others--one separate and far apart? Was he, so admirably formed, so
complete and well-balanced, merely a freak of nature, to use an
old-fashioned phrase--a sport, or spontaneous individual variation--an
experiment for a new human type, imagined by Nature in some past period,
inconceivably long ago, but which she had only now, too late, found time
to carry out? Or rather was he like that little hairy maiden exhibited
not long ago in London, a reproduction of the past, the mystery called
reversion--a something in the life of a species like memory in the life
of an individual, the memory which suddenly brings back to the old man's
mind the image of his childhood? For no dream-monster in human form ever
appeared to me with so strange and terrible a face; and this was no
dream but sober fact, for I saw and spoke with this man; and unless cold
steel has given him his quietus, or his own horse has crushed him, or a
mad bull sored him--all natural forms of death in that wild land--he is
probably still living and in the prime of life, and perhaps at this very
moment drinking gin at some astonished traveller's expense at that very
bar where I met him. The old Palaeolithic man, judging from the few
remains we have of him, must have had an unspeakably savage and, to our
way of thinking, repulsive and horrible aspect, with his villainous low
receding forehead, broad nose, great projecting upper jaw, and
retreating chin; to meet such a man face to face in Piccadilly would
frighten a nervous person of the present time. But his teeth were not
unlike our own, only very much larger and more powerful, and well
adapted to their work of masticating the flesh, underdone and possibly
raw, of mammoth and rhinoceros. If, then, this living man recalls a type
of the past, it is of a remoter past, a more primitive man, the volume
of whose history is missing from the geological record. To speculate on
such a subject seems idle and useless; and when I coveted possession of
that head it was not because I thought that it might lead to any fresh
discovery. A lower motive inspired the feeling. I wished for it only