The first rudimentary beginnings of that complex life of communities which we call civilization marked a period when man had already long been by far the most important creature on the planet.  The history of the living world had become, in fact, the history of man, and therefore something totally different in kind as well as in degree from what it had been before.  There are interesting analogies between what has gone on in the development of life generally and what has gone on in the development of human society, and these I shall discuss elsewhere.[9] But the differences are profound, and go to the root of things.

  [9] In the Romanes Lecture at Oxford.—­L.F.A.

Throughout their early stages the movements of civilization—­for, properly speaking, there was no one movement—­were very slow, were local in space, and were partial in the sense that each developed along but few lines.  Of the numberless years that covered these early stages we have no record.  They were the years that saw such extraordinary discoveries and inventions as fire, and the wheel, and the bow, and the domestication of animals.  So local were these inventions that at the present day there yet linger savage tribes, still fixed in the half-bestial life of an infinitely remote past, who know none of them except fire—­and the discovery and use of fire may have marked, not the beginning of civilization, but the beginning of the savagery which separated man from brute.

Even after civilization and culture had achieved a relatively high position, they were still purely local, and from this fact subject to violent shocks.  Modern research has shown the existence in prehistoric or, at least, protohistoric times of many peoples who, in given localities, achieved a high and peculiar culture, a culture that was later so completely destroyed that it is difficult to say what, if any, traces it left on the subsequent cultures out of which we have developed our own; while it is also difficult to say exactly how much any one of these cultures influenced any other.  In many cases, as where invaders with weapons of bronze or iron conquered the neolithic peoples, the higher civilization completely destroyed the lower civilization, or barbarism, with which it came in contact.  In other cases, while superiority in culture gave its possessors at the beginning a marked military and governmental superiority over the neighboring peoples, yet sooner or later there accompanied it a certain softness or enervating quality which left the cultured folk at the mercy of the stark and greedy neighboring tribes, in whose savage souls cupidity gradually overcame terror and awe.  Then the people that had been struggling upward would be engulfed, and the levelling waves of barbarism wash over them.  But we are not yet in position to speak definitely on these matters.  It is only the researches of recent years that have enabled us so much as to guess at the course of events in prehistoric Greece; while as yet we can hardly even hazard a guess as to how, for instance, the Hallstadt culture rose and fell, or as to the history and fate of the builders of those strange ruins of which Stonehenge is the type.