"THE physical world is made up of atoms and ether, and there is no room for ghosts."

W. K. CLIFFORD.

"IF ghos'es want me to believe in 'em, let 'em leave off skulking i' the dark and i' lone places-let 'em come where there's company and candles.”

GEORGE ELIOT.

DREAMS:

THEIR PLACE IN THE GROWTH OF BELIEFS IN THE SUPERNATURAL.

SI.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SAVAGE AND CIVILISED MAN.

THE evidence as to pre-historic man's material furniture and surroundings, which was first gathered from and restricted to ancient river valleys and bone caverns of Great Britain, France, and Belgium, is no longer isolated. It is supported by evidence which has been collected from every part of the globe inhabited in past or present times, and its uniform character has enabled us to determine what lies beyond an horizon which within the last half century was bounded by the hazy line of myth and tradition. So rigid seemed the limit defining man's knowledge of his past that some forty years ago even the Geological Society of London recorded with barest reference the unearthing of relics witnessing to his presence in Britain hundreds of thousands of years ago. The canon was closed, and no one ventured

to add to the sayings of the book. But the discoveries which had disproved belief in the earth's supremacy in the universe, and in its creation in six days, led the way to researches into the history of the life upon its surface, and especially of that which, in the language of ancient writ, was "made in the image of God." When the long-forbidding line, imaginary as the equator and lacking its convenience, was crossed, there was found the evidence of the conditions under which man emerged from a state quite other than that which had formed the burden of legends sacred with the hoariness of time. Those conditions, it is well-nigh needless to remind the reader, accord with that theory which holds man to be no specially-created being, started on this earth, fully equipped, Minerva-like, with all ripeness of wisdom and loftiness of soul, but the last and long result of an ever-ascending series of organisms ranging from the lowest, shapeless, nerveless specks to homo sapiens, "the foremost in the files of time." Evolution is advance from the simple to the complex. The most primitive forms reach maturity in a shorter time than the higher forms, and fulfil their purpose quicker, and this doctrine applies not only in relation to man and the inferior creatures, but as between the several races of man himself. Herein the differences, which are determined by size, still more by increase in complexity, of brain-stuff, are greater than between the lowest man and the highest animals-that is to say, the savage and civilised man are farther apart than the savage and the anthropoid ape. The cranial

capacity of the modern Englishman surpasses that of the non-Aryan inhabitant of India by a difference of sixty-eight cubic inches, while between this nonAryan skull and the skull of the gorilla the difference in capacity is but eleven inches,1 and if we were to take into account the differences in structural complexity, as indicated by the creasing and furrowing of the brain surface, the contrast would be still more striking.

The brains of the earliest known races, the men of the Ancient Stone Age, ape-like savages who fought with woolly-haired elephants, cave-lions, and cave-bears, amidst the forests and on the slopes of the valleys and hills where London now stands, and who in the dawn of human intelligence, applying means to ends, came off victorious, were doubtless much nearer to the chimpanzee with his thirty-five cubic inches than to the Papuan with his fifty-five cubic inches. Indeed, we need not travel beyond this

1 The following paragraph from Professor Huxley's Observations on the Human Skulls of Engis and Neanderthal is extracted from Lyell's Antiquity of Man, p. 89 (4th edition).

“The most capacious healthy European skull yet measured had a capacity of 114 cubic inches, the smallest (as estimated by weight of brain) about 55 cubic inches, while, according to Professor Schaaffhausen, some Hindu skulls have as small a capacity as about 46 cubic inches (27 oz. of water). The largest cranium of any gorilla yet measured contained 34.5 cubic inches."

Commenting on this paper Sir Charles Lyell remarks that "it is admitted that the differences in character between the brain of the highest races of man and that of the lowest, though less in degree, are of the same order as those which separate the human from the Simian brain," and that the statements of both Professor Huxley and Dr. Morton show "that the range of size or capacity between the highest and lowest human brain is greater than that between the highest Simian and the lowest human brain."

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age or island; it suffices to compare the brain quality of the rustic, thinking of "maistly nowt," with that of the highest minds amongst us, as evidence of the enormous diversity between wild and cultivated stocks of mankind.

Unless we are so enchained to fond delusions as to place man in a kingdom by himself, and deny in the sympathetic, moral, and intellectual faculties in brutes the germs of those capacities which, existing in a pre-human ancestry, have flowered in the noblest and wisest of our race, we may find in such differences as are shown to occur between civilised and primitive man further evidence of the enormous time since the latter appeared. For unnumbered ages man-then physically hardly distinguishable from apes may have remained stationary. Certainly the relics from the Drift show no advance given no change in the conditions, the species do not vary, and man, once adapted to his surroundings, changed only as these changed. But, obscure as are the causes, there came a period when conditions arose inducing some variation, no matter how slight, in brain development, which was of more need than any variation in the rest of the body, and when an impetus was given which, leaving the latter but slightly affected, quickened the former, so that man passed from the highest animality to the lowest humanity. Slowly, in the course of a struggle not yet ended, the ape and tiger" were subdued within him, and those social conditions induced to which are due that progress which ever draws him nearer to the angels.