Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III A BIOLOGIC INTERPRETATION OF WAR CHAPTER III A Biologic Interpretation Of War The Rise of Man through Struggle It is through the fortuitous mating of an infinite number of ancestors, whose characteristics have been transmitted down to the present time, that the individual of to-day has become the product of all the past. The path of descent is the same for civilized man, half-civilized man, savage man, prehistoric man, and so on down the pathway through the long line of the successive progenitors of man, an unbroken succession from the present to the lowest forms of life. Within himself every individual holds the imperfect record of this ascent along a crimson trail. We may suppose that eons ago as a weaker creature man's distant progenitor was driven by powerful enemies to the trees where his strategy was further evolved and his fore-feet became hands. Cautiously he returned to the hostile ground of hisancient enemies and resumed the battle by utilizing the forces of nature. He discovered fire, he found metals, he fashioned simple tools and weapons ; made dugouts ; tamed animals ; planted seeds, utilizing Nature herself to aid him in obtaining food, shelter, and clothing, and in securing protection against his foes. In the gradual evolution of man the ever-present law of continuity holds. There is no break in the path from the orgy of the naked savage to the sensual dance of to-day; from the careless sale of a Bushman's daughter to the fixed price of the daughter of a living Croesus; from the savage grapple with wild beasts to the present grinding struggle of competition. From birth to maturity civilized man is tossed upon the same seas of passion and wrecked upon the same rocks as those upon which the simplest tribesman was wrecked eons ago ! During t...