The examination of these remains has enormously widened our know ledge of prehistoric man. 'The late Dr. Davidson Black who described the nds sums up by saying that "Sinanthropus is a generalized and progressive type, closely related to the original type' of hominidae which was the prototype not only of the Neanderthal man-and of the South African fossil races, buy of the moern Homo sapient." He knew the use of fire, Possibly his hand was not very different to" ours, and his brain was of equal size: but his foot, Drobably, was not very well develop"
Finally we have the record of man himself who apparently persisted 11: China all through the loess or dust depositing epoch to which reference has already been made. "He seems have dropped his implements here and anxious to say where. the rem: position of affairs in 1917 when the the problem in earnest. thoughtful ostrich (Stratniotithus) Laid it eggs where sand storms buri-fed them and. so. preserved them intact for countless ages for our edly fication and enlightenment.
'The middle period of the Pleistocone age, which was the ice age in four' parts of the world, was in Eas: tern Asia a dry period during which the air-blown loess was formed ike blanket" allover" northern and central China. It" filled up all the valleys and hid all the other features of the lowlands. The China of that period must have been an uncommonly unpleasant place to live in: But as wehave noted, the yellow sell with which the people are so intima ately associated "has had a large share in forming the peculiar charac ter of the Chinese. During that orlod of terrific dust storms the rainfall was exceedingly small. Since then it has increased, and the vast erosion of the silt Inden rivers 1s comparatively recent feature.
View Brought Nearer At Yang Shao Tsun (Honan), and at many other places, great stone-age sites have been discovered which have yielded a rich harvest of impiements, utensils and painted pottery which give us a vivid Impression of life as it was lived four thousand years ago. A curious thing is that in many eases these objects are clearly the prototype of implements in use amongst the more primitive commun-{les of China to-day. Investigation shows that since these ancient sites were occupied the country has been extensively eroded, with the result that the level of the water in the sull has been lowered to a very con-Siderable extent. It has been ascertained that those ancient people were cultivating rice four thousand years ago in places where rice car: no lon-be cultivated.
"These recent. investigation have given us a marvelously extended View of ancient conditions in China:
id, of course, research Is still in its Infaney. The field has scarcely been scratched: but at least' a beginning has been made by a band of scientists about whom one does not hear very much. Some of them are British, some of them Chinese who seem take kindly to this sort of scien-tine works: but the most distinguish-ea have been Swedes, of whom Professor J. Gunnar Anderson is one.
Professor Andersson's Genius tu each phase of this grand Cavatcade of history it has been the good fortune of Professor Anderson (to whom Tam here indebted) to initiate the research which resulted in those starting discoveries which from time to time have distracted, if only for a. moment, the World's attention from {ts more sorrowful preoccupations. The Swedes have taken a leading part, and indeed their contribuuon has been fruitful and distinguished. Professor Anderson himself was originally curator of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm till he was appointed mining adviser the Chinese government. In reading the work of another distinguished explorer (Sven Hedin) some time ago T'was painfully aware of a selfish egoism which spoiled the record of Femarkable achievements. "No such defect exists in Andersson's "Children. of the Yellow Earth." Indeed. so Kenerously does Professor Anderson raise and elaborate the work of his assistants, and of those who took. over operations where he left off that, it is diMeult to bear in mind sometimes (as one should) that the initiative' was his. He has that quality—intultion—without which nu' e-logist and no archaeologist can be. Successful. Professor Anderson has genius for interpretation. and ced almost all his most startling: successes arose from the most trivial observations. A stone ona collea ferie's veriting desk led him straight brillers of tons of easily accessible iron ore within a few miles of Peking. It was in 1914 that he stumbled upon the organic origin of Stromato-Ute ore. Tu 1918 he discovered the Colienia nodules and recognized their connection with similar fossils in the pre-Cambrian rocks of North America.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.