men probably subsisted merely on natural fruits and other vegetable productions. To secure these in a mild climate they would require no implements, except perhaps to dig for roots or to crack nuts. If they migrated into a colder climate, or if the climate became more severe, they might be obliged to become hunters and fishermen, and would invent new implements and weapons, not because they had advanced in civilisation, but, as Lamech has it in Genesis, 'because of the ground which the Lord had cursed,' and which would no longer yield food to them. At the same time they might contend with one another for the most sheltered and productive stations, and so war might further stimulate that very questionable advance in civilisation which consists in the improvement of weapons of destruction. We have much to learn as to these matters; but we must, if we have any regard to physiology and to natural probability, start from the idea that the most primitive men were frugivorous and fitted for a mild climate. In this case we should expect that these earliest men would leave behind them scarcely any weapons or implements except of the simplest kind, and that their apparent progress in the arts of war and the chase might in reality be evidence, up to a certain point at least, of increasing barbarism. Primitive as well as modern men present in these respects strange paradoxes. We have to inquire in the sequel as to the cause of the final disappearance of the palæocosmic men, and as to the question whether history is cognisant of any such human period as that which has occupied us in this chapter, or whether, as has sometimes been assumed, it is altogether prehistoric.