Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life and Art

by Henry Fairfield Osborn

NOTE II

HORACE ON THE EARLY EVOLUTION OF MAN

Horace[BE] also adopted the Greek conception of the natural evolution of human culture:

"Your men of words, who rate all crimes alike,
Collapse and founder, when on fact they strike:
Sense, custom, all, cry out against the thing,
And high expedience, right's perennial spring.
When men first crept from out earth's womb, like worms,
Dumb speechless creatures, with scarce human forms,
With nails or doubled fists they used to fight
For acorns or for sleeping-holes at night;
Clubs followed next; at last to arms they came,
Which growing practice taught them how to frame,
Till words and names were found, wherewith to mould
The sounds they uttered, and their thoughts unfold;
Thenceforth they left off fighting, and began
To build them cities, guarding man from man,
And set up laws as barriers against strife
That threatened person, property, or wife.
'Twas fear of wrong gave birth to right, you'll find,
If you but search the records of mankind.
Nature knows good and evil, joy and grief,
But just and unjust are beyond her brief:
Nor can philosophy, though finely spun,
By stress of logic prove the two things one,
To strip your neighbor's garden of a flower
And rob a shrine at midnight's solemn hour."

NOTE III

ÆSCHYLUS ON THE EARLY EVOLUTION OF MAN

Æschylus, in Prometheus Bound,[BF] presents one of the earliest known as well as one of the noblest conceptions of the natural development of the human faculties:

"And let me tell you—not as taunting men,
But teaching you the intention of my gifts,
How, first beholding, they beheld in vain,
And hearing, heard not, but, like shapes in dreams,
Mixed all things wildly down the tedious time,
Nor knew to build a house against the sun
With wicketed sides, nor any woodwork knew,
But lived, like silly ants, beneath the ground
In hollow caves unsunned. There came to them
No steadfast sign of winter, nor of spring
Flower-perfumed, nor of summer full of fruit,
But blindly and lawlessly they did all things,
Until I taught them how the stars do rise
And set in mystery, and devised for them
Number, the inducer of philosophies,
The synthesis of Letters, and, beside,
The artificer of all things, Memory
That sweet Muse-mother."

NOTE IV