A Short History of the WorldWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
A Short History of the World
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
World history
This difference between the reptile world and the world of our human
minds is one our sympathies seem unable to pass. We cannot conceive in
ourselves the swift uncomplicated urgency of a reptile’s instinctive
motives, its appetites, fears and hates. We cannot understand them in
their simplicity because all our motives are complicated; our’s are
balances and resultants and not simple urgencies. But the mammals and
birds have self-restraint and consideration for other individuals, a
social appeal, a self- control that is, at its lower level, after our
own fashion. We can in consequence establish relations with almost all
sorts of them. When they suffer they utter cries and make movements
that rouse our feelings. We can make understanding pets of them with a
mutual recognition. They can be tamed to self-restraint towards us,
domesticated and taught.
COMPARATIVE SIZES OF BRAINS OF RHINOCEROS AND DINOCERAS
COMPARATIVE SIZES OF BRAINS OF RHINOCEROS AND DINOCERAS
_Nat. Hist. Mus._
That unusual growth of brain which is the central fact of Cainozoic
times marks a new communication and interdependence of individuals. It
foreshadows the development of human societies of which we shall soon
be telling.
As the Cainozoic period unrolled, the resemblance of its flora and
fauna to the plants and animals that inhabit the world to-day
increased. The big clumsy Uintatheres and Titanotheres, the
Entelodonts and Hyracodons, big clumsy brutes like nothing living,
disappeared. On the other hand a series of forms led up by steady
degrees from grotesque and clumsy predecessors to the giraffes, camels,
horses, elephants, deer, dogs and lions and tigers of the existing
world. The evolution of the horse is particularly legible upon the
geological record. We have a fairly complete series of forms from a
small tapir-like ancestor in the early Cainozoic. Another line of
development that has now been pieced together with some precision is
that of the llamas and camels.
IX
MONKEYS, APES AND SUB-MEN
Naturalists divide the class _Mammalia_ into a number of orders. At the
head of these is the order _Primates_, which includes the lemurs, the
monkeys, apes and man. Their classification was based originally upon
anatomical resemblances and took no account of any mental qualities.
Now the past history of the Primates is one very difficult to decipher
in the geological record. They are for the most part animals which
live in forests like the lemurs and monkeys or in bare rocky places
like the baboons. They are rarely drowned and covered up by sediment,
nor are most of them very numerous species, and so they do not figure
so largely among the fossils as the ancestors of the horses, camels and
so forth do. But we know that quite early in the Cainozoic period,
that is to say some forty million years ago or so, primitive monkeys
and lemuroid creatures had appeared, poorer in brain and not so
specialized as their later successors.
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