The Prehistoric Man needs rehabilitation. At least it can be urged that there are possible phases of the prehistoric man that can be elevated into emotional dignity, not unworthy of romance and heroics. It has been too commonly assumed, under the omnipresent pressure of scientific generalizations, that the prehistoric was a semi-feral type of human animal, squalid, distorted, simian-faced, thin-thighed and adumbrant, without speech, perchance groping his blind and biological course upward, by some sort of evolution, into a reasoning, talking, purposive and spiritual creature; that he was a faunal expression simply, like a triceratops in the Upper Cretaceous, or a mud-buffalo in the Philippines.

But there is some sense in claiming for him the possibilities of dramatic action and feeling, assuring to him the restitution of poetic feeling, religious designs, and emotional episodes. It is sensible, for if we place the prehistoric anywhere before the advent of human annals, the length in time of his existence is so enormous that it is inconceivable that he could not have evolved speech, and if speech then the retinue of feelings and ideas which arise with speech, just as speech itself is the index of a cerebral cortex that has become elaborately modified. Let us look at this claim more closely; let us even affectionately increase, intensify and adorn it.

This story has been written under the influence of a melodramatic assumption, hostile, it will be said, to probability, and essentially fanciful, chimerical and fabulous. It cannot be denied that it departs, perhaps summarily, from the postulates of archÆology, as to the life and demeanor and mental compass, or, more particularly, emotional resources of that necessary object who must, to relieve anthropology of its lugubrious alarm over accepting a quicker entrance into the world of our race, have lived in the great Prehistoric Day of Geology.

In the day which saw the passage into sedimentary records of the last of the Tertiaries, and carried on its calendars the rise, amplitude and disappearance of the Ice Age, in that day Man lived, and he lived all through it, and it was a long day, measured by thousands of years. But why must it be predicated that man could not have reached in that day such a range of feelings as are involved in the rise and refinement of love? It is perfectly true, as it is entirely permissible so to choose, that this tale of the Woman of the Ice Age, has to do with the advanced types of prehistoric man, and that thus typified the author has reason to insist that Lhatto and Ogga are just creations.

The physical perfection of Lhatto and Ogga cannot be wisely disputed. The prehistoric is usually thought of as a half-emancipated ape, shaggy with hair, protuberant in eye-brows and mouth, shuffling, chattering his uncouth experiments in speech or conveying his desires by grimaces, shrugs, gestures and contortions. But when we realize, that however explained, evolution does not present us with abundant intermediate forms in its processes of improvement, but rather offers us a range of ascending steps, or positions, with the blended connexions removed, it is quite unlikely that in the evolution of man there was any hesitancy in passing from the monkey state to the rights of primogeniture as God’s image.

And the prehistoric must have done so. The requirements of his life, the need of strength and agility, of ingenuity, of muscular resources coupled with the fruitfulness of improving forms, as from century to century reproduction placed him farther and farther in the void and waste of a world, inarticulate and unbridled, these things made him, where environment was favorable, sinuous, forceful, tall, harmonious in physique. And these things, besides putting upon the body the abiding beauty of form, through allied avenues of change would have placed upon his face the stamp of beauty in expression. At least with some. And of these were Lhatto and Ogga. It is not obligatory to be too precise. The romance bends to no sterile laws of ratiocination and logic. It may, for an instant, supercede the harshest negations of science. It does so in this book, but not too carelessly.

For as to environment, it cannot be too sharply noted that it adapts and modifies its organic contents. The plant, the animal, the Man, are bent and made according to the emotional plan it permits.

Buckle has shown how the physical features of a land have been profoundly active in shaping the racial temperaments of the contrasted populations of India and Greece. In India nature is dominating; the lofty mountains, the torrential and wide rivers, the tyrannous climate, form so severe and overpowering a restraint upon human activity that man becomes dwarfed and insignificant. In Greece, nature, less oppressively developed, has induced the growth of a radiant and high and forceful type of man.

Prof. Keane has said of the Hebrew intellect that it is “less varied, but more intense, a contrast due to the monotonous and almost changeless environment of yellow sands, blue skies, flora and fauna limited to a few species, and mainly confined to oases and plains, reclaimed by irrigation from the desert, everywhere presenting the same uniform aspect.” Prof. Gregory has also pointed out the decisive influence of physical environment on the East African races. He summarizes the aspects of these under the general heading of “instability,” as the variable rainfall, earth movements, etc. He says these “keep alive a disposition toward nomad life, alien alike to the growth of either a fatalism like that of India, or culture like that of Greece. All the tribes, however, cannot become nomadic. Some of them are physically and mentally incompetent for the strains of such a life, and must be content with servitude, or else submit to the ever recurring raids of the more powerful tribes. The physical conditions of the country therefore help to divide the people into two classes: one consists of warlike, conquering nomads; the other of feebler races, who either eke out a precarious existence on mountain summits, in forest clearings, and on islands in the vast malarial swamp, or else live as serfs and helots in subjection to the dominant tribes.”

The intensive influence of nature upon man is deeply hidden in the response Man makes to his physical surroundings, which response in some way grows from the attributes of his mind, as that he loves beauty, that he is stimulated to action by desire, that he feels the subtlety of contrast and color, and living wonders and natural splendor.

And that we may extract from this truth the last possible quantity of justification, the story here places Lhatto and Ogga in the midst of a great diversity and extension of natural features. It assumes that long before their time man had eventuated. Not a shadow and mask and caricature, but man in the possession of a mental character that was responsive to all these wonders about him. It assumes that whereas men living near or in glaciated and cold countries were still immersed in a sort of moral hebitude; those men, as Ogga and Lhatto, who by a sudden juxtaposition of the cold and the hot, were swayed by the contrasted marvels of the glacier and semi-tropic forest, had felt the excitation of their sense of beauty and wonder and worship. It assumes for them at least a psychological stage. It assumes that such a region of contrasts could have existed along our western coasts, where the great terminal moraine, the limital outline of the glacier, bends northward. Here was a southern section, warm and prolific and luxuriant, and here was a northern section, as described in the story, lingering under the malign torpor of ice and snow.

It assumes that the period of time chosen, when the Ice was itself surrendering its strongholds and in stubborn despair relinquishing its conquests, was not so far distant from the historic or semi-historic period, not so far distant from this present period of emotional complexity.

Nor is this last assumption unreasonable. The views as to the distance of the Ice Age in time from our own geological day have undergone some marked changes. It is no longer a requisite of geological orthodoxy to place that period in a chronological perspective diminishing to a point of time which may be sixty thousand years away.

Sir Henry H. Howorth, Prof. Bonney, Matthieu Williams, Pettersen, Kjerulf have promulgated their views as to the necessary assumptions of the Glacialists. Howorth, indeed, says (Glacial Nightmare and the Flood) of the tremendous conception of a continental ice-sheet sweeping over the Northern Sea from Norway into Great Britain, that it was “the invention of Croll, who, sitting in his armchair, and endowed with a brilliant imagination, imposed upon sober science this extraordinary postulate.”

The recentness,—and we may here quote acceptably from the Rev. H. N. Hutchinson—“of the Glacial period, is becoming much more generally recognized, and many geologists failed to see how the striations, moraines and roches moutonnÉes could have lasted for anything like the periods required by the Astronomical theory. One is inclined to think that delicate striations and polishings would have been destroyed by atmospheric influences within the space of twenty thousand years.”

Lhatto and Ogga were indeed placed at a great distance from us, but they are not therefore utterly lost in the shadows or clouds of antiquity, of myth and fable, or somnambulous reverie, as to be alien to our hearts and sympathies.

Lhatto and Ogga were the heirs to a vast amount of temperamental evolution. If they were elevated in feeling, adroit and sensitive in thought, there had been enough time expended in developing men to bestow upon them these virtues of the head and heart.

Has not Prof. A. H. Keane, in his authoritative Compendium of Geography and Travel of South America, said that, “it is beyond reasonable doubt that man had spread in early Pleistocene times from his eastern cradle to the New World, probably by two routes: from Europe by the still persisting land connexion with Greenland and Labrador, and from Asia by the narrow Behring Sea?”

He says “the inference seems inevitable that South America was already in Pleistocene time peopled to its utmost (?) limits by two primitive races, that still persist in the same region”; and if South America a fortiori North America.

It is here assumed, and with reason, that Lhatto and Ogga and Lagk talked, and Prof. Cunningham has pointed out that speech has necessitated structural modifications in the human brain totally absent from the brain of the Anthropoid Ape, and of the speechless microcephalic idiot.

These waifs of reconstruction dwelling in the dark backward of time, from whom, as from others, the motions of the heart and head were to start the wide ethnic impulses which have moved to and fro, like luminous and refluent waves, over the sad face of savage life, these waifs deny no natural assumptions. They lead us only into a new zone of imaginative work, and we are bidden to weave fabrics of design which carry on them the pictures of a lost past, when strange creatures, long extinct, were known to men, themselves extinct, when a strange epoch was placing its landmarks over a world, upon which the dawn of Mind had opened, when the Prehistoric somehow extricated from an inheritance of claws and hair and carnivorous ferocity, felt the mystery of the earth, looked with question upon the unrolled skies, and began the long drama of human love and hate.

Let it be so. Let us not be overscrupulous in the dogmas of our literary faith, nor too inquisitive as to the realism of a resurrected day. Were we always too cautious, our religion—which furnishes you, reader, with the balm and fortitude of your existence—would decrepitate and pass away into smoke and dust.