Excerpt from the book...What was the intellectual capacity of man when he made his firstappearance upon the earth? Or, to speak with more scientific precision(as the question relates to material evidences), what were the mentalpowers of the people who fashioned the earliest stone implements, whichare admitted to be the oldest remaining traces of our kind? As thesepeople were low in the arts of life, were they also low in naturalcapacity? This is certainly one of the most important questions whichthe science of anthropology has yet to answer. Of late years theprevalent disposition has apparently been to answer it in theaffirmative. Primitive man, we are to believe, had a feeble and narrowintellect, which in the progress of civilization has been graduallystrengthened and enlarged. This conclusion is supposed to be inaccordance with the development theory; and the distinguished author ofthat theory has seemed to favor this view. Yet, in fact, the developmenttheory has nothing to do with the question. If we suppose that theexisting and--so far as we know--the only species of man appeared uponthe earth with the physical conformation and mental capacity which heretains at this day, we make merely the same supposition with regard tohim that we make with regard to every other existing species of animal.How it was that this species came to exist is another question altogether.