Animism the Seed of Religion

ague significance, since the stage of his evolution, which is assumed, lies far behind that which yields the earliest known traces of his presence. At the back of the comparatively recent Neolithic or polished stone-using age there are the prehistoric Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age, with its relics of rudely-fashioned tools and weapons, and of primitive art in scratchings of mammoth and reindeer on bone and slate; and the vastly older Eolithic age, whose artificially- chipped flints have been found in large numbers in the plateau gravel of South-East England. More remote, in a dateless past, must be placed the proto-human, perhaps represented by the calvaria or portion of skull, two molar teeth and thigh-bone, found in an Upper Pliocene deposit in Java in 1892 by Dr. Dubois, to which the name Pithecanthropus erectus, or " upright ape-man," has been given. In these fragments experts in anthropology see " the nearest likeness yet found of the human ancestor at a stage immediately antecedent to the definitely human stage, and yet at the same time in advance of the simian or ape-like stage."10 We are, therefore, yet an immeasurable distance from Homo sapiens, and in near touch with Homo alalus, semi- erect, big-brained, deft-handed, because of his op- posable thumb, communicating with other homines alali by various grunts and groans, supplemented by grimaces, gestures and postures. This is no fancy sketch ; there are to this day tribes extant, like the Veddahs of Ceylon, ...