Naturally, the above passage has attracted the attention of anthropologists; and I am sorry to expose myself to the charge of immodesty in venturing to put forward a different view. Atkinson in his essay on _Primal Law_, edited with qualified approval by Andrew Lang, starts from Darwin’s hypothesis, and merely modifies it by urging that the young males, when driven off by their father, did not wander away, but kept near the family, always on the watch to murder their father. This amendment he makes, because he had observed the same habits in cattle and horses. Then, through a row of hypotheses with little evidence or rational connection, he arrives at an explanation of certain savage laws of avoidance, exogamy, etc. More recently, Prof. Freud has produced a most ingenious and entertaining essay on _Totem und Tabu_, in which he builds upon the same foundations. You easily see how the “Œdipus complex” emerges from such a primitive state of things, but will hardly, without reading the work, imagine the wealth of speculation it contains or its literary attractiveness. Atkinson probably relied upon the supposed parallel case of wild cattle and horses, because those animals resemble the apes in being vegetarian: though the diets are, in fact, very different. But even if such a comparison indicates a possible social state of our original ape-like stock, what is there in such a state that can be supposed to have introduced the changes that made our forebears no longer ape-like? Supposing those changes to have already taken place, what evidence is there that the same social state endured? None: for it was assumed to have been the social state of our forebears on the ground of their resemblance in diet and family economy to the gorilla. Returning, then, to our hypothesis as to the chief cause of human differentiation, namely, that a certain Primate, more nearly allied to the anthropoids than to any other, became carnivorous and adopted the life of a hunter, there are (as I have said) two ways in which this may have happened: either by such a variation on the part of our ancestor that he felt a stronger appetite for animal food than the gorilla does—strong enough to make him hunt for prey; or by such a change of climate in the region he inhabited—say from sub-tropical to temperate—as to make his former diet scarce, especially in winter, so that he became a hunter to avoid starvation. Every one admits that he became a hunter at some time: why not at the earliest? Nothing less than some great change of life, concentrating all his powers and straining every faculty, can possibly account for the enormous differentiation of Man. The adoption of the hunting life is such a change; and the further back we put it, the better it explains the other changes that have occurred in our physical and mental nature.