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The physical evolution of human races is the next major division of the large subject before us. Heretofore the obvious differences displayed by various races have been disregarded and the species has been treated as a unit, in order that its evolution from pre-human ancestors might be made clear.
It has always been so, from the time of the first pre-human anthropoid crossing a mountain-divide in quest of better berry-bushes beyond, down to the latest Slovak, arriving on our shores to-day, to go to work in the coal-mines of Pennsylvania. These migratory movements of peoples have been called drifts, and the word is apposite.
It were tedious to recount all the steps in the further development of Northern Buddhism. That is, first, five pre-penultimate Buddhas; then their Bodhisattvas or penultimate Buddhas; and then the ultimate or human Buddhas, of which Gautama was one. Or, first abstraction; then pre-human effluence; then emanation.
But the reconstructed pre-human history of man so far as we can make it seems to show, as we have already suggested, that early man could have had no definite herd instincts or pack instincts such as some of the animals have, that his habits were plastic and guided by intelligence rather than by impulse.
For wheels are the mark of a man quite as much as wings are the mark of an angel. Wheels are the things that are as old as mankind and yet are strictly peculiar to man, that are prehistoric but not pre-human.
This is the indulgence of a most rudimentary impulse; pre-social and largely pre-human, of no service save as it affects bodily health, and of a most deterring influence on real human development. Where hunting and fishing is of real human service, done as a means of livelihood, it is looked down upon like any other industry; it is no longer "sport."
Our faculty of imitation, on which so much of our amusement depends, was exercised by the mocking-bird; and the whole tribe of monkeys must have walked about the pre-human world, playing off those tricks in which we see the comicality and mischief-making of our character so curiously exaggerated.
Thus it has come about that the codification of the ancient sympathies, won by experience in the pre-human time and in the early life of man, has led to the institution of a barrier which makes further advance a matter of difficulty one which, in the case of most peoples, binds them firmly to the past, arresting their sympathetic development at a point which it had attained when their laws were framed.
Whatever view we take of the origin of man, each organ in his frame must have a meaning; and, as these organs are vestigial and useless even in the lowest tribes of men, who represent primitive man, they must be vestiges of organs that were of use in a remote pre-human ancestor.
The blindly instinctive life, with its almost exclusive interests in food, safety and reproduction; the law of the flesh in its simplest form, carried over from our pre-human ancestry and still capable of taking charge when we are off our guard.
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