Sociologists, surveying extant peoples, have usually distinguished four stages of culture, the hunting, pastoral, agricultural and manufacturing; and some have indicated what they suppose to have been a still earlier stage, the “collecting,” such as may be seen, _e. g._, amongst the Fuegians. But the collecting state is plainly degenerate, the resource of tribes fallen into distress; it cannot have been the first stage, because it implies no conditions that tend in any way to develop body or mind or society. That hunting came first is a true intuition: and, to understand the development of human nature, we need only refer the hunting-life back to the very origin of the human stock.[31] (_b_) The great anthropoids are all confined to the equatorial forests; and it is obvious that, with their diet, it is impossible to pass out of tropical or (at furthest) sub-tropical regions. But the adoption of a flesh diet enabled the human stock to extend the range of its hunting (allowing for gradual adaptation to climate or accommodation by clothing) to any country that supplied the requisite prey; and, accordingly, in course of time, it wandered to every part of the world. The settling of various off-shoots of the original stock in certain regions long enough for them to undergo adaptation to local conditions is (as we have seen) the simplest explanation of existing races. (_c_) Whilst none of the great anthropoids has advanced socially beyond family life, man is everywhere (with few and doubtful exceptions) gregarious—living at the lowest grade in tribes or bands of about fifty; and the gregarious life is one of the most important conditions of his peculiar development. Possibly, he may originally have been more gregarious than any extant anthropoid, in spite of his not needing society for defence, and of its seeming to be for so large a frugivorous animal inconvenient in relation to nutrition. Moreover, if the great anthropoids and our own ancestors were descended from some stock of the lower monkeys, such as always go in troops, the gregarious instinct may have remained with them as a latent character. Still, it is my conjecture that man became gregarious, or recovered the social habit, because of the utility of co-operative hunting; so that he became at first a sort of wolf-ape. This will be discussed in the next section. I observe here, however, that the hypothesis helps us to understand why man is still imperfectly sociable; the purpose of the hunting-pack, each wolf-ape seeking prey, was unfavourable to social life in other relations. That in human life group-consciousness preceded self-consciousness is a groundless and fantastic notion: all known savages are fully self-conscious, as their sentiments and behaviour imply; and even the higher brutes are (in my judgment) self-conscious in their relations with others. Current speculations about fashion, imitation, tradition, crowd-psychology, are in danger of