not wanting to chimpanzees; for in captivity they learn to understand a good deal that is said to them. What they wanted was a sufficient motive for persistently trying to communicate, such that those who made any progress in the art had a living advantage over others. Man had such a motive; because co-operation was necessary to him, not (as we have seen) in industry, but in hunting. In hunting, in planning and directing the hunt, speech is plainly useful; and it is better than gesture, which probably preceded, and generally accompanied it; because, as speech became independent of gesture, it could go on whilst the hands and body were otherwise employed, or where comrades could not see one another—transferring, by a very profitable division of labour, the whole business of expression to organs not otherwise needed. It may not be much more than very simple beginnings of articulate speech that can be traced to early co-operative hunting; but in the beginning lies the whole difficulty. And the situation was particularly favourable to the beginning of language by onomatopœia, imitating the characteristic noises of different animals and of the weapons and actions employed in pursuing and slaying them.

(10) The intelligence and extensive knowledge (compared with anthropoids) that distinguish Man in his lowest known condition are clearly accounted for by his adoption of the hunting life. Already (as we may assume) the most intelligent of living animals, with great knowledge of the forest, he had everything to learn about the world beyond the forest as soon as he ventured into it, and everything to learn about the art of hunting. Depending chiefly upon sight and hearing, he had to learn by observation, and to remember, and to apply all and more than all that the carnivore knows and does instinctively, or learns by following its mother. He must have learned to discriminate all sorts of animals, many of them new in a strange country; their reactions to himself, manner of flight, or of attack, or defence; the spoor of each and its noises; its habits and haunts, where it reposed or went to drink, where to set snares or lie in wait for it. Advancing to the use of weapons, he must have adapted them to his prey; he must have discovered the best materials—wood, or stone, or bone—for making weapons, the best materials for snares, and where to find such things. He must have fixed in his mind this series: game, weapons, the making of them, materials, where found; and must have learned to attend to the items of the series in the necessary order without impatience or confusion: a task far beyond the power of any other animal.

Further, the hunting life supplied a stimulus that had formerly been wanting to our ape. There is some difficulty in comprehending why the anthropoid should be as intelligent as he is; and, similarly, it seemed to Wallace that the savage has intelligence above his needs—“in his large and well-developed brain he possesses an organ quite disproportionate to his actual requirements.”[8] This illusion results from our not reflecting that the first task of increasing intelligence is to deal appropriately with details in greater and greater number and variety, and that the details of their life, with both savage and anthropoid, are just what we cannot appreciate. Still, the anthropoid seems to have a rather lazy time of it: especially, he seems to have hardly any occasion for following out a purpose needing some time for its accomplishment. This powerful stimulus the hunting life applies to carnivores, above all to dogs and wolves; and in the same way it affected our ape: compelling him to combine many activities for a considerable period of time, along with his fellows, and direct them to one end in the actual hunting, and (later) to prosecute still other activities for a longer period in preparing weapons and snares to make the hunting more effective. Add to these considerations the development of gesture and rudiments of speech, exacting intelligence for their acquisition and increasing intelligence by their attainment, and the superiority of the lowest savage to an anthropoid is sufficiently explained. Severe must have been the selection of those that were capable of such progress, and correspondingly rapid the advance and differentiation of the species.

(11) Using stones as weapons, and finding that broken stones do most damage, and breaking them for that purpose, the progressive hunter necessarily makes some sparks fly; and if these fall amongst dry leaves or grass, he may light a fire. “In making flint implements sparks would be produced; in polishing them it would not fail to be observed that they became hot; and in this way it is easy to see how the two methods of making fire may have originated.”[9] But if the production of fire by friction had been suggested by the polishing of flints, it could hardly have been discovered before the neolithic stage; whereas hearths are known of much earlier date. And it may have happened earlier whilst some one was polishing an arrow or a spear with another piece of wood: a supposition which dispenses with the long inference from a warm flint to a flaming stick. It is a curious fact that to this day in Australia fire is sometimes made by rubbing a spear-thrower upon a shield;[10] but I lay no stress upon this, as if such a practice must be traditionary from the earliest discovery of the method. Either in the chipping of flints or in the polishing of spears it is far easier, and a more probable way, to learn the art of making fire than by observing that dried boughs or bamboos driven together by the wind sometimes catch fire; because those processes include the very actions which the art employs: imitation of nature is not called for. It is true that the natives of Nukufetan in the South Seas explain the discovery of fire by their having seen smoke arise from two crossed branches of a tree shaken in the wind;[11] but this, probably, is merely the speculation of some Polynesian philosopher. Volcanoes, too, have been pointed out as a possible source of fire; and, in the myth, Demeter is said to have lit her torches at the crater of Ætna—an action fit for a goddess. But were such an origin of fire conceivable with savages, it would not show how they came to make it themselves. Fire at first must have excited terror. Until uses were known for fire no one could have ventured to fetch it from a volcano, nor to make it by imitating the friction of boughs in the wind. Fires were accidentally lit by man again and again, and much damage done, before he could learn (a) the connection of events, (b) the uses of fire, (c) purposely to produce it, (d) how to control it. The second and fourth of these lessons are much more difficult than the mere making of fire; they are essential, yet generally overlooked. It seems necessary to suppose a series of accidents at each step, in order to show the effects of fire in hardening wood, hollowing wood, cooking game, baking and (later) glazing clay, and so forth. Perhaps a prairie-fire disclosed the advantages of cooking game, and many a prairie was afterwards