When the Glacial period passed away, our nameless simian man, or manlike ape, might naturally be supposed to revert to its original condition, and to establish itself as of old in the new forests of the Modern period. For some unknown reason, however, perhaps because it had gone too far in the path of improvement to be able to turn back, this reversion did not take place. On the contrary, the ameliorated circumstances and wider range of the new continents enabled it still further to improve. Ease and abundance perfected what struggle and privation had begun; it added to the rude arts of the Glacial time; it parted with the shaggy hair now unnecessary; its features became softer; and it returned in part to vegetable food. Language sprang up from the attempt to articulate natural sounds. Fire-making was invented and new arts arose. At length the spiritual nature, potentially present in the creature, was awakened by some access of fear, or some grand and terrible physical phenomenon; the idea of a higher intelligence was struck out, and the descendant of apes became a superstitious and idolatrous savage. How much trouble and discussion would have been saved, had he been aware of his humble origin, and never entertained the vain imagination that he was a child of God, rather then a mere product of physical evolution! It is, indeed, curious, that at this point evolutionism, like theism, has its "fall of man;" for surely the awakening of the religious sense, and of the knowledge of good and evil, must on that theory be so designated, since it subverted in the case of man the previous regular operation of natural selection, and introduced all that debasing superstition, priestly domination, and religious controversy which have been among the chief curses of our race, and which are doubly accursed if, as the evolutionist believes, they are not the ruins of something nobler and holier, but the mere gratuitous, vain, and useless imaginings of a creature who should have been content to eat and drink and die, without hope or fear, like the brutes from which he sprang.