And now, having brought the African migration—to which I allot the Semitic populations of Arabia, Syria, and Babylonia—from its extremity at the Cape to a point so near the hypothetical centre as the frontiers of Persia and Armenia, I leave it for the present.
The English of England are not the earliest occupants of the island. Before them were the ancient Britons. Were these the earliest occupants? Who were the men by whose foot Britain, till then the home of the lower animals alone, was first trodden? This is uncertain. Why may not the Kelts have stood in the same relation to some rude Britons still more primitive, that the Anglo-Saxons did to the Kelts? Perhaps they really did so. Perhaps, even the rude and primitive tribes thus assumed had aborigines who looked upon them as intruders, themselves having in their turn been interlopers. The chief objection against thus multiplying aboriginal aborigines is the rule de non apparentibus, &c.
But Britain is an island. Everything relating to the natural history of the useful arts is so wholly uninvestigated, that no one has proposed even to approximate the date of the first launch of the first boat; in other words, of the first occupancy of a piece of land surrounded by water. The whole of that particular continent in which the first protoplasts saw light, may have remained full to overflowing before a single frail raft had effected the first human migration.
Britain may have remained a solitude for centuries and milleniums after Gaul had been full. I do not suppose this to have been the case; but, unless we imagine the first canoe to have been built simultaneously with the demand for water-transport, it is as easy to allow that a long period intervened between that time and the first effort of seamanship as a short one. Hence, the date of the original populations of islands is not in the same category with that of the dispersion of men and women over continents.
On continents, we must assume the extension from one point to another to have been continuous—and not only this, but we may assume something like an equable rate of diffusion also. I have heard that the American population moves bodily from east to west at the rate of about eleven miles a year.
As I use the statement solely for the sake of illustrating my subject, its accuracy is not very important. To simplify the calculation, let us say ten. At this rate a circle of migration of which the centre was (say) in the Altai range, would enlarge its diameter at the rate of twenty miles a year—i.e. ten miles at one end of the radius and ten at the other.
Hence a point a thousand miles from the birth-place of the patriarchs of our species would receive its first occupants exactly one hundred years after the original locality had been found too limited. At this rate a very few centuries would people the Cape of Good Hope, and fewer still Lapland, the parts about Cape Comorin, the Malayan Peninsula, and Kamskatka—all parts more or less in the condition of extreme points[22].
Now as long as any continental extremities of the earth’s surface remain unoccupied—the stream (or rather the enlarging circle of migration) not having yet reached them—the primary migration is going on; and when all have got their complement, the primary migration is over. During this primary migration, the relations of man, thus placed in movement, and in the full, early and guiltless exercise of his high function of subduing the earth, are in conflict with physical obstacles, and with the resistance of the lower animals only. Unless—like Lot’s wife—he turn back upon the peopled parts behind him, he has no relations with his fellow-men—at least none arising out of the claim of previous occupancy. In other words—during the primary migration—the world that lay before our progenitors was either brute or inanimate.