2. On the whole, however, nomadic life is at the present day the exception. Most of the nations that are not savages live in houses, not in portable tents, in cities, not encampments, and form compact, solidly bound communities, not loose sets of tribes, now friendly, now hostile to one another. But it has not always been so. There have been times when settled life was the exception and nomadic life the rule. And the older the times, the fewer were the permanent communities, the more numerous the roving tribes. For wandering in search of better places must have been among the first impulses of intelligent humanity. Even when men had no shelter but caves, no pursuit but hunting the animals, whose flesh was their food and in whose skins they clothed themselves, they must frequently have gone forth, in families or detachments, either to escape from a neighborhood too much infested with the gigantic wild beasts which at one time peopled the earth more thickly than men, or simply because the numbers of the original cave-dwellers had become too great for the cave to hold them. The latter must have been a very usual occurrence: families stayed together until they had no longer room enough, or quarrelled, when they separated. Those who went never saw again the place and kindred they left, although they carried with them memories of both, the few simple arts they had learned there and the customs in which they had been trained. They would stop at some congenial halting-place, when, after a time, the same process would be repeated--and so again and again.