The Story of Ab. By Stanley Waterloo. (A. and C.
Black.)— This is not the first attempt to write the story of prehistoric man. Sir Arthur Helps laid the scene of his " Realtnah" in a lake- village ; but the lake-village overlaps historic time, for Herodotus describes it. Mr. Stanley Waterloo takes us back to the " cave man," and the "carve man" of Britain in the very early days before there was the " silver streak " between Britain and France. We have no hesitation in saying that the book is a great success. The struggle of the human animal for existence is admirably depicted,—his struggle for existence against the beasts, fiercer and more powerful than he is, which haunt the same forests ; his struggle upwards to a higher plane of existence, both physical and spiritual. The writer does not hold, it is clear, with Mr. Buckle's theory, that all progress is the work of the race, not of the individual. It is the personality of Ab that counts for so much. We see the genius of this particular person lifting up the whole race. It may be said that he does too much and too quickly ; that progress must have been slower, inventions worked out more slowly, and conceptions more gradually evolved. But there is ample justification in the literary necessity ; we cannot wait in a story for the slow process which may be historically true. Among many good things, we may mention the narrow escape which the race had of a less prosperous development. If Ab had married the charming " Slush " girl what a loss it would have been to posterity, for she was not worth a tithe of Lightfoot. Happily she swam too fast for him, and the courtship came to nothing.
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