Last of all, like diners-out at dessert, the evolutionists take to politics.  Having shown us entirely to their own satisfaction the growth of suns, and systems, and worlds, and continents, and oceans, and plants, and animals, and minds, they proceed to show us the exactly analogous and parallel growth of communities, and nations, and languages, and religions, and customs, and arts, and institutions, and literatures.  Man, the evolving savage, as Tylor, Lubbock, and others have proved for us, slowly putting off his brute aspect derived from his early ape-like ancestors, learned by infinitesimal degrees the use of fire, the mode of manufacturing stone hatchets and flint arrowheads, the earliest beginnings of the art of pottery.  With drill or flint he became the Prometheus to his own small heap of sticks and dry leaves among the tertiary forests.  By his nightly camp-fire he beat out gradually his excited gesture-language and his oral speech.  He tamed the dog, the horse, the cow, the camel.  He taught himself to hew small clearings in the woodland, and to plant the banana, the yam, the bread-fruit, and the coco-nut.  He picked and improved the seeds of his wild cereals till he made himself from grass-like grains his barley, his oats, his wheat, his Indian corn.  In time, he dug out ore from mines, and learnt the use first of gold, next of silver, then of copper, tin, bronze, and iron.  Side by side with these long secular changes, he evolved the family, communal or patriarchal, polygamic or monogamous.  He built the hut, the house, and the palace.  He clothed or adorned himself first in skins and leaves and feathers; next in woven wool and fibre; last of all in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day.  He gathered into hordes, tribes, and nations; he chose himself a king, gave himself laws, and built up great empires in Egypt, Assyria, China, and Peru.  He raised him altars, Stonehenges and Karnaks.  His picture-writing grew into hieroglyphs and cuneiforms, and finally emerged, by imperceptible steps, into alphabetic symbols, the raw material of the art of printing.  His dug-out canoe culminates in the iron-clad and the ‘Great Eastern’; his boomerang and slingstone in the Woolwich infant; his boiling pipkin and his wheeled car in the locomotive engine; his picture-message in the telephone and the Atlantic cable.  Here, where the course of evolution has really been most marvellous, its steps have been all more distinctly historical; so that nobody now doubts the true descent of Italian, French, and Spanish from provincial Latin, or the successive growth of the trireme, the ‘Great Harry,’ the ‘Victory,’ and the ‘Minotaur’ from the coracles or praus of prehistoric antiquity.