We saw in our last letter how life came to the earth in very simple forms and slowly through millions of years evolved and became what it is today. We also notice one very interesting and important rule in this evolution of life—animals are always trying to adapt themselves to their surroundings. In trying to do this they have developed many new qualities and have become higher and more complicated animals. We can see this change or progress in many ways. For instance, first of all there were animals without bones, but as these could not survive for long they developed bones. The first bone they developed was the backbone. So we have a division of animals—the boneless ones and those with bones. Man and the animals you see about you have of course bones.
Then again you find the simple animals like fishes laying eggs and leaving them. They lay thousands of eggs at a time but do not look after them. The mother does not care for her children at all. She simply leaves the eggs and never comes back to them. As there is no one to look after them most of these eggs die and only a few of them develop into fishes. Is this not terrible waste? As we go up and examine the higher animals we find that their eggs or children are fewer but they look after them better. The hen also lays eggs but she sits upon them and so hatches them, and when the little chicks come out she feeds them for some time. When they grow up the mother does not care much for them.
There comes a great change in the higher animals—the mammals—about whom I said something in my last letter. These animals do not lay eggs but the mother keeps the egg inside her and gives birth to the fully developed baby animal, like dogs or cats or rabbits. And afterwards the mother suckles, or gives milk, to her young. The mother thus looks after her babies a great deal. Even here, however, you find that there is a great deal of waste. The rabbit gives birth to large numbers of baby rabbits every few months and many of these die. But a higher animal like the elephant only gives birth to one baby elephant and looks after the baby well.
So you will see that as animals develop they do not lay eggs but bear developed young ones like themselves, only smaller, and the higher animals usually give birth to one baby at a time. You will also notice that the higher animals have some affection for their young one. Man is the highest animal and so you find that the mother and the father love and take care of their children a great deal.
In this way man must have first developed from the lower animals. Probably the first men were hardly men like we know them today. They must have been half apes, half men, living rather like monkeys. Do you remember going with us to see a professor in Heidelberg in Germany? He showed us a little museum full of fossils and especially an old skull which he kept carefully locked up in a safe. The skull was supposed to belong to one of these earliest men. We now call him the Heidelberg man, simply because the skull was found buried near Heidelberg. Of course there was no Heidelberg or any other city in those days.
In those early days when the first men wandered about it used to be very cold. It is called the Ice Age because there was so much ice. Glaciers, such as now exist near the North Pole, came right down to England and Germany. The men must have found it very difficult to live and they must have had a hard time. They would only live where there were no glaciers. We are told by scientists that at that time the Mediterranean was not a sea at all but one or two lakes. There was no Red Sea either. It was all land. Probably the greater part of India was an island and the sea existed in the Punjab and part of our provinces. Imagine all South India and Central India as one big island cut off from the Himalayas by the sea! You would then have to go to Mussoorie partly by a steamer!
Man, when he first came, must have been surrounded by many huge animals, and he must have lived in fear of them. Today man is master of the world and he makes the animals do what he likes. Some he tames like the horse, the cow, the elephant, the dog, the cat and so many others. Some he eats; and some, like the lion and the tiger, he shoots for pleasure. But in those days he was not the master but a poor hunted creature himself, trying to keep away from the great beasts. Gradually, however, man raised himself and became more and more powerful till he became stronger than any animal. How did he do this? Not by physical strength for the elephant is much stronger than he is. It was by intelligence and brain power.
We can trace this growth of intelligence from the earliest days of man to the present day. Indeed it is intelligence that separates man from the other animals. There is practically no difference between a man without any intelligence and an animal.
The first great discovery that man probably made was that of fire. We light a fire now by a match. But of course matches are quite recent things. In olden times fires were made by rubbing two flints against each other till a spark came, and this spark set fire to a piece of dry straw or some other dry thing. Fires sometimes occur by themselves in the forests perhaps by the rubbing together of flints or something else. The animals were not clever enough to learn anything from this. But man was cleverer. He saw the use of fire. It kept him warm in the winter and frightened away his enemies, the big animals. So whenever a fire started the men and women must have tried to keep it up by throwing dry leaves into it. They did not want it to go out. Slowly they must have found out that they themselves could produce a spark and a fire by rubbing flints together. This was a great discovery for them and it gave them some power over the other animals. Man was then well on his way to the lordship of the world.