The history of clothing begins with the employment of an animal's hide or a branch of leaves to protect the body from the sun's heat or the cold winds. Other early beginnings of the more elaborate decorative clothing are discerned by anthropologists in the scars made upon the arms and breast as in the case of the Australian black man, and in the figured patterns of tattooing, so remarkably developed by the natives in the islands of the South Pacific Ocean. A visit to a gallery of ancient and medieval paintings clearly shows that the conventional modes of clothing the human body have changed from century to century, while it is equally plain that they alter even from year to year of the present time, according to the vagaries of fashion.
A brief review of the "arts of pleasure," including music and sculpture and painting, demonstrates their evolution also. The earliest cavemen of Europe left crude drawings of reindeer and bears and wild oxen scratched upon bits of ivory or upon the stone walls of their shelters; the painting and sculpture of early historic Europe were more advanced, but they were far from being what Greece and Rome produced in later centuries. Indeed, the evolution of Greek sculpture carried this higher art to a point that is generally conceded to be far beyond that attained by even our modern sculptors, just as flying reptiles of the Chalk Age developed wings and learned to fly long before birds and bats came into existence.
In the field of music, the earliest stages can be surmised only by a study of the actual songs and instruments of primitive peoples now living in wild places. No doubt the song began as a recitation by a savage of the events of a battle or a journey in which he had participated. In giving such a description he lives his battles again, and his simulated moods and passions alter his voice so that the spoken history becomes a chant. From this to the choral and oratorio is not very far.
Musical instruments seem to have had a multiple origin. The ram's horn of the early Briton and the perforated conch-shell of the South Sea Islander are natural trumpets; when they were copied in brass and other metals they evolved rapidly to become the varied wind instruments typified to-day by the cornet and the tuba. In the same way the reed of the Greek shepherd is the ancestor of the flute and clarionet. Stringed instruments like the guitar, zither, and violin form another class which begins with the bow and its twanging string. The power of the note was intensified by holding a gourd against the bow to serve as a resonance-chamber. When the musician of early times enlarged this chamber, moved it to the end of the bow, and multiplied the strings, he constructed the cithara of antiquity,—the ancestor of a host of modern types, from the harp to the bass-viol and mandolin.
The dance and the drama find their beginnings in the simple reënactment of an actual series of events. Among Polynesians of to-day the dances still retain the rhythmic beat of the war-tread measure, and many of the motions of the arms are more or less conventionalized imitations of the act of striking with a club, or hurling a spear, and other acts. To such elements many other things have been added, but the fact remains that our own formal dances, as well as the sun-dance of the Indian and the mad whirl of the Dervish, are modern products which have truly evolved.
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When we turn to science and philosophy and other intellectual attainments of modern civilized peoples, it is easier to see how evolution has been accomplished, because we possess a wealth of written literature which explains the way that human ideas have changed from century to century. In these cases there can be no question that such evidences provide accurate instruments for estimating the mental abilities of the writers who produced them. We shall take up the higher conceptions of mankind at a later juncture, so at this point we need only to note that even these mental possessions, like household culture and even the physical structures of a human body, have changed and differentiated to become the widely different interpretations of the world and supernature that are held by the civilized, barbarous, and savage races of to-day.
As we look back over the facts that have been cited, and as we contemplate the large departments of knowledge about human psychology, mental development, and racial culture which these few details illustrate, we come to realize how securely founded is the doctrine that even the human mind with all its varied powers has grown to be what it is. Indeed, it is solely due to his mental prowess that man has attained a position above that of any lower animal. And yet every human organ and its function can be traced to something in the lower world; it is a difference only in degree and not in category that science discovers. The line connecting civilized man with the savage leads inevitably through the ape to the lower mammalia possessing intelligence, and on down to the reflex organic mechanisms which end with the Amoeba. It is a long distance from the mechanical activities of the protozoön to the processes of human thought; yet the physical basis of the latter is a cellular mechanism and nothing more, developed during a single human life in company with all other organs from a one-celled starting-point—the human egg.
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The method by which mental evolution has been accomplished is likewise demonstrable, because the factors are identical with those which bring about specific transformation in physical respects. This is to be expected, for the contention that the structures and the functions of the several organs constituting any system are inseparable has never been gainsaid.