# Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3812/The Progress of Man

THE PROGRESS OF MAN.
(By our Anthropological Expert.)
Professor Keith, of the Royal College of Surgeons, reporting on the skeleton of a prehistoric twelve-year-old boy recently discovered near Ipswich, pronounces his stature to be much the same as the average height of a modern boy of the same age, but the size of the head is remarkably large. The professor states that he and his colleagues are trying to get hold of people of every period, going as far back as they can. They will then be able to differentiate the types that lived in any period, and check the changes that came over them. So far, however, there has been very little change.
Perhaps the most striking result of Professor Keith's appeal so far has come from the Isle of Man, where a magnificent three-legged skeleton has been discovered in the Caves of Bradda. The remains have been pronounced by Professor Quellin, the famous Manx anthropologist, to be those of a man not less than 175 years of age, whose facial angle bears so marked a resemblance to that of Mr. Hall Caine as to warrant the hypothesis that he was one of the royal ancestors of the eminent novelist. Close to the skeleton was a long bronze trumpet, from which Professor Quellin, after several ineffectual efforts, ultimately succeeded in eliciting a deep booming note. Mr. Hall Caine, who has taken the liveliest interest in the discovery, is at present studying the instrument, and will, it is hoped, give a recital shortly in the House of Keys.
The recent excavations at the famous Culbin Sands, undertaken by the Forres Antiquarian Institute, have also resulted in some remarkable finds. Prominent among these is a complete set of golf clubs belonging to the Bronze period. In regard to length the clubs are very much the same as the average implements used at the present day, but the large size of the heads is remarkable, the niblick weighing nearly half a hundredweight. It is plausibly inferied that clubs of this pattern may also have been used as weapons, as the dwellers in this district in the Bronze period are known to have been of a warlike and tumultuous disposition. The game is believed to have been introduced by some Maccabaean settlers, the ancestors of the clan of Macbeth, who flourished in the vicinity.
In that fine spirit of enterprise which has always characterised The Daily Lyre, the proprietors of that periodical have offered a prize of £5,000 for the most characteristic relic of ancient and modern British civilization, to be sent in by October 1. Already several notable exhibits have been forwarded for the competition. Mr. Ronald McLurkin, of Tain, has submitted portions of the boiler of an ancient locomotive, apparently used on the Highland Railway in the time of the Boer War. Dr. Edgar Hollam, of Brancaster, has sent a fine specimen of a fossilised Norfolk biffin, and Miss Sheila Muldooney, of Skibbereen, a copy of The Skibbereen Eagle containing the historic announcement that it had its eye on the Tsar of Russia. Sir George Alexander sends a daguerreotype of himself in knicker-bockers with side whiskers and moustache, and Mr. Bernard Shaw the first interview with himself that he ever wrote. It appeared in The Freeman's Journal in the "seventies" and is illustrated with six portraits, in one of which Mr. Shaw appears in an Eton suit and a tall hat, "the only one I ever possessed."
Sir Henry Howarth has forwarded a copy of The Times containing his first contribution to that journal, a letter occupying a column-and-a-half of small print, on the mammoth as a domestic pet in the Court of the early Moghul Emperors. Mr. Winston Churchill competes with an essay which he wrote, while a schoolboy at Harrow, on the dangers of Democracy; and Master Anthony Asquith has sent the rough notes of a Lecture on "The Balliol Manner" which he delivered many years ago before a select audience at Claridge's. The contrast in form and thought between this crude essay and his recent lectures on the mysticism of Rabindranath Tagore is quite amazing. We may also briefly note the MS. version of an early sonnet by Mr. Edmund Gosse, addressed to Sir Sidney Lee; several safety-pins and a sponge-bag which once belonged to Charlotte Brontë and are now entered for the competition by Mr. Clement Shorter; and a hot-water bottle used by S. T. Coleridge when he was writing "The Ancient Mariner," now in the possession of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree.
The interesting point that emerges so far is that while little change is observable in the physique, habits and manners of the British, as illustrated by these relics, up to the last ten years or so, the development in every direction, since the foundation of The Daily Lyre, has been quite extraordinarily rapid and pronounced. For instance, a cast of the head of a modern "nut" shows a compactness which compares most favourably with the overgrown cranium of the prehistoric boy reported on by Professor Keith.