11.THE FIRST TRUE MEN | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

11.THE FIRST TRUE MEN

The earliest signs and traces at present known to science, of a humanity which is indisputably kindred with ourselves, have been found in western Europe and particularly in France and Spain. Bones, weapons, scratchings upon bone and rock, carved fragments of bone, and paintings in caves and upon rock surfaces dating. it is supposed. from 30,000 years ago or more, have been discovered in both these countries. Spain is at present the richest country in the world in these first relics of our real human ancestors.

Of course our present collections of these things are the merest

beginnings of the accumulations we may hope for in the future, when

there are searchers enough to make a thorough examination of all

possible sources and when other countries in the world, now

inaccessible to archæologists, have been explored in some detail. The

greater part of Africa and Asia has never even been traversed yet by a

trained observer interested in these matters and free to explore, and

we must be very careful therefore not to conclude that the early true

men were distinctively inhabitants of western Europe or that they first

appeared in that region.

In Asia or Africa or submerged beneath the sea of to-day there may be

richer and much earlier deposits of real human remains than anything

that has yet come to light. I write in Asia or Africa, and I do not

mention America because so far there have been no finds at all of any

of the higher Primates, either of great apes, sub-men, Neanderthalers

nor early true men. This development of life seems to have been an

exclusively old world development, and it was only apparently at the

end of the Old Stone Age that human beings first made their way across

the land connexion that is now cut by Behring Straits, into the

American continent.

The Walls of the Caves are covered in these representations of Bulls,

etc., painted in the soft tones of red shaded to black. They may be

fifteen or twenty thousand years old

These first real human beings we know of in Europe appear already to

have belonged to one or other of at least two very distinct races. One

of these races was of a very high type indeed; it was tall and big

brained. One of the women’s skulls found exceeds in capacity that of

the average man of to-day. One of the men’s skeletons is over six feet

in height. The physical type resembled that of the North American

Indian. From the Cro-Magnon cave in which the first skeletons were

found these people have been called Cro-Magnards. They were savages,

but savages of a high order. The second race, the race of the Grimaldi

cave remains, was distinctly negroid in its characters. Its nearest

living affinities are the Bushmen and Hottentots of South Africa. It

is interesting to find at the very outset of the known human story,

that mankind was already racially divided into at least two main

varieties; and one is tempted to such unwarrantable guesses as that the

former race was probably brownish rather than black and that it came

from the East or North, and that the latter was blackish rather than

brown and came from the equatorial south.

And these savages of perhaps forty thousand years ago were so human

that they pierced shells to make necklaces, painted themselves, carved

images of bone and stone, scratched figures on rocks and bones, and

painted rude but often very able sketches of beasts and the like upon

the smooth walls of caves and upon inviting rock surfaces. They made a

great variety of implements, much smaller in scale and finer than those

of the Neanderthal men. We have now in our museums great quantities of

their implements, their statuettes, their rock drawings and the like.

The earliest of them were hunters. Their chief pursuit was the wild

horse, the little bearded pony of that time. They followed it as it

moved after pasture. And also they followed the bison. They knew the

mammoth, because they have left us strikingly effective pictures of

that creature. To judge by one rather ambiguous drawing they trapped

and killed it.

They hunted with spears and throwing stones. They do not seem to have

had the bow, and it is doubtful if they had yet learnt to tame any

animals. They had no dogs. There is one carving of a horse’s head and

one or two drawings that suggest a bridled horse, with a twisted skin

or tendon round it. But the little horses of that age and region could

not have carried a man, and if the horse was domesticated it was used

as a led horse. It is doubtful and improbable that they had yet learnt

the rather unnatural use of animal’s milk as food.

They do not seem to have erected any buildings though they may have had

tents of skins, and though they made clay figures they never rose to

the making of pottery. Since they had no cooking implements their

cookery must have been rudimentary or nonexistent. They knew nothing

of cultivation and nothing of any sort of basket work or woven cloth.

Except for their robes of skin or fur they were naked painted savages.

These earliest known men hunted the open steppes of Europe for a

hundred centuries perhaps, and then slowly drifted and changed before a

change of climate. Europe, century by century, was growing milder and

damper. Reindeer receded northward and eastward, and bison and horse

followed. The steppes gave way to forests, and red deer took the place

of horse and bison. There is a change in the character of the

implements with this change in their application. River and lake

fishing becomes of great importance to men, and fine implements of bone

increased. “The bone needles of this age,” says de Mortillet, “are

much superior to those of later, even historical times, down to the

Renaissance. The Romans, for example, never had needles comparable to

those of this epoch.”

Almost fifteen or twelve thousand years ago a fresh people drifted into

the south of Spain, and left very remarkable drawings of themselves

upon exposed rock faces there. These were the Azilians (named from the

Mas d’Azil cave). They had the bow; they seem to have worn feather

headdresses; they drew vividly; but also they had reduced their

drawings to a sort of symbolism—a man for instance would be represented

by a vertical dab with two or three horizontal dabs—that suggest the

dawn of the writing idea. Against hunting sketches there are often

marks like tallies. One drawing shows two men smoking out a bees’ nest.

FIGHT OF BOWMEN

Among the most recent discoveries of Palæolithic Art are these

specimens found in 1920 in Spain. They are probably ten or twelve

thousand years old

These are the latest of the men that we call Palæolithic (Old Stone

Age) because they had only chipped implements. By ten or twelve

thousand years a new sort of life has dawned in Europe, men have learnt

not only to chip but to polish and grind stone implements, and they

have begun cultivation. The Neolithic Age (New Stone Age) was

beginning.

It is interesting to note that less than a century ago there still

survived in a remote part of the world, in Tasmania, a race of human

beings at a lower level of physical and intellectual development than

any of these earliest races of mankind who have left traces in Europe.

These people had long ago been cut off by geographical changes from the

rest of the species, and from stimulation and improvement. They seem

to have degenerated rather than developed. They lived a base life

subsisting upon shellfish and small game. They had no habitations but

only squatting places. They were real men of our species, but they had

neither the manual dexterity nor the artistic powers of the first true

men.

10.THE NEANDERTHALER AND THE RHODESIAN MAN | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

10.THE NEANDERTHALER AND THE RHODESIAN MAN

About fifty or sixty thousand years ago, before the climax of the Fourth Glacial Age, there lived a creature on earth so like a man that until a few years ago its remains were considered to be altogether human. We have skulls and bones of it and a great accumulation of the large implements it made and used. It made fires. It sheltered in caves from the cold. It probably dressed skins roughly and wore them. It was right-handed as men are.

Yet now the ethnologists tell us these creatures were not true men.

They were of a different species of the same genus. They had heavy

protruding jaws and great brow ridges above the eyes and very low

foreheads. Their thumbs were not opposable to the fingers as men’s

are; their necks were so poised that they could not turn back their

heads and look up to the sky. They probably slouched along, head down

and forward. Their chinless jaw-bones resemble the Heidelberg jaw-bone

and are markedly unlike human jaw-bones. And there were great

differences from the human pattern in their teeth. Their cheek teeth

were more complicated in structure than ours, more complicated and not

less so; they had not the long fangs of our cheek teeth; and also these

quasi-men had not the marked canines (dog teeth) of an ordinary human

being. The capacity of their skulls was quite human, but the brain was

bigger behind and lower in front than the human brain. Their

intellectual faculties were differently arranged. They were not

ancestral to the human line. Mentally and physically they were upon a

different line from the human line.

Skulls and bones of this extinct species of man were found at

Neanderthal among other places, and from that place these strange

proto-men have been christened Neanderthal Men, or Neanderthalers. They

must have endured in Europe for many hundreds or even thousands of

years.

THE NEANDERTHALER, ACCORDING TO PROF. RUTOT

THE NEANDERTHALER, ACCORDING TO PROF. RUTOT

At that time the climate and geography of our world was very different

from what they are at the present time. Europe for example was covered

with ice reaching as far south as the Thames and into Central Germany

and Russia; there was no Channel separating Britain from France; the

Mediterranean and the Red Sea were great valleys, with perhaps a chain

of lakes in their deeper portions, and a great inland sea spread from

the present Black Sea across South Russia and far into Central Asia.

Spain and all of Europe not actually under ice consisted of bleak

uplands under a harder climate than that of Labrador, and it was only

when North Africa was reached that one would have found a temperate

climate. Across the cold steppes of Southern Europe with its sparse

arctic vegetation, drifted such hardy creatures as the woolly mammoth,

and woolly rhinoceros, great oxen and reindeer, no doubt following the

vegetation northward in spring and southward in autumn.

Map: Possible Outline of Europe and Western Asia at the Maximum of the

Fourth Ice Age (about 50,000 years ago)

Such was the scene through which the Neanderthaler wandered, gathering

such subsistence as he could from small game or fruits and berries and

roots. Possibly he was mainly a vegetarian, chewing twigs and roots.

His level elaborate teeth suggest a largely vegetarian dietary. But we

also find the long marrow bones of great animals in his caves, cracked

to extract the marrow. His weapons could not have been of much avail

in open conflict with great beasts, but it is supposed that he attacked

them with spears at difficult river crossings and even constructed

pitfalls for them. Possibly he followed the herds and preyed upon any

dead that were killed in fights, and perhaps he played the part of

jackal to the sabre-toothed tiger which still survived in his day.

Possibly in the bitter hardships of the Glacial Ages this creature had

taken to attacking animals after long ages of vegetarian adaptation.

We cannot guess what this Neanderthal man looked like. He may have been

very hairy and very unhuman-looking indeed. It is even doubtful if he

went erect. He may have used his knuckles as well as his feet to hold

himself up. Probably he went about alone or in small family groups. It

is inferred from the structure of his jaw that he was incapable of

speech as we understand it.

For thousands of years these Neanderthalers were the highest animals

that the European area had ever seen; and then some thirty or

thirty-five thousand years ago as the climate grew warmer a race of

kindred beings, more intelligent, knowing more, talking and

co-operating together, came drifting into the Neanderthaler’s world

from the south. They ousted the Neanderthalers from their caves and

squatting places; they hunted the same food; they probably made war

upon their grisly predecessors and killed them off. These newcomers

from the south or the east—for at present we do not know their region

of origin—who at last drove the Neanderthalers out of existence

altogether, were beings of our own blood and kin, the first True Men.

Their brain-cases and thumbs and necks and teeth were anatomically the

same as our own. In a cave at Cro-Magnon and in another at Grimaldi, a

number of skeletons have been found, the earliest truly human remains

that are so far known.

So it is our race comes into the Record of the Rocks, and the story of

mankind begins.

The world was growing liker our own in those days though the climate

was still austere. The glaciers of the Ice Age were receding in

Europe; the reindeer of France and Spain presently gave way to great

herds of horses as grass increased upon the steppes, and the mammoth

became more and more rare in southern Europe and finally receded

northward altogether ....

We do not know where the True Men first originated. But in the summer

of 1921, an extremely interesting skull was found together with pieces

of a skeleton at Broken Hill in South Africa, which seems to be a relic

of a third sort of man, intermediate in its characteristics between the

Neanderthaler and the human being. The brain-case indicates a brain

bigger in front and smaller behind than the Neanderthaler’s, and the

skull was poised erect upon the backbone in a quite human way. The

teeth also and the bones are quite human. But the face must have been

ape-like with enormous brow ridges and a ridge along the middle of the

skull. The creature was indeed a true man, so to speak, with an ape-

like, Neanderthaler face. This Rhodesian Man is evidently still closer

to real men than the Neanderthal Man.

This Rhodesian skull is probably only the second of what in the end may

prove to be a long list of finds of sub-human species which lived on

the earth in the vast interval of time between the beginnings of the

Ice Age and the appearance of their common heir, and perhaps their

common exterminator, the True Man. The Rhodesian skull itself may not

be very ancient. Up to the time of publishing this book there has been

no exact determination of its probable age. It may be that this

sub-human creature survived in South Africa until quite recent times.

9.MONKEYS, APES AND SUB-MEN | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD 

BY 

H. G. WELLS

9.MONKEYS, APES AND SUB-MEN 

Naturalists divide the class _Mammalia_ into a number of orders. At the head of these is the order _Primates_, which includes the lemurs, the monkeys, apes and man. Their classification was based originally upon anatomical resemblances and took no account of any mental qualities.

Now the past history of the Primates is one very difficult to decipher

in the geological record. They are for the most part animals which

live in forests like the lemurs and monkeys or in bare rocky places

like the baboons. They are rarely drowned and covered up by sediment,

nor are most of them very numerous species, and so they do not figure

so largely among the fossils as the ancestors of the horses, camels and

so forth do. But we know that quite early in the Cainozoic period,

that is to say some forty million years ago or so, primitive monkeys

and lemuroid creatures had appeared, poorer in brain and not so

specialized as their later successors.

The great world summer of the middle Cainozoic period drew at last to

an end. It was to follow those other two great summers in the history

of life, the summer of the Coal Swamps and the vast summer of the Age

of Reptiles. Once more the earth spun towards an ice age. The world

chilled, grew milder for a time and chilled again. In the warm past

hippopotami had wallowed through a lush sub-tropical vegetation, and a

tremendous tiger with fangs like sabres, the sabre-toothed tiger, had

hunted its prey where now the journalists of Fleet Street go to and

fro. Now came a bleaker age and still bleaker ages. A great weeding

and extinction of species occurred. A woolly rhinoceros, adapted to a

cold climate, and the mammoth, a big woolly cousin of the elephants,

the Arctic musk ox and the reindeer passed across the scene. Then

century by century the Arctic ice cap, the wintry death of the great

Ice Age, crept southward. In England it came almost down to the

Thames, in America it reached Ohio. There would be warmer spells of a

few thousand years and relapses towards a bitterer cold.

Geologists talk of these wintry phases as the First, Second, Third and

Fourth Glacial Ages, and of the interludes as Interglacial periods. We

live to-day in a world that is still impoverished and scarred by that

terrible winter. The First Glacial Age was coming on 600,000 years

ago; the Fourth Glacial Age reached its bitterest some fifty thousand

years ago. And it was amidst the snows of this long universal winter

that the first man-like beings lived upon our planet.

By the middle Cainozoic period there have appeared various apes with

many quasi-human attributes of the jaws and leg bones, but it is only

as we approach these Glacial Ages that we find traces of creatures that

we can speak of as “almost human.” These traces are not bones but

implements. In Europe, in deposits of this period, between half a

million and a million years old, we find flints and stones that have

evidently been chipped intentionally by some handy creature desirous of

hammering, scraping or fighting with the sharpened edge. These things

have been called “Eoliths” (dawn stones). In Europe there are no bones

nor other remains of the creature which made these objects, simply the

objects themselves. For all the certainty we have it may have been

some entirely un-human but intelligent monkey. But at Trinil in Java,

in accumulations of this age, a piece of a skull and various teeth and

bones have been found of a sort of ape man, with a brain case bigger

than that of any living apes, which seems to have walked erect. This

creature is now called _Pithecanthropus erectus_, the walking ape man,

and the little trayful of its bones is the only help our imaginations

have as yet in figuring to, ourselves the makers of the Eoliths.

It is not until we come to sands that are almost a quarter of a million

years old that we find any other particle of a sub- human being. But

there are plenty of implements, and they are steadily improving in

quality as we read on through the record. They are no longer clumsy

Eoliths; they are now shapely instruments made with considerable skill.

_And they are much bigger than the similar implements afterwards made

by true man._ Then, in a sandpit at Heidelberg, appears a single

quasi-human jaw-bone, a clumsy jaw-bone, absolutely chinless, far

heavier than a true human jaw-bone and narrower, so that it is

improbable the creature’s tongue could have moved about for articulate

speech. On the strength of this jaw-bone, scientific men suppose this

creature to have been a heavy, almost human monster, possibly with huge

limbs and hands, possibly with a thick felt of hair, and they call it

the Heidelberg Man.

This jaw-bone is, I think, one of the most tormenting objects in the

world to our human curiosity. To see it is like looking through a

defective glass into the past and catching just one blurred and

tantalizing glimpse of this Thing, shambling through the bleak

wilderness, clambering to avoid the sabre- toothed tiger, watching the

woolly rhinoceros in the woods. Then before we can scrutinize the

monster, he vanishes. Yet the soil is littered abundantly with the

indestructible implements he chipped out for his uses.

The Heidelberg Man, as modelled under the supervision of Prof. Rutot

Still more fascinatingly enigmatical are the remains of a creature

found at Piltdown in Sussex in a deposit that may indicate an age

between a hundred and a hundred and fifty thousand years ago, though

some authorities would put these particular remains back in time to

before the Heidelberg jaw- bone. Here there are the remains of a thick

sub-human skull much larger than any existing ape’s, and a

chimpanzee-like jaw-bone which may or may not belong to it, and, in

addition, a bat-shaped piece of elephant bone evidently carefully

manufactured, through which a hole had apparently been bored. There is

also the thigh-bone of a deer with cuts upon it like a tally. That is

all.

What sort of beast was this creature which sat and bored holes in

bones?

Scientific men have named him Eoanthropus, the Dawn Man. He stands

apart from his kindred; a very different being either from the

Heidelberg creature or from any living ape. No other vestige like him

is known. But the gravels and deposits of from one hundred thousand

years onward are increasingly rich in implements of flint and similar

stone. And these implements are no longer rude “Eoliths.” The

archæologists are presently able to distinguish scrapers, borers,

knives, darts, throwing stones and hand axes ....

We are drawing very near to man. In our next section we shall have to

describe the strangest of all these precursors of humanity, the

Neanderthalers, the men who were almost, but not quite, true men.

But it may be well perhaps to state quite clearly here that no

scientific man supposes either of these creatures, the Heidelberg Man

or _Eoanthropus_, to be direct ancestors of the men of to-day. These

are, at the closest, related forms.

8.THE AGE OF MAMMALS | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

8.THE AGE OF MAMMALS

The opening of the next great period in the life of the earth, the Cainozoic period, was a period of upheaval and extreme volcanic activity. Now it was that the vast masses of the Alps and Himalayas and the mountain backbone of the Rockies and Andes were thrust up, and that the rude outlines of our present oceans and continents appeared. The map of the world begins to display a first dim resemblance to the map of to-day. It is estimated now that between forty and eighty million years have elapsed from the beginnings of the Cainozoic period to the present time.

At the outset of the Cainozoic period the climate of the world was

austere. It grew generally warmer until a fresh phase of great

abundance was reached, after which conditions grew hard again and the

earth passed into a series of extremely cold cycles, the Glacial Ages,

from which apparently it is now slowly emerging.

But we do not know sufficient of the causes of climatic change at

present to forecast the possible fluctuations of climatic conditions

that lie before us. We may be moving towards increasing sunshine or

lapsing towards another glacial age; volcanic activity and the upheaval

of mountain masses may be increasing or diminishing; we do not know; we

lack sufficient science.

With the opening of this period the grasses appear; for the first time

there is pasture in the world; and with the full development of the

once obscure mammalian type, appear a number of interesting grazing

animals and of carnivorous types which prey upon these.

At first these early mammals seem to differ only in a few characters

from the great herbivorous and carnivorous reptiles that ages before

had flourished and then vanished from the earth. A careless observer

might suppose that in this second long age of warmth and plenty that

was now beginning, nature was merely repeating the first, with

herbivorous and carnivorous mammals to parallel the herbivorous and

carnivorous dinosaurs, with birds replacing pterodactyls and so on.

But this would be an altogether superficial comparison. The variety of

the universe is infinite and incessant; it progresses eternally;

history never repeats itself and no parallels are precisely true. The

differences between the life of the Cainozoic and Mesozoic periods are

far profounder than the resemblances.

The most fundamental of all these differences lies in the mental life

of the two periods. It arises essentially out of the continuing

contact of parent and offspring which distinguishes mammalian and in a

lesser degree bird life, from the life of the reptile. With very few

exceptions the reptile abandons its egg to hatch alone. The young

reptile has no knowledge whatever of its parent; its mental life, such

as it is, begins and ends with its own experiences. It may tolerate the

existence of its fellows but it has no communication with them; it

never imitates, never learns from them, is incapable of concerted

action with them. Its life is that of an isolated individual. But

with the suckling and cherishing of young which was distinctive of the

new mammalian and avian strains arose the possibility of learning by

imitation, of communication, by warning cries and other concerted

action, of mutual control and instruction. A teachable type of life

had come into the world.

The earliest mammals of the Cainozoic period are but little superior in

brain size to the more active carnivorous dinosaurs, but as we read on

through the record towards modern times we find, in every tribe and

race of the mammalian animals, a steady universal increase in brain

capacity. For instance we find at a comparatively early stage that

rhinoceros-like beasts appear. There is a creature, the Titanotherium,

which lived in the earliest division of this period. It was probably

very like a modern rhinoceros in its habits and needs. But its brain

capacity was not one tenth that of its living successor.

The earlier mammals probably parted from their offspring as soon as

suckling was over, but, once the capacity for mutual understanding has

arisen, the advantages of continuing the association are very great;

and we presently find a number of mammalian species displaying the

beginnings of a true social life and keeping together in herds, packs

and flocks, watching each other, imitating each other, taking warning

from each other’s acts and cries. This is something that the world had

not seen before among vertebrated animals. Reptiles and fish may no

doubt be found in swarms and shoals; they have been hatched in

quantities and similar conditions have kept them together, but in the

case of the social and gregarious mammals the association arises not

simply from a community of external forces, it is sustained by an inner

impulse. They are not merely like one another and so found in the same

places at the same times; they like one another and so they keep

together.

This difference between the reptile world and the world of our human

minds is one our sympathies seem unable to pass. We cannot conceive in

ourselves the swift uncomplicated urgency of a reptile’s instinctive

motives, its appetites, fears and hates. We cannot understand them in

their simplicity because all our motives are complicated; our’s are

balances and resultants and not simple urgencies. But the mammals and

birds have self-restraint and consideration for other individuals, a

social appeal, a self- control that is, at its lower level, after our

own fashion. We can in consequence establish relations with almost all

sorts of them. When they suffer they utter cries and make movements

that rouse our feelings. We can make understanding pets of them with a

mutual recognition. They can be tamed to self-restraint towards us,

domesticated and taught.

That unusual growth of brain which is the central fact of Cainozoic

times marks a new communication and interdependence of individuals. It

foreshadows the development of human societies of which we shall soon

be telling.

As the Cainozoic period unrolled, the resemblance of its flora and

fauna to the plants and animals that inhabit the world to-day

increased. The big clumsy Uintatheres and Titanotheres, the

Entelodonts and Hyracodons, big clumsy brutes like nothing living,

disappeared. On the other hand a series of forms led up by steady

degrees from grotesque and clumsy predecessors to the giraffes, camels,

horses, elephants, deer, dogs and lions and tigers of the existing

world. The evolution of the horse is particularly legible upon the

geological record. We have a fairly complete series of forms from a

small tapir-like ancestor in the early Cainozoic. Another line of

development that has now been pieced together with some precision is

that of the llamas and camels.

7.THE FIRST BIRDS AND THE FIRST MAMMALS | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

7.THE FIRST BIRDS AND THE FIRST MAMMALS

In a few paragraphs a picture of the lush vegetation and swarming reptiles of that first great summer of life, the Mesozoic period, has been sketched. But while the Dinosaurs lorded it over the hot selvas and marshy plains and the Pterodactyls filled the forests with their fluttering's and possibly with shrieks and croakings as they pursued the humming insect life of the still flowerless shrubs and trees, some less conspicuous and less abundant forms upon the margins of this abounding life were acquiring certain powers and learning certain lessons of endurance, that were to be of the utmost value to their race when at last the smiling generosity of sun and earth began to fade.

A group of tribes and genera of hopping reptiles, small creatures of

the dinosaur type, seem to have been pushed by competition and the

pursuit of their enemies towards the alternatives of extinction or

adaptation to colder conditions in the higher hills or by the sea.

Among these distressed tribes there was developed a new type of

scale—scales that were elongated into quill-like forms and that

presently branched into the crude beginnings of feathers. These

quill-like scales layover one another and formed a heat-retaining

covering more efficient than any reptilian covering that had hitherto

existed. So they permitted an invasion of colder regions that were

otherwise uninhabited. Perhaps simultaneously with these changes there

arose in these creatures a greater solicitude for their eggs. Most

reptiles are apparently quite careless about their eggs, which are left

for sun and season to hatch. But some of the varieties upon this new

branch of the tree of life were acquiring a habit of guarding their

eggs and keeping them warm with the warmth of their bodies.

With these adaptations to cold other internal modifications were going

on that made these creatures, the primitive birds, warm-blooded and

independent of basking. The very earliest birds seem to have been

seabirds living upon fish, and their fore limbs were not wings but

paddles rather after the penguin type. That peculiarly primitive bird,

the New Zealand Ki-Wi, has feathers of a very simple sort, and neither

flies nor appears to be descended from flying ancestors. In the

development of the birds, feathers came before wings. But once the

feather was developed the possibility of making a light spread of

feathers led inevitably to the wing. We know of the fossil remains of

one bird at least which had reptilian teeth in its jaw and a long

reptilian tail, but which also had a true bird’s wing and which

certainly flew and held its own among the pterodactyls of the Mesozoic

time. Nevertheless birds were neither varied nor abundant in Mesozoic

times. If a man could go back to typical Mesozoic country, he might

walk for days and never see or hear such a thing as a bird, though he

would see a great abundance of pterodactyls and insects among the

fronds and reeds.

And another thing he would probably never see, and that would be any

sign of a mammal. Probably the first mammals were in existence

millions of years before the first thing one could call a bird, but

they were altogether too small and obscure and remote for attention.

The earliest mammals, like the earliest birds, were creatures driven by

competition and pursuit into a life of hardship and adaptation to cold.

With them also the scale became quill-like, and was developed into a

heat-retaining covering; and they too underwent modifications, similar

in kind though different in detail, to become warm-blooded and

independent of basking. Instead of feathers they developed hairs, and

instead of guarding and incubating their eggs they kept them warm and

safe by retaining them inside their bodies until they were almost

mature. Most of them became altogether vivaparous and brought their

young into the world alive. And even after their young were born they

tended to maintain a protective and nutritive association with them.

Most but not all mammals to-day have mammæ and suckle their young. Two

mammals still live which lay eggs and which have not proper mammæ,

though they nourish their young by a nutritive secretion of the under

skin; these are the duck-billed platypus and the echidna. The echidna

lays leathery eggs and then puts them into a pouch under its belly, and

so carries them about warm and safe until they hatch.

But just as a visitor to the Mesozoic world might have searched for

days and weeks before finding a bird, so, unless he knew exactly where

to go and look, he might have searched in vain for any traces of a

mammal. Both birds and mammals would have seemed very eccentric and

secondary and unimportant creatures in Mesozoic times.

The Age of Reptiles lasted, it is now guessed, eighty million years.

Had any quasi-human intelligence been watching the world through that

inconceivable length of time, how safe and eternal the sunshine and

abundance must have seemed, how assured the wallowing prosperity of the

dinosaurs and the flapping abundance of the flying lizards! And then

the mysterious rhythms and accumulating forces of the universe began to

turn against that quasi-eternal stability. That run of luck for life

was running out. Age by age, myriad of years after myriad of years,

with halts no doubt and retrogressions, came a change towards hardship

and extreme conditions, came great alterations of level and great

redistributions of mountain and sea. We find one thing in the Record

of the Rocks during the decadence of the long Mesozoic age of

prosperity that is very significant of steadily sustained changes of

condition, and that is a violent fluctuation of living forms and the

appearance of new and strange species. Under the gathering threat of

extinction the older orders and genera are displaying their utmost

capacity for variation and adaptation. The Ammonites for example in

these last pages of the Mesozoic chapter exhibit a multitude of

fantastic forms. Under settled conditions there is no encouragement

for novelties; they do not develop, they are suppressed; what is best

adapted is already there. Under novel conditions it is the ordinary

type that suffers, and the novelty that may have a better chance to

survive and establish itself....

There comes a break in the Record of the Rocks that may represent

several million years. There is a veil here still, over even the

outline of the history of life. When it lifts again, the Age of

Reptiles is at an end; the Dinosaurs, the Plesiosaurs and Ichthyosaurs,

the Pterodactyls, the innumerable genera and species of Ammonite have

all gone absolutely. In all their stupendous variety they have died

out and left no descendants. The cold has killed them. All their

final variations were insufficient; they had never hit upon survival

conditions. The world had passed through a phase of extreme conditions

beyond their powers of endurance, a slow and complete massacre of

Mesozoic life has occurred, and we find now a new scene, a new and

hardier flora, and a new and hardier fauna in possession of the world.

It is still a bleak and impoverished scene with which this new volume

of the book of life begins. The cycads and tropical conifers have given

place very largely to trees that shed their leaves to avoid destruction

by the snows of winter and to flowering plants and shrubs, and where

there was formerly a profusion of reptiles, an increasing variety of

birds and mammals is entering into their inheritance.