixed star to us, on this minute scald, be it remembered — the earth as a one-inch ball, and the moon a little pea — would be over 40,000 miles away. Most of the fixed stars we see would still be scores and hun¬ dreds of millions of miles off.

The diameter of our world is a little under 8,000 miles. Its surface is rough, the more projecting parts of the roughness are moun¬ tains, and in the hollows of its surface there is a film of water, the oceans and seas. This film of water is about five miles thick at its deepest part — that is to say, the deepest oceans have a depth of five miles. This is very little in comparison with the bulk of the world.

About this sphere is a thin covering of air, the atmosphere. As we ascend in a balloon or go up a mountain from the level of the sea-shore the air is continually less dense, until at last it becomes so thin that it cannot support life. At a height of twenty miles there is scarcely any air at all — not one hundredth part of the density of air at the surface of the sea. The highest point to which a bird can fly is about four miles up — the condor, it is said, can struggle up to that ; but most small birds and insects which are carried up by aeroplanes or balloons drop off insensible at a much lower level, and the greatest height to which any mountaineer has ever climbed is under five miles. Men have flown in aeroplanes to a height of over four miles, and balloons with men in them have reached very nearly seven miles, but at the cost of consider¬ able physical suffering. Small experimental balloons, containing not men, but recording instruments, have gone as high as twenty - two miles.

It is in the upper few hundred feet of the crust of the earth, in the sea, and in the lower levels of the air below four miles that life is found. We do not know of any fife at all except in these films of air and water upon our planet. So far as we know, all the rest of space is as yet without life. Scientific men have discussed the possibility

of life, or of some process of a similar kind, occurring upon such kindred bodies as the planets Venus and Mars. But they point merely to questionable possibilities.

Astronomers and geologists and those who study physics have been able to tell us some¬ thing of the origin and history of the earth. They consider that, vast ages ago, the sun was a spinning, flaring mass of matter, not yet concentrated into a compact centre of heat and fight, considerably larger than it is now, and spinning very much faster, and that as it whirled, a series of fragments detached themselves from it, which became the planets. Our earth is one of these planets. The flaring mass that was the material of the earth broke into two masses as it spun ; a larger, the earth itself, and a smaller, which is now the dead, still moon. Astronomers give us convincing reasons for supposing that sun and earth and moon and all that system were then whirling about at a speed much greater than the speed at which they are moving to-day, and that at first our earth was a flaming thing upon which no fife could five. The way in which they have reached these conclusions is by a very beautiful and interesting series of observations and reasoning, too long and elaborate for us to deal with here. But they oblige us to believe that the sun, incandescent though it is, is now much cooler than it was, and that it spins more slowly now than it did, and that it continues to cool and slow down. And they also show that the rate at which the earth spins is diminishing and continues to diminish — that is to say, that our day is growing longer and longer, and that the heat at the centre of the earth wastes slowly. There was a time when the day was not a half and not a third of what it is to-day ; when a blazing hot sun, much greater than it is now, must have moved visibly — had there been an eye to mark it — from its rise to its setting across the skies. There will be a time when the day will be as long as a year is now, and the cooling sun, shorn of its beams, will hang motionless in the heavens.

It must have been in days of a much hotter sun, a far swifter day and night, high tides, great heat, tremendous storms and earthquakes, that fife, of which we are a part, began upon the world. The moon also was nearer and brighter in those days and had a changing face.

THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS

5

II

THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS

§ 1. The First Living Things. § 2, How Old is the World t

§ 1

E do not know how life began upon the earth.

Biologists, that is to say, students of life, have made guesses about these beginnings, but we will not discuss them here. Let us only note that they all agree that life began where the tides of those swift days spread and receded over the steaming beaches of mud and sand.

The atmosphere was much denser then, usually great cloud masses obscured the sun, frequent storms darkened the heavens. The land of those days, upheaved by violent volcanic forces, was a barren land, without vegetation, without soil. The almost in¬ cessant rain-storms swept down upon it, and rivers and torrents carried great loads of sediment out to sea, to become muds that hardened later into slates and shales, and sands that became sandstones. The geolo¬ gists have studied the whole accumulation of these sediments as it remains to-day, from those of the earliest ages to the most recent. Of course the oldest deposits are the most distorted and changed and worn, and in them there is now no certain trace to be found of life at all. Probably the earliest forms of life were small and soft, leaving no evidence of their existence behind them. It was only when some of these living things developed skeletons and shells of lime and such-like hard material that they left fossil vestiges after they died, and so put themselves on record for examination.

The literature of geology is very largely an account of the fossils that are found in the rocks, and of the order in which layers after layers of rocks lie one on another. The very oldest rocks must have been formed before there was any sea at all, when the earth was too hot for a sea to exist, and when the water that is now sea was an atmosphere of steam mixed with the air. Its higher levels were dense with clouds, from which a hot rain fell towards the rocks below, to be converted again into steam long before it reached their incandescence. Below this steam atmosphere the molten world-stuff solidified as the first rocks. These first rocks must have solidified as a cake over glowing liquid material beneath, much as

cooling lava does. They must have appeared first as crusts and clinkers. They must have been constantly remelted and recrystallized before any thickness of them became per¬ manently solid. The name of Fundamental Gneiss is given to a great underlying system of crystalline rocks which probably formed age by age as this hot youth of the world drew to its close. The scenery of the world in the days when the Fundamental Gneiss was formed must have been more like the interior of a furnace than anything else to be found upon earth at the presem time.

After long ages the steam in the atmo¬ sphere began also to condense and fall right down to earth, pouring at last over these warm primordial rocks in rivulets of hot water and gathering in depressions as pools and lakes and the first seas. Into those seas the streams that poured over the rocks brought with them dust and particles to form a sediment, and this sediment accumu¬ lated in la^’ers, or as geologists call them, strata , and formed the first Sedimentary Rocks. Those earliest sedimentary rocks sank into depressions and were covered by others ; they were bent, tilted up, and torn by great volcanic disturbances and by tidal strains that swept through the rocky crust of the earth. We find these first sedimentary rocks still coming to the surface of the land here and there, either not covered by later strata or exposed after vast ages of con¬ cealment by the wearing off of the rock that covered them later — there are great surfaces of them in Canada especially ; they are cleft and bent, partially remelted, recrystallized, hardened and compressed, but recognizable for what they are. And they contain no single certain trace of fife at all. They are frequently called Azoic (lifeless) Rocks. But since in some of these earliest sediment¬ ary rocks a substance called graphite (black lead) occurs, and also red and black oxide of iron, and since it is asserted that these substances need the activity of living things for their production, which may or may not be the case, some geologists prefer to call these earliest sedimentary rocks Archceozoic (primordial life). They suppose that the first life was soft living matter that had no

6

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

shells or skeletons or any such structure that could remain as a recognizable fossil after its death, and that its chemical influence caused the deposition of graphite and iron oxide. This is pure guessing, of course, and there is at least an equal probability that in the time of formation of the Azoic Rocks, life had not yet begun.

Overlying or overlapping these Azoic or Archseozoic rocks come others, manifestly also very ancient and worn, which do contain

the beginnings of land plants and land creatures. These rocks are called the Palaeozoic (ancient life) rocks. They mark a vast era, during which life was slowly spreading, increasing, and developing in the seas of our world. Through long ages, through the earliest Palaeozoic time, it was no more than a proliferation of such swim¬ ming and creeping things in the water. There were creatures called trilobites ; they were crawling things like big sea woodlice

Note its general resemblance, except for size, to the microscopic summer ditch water life of to-day.

traces of life. These first remains are of the' simplest description ; they are the vestiges of simple plants called algae, or marks like the tracks made by worms in the sea mud. There are also the skeletons of the microscopic creatures called Radiolaria. This second series of rocks is called the Proterozoic (beginning of life) series, and marks a long age in the world’s history. Lying over and above the Proterozoic rocks is a third series, which is found to contain a considerable number and variety of traces of living things. First comes the evidence of a diversity of shell-fish, crabs, and such-like crawling things, worms, seaweeds, and the like ; then of a multitude of fishes and of

that were probably related to the American king-crab of to-day. There were also sea- scorpions, the prefects of that early world. The individuals of certain species of these were nine feet long. These were the very highest sorts of life. There were abundant different sorts of an order of shellfish called brachiopods. There were plant animals, rooted and joined together like plants, and loose weeds that waved in the wraters.

It was not a display of life to excite our imaginations. There was nothing that ran or flew or even swam swiftly or skilfully. Except for the size of some of the creatures, it was not very different from, and rather less various than, the kind of life a student

THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS

7

$00/ million

ar ^yaoxs ayo

600,

60 ” “

360

Of / 36

^?/26 ”

140/

40/

14 ” “

} Azoic or Arclva eozoic

Possibly without life ab abb

\ “Proterozoic

14/itbout visible troves of lump struct ~ urc. 7Lp of* frnrnabmlae, felly fsbu-, — ■ (green Sewn cwb tbc. lake

Lariy Palaeozoxc

‘Before the appearance of any vertebrate animals fApe of Sea Scorpions & TxrLobifes.

Later Valceozoic

Poxy of fishes , fiznphibia , and Swamp forests.

Alesozoic

3gj<z of fepbles.

\ Cdixiozoic ofT/faxnmals, (grass, & J Land forests.

would gather from any summer-time diteh now¬ adays for microscopic examination. Such was the life of the shallow seas through a hundred million years or more in the Early Palaeozoic period. The land during that time was apparently absolutely bar¬ ren. We find no trace nor hint of land life. Every¬ thing that lived in those days lived under water for most or all of its life.

Between the formation of these Lower Palaeozoic rocks in which the sea scorpion and trilobite ruled, and our own time, there have intervened al¬ most immeasurable ages represented by layers and masses of sedimentary rocks. There are first the Upper Palaeozoic Rocks, and above these the geolo¬ gists distinguish two great divisions . N ext ab o ve the Palaeozoic come the Meso¬ zoic (middle life) rocks, a second vast system of fossil-bearing rocks, repre¬ senting perhaps a hundred millions of swift years, and containing a wonder¬ ful array of fossil remains, bones of giant reptiles and the like, which we will pre¬ sently describe ; and above these again are the Cainozoic (recent life) rocks, a third great volume in the history of life, an un¬ finished volume of which the sand and mud that was carried out to sea yesterday by the rivers of the world, to bury the bones and scales and bodies and tracks that will become at last fossils of the things of to-day, constitute the last written leaf.

These markings and fossils in the rocks and the rocks themselves are our first historical documents. The history of life that men have puzzled out and are still puzzling out from them is called the Record of the Rocks. By studying this record men are slowly piecing together a story of life’s beginnings, and of the beginnings of our kind, of which our ancestors a century or so ago had no suspicion. But when we call these rocks and the fossils a record and a history, it must not be supposed that there is any sign of an orderly keeping of a record. It is merely

that whatever happens leaves some trace, if only we are intelligent enough to detect the meaning of that trace. Nor are the rocks of the world in orderly layers one above the other, convenient for men to read. They are not like the books and pages of a library. They are torn, disrupted, interrupted, flung about, defaced, like a carelessly arranged office after it has experienced in succession a bombardment, a hostile military occupation, looting, an earthquake, riots, and a fire. And so it is that for countless generations this Record of the Rocks lay unsuspected beneath the feet of men. Fossils were known to the Ionian Greeks in the sixth century B.C., they were discussed at Alexandria by Eratosthenes and others in the third century B.C., a discussion which is summarized in Strabo’s Geography (? 20-10 b.c.). They were known to the Latin poet Ovid, but he did not understand their nature. He thought they were the first rude efforts of creative power. They were noted by Arabic writers in the tenth century. Leonardo da Vinci.

8

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

who lived so recently as the opening of the sixteenth century (1452 — 1519), was one of the first Europeans to grasp the real signific¬ ance of fossils, and it has been only within the last century and a half that man has begun the serious and sustained deciphering of these long-neglected early pages of his world’s history.

§ 2

Speculations about geological time vary enormously. Estimates of the age of the oldest rocks by geologists and astronomers starting from different standpoints have varied between 1,600,000,000, and 25,000,000. The whole weight of modem opinion seems now to be shifting to the longest estimate. That the period of time has been vast, that it is to be counted by scores and possibly by hundreds of millions of years, is the utmost that can be said with certainty in the matter. It is quite open to the reader to divide every number in the appended time diagram by ten or multiply it by two ; no one can gain¬ say him.

Of the relative amount of time as between

one age and another we have, however, stronger evidence ; if the reader expands the 600,000,000 we have given here to 800,000,000, then he must reduce the 80,000,000 of the Cainozoic to 40,000,000. And be it noted that whatever the total sum may be, most geologists are in agreement that half or more than half of the whole of geological time had passed before life had developed to the Later Palceozoic level.

Reading quickly through these opening chapters, the reader may be apt to think of them as a mere swift prelude of preparation to the apparently much longer history that follows, but in reality that subsequent history , is longer only because it is more detailed and more interesting to us. It looms larger in perspective. For ages that stagger the imagination this earth spun hot and lifeless, and again for ages of equal vastness it held no life above the level of the animalcula in a drop of ditch water.

Not only is Space from the point of view of life and humanity empty, but Time is empty also. Life is like a little glow, scarcely kindled yet, in these void immensities.

Ill

NATURAL SELECTION AND THE CHANGES

OF SPECIES

NOW here it will be well to put plainly certain general facts about this new thing, life, that was creeping in the shallow waters and intertidal muds of the early Palaeozoic period, and which is perhaps confined to our planet alone in all the immensity of space.

Life differs from all things whatever that are without life in certain general aspects. There are the most wonderful differences among living things to-day, but all living things past and present agree in possessing a certain power of growth, all living things take nourishment, all living things move about as they feed and grow, though the movement may be no more than the spread of roots through the soil, or of branches in the air. Moreover, living things reproduce ; they give rise to other living things, either by growing and then dividing or by means of seeds or spores or eggs or other ways of producing young. Reproduction is a characteristic of life.

No living thing goes on living for ever. There seems to be a limit of growth for every kind of living thing. Among very small and simple living things, such as that microscopic blob of living matter the Amoeba , an in¬ dividual may grow and then divide com¬ pletely into two new individuals, which again may divide in their turn. Many other microscopic creatures live actively for a time, grow, and then become quiet and inactive, enclose themselves in an outer covering and break up wholly into a number of still smaller things, spores, which are released and scattered and again grow into the likeness of their parent. Among more complex creatures the reproduction is not usually such simple division, though division does occur even in the case of many creatures big enough to be visible to the unassisted eye. But the rule with almost all larger beings is that the individual grows up to a certain limit of size. Then, before it becomes unwieldy, its growth declines and stops. As it reaches

NATURAL SELECTION

9

its full size it matures . it begins to produce young, which are either born alive or hatched from eggs. But all of its body does not produce young. Only a special part does that. After the individual has lived and produced offspring for some time, it ages and dies. It does so by a sort of necessity. There is a practical limit to its life as well as to its growth. These things are as true of plants as they are of animals. And they are not true of things that do not live.

is always a slight difference, which we speak of as individuality. A thousand butterflies this year may produce two or three thousand next year ; these latter will look to us almost exactly like their predecessors, but each one will have just that slight difference. It is hard for us to see individuality in butterflies because we do not observe them very closely, but it is easy for us to see it in men. All the men and women in the world now are descended from the men and women of

DIAGRAM OF LIFE IN THE LATER PALEOZOIC AGE.

Life is creeping out of the water. An insect, like a dragon-fly, is shown. There were amphibia like gigantic newts and salamanders, and even primitive reptiles in these swamps.

Non-living things, such as crystals, grow, but they have no set limits of growth or size, they do not move of their own accord and there is no stir within them. Crystals once formed may last unchanged for millions of years. There is no reproduction for any non-living thing.

This growth and dying and reproduction of living things leads to some very wonderful consequences. The young which a living thing produces are either directly, or after some intermediate stages and changes (such as the changes of a caterpillar and butterfly), like the parent living thing. But they are never exactly like it or like each other. There

a.d. 1800, but not one of us now is exactly the same as one of that vanished generation. And what is true of men and butterflies is true of every sort of living thing, of plants as of animals. Every species changes all its individualities in each generation. That is as true of all the minute creatures that swarmed and reproduced and died in the Archseozoic and Proterozoic seas, as it is of men to-day.

Every species of living things is con¬ tinually dying and being born again, as a multitude of fresh individuals.

Consider, then, what must happen to a new-born generation of living things of any

10 THE OUTLINE

species. Some of the individuals will be stronger or sturdier or better suited to succeed in life in some way than the rest, many individuals will be weaker or less suited. In particular single cases any sort of luck or accident may occur, but on the whole the better equipped individuals will live and grow up and reproduce themselves and the weaker will as a rule go under. The latter will be less able to get food, to fight their enemies and pull through. So that in each generation there is as it were a picking over of a species, a picking out of most of the weak or unsuitable and a preference for the strong and suitable. This process is called Natural Selection or the Survival of the Fittest. 1

It follows, therefore, from the fact that living things grow and breed and die. that every species so long as the conditions under which it lives remain the same, becomes more and more perfectly fitted to those con¬ ditions in every generation.

But now suppose those conditions change, then the sort of individual that used to succeed may now fail to succeed and a sort of individual that could not get on at all under the old conditions may now find its opportunity. These species will change, therefore, generation by generation ; the old sort of individual that used to prosper and dominate will fail and die out and the new sort of individual will become the rule, — until the general character of the species changes.

Suppose, for example, there is some little furry whitey-brown animal living in a bitterly cold land which is usually under snow. Such individuals as have the thickest, whitest fur will be least hurt by the cold, less seen by their enemies, and less conspicuous as they seek their prey. The fur of this species will thicken and its whiteness increase with every generation, until there is no advantage in carrying any more fur.

Imagine now a change of climate that brings warmth into the land, sweeps away the snows, makes white creatures glaringly visible during the greater part of the year and thick fur an encumbrance. Then every individual with a touch of brown in its colouring and a thinner fur will find itself at an advantage, and very white and heavy fur will be a handicap. There will be a weeding out of the white in favour of the brown in each generation. If this change of climate come about too quickly, it may of course exterminate the species altogether ; but if

1 It might be called with more exactness the Survival of the Fitter.

OF HISTORY

it come about gradually, the species, al¬ though it may have a hard time, may yet be able to change itself and adapt itself generation by generation. This change and adaptation is called the Modification of Species.

Perhaps this change of climate does not occur all over the lands inhabited by the species ; maybe it occurs only on one side of some great arm of the sea or some great mountain range or such-like divide, and not on the other. A warm ocean current like the Gulf Stream may be deflected, and flow so as to warm one side of the barrier, leaving the other still cold. Then on the cold side this species will still be going on to its utmost possible furriness and whiteness and on the other side it will be modifying towards brownness and a thinner coat. At the same time there will probably be other changes going on ; a difference in the paws perhaps, because one half of the species will be fre¬ quently scratching through snow for its food, while the other will be scampering over brown earth. Probably also the difference of climate will mean differences in the sort of food available, and that may produce differences in the teeth and the digestive organs. And there may be changes in the sweat and oil glands of the skin due to the changes in the fur, and these will affect the excretory organs and all the internal chemis¬ try of the body. And so through all the structure of the creature. A time will come when the two separated varieties of this formerly single species will become so unlike each other as to be recognizably different species. Such a splitting up of a species m the course of generations into two or more species is called the Differentiation of Species.

And it should be clear to the reader that given these elemental facts of life, given growth and death and reproduction with individual variation in a world that changes, life must change in this way, modification and differentiation must occur, old species must disappear, and new ones appear. We have chosen for our instance here a familiar sort of animal, but what is true of furry beasts in snow and ice is true of all life, and equally true of the soft jellies and simple beginnings that flowed and crawled for hundreds of millions of years between the tidal levels and in the shallow, warm waters of the Proterozoic seas.

The early life of the early world, when the blazing sun rose and set in only a quarter of the time it now takes, when the warm seas poured in great tides over the sandy and muddy shores of the rocky lands and the air

LIFE AND CLIMATE

11

was full of clouds and steam, must have been modified and varied and species must have developed at a great pace. Life was prob¬ ably as swift and short as the days and years ; the generations, which natural selec¬ tion picked over, followed one another in rapid succession.

Natural selection is a slower process with man than with any other creature. It takes twenty years or more before an ordinary human being in western Europe grows up and reproduces. In the case of most animals the new generation is on trial in a year or less. With such simple and lowly beings, however, as first appeared in the primordial seas, growth and reproduction was probably a matter of a few brief hours or even of a few brief minutes. Modification and differentia¬ tion of species must accordingly have been extremely rapid, and life had already de¬ veloped a great variety of widely contrasted forms before it began to leave traces in the rocks. The Record of the Rocks does not begin, therefore, with any group of closely related forms from which all subsequent and existing creatures are descended. It begins

in the midst of the game, with nearly every main division of the animal kingdom already represented. Plants are already plants, and animals animals. The curtain rises on a drama in the sea that has already begun, and has been going on for some time. The brachiopods are discovered already in their shells, accepting and consuming much the same sort of food that oysters and mussels do now ; the great water scorpions crawl among the seaweeds, the trilobites roll up into balls and unroll and scuttle away. In that ancient mud and among those early weeds there was probably as rich and abund¬ ant and active a life of infusoria and the like as one finds in a drop of ditch water to-day. In the- ocean waters too, down to the utmost downward limit to which light could filter, then as now, there was an abundance of minute and translucent, and in many cases phosphorescent, beings.

But though the ocean and intertidal waters already swarmed with life, the land above the high-tide line was still, so far as we can guess, a stony wilderness without a trace of life.

IV

LIFE AND CLIMATE

§ 1. Life and Water. § 4. The Sun a Steadfast Star.

§ 2. The Earliest Animals. § 5. Changes from within the Earth-

$ 3. Why Life must change continually. § 6. Man may control Change.

§ 1

HEREVER the shore line ran there was life, and that life went on in and by and with water as its home, its medium, and its fundamental necessity.

The first jelly-like beginnings of life must have perished whenever they got out of the water, as jelly-fish dry up and perish on our beaches to-day. Drying up was the fatal thing for life in those days, against which at first it had no protection. But in a world of rain-pools and shallow seas and tides, any variation that enabled a living thing to hold out and keep its moisture during hours of low tide or drought met with every encourage¬ ment in the circumstances of the time. There must have been a constant risk of stranding. And, on the other hand, life had to keep rather near the shore and beaches in

the shallows because it had need of air (dissolved of course in the water) and fight.

No creature can breathe, no creature can digest its food, without water. We talk of breathing air, but what all living things really do is to breathe oxygen dissolved in water. The air we ourselves breathe must first be dissolved in the moisture in our lungs ; and all our food must be liquefied before it can be assimilated. Water-living creatures which are always under water, wave the freely exposed gills by which they breathe in that water, and extract the air dissolved in it. But a creature that is to be exposed for any time out of the water, must have its body and its breathing apparatus protected from drying up. Before the seaweeds could creep up out of the Early Palaeozoic seas into the intertidal fine of the beach, they had to develop a tougher outer skin to hold their moisture. Before the ancestor of the sea

12

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

scorpion could survive being left by the tide it had to develop its casing and armour. The trilobites probably developed their tough covering and rolled up into balls, far less as a protection against each other and any other enemies they may have possessed, than as a precaution against drying. And when presently, as we ascend the Palaeozoic rocks, the fish appear, first of all the back¬ boned or vertebrated animals, it is evident that a number of them are already adapted by the protection of their gills with gill covers and by a sort of primitive lung swimming- bladder, to face the same risk of temporary stranding.

Now the weeds and plants that were adapting themselves to intertidal conditions were also bringing themselves into a region of brighter light, and light is very necessary and precious to all plants. Any develop¬ ment of structure that would stiffen them and hold them up to the light, so that instead

of crumpling and flopping when the waters receded, they would stand up outspread, was a great advantage. And so we find them developing fibre and support, and the be¬ ginning of woody fibre in them. The early plants reproduced by soft spores, or half¬ animal “ gametes,” that were released in water, were distributed by water and could only germinate under water. The early plants were tied, and most lowly plants to¬ day are tied, by the conditions of their life cycle, to water. But here again there was a great advantage to be got by the develop¬ ment of some protection of the spores from drought that would enable reproduction to occur without submergence. So soon as a species could do that, it could live and re¬ produce and spread above the high-water mark, bathed in light and out of reach of the beating and distress of the waves. The main classificatory divisions of the larger plants mark stages in the release of plant life from the necessity of submergence by the development of woody support * and of a method of reproduction that is more and

more defiant of drying up. The lower plants are still the prisoner attendants of water. The lower mosses must live in damp, and even the development of the spore of the ferns demands at certain stages extreme wetness. The highest plants have carried freedom from water so far that they can five and reproduce if only there is some moisture in the soil below them. They have solved their problem of living out of water altogether.

The essentials of that problem were worked out through the vast aeons of the Proterozoic Age and the early Palaeozoic Age by nature’s method of experiment and trial. Then slowly, but in great abundance, a variety of new plants began to swarm away from the sea and over the lower lands, still keeping to swamp and lagoon and water¬ course as they spread.

§ 2

And after the plants came the animal life.

There is no sort of land animal in the world, as there is no sort of land plant, whose structure is not primarily that of a water-inhabiting being which has been adapted through the modification and differ¬ entiation of species to life out of the water. This adaptation is attained in various ways. In the case of the land scorpion the gill- plates of the primitive sea scorpion are sunken into the body so as to make the lung-books secure from rapid evaporation. The gills of crustaceans, such as the crabs which run about in the air, are protected by the gill- cover extensions of the back shell or carapace. The ancestors of the insects developed a system of air pouches and air tubes, the tracheal tubes, which carry the air all over the body before it is dissolved. In the case of the vertebrated land animals, the gills of the ancestral fish were first supplemented and then replaced by a bag-like growth from the throat, the primitive lung swimming- bladder. To this day there survive certain mudfish which enable us to understand very clearly the method by which the vertebrated land animals worked their way out of the water. These creatures ( e.g . the African lung -fish) are found in tropical regions in which there is a rainy full season and a dry season, during which the rivers become mere ditches of baked mud. During the rainy season these fish swim about and breathe by gills like any other fish. As the waters of the river evaporate, these fish bury themselves in the mud, their gills go out of action, and the creature keeps itself alive until the waters return by swallowing

LIFE AND CLIMATE

13

air, which passes into its swimming - bladder. The Australian lung-fish, when it is caught by the drying up of the river in stagnant pools, and the water has become deaerated and foul, rises to the surface and gulps air. A newt in a pond does exactly the same thing.

These creatures still re¬ main at the transition stage, the stage at which the ancestors of the higher vertebrated animals were released from their restric¬ tion to an under-water life.

The amphibia (frogs, newts, tritons, etc.) still show in their life history all the stages in the pro¬ cess of this liberation.

They are still dependent on water for their repro¬ duction ; their eggs must be laid in sunlit water, and there they must develop.

The young tadpole has branching external gills that wave in the water ; then a gill cover grows back over them and forms a gill chamber.

Then, as the creature’s legs appear and its tail is absorbed, it begins to use its lungs, and its gills dwindle and vanish. The adult frog can live all the rest of its days in the air, but it can be drowned if it is kept stead¬ fastly below water. When we come to the reptile, however, we find an egg which is protected from evaporation by a tough egg case, and this egg produces young which breathe by lungs from the very moment of hatching. The reptile is on all fours with the seeding plant in its freedom from the necessity to pass any stage of its life cycle in water.

The later Palaeozoic Rocks of the northern hemisphere give us the materials for a series of pictures of this slow spreading of fife over the land. Geographically, all round the northern half of the world it was an age of lagoons and shallow seas very favourable to this invasion. The new plants, now that they had acquired the power to live this new aerial life, developed with an extraordinary richness and variety.

There were as yet no true flowering

plants,1 no grasses nor trees that shed their leaves in winter2 ; the first “ flora ” consisted of great tree ferns, gigantic equisetums, cycad ferns, and kindred vegetation. Many of these plants took the form of huge-stemmed trees, of which great multitudes of trunks survive fossilized to this day. Some of these trees were over a hundred feet high, of orders and classes now vanished from the world. They stood with their stems in the water, in which no doubt there was a thick tangle of soft mosses and green slime and fungoid growths that left few plain vestiges behind them. The abundant remains of these first swamp forests constitute the main coal- measures of the world to-day.

Amidst this luxuriant primitive vegetation crawled and glided and flew the first insects. They were rigid-winged, four-winged crea¬ tures, often very big, some of them having wings measuring a foot in length. There were numerous dragon-flies — one found in the Belgian coal-measures had a wing span of twenty- nine inches ! There were also a

1 Phanerogams. 2 Deciduous trees.

14

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

great variety of flying cockroaches. Scor¬ pions abounded, and a number of early spiders, which, however, had no spinnerets for web-making.1 Land snails appeared. So too did the first-known step of our own ancestry upon land, the amphibia. As we ascend the higher levels of the Later Palaeozoic record, we find the process of air adaptation has gone as far as the appear¬ ance of true reptiles amidst the abundant and various amphibia.

The land life of the Upper Palaeozoic Age was the life of a green swamp forest without flowers or birds or the noises of modern insects. There were no big land beasts at all ; wallowing amphibia and primitive rep¬ tiles were the very highest creatures that life had so far produced. Whatever land lay away from the water or high above the water was still altogether barren and lifeless. But steadfastly, generation by generation, life was creeping away from the shallow sea-water of its beginning.

§ 3

The Record of the Rocks is like a great book that has been carelessly misused. All its pages are torn, worn and defaced, and many are altogether missing. The outline of the story that we sketch here has been pieced together slowly and painfully in an investigation that is still incomplete and still in progress. The Carboniferous Rocks, the “ coal-measures,” give us a vision of the first great expansion of life over the wet lowlands. Then come the torn pages known as the Permian Rocks (which count as the last of the Palaeozoic), that preserve very little for us of the land vestiges of their age. Only after a long interval of time does the history spread out generously again.

It must be borne in mind that great changes of climate have always been in pro¬ gress, that have sometimes stimulated and sometimes checked life. Every species of living thing is always adapting itself more and more closely to its conditions. And conditions are always changing. There is no finality in adaptation. There is a con¬ tinuing urgency towards fresh change.

About these changes of climate some explanations are necessary here. They are not regular changes ; they are slow fluctua¬ tions between heat and cold. The reader

1 This, says Mr. R. I. Pocock, has to be qualified. There were Carboniferous spiders with spinnerets, though they may have used the silk only for egg cases. And he thinks that the Carboniferous myriapods point to ground beneath the trees.

must not think that because the sun and earth were once incandescent, the climatic history of the world is a simple story of cooling down. The centre of the earth is certainly very hot to this day, but we feel nothing of that internal heat at the surface ; the internal heat, except for volcanoes and hot springs, has not been perceptible at the surface since first the rocks grew solid. Even in the Azoic or Archaeozoic Age there are traces in ice-worn rocks and the like of periods of intense cold. Such cold waves have always been going on everywhere, alternately with warmer conditions. And there have been periods of great wetness and periods of great dryness throughout the earth.

A complete account of the causes of these great climatic fluctuations has still to be worked out, but we may perhaps point out some of the chief of them.2 Prominent among them is the fact that the earth does not spin in a perfect circle round the sun. Its path or orbit is like a hoop that is dis¬ torted ; it is, roughly speaking, elliptical (ovo-elliptical), and the sun is nearer to one end of the ellipse than the other. It is at a point which is a focus of the ellipse. And the shape of this orbit never remains the same. It is slowly distorted by the attrac¬ tions of the other planets, for ages it may be nearly circular, for ages it is more or less elliptical. As the ellipse becomes most nearly circular, then the focus becomes most nearly the centre. When the orbit becomes most elliptical, then the position of the sun becomes most remote from the middle or, to use the astronomer’s phrase, most eccen¬ tric. When the orbit is most nearly circular, then it must be manifest that all the year round the earth must be getting much the same amount of heat from the sun ; when the orbit is most distorted, then there will be a season in each year when the earth is nearest the sun (this phrase is called Peri¬ helion) and getting a great deal of heat com¬ paratively, and a season when it will be at its farthest from the sun ( Aphelion ) and getting very little warmth. A planet at aphelion is travelling its slowest, and its fastest at perihelion ; so that the hot part of its year will last for a much less time than the cold part of its year. (Sir Robert Ball calculated that the greatest difference possible between the seasons was thirty-three days.) During ages when the orbit is most nearly

2 See Sir R. Ball’s Causes of the Great Ice Age, and Dr. Croll’s Climate and Time. These are sound books to read still, but the reader will find many of their conclusions modified in Wright’s The Quaternary Ice Age, which is a quarter of a century more recent.

LIFE AND CLIMATE

15

circular there will therefore be least extremes of climate, and when the orbit is at its greatest eccentricity, there will be an age of cold with great extremes of seasonal tem¬ perature. These changes in the orbit of the earth are due to the varying pull of all the planets, and Sir Robert Ball declared himself unable to calculate any regular cycle of orbital change, but Professor G. H. Darwin maintained that it is pos¬ sible to make out a kind of cycle between greatest and least eccentricity of about 200,000 years.

ter. There is, according to Laplace, a possible variation of nearly three degrees (from 22° 6' to 24° 50') in this inclination of the equator to the orbit, and when this is at a maximum, the difference between summer and winter is at its greatest. Great importance has been attached to this variation in the in¬ clination of the equator to the orbit by Dr. Croll in his book Climate and Time. At present the angle is 23° 27'. Manifestly when the angle is at its least, the world’s climate, other things being equal, will be most equable.

Bytmnc

(fWuLtiorL^

Maximum eccentricity of Orbit.

Maximum mcliiiaiim of Equator to Orbit . Winter at Perihelion.

Winker in northern, hemisphere — warm hut brief -

Autumn in northern hemisphere

~lsirn)~

Spring in northern, hemisphere

i Summer in northern, hemisphere — long but cold

‘Equable

Condbxon#

Orbit nearly circular. Least inclination of Equator to Orbit Spring at Aphelion.

Summer of northern hemisphere

as loner as winter r 7 , r .

- _ Long cooush Spring _ j

| in northern hemisphere

'M

SUN) 5-

Short warmish Autumn SB L»-

in northernhemisphere TI r ,

‘ vv inter of northern hemisphere

as long as summer

a. k. it

DIAGRAM TO ILLUSTRATE ONE SET OF CAUSES, THE ASTRONOMICAL VARIATIONS, WHICH MAKE THE CLIMATE OF THE WORLD CHANGE SLOWLY BUT CONTINUOUSLY.

It does not change in regular periods.

It fluctuates through vast ages, must change too or perish.

As the world’s climate changes, life

But this change in the shape of the orbit is only one cause of the change of the world’s climate. There are many others that have to be considered with it. As most people know, the change in the seasons is due to the fact that the equator of the earth is inclined at an angle to the plane of its orbit. If the earth stood up straight in its orbit, so that its equator was in the plane of its orbit, there would be no change in the seasons at all. The sun would always be overhead at the equator, and the day and night would each be exactly twelve hours long throughout the year everywhere. It is this inclination which causes the difference in the seasons and the unequal length of the day in summer and win-

And as a third important factor there is what is called the precession of the equinoxes. This is a slow wabble of the pole of the spin¬ ning earth that takes 25,000 odd years. Anyone who watches a spinning top as it “ sleeps.” will see its axis making a slow circular movement, exactly after the fashion of this circling movement of the earth’s axis. The north pole, therefore, does not always point to the same north point among the stars ; its pointing traces out a circle in the heavens every 25,000 years.

Now, there will be times when the earth is at its extreme of aphelion or of perihelion, when one hemisphere will be most turned to the sun in its midsummer position and the

16

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

other most turned away at its midwinter position. And as the precession of the equinoxes goes on, a time will come when the summer-winter position will come not at aphelion and perihelion, but at the half-way points between them. When the summer of one hemisphere happens at perihelion and the winter at aphelion, it will be clear that the summer of the other hemisphere will happen at aphelion and its winter at peri¬ helion. One hemisphere will have a short hot summer and a very cold winter, and the other a long cold summer and a briefer warmish winter. But when the summer- winter positions come at the half-way point of the orbit, and it is the spring of one hemi¬ sphere and the autumn of the other that is at aphelion or perihelion, there will not be the same wide difference between the climate of the two hemispheres.

Here are three wavering systems of change all going on independently of each other — the precession of the equinoxes, the change in the obliquity of the equator to the orbit, and the changes in the eccentricity of the orbit. Each system tends by itself to pro¬ duce periods of equability and periods of greater climatic contrast. And all these systems of change interplay with each other. When it happens that at the same time the orbit is most nearly circular, the equator is at its least inclination from the plane of the earth’s orbit, and the spring and autumn are at perihelion and aphelion, then all these causes will be conspiring to make climate warm and uniform ; there will be least difference of summer and winter. When, on the other hand, the orbit is in its most eccentric stage of deformation, when also the equator is most tilted up and when further the summer and winter are at aphe- Hon and perihelion, then climates will be at their extremest and winter at its bitterest. There will be great accumulations of ice and snow in winter ; the heat of the brief hot summer will be partly reflected back into space by the white snow, and it will be unequal to the task of melting all the winter’s ice before the earth spins away once more towards its chilly aphelion. The earth will accumulate cold so long as this conspiracy of extreme conditions continues.

So our earth’s climate changes and wavers perpetually as these three systems of influence come together with a common tendency to¬ wards warmth or severity, or as they con¬ tradict and cancel each other.

We can trace in the Record of the Rocks an irregular series of changes due to the interplay of these influences ; there have

been great ages when the separate rhythms of these three systems kept them out of agreement and the atmosphere was tem¬ perate, ages of world- wide warmth, and other ages when they seemed to concentrate bitterly to their utmost extremity, to freeze out and inflict the utmost stresses and hard¬ ship upon life.

And in accordance we find from the record in the rocks that there have been long periods of expansion and multiplication when life flowed and abounded and varied, and harsh ages when there was a great weeding out and disappearance of species, genera, and classes, and the learning of stern lessons by all that survived. Such a pro¬ pitious conjunction it must have been that gave the age of luxuriant low-grade growth of the coal-measures ; such an adverse series of circumstances that chilled the closing aeons of the Palaeozoic time.

It is probable that the warm spells have been long relatively to the cold ages. Our world to-day seems to be emerging with fluctuations from a prolonged phase of adversity and extreme conditions. Half a million years ahead it may be a winterless world with trees and vegetation even in the polar circles. At present we have no cer¬ tainty in such a forecast, but later on, as knowledge increases, it may be possible to reckon with more precision, so that our race will make its plans thousands of years ahead to meet the coming changes.

§ 4

Another entirely different cause of changes in the general climate of the earth may be due to variations in the heat of the sun. We do not yet understand what causes the heat of the sun or what sustains that undying fire. It is possible that in the past there have been periods of greater and lesser intensity. About that we know nothing ; human experience has been too short ; and so far we have been able to find no evidence on this matter in the geological record. On the whole, scientific men are inclined to believe that the sun has blazed with a general steadfastness throughout geological time. It may have been cooling slowly, but, speaking upon the scale of things astronomi¬ cal, it has certainly not cooled very much.

§ 5

A third great group of causes influencing climate are to be found in the forces within the world itself. Throughout the long

LIFE AND CLIMATE

17

history of the earth there has been a con¬ tinuous wearing down of the hills and mountains by frost and rain and a carrying out of their material to become sedimentary rocks under the seas. There has been a continuous process of wearing down the land and filling up the seas, by which the seas, as they became shallower, must have spread more and more over the land. The reverse process, a process of crumpling and upheaval, has also been in progress, but less regularly. The forces of upheaval have been spasmodic ; the forces of wearing down continuous. For long ages there has been comparatively little volcanic upheaval, and then have come periods in which vast mountain chains have been thrust up and the whole outline of land and sea changed. Such a time was the opening stage of the Cainozoic period, in which the Alps, the Himalayas, and the Andes were all thrust up from the sea-level to far beyond their present elevations, and the main outlines of the existing geography of the world were drawn.

Now, a time of high mountains and deep seas would mean a larger dry land surface for the world, and a more restricted sea surface, and a time of low lands would mean a time of wider and shallower seas. High mountains precipitate moisture from the atmosphere and hold it out of circulation as snow and glaciers, while smaller oceans mean a lesser area for surface evaporation. Other things being equal, lowland stages of the world’s history would be ages of more general atmospheric moisture than periods of relatively greater height of the mountains and greater depth of the seas. But even small increases in the amount of moisture in the air have a powerful influence upon the transmission of radiant heat through that air. The sun’s heat will pass much more freely through dry air than through moist air, and so a greater amount of heat would reach the land surfaces of the globe under the con¬ ditions of extremes of elevation and depth, than during the periods of relative lowness and shallowness. Dry phases in the history of the earth mean, therefore, hot days. But they also mean cold nights, because for the same reason that the heat comes abundantly to the earth, it will be abundantly radiated away. Moist phases mean, on the other hand, cooler days and warmer nights. The same principle applies to the seasons, and so a phase of great elevations and depressions of the surface would also be another contri¬ butory factor on the side of extreme climatic conditions.

And a stage of greater elevation and de¬

pression wmuld intensify its extreme conditions by the gradual accumulation of ice caps upon the polar regions and upon the more elevated mountain masses. This accumulation would be at the expense of the sea, whose surface would thus be further shrunken in com¬ parison with the land.

Here then is another set of varying in¬ fluences that will play in with and help or check the influence of the astronomical variations stated in § 3 and § 4. There are other more localized forces at work into which we cannot go in any detail here, but which will be familiar to the student of the elements of physical geography ; the in¬ fluence of great ocean currents in carrying warmth from equatorial to more temperate latitudes ; the interference of mountain chains with the moisture borne by prevalent winds and the like. As in the slow processes of nature these currents are deflected or the mountain chains worn down or displaced by fresh upheavals, the climate over great areas will be changed and all the conditions of life changed with it. Under the incessant slow variations of these astronomical, telluric, and geographical influences life has no rest. As its conditions change it must change or perish.

§ 6

And while we are enumerating the forces that change climate and the conditions of terrestrial life, we may perhaps look ahead a little and add a fourth set of influences, at first unimportant in the history of the world so far as the land surface is concerned, but becoming more important after the age of Reptiles, to which we shall proceed in our next chapter. These are the effects pro¬ duced upon climate by life itself. Particu¬ larly great is the influence of vegetation, and especially that of forests. Every tree is con¬ tinually transpiring water vapour into the air ; the amount of water evaporated in summer by a lake surface is far less than the amount evaporated by the same area of beech forest. As in the Later Mesozoic and the Cainozoic Age, great forests spread over the world, their action in keeping the air moist and mitigating and stabil¬ izing climate by keeping the summer cool and the winter mild must have become more and more important. More¬ over, forests accumulate and protect soil and so prepare the possibility of agricul¬ tural life.

Water-weeds again may accumulate to choke and deflect rivers, flood and convert great areas into marshes, and so lead to the

18

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

destruction of forests or the replacement of grass-lands by boggy wildernesses.

Finally, with the appearance of human communities, came what is perhaps the most powerful of all living influences upon climate. By fire and plough and axe man alters his world. By destroying forests and by irriga¬ tion man has already affected the climate of great regions of the world’s surface. The destruction of forests makes the seasons more extreme ; this has happened, for instance, in the north-eastern states of the United States of America. Moreover,

the soil is no longer protected from the scour of rain, and is washed away, leaving only barren rock beneath. This has hap¬ pened in Spain and Dalmatia and, some thousands of years earlier, in South Arabia. By irrigation, on the other hand, man restores the desert to life and mitigates climate. This process is going on in North¬ west India and Australia. In the future, by making such operations world-wide and systematic, man may be able to control climate to an extent at which as yet we can only guess.

THE AGE

V

OF REPTILES

§ 1. The Age of Lowland Life. § 2. Flying Dragons.

§ 3. The First Birds.

§ 4. An age of Hardship and Death. § 5. The first appearance of Fur and Feathers.

§ 1

E know that for hundreds of thousands of years the wetness and warmth, the shallow lagoon conditions that made possible the vast accumulations of vegetable matter which, compressed and mummified,1 are now coal, prevailed over most of the world. There were some cold intervals, it is true ; but they did not last long enough to destroy the growths. Then that long age of luxuriant low-grade vegetation drew to its end, and for a time life on the earth seems to have under¬ gone a period of world-wide bleakness.

When the story resumes again after this arrest at the end of the Palaeozoic period, we find life entering upon a fresh phase of rich¬ ness and expansion. Vegetation has made great advances in the art of living out of water. While the Palaeozoic plants of the coal - measures probably grew with swamp water flowing over their roots, the Mesozoic flora from its very outset included palm-like cycads and low-ground conifers that were distinctly land plants growing on soil above the water level. The lower levels of the Mesozoic land were no doubt covered by great fern brakes and shrubby bush and a kind of jungle growth of trees. But there existed as yet no grass, no turf or greensward, and

1 Dr. Marie Stopes, Monograph on the Constitution of Coal.

no flowering plants at all, great or small. Probably the Mesozoic was not an age of very brightly coloured vegetation. It must have had a flora green in the wet season and brown and purple in the dry. There were no gay flowers, no bright autumn tints before the fall of the leaf, because there was as yet no fall of the leaf. And beyond the lower levels the world was still barren, still un¬ clothed, still exposed without any mitigation to the wear and tear of the wind and rain.

When one speaks of conifers in the Mesozoic the reader must not think of the pines and firs that clothe the high mountain slopes of our time. He must think of low- growing evergreens. The mountains were still as bare and lifeless as ever. The only colour effects among the mountains were the colour effects of naked rock, such colours as make the landscape of Colorado so marvellous to-day.

Amidst this spreading vegetation of the lower plains the reptiles were increasing mightily in multitude and variety. They were now in many cases absolutely land animals. There are numerous anatomical points of distinction between a reptile and an amphibian ; they held good between such reptiles and amphibians as prevailed in the carboniferous time of the Upper Palaeozoic ; but the fundamental difference between reptiles and amphibia which matters in this

THE AGE OF REPTILES

19

^Bvontosauxms

Some Mesozoic "Reptiles

cDv^Io3jocixs

S '\x--foot maxi dh drawn to same *■* ^ Scale as other

iiapcrcs . iiL

I eJ.W.THr.

history is that the amphibian must go back to the water to lay its eggs, and that in the early stages of its life it must live in and under water. The reptile, on the other hand, has cut out all the tadpole stages from its life cycle, or, to be more exact, its tadpole stages are got through before the young leave the egg case. The reptile has come out of the water altogether. Some had gone back to it again, just as the hippopotamus and the otter among mammals have gone back, but that is a further extension of the story to which we cannot give much attention in this Outline.

In the Palaeozoic period, as we have said, life had not spread beyond the swampy river valleys and the borders of sea lagoons and the like ; but in the Mesozoic, life was growing ever more accustomed to the thinner medium of the air, was sweeping boldly up over the plains and towards the hill-sides. It is well for the student of human history and the human future to note that. If a disembodied intelligence with no knowledge of the future had come to earth and studied life during the early Palaeozoic age, he might very reason¬ ably have concluded that life was absolutely confined to the water, and that it could never spread over the land. It found a way. In the Later Palaeozoic Period that visitant

might have been equally sure that life could not go beyond the edge of a swamp. The Mesozoic Period would still have found him setting bounds to life far more limited than the bounds that are set to-day. And so to¬ day, though we mark how life and man are still limited to five miles of air and a depth of perhaps a mile or so of sea, we must not con¬ clude from that present limitation that life, through man, may not presently spread out and up and down to a range of living as yet inconceivable.

The earliest known reptiles were beasts with great bellies and not very powerful legs, very like their kindred amphibia, wallowing as the crocodile wallows to this day ; but in the Mesozoic they soon began to stand up and go stoutly on all fours, and several great sections of them began to balance them¬ selves on tail and hind-legs, rather as the kangaroos do now, in order to release the fore limbs for grasping food. The bones of one notable division of reptiles which re¬ tained a quadrupedal habit, a division of which many remains have been found in South African and Russian Early Mesozoic deposits, display a number of characters which approach those of the mammalian skeleton, and because of this resemblance to the mammals (beasts) this division is called

20

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

the Theriomorpha (beastlike). Another divi¬ sion was the crocodile branch, and another developed towards the tortoises and turtles. The Plesiosaurs and Ichthyosaurs were two groups which have left no living representa¬ tives ; they were huge reptiles returning to a whale-like life in the sea. Pliosaurus, one of the largest plesiosaurs, measured thirty feet from snout to tail tip — of which half was neck. The Mosasaurs were a third group of great porpoise-like marine lizards. But the largest and most diversified group of these Mesozoic reptiles was the group we have spoken of as kangaroo-like, the Dinosaurs , many of which attained enormous propor¬ tions. In bigness these greater Dinosaurs haPe never been exceeded, although the sea can still show in the whales creatures as great. Some of these, and the largest among them, were herbivorous animals ; they browsed on the rushy vegetation and among the ferns and bushes, or they stood up and

grasped trees with their fore-legs while they devoured the foliage. Among the browsers, for example, was the Di- plodocus carnegii, which measured eighty - four feet in length. The Gi- gantosaurus, disinterred by a German expedi¬ tion in 1912 from rocks in East Africa, was still more colossal. It measured well over a hundred feet ! These greater monsters had legs, and they are usually figured as stand¬ ing up on them ; but it is very doubtful if they could have supported their weight in this way out of water. Buoyed up by water or mud, they may have got along. Another noteworthy type we have figured is the Triceratops. There were also a number of great flesh -eaters who preyed upon these herbivores. Of these, Tyrannosaurus seems almost the last word in “ frightfulness ” among living things. Some species of this genus measured forty feet from snout to tail. Ap¬ parently it carried this vast body kangaroo fashion on its tail and hind-legs. Probably it reared itself up. Some authorities even suppose that it leapt through the air. If so, it possessed muscles of a quite miraculous quality. A leaping elephant would be a far less astounding idea. Much more probably it waded half submerged in pursuit of the herbivorous river saurians.

§ 2

One special development of the dinosaurian type of reptile was a light, hopping, climbing group of creatures which developed a bat¬ like web between the fourth finger and the side of the body, which was used in gliding from tree to tree after the fashion of the flying squirrels. These bat-lizards were the Ptero¬ dactyls. They are often described as flying reptiles, and pictures are drawn of Mesozoic scenery in which they are seen soaring and

THE AGE OF REPTILES

21

J. F-. 1 1.

swooping about. But their breastbone has no keel such as the breast¬ bone of a bird has for the attachment of muscles strong enough for long sus¬ tained flying. They must have flitted about like bats. They must have had a grotesque resemblance to heraldic dragons, and they played the part of bat-like birds in the Meso¬ zoic jungles. But bird-like though they were, they were not birds nor the ancestors of birds. The structure of their wings was altogether different from that of birds. The structure of their wings was that of a hand with one long finger and a web ; the wing of a bird is like an arm with feathers projecting from its hind edge. And these Pterodactyls had no feathers.

§ 3

Far less prevalent at this time were certain other truly bird-like crea¬ tures, of which the earlier sorts also hopped [and clambered and the later sorts skimmed and flew. These were at first — by all the standards of classifica¬ tion — Reptiles. They developed into true

birds as they developed wings and as their reptilian scales became long and com¬ plicated, fronds rather than scales, and so at last, by much spreading and splitting, feathers. Feathers are the distinctive cover¬ ing of birds, and they give a power of resist¬ ing heat and cold far greater than that of any other integumentary covering except perhaps the thickest fur. At a very early stage this novel covering of feathers, this new heat¬ proof contrivance that life had chanced upon, enabled many species of birds to invade a province for which the pterodactyl was ill equipped. They took to sea fishing — if indeed they did not begin with it — and spread to the north and south polewards beyond the temperature limits set to the true reptiles. The earliest birds seem to have been carni¬ vorous divers and water birds. To this day

some of the most primitive bird forms are found among the sea birds of the Arctic and Antarctic seas, and it is among these sea birds that zoologists still find lingering traces of teeth, which have otherwise vanished com¬ pletely from the beak of the bird.

The earliest known bird (the Archaeopteryx ) had no beak ; it had a row of teeth in a jaw like a reptile’s. It had three claws at the forward corner of its wing. Its tail too was peculiar. All modern birds have their tail feathers set in"a short compact bony rump ; the Archaeopteryx had a long bony tail with a row of feathers along each side.

§ 4

This great period of Mesozoic life, this second volume of the book of life, is indeed an amazing story of reptilian life proliferating and developing. But the most striking thing * of all the story remains to be told. Right up

■

22

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

Trcspctrovrus

(cRapbhax‘ *nri%l&iz’ waier-bitd)

to the latest Mesozoic rocks we find all these reptilian orders we have enumerated still flourishing unchallenged. There is no hint of an enemy or competitor to them in the relics we find of their world. Then the record is broken. We do not know how long a time the break represents ; many pages may be missing here, pages that may re¬ present some great cataclysmal climatic change. When next we find abundant traces of the land plants and the land animals of the earth, this great multitude of reptile species had gone. For the most part they have left no descendants. They have been wiped out.” The pterodactyls have gone absolutely, of the plesiosaurs and ichthyo¬ saurs none is alive ; the mosasaurs have gone ; of the lizards a few remain, the monitors of the Dutch East Indies being the largest ; all the multitude and diversity of the dino¬ saurs have vanished. Only the crocodiles and the turtles and tortoises carry on in any quantity into Cainozoic times. The place

of all these types in the picture that the Caino¬ zoic fossils presently un¬ fold to us is taken by other animals not closely related to the Mesozoic reptiles and certainly not descended from any of their ruling types. A new kind of life is in pos¬ session of the world.

This apparently abrupt ending up of the reptiles is, beyond all question, the most striking revo¬ lution in the whole his¬ tory of the earth before the coming of mankind. It is probably connected with the close of a vast period of equable warm conditions and the onset of a new austerer age, in which the winters were bitterer and the summers brief but hot. The Me¬ sozoic life, animal and vegetable alike, was adap¬ ted to warm conditions and capable of little resistance to cold. The new life, on the other hand, was before all things capable of resisting great changes of tem¬ perature.

It was not only that the Reptiles as such had no fur nor feathers to equalize temperature conditions, but that the structure of the Reptilian heart is also not adapted to the maintenance of a high tem¬ perature against surrounding cold.

Whatever it was that led to the extinction of the Mesozoic reptiles, it was probably some very far-reaching change indeed, for the life of the seas did at the same time undergo a similar catastrophic alteration. The crescendo and ending of the Reptiles on land was paralleled by the crescendo and ending of the Ammonites, a division of creatures like squids with coiled shells which swarmed in those ancient seas. All through the rocky record of this Mesozoic period there is a vast multitude and variety of these coiled shells ; there are hundreds of species, and towards the end of the Mesozoic period they increased in diversity and produced exaggerated types. When the record re¬ sumes these too have gone. So far as the reptiles are concerned, people may perhaps

THE AGE OF REPTILES

23

be inclined to argue that they were exter¬ minated because the Mammals that replaced them, competed with them, and were more fitted to survive ; but nothing of the sort can be true of the Ammonites, because to this day their place has not been taken. Simply they are gone. Unknown conditions made it possible for them to live in the Mesozoic seas, and then some unknown change made life impossible for them. No genus of Ammonite survives to-day of all that vast variety, but there still exists one isolated genus very closely related to the Ammonites, the Pearly Nautilus. It is found, it is to be noted, in the warm waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

And as for the Mammals competing with and ousting the less fit reptiles, a struggle of which people talk at times, there is not a scrap of evidence of any such direct com¬ petition. To judge by the Record of the Rocks as we know it to day, there is much more reason for believing that first the reptiles in some inexplicable way perished, and then that later on, after a very hard time for all life upon the earth, the mammals, as conditions became more genial again, de¬ veloped and spread to fill the vacant world.

§ 5

Were there mammals in the Mesozoic period ?

This is a question not yet to be answered precisely. Patiently and steadily the geolo¬ gists gather fresh evidence and reason out completer conclusions. At any time some new deposit may reveal fossils that will illuminate this question. Certainly either mammals, or the ancestors of the mammals, must have lived throughout the Mesozoic period. In the very opening chapter of the Mesozoic volume of the Record there were those Theriomorphous Reptiles to which we have already alluded, and in the later Mesozoic a number of small jaw-bones are found, entirely mammalian in character. But there is not a scrap, not a bone, to suggest that there lived any Mesozoic Mammal which could look a dinosaur in the face. The Mesozoic mammals or mammal-like reptiles — for we do not know clearly which they were — seem to have been all obscure little beasts of the size of mice and rats, more like a down-trodden order of reptiles than a distinct class ; prob¬ ably they still laid eggs and were developing only slowly their distinctive covering of hair. They lived away from big waters, and per¬ haps in the desolate uplands, as marmots do

now ; probably they lived there beyond the pursuit of the carnivorous dinosaurs. Some perhaps went on all fours, some chiefly went on their hind-legs and clambered with their fore limbs. They became fossils only so occasionally that chance has not yet revealed a single complete skeleton in the whole vast record of the Mesozoic rocks by which to check these guesses.

These little Theriomorphs, these ances¬ tral mammals, developed hair. Hairs, like feathers, are long and elaborately specialized scales. Hair is perhaps the clue to the sal¬ vation of the early mammals. Leading lives upon the margin of existence, away from the marshes and the warmth, they developed an outer covering only second in its warmth- holding (or heat-resisting) powers to the down and feathers of the Arctic sea-birds. And so they held out through the age of hardship between the Mesozoic and Cainozoic ages, to which most of the true reptiles succumbed.

All the main characteristics of this flora and sea and land fauna that came to an end with the end of the Mesozoic age were such as were adapted to an equable climate and to shallow and swampy regions. But in the case of their Cainozoic successors, both hair and feathers gave a power of resistance to variable temperatures such as no reptile possessed, and with it they gave a range far greater than any animal had hitherto attained.

The range of life of the Lower Palaeozoic Period was confined to warm water.

The range of life of the Upper Palaeozoic Period was confined to warm water or to warm swamps and wet ground.

The range of life of the Mesozoic Period as we know it was confined to water and fairly low-lying valley regions under equable con¬ ditions.

Meanwhile in each of these periods there were types involuntarily extending the range of life beyond the limits prevailing in that period ; and when ages of extreme con¬ ditions prevailed, it was these marginal types which survived to inherit the depopu¬ lated world.

That perhaps is the most general state¬ ment we can make about the story of the geological record ; it is a story of widen¬ ing range. Classes, genera, and species of animals appear and disappear, |but the range widens. It widens always. Life has never had so great a range as it has to-day. Life to-day. in the form of man, goes higher in the air than it has ever done before ; man’s geographical range is from pole to pole, he

24

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

goes under the water in submarines, he sounds the cold, lifeless darkness of the deepest seas, he burrows into virgin levels of the rocks, and in thought and knowledge he pierces to the centre of the earth and reaches out to the uttermost star. Yet in all the relics of the Mesozoic time we find no certain memorials of his ancestry. His ancestors,

like the ancestors of all the kindred mammals, must have been creatures so rare, so obscure, and so remote that they have left scarcely a trace amidst the abundant vestiges of the monsters that wallowed rejoicing in the steamy air and lush vegetation of the Meso¬ zoic lagoons, or crawled or hopped or fluttered over the great river plains of that time.

VI

THE AGE OF MAMMALS

§ 1. A New Age of Life.

§ 2. Tradition comes into the World.

§ 1

HE third great division of the geo¬ logical record, the Cainozoic, opens with a world already physically very like the world we live in to-day. Probably the day was at first still perceptibly shorter, but the scenery had become very modern in its character. Climate was, of course, under¬ going, age by age, its incessant and irregular variations ; lands that are temperate to-day have passed, since the Cainozoic age began, through phases of great warmth, intense cold, and extreme dryness ; but the landscape, if it altered, altered to nothing that cannot still be paralleled to-day in some part of the world or other. In the place of the cycads, sequoias, and strange conifers of the Mesozoic, the plant names that now appear in the lists of fossils include birch, beech, holly, tulip trees, ivy, sweet gum, bread-fruit trees. Flowers had developed concurrently with bees and butterflies. Palms were now very important. Such plants had already been in evidence in the later levels of the (American Cretaceous) Mesozoic, but now they dominated the scene altogether. Grass was becoming a great fact in the wrorld. Certain grasses too had appeared in the later Mesozoic, but only with the Cainozoic period came grass plains and turf spreading wide over a world that was once barren stone.

The period opened with a long phase of considerable warmth ; then the world cooled. And in the opening of this third part of the record, this Cainozoic period, a gigantic crumpling of the earth’s crust and an up¬ heaval of mountain ranges was in progress. The Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, are all Cainozoic mountain ranges ; the background of an early Cainozoic scene to be typical

§ 3. An Age of Brain Growth.

§ 4. The World grows Hard again.

should display an active volcano or so. It must have been an age of great earthquakes.

Geologists make certain main divisions of the Cainozoic period, and it «will be con¬ venient to name them here and to indicate their climate. First comes the Eocene (dawn of recent life), an age of exceptional warmth in the world’s history, subdivided into an older and newer Eocene ; then the Oligocene (but little of recent life), in wrhich the climate was still equable. The Miocene (with living species still in a minority) was the great age of mountain building, and the general tem¬ perature was falling. In the Pliocene (more living than extinct species), climate was very much at its present phase ; but with the Pleistocene (a great majority of living species) there set in a long period of extreme con¬ ditions — it was the Great Ice Age. Glaciers spread from the poles towards the equator, until England to the Thames was covered in ice.

Thereafter to our own time came a period of partial recovery. We may be moving now towards a warmer phase. Half a million years hence this may be a much sunnier and pleasanter world to live in than it is to-day.

§ 2

In the forests and following the grass over the Eocene plains there appeared for the first time a variety and abundance of mammals. Before we proceed to any description of these mammals, it may be well to note in general terms what a mammal is.

From the appearance of the vertebrated animals in the Lower Palaeozoic Age, when the fish first swarmed out into the sea, there has been a steady progressive development

THE AGE OF MAMMALS

25

ot vertebrated creatures. A fish is a verte- brated animal that breathes by gills and can live only in water. An amphibian may be described as a fish that has added to its gill¬ breathing the power of breathing air with its swimming bladder in adult life, and that has also developed limbs with five toes to them in place of the fins of a fish. A tadpole is for a time a fish, it becomes a land creature as it develops. A reptile is a further stage in this detachment from water ; it is an amphibian that is no longer amphibious ; it passes through its tad¬ pole stage — its fish stage that is — in an egg.

From the beginning it must breathe in air ; it can never breathe under water as a tadpole can do.

Now a modern mammal is really a sort of reptile that has developed a pecu¬ liarly effective protective covering, hair ; and that also retains its eggs in the body until they hatch so that it brings forth living young (viviparous), and even after birth it cares for them and feeds them by its mammae for a longer or shorter period. Some reptiles, some vipers for example, are viviparous, but none stand by their young as the real mam¬ mals do. Both the birds and the mammals, which escaped whatever destruc¬ tive forces made an end of the Mesozoic reptiles, and which survived to dominate the Cainozoic world, have these two things in com¬ mon ; first, a far more effective protection against changes of temperature than any other variation of the reptile type ever pro¬ duced, and, secondly, a peculiar care for their eggs, the bird by incubation and the mammal by retention, and a dis¬ position to look after the young for a certain period after hatching or birth. There is by comparison the greatest care¬ lessness about offspring in the reptile.

Hair was evidently the earliest distinction of the mammals from the rest of the reptiles.

It is doubtful if the particular Theriodont reptiles who were developing hair in the early Mesozoic were viviparous. Two mammals survive to this day which not only do not suckle their young,1 but which lay eggs, the Ornithorhynchus and the Echidna , and in the Eocene there were a number of allied forms. They are the survivors of what was probably

a much larger number and variety of small egg-laying hairy creatures, hairy reptiles, hoppers, climbers, and runners, which in¬ cluded the Mesozoic ancestors of all existing mammals up to and including man.

Now we may put the essential facts about

1 They secrete a nutritive fluid on which the young feeds from glands scattered over the skin. But the glands are not gathered together into mammae with nipples for suckling. The stuff oozes out, the mother lies on her back, and the young browse upon her moist skin.

26

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

mammalian reproduction in another way. The mammal is a family animal. And the family habit involved the possibility of a new sort of continuity of experience in the world. Compare the completely closed-in life of an individual lizard with the life of even a quite lowly mammal of almost any kind. The former has no mental continuity with any¬

thing beyond itself ; it is a little self-con¬ tained globe of experience that serves its purpose and ends ; but the latter “ picks up ” from its mother, and “ hands on ” to its offspring. All the mammals, except for the two genera we have named, had already before the lower Eocene age arrived at this stage of pre-adult dependence and imitation. They were all more or less imitative in youth and capable of a certain modicum of educa¬ tion ; they all, as a part of their develop¬

ment, received a certain amount of care and example and even direction from their mother. This is as true of the hyaena and rhinoceros as it is of the dog or man ; the difference of educability is enormous, but the fact of protection and educability in the young stage is undeniable. So far as the vertebrated animals go, these new mammals, with their viviparous, y o u n g-p r o t e"c t i n g dis¬ position, and these new birds, with their in¬ cubating, young-protect¬ ing disposition, introduce at the opening of the Cainozoic period a fresh thing into the expand¬ ing story of life, namely, social association, the addition to hard and in¬ flexible instinct of tradi¬ tion , and the nervous or¬ ganization necessary to re¬ ceive tradition.

All the innovations that come into the history of life begin very humbly. The supply of blood-vessels in the swimming bladder of the mudfish in the lower Palseozoic torrent - river, that enabled it to pull through a season of drought, would have seemed at that time to that bodiless visitant to our planet we have already imagined, a very unimport¬ ant side fact in that ancient world of great sharks and plated fishes, sea-scorpions, and coral reefs and sea¬ weed ; but it opened the narrow way by which the land vertebrates arose to predominance. The mud¬ fish would have seemed then a poor refugee from the too crowded and ag¬ gressive life of the sea. But once lungs were launched into the world, every line of descent that had lungs went on improving them. So too in the upper Palaeozoic, the fact that some of the Amphibia wrere losing their “ amphibiousness ” by a retardation of hatch¬ ing of their eggs, would have appeared a mere response to the distressful dangers that threatened the young tadpole. Yet that prepared the conquest of the dry land for the triumphant multitude of the

27

THE AGE OF MAMMALS

Mesozoic reptiles. It opened a new direction towards a free and vigorous land-life along which all the reptilian animals moved. And this viviparous, young-tending training that the ancestral mammalia underwent during that age of inferiority and hardship for them, set going in the world a new continuity of perception, of which even man to-day only begins to appreciate the significance.

§ 3

A number of types of mammal already ap¬ pear in the Eocene. Some are differentiating in one direction, and some in another, some are perfecting themselves as herbivorous quadrupeds, some leap and climb among the trees, some turn back to the water to swim, but all types are unconsciously ex¬ ploiting and developing the brain which is the instrument of this new power of acquisi¬ tion and educability. In the Eocene rocks are found small early predecessors of the horse (Eohippus), tiny camels, pigs, early tapirs, early hedgehogs, monkeys and lemurs, opossums and carnivores. Now, all these were more or less ancestral to living forms, and all have brains relatively much smaller than their living representatives. There is, for instance, an early rhinoceros-like beast, Titanotherium, with a brain not one-tenth the size of that of the existing rhinoceros. The latter is by no means a perfect type of the attentive and submissive student, but even so it is ten times more observant and teachable than its predecessor. This sort of thing is true of all the orders and families that survive until to-day. All the Cainozoic mammals were doing this one thing in common under the urgency of a common necessity ; they were all growing brain. It was a parallel advance. In the same order or family to¬ day, the brain is usually from six to ten times what it was in the Eocene ancestor.

The Eocene period displayed a series of herbivorous brutes of which no representa¬ tive survives to-day. Such were the Uinta- theres and the Titanotheres. They were ousted by more specialized graminivorous forms as grass spread over the world. In pursuit of such beasts came great swarms of primitive dogs, some as big as bears, and the first cats, one in particular ( Smilodon ), a small fierce-looking creature with big knife-like canines, the first sabre-toothed tiger, which was to develop into greater things. Ameri¬ can deposits in the Miocene display a great variety of camels, giraffe camels with long necks, gazelle camels, llamas, and true camels. North America, throughout most of the

Cainozoic period, appears to have been in open and easy continuation with Asia, and when at last the glaciers of the Great Ice Age, and then the Bering Strait, came to separate the two great continental regions, the last camels were left in the old world and the llamas in the new.

In the Eocene the first ancestors of the elephants appear in northern Africa as snouted creatures ; the elephant’s trunk dawned on the world in the Miocene and grew longer with the ages.

§ 4

Through millions of animal generations

the spinning world circled about the sun ; slowly its orbit, which may have been nearly circular during the equable days of the early Eocene, was drawn by the attraction of the circling outer planets into a more elliptical form. Its axis of rotation, which had always heeled over to the plane of its orbit, as the mast of a yacht under sail heels over to the level of the water, heeled over by impercept¬ ible degrees a little more and a little more. And each year its summer point shifted a little further from perihelion round its path.

These were small changes to happen to a

one-inch ball, circling at a distance of 330 yards from a flaming sun nine feet across, in the course of a few million years. They were changes an immortal astronomer in Neptune, watching the earth from age to age, would have found almost imperceptible. But from the point of view of the surviving mammalian life of the Miocene, they mattered pro¬ foundly. Age by age the winters grew on the whole colder and harder and a few hours longer relatively to the summers in a thousand years ; age by age the summers grew briefer. On an average the winter snow lay a little later in the spring in each century, and the glaciers in the northern mountains gained an inch this year, receded half an inch next, came on again a few inches. . . .

The Record of the Rocks tells of the in¬ creasing chill. The Pliocene was a tem¬ perate time, and many of the warmth-loving plants and animals had gone. Then, rather less deliberately, some feet or some inches every year, the ice came on.

An arctic fauna, musk ox, woolly mam¬ moth, woolly rhinoceros, lemming, ushers in the Pleistocene. Over North America, and Europe and Asia alike, the ice advanced. For thousands of years it advanced, and then for thousands of years it receded, to advance

28

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

again. Europe down to the Baltic shores, Britain down to the Thames, North America down to New England, and more centrally as far south as Ohio, lay for ages under the glaciers. Enormous volumes of water were withdrawn from the ocean and locked up in those stupendous ice caps so as to cause a world-wide change in the relative levels of land and sea. Vast areas were exposed that are now again sea bottom.

The world to-day is still coming slowly out of the last of four great waves of cold. It is

not growing warmer steadily. There have been fluctuations. Remains of bog oaks, for example, which grew two or three thousand years ago, are found in Scotland at latitudes in which not even a stunted oak will grow at the present time. This change towards warmth may go on or it may not. We do not know. And it is amidst this crescendo and diminuendo of frost and snow that we first recognize forms that are like the forms of men. The Age of Mammals culminated in ice and hardship and man.

BOOK n

THE MAKING OF MAN

-

VII

SUB MEN AND MEN

§ 1. Man supposed to be descended § 2. First Traces of Man-like Creatures,

from a walking Ape. § 3. The Heidelberg Sub-man.

§ 4. The Piltdown Sub-man.

THE origin of man is still very obscure. Tt is commonly asserted that he is “ descended ” from some man-like ape such as the chimpanzee, the orang-utang, or the gorilla, but that of course is as reason¬ able as saying that I am “ descended ” from some Hottentot or Esqui¬ maux as young or younger than myself. Others, alive to this objection, say that man is descended from the common ancestor of the chimpanzee, the orang¬ utang, and the gorilla.

Some “ anthropologists ” have even indulged in a speculation whether man¬ kind may not have a double or treble origin ; the negro being descended from a gorilla-like ances¬ tor, the Chinese from a chimpanzee-like ancestor, and so on. These are very fanciful ideas, to be men¬ tioned only to be dis¬ missed. It was formerly assumed that the human ancestor was “ probably arboreal,” but the cur¬ rent idea among those who are qualified to form an opinion seems to be that he was a “ ground ape,” and that the exist¬ ing apes have developed in the arboreal direction.

We give the prevailing opinion. It is well to bear in mind that the animal ancestry of man is still passionately de¬ nied by many able and learned people. And it is only fair to them to

admit that none of the sub-human species we shall proceed to describe is believed by scientific men to be the direct ancestor of man. At nearest these sub-men are cousins and collaterals.

Of course if one puts the skeleton of a man and the skeleton of a gorilla side by side, their general resemblance is so great that it

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32

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

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TIME DIAGRAM OF THE GLACIAL AGES.

The reader should compare this diagram carefully with our first time diagram, Chapter II, p. 7. and the. text of § 2, p. 8. That diagram, if it were on the same scale as this one, would be between 41 and 410 feet long. The position of the Eoanthropus is very uncertain; it may be as early as the Pliocene.

is easy to jump to the conclusion that the former is derived from such a type as the latter by a process of brain growth and general refinement. But if one examines closely into one or two differences, the gap widens. Particular stress has recently been laid upon the tread of the foot. Man walks on his toe and his heel ; his great toe is his chief lever in walking, as the reader may see for himself if he examines his own footprints on the bathroom floor and notes where the pressure falls as the footprints become fainter. His great toe is the king of his toes.

Among all the apes and monkeys, the only group that have their great toes developed on anything like the same fashjon as man are some of the lemurs. The baboon walks on a flat foot and all his toes, using his middle toe as his chief throw off, much as the bear does. And the three great apes all walk on the outer side of the foot in a very different manner from the walking of man.

The great apes are forest dwellers ; their walking even now is incidental ; they are at their happiest among trees. They have very distinctive methods of climbing : they swing by the arms much more than the monkeys

do and do not, like the latter, take off with a spring from the feet. They have a specially developed climbing style of their own. But man walks so well and runs so swiftly x as to suggest a very long ancestry upon the ground. Also, he does not climb well now ; he climbs with caution and hesitation. Moreover, it is to be noted that he does not swim naturally; he has to learn to swim, and that seems to point to a long-standing separation from rivers and lakes and the sea. Conceivably the precursor of the sub-men and men we shall presently describe was at the opening of the Cainozoic period, a running ape living chiefly on the ground, hiding among rocks rather than trees. It could still climb trees well and hold things between its great toe and its second toe (as the Japanese can to this day), but it was already coming down to the ground again from a still remoter, a Mesozoic arboreal ancestry. It is quite understandable that such a creature would very rarely die in water in such circumstances as to leave bones to become fossilized.

It must always be borne in mind that among its many other imperfections the Geological Record necessarily contains abun-

SUB-MEN AND MEN

33

dant evidence only of water or marsh crea¬ tures or of creatures easily and frequently drowned. The same reasons that make any traces of the ancestors of the mammals rare and relatively unprocurable in the Mesozoic rocks, probably make the signs of possible human ancestors rare and relatively unpro¬ curable in the Cainozoic rocks. Such know¬ ledge as we have of the earliest men, for example, is almost entirely got from a few caves, into which they went and in which they left their marks. Until the hard Pleistocene times they lived and died in the open, and their bodies were consumed or decayed altogether.

POSSIBLE APPEARANCE OF THE SUB-MAN

PITHECANTHROP US.

The face, jaws, and teeth, are mere guess-work (see text). The creature may have been much less human looking than this.

But it is well to bear in mind also that the record of the rocks has still to be thoroughly examined. It has been studied only for a few generations, and by only a few men in each generation. Most men have been too busy making war, making profits out of their neigh¬ bours, toiling at work that machinery could do for them in a tenth of the time, or simply playing about, to give any attention to these more interesting things. There may be, there probably are, thousands of deposits still un¬ touched containing countless fragments and vestiges of man and his progenitors. In Asia particularly, in India or the East Indies, there may be hidden the most illuminating clues. What we know to-day of early men is* the merest scrap of what will presently be known .

The apes and monkeys already appear tc have been differentiated at the beginning of the Cainozoic Age, and there are a number of Oligocene and Miocene apes whose rela¬ tions to one another and to their sub-human

associates, to be presently described, have still to be made out. Among these we maj mention Dryopithecus of the Miocene Age, with a very human-looking jaw. In the Siwalik Hills of northern India remains of some very interesting apes have been found, of which Sivapithecus and Palceopithecus show some quasi-human trails. Possibly these ani¬ mals already used implements. Charles Dar¬ win represents baboons as opening nuts by breaking them with stones, using stakes to prise up rocks in the hunt for insects, and striking blows with sticks and stones.1 The chimpanzee makes itself a sort of tree hut by intertwining branches. Stones apparently chipped for use have been found in strata of Oligocene Age at Boncelles in Belgium. Pos¬ sibly the implement-using disposition was already present in the Mesozoic ancestry from which we appear to be descended.2

1 Darwin’s Descent of Man.

2 In Conquest for February, 1920, Mr. R. I. Pocock published a very useful criticism of this section as it stood in the first version of the Outline. It has been carefully modified in accordance with his views. In addition, I take the liberty of quoting the following :

“ It was formerly held, I believe, that, so far as habits are concerned, the transitional steps in man’s descent were to be traced from an active arboreal monkey to the equally active arboreal gibbon, and thence to the less active, but still mainly arboreal, orang-utang ; from the latter to the half arboreal, half terrestrial chimpanzee, thence, through the mainly terrestrial gorilla, to wholly terrestrial man. In other words, the stages of man’s evolution were a series of structural modifications resulting from the gradual dropping of the ancestral habit of living in trees in favour of life on the ground. But such a conception leaves unexplained the great differences between monkeys and gibbons in arboreal and terrestrial activity. Were it correct, we should expect the gibbons to show a transition between monkeys and other apes in their method of moving through trees and on the ground. They show no such transition. It is necessary, therefore, to formu¬ late another theory.

“ Since all the active climbing monkeys have well- developed tails, and since the tail tends to shorten or disappear in species of less active habits which live, like the monkey of Gibraltar, on rocky hillsides, the absence of the tail in apes suggests very forcibly that their ancestor had to a great extent given up living in trees. Moreover, the short broad foot of the apes, their ability to stand and walk erect, their peculiar way of climbing, all point to the conclusion that they are descended, not from a truly arboreal ape, but from an ape which had already taken to terrestrial life, with partly bipedal, partly quad¬ rupedal progression ; an ape which, while still retaining the power to ascend trees for purposes of feeding and escaping from carnivorous foes, was, at best, probably a slow, inactive climber, certainly not an arboreal leaper like a monkey. A large ape of that mode of life, with hands and feet not very different from those of a chimpanzee or gorilla, but with stronger legs and shorter arms, is my conception of the ancestor of existing apes and of man. And the progenitor of that hypothetical ancestor was probably a big ground monkey.”

D

34

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

§ 2

Among the earliest evidences of some creature, more man-like than any living ape upon earth, are a number of flints and stones very roughly chipped and shaped so as to be held in the hand. These were probably used as hand-axes. These early implements (“ Eoliths ”) are often so crude and simple that there was for a long time a controversy whether they were to be regarded as natural or artificial productions.1 The date of the earliest of them is put by geologists as Plio¬ cene — that is to say, before the First Glacial Age. They occur also throughout the First Interglacial period. We know of no bones or other remains in Europe or America of the quasi-human beings of half a million years ago, who made and used these im¬ plements. They used them to hammer with, perhaps they used them to fight with, and perhaps they used bits of wood for similar purposes.2

But at Trinil, in Java, in strata which are said to correspond either to the later Pliocene or to the American and European First Ice Age, there have been found some scattered bones of a creature, such as the makers of these early implements may have been. The top of a skull, some teeth, and a thigh¬ bone have been found. The skull shows a brain-case about half-way in size between that of the chimpanzee and man, but the thigh-bone is that of a creature as well adapted to standing and running as a man, and as free, therefore, to use its hands. The creature was not a man, nor was it an arboreal ape like the chimpanzee. It was a walking ape. It has been named by natural¬ ists Pithecanthropus erectus (the walking ape- man).

Of the makers of the European Eoliths we have yet no bones at all. We can only guess at their appearance.

1 Among the earlier pioneers of the latter view was Mr. Harrison, a grocer of Ightham in Kent, one of those modest and devoted observers to whom British geology owes so much. At first his “ Eoliths ” were flouted and derided by archaeologists, but to-day he has the scientific world with him in the recognition of the quasi-human origin of many of his specimens. With him we must honour Mr. W. J. Lewis Abbott, a jeweller of St. Leonards, whose intimate knowledge of stone structure has been of the utmost value in these discussions. See “ Occ. Papers.” No. 4, of the Boyal Anthropl. Inst., for a description by Sir E. It. Lankester of one of the better formed of these early implements.

? Some writers suppose that a Wood and Shell age preceded the earliest Stone Age. South Sea Islanders. Negroes, and Bushmen stiil make use of wood and the sharp-edged shells of land and water molluscs as implements.

While these early men or “ sub-men ” or “ pseudo-men ” of the Eoliths were running about Europe four or five hundred thousand years ago, there were mammoths, rhino¬ ceroses, a huge hippopotamus, a giant beaver, and a bison and wild cattle in their world. There were also wild horses, and the sabre- toothed tiger still abounded. There are no traces of lions or true tigers at that time in Europe, but there were bears, otters, wolves and a wild boar. It may be that the early sub-man sometimes played jackal to the sabre-toothed tiger, and finished up the bodies on w7hich the latter had gorged itself.

§ 3

After Pithecanthropus, that first glimpse of something at least sub-human in the record of geology, there is not another fragment of human or man-like bone yet known from that record for an interval of hundreds of thou¬ sands of years. There is nothing human or sub-human to be found except an increasing abundance of stone implements. But these improve in quality. It is not until we reach deposits which are stated to be of the Second Interglacial period, 200,000 years later, 200,000 or 250,000 years ago, that another little scrap of bone comes to hand. Then we find a jaw-bone.

This jaw-bone was found in a sandpit near Heidelberg, at a depth of eighty feet from the surface, and it is not the jaw-bone of a man as we understand man, but it is man-like in every respect, except that it has absolutely no trace of a chin ; it is more massive than a man’s, and its narrowness behind could not, it is thought, have given the tongue sufficient play for articulate speech. It is not an ape’s jaw-bone ; the teeth are human. The owner of this jaw-bone has been variously named Homo Heidelbergensis and Paleo¬ anthropus Heidelbergensis, according to the estimate formed of his humanity or sub¬ humanity by various authorities. He lived in a world not remotely unlike the world of the still earlier sub-man of the first imple¬ ments ; the deposits in which it is found show that there were elephants, horses, rhinoceroses, bison, a moose, and so forth with it in the world, but the sabre-toothed tiger was declining and the lion was spreading over Europe. The implements of this period (known as the Chellean period) are a very considerable advance upon those of the Pliocene Age. They are well made but very much bigger than any truly human imple¬ ments. The Heidelberg man may have had a very big body and large forelimbs.

SUB-MEN AND MEN

35

He may have been a woolly strange looking inhuman creature.

§ 4

We must turn over the Record for, it may be, another 100,000 years for the next remains of anything human or sub-human. Then in a deposit ascribed to the Third Interglacial period, which may have begun 100,000 years ago and lasted 50,000 years, the smashed pieces of a whole skull turn up. The deposit is a gravel which may have been derived from the washing out of still earlier gravel strata, and this skull fragment may be in reality as old as the First Glacial period. The bony remains discovered at Piltdown in Sussex display a creature still ascending only very gradually from the subhuman.

The first scraps of this skull were found in an excavation for road gravel in Sussex. Bit by bit other fragments of this skull were hunted out from the quarry heaps until most of it could be pieced together. It is a thick skull, thicker than that of any living race of men, and it has a brain capacity intermediate between that of Pithecanthropus and man. This creature has been named Eoanthropus, the dawn man. In the same gravel-pits were found teeth of rhinoceros, hippopotamus, and the leg- bone of a deer with marks upon it that may be cuts. A curious bat-shaped instrument of elephant bone has also been found.

There was moreover a jaw-bone among these scattered remains, which was at first assumed naturally enough to belong to Eoanthropus, but which it "was afterwards suggested was probably that of a chimpanzee. It is extraordinarily like that of a chim¬ panzee, but Dr. Keith, one of the greatest authorities in these questions, assigns it, after an exhaustive analysis in his Antiquity of Man (1915), to the skull with which it is found. It is, as a jaw-bone, far less human in character than the jaw of the much more ancient Homo Heidelbergensis, but the teeth are in some respects more like those of living men.

Dr. Keith, swayed by the jaw-bone, does

not think that Eoanthropus, in spite of its name, is a creature in the direct ancestry of man. Much less is it an intermediate form between the Heidelberg man and the Neanderthal man we shall presently describe. It was only related, he thinks, to the true ancestor of man as the orang is related to the chimpanzee. It was one of a number of sub¬ human running apes of more than ape-like intelligence, and if it was not on the line royal, it was at any rate a very close collateral.

After this glimpse of a skull, the Record for very many centuries gives nothing but flint implements, which improve steadily in quality. A very characteristic form is shaped like a sole, with one flat side stricken off at one blow and the other side worked. The archaeologists, as the Record continues, are presently able to distinguish scrapers, borers, knives, darts, throwing stones, and the like. Progress is now more rapid ; in a few centuries the shape of the hand-axe shows distinct and recognizable improve¬ ments. And then comes quite a number of remains. The Fourth Glacial Age is rising towards its maximum. Man is taking to caves and leaving vestiges there ; at Krapina in Croatia, at Neanderthal near Dusseldorf, at Spy, human remains have been found, skulls and bones of a creature that is cer¬ tainly a man. Somewhen about 50,000 years ago, if not earlier, appeared Homo N eanderthalensis (also called Homo antiquus and Homo primigenius), a quite passable human being. His thumb was not quite equal in flexibility and usefulness to a human thumb, he stooped forward and could not hold Ins head erect, as all living men do, he was chinless and perhaps incapable of speech, there were curious differences about the enamel and the roots of his teeth from those of all living men, he was very thick-set, he was, indeed, not quite of the human species ; but there is no dispute about his attribution to the genus Homo. He was certainly not descended from Eoanthropus, but his jaw¬ bone is so like the Heidelberg jaw-bone, as to make it possible that the clumsier and heavier Homo Heidelbergensis , a thousand centuries before him, was of his blood and race.

36 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

.

VIII

THE NEANDERTHAL MEN, AN EXTINCT RACE

(The Early Palaeolithic Age1)

§ 1, The World 50,000 Years Ago.

§ 2. The Daily Life of the First Men.

§ 1

N the time of the Third Interglacial period the outline of Europe and west¬ ern Asia was very different from what it is to-day. Vast areas to the west and north-west which are now under the Atlantic waters were then dry land ; the Irish Sea and the North Sea were river valleys. Over these northern areas there spread and receded and spread again a great ice cap such as covers central Greenland to-day (see Map on p. 37). This vast ice cap, which covered both polar regions of the earth, withdrew huge masses of water from the ocean, and the sea-level consequently fell, exposing great areas of land that are now submerged again. The Mediterranean area was prob¬ ably a great valley below the general sea- level, containing two inland seas cut off from the general ocean. The climate of this Mediterranean basin was perhaps cold tem¬ perate, and the region of the Sahara to the south was not then a desert of baked rock and blown sand, but a well-watered and fertile country. Between the ice sheets to the north and the Alps and Mediterranean valley to the south stretched a bleak wilder¬ ness whose climate changed from harshness to a mild kindliness and then hardened again for the Fourth Glacial Age.

Across this wilderness, which is now the great plain of Europe, wandered a various fauna. At first there were hippopotami, rhinoceroses, mammoths, and elephants. The sabre-toothed tiger was diminishing towards extinction. Then, as the air chilled, the hippopotamus, and then other warmth- loving creatures, ceased to come so far north, and the sabre-toothed tiger disappeared

1 Three phases of human history before the know¬ ledge and use of metals are often distinguished. First there is the so-called Eolithic Age (dawn of stone implements), then the Palaeolithic Age (old stone im¬ plements), and finally an age in which the implements are skilfully made and frequently well finished and polished (Neolithic Age). The Palaeolithic Period is further divided into an earlier (sub-human) and a later (fully human) period. We shall comment on ■these divisions later.

§ 3. The Last Paleolithic Men.

§ 4. The Rhodesian Skull.

altogether. The woolly mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the musk ox, the bison, the aurochs, and the reindeer became pre¬ valent, and the temperate vegetation gave place to plants of a more arctic type. The glaciers spread southward to the maximum of the Fourth Glacial Age (about 50,000 years ago), and then receded again. In the earlier phase, the Third Interglacial period, a certain number of small family groups of men ( Homo N eanderthalensis) and probably of sub- men (Eoanthropus) wandered over the land, leaving nothing but their flint imple¬ ments to witness to their presence. They probably used a multitude and variety of wooden implements also ; they had probably learnt much about the shapes of objects and the use of different shapes from wood, knowledge which they afterwards applied to stone ; but none of this wooden material has survived ; we can only speculate about its forms and uses. As the weather hardened to its maximum of severity, the Neanderthal men, already it would seem acquainted with the use of fire, began to seek shelter under rock ledges and in caves, and so leave remains behind them. Hitherto they had been accustomed to squat in the open about the fire, and near their water supply. But they were sufficiently intelligent to adapt themselves to the new and harder conditions. (As for the sub-men, they seem to have suc¬ cumbed to the stresses of this Fourth Glacial Age altogether. At any rate, the rudest type of Palaeolithic implements presently dis¬ appears.)

Not merely man was taking to the caves. This period also had a cave lion, a cave bear, and a cave hyaena. These creatures had to be driven out of the caves and kept out of the caves in which these early men wanted to squat and hide ; and no doubt fire was an effective method of eviction and protection. Probably early men did not go deeply into the caves, because they had no means of lighting their recesses. They got in far enough to be out of the weather, and stored wood and food in odd corners. Perhaps they barricaded the cave mouths. Their only available light for

THE NEANDERTHAL MEN

37

going deeply into the caverns would be torches. What did these Neanderthal men hunt ? Their only possible weapons for killing such giant creatures as the mammoth or the cave bear, or even the reindeer, were spears of wood, wooden clubs, and those big pieces of flint they left behind them, the “ Chellean ” and “ Mousterian ” implements ; 1 and prob¬ ably their usual quarry was smaller game. But they did certainly eat the flesh of the

fell ; but they brought back the big marrow¬ bones to the cave to crack and eat at leisure, because few ribs and vertebrae are found in the caves, but great quantities of cracked and split long bones. They used skins to wrap about them, and the women probably dressed the skins.

We know also that they were right-handed like modern men, because the left side of the brain (which serves the right side of the

THIS MAP REPRESENTS THE PRESENT STATE OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE AND WESTERN ASIA AT A PERIOD WHICH WE GUESS TO BE ABOUT 50.000 YEARS AGO,

THE NEANDERTHALER AGE.

Much of this map is of course speculative, but its broad outlines must be fairly like those of the world in

which men first became men.

big beasts when they had a chance, and perhaps they followed them when sick or when wounded by combats, or took ad¬ vantage of them when they were bogged or in trouble with ice or water. (The Labrador Indians still kill the caribou with spears at awkward river crossings.) At Dewlish, in Dorset, an artificial trench has been found which is supposed to have been a Palaeolithic trap for elephants.2 We know that the Neanderthalers partly ate their kill where it

1 Prom Chelles and Le Moustier in Prance.

* Osmond Fisher, quoted in Wright’s Quaternary

lee Age.

body) is bigger than the right. But while the back parts of the brain which deal with sight and touch and the energy of the body are well developed, the front parts, which are connected with thought and speech, are comparatively small. It was as big a brain as ours, but different. This species of Homo had certainly a very different mentality from ours ; its indivi¬ duals were not merely simpler and lower than we are, they were on another line. It may be they did not speak at all, or very sparingly. They had nothing that we should call a language.

38

\

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

§ 2

In Worthington Smith’s Man the Primeval Savage there is a very vividly written descrip¬ tion of early Palaeolithic life, from which much of the following account is borrowed. In the original, Mr. Worthington Smith assumes a more extensive social life, a larger community, and a more definite division of labour among its members than is altogether justifiable in the face of such subsequent writings as J. J. Atkinson’s memorable essay on Primal Law.1 For the little tribe Mr. Worthington Smith described, there has been substituted, therefore, a family group under the leadership of one Old Man, and the suggestions of Mr. Atkinson as to the be¬

haviour of the Old Man have been worked into the sketch.

Mr. Worthington Smith describes a squat- ting-place near a stream, because primitive man, having no pots or other vessels, must needs have kept close to a water supply, and with some chalk cliffs adjacent from which flints could be got to work. The air was bleak, and the fire was of great importance, because fires once out were not easily relit in those days. When not required to blaze it was probably banked down with ashes. The most probable way in which fires were started was by hacking a bit of iron pyrites with a flint amidst dry dead leaves ; con¬ cretions of iron pyrites and flints are found together in England where the gault and chalk approach each other.2 The little

1 Social Origins, by Andrew Lang, and Primal Law> by J. J. Atkinson. (Longmans, 1903.)

a This first origin of fire was suggested by Sir John Lubbock ( Prehistoric Times), and Ludwig Uopf, in The Human Species, says that “ Flints and pieces of pyrites are found in close proximity in palaeolithic settlements near the remains of mammoths.”

group of people would be squatting about amidst a litter of fern, moss, and such-like dry material. Some of the women and children would need to be continually gathering fuel to keep up the fires. It would be a tradition that had grown up. The young would imitate their elders in this task. Perhaps there would be rude wind shelters of boughs on one side of the encampment.

The Old Man, the father and master of the group, would perhaps be engaged in hammering flints beside the fire. The children would imitate him and learn to use the sharpened fragments. Probably some of the women would hunt good flints ; they would fish them out of the chalk with sticks and bring them to the squatting - place.

There would be skins about. It seems probable that at a very early time primitive men took to using skins. Probably they were wrapped about the children, and used to lie upon when the ground was damp and cold. A woman would perhaps be pr< paring a skin. The inside of the skin would be well scraped free of superfluous flesh with trimmed flints, and then strained and pulled and pegged out flat on the grass, and dried in the rays of the sun.

Away from the fire other members of the family group prowl in search of food, but at night they all gather closely round the fire and build it up, for it is their protection against the wandering bear and such-like beasts of prey. The Old Man is the only fully adult male in the little group. There are women, boys and girls, but so soon as the boys are big enough to rouse the Old Man’s jealousy, he will fall foul of them and either drive them off or kill them. Some girls may perhaps go off with these exiles, or two or three of these youths may keep together for a time, wandering until they come upon some other group, from which they may try to steal a mate. Then they would probably fall out among themselves. Some day, when he is forty years old perhaps or even older, and his teeth are worn down and his energy abating, some younger male will stand up to the old man and kill him and reign in his stead. There is probably short shrift for the old at the squatting-place. So soon as they grow weak and bad-tem¬ pered, trouble and death come upon them.

What did they eat at the squatting- place ?

“ Primeval man is commonly described as a hunter of the great hairy mammoth, of the bear, and the lion, but it is in the highest degree improbable that the human savage

m

THE NEANDERTHAL MEN

39

Chcll&ui

. ^

Chopping

tool r

[N.B. This us

a. raodern. — not a. Neander¬ thal-— hand .]

Scrape.

ever hunted animals much larger than the hare, the rabbit, and the rat. Man was probably the hunted rather than the hunter.

“ The primeval savage was both herbivorous and carnivorous. He had for food hazel-nuts, beech¬ nuts, sweet chestnuts, earth-nuts, and acorns.

He had crab -apples, wild pears, wild cherries, wild gooseberries, bullaces, sorbs, sloes, blackberries, yewberries, hips and haws, watercress, fungi, the larger and softer leaf- buds, nostoc (the vegetable sub¬ stance called £ fallen stars ’ by countryfolk), the fleshy, juicy, asparagus-like rhi¬ zomes or subterranean stems of the Labiatce and like plants, as well as other delicacies of the vegetable kingdom. He had birds’ eggs, young birds, and the honey and honeycomb of wild bees. He had newts, snails, and frogs — the two latter delicacies are still highly esteemed in Nor¬ mandy and Brittany. He had fish, dead and alive, and fresh-water mussels ; he cotlld easily catch fish with his hands and paddle and dive for and trap them.

By the seaside he would have fish, mollusca, and seaweed. He would have many of the larger birds and smaller mammals, which he could easily secure by throwing stones and sticks, or by setting simple snares. He would have the snake, the slow- worm, and the crayfish. He would have various grubs and insects, the large larvae of beetles and various caterpillars. The taste for caterpillars still survives in China, where they are sold in dried bundles in the markets. A chief and highly nourish¬ ing object of food would doubtlessly be bones smashed up into a stiff and gritty paste.

“ A fact of great importance is this— primeval man would not be particular about having his flesh food over-fresh. He would constantly find it in a dead state, and, if semi-putrid, he would relish it none the less

ValecoXik&re Sterne Implements

(all roughly to scale of hand shown )

Three views of a t* ostTo* carinate (earliest period) implement

Hand- axes

l^ousterian

-hp

•cer

‘Reindeer

%

<J. K H.

EARLY STONE IMPLEMENTS.

The Mousterian Age implements, and all above it, are those of Neanderthal men or, possibly in the case of the rostro-carinates, of sub-men. The lower row (Reindeer Age) are the work of true men. The student should compare this diagram with the time diagram attached to Chapter VII, § 1, and he should note the relatively large size of the pre-human implements.

— the taste for high or half- putrid game still survives. If driven by hunger and hard pressed, he would perhaps sometimes eat his weaker companions or unhealthy children who happened to be feeble or unsightly or burthensome. The larger ani¬ mals in a weak and dying state would no doubt be much sought for ; when these were not forthcoming, dead and half-rotten examples would be made to suffice. An unpleasant odour would not be objected to ; it is not objected to now in many continental hotels.

The savages sat huddled close together round their fire, with fruits, bones, and half- putrid flesh. We can imagine the old man and his women twitching the skin of their

40

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

shoulders, brows, and muzzles as they were annoyed or bitten by flies or other insects. We can imagine the large human nostrils, indicative of keen scent, giving rapidly repeated sniffs at the foul meat before it was consumed ; the bad odour of the meat,, and the various other disgusting odours belonging co a haunt of savages, being not in the least disapproved.

“ Man at that time was not a degraded tnimal, for he had never been higher ; he was therefore an exalted animal, and, low as we esteem him now, he yet represented the

highest stage of development of the animal kingdom of his time.”

That is at least an acceptable sketch of a Neanderthal squatting - place. But before extinction overtook them, even the Neanderthalers learnt much and went far.

Whatever the older Palaeolithic men did with their dead, there is reason to suppose that the later Homo N eanderthalensis buried some individuals at least with respect and ceremony. One of the best-known Neander¬ thal skeletons is that of a youth who ap¬ parently had been deliberately interred. He had been placed in a sleeping posture, head on the right fore-arm. The head lay on a number of flint fragments carefully piled together “ pillow fashion.” A big hand-axe lay near his head, and around him were numerous charred and split ox bones, as though there had been a feast or an offering.

To this appearance of burial during the later Neanderthal age we shall return when we are considering the ideas that were inside the heads of primitive

men- , , ,

This sort of men may have wandered,

squatted about their fires, and died in Europe

for a period extending over 100,000 years,

if we assume, that is, that the Heidelberg

jaw-bone belongs to a member of the species,

a period so vast that all the subsequent

history of our race becomes a thing of

yesterday. Along its own line this species

of men was accumulating a dim tradition,

and working out its limited possibilities.

Its thick skull imprisoned its brain, and to

the end it was low-browed and brutish.

§ 3

When the Dutch discovered Tasmania, they found a detached human race not very greatly advanced beyond this Lower Palaeo¬ lithic stage. But over most of the world the Lower Palaeolithic culture had developed into a more complicated and higher life twenty or thirty thousand years ago. The Tas¬ manians were not racially Neanderthalers ; then brain-cases, their neck-bones, their jaws and teeth, show that ; they had no Neanderthal affinities ; they were of the same species as ourselves. There can be little doubt that throughout the hundreds of centuries during which the scattered little groups of Neanderthal men were all that represented men in Europe, real men, of our own species, in some other part of the world, were working their way along parallel fines from much the same stage as the Neander¬ thalers ended at, and which the Tasmanians preserved, to a higher level of power and achievement. The Tasmanians, living under unstimulating conditions, remote from any other human competition or example, lagged behind the rest of the human brother¬ hood.

§ 4

In the summer of 1921 a very interesting find was made in a cave on the Broken Hill property in South Africa. This was the skull, but without the lower jaw, and a num¬ ber of bones of a new species of Homo inter¬ mediate between the Neanderthal Man and the True Men ( Homo sapiens). The skull was but little mineralized ; its owner may have been alive but a few thousand years ago. This newly discovered creature {Homo Rhodesiensis), this Rhodesian Cave Man, had,

THE FIRST TRUE MEN

41

so far as these remains show, none of the special characteristics of a Neanderthaler ; its brain case, neck, teeth and limbs were quite in the human line. (We know nothing of its hands.) But the size of the upper jaw and its articular surfaces indicate a lower jaw of more than Heidelberg massiveness,

and there are ape-like brow ridges that rival the Neanderthaler’s. The creature seems to have been an almost human being with an apeish type of face. It may have sur¬ vived to the human period, and have been contqpaporary with true men in South Africa.

IX

THE LATER POSTGLACIAL PALAEOLITHIC MEN, THE

FIRST TRUE MEN

(Later Palaeolithic Age)

§ 1. The Coyning of Men like Ourselves. § 2. Hunters give Place to Herdsmen.

§ 3. No Sub-men in America.

§ 1

HE Neanderthal type of man pre¬ vailed in Europe at least for tens of thousands of years. For ages that make all history seem a thing of yester¬ day, these nearly human creatures prevailed. If the Heidelberg jaw was that of a Neander¬ thaler, and if there is no error in the estimate of the age of that jaw, then the Neanderthal Race lasted out for more than 200,000 years ! Finally, between 40,000 and 25,000 years ago, as the Fourth Glacial Age softened towards more temperate conditions (see Map on p. 43), a different human type came upon the scene, and, it would seem, exter¬ minated Homo Neanderthalensis.1 This new type was probably developed in South Asia or North Africa, or in lands now submerged in the Mediterranean basin, and, as more remains are collected and evidence accumu-

1 The opinion that the Neanderthal race (Homo N eanderthalensis) is an extinct species which did not interbreed with the true men (Homo sapiens) is held by Professor Osborn, and it is the view to which the writer inclines and to which he has pointed in the treatment of this section ; but it is only fair to the reader to note that many writers do not share this view. They write and speak of living “ Neander- thalers ” in contemporary populations. One observer has written in the past of such types in the west of Ireland ; another has observed them in Greece. These so-called “ living Neanderthalers ” have neither the peculiarities of neck, thumb, nor teeth that, dis¬ tinguish the Neanderthal race of pre-men. The cheek teeth of true men, for instance, have what we call fangs, long fangs ; the Neanderthaler’s cheek tooth is a more complicated and specialized cheek tooth, a long tooth with short fangs, and his canine teeth were less marked, less like dog-teeth, than ours. Nothing

lates, men will learn more of their early stages. At present we can only guess where and how, through the slow ages, parallel with the Neanderthal cousin, these first true men arose out of some more ape-like progenitor. For hundreds of centuries they were acquiring skill of hand and limb, and power and bulk of brain, in that still unknown environment. They were already far above the Neanderthal level of achievement and intelligence, when first they come into our ken, and they had already split into two or more very distinctive races.

These newcomers did not migrate into Europe in the strict sense of the word, but rather, as century by century the climate ameliorated, they followed the food and plants to which they were accustomed, as those spread into the new realms that opened to them. The ice was receding, vegetation was increasing, big game of all sorts was becoming more abundant. Steppe-like con-

could show more clearly that he was on a different line of development. We must remember that so far only western Europe has been properly explored for Palaeolithic remains, and that practically all we know of the Neanderthal species comes from that area (see Map, p. 37). No doubt the ancestor of Homo sapiens (which species includes the Tasmanians) was a very similar and parallel creature to Homo neanderthalensis. And we are not so far from that ancestor as to have eliminated not indeed “ Neander¬ thal,” but “ Neanderthaloid ” types. The existence of such types no more proves that the Neanderthal species, the makers of the Chellean and Mousterian implements, interbred with Homo sapiens in the European area than do monkev-faced people testify to an interbreeding with monkeys ; or people with faces like horses, that there is an equine strain in our population.

42

THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY

ditions, conditions of pasture and shrub, were bringing with them vast herds of wild horse. Ethnologists (students of race) class these new human races in one same species as ourselves, and with all human races sub¬ sequent to them, under one common specific name of Homo sapiens. They had quite human brain-cases and hands. Their teeth and their necks were anatomically as ours are.

We know of two distinct sorts of skeletal remains in this period, the first of these known as the Cro-Magnon race, and the

second the Grimaldi race ; but the great bulk of the human traces and appliances we find are either without human bones or with insufficient bones for us to define their associated physical type. There may have been many more distinct races than these two. There may have been intermediate types. In the grotto of Cro-Magnon it was that complete skeletons of one main type of these Newer Palseolithic men, these true men, were first found, and so it is that they are spoken of as Cro-Magnards.

These Cro-Magnards were a tall people with very broad faces, prominent noses, and, all things considered, astonishingly big brains. The brain capacity of the woman in the Cro-Magnon cave exceeded that of the average male to-day. Her head had been smashed by