It was considerations of this sort which led the great philologist Max Müller to ridicule Darwin’s conception of primitive man as a savage. “As far as we can trace the footsteps of man,” he writes, “even on the lowest strata of history, we see that the Divine gift of a sound and sober intellect belonged to him from the very first; and the idea of humanity emerging slowly from the depths of an animal brutality can never be maintained again in our century. The earliest work of art wrought by the human mind—more ancient than any literary document, and prior even to the first whisperings of tradition—the human language, forms one uninterrupted chain, from the first dawn of history down to our own times. We still speak the language of the first ancestors of our race; and this language with its wonderful structures, bears witness against such gratuitous theories. The formation of language, the composition of roots, the gradual discrimination of meanings, the systematic elaboration of grammatic forms—all this working which we can see under the surface of our own speech attests from the very first the presence of a rational mind, of an artist as great at least as his work.” (“Essays,” vol. I, p. 306.) History and philology are far more solid and certain as a basis for inference than are “index fossils” and prehistoric archæology; and the lesson taught by history and philology is that primitive man was not a savage, but a cultured being endowed with an intellect equal, if not superior, to our own.