V
MAN AND HIS BROTHER
TRADITIONAL beliefs are like the coco de mer which was found floating, here and there, on the sea, or washed up on the shore, and which gave birth to the strangest conjectures; it was supposed to tell of undiscovered continents or to have dropped from heaven itself. Then, one day, some one saw this peculiar cocoanut quietly growing on a tall palm-tree in an obscure islet of the Indian Ocean. All we gather of primitive traditions is the fruit. Yet the fruit did not grow in the air, it grew on branches and the branches grew on a trunk and the trunk had a root. To get to the root of even the slightest of our own prejudices—let alone those of the savage—we should have to travel back far into times when history was not.
Lucretius placed at the beginning of the ages of mankind a berry-eating race, innocent of blood. The second age belonged to the hunter who killed animals, at first, and possibly for a long time, for their skins, before he used their flesh as food. In the third age animals were domesticated; first the sheep, because that was gentle and easily tamed (which one may see by the moufflons at Monte Carlo), then, by degrees, the others.
This classification was worthy of the most far-seeing mind of antiquity. Had not human originally meant humane we should not have been here to tell the tale. The greater traditions of a bloodless age are enshrined in sacred books; minor traditions of it abound in the folk-lore of the world. Man was home-sick of innocence; his conscience, which has gone on getting more blunted, not more sensitive, revolted at the “daily murder.” So mankind called upon heaven to provide an excuse for slaughter.
The Kirghis of Mongolia say that in the beginning only four men and four animals were made: the camel, the ox, the sheep, and the horse, and all were told to live on grass. The animals grazed, but the men pulled up the grass by the roots and stored it. The animals complained to God that the men were pulling up all the grass, and that soon there would be none left. God said: “If I forbid men to eat grass, will you allow them to eat you?” Fearing starvation, the animals consented.
From the first chapter of Genesis to the last of the “Origin of Species” there is one long testimony to our vegetarian ancestor, but beyond the fact that he existed, what do we know about him? We may well believe that he lived in a good climate and on a plenteous earth. Adam and Eve or their representatives could not have subsisted in Greenland. I think that the killing of wild animals, and especially the eating of them, began when man found himself confronted by extremes of cold and length of winter nights. The skins of animals gave him the only possibility of keeping warm or even of living at all, if he was to brave the outer air, while their flesh may have been often the only food he could find. He was obliged to eat them to keep alive, as Arctic explorers have been obliged to eat their sledge-dogs. Not preference, but hard necessity, made him carnivorous.
These speculations are confirmed by the doings of the earliest man of whom we have any sure knowledge; not the proto-man who must have developed, as I have said, under very different climatic conditions. Perhaps he sat under the palm-trees growing on the banks of the Thames, but though the palm-trees have left us their fruit, man, if he was there, left nothing to speak of his harmless sojourn. By tens of thousands of years the earliest man with whom we can claim acquaintance is the reindeer hunter of Quartenary times. He hunted and fed upon the reindeer, but he had not tamed them. He wore reindeer skins, but he could not profit by reindeer milk; no children were brought up by hand, possibly to the advantage of the children. It is likely, by the by, that the period of human lactation was very long. The horse also was killed for food at a time infinitely removed from the date of his first service to man.
REINDEER BROWSING.
Older Stone Age.
