How Man Has Improved

The relation of inan to nature priïnordially and of savage races in present day is, as we know, very different from what it bas been represented to be by poets and philosophers. In the deligktful pietures their fancy painted there was nothing trae ; the idyllic conditions aniid which they ianoied tlio still youthful human race as living never have existed anywhere. The history of man the world ovei bas its baginning not ifi a golden age, but in at age oi' stone. Instead of noble shepherds and lovely shepherdesses, who, under benignant skies amid pioturesque scènes, live in innoconce on the produce of their flocks, decorously enjoying all the purest gifts of fortune, the realty presenta to our view rude, uncouth hortlea struggling against huuger, against wild beasts, against the inclemency of the seasons ; buried in filth, in groveling ignorance, and brutal selfisbness; their women made slaves, their old people cast out ; practicing cannibalism first out of necessity, and then because superstitious usage had allowed the custom. Into the mental state of snch beings we ean enter as little as into that of children. We cannot strip oursolves of the acquisitions made by the generations whose successors we are, and whope priceless boardings of the fruits of their labor now inure to our benetit. If, as Broca teaches, the mean cerebral mass of Parisiuns in the present day exceeds that of Parisiana in the twelfth century, may we not assunie our brain to have, by a procesa of gradual improvement, become more bigbly developed than the brain of the men of the stone age, 100,000 years ago ? And this brain, more perfect as it is by nature, bas been, at an earlyperiod of itslife, subjectedto innumerable unconscious influences, and, later, to the cosscious icfluences of educatión, which render it in some sense incommensurable witb the brain of those