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It is a broad, bluff, open face, with abundance of brain-development, with plenty of shrewd intelligence, and not a little of strong volition the presentation of a strong, highly-gifted and thoroughly self-radiant character, but the last face in the world to have belonged to a man accustomed to sacrifice much to the graces or elegancies of life.
The far more important question is: How did this one particular group of anthropoid animals of the Miocene come to surpass all its cousins, and all the rest of the mammals, in brain-development? Let us first rid the question of its supposed elements of mystery and make of it a simple problem.
If we further suppose that this primitive being extended the range of his hunting, from insects and small or dead birds to small land-animals, the stimulation would be all the greater. In a word, the very fact of a change from the trees to the ground suggests a line of brain-development which may plausibly be conceived, in the course of a million years, to evolve an Ape-Man out of a man-like ape.
In giving scope for many kinds of skill, they are helping the intellectual training; and however ready we may be to pay lip-service to the principle of learning by doing, and to admit the educational importance of the hand in brain-development, in most of our school work we still ignore these things, so far as any practical application of them is concerned.
Time itself is no factor in evolution, but in this case it is a significant condition. It means that, on this view of the evolution of man, we are merely assuming that an advance in brain-development took place between the Miocene and the Pleistocene, not similar to, but immeasurably less than, the advance which we know to have been made in the last fifty thousand years.
I had seen nothing of this first phase of his brain-development; it is only now, at a later day, that I can thus give an account of its prodigious fruit and results. Lambert was now thirteen. I was so fortunate as to witness the first stage of the second period.
It will suffice for our purpose to refer to the arrested brain-development of microcephalous idiots, as described in Vogt's memoir. The frontal sinus, or the projection over the eye-brows, is largely developed, and the jaws are prognathous to an "effrayant" degree; so that these idiots somewhat resemble the lower types of mankind.
Any finer training or the use of the hands will develop the centre for the fore limbs, and, on the principles, may react on the more important region of the cortex. Hence in turning the fore foot into a hand, for climbing and grasping purposes, the primitive Primate entered upon the path of brain-development.
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