(10) The intelligence and extensive knowledge (compared with anthropoids) that distinguish Man in his lowest known condition are clearly accounted for by his adoption of the hunting life. Already (as we may assume) the most intelligent of living animals, with great knowledge of the forest, he had everything to learn about the world beyond the forest as soon as he ventured into it, and everything to learn about the art of hunting. Depending chiefly upon sight and hearing, he had to learn by observation, and to remember, and to apply all and more than all that the carnivore knows and does instinctively, or learns by following its mother. He must have learned to discriminate all sorts of animals, many of them new in a strange country; their reactions to himself, manner of flight, or of attack, or defence; the spoor of each and its noises; its habits and haunts, where it reposed or went to drink, where to set snares or lie in wait for it. Advancing to the use of weapons, he must have adapted them to his prey; he must have discovered the best materials—wood, or stone, or bone—for making weapons, the best materials for snares, and where to find such things. He must have fixed in his mind this series: game, weapons, the making of them, materials, where found; and must have learned to attend to the items of the series in the necessary order without impatience or confusion: a task far beyond the power of any other animal. Further, the hunting life supplied a stimulus that had formerly been wanting to our ape. There is some difficulty in comprehending why the anthropoid should be as intelligent as he is; and, similarly, it seemed to Wallace that the savage has intelligence above his needs—“in his large and well-developed brain he possesses an organ quite disproportionate to his actual requirements.”[8] This illusion results from our not reflecting that the first task of increasing intelligence is to deal appropriately with details in greater and greater number and variety, and that the details of their life, with both savage and anthropoid, are just what we cannot appreciate. Still, the anthropoid seems to have a rather lazy time of it: especially, he seems to have hardly any occasion for following out a purpose needing some time for its accomplishment. This powerful stimulus the hunting life applies to carnivores, above all to dogs and wolves; and in the same way it affected our ape: compelling him to combine many activities for a considerable period of time, along with his fellows, and direct them to one end in the actual hunting, and (later) to prosecute still other activities for a longer period in preparing weapons and snares to make the hunting more effective. Add to these considerations the development of gesture and rudiments of speech, exacting intelligence for their acquisition and increasing intelligence by their attainment, and the superiority of the lowest savage to an anthropoid is sufficiently explained.