The original owner of the famous Trinil skull, a _Pithecanthropus erectus_, lived, according to some, in the Late Pliocene, according to others in the Early Plistocene, period--that is to say, somewhere about the beginning of our last Glacial epoch, some 270,000 years ago. Assuming that he and his like reached puberty at sixteen to twenty years of age, about 17,000 generations would lie between him and ourselves, or, to put it more forcibly, between him and the lowest living human races--say the Ceylonese Veddahs. Only 250 generations, at twenty years, carry us back to 3000 B.C. (_i.e._, beyond the ken of history); and if it be objected that the differences between the oldest inhabitants of Egypt, the Naquada, and the present Fellahin are very slight, we are welcome to multiply these differences sixty or seventy fold, in order to arrive at the Pithecanthropus level. But these Naquada had no metal implements, and there cannot be the slightest doubt that the development of the human race went on by leaps and bounds after certain discoveries had been made--to wit, the use of implements and that of fire. That creature which first took up a stone or a branch and wielded it thereby got such an enormous advantage over his fellow-creatures that his mental and bodily development went on apace. The same applies to the improvement of speech. We assume the single, monophyletic origin of mankind at one place, in one district; and the differences between some of the races of man are great enough to constitute what we might call species. Compare the Venus of Milo, that noble expression of the ancient Greeks' notion of female beauty, with the 'products of art' of the Veddahs or the dwarfs of Central Africa, or think of the beau-idéal which a Michael Angelo could possibly have evolved if he had never seen any but such people. _TIME AND EVOLUTION_