That which we know of man divides clearly into two great ages of his being. The first is, as far as our view is concerned, limited on the one side by that profound fugue of planetary Destiny which we call the beginning of the Ice Age--and about which we can (within the picture of world-history) say no more than _that_ a cosmic change took place--and on the other by the beginnings of high cultures on Nile and Euphrates, with which the whole meaning of human existence became suddenly different. We discover everywhere the sharp frontier of Tertiary and Diluvial, and on the hither side of it we see man as a completely formed type, familiar with custom, myth, wit, ornament, and technique and endowed with a bodily structure that has not materially altered up to the present day. We will consider the first age as that of the primitive Culture. The only field in which this Culture endured throughout the second age (though certainly in a very “late” form) and is found alive and fairly intact to-day is north-west Africa. It is the great merit of Leo Frobenius[37] that he recognized this quite clearly, beginning with the assumption that in this field a _whole world_ of primitive life (and not merely a greater or less number of primitive tribes) remained remote from the influences of the high Cultures. The ethnologist-psychologist, on the contrary, delights in collecting, from all over the five continents, fragments of peoples who really have nothing in common but the negative fact of living a subordinate existence in the middle of one or another of the high Cultures, without participation in its inner life. The result is a congeries of tribes, some stationary, some inferior, and some decadent, whose respective modes of expression, moreover, are indiscriminately lumped together. But the primitive Culture is not fragmentary, but something _strong and integral_, something highly vital and effectual. Only, this Culture is so different from everything that we men of a higher Culture possess in the way of spiritual potentialities that we may question whether even those people which have carried the first age very deep into the second are good evidence, in their present modes of being and waking-being, for the condition of the old time.