Through Vague Epochs
more years ago, these groups of intelligent human beings possessed faculties and powers in all essentials “modern,” though still in the dawn of education. These folk saw as we see, felt as we feel, and they otherwise functioned as we function to-day. They were men and women with our emotions, hopes, and dreams. They were bound to our cycle of childhood, vigor, and senility—beings of our own intellectual timbre, more roughly hewn perhaps and more ruggedly joined.
Beyond these racial groups in time, we see others vaguely that are intelligent, and still of an Eastern origin drawn Westward by migration, and ever lower in order as the period recedes, until man’s earliest ancestry is reduced to the level of brutedom.
One of the most significant facts in the study of prehistoric man, and one that yet may throw much light on his language, is his rapid spiritual ascendancy. That his higher development was relatively swift and progressive is made evident by an examination of
20
