RUTH BYBEE'S EXHIBIT AT THE STATE FAIR, UTAH This little girl made every article in the exhibit and dressed the doll for good measure. Her Battenburg lace, her hand-painted china, no less than her jellies, jams, and pickles, show how good training may make a girl independent (see text, page 101). will content ourselves with the Brazilian product. THE WORLD OUR SERVANT And so, when we come to reckon up those who have helped produce the raw materials of which our foods are made, we find the clouted African savage and the American stock grower; the South American Indian and the California truck farmer; the Javanese coffee picker and the Virginia dairyman; the turbaned Arabian and the New York orchardist; the Chinese coolie and the Dakota wheat farmer; the Mexican peon and the Chesapeake Bay fisherman; the Porto Rican planter and the Hawaiian sugar grower; the Spanish olive packer and the Alaskan Eskimo fisherman. Yet all these neglect the matter of transportation. Our food comes to us on the heads of Indians, on the backs of donkeys, drawn in carts by huge water buffaloes, aboard the "ship of the desert,' on wheelbarrows propelled by Chinese coolies. Steamships, railroad trains, auto trucks, and delivery cars have all played their part in the great work of catering to discriminating appetites. Truly the man who dines well ought to be a deep student of geography, for all races, all nationalities, all types of people, all points of the compass, all latitudes-continent, island, river, and seaall must come to him as he looks over the bill of fare and tries to find those things that delight his palate. To carry out the purpose for which it was founded twenty-seven years ago, namely, "the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge, the National Geographic Society publishes this Magazine. All receipts from the publication are invested in the Magazine itself or expended directly to promote geographic knowledge and the study of geography. Articles or photographs from members of the Society, or other friends, are desired. For material that the Society can use, adequate remuneration is made. Contributions should be accompanied by an addressed return envelope and postage, and be addressed: Eutered at the Post-Office at Washington, D. C., as Second-Class Mail Matter VOL. XXIX, No. 2 WASHINGTON FEBRUARY, 1916 THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE HOW OLD IS MAN? F RECENT years scientific writers have for convenience sake distinguished as prehistory that part of man's long history on this earth which precedes the period for which we possess written records, or at least records that may be treated as in some sort their equivalent. This prehistory of man is, of course, immensely longer than what can, by any stretch of language, be called his true history. At present our historical records begin in Egypt and Mesopotamia, using the latter word to include the entire country adjacent to the Tigris and Euphrates; and the first dim indications of anything that can properly be called history do not go back seven thousand years, while it is not until some five thousand years ago that we begin to be on continuously firm. historical ground. At that time Europe was still in the prehistoric stage, and its inhabitants knew practically nothing of either metals or writing, being in the neolithic or polished stone cultural stage. In America history cannot be said to have begun much before the advent of the white man, although there are extraordinary architectural remains of old and strange civilizations in Mexico, Central America, and Peru. "Old," however, is a relative term. The earliest monuments beside the lower Nile and lower Euphrates, like the earliest monuments on the high plateaus or in the dense tropical forests of the new world, are purely modern-are things of yesterday-when measured by the hoary antiquity into which we grope when we attempt to retrace the prehistory of man, the history of his development from an apelike creature struggling with his fellow-brutes, to the being with at least longings and hopes that are half divine. All our knowledge of man's slow progress during the immense stretch of time covering this development has been obtained during the last two generations; it is still of a sketchy and fragmentary kind, and we cannot hope that it will ever be complete; but already we know enough to indicate the rough outlines of some of the most important of the developmental stages, and as regards certain of the later stages to fill in various details. THE REPTILES DISAPPEAR AND MAMMALS RULE THE EARTH In geological or paleontological parlance, the Age of Mammals is known as the Tertiary period. At the beginning of this period the gigantic creatures with which the Age of Reptiles, the secondary period of the earth's history, culminated, had all died out. The mammals, which for ages had existed as small, warm-blooded beasts of low type, now had the field much to themselves. They developed along many different lines, including that of the primates, from which came the monkeys, the anthropoid apes, and finally the halfhuman predecessors of man himself. At about the time when these last appeared |