BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
———

THE
DAWN OF HISTORY:

AN INTRODUCTION TO
PRE-HISTORIC STUDY.
EDITED BY
C. F. KEARY, M.A., F.S.A.
NEW EDITION.
NEW YORK:
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS.
1902
THE CAXTON PRESS
NEW YORK.

PREFACE.

The present edition of the Dawn of History is a considerable enlargement upon the former one, as may be judged from the fact that the former, including the Appendix, contained only 231 pages, whereas the present edition contains 357. These enlargements have chiefly affected the first four chapters with the ninth and tenth, and, generally speaking, the chapters for which the editor is wholly responsible. He felt himself quite incapable of improving chapters eight, eleven, and thirteen, which can hardly fail to be recognized as the best in the volume; and, unhappily, the hand which wrote them—that of Annie Keary—is no longer able to revise or alter. Some slight corrections therefore have been made, in accordance with the advance of these branches of study during recent years, but nothing more. No more were needed, for (in the case of the chapters on writing, for example) further research has only tended to establish more firmly the conclusions here accepted. The chapters on early social life (vi., vii.), again, did not seem to the editor to require more than slight corrections.

In the chapters dealing with religion and mythology, it was not to be expected that the writers could avoid treading upon controversial ground; but as almost every proposition upon these matters is disputed by some one, it was not possible to adopt the plan of putting forward only those facts and theories which may be considered as established. Some disputed points are discussed in the Appendix. Even on the subject of language the views of one (small) school of philologists had to be relegated in like manner to the Appendix.

So far for the character of the alterations upon the first edition. The new matter introduced, whenever it has not been of the nature of a correction of the old, has been aimed in the direction of making more clear the processes through which the human mind has gone in the acquisition of each fresh capacity—more clear the extent to which each successive phase of pre-historic life has been built upon the preceding phase—more clear the process by which mankind seems to have gone through the stages of language-formation, and so forth. This has been the direction in which the editor has sought to improve upon the earlier edition: rather than in loading his pages by a greater accumulation of facts, to make the relationship of the various facts to one another plainer and more easy to remember; in one word, to appeal to the reason much more than to the memory.

This is by no means the principle on which a great majority of introductions and manuals seem to have been written, but upon a principle almost the reverse of this.

Finally, it has never been lost sight of, that the present volume is meant to leave the reader, so to say, at the door of history. It is not designed to be an anthropology, or a history of the growth of faculty among mankind at large, but only a pre-historic study, an account of the ascertainable doings and thoughts on the part of the people who have gone to make up the historic races of the world. Even the stone-age civilization is treated, not as a phase of culture in the abstract, but as an element of the growth in culture of the historic nations of our planet.

C. F. KEARY.

200, Cromwell Road, S.W.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

The advance of pre-historic study has been during the last ten years exceptionally rapid; and, considering upon how many subsidiary interests it touches, questions of politics, of social life, of religion almost, the science of pre-historic archæology might claim to stand in rivalry with geology as the favourite child of this century; as much a favourite of its declining years as geology was of its prime. But as yet, it will be confessed, we have little popular literature upon the subject, and that for want of it the general reader is left a good deal in arrear of the course of discovery. His ideas of nationalities and kindredship among peoples is, it may be guessed, still hazy. We still hear the Russians described as Tartars: and the notion that we English are descendants of the lost Israelitish tribes finds innumerable supporters. I am told that a society has been formed in London for collecting proofs of this more than Ovidian metamorphosis. The reason of this public indifference is very plain. Pre-historic science has not yet passed out of that early stage when workers are too busy in the various branches of the subject to spare much time for a comparison of the results of their labours; when, one may say, fresh contributions are pouring in too fast to be placed upon their proper shelves in the storehouse of our knowledge. In such a state of things the reader who is not a specialist is under peculiar disadvantages for a discovery of what has been done. He stands bewildered, like the sleeping partner in a firm, to whom no one—though he is after all the true beneficiary—explains the work which is passing before his eyes.

It will not be thought a misplaced object to attempt some such explanation, and that is the object of the following chapters. And as at some great triumph of mechanism and science—a manufactory, an observatory, an ironclad,—a junior clerk or a young engineer is told off to accompany the intelligent visitor and explain the workings of the machinery; or as, if the simile serve better, in those cities which are sought for their treasures of art and antiquity, the lower class of the population become self-constituted into guides to beauties which they certainly neither helped to create nor keep alive; so this book offers itself to the interested student as a guide over some parts of the ground covered by pre-historic inquiry, without advancing pretensions to stand beside the works of specialists in that field. The peculiar objects kept in view have been, to put the reader in possession of (1) the general results up to this time attained, the chief additions which pre-historic science has made to the sum of our knowledge, even if this knowledge can be given only in rough outline; (2) the method or mechanism of the science, the way in which it pieces together its acquisitions, and argues upon the facts it has ascertained; and (3) to put this information in a form which might be attractive and suitable to the general reader.

The various labours of a crowd of specialists are needed to give completeness to our knowledge of primitive man, and it is scarcely necessary to say that there are a hundred questions which in such a short book as this have been left untouched. The intention has been to present those features which can best be combined to form a continuous panorama, and also to avoid, as far as possible, the subjects most under controversy. No apology surely is needed for the conjoint character of the work: as in every chapter the conclusions of many different and sometimes contradictory writers had to be examined and compared, and as these chapters, few as they are, spread over various special fields of inquiry.

It is to be hoped that some readers to whom pre-historic study is a new thing may be sufficiently interested in it to desire to continue their researches. For the assistance of such, lists are given, at the end, of the chief authorities consulted on the subject of each chapter, with some notes upon questions of peculiar interest.

The vast extent of the field, the treasures of knowledge which have been already gathered, and the harvest which is still in the ear, impress the student more and more the deeper he advances into the study. Surely, if from some higher sphere, beings of a purely spiritual nature—nourished, that is, not by material meats and drinks, but by ideas—look down upon the lot of man, they must be before everything amazed at the complaints of poverty which rise up from every side. When every stone on which we tread can yield a history, to follow up which is almost the work of a lifetime; when every word we use is a thread leading back the mind through centuries of man’s life on earth; it must be confessed that, for riches of any but a material sort, for a wealth of ideas, the mind’s nourishment, there ought to be no lack.

CONTENTS.

THE DAWN OF HISTORY.

CHAPTER I.
THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN.

The dawn
of history.

When St. Paulinus came to preach Christianity to the people of Northumbria, King Eadwine (so runs the legend) being minded to hear him, and wishing that his people should do so too, called together a council of his chief men and asked them whether they would attend to hear what the saint had to tell; and one of the king’s thanes stood up and said, ‘Let us certainly hear what this man knows, for it seems to me that the life of man is like the flight of a sparrow through a large room, where you, King, are sitting at supper in winter, while storms of rain and snow rage abroad. The sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and straightway out again at another is, while within, safe from the storm; but soon it vanishes out of sight into the darkness whence it came. So the life of man appears for a short space; but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are all ways ignorant.’[1] This wise and true saying of the Saxon thane holds good too for the human race as far as its progress is revealed to us by history. We can watch this progress through a brief interval—for the period over which real, continuous authentic history extends; and beyond that is a twilight space, wherein, amid many fantastic shapes of mere tradition or mythology, here and there an object or an event stands out more clearly, lit up by a gleam from the sources of more certain knowledge which we possess.

To draw with as much accuracy as may be the outline of these shapes out of the past is the business of the prehistoric student; and to assist him in his task, what has he? First, he has the Bible narrative, wherein some of the chief events of the world’s history are displayed, but at uncertain distances apart. Then we have the traditions preserved in other writings, in books, or on old temple stones—in these the truth has generally to be cleared from a mist of allegory, or at least of mythology. And, lastly, besides these conscious records of times gone by, we have other dumb memorials, old buildings—cities or temples—whose makers are long since forgotten, old tools or weapons, buried for thousands of years, to come to light in our days; and again, old words, old beliefs, old customs, old arts, old forms of civilization which have been unwittingly handed down to us, can all, if we know the art to interpret their language, be made to tell us histories of the antique world. It is, then, no uninteresting study by which we learn how to make these silent records speak. ‘Of man’s activity and attainment,’ Carlyle finely says, ‘the chief results are aeriform, mystic, and preserved in tradition only: such are his Forms of Government, with the Authority they rest on; his Customs or Fashions both of Cloth-habits and Soul-habits; much more his collective stock of Handicrafts, the whole Faculty he has acquired of manipulating nature—all these things, as indispensable and priceless as they are, cannot in any way be fixed under lock and key, but must flit, spirit-like, on impalpable vehicles from Father to Son; if you demand sight of them they are nowhere to be met with. Visible Ploughmen and Hammermen there have been, even from Cain and Tubalcain downwards; but where does your accumulated Agricultural, Metallurgic and other Manufacturing SKILL lie warehoused? It transmits itself on the atmospheric air, on the sun’s rays (by Hearing and by Vision); it is a thing aeriform, impalpable, of quite spiritual sort.’

How many of these intangible spiritual possessions must man have acquired before he has learned the art of writing history, and so of keeping a record of what had gone before: how much do we know that any individual race of men has learned before it brings itself forward with distinctness in this way! For as a first condition of all man must have learned to write; and writing, as we shall hereafter see, is a slowly developing art, which man acquired by ages of gradual experiment. His language, too, must ere this have reached a state of considerable cultivation; and it will be our object in the course of these pages to show through what a long history of its own the language of any nation must go before it becomes fit for the purposes of literature—through how many changes it passes, and what a story it reveals to us by every change. And then, again, before a nation can have a history it must be a nation, must have a national life to record; that is to say, the people who compose it must have left the simple condition of society which belongs to a primitive age, the state of a mere hunter or fisher, even the state of being a mere shepherd, the pastoral and nomadic life which precedes the knowledge of agriculture. He must have drawn closer the loose bonds which held men together under the conditions of patriarchal life, and have constituted a more permanent system of society. Whether under pressure from without, the pressure of hostile nationalities, or only from the growth of a higher conception of social life, the nation has had to rise from out of a mere collection of tribes, until the head of the family has become the king—the rude tents of early days have grown into houses and temples, and the pens of their sheepfolds grown into walled cities, such as Corinth or Athens or Rome. Such changes as these must be completed before history comes to be written; and with such changes as these, and with a thousand others, changes and growths in Art, in Poetry, in Manufactures, in Commerce, and in Laws, the pre-historical student has to deal. On all these subjects we shall have something to say.

Before, however, we enter upon any one of these it is right that we remind the reader—and remind him once for all—that our knowledge upon all these points is but partial and uncertain, and never of such a character as will allow us to speak with dogmatic assurance. Our information can necessarily never be direct; it can only be built upon inferences of a higher or lower degree of probability. It is, however, a necessity of our minds that from whatever information we possess we must form an unbroken panorama—imagination has no place for unfilled blanks; and we may form our picture freely and without danger of harm, so long as we are ready to modify or enlarge it when more knowledge is forthcoming. As the eye can in a moment supply the deficiencies of some incompleted picture, a landscape of which it gets only a partial glance, or a statue which has lost a feature, so the mind selects from its knowledge those facts which form a continuous story, and loses those which are known only as isolated fragments.

Set a practised and an unpractised draughtsman to draw a circle, and we may witness how differently they go to work. The second never takes his pencil off the paper, and produces his effect by one continuous line, which the eye has no choice but at once to condemn as incomplete. The wiser artist proceeds by a number of short consecutive strokes, splitting up, as it were, his divergence over the whole length of the figure he is drawing, and so allows the eye, or perhaps one should rather say the mind, by that faculty it has, to select the complete figure which it can conceive more easily than express. No one of the artist’s strokes is the true fraction of a circle, but the result is infinitely more satisfactory than if he had tried to make his pencil follow unswervingly the curve he wished to trace. Or again, notice how a skilful draughtsman will patch up by a number of small strokes any imperfect portion of a curve he is drawing, and we have another like instance of this selective faculty of the eye or of the mind. Just in the same way is it with memory. Our ideas must be carried on continuously, we cannot afford to remember lacunæ, mere blank spaces.

In the Bible narrative, for example, wherein, as has before been said, certain events of the world’s history are related with distinctness, but where as a rule nothing is said of the times which intervened between them, we are wont to make very insufficient allowance for these unmentioned periods, and form for ourselves a rather arbitrary picture of the real course of things, fitting two events on to one another which were really separated by long ages. To correct this view, to enlarge the series of known facts concerning the early history of the human race, comes in pre-historic inquiry; and again, to correct the picture we now form, doubtless fresh information will continue to pour in. All this is no reason why we should pronounce our present picture to be untrue; it is only incomplete. We must be always ready to enlarge it, and to fill in the outlines, but still we can only remember the facts which we have already acquired, if we look at them, not as fragments only, but as a complete whole.

In representing, therefore, throughout the following chapters, the advance of the human race in the discovery of all those arts and faculties which go to make up civilization in the light of a continuous progress, it will not be necessary to pause and remind the reader in every case that these steps of progress which seem to spread themselves out so clearly before us have been made in an uncertain manner, sometimes rapidly, sometimes very slowly and painfully, sometimes by immense strides, sometimes by continual haltings and goings backwards and forwards. It will be enough to say here, once for all, that our history must be thought of as a history of events rather than a strictly chronological one; just as the geological periods are not measured by days and years, but by the mutations through which our solid-seeming earth has passed.

The earliest
traces of man.

First we turn to what must needs be our earliest inquiry—the search after the oldest traces of man which have been found upon the earth. It has been said that one of the first fruits of knowledge is to show us our own ignorance; and certainly in the early history of the world and of man there is nothing which science points out so clearly as the vast silent periods whereof until recently we had no idea. It is difficult for us of the present age to remember how short a time it is since all our certain knowledge, touching the earth on which we live, lay around that brief period of its existence during which it had come under the notice and the care of man.

When all we knew of Europe, and especially of our own islands, belonged to the comparatively short time during which they have been known to history, we had in truth much to wonder at in the political changes these countries were seen to have undergone; and our imaginations could be busy with the contrast between the unchanged features of our lands and seas and the ever-varying character of those who dwelt upon or passed over them. It is interesting to think that on such a river bank or on such a shore Cæsar or Charlemagne have actually stood, and that perhaps the grass or flowers or shells under their feet looked just the same as they do now, that the waves beat upon the strand in the same cadence, or the water flowed by with the same trickling sound. But when we open the pages of geology, we have unrolled before us a history of the earth itself, extending over periods compared with which the longest epoch of what is commonly called history seems scarcely more than a day, and of mutations in the face of nature so grand and awful that as we reflect upon them, forgetting for an instant the enormous periods required to bring these changes about, they sound like the fantastic visions of some seer, telling in allegorical language the history of the creation and destruction of the world.

Of such changes, not the greatest, but the most interesting to the question we have at present in hand, were those vicissitudes of climate which followed upon the time when the formation of the crust of the earth had been practically completed. We learn of a time when, instead of the temperate climate which now favours our country, these islands, with the whole of the north of Europe, were wrapped in one impenetrable sheet of ice. The tops of our mountains, as well as of those of Scandinavia and the north of continental Europe, bear marks of the scraping of this enormous glacier, which must have risen to a height of two or three thousand feet. Not a single green thing, therefore, might be seen between our latitudes and the pole, while the ice-sheet, passing along the floor of the North Sea, united these islands with Scandinavia and spread far out into the deep waters of the Atlantic. For thousands of years such a state of things endured, but at last it slowly passed away. As century followed century the glacier began to decrease in size. From being colder than that of any explored portion of our hemisphere, the climate of northern Europe began to amend, until at last a little land became visible, which was covered first with lichens, then with thicker moss, and then with grass; then shrubs began to grow, and they expanded into trees and the trees into forests, while still the ice-sheet went on decreasing, until now the glaciers remained only in the hills. Animals returned from warmer climates to visit our shores. The birds and beasts and fishes of the land and sea were not much different from those which now inhabit there; the species were different, but the genera were for the most part the same. Everything seemed to have been preparing for the coming of man, and it is about this time that we find the earliest traces of his presence upon earth.[2]

We may try and imagine what was the appearance of the world, and especially of Europe—for it is in Europe that most of these earliest traces of our race have as yet been found, though all tradition and likelihood point out man’s first home to have been in Asia—when we suppose that man first appeared upon these western shores. At this time the continent of Europe stood at a higher level than it does now. The whole of the North Sea, even between Scotland and Denmark, is not more than fifty fathoms, or three hundred feet deep, while the Irish Sea is not more than sixty fathoms; and at this period undoubtedly the British Isles, besides being all joined together, formed part of the mainland, not by being united to France only, but by the presence of dry land all the way from Scotland to Denmark, over all that area now called the German Ocean. Our Thames and our other eastern rivers were then but tributaries of one large stream, which bore through this continent, and up into the northern seas, their waters united with those of the Rhine, and perhaps of the Weser and the Elbe. The same upheaval turned into land a portion of the Atlantic Ocean, all that bed probably which now extends from Spain and Africa as far as the Azores and the Canaries. The north of Africa was joined on to this continent and to Spain, for the narrow Straits of Gibraltar had not yet been formed; but a great sea stood where we now have the Great Sahara, and united the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, while a great Mediterranean Sea stood in Central Asia, and has left no more than traces in the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Aral.

We have to look at a map to see the effect of these changes in the appearance of Europe; and there were no doubt other internal changes in the appearances of the countries themselves. The climate still was much more extreme than it is now. The glaciers were not yet quite gone. And the melting of these and of the winter snows gave rise to enormous rivers which flowed from every hill. Our little river the Ouse, for instance, which flows out through Norfolk into the Wash, was, when swollen by these means, probably many miles broad. Vast forests grew upon the banks of the rivers, and have left their traces in our peat formations; and in these forests roamed animals unknown to us. Of these the most notable was the mammoth (Elephas primigenius, in the language of the naturalists), a huge, maned elephant, whose skeleton and gigantic tusks are conspicuous in some of our museums, and who has given his name to this the earliest age of man’s existence: it is called the Mammoth Age of man. With the mammoth, too, lived other species of animals, which are either now extinct, or have since been driven from our latitudes; the woolly rhinoceros, the cave lion, the cave bear, the Lithuanian bison, the urus, the reindeer, and the musk-ox. It is with the remains of these animals, near the ancient banks of these great rivers, that we find the earliest tools and weapons manufactured by human hands.

Implements of
the river drift.

The earliest of all the known remains of human-kind are the implements which are found deposited in the ancient beds of rivers. Now flooded by melting snow into huge lakes and now again drained off by the sudden bursting of a bound, it was natural that these great streams should often change their course, and often dig out huge areas of soil from the land upon their banks. In doing so they sometimes dug out the implements which earlier generations of men had left behind them on the surface of the soil, and which a few years would be enough to cover with mould and hide from sight. Then carrying along these implements of flint, they have deposited them in great beds of sand and gravel, somewhere in their ancient course.

We have no means of measuring the time which may have elapsed since these stone weapons and tools were made. And we need not speak here of the geological changes which must have passed over the surface of the earth since they were deposited upon it. All we know is that, after the great streams flowing through wide valleys have dug these implements from under the earth which time had heaped over them, carried them along and deposited them once more amid sand and pebbles in a bed upon some point of its course, the river must through long subsequent years have cut so much deeper into the valley through which it flowed, and at the same time probably so shrunk in its bed, that these river drifts, as they are called, stand in many cases fifty, eighty, a hundred feet above the level of the present stream. It is because they are found in the beds made by the ancient rivers, that the implements of this period are called drift implements.

The river Ouse, of which we spoke just now, which, though to-day a small river, drains a large and level country as it runs through the counties of Bedford, Huntingdon, and Cambridge, has been one of the most prolific in this class of pre-historic remains. Another river which still better deserves to be remembered in this respect is the Somme in the north of France. For it was in the beds of this stream, by Abbeville and Amiens, that the drift implements were first discovered, or first recognized for what they really are, the earliest traces of human labour; and it was here that the foundation was laid for this branch of pre-historic study by M. Boucher de Perthes. This was forty-one years ago, in 1847.

These drift implements, then, form a class apart—apart even from all other stone implements made by man, and probably earlier than any other class. Very simple and rude are these drift implements. It would require a skilled eye to detect any difference between most of them and a flint which had only been chipped by natural means. But the first thing to remember is, that the makers of these implements had nothing but other still ruder materials to help them in this manufacture of theirs. Metals of all kinds were as yet utterly unknown to man.

We who are so habituated to the employment of metal, either in the manufacture or the composition of every article which meets our eye, can scarcely realize that man lived long ages on the earth before the metals and minerals, its hidden treasures, were revealed to him. This pen I write with is of metal, or, were it a quill, it would still have been shaped by the use of steel; the rags of which this paper is made up have been first cut by metal knives, then bleached by a mineral (chlorine), then torn on a metal cylinder, then thrown into a vat which was either itself of metal or had been shaped by metal tools, then drawn on a wire-cloth, etc. And so it is with everything which is made nowadays. We can scarcely think of any single manufacture in which is not traceable the paramount influence of man’s discoveries beneath the surface of the ground. But primitive man could profit by no such inherited knowledge, and had only begun to acquire some powers which he could transmit to his own descendants. For his tools he must look to the surface of the earth only; and the hardest substances he could find were stones. Not only during the period of which we are now speaking, but for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years lasted man’s ignorance of the metals, ignorance therefore of all that the metals could produce for him. The long age of this state of ignorance is distinguished in pre-history by the name of the Stone Age, because the hardest things then known to mankind were stones, and the most important of his implements and utensils had therefore to be made of stones.

There can be no harm if we so far anticipate our second chapter as to say that this Stone Age is distinguished by pre-historic students into two main periods: (1) the age in which all the stone implements were made exclusively by chipping, (2) the age in which grinding or polishing was brought in to supplement the use of chipping. Wherefore the first age is also called the Unpolished Stone Age, the second is called the Polished Stone Age. Not that by any means all the implements in the later age were made of polished stone; far from it. Only that, contemporaneously with the stone implements still made by chipping merely, others of polished stone were used. But of this more hereafter. Lastly, the two epochs are also distinguished more simply as the Old Stone Age and the New Stone Age—or, turned into Greek, the Palæolithic Era and the Neolithic Era.

Now we go back to speak of the Palæolithic Era only. And in this we have as yet got no further than the implements of the river drifts. It is not to be supposed that at any time of his history man used implements of stone and no others; for wood and bone must have been always as ready to his hand as stone was, and for many purposes bone and wooden utensils would serve better than stone ones. But the stone implements would always deserve to be accounted the most important; because by means of them the others of softer material must have been shaped. As regards the drift deposits, here the remains of man’s work are exclusively stone implements, but probably only because all that were made of some softer substance have perished, or remain as yet undiscovered. And most primitive these stone tools or weapons are. By the rudeness and uniformity of their shapes as contrasted even with other classes of stone implements, they testify to the simplicity of those who manufactured them. They have for the most part only two or three distinctive types: they are either of a long, pear-shaped make, narrowed almost to a point at the thin end, and adapted, we may suppose, for boring holes, while the broad end of the pear was pressed against the palm of the hand; and secondly, of a sort of oval form, chipped all round the edge, capable of being fitted into a wooden haft, a cleft stick or whatever it might be, to form an implement which might be used for all sorts of cutting or scraping. A variety of this last implement, of rather a tongue-like shape, was called by the French workmen who worked under M. Boucher de Perthes, langue-de-chat. These might serve the purpose of spear-heads. Some have supposed that stones of this last form were used, as similar ones are used by the Esquimaux to this day, in cutting holes in the ice for the purpose of fishing: we must not forget that during at any rate a great part of the early stone age the conditions of life were those of arctic countries at the present time. A third variety of stone implements is made of thinner flakes, and capable of being used as a knife.[3]

We cannot determine all the uses to which primitive man must have put his rude and ineffective weapons; we can only wonder that with such he was able to maintain his existence among the savage beasts by which he was surrounded; and we long to form to ourselves some picture of the way in which he got the better of their huge strength, as well as of his dwelling-place, his habits, and his appearance. Rude as his weapons are, and showing no trace of improvement, it seems as though man of the drift period must have lived through long ages of the world’s history. These implements are found associated with the remains of the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, animals naturally belonging to the arctic or semi-arctic climate which succeeded the glacial era; but like implements are found, associated with the remains of the bones of the lion, the tiger, and the hippopotamus, all of which, and the last especially, are rarely found outside the torrid zone. This would imply that the drift implements lasted through the change from a rigid to a torrid climate, and probably back again to a cold temperate one.

Implements of
the caves.

Contemporary very likely with some portion of the drift period are another series of deposits which contain still more interesting traces of early man. These are what are called the cave deposits—a remarkable series of discoveries made in caves in various parts of Europe which appear to carry us down farther in the history of human development.

These caves are natural caverns, generally formed in the limestone rocks, and at present the most remarkable ‘finds’ have been obtained from the caves of Devonshire, of the Department of the Dordogne in France, from various caves in Belgium, and from a very remarkable cavern in the Neanderthal, near Düsseldorf, in Germany. But there is scarcely any country in Europe where some caves containing human bones and weapons have not been opened. The rudest drift implements seem older than almost any of those found in caves; and, on the whole, the cave-remains seem to give us a picture of man in a more civilized condition than the man of the drift.

Let us pause for one moment before these cave remains. For, simple as they are, they open a little bit the veil which hides from us the lives of the earliest of men. We call the things which we have found implements. For we cannot really tell whether they should be called tools or weapons. Nay, and this is a thing worth remembering, in the most primitive conditions of society man’s tools are his weapons and his weapons are almost his only tools. Man’s first condition of life is the venatory condition. He is at first a mere hunter (or trapper) and fisherman. He begins without the use of any domestic animal. He has not even the dog, at first, to help him in his hunting; much less has he cattle or sheep to vary his occupation in life. With the rest of the animal creation he is constantly at war. He preys upon other animals, and other animals, if they can, prey upon him. Wherefore, as I have said, his earliest tools are likewise his weapons, his weapons are his tools; and the arts of peace and war are undistinguishable.

The next distinct stage of life is the pastoral stage. Man has now his domesticated animals; he has cattle and sheep and horses maybe. Tending his flocks and herds is now his chief occupation. But this tending implies protecting them and himself. And still, though some of his implements are for peaceful use—his crooks, his goads, his lassoes, his bridles, his hurdles and sheep-pens, or, again, his needles for sewing together the hides which form his clothes—still most are for war. Yet, if any distinction is possible, his weapons should now be those of defence rather than those of offence.

The third great stage is the agricultural—a stage of life at which all civilized nations and many which can hardly be called civilized have arrived; when man ploughs and sows, and reaps, plants vines and orchards. Then most of the implements used in these industries, the implements on which therefore his nourishment depends, are wholly distinct from the weapons of war, and the peaceful existence has become (as the phrase is) differentiated from the warlike. This is the token of a higher civilization.

At present we are far from such a stage of progress in the history of man. The cave-dwellers were, we may be sure, in the hunting and fishing stage of civilization; and we cannot really tell, among a large proportion of their weapons, which were designed to serve against animals for the purposes of the chase, and which against their fellow-men. We can hardly distinguish among some of their weapons whether they were to be used in hunting or fishing. They had stone axes and spear-heads, and they also had what we may call harpoons. But harpoons are merely lances attached to a thong, and may be used with equal success against animals or against the larger fish, salmons or whales. These harpoons are barbed. They are made of wood and of bone. A curious and close inquiry has discovered that the bones of animals found among the human remains in the caves have been scored in such a way as to suggest that the sinews were cut from them—to be used, no doubt, as thongs to the harpoons, as lines for fishing, as threads for sewing garments, etc. The cave men had also barbed hooks—fishing-hooks we may call them; though they too may sometimes have been employed against animals or even birds. It is most probable that these primitive men did not know the use of the bow and arrow, and that the name arrow-heads sometimes given to certain of their weapons is a misnomer; that they should be called javelin-heads. Bone awls have been found, no doubt for the sake (chiefly) of piercing the scraped skins of animals, which might afterwards be sewn together into garments: bone knives, pins, and needles have also been found—the last a most important form of implement—in considerable numbers.

What is still more interesting than all these discoveries, we here find the rudiments of art. Some of the bone implements, as well as some stones, are engraved, or even rudely sculptured, generally with the representation of an animal. These drawings are singularly faithful, and really give us a picture of the animals which were man’s contemporaries upon the earth; so that we have the most positive proof that man lived the contemporary of animals long since extinct. The cave of La Madeleine, in the Dordogne, for instance, contained a piece of a mammoth’s tusk engraved with an outline of that animal; and as the mammoth was probably not contemporaneous with man during the latter part even of the old-stone age, this gives an immense antiquity to the first dawnings of art. How little could the scratcher of this rough sketch—for it is not equal in skill to drawings which have been found in other caves—dream of the interest which his performance would excite thousands of years after his death! Not the greatest painter of subsequent times, and scarcely the greatest sculptor, can hope for so near an approach to immortality for their works. Had man’s bones been only found in juxtaposition with those of the mammoth and his contemporary animals, this might possibly have been attributed to chance disturbances of the soil, to the accumulation of river deposits, or to many other accidental occurrences; or had the mammoth’s bone only been found worked by man, there was nothing positive to show that the animal had not been long since extinct, and this a chance bone which had come into the hands of a later inhabitant of the earth, just as it has since come into our hands; but the actual drawing of this old-world, and as it sometimes seems to us almost fabulous, animal, by one who actually saw him in real life, gives a strange picture of the antiquity of our race, and withal a strange feeling of fellowship with this stone-age man who drew so much in the same way as a clever child among us might have drawn to-day.[4]

It is worth while to look well at these cave-drawings. They are of various degrees of merit, for some are so skilful as to excite the admiration of artists and the astonishment of archæologists. And it is a curious fact that during ages which succeeded those of the cave-dwellers, all through the polished stone period and the age of bronze—of which we shall have to speak anon—no such ambitious imitative works of art seem to have been attempted. So far as we can tell, these after generations of men aimed at no such thing as a drawing of an animal or even of a plant. They confined themselves to ornamental patterns, to certain arrangements of points and lines. The love of imitation is doubtless one of the rudimentary feelings in the human mind; as we may see by watching children. But, rudimentary as it is, it springs from the same root as the highest promptings of the intellect—that is to say, from the wish to create—to fashion something actually ourselves. This is sufficient to explain the origin of these carvings; yet we need not suppose that when the art of making them was once known they were used merely for amusement. Long afterwards we find such drawings and representations looked upon as having some qualities of the things they represent; as, for instance, where in an ancient grave at Mæshow, in the Orkney islands, we find the drawing of a dragon, which had been supposed to watch over the treasures concealed therein. Savages in the present day often think that part of them is actually taken away when a drawing of them is made, and exactly a similar feeling gave rise to the superstition so prevalent in the Middle Ages, that witches and magicians could make a figure in wax to imitate the one on whom they wished to wreak their vengeance, and that all the pains inflicted upon this waxen antitype were reproduced in the body of the victim. On such confusion of ideas do all idolatries rest. So may we not, without too bold a flight, imagine that some superstitious notions, touching the efficacy of these drawings, was a spur to the industry of our first forerunners on the earth, and contributed to their wonderfully acquired skill in their art? May they not have thought that their representations gave them some power over the animals they represented: that the lance-head carved with a mammoth would be efficient against the mammoth’s hide; that the harpoon containing the representation of a deer or a fish was the weapon best adapted for transfixing either?[5]

However this may be, we cannot close our eyes to the interest which attaches to the first dawnings of art in the world. Nor is this interest confined altogether to its æsthetic side—the mere beauty and value of art itself—great though this be. Not only does drawing share that mysterious power of imparting intense pleasure which belongs to every form of art, but it was likewise, after human speech, the first discovered means of conveying an idea from one man to another. As we shall come to see in a later chapter, the invention of drawing bore with it the seeds of the invention of writing, the greatest step forward, in material things at any rate, that man has ever made.

There is one other fact to be mentioned, and then the information which our cave discoveries can give us concerning the life of man in those days is pretty nearly exhausted. Traces of fires have been found in several caves, so that there can be no doubt that man had made this important discovery, the discovery of fire, also. It seems to us impossible to imagine a time when men could have lived upon the earth without this all-useful element, when they must have devoured their food uncooked, and only sheltered themselves from the cold by the thickness of their clothing, or at night by huddling together in close underground houses. We have certainly no proof that man’s existence was ever of such a sort as this; but yet it is clear that the art of making fires is one not discoverable at first sight. How long man took to find out that method of ignition by friction of two sticks—the method employed in different forms by all the less cultivated nations spread over the globe, and one which we may therefore fairly take to be the most primitive and natural—we shall never know. We have only the negative evidence that he had discovered it at that primæval time when he began to leave his remains within the caves.

Thus have we completed the catalogue of facts upon which we may build up for ourselves some representation of the life of man in the earliest ages of his existence upon earth. It must be confessed that they are meagre enough. We should like some further facts which would help us to picture the man himself, his size, his appearance, what race he most resembled of any of those which now inhabit our globe. Unfortunately we have little that can assist us here. Human remains have been found—on one or two occasions a skeleton in tolerably complete preservation—but not yet in sufficient numbers to allow us to draw any certain conclusions from them, or even to hazard any very probable conjecture.

Human
remains.

Among these discoveries of human skeletons, none excited more interest at the time it was made than the Neanderthal skeleton, so-called from the place in which it was found. The discovery was made in 1857 by Dr. Fuhlrott of Elberfeld; and when the skull and other parts of the skeleton were exhibited at a scientific meeting at Bonn, in the same year, doubts were expressed as to the human character of the remains. These doubts, which were soon dissipated, arose from the very low type of the head, which was pronounced by many to be the most ape-like skull that they had ever seen. The bones themselves indicated a person of much the same stature as a European of the present day, but with such an unusual thickness in some of them as betokened a being of very extraordinary strength. This discovery, had it been supported by others, might have seemed to indicate a race of men of a type inferior even to the most savage races of our present globe. But it has not been so supported. On the contrary, another skull found at Engis, near Liége, not more than seventy miles from the cave of the Neanderthal, was proved after careful measurements not to differ materially from the skulls of individuals of the European race—a fact which prevents us from making any assertions respecting the primitive character in race or physical conformation of these cave-dwellers. Indeed, in a very careful and elaborate paper upon the Engis and Neanderthal skulls, Professor Huxley places an average skull of a modern native of Australia about half-way between those of the Neanderthal and Engis caves; but he also says that after going through a large collection of Australian skulls, he ‘found it possible to select from among these crania two (connected by all sorts of intermediate gradations), the one of which should very nearly resemble the Engis skull, while the other should somewhat less closely approximate to the Neanderthal skull in form, size, and proportions.’ And yet as regards blood, customs, or language, the natives of Southern and Western Australia are as pure and homogeneous as almost any race of savages in existence. This shows us how difficult would have been any reasoning founded upon the insufficient data we possess. In fact, it would no doubt be possible to find in Europe among persons of abnormal under-development, such as idiots, skulls of a formation which would match that of the Neanderthal.

This class of evidence is therefore merely negative. We certainly cannot pronounce that man of the old stone age was of a lower type than low types of savages of the present day; we cannot even say that he was as undeveloped as are the Lapps of modern Europe; but in this negative evidence there is a certain amount of satisfaction. We might be not unwilling to place on the level of the Eskimo or the Lapp the fashioners of the rudest of the stone implements, but the artists of the caves we may well imagine to have attained a higher development. And there is nothing at all unreasonable or opposed to our experience of Nature in supposing a race of human beings to have flourished in Europe in these old times, to have been possessed of a certain amount of civilization, but not to have advanced from that towards any very great improvement before they were at last extinguished by some other race with a greater faculty for progress. As we shall come to see later on, there is some reason for connecting man of the later stone age as regards race with the Eskimo or Lapp of to-day. Yet even if this be admitted, we must look upon the latter rather as the dregs of the races they represent. It is not always the highest types of any particular race, whether of men, of animals, or of plants, which live the longest. Species which were once flourishing are often only represented by stunted and inferior descendants; just as the animals of the lizard class once upon a time, and long before the coming of man upon the earth, had their age of greatest development and reached proportions which are unknown in these days.

So we may imagine man spreading out at various times and in many different streams from his first home in Asia. The earlier races to leave this nursing-place did not, we may suppose, contain sufficient force to carry them beyond a low level of culture; very likely they sank in civilization and in the end got pushed on one side by more energetic people who came like a second wave from the common source. When, in the history of the world, we come to speak of races of whom we know more, we shall see strong reasons to believe that this was the rule followed; nay, it is even followed at the present day, where European races are spreading over all the world, and gradually absorbing or extinguishing inferior members of the human family. We must, therefore, in our present state of ignorance, be content to look upon palæolithic man merely as we find him, and not to advance vague surmises whether he gradually advanced to the use of better stone weapons, and at last to metals, or whether he was extinguished by subsequent races who did thus advance.

The life of
palæolithic man.

Taking, then, this race as we find it, without speculating upon its immediate origin or future, we may endeavour to gather some notion of man’s way of life in these primitive times. It was of the simplest. We may well suppose, for some proofs to the contrary would otherwise most likely have been discovered, that his life was that of the hunter, which is, it has been said, generally the earliest phase of human society, and that he had not yet learned to till the ground, or to keep domestic animals for his use. No bones of animals like the sheep or dog are found among palæolithic remains, and therefore it seems probable that palæolithic man had not yet entered upon the next and higher phase, the pastoral life. He had probably no fixed home, no idea of nationality, scarcely any of obligations beyond the circle of his own family, in that larger sense in which the word ‘family’ is generally understood by savages. Some sort of family or tribe no doubt held together, were it only for the sake of protecting themselves against the attacks of their neighbours. For the rest, their time was spent, as the time of other savages is spent, out of doors in fighting and hunting, within doors in preserving their food and their skins, in elaborately manufacturing their implements of stone and bone. In the inclement seasons they were crowded together in their caves, perhaps for months together, as the Eskimo are in winter, almost without moving. As appears from the remains in the caves, they were in the habit at such times of throwing the old bones and the offal of their food into any corner (the Eskimo do so to this day), without taking the smallest trouble to obviate the unpleasant effects produced by the decay of all this animal matter in an atmosphere naturally close. Through the long winter nights they found time to perfect their skill in those wonderful bone carvings, and to lay up a store of weapons which they afterwards—anticipating the rise of commerce—exchanged with the inhabitants of some other cave for their peculiar manufacture; for in one of the caves of the Dordogne we find the remains of what must have been a regular manufactory of one sort of flint-knife or lance-head, almost to the exclusion of any other of the ordinary weapons, while another cave seems to have been devoted as exclusively to the production of implements of bone.

Man had no doubt a hard life, not only to obtain the food he needed, but to defend himself against the attacks of many wild animals by whom he was surrounded, animals whose particular species have in many cases become extinct, and whose classes have long ceased to inhabit Europe. Such are the cave lion, cave bear, cave hyæna, brown bear, grizzly bear, mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, urus, bison, and such rarities (with us) as the reindeer, the Irish elk, and the beaver.

Some people have thought that they discovered in the traces of fires which had been sometimes lighted before caves in which were found human skeletons, the indication of sepulchral rites, and that these caves were used as burial-places. But these suppositions are too vague and uncertain to be relied upon. It may, however, be said that we have evidence pointing to the fact that even in the drift period men buried their dead, and it is hardly possible to believe that they did so without paying some obsequies to the remains. On this interesting subject of sepulchral rites we must forbear to say anything until we come to speak of the second stone age. Our knowledge of the early stone-people must close with the slight picture we have been able to form of their life; of their death, of their rites of the dead, and the ideas concerning a future state which these might indicate, we cannot speak.

This, then, is all we know of man of the first stone age, and it is not probable that our knowledge will ever be greatly increased. New finds of these stone implements are being made almost every day, not in Europe only, though at present chiefly there, but in many other parts of the globe. But the new discoveries closely resemble the old, the same sort of implements recur again and again, and we only learn by them over how great a part of the globe this stage in our civilization extended. Further information of this kind may change some of our theories concerning the duration or the origin of this civilization, but it will not add much to our knowledge of its nature. Yet it cannot be denied that the thought of man’s existence only, though we know little more than this, a contemporary of the mammoth at the time which immediately succeeded the glacial period, or perhaps before the glacial period had quite come to an end, is full of the deepest interest for us. The long silent time which intervenes between the creation of our first parents and those biblical events whereof the narration is to a certain extent continuous and consecutive, till the dawn of history in the Bible narrative in fact, is to some small extent filled in. We shall see in the next chapter how the second stone age serves to carry the same picture further. In rudest outline the life of man is placed before us, and if we have no more than this, we have at any rate something which may occupy our imaginations, and prevent them, as they otherwise would do, as, of old, men’s minds did, from leaping almost at a bound from the Creation to the Flood, and from the Flood to the time of Abraham.

CHAPTER II.
THE SECOND STONE AGE.

The age of
polished stone.

Between the earlier and the later stone age, between man of the drift period and man of the neolithic era, occurs a vast blank which we cannot fill in. We bid adieu to the primitive inhabitants of our earth while they are still the contemporaries of the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros, or of the cave lion and the cave bear, and while the very surface of the earth wears a different aspect from what it now wears. With a changed condition of things, with a race of animals which differed not essentially from those known to us, and with a settled conformation of our lands and seas not again to be departed from, comes before us the second race of man—man of the polished stone age. We cannot account for the sudden break; or, what is in truth the same thing, many different suggestions to account for it have been made. Some have supposed that the palæolithic men lived at a time anterior to the last glacial era, for there were many glacial periods in Europe, and were either exterminated altogether or driven thence to more southern countries by the change in climate. Others have imagined that a new and more cultivated race migrated into these countries, and at once introduced the improved weapons of the later stone age; and lastly, others have looked upon the first stone age as having existed before the Deluge, and hold that the second race of man, the descendants of Noah, began at once with a higher sort of civilization. Two of these four theories, it will be seen, must suppose that man somewhere went through the stages of improvement necessary to the introduction of the newer sort of weapons, and they therefore take it for granted that the graduated series of stone implements, indicating a gradual progress from the old time to the newer, though they have not yet been found, are to be discovered somewhere. The first and last theories would seem to be more independent of this supposition, and therefore, as far as our knowledge yet goes, to be more in accordance with the facts which we possess. It is, however, by no means safe to affirm that the graduated series of implements required to support the other suppositions will never be found.

The
kitchen-middens.

Be this as it may, with the second era begins something like a continuous history of our race. However scanty the marks of his tracks, we may feel sure that from this time forward man passed on one unbroken journey of development and change through the forgotten eras of the world’s life down to the dawn of history. We take the rudest condition in which we find man to be the most primitive, and we start with him in this new stone age as still a fisher or a hunter only. He first appears before us as depending for his nourishment chiefly upon the shell-fish on certain coasts of northern Europe. In the north of Europe—that is to say, upon the shores of the Baltic—are found numbers of mounds, some five or ten feet high, and in length as much, sometimes, as a thousand feet, by one or two hundred feet in breadth. The mounds consist for the most part of myriads of cast-away shells of oysters, mussels, cockles, and other shell-fish; mixed up with these are not a few bones of birds and quadrupeds, showing that these also served for food to the primitive dwellers by the shell mounds. The mounds are called in the present day kjökken-möddings, kitchen-middens. They have been chiefly found in Denmark. They are, in truth, the refuse heaps of the earliest kitchens which have smoked in these northern regions;[6] for they are the remains of some of the earliest among the polished-stone age inhabitants of Europe. So primitive are the weapons of the Danish kitchen-middens, that they have sometimes been classed with the old stone age implements. But I believe some traces of grinding if not of polishing have been found on them. And at any rate the mammalia contemporary with the kitchen-midden men are very different from those of the drift or of the caves.

The raisers of these refuse mounds were, we may judge, pre-eminently fishers; and not generally fishers of that adventurous kind who seek their treasure in the depths of the ocean. They lived chiefly upon those smaller fish and shell-fish which could be caught without much difficulty or danger. Yet not only on these; for the bones of some deep-sea fish have also been discovered, whence we know that these mound-raisers were possessed of the art of navigation, though doubtless in a most primitive form. Among remains believed to be contemporary with the shell mounds are found canoes not built of planks, as our boats and as most canoes are nowadays, but merely hollowed out of the trunks of trees; sometimes these canoes are quite straight fore and aft, just as the trunk was when it was cut, sometimes a little bevelled from below, like a punt of the present day; but we believe they are never found rounded or pointed at the prow. Here, then, we see another discovery which has been of the greatest use to mankind, whereof the first traces come to us from these northern shell mounds. That ‘heart with oak and bronze thrice bound,’ the man who first ventured to sea in the first vessel, had lived before this time. Whoever he was, we cannot, if we think of it, refuse to endorse the praise bestowed upon him by the poet; it required no mean courage to venture out to sea on such a strange make-shift as was the first canoe. Perhaps the earliest experiment was an involuntary one, made by some one who was washed away upon a large log or felled tree. We can fancy how thence would arise the notion of venturing again a little way, then of hollowing a seat in the middle of the trunk, until the primitive canoes, such as we find, came into existence.

In these imperfect vessels men gradually ventured further and further into the ocean; and, judging of the extent of their voyages by the deep-sea remains, we may be certain that their bravery was fatal to many. This is in all probability the history of the discovery or re-discovery of the art of navigation among savage people generally; in all cases does the canoe precede the regular boat. I say ‘re-discovery’ because a nation which has settled long inland might very easily lose the art even if their ancestors had possessed it. For it is a fact that people rarely begin attempts at ship-building before they come to live near the sea. As long as they can range freely on land, their rivers do not tempt them to any dangerous experiments. But the vast plain of the sea is too important, and makes too great an impression on their imagination for its charm to be long withstood. Sooner or later, with much risk of life, men are sure to try and explore its solitudes, and navigation takes its rise. This art of seafaring, then, is amongst the most noticeable of the belongings of the fishermen of the shell mounds. Considering that they had none but rude stone implements, the felling and hollowing of trees must have been an affair of no small labour, and very likely occupied a great deal of their time when they were not actually seeking their food, even though the agency of fire supplemented the ineffectual blows of their stone weapons. They probably used nets for their sea-fishing, made most likely of twisted bark or grass. And they were hunters as well as fishers, for it has been said that the remains of various animals have been discovered on the shell mounds. From these remains we see that the age of the post-glacial animals has by this time quite passed away; no mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, or cave lion or bear is found; even the reindeer, which in palæolithic days must have ranged over France and Switzerland, has retired to the north.

The fact is, the climate is now much more temperate and uniform than in the first stone age. Then the reindeer and the chamois, animals which belong naturally to regions of ice and snow, freely traversed, in winter at least, the valleys or the plains far towards the south of Europe.[7] But as the climate changed, the first was driven to the extreme north of Europe, and the second to the higher mountain peaks. The only extinct species belonging to the shell mounds is the wild bull (bos primigenius), which however survived in Europe until quite historical times. His remains appear in great numbers, as do those of the seal, now very rare, and the beaver, which is extinct in Denmark. No remains of any domesticated animal are found; but the existence of tame dogs is guessed at from the fact that the bones bear traces of the gnawing of canine teeth, and from the absence of bones of young birds and of the softer bones of animals generally. For it has been shown experimentally that just such portions are absent from these skeletons as will be devoured when birds or animals of the same species are given to dogs at this day. Dogs, therefore, we may feel pretty sure, were domesticated by the stone-age men; so here again we can see the beginning of a step in civilization which has been of incalculable benefit to man, the taming of animals for his use. The ox, the sheep, the goat, were as yet unknown; man was still in the hunter’s condition, and had not advanced to the shepherd state, only training for his use the dog, to assist him in pursuit of the wild animals who supplied part of his food. He was, too, utterly devoid of all agricultural knowledge. Probably the domestication of the dog marks a sort of transition state between the hunter and the shepherd. When that experiment has been tried, the notion must sooner or later spring up of training other animals, and keeping them for use or food. With regard to the dogs themselves, it is a curious fact that those of the stone age are smaller than those of the bronze period, while the dogs of the bronze age are again smaller than those of the age of iron. This is an illustration of the well-known fact that domestication increases the size and improves the character of animals, as gardening does that of plants.

There is one other negative fact which we gather from the bones of these refuse-heaps—no human bones are mingled with them; so we may conclude that these men were not cannibals. In fact, cannibalism is an extraordinary perversion of human nature, arising it is difficult to say exactly how, and only showing itself among particular people and under peculiar conditions. There is no doubt that, among a very large proportion of the savage nations which at present inhabit our globe, cannibalism is practised, and of this fact many explanations have been offered; but they are generally far-fetched and unsatisfactory; and it is certainly not within our scope to discuss them here. How little natural cannibalism is even to the most savage men is proved by the fact that man is scarcely ever, except under urgent necessity, found to feed upon the flesh of carnivorous or flesh-eating animals, and this alone, besides every instinct of our nature, would be sufficient to prevent him from eating his fellow-men.

We have many proofs of the great antiquity of the shell mounds. Their position gives one. Whilst most of them are confined to the immediate neighbourhood of the seashore, some few are found at a distance of several miles inland. These exceptions may always be referred to the presence of a stream which has gradually deposited its mud at the place where it emptied itself into the sea, or to some other sufficient cause of the protrusion of the coast-line; so that these miles of new coast have come into existence after the shell mounds were raised. On the other hand, there are no mounds upon those parts of the coast which border on the Western Ocean. But it is just here that, owing to a gradual depression of the land at the rate of two or three inches in a century[8] the waves are slowly eating away the shore. This is what happens on every sea-coast. Almost all over the world there is a small but constant movement of the solid crust of the earth, which is, in fact, only a crust over the molten mass within. Sometimes, and in some places, the imprisoned mass makes itself felt, in violent upheavals, in sudden cracks of the inclosing surface, which we call earthquakes and volcanoes; but oftener its effect is slight and almost unnoticed. This interchange of state between the kingdoms of the land and of the ocean helps to show us the time which has passed between the making of the kitchen-middens and our own days. There seems little doubt that all along the Danish coast of the North Sea, as well as on that of the Baltic, these mounds once stood; but by the gradual undermining of the cliffs the former series have all been swept away, while the latter have, as it appears, been moved a little inland; and we have seen that when there was another cause present to form land between the kitchen-middens and the sea, the distance has often been increased to several miles.

Here is another and a still stronger proof of the antiquity of the shell mounds. If we examine the shells themselves, we find that they all belong to still living species, and they are all exactly similar to such as might be found in the ocean at the present day. But it happens that this is not now the case with the shells of the same fish belonging to the Baltic Sea. For the waters of this sea are now brackish, and not salt; and since they became so the shell-fish in it have gradually grown smaller, and do not now attain half their natural size. The oyster, moreover, will not now live at all in the Baltic, except near its entrance, where, whenever the wind blows from the north-west, a strong current of salt ocean water is poured in. Yet oyster shells are especially abundant in the kitchen-middens. From all this we gather that, at the time of the making of these mounds, there must have been free communication between the ocean and the Baltic Sea. In all probability, in fact, there were a number of such passages through the peninsula of Jutland, which was consequently at that time an archipelago.

The tumuli
or barrows.

As ages passed on the descendants of these isolated fishermen spread themselves over Europe, and, improving in their way of life and mastery over mechanical arts, found themselves no longer constrained to trust for their livelihood to the spoils of the sea-shallows. They made lances and axes (headed with stone), and perfected the use of the bow and arrow until they became masters of the game of the forest. And then, after a while, man grew out of this hunter stage and domesticated other animals besides the dog: oxen, pigs, and geese. No longer occupied solely by the search for his daily food, he raised mighty tombs—huge mounds of earth enclosing a narrow grave—to the departed great men of his race; and he reared up those enormous masses of stone called cromlechs or dolmens—such as we see at Stonehenge—as altars to his gods.[9]

The great tombs of earth—which have their fellows not in Europe only, but over the greater part of the world—are the special and characteristic features of the stone age. The raisers of the kitchen-middens probably preceded the men who built the tombs; for their mode of life was, as we should say, the most primitive; but they were confined to a corner of Europe. The tomb-builders formed one of a mighty brotherhood of men linked together by the characteristics of a common civilization. These stone-age sepulchres, called in England tumuli, barrows, or hows, are hills of earth from one to as much as four hundred feet long, by a breadth and height of from thirty to fifty feet. They are either chambered or unchambered; that is, they are either raised over a small vault made of stone (with perhaps a sort of vestibule or entrance chamber), or else a mere hollow has been excavated within the mound. In these recesses repose the bodies of the dead, some great chieftain or hero—the father of his people, who came to be regarded after his death with almost the veneration of a god. Beside the dead were placed various implements and utensils, left there to do him honour or service, to assist him upon the journey to that undiscovered country whither he was bound; the best of sharpened knives or spear-heads, some jars of their rude pottery, once filled with food and drink, porridge, rough cakes and beer.[10] And maybe a wife or two, and some captives of the last battle were sacrificed to his shade, that he might not go quite unattended into that ‘other world.’ The last ceremony, the slaughter of human victims to the manes of the dead, was not always, but it must have been often, enacted. Out of thirty-two stone-age barrows excavated in Wiltshire, seventeen contained only one skeleton, and the rest various numbers, from two to an indefinite number; and, in one case at least, all the skulls save one were found cleft as by a stone hatchet.

At the doors of the mounds or in an entrance chamber many bones have been discovered, the traces of a funeral feast, the wake or watch kept on the evening of the burial. Likely enough, if the chief were almost deified after death, the funeral feast would become periodical. It would be considered canny and of good omen that the elders of the tribe should meet there at times in solemn conclave, on the eve of a warlike expedition or whenever the watchful care of the dead hero might avail his descendants. From the remains of these feasts, and from the relics of the tombs, we have the means of forming some idea of man’s acquirements at this time. His implements are improvements upon those of the stone age: in all respects, that is, save in this one, that he had now no barbed weapons; whereas we remember that in the caves barbed harpoons are frequently met with. Nor, again, had he the artistic talent of the cave-dwellers: no traces of New Stone-age drawings have come to light. For the rest, his implements and weapons may be divided into a few distinctive classes:—

1. Hammers, hatchets, tomahawks, or chisels; an instrument made of a heavy piece of stone brought to a sharp cutting edge at one end, and at the other rounded or flat, so as to serve the double purpose of a hammer and an axe. When these are of an elongated form they are called celts or chisels. As subspecies to the hammers and celts we have picks and gouges. 2. Arrow and spear heads, which differ in size but not much in form, both being long and narrow in shape, often closely resembling the leaf of the laurel or the bay, sometimes of a diamond shape, but more often having the lateral corners nearest to the end which fitted into the shaft. Viewed edgeways, they also appear to taper towards either end, for while one point was designed to pierce the victim, the other was fitted into a cleft handle, and bound into it with cord or sinew. Implements have been discovered still fitted into their handles. 3. The stone knives, which have generally two cutting edges, and when this is the case do not greatly differ from the spear-heads, though they are commonly less pointed than the latter. And to these three important forms we may add, as less important types, a rounded form of implement, generally called a scraper, and similar to the scrapers of the palæolithic era; stones designed for slinging, net-weights, and perhaps corn-grinders or nut-crushers. A few bone implements have been found in the tumuli, a pin, a chisel, and a knife or so; but they are very rare, they are never carved, and have not one quarter of the interest which belongs to the bone implements of the caves. Finally, we must not omit to say that in Anhalt, in Germany, a large stone has been found which seems to have served the purpose of a plough. For there can be little doubt that if some of the tumuli belong to a time before the use of domesticated animals—save the dog—they last down to a time when man not only had tame oxen, pigs, goats, and geese,[11] but also sowed and planted, and lived the life of an agricultural race; nor will it be said that such an advance was extraordinary when we say that the minimum duration of the age of polished stone in central Europe was probably two thousand years.

Other relics from the mounds, not less interesting than the weapons, are their vessels of pottery; for here we see the earliest traces of another art. This pottery is of a black colour, curiously mixed with powdered shells, perhaps to strengthen the clay, perhaps for ornament. Its pottery belongs to the latter portion of this age of stone, a period distinguished not only by the use of domestic animals, but also by the growth of cereals. We have said that bones of cattle, swine, and in one case of a goose, have been found among the refuse of the funeral feasts. But man was still a hunter, as he is to this day, though he had found other means of support besides the wild game; so we also find the bones of the red deer and the wild bull, both of which supplied him with food. Wolves’ teeth, too, have been found pierced, so as to be strung into a necklace; for personal adornment formed, in those days as now, part of the interest of life. Jet beads have been discovered in large numbers, and even some of amber, which seems to have been brought from the Baltic to these countries and as far south as Switzerland; and it is known that during the last portion of what is, nevertheless, still the stone period, the most precious metal of all, gold, was used for ornament. Gold is the one metal which is frequently found on the surface of the ground, and therefore it was naturally the first to come under the eye of man.

The religion of the mound-builders probably consisted in part of the worship of the dead, so that the very tombs themselves, and not the cromlechs only, were a sort of temples. And yet they had the deepest dread of the reappearance of the departed upon earth—of his ghost. To prevent his ‘walking’ they adopted a strange practical form of exorcism. They strewed the ground at the grave’s mouth with sharp stones or broken pieces of pottery, as though a ghost could have his feet cut, and by fear of that be kept from returning to his old haunts. For ages and ages after the days of the mound-builders the same custom lived on of which we here see the rise. The same ceremony—turned now to an unmeaning rite—was used for the graves of those, such as murderers or suicides, who might be expected to sleep uneasily in their narrow house. This is the custom which is referred to in the speech of the priest to Laertes.[12] Ophelia had died under such suspicion of suicide, that it was a stretch of their rule, he says, to grant her Christian burial.

‘And but the great command o’ersways our order,
She should in ground unsanctified have lodged
To the last trumpet: for charitable prayers,
Shards, flints and pebbles, should be thrown on her.’
* * * * * * * * *

The body of him for whom the mound was built was not buried in the centre, but at one end, and that commonly the east, for in most cases the barrows lie east and west. It is never stretched out flat, but lies or sits in a crouched attitude, the head brought down upon the breast, and the knees raised up to meet the chin. So that the dead man was generally left facing toward the west—the going down of the sun. There cannot but be some significance in this. The daily death of the sun has, in all ages and to all people, spoken of man’s own death, his western course has seemed to tell of that last journey upon which all are bent. So that the resting-place of the soul is nearly always imagined to lie westward in the home of the setting sun. For the rest, there seems little doubt that the barrows represent nothing else—though upon a large scale—than the dwelling-home of the time, and we may believe that the greater part of the funeral rights connected with the mounds were very literal and unsymbolical.[13] The Eskimo and Lapps of our day dwell in huts no more commodious than the small chambers of the barrows, and exceedingly like them in shape; only they keep them warm by heaping up over them not earth but snow. In these hovels they sit squatting, in an attitude not unlike that of the skeleton of the tumuli. Of the human remains the skulls are small and round, and have a prominent ridge over the sockets of the eyes, showing that the ancient race was of small stature with round heads—what is called brachycephalus, or short-headed, and had over-hanging eyebrows; in short, their skeletons bare a considerable resemblance to those of the modern Laplanders.

We are still, however, left in darkness about that part of the stone-age thought which has left the grandest traces, and of which we should so much have wished to be informed; I mean the religion. Besides the tumuli we have those enormous piles of stone called cromlechs, or dolmens, and sometimes miscalled Druid circles—such as the well-known Stonehenge; these cromlechs were, we may believe, temples or sacred places. Each arrangement of the stones is generally like a simple portico, made by placing one enormous block upon two others; and these porticoes are sometimes arranged in circles, as at Stonehenge, sometimes in long colonnades, as at Carnac in Brittany. Lesser dolmens have been found in most European countries. There can be little doubt that these huge monuments possessed a religious character. And here is one proof of the fact. As a rule, the grave-mounds—the tumuli—are built upon elevations commanding a considerable prospect, and it is rare to find two within sight. Yet over Salisbury Plain, and the part about Stonehenge, they are much more numerous, as many as a hundred and fifty having been discovered in this neighbourhood, as though all the ground about this great cromlech were a hallowed region, and it were a desired privilege to be buried within such sacred precincts. Of the worship which these stone altars commemorate we know absolutely nothing. There seems to be no reasonable doubt that they belong to the period we are describing. The name Druid Circles, which has been sometimes given them, is an absurd anachronism, for, as we shall have occasion to see later on, the ancestors of the Kelts (or Celts), to whom the Druidical religion belonged, were probably at this time still living on the banks of the Oxus in Central Asia; at any rate they had not yet migrated to Brittany or to Great Britain. Thus, though we must continue to wonder how these people could ever have raised such enormous stones as altars of their religion, the nature of that religion itself is hidden from us.

The tumuli and the relics which they contain are the truest representatives of the second stone age which have come down to us. The barrows raise their summits in every land, and the characteristic features of the remains found in them are the same for each. We must judge that they, that the most genuine stone-age tumuli, arose during the greatest extension of the stone-age races, before any new peoples had come to dispute their territory. What the kitchen-middens show in the germ, they show in its perfection—all the perfection attainable by it.

We have already enumerated the most important forms of weapons and implements found in these tumuli; and there would be no use in entering upon a lengthy verbal description of what would be so much better illustrated by drawings. The books enumerated in the Appendix give abundant illustrations of the stone-age remains. One caution, however, we need to give the reader. This second stone age is called, we know, the age of polished stone. But, as has been already said, that by no means implies that all the implements made in these days were polished. On the contrary, certain stone manufactures, notably arrow-heads, were never polished. They went on being made by chipping, not only during the whole of the second stone age, but far into the first metal age, when bronze had been introduced and was used for the manufacture of numerous weapons and implements. The grinding of the edges of certain sharp weapons is a more important characteristic than the polishing of the whole or a portion of their surface. But this grinding was not universally employed, but used generally only for the larger implements.

The lake
villages.

And now, having dealt with the remains from the tumuli, the flower, as we may call them, of the second stone period, we pass on to a third series of remains, which must be in part contemporary with the stone-using men, and have continued on and been absorbed into the metal age, which next supervened. These remains came from what are called the lake-dwellings, and though traces of such dwellings have been found in many countries in Europe, in our isles among others, still the chief provenance of the lake-dwellings, so far as our discoveries yet go, is in Switzerland and the north of Italy. But let it not be supposed that these lake-dwellings extended over a short period. A variety of separate pieces of evidence enforce upon us the conclusion that the stone age in Europe endured for at least two thousand years. Even the latter portion of that epoch will allow a cycle vast enough for the lives of the lake-dwellers; for the dwellings did not come to an end at the end of the age of stone, they only began in it. They were seen by Roman eyes almost as late as the beginning of our own era.

For at least two thousand years, then, we may say, the men who lived in the country of the Swiss lakes, and those of Northern Italy, adopted for the sake of security the custom of making their dwellings, not upon the solid ground, but upon platforms constructed with infinite trouble above the waters of the lake. And the way they set about it was in this wise: Having chosen their spot—if attainable, a sunny shore protected as much as possible from storms, and having a lake-bottom of a soft and sandy nature—they proceeded to drive in piles, composed of tree-stems taken from the neighbouring forests, from four to eight inches in diameter. These piles had to be felled, and afterwards sharpened, either by fire or a stone axe, then driven in from a raft by the use of ponderous stone mallets; and when we have said that in one instance the number of piles of a lake village has been estimated at from 40,000 to 50,000, the enormous labour of the process will be apparent. This task finished, the piles were levelled at a certain height above the water, and a platform of boards was fastened on with pegs. On the platform were erected huts, probably square or oblong in shape, not more than twenty feet or so in length, adapted however for the use of a single family, and generally furnished, it would appear, with a hearthstone and a corn-crusher apiece. The huts were made of wattle-work, coated on both sides with clay. Stalls were provided for the cattle, and a bridge of from only ten or twelve to as much as a hundred yards in length led back to the mainland. Over this the cattle must have been driven every day, at least in summer, to pasture on the bank; and no doubt the village community separated each morning for the various occupations of fishing, for hunting, for agriculture, and for tending the cattle. As may be imagined, these wooden villages were in peculiar danger from fire, and a very large number have suffered destruction in this way; a circumstance fortunate for modern science, for many things which had been partially burnt before falling into the lake have, by the coating of charcoal formed round them, been made impervious to the corroding influence of the water. Thus we have preserved their very grain itself, and their loaves or cakes of crushed but not ground meal. The grains are of various kinds of wheat and barley, oats, and millet.[14]

It is natural to ask for what object the enormous trouble of erecting these lake-dwellings could have been undertaken; and the only answer which can be given is, that it was to protect their inhabitants from their enemies. Whether each village formed a separate tribe and made war upon its neighbours, or whether the lake-dwellers were a peaceful race fleeing from more savage people of the mainland, is uncertain. There is nothing which leads us to suppose they were a race of a warlike character, and as far as the arts of peace go they had advanced considerably upon the men of the tumuli. More especially do the woven cloths, sometimes worked with simple but not inartistic patterns, excite our admiration. They had their trade too. Ornaments of amber are frequent, and amber must have been brought from the Baltic; while in one settlement, believed to be of the stone age, the presence of a glass bead would seem to imply indirect commerce with Egypt, the only country in which the traces of glass manufacture at this remote period have been found.[15] It is believed by good authorities, that the stone age in Europe came to an end about two thousand years before Christ, or at a date which is generally considered to be about that of Abraham; and its shortest duration, as we saw, must also be considered to be two thousand years.

These men of the lakes stand in no degree behind the mound-builders for the material elements of civilization. Nay, they are in some respects before them. Their life seems to have been more confined and simple than that which was going on in other parts of Europe. Its very peacefulness and simplicity gave men the opportunity for perfecting some of their arts. Thus their agriculture was more careful and more extended than that of the men of the tumuli. Their cattle would appear to have been numerous; all were stall-fed upon the island home; if in the morning driven out to pasture over the long bridge to the mainland, they were brought home again at night. To agriculture these lake-dwellers had added the special art of gardening, for they cultivated fruit-trees; and they span hemp and flax, and even constructed—it is believed—some sort of loom for weaving cloth. Yet for all that, if in these respects they were superior to the men of the tumuli, their life was probably more petty and narrow than the others’. There must have been some grandeur in the ideas of men who could have built those enormous tombs and raised those wondrous piles of altar-stones. If the first were made in honour of their chiefs, the existence of such chiefs implies a power in the stone-age men of expanding into a wide social life; so too the immense labour which the raising of the cromlechs demanded argues strong if not the most elevated religious ideas. And it has been often and truly remarked that these two elements of progress, social and religious life, are always intimately associated. It is in a common worship more than in common language that we find the beginning of nationalities. It was so in Greece. The city life grew up around the temple of a particular tutelary deity, and the associations of cities arose from their association in the worship at some common shrine. The common nationality of the Hellenes was kept alive more than anything in the quadrennial games in honour of the Olympian Zeus, just as the special citizenship of Athens found expression in the peculiar worship of the virgin goddess Athênê. So we may well argue from the great stone remains, that man had even then made some progress in political life. They show us the extended conditions of tribal government. But the lake-dwellers only give us a picture of the simplest and narrowest form of the village community. It is with them a complete condition of social equality; there is no appearance of any grade of rank; no hut on these islands is found larger or better supplied or more cared for than the rest. A condition of things not unlike that which we find in Switzerland at the present day; one favourable to happiness and contentment, to improvement in the simpler arts, but not to wide views of life, or to any great or general progress.

The civilization of
the stone ages.

And now let us, before we bid adieu to the men of the stone age, recount our gains, and see what picture the researches of pre-historic science allow us to draw of the progress of mankind from its earliest condition to that in which we now find it. We will forget for a moment the great gap which intervenes between the two stone ages, the age of unpolished stone and the age of polished stone, and simply following step by step the changes in human implements much as if we were walking round the cases of some well-arranged museum, we will note, as we pass it, each marked improvement or new acquisition in the arts of life.

1. To begin, then, with the men of the river drift—so far as we can judge, the rudest and most uncultured of all. It is not certain that these men had so much as wooden handles to their implements of stone, but it is probable that they had them. As we have said, they had only two or three marked varieties in these weapons. How little advance there seems from the state of simply using or hurling the stones in the state in which they are found! At the same time, it must be said that the implements of wood or horn, pointed stakes or even javelins, which these early men may have had would almost certainly have perished.

Nor, again, is there any evidence that the men of the drift period were cognizant of the use of fire, though here it is more likely that they were than that they were not.

2. When we come to the cave-dwellers we see marked signs of a higher civilization. The first and most important of these signs undoubtedly is the evidence of knowledge how to procure fire. We see a much greater variety in the implements used by the cave-dwellers. This, no doubt, is due in part to the disappearance of a portion of the implements of the drift age; but still we must take things as we find them. And putting side by side the specimens of the drift-implements and the cave-implements, we are at once struck by the superiority of the latter in make and in variety of form.

Thirdly, as has already been pointed out, we have here the earliest traces of art. On that subject it is not necessary again to dwell.

3. And now pass on to the second stone age, and see what progress man has made in the interval which separates the two periods. We begin with the society represented by the kitchen-middens. We do not possess any certainly polished-stone implements from these refuse-heaps. But I do not lay any great stress upon the invention of the art of polishing or even of grinding the stone; though that was not without importance, for it enabled the men of the second stone age to make use of much harder and more durable sorts of stone for their cutting implements. The earliest stone-age men made their implements of all sorts almost exclusively of flints, because the flint was a stone not difficult to chip into shape and to give an edge to by chipping. But when it comes to polishing or grinding instead of chipping an edge upon stones, there are a variety of other kinds of stone which are much more durable and much more serviceable than flints are, for the very reason that they are not liable to chip, and these stones (jade, granite, greenstone, obsidian, or one or other of the marbles, for example) we find a good deal employed during the latter stone age.

What, however, is more significant than would be the use of polished-stone implements by the kitchen-midden men is the evidence of their use of canoes, and therefore the evidence that they understood the art of navigation.

Next after that we must place the use of the bow, which also was probably known to the earliest men of the polished-stone age, but not to those of the preceding era.

Finally, we have the beginning of domestication of animals in the domestication of the dog. But we have as yet no beginning of agriculture.

4. Pass on to the men who raised the tumuli and we find still further signs of progress. Of these the tumuli themselves are the most significant. For in them we see the beginning of the art of building. I do not say that houses were unknown to the kitchen-midden men; only that we have no proof that they lived in houses; and we are here taking the evidences of advancing civilization as we come across them. In the case of the still earlier cave-dwellers we may take it for granted that the art of house-building was unknown to them, and quite as much so to the men of the river drift.[16]

True, the tumuli are not houses; they are tombs. But the men who could raise these tombs could raise houses likewise, and there can be little doubt that the architecture of the tombs, here and throughout the history of mankind, was modelled upon the architecture of the houses. Wherefore we may assume that these last were low and narrow chambers, a sort of constructed caves, so to speak, which is just what we should expect the earliest houses to be. We should expect that the first advance from cave-dwelling or burrowing in the ground would be to raise an artificial mountain and burrow within that. But soon the insecurity of this house would become apparent, and the next advance—no mean one, however,—would be the propping of stones upon others to make a chamber before the earth was heaped up in the tumulus, and when that step had been reached the art of house-building had begun.

We might call the next step forward the acquisition of a religion, of which the first signs are apparent in the cromlechs of this age. In this case, again, we only follow the testimony of the remains that have been discovered in the order in which they have come to light. It would be far too much to say that the earlier stone-age men were without religious observances. All we can say is, that the first certain remains of these belong to the time of the tumuli and the cromlechs. The reasons which lead us to believe that these last, the cromlechs, had a religious character have been already given.

Commerce was not unknown even to the cave-dwellers, but the first proofs of anything like a distant commerce come to us from the date of the grave-mounds.

The domestic animals of the tumuli begin to be numerous—oxen, pigs, goats, and geese,—though these remains are not found in the earliest mounds. And there is likewise among them some trace of agriculture.

Finally, traces of the art of pottery-making appear for the first time in these graves.

5. The village communities show an advance to the most undoubted use of agriculture, to the planting of fruit-trees, to the weaving of cloths, and a much more extended practice of domestication than obtained among the men of the grave-mounds.

Thus we see that as long ago as the stone age, before man had yet discovered any metal except, maybe, gold, he had advanced so far as to have discovered the most necessary arts of life, hunting, fishing, navigation (in some form), the domestication of animals, agriculture, planting, weaving, the making of garments—not of skin only, but also of linen or cloth—and the making of pottery.

And now let us note one other thing—the point where the stone age seems to approach most nearly to the borders of actual history. History begins in Egypt. For no continuous Biblical history exists for the days prior to Abraham. But in Egypt, for many centuries before Abraham, we have a continuous history, or at least continuous chronicles and dynastic lists, whose authenticity is admitted, and the remains of no mean civilization in the buildings contemporary with these earliest chronicles.

Egyptian history may be said to begin with the builders of the pyramids. But the pyramids themselves are nothing else than the children of the tumuli of the second stone age. We may call them a sort of crystallized tumuli—barrows of stone instead of earth. But, in truth, the earliest pyramids were probably not built of stone. It is generally believed that the stone pyramids which we see to-day at Gîza and Sakkara were preceded by pyramids of unbaked brick. And what are such buildings of unbaked brick save carefully raised mounds of earth? Here, then, we get the nearest meeting-point between the stone age and the age of history.

Again, the principle upon which were constructed the Egyptian tombs—of which the pyramids were only the most conspicuous forms—were precisely the same as the principles which governed the construction of the more elaborate barrows. These last had not only a chamber for the dead. This chamber was in many cases approached by a passage also made of stones covered with earth; and there can be no question that the mouth of the tomb was used as a sort of ante-room in which the relatives of the dead might hold their wake, or funeral feast. Here have been found the traces of fires, the remains of animals, fragments of vessels of pottery, etc., used or consumed in the feasts. We may believe that the ceremony was repeated at stated intervals. The very same principle governed the construction of the Egyptian tombs. These likewise (in their earliest known forms) consisted of an inner tomb and of an outer chamber; generally between the one and the other there was a passage. The outer chamber is that to which archæologists have given the name of mastaba. In it the relatives of the dead continued year after year to keep a funeral feast in his memory. Or we may say more than in memory of the dead—with the dead, we may say. For the essence of the feast, the fumes of the baked meats, was thought to penetrate along the passage and reach the mummy himself in his dark chamber.

Ages of bronze
and iron.

Thus we come to the end of the stone age or ages. The next great discovery which man made was that of the metals. Not iron at first; before iron was discovered there supervened the age known as the Bronze Age, when copper and tin were known but not iron, and all the most important implements were made of that mixture of copper and tin—bronze, the hardest substance then obtainable. In some countries the discovery of the metals was natural, and one age followed upon the other in gradual sequence. But in Europe it was not so. The men of the bronze age were a new race, sallying out of the East to dispossess the older inhabitants, and if in some places the bronze men and the stone men seem to have gone on for a time side by side, the general character of the change is that of a sudden break.

Therefore we do not now proceed to speak of the characteristic civilization of the bronze age. As will be seen hereafter, the bringers of the new weapons belonged to a race concerning whom we have much ampler means of information than is possessed for the first inhabitants of these lands; and we are spared the necessity of drawing all our knowledge from a scrutiny of their arms or tombs. But before we can satisfactorily show who were the successors of the stone-age men in Europe, and whence they came, we must turn aside towards another inquiry, viz. into the origin of language.

CHAPTER III.
THE GROWTH OF LANGUAGE.

The growth of
language.

We have looked upon man fashioning the first implements and weapons and houses which were ever made; we now turn aside and ask what were the first of those immaterial instruments, those ‘aëriform, mystic’ legacies which were handed down and gradually improved from the time of the earliest inhabitants of our globe? Foremost among these, long anterior to the ‘metallurgic and other manufacturing skill,’ comes language. With us, in whose minds thought and speech are so bound together as to be almost inseparable, the idea that language is an instrument which through long ages has been slowly improved to its present perfection, seems difficult of credit. We think of early man having the same ideas and expressing them as readily as we do now; but this he could not really have done. Not, indeed, that we have any reason to believe that there was a time when man had no language at all; but it seems certain that long ages were necessary before this instrument could be wrought to the fineness in which we find it, and to which, in all the languages with which we are likely to become acquainted, we are accustomed. A rude iron knife or spear-head seems a simple and natural thing to make. But we know that before it could be made iron had to be discovered, and the art of extracting iron from the ore; and, as a matter of fact, we know that thousands of years passed before the iron spear-head was a possibility; thousands of years spent in slowly improving the weapons of stone, and passing on from them to the weapons of bronze. So, too, with language; simple as it seems at first sight to fit the word on to the idea, and early as we ourselves learn this art, a little thought about what language is will show us how much we owe to the ages which have gone before.

The two main
classes of words
‘significant’
and ‘insignificant.’

To understand fully the department of study called the science of language considerable linguistic knowledge is necessary. But to grasp many of the general principles of this science, and many of the most important facts which it teaches, we do not need any such wide knowledge. In fact, a little thoughtful examination of any single tongue (his own, whichever it may be) would teach a person many things which without thought he would be inclined to pass over as matters of course or matters of no consequence. In truth, in this science of language what we need, even before we need a very wide array of facts, is what is called the scientific method in dealing with the facts which we possess. But, again, this which we call the scientific method is really represented by two qualities which have less pretentious names—observation and common sense.

Let us begin then by, so to say, challenging our own language, our English as we find it to-day, and see what hints we can gain from it of the formation of language as a whole and of its origin. An ounce of information gained in this wise, by examination and the use of our own common sense, is worth a much greater bulk of knowledge gained second-hand from books, and merely remembered as facts divorced from their causes.

Take any sentence, and place that, so to say, under a microscope, or under the dissecting-knife—take the opening sentence of this chapter, for example.

“We have looked upon man fashioning the first implements and weapons and houses that were ever made.”

Let us look at these few words alone.

The first thing we have to notice about this sentence, and any other sentence almost that we could anywhere find, is that the words which compose it fall into two distinct classes, the classes of what I will call meaning and meaningless, or significant and in-significant words. In the first class fall the words we, looked, man, fashioning, implements, weapons, houses, made. These I call ‘meaning’ or ‘significant’ words, because, if we isolate each one and utter it alone, it will call up some image to the mind—we, weapons, fashioning, houses, made, and so forth: the image may be pretty clear or it may be (in the case of the verbs it is) somewhat hazy. But in every case some image or some idea does rise before the mind when any of these words is pronounced. Have and were I exclude for the moment from either class. The words of the second class, then, from the sentence chosen are—upon, the, and, ever. Of the first three, at any rate, there can be no difficulty as to why they are classed as the meaningless or insignificant words of the sentence. Isolated from the words of the first class, upon, the, or and can by no means possibly call up any image or suggest any idea to the mind.

Now, if you take any implement whose manufacture the world has ever seen, unless it be of the most primitive description imaginable, you will find it really devisable into two parts, upon much the same principle that we have here resolved our typical sentence into two primary divisions; it will consist of the essential part, the part which by itself would be useful, and the unessential adjunct which is designed to assist the usefulness of the other portion, but which is useless by itself—or if not useless by itself, it is useless for the purposes for which the implement we are concerned with is made. All handles meant to assist in the use of an implement, be it a stone axe or a most elaborate modern weapon, form such an adjunct to the essential part. Such useful and by comparison useless parts are the blade and the handle of a knife, the barrel and the stock of a gun, the carrying portion of the wheelbarrow and the wheel, the share—the shearing or cutting portion of a plough—and the wooden framework; and so forth. There is no need to multiply examples. Nor, I think, is there any need to insist further how strictly analogous the two classes of words here distinguished are to the two parts of any other implement invented by man. It goes almost of course that the essential portion of any implement is the portion which was invented first, that knife-blades were invented before knife-handles, barrows before barrow-wheels, etc. Wherefore it seems to follow of course that, of the two classes of words whereof language consists—whereof all languages consist—the meaning and the meaningless words, the first were the earliest invented or discovered. This is the same as saying that language once consisted altogether of words which had a definite meaning attaching to them even when uttered by themselves, and consequently that the words of the second class grew, so to say, out of the words of the first class.

These are the conclusions which a mere examination of a single language, our own, under the guidance of observation and common sense, would force upon us; always supposing our language to be a representative one. And these conclusions are strengthened when we come to look a little into the history of words, so far as we can trace it.

So far back, therefore, we may go in the history of language to a time when all the words which men used were words which by themselves evoked distinct ideas. Relegating these words, as far as we can, into the classes which grammarians have invented for the different parts of speech, we see that the significant words are all, as a rule, either nouns (or pro-nouns), adjectives, or verbs; that the insignificant words are, as a rule, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions—what, in fact, are called particles, fragments of speech. I say, as a rule, for both divisions. The pronouns and the auxiliary verbs, for example, are very difficult to classify; and it depends rather on their use in each individual sentence, to which division they are to be relegated.

Origin of
speech undiscoverable.

But though we have now learnt to distinguish the words which by themselves convey definite ideas, and those others whose meaning depends upon the first class, we are as far as ever from understanding how words, whether of one kind or the other, come to have the significance which they have for us. Book—no sooner have we pronounced the word than an idea more or less distinct comes into our mind. The thought and the sound seem inseparable, and we cannot remember the time when they were not so. Yet the connection between the thought and the sound is not necessary. In fact, a sound which generally comes connected with one idea may—if we are engaged at the time upon a language not our own—enter our minds, bringing with it an idea quite unconnected with the first. Share and chère, plea and plie, feel and viel (German), are examples in point; and the same thing is shown by the numerous sounds in our language which have two or more quite distinct meanings, as for example—ware and were, and (with most people) where too. Rite and right and wright are pronounced precisely alike; therefore there can be no reason why one sound should convey one idea more than another. In other words, the idea and the sound have an arbitrary, not a natural connection. We have been taught to make the sound ‘book’ for the idea book, but had we been brought up by French parents the sound ‘livre’ would have seemed the natural one to make.

So that this wondrous faculty of speech has, like those other faculties of which Carlyle speaks, been handed down on impalpable vehicles of sound through the ages. Never, perhaps, since the time of our first parents has one person from among the countless millions who have been born had to invent for himself a way of expressing his thoughts in words. This is alone a strange thing enough. Impossible as it is to imagine ourselves without speech, we may ask the question—What should we do if we were ever left in such a predicament? Should we have any guide in fitting the sound on to the idea? Share and chère, feel and viel—among these unconnected notions is there any reason why we should wed our speech to one rather than another? Clearly there is no reason. Yet in the case which we imagined of a number of rational beings who had to invent a language for the first time, if they are ever to come to an understanding at all there must be some common impulse which makes more than one choose the same sound for a particular idea. How, for instance, we may ask, was it with our first parents? They have passed on to all their descendants for ever the idea of conveying thought by sound, and all the great changes which have since come into the languages of the world have been gradual and, so to say, natural. But this first invention of the idea of speech is of quite another character.

Here we are brought to the threshold of that impenetrable mystery ‘the beginning of things,’ and here we must pause. We recognize this faculty of speech as a thing mysterious, unaccountable, belonging to that supernatural being, man. There must, one would think, have been and must be in us a something which causes our mouth to echo the thought of the heart; and originally this echo must have been spontaneous and natural, the same for all alike. Now it is a mere matter of tradition and instruction, the sound we use for the idea; but at first the two must have had some subtle necessary connection, or how could one of our first parents have known or guessed what the other wished to say? Just as every metal has its peculiar ring, it is as though each impression on the mind rang out its peculiar word from the tongue.[17] Or was it like the faint tremulous sound which glasses give when music is played near? The outward object or the inward thought called out a sort of mimicry, a distant echo—not like, but yet born of the other—on the lips. These earliest sounds may perhaps still sometimes be detected. In the sound flo or flu, which in an immense number of languages stands connected with the idea of flowing and of rivers, do we not recognize some attempt to catch the smooth yet rushing sound of water? And again, in the sound gra or gri, which is largely associated with the notion of grinding, cutting, or scraping,[18] there is surely something of this in the guttural harshness of the letters, which make the tongue grate, as it were, against the roof of the mouth.

It does not, however, seem probable that the earliest words were mere imitations of the sounds produced by the objects they designed to express, such as are some of the words of child-language whereby dogs are called bow-wows and lambs are called baas. Nor need we wonder at this, when we note the principles upon which other sorts of language—expressive actions, for instance—are conceived and used. If we intend to express the idea of motion by an expressive gesture, we do not make any copy of the mode of that motion. We say ‘Go,’ and we dart out our hand, half to show that the person we are addressing is to go in the direction which we point out, or that he is to keep away from us; half, again, to give the idea of his movement by the rapidity of our own. But if we wanted to convey this last idea by mere imitation we should move our legs rapidly and not our arms.

It might be thought that the study of the gesture-language which has been used by men, especially the gesture-language of deaf-mutes, who have no other, would give us the best insight into the origin of language among mankind. But in reality the results of such a study are not very satisfactory; and for this reason, that the deaf-mute has in every case been in contact with one or more persons who possessed speech, and whose ideas were therefore entirely formed by the possession and the inheritance of language. This inherited language they translate into signs for the benefit of the deaf-mute, while the latter is still a baby and incapable of inventing language; wherefore it, in its turn, inherits a language almost as much as its parent has done, though it is a language of gesture and not of spoken words.[19] It is a fact, however, that deaf-mutes who cannot hear the sounds they make, do nevertheless articulate certain sounds which they constantly associate with the same ideas. These seem to bring us very near the language-making faculty of man. Lists of these sounds have been made, but they are not such that we can draw any conclusions touching the natural or universal association of sound and sense.

Growth of
the ‘insignificant’
words out
of the ‘significant.’

The origin of human speech and the mode of its first operation are therefore undiscoverable. We can place no measure to the rapidity with which the first created man may have obtained his stock of words of our first class; as Adam is described naming each one of the animals among whom he lived. All these beginnings lie beyond the ken of linguistic science. But even when he was furnished as fully as we choose to suppose with a class of words which had a meaning of their own, there was still the second class whose invention must have followed upon the invention of the first. The adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, particles,—the words which meant to, and, at, but, when,—these we have already seen must as a whole have come into use later than the other class of words.

This, then, we may fairly call the second stage in the growth of language, the making of these auxiliary words to enforce the meaning of the first class of words. And at the first moment it might seem impossible to imagine how these words could ever have come into existence. Given a certain word-making faculty, we can understand how mankind got sounds to express such ideas as man, head, hard, red. But how he could ever have acquired sounds to express such vague notions as at, by, and, it is much less easy to conceive. A closer observation, however, even of our own language, and a wider knowledge of languages generally, lead to the conclusion that all the words of the second class, the auxiliary words, sprang from words of the first class; that every insignificant word has grown out of a word which had its own significance; that, for instance, with, by, and, have descended from roots (now lost) which, if placed alone, would have conveyed as much idea to the mind as pen, ink, or paper does to us.

This, I say, we should guess even from an examination of our own language alone. For the process is still going on. Take the word even, as used in the sentence which we have just written: ‘Even from an examination.’ Here even is an adverb, quite meaningless when used alone, at least as an adverb; but if we see it alone it becomes another word, an adjective, a meaning word, bringing before us the idea of two things hanging level. ‘Even from’ is nonsense as an idea with nothing to follow it, but ‘even weights’ is a perfectly clear and definite notion, and each of the separate words even and weights give us clear and definite notions too. It is the same with just, which is both adverb and adjective. ‘Just as’ brings no thought into the mind, but ‘just man’ and just and man, separately or together, do. While or whilst are meaningless; but, ‘a while,’ or ‘to while’—to loiter—are full of meaning. In each case the meaningless word came from the meaning word, and was first used as a sort of metaphor, and then the metaphorical part was lost sight of. Ago is a meaningless word by itself, but it is really only a changed form of the obsolete word agone, which was an old past participle of the verb ‘to go.’

And we might find many instances of words in the same process of transformation in other languages. The English word not is meaningless, and just as much so are the French pas and point in the sense of not; but in the sense of footstep, or point, they have meaning enough. Originally Il ne veut pas meant, metaphorically, ‘He does not wish a step of your wishes,’ ‘He does not go a footstep with you in your wish;’ Il ne veut point, ‘He does not go a point with you in your wish.’ Nowadays all this metaphorical meaning is gone, except to the eye of the grammarian. People recognize that Il ne veut point is rather stronger than Il ne veut pas, but it never occurs to them to ask why.

There are so many of these curious examples that one is tempted to go on choosing instances; but we confine ourselves to one more. Our word yes is a word which by itself is quite incapable of calling up a picture in our minds, but the word is or ‘it is,’ though the idea it conveys is very abstract, and, so to say, intangible—as compared, for instance, with such verbs as move, beat—nevertheless belongs to the ‘significant’ class. Now, it happens that the Latin language used the word est ‘it is’ where we should now use the word ‘yes;’ and it still further happens that our yes[20] is probably the same as the German es, and was used in the same sense of it is as well. Instead of the meaningless word ‘yes’ the Romans used the word est ‘it is,’ and our own ancestors expressed the same idea by saying ‘it.’ Still more. It is well known that French is in the main a descendant from the Latin, not the Latin of Rome, but the corrupter Latin which was spoken in Gaul. Now these Latin-speaking Gauls did not, for some reason, say est, ‘it is,’ for yes, as the Romans did; but they used a pronoun, either ille, ‘he,’ or hoc, ‘this.’ When, therefore, a Gaul desired to say ‘yes,’ he nodded, and said he or else this, meaning ‘He is so,’ or ‘This is so.’ As it happens the Gauls of the north said ille, and those of the south said hoc, and these words gradually got corrupted into two meaningless words, oui and oc. It is well known that the people in the south of France were especially distinguished by using the word oc instead of oui for ‘yes,’ so that their ‘dialect’ got to be called the langue d’oc, and this word Languedoc gave the name to a province of France. Long before that time, however, we may be sure, both the people of the langue d’oil, or langue d’oui, and those of the langue d’oc had forgotten that their words for ‘yes’ had originally meant ‘he’ and ‘this.’

We can, from the instances above given, form a pretty good guess at the way in which the auxiliary or meaningless class of sounds came into use in any language. Each of these must once have had a distinct significance by itself, then (getting meanwhile a little changed in form probably) it gradually lost the separate meaning and became only a particle of speech, only an adjunct to other words. In another way, we may say that before man spoke of ‘on the rock’ or ‘under the rock’ he must have used some expression like ‘head of rock,’ or more literally ‘head rock’ and ‘foot rock;’ and that as time went on, new words coming into use for head and foot, these earlier ones dropped down to be mere adjuncts, and men forgot that they had ever been anything else. Just so no ordinary Frenchman knows that his oui and il are both sprung from the same Latin ille; nor does the ordinary Englishman recognize that ago is a past participle of ‘go;’ nor again, to take a new instance, does, perhaps, the ordinary German recognize that his gewiss, ‘certainly,’ is merely an abbreviation of the past participle gewissen, ‘known.’

We have now followed the growth of language through

Root-sounds.

two of its stages, first, the coining of the principal or essential parts of speech, the nouns, adjectives, and verbs; and secondly, the coining at a later date of the auxiliary parts of speech, the prepositions, adverbs, and conjunctions, and (where they exist) the enclitics the and a; these last, however, (as separate words,[21]) are wanting from a large number of languages. A third stage is the variation of certain words to form out of them other words which are nearly related in character to the first. We may speak of this process as a process of ringing the changes upon certain root-sounds to form a series of words allied in sound and allied in sense also. We have several instances of such groups of allied words in our own language. Fly, flee, flew, fled, are words allied in sound and in sense. In these cases the sound of the letters f-l constitutes what we may call the root-sound. And it may be said at once that those languages are said to be related in each of which a certain number of words can be traced back to root-sounds which are common to the two or more tongues.

In the case of the vast majority of words, before we can begin by comparing one word with another, or trying to discover the root-words of several different languages, we have first to trace the history of these words backwards, each in its own language, and find their most primitive forms. But in tongues which are pretty nearly related we have often no difficulty in seeing the similarity of corresponding words just as they stand to-day. We have no difficulty, for instance, in seeing the connection of the German Knecht and our knight,[22] the German Nacht and our night, the German Raum and our room; or, again, the connection between the Italian padre and the French père, the Italian tavola and the French (and English) table, etc.

But where the connection between languages is more distant, we have more and more to go back to much simpler roots, in order to show the relationship between them; and by a vast majority the primitive root-sounds in any large family of languages are single syllables, whereof the most constant parts are (as a rule) the consonants. So far as our knowledge goes, we might think of man as beginning human speech with a certain number of these simple root-sounds, and then proceeding to ring the changes upon these root-sounds to express varieties in the root-idea. Sometimes it is easy enough to trace the connection of ideas between different words which have been formed out of the same root-word. But sometimes this is not at all easy. Nor can we say why this special sound has been adopted for any one notion more than for a number of others to which it would have applied equally well. From a root, which in Sanskrit appears in its most ancient form, as mâ, ‘to measure,’ we get words in Greek and Latin which mean ‘to think;’ and from the same root comes our ‘man,’ the person who measures, who compares, i.e., who thinks, also our moon, which means ‘the measurer,’ because the moon helps to measure out the time, the months. But how arbitrary seems this connection between man and moon! So, too, our crab is from the word creep, and means the animal that creeps. But why this name should have been given to crab rather than to ant and beetle it is impossible to say. So that there appears as little trace of a reason governing the formation of words out of root-sounds as there appeared in the adoption of root-sounds to express certain fundamental ideas.

Thus equipped with his fixed root and the various words formed out of it, man had the rough material out of which to build up all the elaborate languages which the world has known. And he continued his work something in this fashion. As generation followed generation the pronunciation of words was changed, as is constantly being done at the present day. Our grandmothers pronounced ‘Rome,’ ‘Room,’ and ‘brooch,’ as it was spelt, and not as we pronounce it—‘broach.’ And let it be remembered, before writing was invented, there was nothing but the pronunciation to fix the word, and a new pronunciation was really a new word. When there was no written form to petrify a word, these changes of pronunciation were very rapid and frequent, so that not only would each generation have a different set of words from their fathers, but probably each tribe would be partly unintelligible to its neighbouring tribes, just as a Somersetshire man is to a great extent unintelligible to a man from Yorkshire. The first result of these changes would be the springing up of that class of ‘meaningless’ words of which we spoke above. Out of some significant words, such as ‘head’ and ‘foot,’ would arise insignificant words similar to ‘over’ and ‘under.’ Such a change could only begin when of two names each for ‘head’ and ‘foot’ one became obsolete as a noun, and was only used adverbially. Then what had originally meant, metaphorically, ‘head of rock’ and ‘foot of rock’[23] might come to be used for ‘over’ and ‘under the rock,’ in exactly the same way that the word ago, having changed its form from agone, has become a ‘meaningless’ word to the Englishman of to-day.

And with the acquisition of the insignificant words a new and very important process began. To understand

Growth of
inflexions.

what it was we will, as we did before, begin by examining the formation of some of the languages with which we are, probably, more or less familiar. Let us note how very many more variations on the same root are to be found in some languages than in others. On the root dic, which in Latin expresses the notion of speaking, we have the variations dico, dixi, dicere, dictum, dictio, dicto, dicor, dictor, dictator, dictatrix, etc.; and yet this does not nearly exhaust the list, for we have all the changes in the different tenses of dico, dicto, dicor, etc., in the different cases of dictio, dictator. dictatrix, etc. The languages which contain these numerous variations upon one root are what are called the inflected languages, and the greater number of the changes which they make come under the head of what grammarians call inflexions. These inflexions are of no meaning in themselves, they have no existence even in themselves as words. And yet what is curious is that they are the same for a great number of different words; and they express the same relative meaning in the places where they stand whatever the word may be. If the -nis of dictionis expresses a certain idea relative to dictio, so does the -nis of lectionis express the same idea relative to lectio, the -nis of actionis the same idea relative to actio, and so forth.

Or, to take an example from a modern inflected language, if the -es of Mannes, expresses a certain idea relative to Mann, so does the same inflexion (-es or -s) in Hauses, Baums, etc., relative to Haus and Baum.

Now, how are we to explain this fact? Our grammars, it is true, take it for granted, and give it us as a thing which requires no explanation—the genitive inflexion is -nis or -es, or whatever it may be. That is all they tell us. But we cannot be content to take anything of course. An explanation, however, is not difficult, and follows, almost of course, on the exercise of a little common sense. If the -es of Mannes, Hauses, Baumes (Baums) expresses the idea ‘of,’ then, at one time or another, es, or some root from which it is derived, must have meant ‘of.’ This explains easily and naturally enough the inflexions in any inflected language. They have no meaning now, but at one time they (or their original forms—their ancestors, so to speak) had no doubt just as much meaning by themselves as our ‘of.’ And therefore the only difference between our use in England to-day, and the ancestral use in a primitive language, was that we say ‘of [the] man,’ and the ancestral language would have said ‘man-of,’ ‘house-of,’ etc. This accounts for the same genitive forms being used for so many different words.

And that the same genitive forms are not used throughout any language is no real objection to this theory. If we say dictionis, lectionis, but musæ, rosæ; if we say Mannes, Hauses, but Blume, Rose, the only reason of these varieties is that the languages from which these inflexions are derived possessed more than one word meaning ‘of,’ and that one of these words was attached to a certain series of nouns, another word to another series.

This is the explanation which mere common sense would give of the origin of inflexions in language, and further research, had we time to examine the history of language more elaborately, would show that it was fundamentally the right explanation. The only correction which we should have to make on this first and crude theory is explained a little further on. Thus we see in this third stage of language a process very closely analogous to the second. The second stage gave us the auxiliary words, which have decayed so to say, out of the class of significant words. The third stage gives us the auxiliary words joined on to the significant ones, and in their turn decaying to become mere inflexions.

I have called this growth of inflexions the third stage. It is the third great stage in the formation of language, and is the only other stage distinguishable when we are examining what is called an inflected language. And all the languages the general reader is likely to know belong to this class. But when we turn to a wider study of the various tongues in use among mankind we find that this process of forming inflexions is a very slow one, that it, in its turn, has gone through many stages. And it is, in fact, the different stages through which a language has passed on its road to the formation of inflexions which settles the class in which it is to be placed among the various tongues spoken by mankind.

We shall soon understand what are these further stages in language-formation. As far as we have been able to see at present, the inflexion presents itself as something added on to the significant word to give it a varied meaning. It is evidently therefore part of a new process through which language has to go after it has completed its original stock of sounds, namely, the formation of fresh words by joining together two others which already exist. This is a process which, no doubt, in some shape or other, began in the very earliest ages, and which is to this day going on continually. The simpler form of it is the joining together two words which are significant when they stand alone to form a third word expressing a new idea; just as we have joined ‘ant’ to ‘hill’ and formed ant-hill, which is a different idea than either ant or hill taken alone. In the words playful, joyful, again, we have the same process carried rather further. The words mean simply play-full, ‘full of play,’ joy-full, ‘full of joy.’ But we do not in reality quite think of this meaning when we use them. The termination ful has become half-meaningless by itself, and in doing so we observe it has slightly changed its original form.

But far more important in the history of language is the joining of the meaningless or auxiliary words on to other words of the first, the significant class, whereby in the course of time the inflexions of language have been formed. Although we always put the meaningless qualifying word before the chief word, and say ‘on the rock,’ or ‘under the rock,’ it is more natural to man, as is shown by all languages, to put the principal idea first, and say ‘rock on,’ ‘rock under,’ the idea rock being of course the chief idea, the part of the rock, or position in relation to the rock, coming after. So the first step towards forming grammar was the getting a number of meaningless words, and joining them on to the substantive, ‘rock,’ ‘rock-by,’ ‘rock-in,’ ‘rock-to,’ etc. So with the verb. The essential idea in the verb is the action itself, the next idea is the time or person in which the action takes place; and the natural thing for man to do is to make the words follow that order. The joining process would give us from love, the idea of loving, ‘love-I,’ ‘love-thou,’ ‘love-he,’ etc.; and for the imperfect ‘love-was-I,’ ‘love-was-thou,’ ‘love-was-he,’ ‘love-was-we,’ ‘love-was-ye,’ ‘love-was-they;’ for perfect ‘love-have-I,’ ‘love-have-thou,’ ‘love-have-he,’ etc. Of course, these are merely illustrations, but they make the mode of this early joining process clearer than if we had chosen a language where that process is actually found in its purity, and then translated the forms into their English equivalents.

We have now arrived at a stage in the formation of language where both meaning and meaningless words have been introduced, and where words have been made up out of combinations of the two. We see at once that with regard to meaningless words the use of them would naturally be fixed very much by tradition and custom; and whereas there might be a great many words standing for ant and hill, and therefore a great many ways of saying ant-hill, for the meaningless words, such as under and on, there would probably be only a few words. The reason of this is very plain. While all the separate synonyms for hill expressed different ways in which it struck the mind, either as being high, or large, or steep, or what not, for under and on, being meaningless words not producing any picture in the mind, only one word apiece or one or two words could very well be in use. So long as under and on were significant words, meaning, perhaps, as we imagined, head of, or foot of, there would be plenty of synonyms for them; but only one or two out of all these would be handed down in their meaningless forms. And it is this very fact which, as we have seen, accounts for all the grammars of all languages, every one of those grammatical terminations which we know so well in Latin and Greek, and German, having been originally nothing else than meaningless words added on to modify the words which still retained their meaning. We saw before that it was much more natural for people to say ‘rock-on’ or ‘hand-in’ than ‘on the rock’ or ‘in the hand’—because rock and hand were the most important ideas and came first into the mind, while on, in, etc., were only subsidiary ideas depending upon the important ones. If we stop at rock or hand without adding on and in, we have still got something definite upon which our thoughts can rest, but we could not possibly stop at on and in alone, and have any idea in our minds at all. It is plain enough therefore that, though we say ‘on the rock,’ we must have the idea of all the three words in our mind before we begin the phrase, and therefore that our words do not follow the natural order of our ideas; whereas rock-on, hand-in, show the ideas just in the way they come into the mind.

It is a fact, then, that all case-endings arose from adding on meaningless words to the end of the word, the noun or pronoun—Mann, des mann-es, dem Mann-e; hom-o, hom-inis, hom-ini: the addition to the root in every case was once a distinct word of the auxiliary kind, or derived from such a word. The meanings of case-endings such as these cannot, it is true, be discovered now, for they came into existence long before such languages as German or Latin were spoken, and their meanings were lost sight of in ages which passed before history. But that time when the terminations which are meaningless now had a meaning, and the period of transition between this state and the state of a language which is full of grammatical changes inexplicable to those who use them, form distinct epochs in the history of every language. And it is just the same with verb-endings as with the case endings—ich bin, du bist, really express the ‘I’ and ‘thou’ twice over, as the pronouns exist though hidden and lost sight of in the -n and -st of the verb. In the case of verbs, indeed, we may without going far give some idea of how these endings can be detected. We may say at once that Sanskrit, Persian, Armenian, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, German, English, Norse, Gaelic, Welsh, Lithuanian, Russian, and other Slavonic languages are all connected together in various degrees of relationship, all descended from one common ancestor, some being close cousins, and some very distant. Now in Sanskrit ‘I am’ is thus declined:—

By separating the root from the ending in this way we may the more easily detect the additions to the root, and their meanings. As is the root expressing the idea of being, existing; mi is from a root meaning I (preserved in me, Greek and Lat. me, mi, m[ich], etc.); so we get as-mi, am-I, or I am. Then we may trace this form of word through a number of languages connected with the Sanskrit. The most important part of as-mi, the consonants, are preserved in the Latin sum, I am, from which, by some further changes come the French suis, the Italian sono: the same word appears in our a-m, and in the Greek eimi (Doric esmi), I am. Next, coming to the second word, we see one of the s’s cut out, and we get a-si, in which the a is the root, and the si the addition signifying thou. To this addition correspond the final s’s in the Latin es, French es—tu es, and the Greek eis (Doric essi). So, again, in as-ti, the ti expresses he, and this corresponds to the Latin est, French est, the Greek esti, the German ist; in the English the expressive t has been lost. We will not continue the comparison of each word; it will be sufficient if we place side by side the same tense in Sanskrit and in Latin,[24] and give those who do not know Latin an opportunity of recognizing for themselves the tense in its changed form in French or Italian:—

The plural of the added portion we see contains the letters m-s, and if we split these up again we get the separate roots mi and si, so that mas means most literally ‘I,’ and ‘thou,’ and hence ‘we.’ In the second person the Latin has preserved an older form than the Sanskrit, s-t the proper root-consonants for the addition part of the second person plural, combining the ideas thou and he, from which, ye. The third person plural cannot be so easily explained.

It will be seen that in the English almost all likeness to the Sanskrit terminations has been lost. Our verb ‘to be’ is very irregular, being, in fact, a mixture of several distinct verbs. The Anglo-Saxon had the verb beó contracted from beom (here we have at least the m- ending for I), I am, byst, thou art, bydh, he is, and the same appear in the German bin, bist. It is, of course, very difficult to trace the remains of the meaningless additions in such advanced languages as ours, or even in such as Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. Nevertheless, the reader may find it not uninteresting to trace in the Latin through most of the tenses of verbs these endings—m, for I, the first person; s, for thou, the second person; t, for he, the third person; m-s, for I and thou, we; st, for ye, thou and he, ye; nt, for they. And the same reader must be content to take on trust the fact that other additions corresponding to different tenses can also be shown or reasonably guessed to have been words expressive by themselves of the idea which belongs to the particular tense; so that where we have such a tense as—

we may recognize the meaning of the component parts thus:—

Of course, really to show the way in which these meaningless additions have been made and come to be amalgamated with the root, we should have to take examples from a great number of languages in different stages of development. But we have thought it easier, for mere explanation, to take only such languages as were likely to be familiar to the reader, and even to supplement these examples with imaginary ones—like ‘rock-on,’ ‘love-was-I,’ etc.—in English. For our object has been at first merely to give an intelligible account of how language has been formed, of the different stages it has passed through, and to leave to a future time the question as to which languages of the globe have passed through all these stages, and which have gone part of their way in the formation of a perfect language. Between the state of a language in which the meaning of all the separate parts of a word are recognized and that state where they are entirely lost, there is an immense gap, that indeed which separates the most from the least advanced languages of the world.

Monosyllabic
Language.

Every language that is now spoken on the globe has gone through the stage of forming meaningless words, and is therefore possessed of words of both classes. They no longer say ‘head-of-rock’ or ‘foot-of-rock,’ but ‘rock-on’ and ‘rock-under.’ But there are still known languages in which almost every syllable is a word, and where grammar properly speaking is scarcely needed. For grammar, if we come to consider it exactly, is the explanation of the meaning of those added syllables or letters which have lost all natural meaning of their own. If each part of the word were as clear and as intelligible as ‘rock-on’ we should have no need of a grammar at all. A language of this sort is called a monosyllabic or a radical language, not because the people only speak in monosyllables, but because each word, however compound, can be split up into monosyllables or roots, which have a distinctly recognizable meaning. ‘Ant-hill-on’ or ‘love-was-I,’ are like the words of such a language.

Agglutinative
language.

The next stage of growth is where the meaning of the added parts has been lost sight of, except when it is connected with the word which it modifies; but where the essential word has a distinct idea by itself, and without the help of any addition. Suppose, for instance, through ages of change the ‘was I’ in our imaginary example got corrupted into ‘wasi,’ where wasi had no meaning by itself, but was used to express the first person of the past tense. The first person past of love would be ‘love-wasi,’ of move ‘move-wasi,’ and so on, ‘wasi’ no longer having a meaning by itself, but ‘love’ and ‘move’ by themselves being perfectly understandable. Or, to take an actual declension from a Turanian language,—

where, as we see, the root remains entirely unaffected by the addition of the personal pronoun.

A language in this stage is said to be in the agglutinative stage,[25] because certain grammatical endings (like ‘wasi’) are merely as it were glued on to a root to change its meaning, while the root itself remains quite unaffected, and means neither less nor more than it did before.

Inflected
language.

But, as ages pass on, the root and the addition get so closely combined that neither of them alone has, as a rule, a distinct meaning, and the language arrives at its third stage of grammar-formation. It is not difficult to find examples of a language in this condition, for such is the case with all the languages by which we are surrounded. All the tongues which the majority of us are likely to study, almost all those which have any literature at all, have arrived at this last stage, which is called the inflexional. For instance, though we might divide actionis into two parts actio and nis, and say that the former contains the essential idea, and the addition the idea implied by the genitive case, there are only a few Latin words with which such a process is possible, and even in the case of actio the separation is somewhat misleading. In homo the real root is hom, and the genitive is not homo-nis but hominis. So, again, though we were able to separate ‘asmi’ into two parts—‘as’ and ‘mi’—one expressing the idea of being, the other the person ‘I,’ this distinction is the refinement of the grammarian, and would never have been recognized by an ordinary speaker of Sanskrit, for whom ‘asmi’ simply meant ‘I am,’ without distinction of parts. In our ‘am’ the grammarian recognizes that the ‘a’ expresses existence, and the ‘m’ expresses I; but so completely have we lost sight of this, that we repeat the ‘I’ before the verb. Just the same in Latin. No Roman could have recognized in the ‘s’ of sum ‘am’ and in the ‘m’ ‘I;’ for him sum meant simply and purely ‘I am.’ It was no more separable in his eyes than the French êtes (Latin estis) in vous êtes is separable into a root ‘es,’ contracted in the French into ‘ê,’ meaning are, and an addition ‘tes’ signifying you. This, then, is the last stage upon which language enters. It is called the inflexional or inflected stage, because the different grammatical changes are not now denoted by a mere addition to an intelligible word, but by a change in the word itself. The root may in many cases remain and be recognizable in its purity, but very frequently it is unrecognizable, so that the different case-or tense-endings can no longer be looked upon as additions, but as changes. Take almost any Latin substantive, and we see this: homo, a man, the genitive is formed by changing homo into hominis, or, if we please, adding something to the root hom—which has in itself no meaning; musa changes into musæ; and so forth.

The five stages
in the formation
of language.

And now to recapitulate. We have in tracing the growth of language discovered first of all two stages whereby the material of the language was formed: the class of what we have called the meaning or significant words came into being, and out of this was formed the second class of so-called meaningless or auxiliary words. These two stages were in the main passed through before any known language came into existence; for there is no known language which does not contain words of both these classes; albeit the second stage is likewise a process which is still going on, as in the examples chosen, where even and just pass from being adjectives into even and just the adverbs, and the French substantives pas and point take a like change of meaning.

These first two stages passed, there follow three other stages which go to the formation of the grammar of a language: first the stage of merely coupling words together, so as to form fresh words—the monosyllabic state; then the stage in which one part of the additional word has lost its meaning while the root-word remains unchanged—the stage called the agglutinative condition of language; and, finally the stage in which the added portion has become to some extent absorbed into the root-word—which last stage is the inflected condition of a language.

When we have come to this inflexional state, the history of the growth of language comes to an end. It happens indeed, sometimes, that a language which has arrived at the inflected stage may in time come to drop nearly all its inflexions. This has been the case with English and French. Both are descended from languages which had elaborate grammars—the Saxon and the Latin; but both, through an admixture with foreign tongues and from other causes, have come to drop almost all their grammatical forms. We show our grammar only in a few changes in our ordinary verbs—the second and third persons singular, thou goest, he goes; the past tense and the past participle, use, used; buy, bought, etc.; in further variations in our auxiliary verb ‘to be;’ by changes in our pronouns, I, me, ye, you, who, whom, etc.; and by the ‘ ’s’ and ‘s’ of the possessive case and of the plural, and the comparison of adjectives. The French preserve their grammar to some extent in their pronouns, their adjectives, the plurals of their nouns, and in their verbs. Instances such as these are cases of decay, and do not find any place in the history of the growth of language.

We now pass on to examine where the growth of language has been fully achieved, where it has remained only stunted and imperfect.

CHAPTER IV.
FAMILIES OF LANGUAGE.

We have now traced the different stages through which language may pass in attaining to its most perfect form, the inflected stage. There were the two stages in which what we may call the bones of the language were formed, the acquisition of those words which, like pen, ink and paper, when standing alone bring a definite idea into the mind, and, next, the acquisition of those other words which, like to, for, and, produce no idea in the mind when taken alone. We saw that while the first class of words may have been acquired with any imaginable rapidity, the second class could only have gradually come into use as one by one they fell out of the rank of the ‘significant’ class.

Again, after this skeleton of language has been got together, there were, we saw, three other stages which went to make up the grammar of a language: the radical stage, in which all the words of the language can be cut up into roots which are generally monosyllables, each of which has a meaning as a separate word; the agglutinative stage, when the root, i.e. the part of the word which expresses the essential idea, remains always distinct from any added portion; and, thirdly, the inflected stage, when in many cases the root and the addition to the root have become so interwoven as to be no longer distinguishable.

Of course, really to understand what these three conditions are like, the reader would have to be acquainted with some language in each of the three; but it is sufficient if we get clearly into our heads that there are these stages of language-growth, and that, further, each one of all the languages of the world may be said to be in one of the three. Our opportunities of tracing the history of languages being so limited, we have no recorded instance of a language passing out of one stage into another; but when we examine into these states they so clearly wear the appearance of stages that there seems every reason to believe that a monosyllabic language might in time develop into an agglutinative, and again from that stage into an inflexional, language, if nothing stopped its growth.

Arrest in the
growth of
language.

But what, we may ask, are the causes which put a stop to the free growth and development of language? One of these causes is the invention of writing. Language itself is of course spoken language, speech, and as such is subject to no laws save those which belong to our organs of speaking and hearing. No sooner is the word spoken than it is gone, and lives only in the memory; and thus speech, though it may last for centuries, dies, as it were, and comes to life again every hour. It is with language as it is with those national songs and ballads which, among nations that have no writing, take the place of books and histories. The same poem or the same tale passes from mouth to mouth almost unchanged for hundreds of years, and yet at no moment is it visible and tangible, nor for the most part of the time audible even, but for these centuries lives on in men’s memories only. So Homer’s ballads must have passed for several hundred years from mouth to mouth; and, stranger still, stories which were first told somewhere by the banks of the Oxus or the Jaxartes by distant ancestors of ours, are told to this very day, little altered, by peasants in remote districts of England and Scotland. But to return to language. It is very clear that so long as language remains speech and speech only, it is subject to just so many variations as, in the course of a generation or two, men may have introduced into their habits of speaking. Why these variations arise it is perhaps not quite easy to understand; but every one knows that they do arise, that from age to age, from generation to generation, not only are new words being continually introduced, and others which once served well enough dropped out of use, but constant changes are going on in the pronunciation of words. As we have already said, if left to itself a language would not remain quite the same in two different districts. We know, for instance, that the language of common people does differ very much in different counties, so that what with varieties of pronunciation, and what with the use of really peculiar words, the inhabitants of one county are scarcely intelligible to the inhabitants of another.

This constant change in language can be resolved, so to say, into two forces—one of decay, the other of renewal. The change which each word undergoes is of the nature of decay. It loses something from its original form. But then, out of this change, it passes into new forms; and very often out of one word, by this mere process of change in sound, two words spring. We have already seen instances of how this may come about. The Anglo-Saxon agân becomes in process of time agone, as we have seen. That word again, by a further process of decay, changes into ago. So far we have nothing but loss. But then the Old English agân had only the same meaning as our past participle gone.[26] So now we have two words really in the place of one, and where formerly men would have said, ‘It is a long time agone,’ or ‘That man has lately agone,’ we now can say, ‘It is a long time ago,’ ‘The man has lately gone.’ And we may in any language watch this process of decay (phonetic decay, as it is called) and regeneration (dialectic regeneration, the philologists call it) ever going forward. We see, as it were,—

‘The hungry ocean gain
Advantage o’er the kingdom of the shore;
And the firm soil win of the watery main
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store.’

The influence which keeps a language together, and tends to make changes such as these as few as possible, is that of writing. When once writing has been invented it is clear that language no longer depends upon the memory only, no longer has such a seemingly precarious tenure of life as it had when it was no more than speech. The writing remains a strong bulwark against the changes of time. Although our written words are but the symbols of sound, they are symbols so clear that the recollection of the sound springs up in our minds the moment the written word comes before our eyes. So it is that there are hundreds of words in the English language which we should many of us not use once in a lifetime, which are yet perfectly familiar to us. All old-fashioned words which belong to the literary language, and are never used now in common life, would have been forgotten long ago except for writing. The fact, again, that those provincialisms which make the peasants of different counties almost mutually unintelligible do not affect the intercourse of educated people, is owing to the existence of a written language.

Chinese.

It was at one time thought by philologists that in Chinese we had a genuine specimen of a language in the radical stage of formation. As such it is cited, for instance, in Professor Max Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language. But the most trustworthy Chinese scholars are, I believe, now of opinion that the earliest Chinese of which we can find any trace had already passed through this stage and become an agglutinative language, and that it has since decayed somewhat from that condition to become once more almost a monosyllabic language.

However that may be, it is acknowledged that Chinese has never passed beyond a very primitive condition, and that its having rested so long in this state is due more than anything else to the early invention of writing in that country. We know how strange has been the whole history of civilization in China. How the Chinese, after they had made long ago an advance far beyond all their contemporaries at that date of the world’s history, seem to have suddenly stopped short there, and have remained ever since a stunted incomplete race, devoid of greatness in any form. Their character is reflected very accurately in their language. While it was still in a very primitive condition writing was introduced into the country, and from that time forward the tongue remained almost unchanged. Other languages which are closely allied to Chinese—Burmese, Siamese, and Thibetan—are so nearly monosyllabic that they can scarcely be considered to have yet got fairly into the agglutinative stage.

It is, then, writing which has preserved for us Chinese in the very primitive condition in which we find it. For people in a lower order of civilization there may be many other causes at work to prevent an agglutinative language

Turanian
languages.

becoming inflexional. It is not always easy to say what the hindering causes have been in any individual case; but perhaps, if we look at the difference between the last two classes of language, we can get some idea of what they might be for the class of agglutinative languages as a whole. An inflexional language has quite lost the memory of the real meaning of its inflexions—or at least the real reason of them. We could give no reason why we should not use bought in the place of buy, art in the place of am, whom in the place of who—no other reason save that we have always been taught to use the words in the position they take in our speech. But there was once a time when the changes only existed in the form of additions having a distinct meaning. Even in agglutinative languages these additions have a distinct meaning as additions, or, in other words, if we were using an agglutinative language we should be always able to distinguish the addition from the root, and so should understand the precise effect of the former in modifying the latter. To understand the use of words in an agglutinative language, therefore, a great deal less of tradition and memory would be required than are wanted to preserve an inflected language. This really is the same as saying that for the inflected language we must have a much more constant use; and this again implies a greater intellectual life, a closer bond of union among the people who speak it, than exists among those who speak agglutinative languages.

Or if we look at the change from another point of view, we can say that the cause of the mixing up of the root, and its addition came at first from a desire to shorten the word and to save time—a desire which was natural to people who spoke much and had much intercourse. We may then, from these various considerations, conclude that the people who use the agglutinative languages are people who have not what is called a close and active national life. This is exactly what we find to be the case. If a primitive language, such as the Chinese, belongs to a people who have, as it were, developed too quickly, the agglutinative languages, as a class, distinguish a vast section of the human race whose natural condition is a very unformed one, who are for the most part nomadic races without fixed homes, or laws, or states. They live a tribal existence, each man having little intercourse save with those of his immediate neighbourhood. They are unused to public assemblies. Such assemblies take among early peoples almost the place of literature, in obliging men to have a common language and a united national life. Being without these controlling influences, it results that the different dialects and tongues belonging to the agglutinative class are almost endless. It is not our intention to weary the reader by even a bare list of them. But we may glance at the chief heads into which these multifarious languages may be grouped, and the geographical position of those who speak them.

The agglutinative tongues include the speech of all those peoples of Central Asia whom in common language we are wont to speak of as Tartars, but whom it would be more correct to describe as belonging to the Turkic or Mongol class, and of whom several different branches—the Huns, who emigrated from the borders of China to Europe; the Mongols or Moghuls, who conquered Persia and Hindustan; and lastly, the Osmanlîs, or Ottomans, who invaded Europe and founded the Turkish Empire—are the most famous, and most infamous, in history. Another large class of agglutinative languages belongs to the natives of the vast region of Siberia, from the Ural mountains to the far east. Another great class, closely allied to these last, the Finnish tongues namely, once spread across all the northern half of what is now European Russia, and across North Scandinavia; but the people who spoke them have been gradually driven to the extreme north by the Russians and Scandinavians. Lastly, a third division is formed by those languages which belonged to the original inhabitants of Hindustan before the greater part of the country was occupied by the Hindus. These languages are spoken of as the Dravidian class. The natural condition of these various nations or peoples is, as we have said, a nomadic state, a state in which agriculture is scarcely known, though individual nations out of them have risen to considerable civilization. And as in very early times ancestors of ours who belonged to a race speaking an inflexional language bestowed upon some part of these nomadic people the appellation Tura, which means ‘the swiftness of a horse,’ from their constantly moving from place to place, the word Turanian has been applied to all these various peoples, and the agglutinative languages are spoken of generally as Turanian tongues.

Aryan and
Semitic
languages.

And now we come to the last—the most important body of languages—the inflected; and we see that for it have been left all the more important nations and languages of the world. Almost all the ‘historic’ people, living or dead, almost all the more civilized among nations, come under this our last division: the ancient Egyptians, Chaldæans, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, as well as the modern Hindus and the native Persians, and almost all the inhabitants of Europe, with the countless colonies which these last have spread over the surface of the globe. The class of inflected languages is separated into two main divisions or families, within each of which the languages are held by a tie of relationship. Just as people are of the same family when they recognize their descent from a common ancestor, so languages belong to one family when they can show clear signs that they have grown out of one parent tongue. We may be sure that we are all the children of the first pair, and we may know in the same way that all languages must have grown and changed out of the first speech. But the traces of parentage and relationship are in both cases buried in oblivion; it is only when we come much farther down in the history of the world that we can really see the marks of distinct kinship in the tongues of nations separated by thousands of miles, different in colour, in habits, in civilization, and quite unconscious of any common fatherhood.

Kinship in
languages.

Now as to the way in which this kinship among languages may be detected. Among some languages there is such a close relationship that even an unskilled eye can discover it. When we see, for instance, such likenesses as exist in English and German between the very commonest words of life—kann and can, soll and shall, muss and must, ist and is, gut and good, hart and hard, mann and man, für and for, together with an innumerable number of verbs, adjectives, substantives, prepositions, etc., which differ but slightly one from another—we may feel sure either that the English once spoke German, that the Germans once spoke English, or that English and German have both become a little altered from a lost language which was spoken by the ancestors of the present inhabitants of England and Deutsch-land. As a matter of fact the last is the case. English and German are brother languages, neither is the parent of the other. Now having our attention once called to this relationship, we might, any of us who know English and German, at once set about making a long list of words which are common to the two languages; and it would not be a bad amusement for any reader just to turn over the leaves of a dictionary and note how many German words (especially of the common sort) they find that have a corresponding word in English. The first thing we begin to see is the fact that the consonants form, as it were, the bones of a word, and that changes of a vowel are, as a rule, comparatively unimportant provided these remain unaltered. The next thing we see is that even the consonants do not generally remain the same, but that in place of one such letter in one language, another of a sound very like it appears in the other language.

For instance, we soon begin to notice that ‘T’ in German is often represented by ‘D’ in English, as tag becomes day; tochter, daughter; breit, broad; traum, dream; reiten, ride; but sometimes by ‘TH’ in English, as vater becomes father; mutter, mother. Again, ‘D’ in German is often equal to ‘TH’ in English, as dorf, thorpe; feder, feather; dreschen, thrash (thresh); drängen, throng; der (die), the; das, that. Now there is a certain likeness common to these three sounds, ‘T,’ ‘D,’ and ‘TH,’ as any one’s ear will tell him if he say te, de, the. As a matter of fact they are all pronounced with the tongue pressed against the teeth, only in rather different places; and in the case of the last sound, the,[27] with a breath or aspirate sent between the teeth at the same time. So we see that, these letters being really so much alike in sound, there is nothing at all extraordinary in one sound becoming exchanged for another in the two languages. We learn, therefore, to look beyond the mere appearance of the word, to weigh, so to speak, the sounds against each other, and to detect likenesses which might perhaps otherwise have escaped us. For instance, if we see that CH in German is often represented by GH in English—in such words as tochter, daughter; knecht, knight; möchte, might; lachen, laugh,—we have no difficulty in now seeing how exactly durch corresponds to our through. For we have at the beginning the d which naturally corresponds to our t, the r remains unchanged, and the ch naturally corresponds to our gh; only the vowel is different in position, and that is of comparatively small account. Nevertheless at first sight we should by no means have been inclined to allow the near relationship of durch and through. Thus our power of comparison continually increases, albeit a knowledge of several languages is necessary before we can establish satisfactory rules or proceed with at all sure steps.

When we have acquired this knowledge there are few things more interesting than noting the changes which words undergo in the different tongues, and learning how to detect the same words under various disguises. And when we have begun to do this, it is by comparing the words of our own language with corresponding words in the allied tongues German, Norse, or Dutch, whatever it may be, that we are most frequently reminded of the meaning of words which have half grown out of use with us. As, for instance, when the German Leiche (corpse) reminds us of the meaning of lich-gate (A.S. lica, a corpse) and Lichfield; or the Norse moos, a marshy or heathy region, explains our moss-troopers. I doubt if most people quite know what sea-mews are, still more if the word mewstone (which, for example, is the name of a rock near Plymouth) would at once call up the right idea into their mind. But the German Möwe, sea-gull, makes it all plain. How curious is the relationship between earth and hearth, which is exactly reproduced in the German Erde and Herde! or the obsolete use of the word tide for ‘time’ (the original meaning of the tides—the ‘times,’) in the expression ‘Time and tide wait for no man’! But in the Norse we have the same expression Tid og Time, which signifies exactly Macbeth’s ‘time and the hour.’ And of course these words, our tide, Norse Tid, are the correspondants of the German zeit. When once we have detected how often the German z corresponds to the English t—as in Zahn, tooth; Zehe, toe; Zählen, to tell (i.e., to count); Zinn, tin—we have no difficulty in seeing that our town may correspond to the German Zaun, a hedge: and we guess, what is in fact the case, that the original meaning of town was only an enclosed or empaled place. The relationship of our fee to the German Vieh, cattle, and the proof that the earliest money with us was cattle-money, would, at first sight, be perhaps not so easily surmised by a mere comparison of German and English words. These are only one or two of the ten thousand points of interest which rise up before us almost immediately after we have, so to say, stepped outside the walls of our own language into the domains of its very nearest relations.

Nor is the interest of this kind of comparison less great very often in the case of proper names. The smaller family—or, as we have used the word family to express a large class of languages, let us say the branch to which English and German belong—is called the Teutonic branch. To that branch belonged nearly all those barbarian nations who, towards the fall of the Roman empire, began the invasion of her territories, and ended by carving out of them most of the various states and kingdoms of modern Europe. The best test we have of the nationalities of these peoples, the best proof that they were connected by language with each other and with the modern Teutonic nations, is to be found in their proper names. We have, for instance, among the Vandals such names as Hilderic, Genseric, and the like; we compare them at once with Theodoric and Alaric, which were names of famous Goths. Then as the Gothic language has been preserved we recognize the termination rîk or rîks in Gothic, meaning a ‘king,’ and connected with the German reich, and also with the Latin rex—Alaric becomes al-rik, ‘all-king,’ universal king. In Theodoric we recognize the Gothic thiudarik, ‘king of the people.’ Again, this Gothic word thiuda is really the same as the German deutsch, or as ‘Dutch,’ and is the word of which ‘Teutonic’ is only a Latinized form. In the same way Hilda-rik in Gothic is ‘king of battles;’ and having got this word from the Vandals we have not much difficulty in recognizing Childeric, the usually written form of the name of a Frankish king, as the same word. This change teaches us to turn ‘CH’ of Frankish names in our history-books into ‘H,’ so that instead of Chlovis (which should be Chlodoveus) we first get Hlovis, which is only a softened form of Hlodovig, or Hludwig, the modern Ludwig, our Louis. Hlud is known to have meant ‘famous’[28] and wig a ‘warrior,’ so that Ludwig means famous warrior. The same word ‘wig’ seems to appear in the word Merovingian, a Latinized form of Meer-wig,[29] which would mean sea-warrior.

These instances show us the kind of results we obtain by a comparison of languages. In the case of these names, for instance, we have got enough to show a very close relationship amongst the Vandals, the Goths, and the Franks; and had we time many more instances might have been chosen to support this conclusion. Here, of course, we have been confining ourselves to one small branch of a large family. The road, the farther we go, is beset with greater difficulties and dangers of mistake, and the student can do little unless he is guided by fixed rules, which we should have to follow, supposing we were able to carry on our inquiries into many and distant languages. We may, to some extent, judge for ourselves what some of these guiding rules must be.

Those words which we have instanced as being common to English and German, both we and the Germans have got by inheritance from an earlier language. Yet there are in English hundreds of words which are not acquired by inheritance from other languages, but merely by adoption; hundreds of words have been taken directly from the Latin, or from the Latin through the French, or from the Greek, and not derived from any early language which was the parent of the Latin, Greek, and English. How shall we distinguish between these classes of words? We answer, in the first place, that the simpler words are almost sure to be inherited, because people, in however rude a state they were, could never have done without words to express such everyday ideas as to have, to be, to laugh, to make, to kill—I, thou, to, for, and; whereas they might have done well enough without words such as government, literature, sensation, expression, words which express either things which were quite out of the way of these primitive people, or commonish ideas in a somewhat grand and abstract form.

One of our rules, therefore, must be to begin by choosing the commoner class of words, or, generally speaking, those words which are pretty sure never to have fallen out of use, and which therefore must have been handed down from father to son.

There is another rule—that those languages must be classed together which have like grammatical forms. This is the rule of especial importance in distinguishing a complete family of languages. For when once a language has got into the inflected stage, though it may hereafter lose or greatly modify nearly all its inflexions, it never either sinks back into the agglutinative stage, or adopts the grammatical forms of another language which is also in the inflected condition.

These are the general rules, therefore, upon which we go. We look first for the grammatical forms and then for the simple roots, and according to the resemblance or want of resemblance between them we decide whether two tongues have any relationship, and whether that relationship is near or distant.

The Semitic
races.

Now it has in this way been found out that all inflected languages belong to one of two families, called the Semitic and the Aryan. Let us begin with the Semitic. This word, which is only a Latinized way of saying Shemite, is given to the nations who are supposed to be descended from Shem, the second son of Noah. The nations who have spoken languages belonging to this Semitic family have been those who appear so much in Old Testament history, and who played a mighty part in the world while our own ancestors were still wandering tribes, and at an age when darkness still obscured the doings of the Greeks and Romans. Foremost among all in point of age and fame stand the Egyptians, who are believed to have migrated in far pre-historic ages to the land in which they rose to fame. They found there a people of a lower, a negro or half-negro race, and mingled with them, so that their language ceased to be a pure Semitic tongue. In its foundation, however, it was Semitic. The earliest of the recorded kings of Egypt, Menes, is believed to date back as far as 5000 B.C. Next in antiquity come the Chaldæans, who have left behind them great monuments in the ancient cities Erech and Ur, and their successors the Assyrians and Babylonians. Abraham, himself, we know, was a Chaldæan, and from him descended the Hebrew nation, who were destined to shed the highest honour on the Semitic race. Yet, so great may be the degeneration of some races and the rise of others, so great may be the divisions which thus spring up between peoples who were once akin, it is also true that all those peoples whom the Children of Israel were specially commanded to fight against and even to exterminate—the Canaanites, the Moabites, and the Edomites—were likewise of Semitic family. The Phœnicians are another race from the same stock who have made their mark in the world. We know how, coming first from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, they led the way in the art of navigation, sent colonies to various parts of the world, and foremost among these founded Carthage, the rival and almost the destroyer of Rome. Our list of celebrated Semitic races must close with the Arabs, the founders of Mohammedanism, the conquerors at whose name all Europe used to tremble, whose kingdoms once extended in an unbroken line from Spain to the banks of the Indus.

The Aryan
races.

Such a list gives no mean place to the Semitic family of nations; but those of the Aryan stock are perhaps even more conspicuous. This family (which is sometimes called Japhetic, or descendants of Japhet) includes the Hindus and Persians among Asiatic nations, and almost all the peoples of Europe. It may seem strange that we English should be related not only to the Germans and Dutch and Scandinavians, but to the Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, French, Spanish, Italians, Romans, and Greeks as well; stranger still that we can claim kinship with such distant peoples as the Armenians, Persians, and Hindus. Yet such is the case, and the way in which all these different nations once formed a single people, speaking one language, and their subsequent dispersion over the different parts of the world in which we now find them, affords one of the most interesting inquiries within the range of pre-historic study. What seems actually to have been the case is this: In distant ages, somewhere about the rivers Oxus and Jaxartes, and on the north of that mountainous range called the Hindoo-Koosh, dwelt the ancestors of all the nations we have enumerated, forming at this time a single and united people, simple and primitive in their way of life, but yet having enough of a common national life to preserve a common language. They called themselves Aryas or Aryans, a word which, in its very earliest sense, seems to have meant those who move upwards, or straight; and hence, probably, came to stand for the noble race as compared with other races on whom, of course, they would look down.[30]

How long these Aryans had lived united in this their early home it is, of course, impossible to say; but as the tribes and families increased in numbers, a separation would naturally take place. Large associations of clans would move into more distant districts, the connection between the various bodies which made up the nation would be less close, their dialects would begin to vary, and thus the seeds of new nations and languages would be sown. The beginning of such a separation was a distinction which arose between a part of the Aryan nation, who stayed at the foot of the Hindoo-Koosh Mountains, and in all the fertile valleys which lie there, and another part which advanced farther into the plain. This latter received the name Yavanas, which seems to have meant the protectors, and was probably given to them because they stood as a sort of foreguard between the Aryans, who still dwelt under the shadow of the mountains, and the foreign nations of the plains. And now, their area being enlarged, they began to separate more and more from one another; while at the same time, as their numbers increased, the space wherein they dwelt became too small for them who had, out of one, formed many different peoples. Then began a series of migrations, in which the collection of tribes who spoke one language and formed one people started off to seek their fortune in new lands, and thus for ever broke off association with their kindred and their old Aryan home. One by one the different nations among the Yavanas (the protectors) were infected with this new spirit of adventure, and though they took different routes, they all travelled westward, and arrived in Europe at last.[31]

A not improbable cause has been suggested of these migrations. It is known that, in spite of the immense volume of water which the Volga is daily pouring into it, the Caspian Sea is gradually drying up, and it has been conjectured as highly probable that hundreds of years ago the Caspian was not only joined to the Sea of Aral, but extended over a large district which is now sandy desert. The slow shrinking in its bed of this sea would, by decreasing the rainfall, turn what was once a fertile country into a desert; and if we suppose this result taking place while the Aryan nations were gradually increasing in numbers, the effect would be to drive them, in despair of finding subsistence in the ever-narrowing fertile tract between the desert and the mountains, to seek for new homes elsewhere. This, at any rate, is what they did. First among them, in all probability, started the Kelts or Celts, who, travelling perhaps to the south of the Caspian and the north of the Black Sea, found their way to Europe, and spread far on to the extreme west. At one time it is most likely that the greater part of Europe was inhabited by Kelts, who partly exterminated and partly mingled with the stone-age men whom they found there. As far as we know of their actual extension in historic times we find this Keltic family living in the north of Italy, in Switzerland, over all the continent of Europe west of the Rhine, and in the British Isles; for the Gauls, who then inhabited the northern part of continental Europe west of the Rhine, the ancient Britons, and probably the Iberians, the ancient inhabitants of Spain, belonged to this family.[32] The Highland Scotch, who belong to the old blood, call themselves Gaels, and their language Gaelic, which is moreover so like the language of the old Irish (who called themselves by practically the same name—Gaedhill) that a Highlander could make himself understood in Ireland; perhaps he might do so in Wales, where the inhabitants are likewise Kelts. These words Gael and Gaedhill are of the same origin and meaning as Gaul. In the early days of the Roman republic the Gauls, as we know, inhabited all the north of Italy, and used often to make successful incursions down to the very centre of the peninsula. Beyond the Alps they extended as far as into Belgium, which formed part of ancient Gaul. So much for the Kelts.

Another great family which left the Aryan home was that from which descended the Greeks and Romans.[33] The primitive ancestors of these two people have been called the Pelasgians (Pelasgi), the name which the Greeks gave to their own ancestors who lived in the days before the name Hellenes was used for the Greek nationality. There is evidence of a certain early civilization, which is believed to have been that of these primitive Pelasgi, in the centre of Asia Minor. And it seems probable that the line of migration of this nationality passed to the south of the Caspian Sea, then through Asia Minor, and finally, not all at once, but in successive streams, some across the Hellespont or Dardanelles to the north of Italy and the north of Greece, and some to the coast of Asia Minor, and across by the islands of the Ægean to the mainland of Greece. At every point upon the route there were left behind remains—offshoots, as it were, or cuttings from the great Pelasgic stem,—a primitive half-Greek stock in the centre of Asia Minor, a barbarous half-Greek stock in Thrace and Macedon; while all along the coasts of Asia Minor and the Greek Islands, and in the southern parts of European Greece (more especially those which looked eastward) there arose a much more cultivated race. For in these regions the Greeks came in contact with the Phœnicians, and gathered much from the civilizations of Egypt and Assyria. If there were remains of a primitive Italian race in the north of Italy these were (in subsequent, but still pre-historic years) blotted out by the spread of the Gauls beyond the Alps.

How little did these rival nationalities, the Greeks and Romans, deem that their ancestors had once formed a single people! All such recollections had been lost to the Greeks and Romans, who, when we find them in historic times, had invented quite different stories to account for their origin.

Next we come to two other great families of nations who seem to have taken the same route at first, and perhaps began their travels together as the Greeks and Romans did. These are the Teutons and the Slavs. They seem to have travelled by the north of the Caspian and Black Sea, extending over all the south of Russia, and down to the borders of Greece; then gradually to have pushed on to Europe, ousting the Kelts from the eastern portion, until we find them in the historical period threatening the borders of the Roman empire on the Rhine and the Danube. Probably the Teutons pushed on most to the west, and left the Slavs behind.

The Teutonic family of nations first comes before us vaguely in the history of the invasion of Gaul and Italy by the Cimbri and the Teutones, which, as we know, was checked by Marius in the years 102 and 101 B.C. It is probable that both Cimbri and Teutones were of German origin, though some have connected the name Cimbri with Cymri, the native name of the Welsh (whence Cumberland, etc.). This attack by the Cimbri and Teutones was only an isolated attempt on behalf of the Teutons. The great invasion of the Roman empire by them did not begin till five centuries later, in 395 A.D. Of the nations who from this time forward were engaged in the dismemberment of the empire, and in laying the foundations of mediæval history, almost all seem to have been of Teutonic origin. The chief among these nationalities were the Goths—divided into two great nationalities, the Visi-Goths (West Goths), and the Ostro-Goths (East Goths), who successively conquered Italy, and founded kingdoms in Italy, South Aquitaine, and Spain. Then there were the Vandals, the Burgundians, the Alani and the Suevi, who invaded Gaul at the beginning of the fifth century, and passed on, some of them, to found kingdoms in Spain and Africa. There were the Lombards who succeeded the Ostro-Goths as conquerors of Italy; the Franks who subdued the Burgundians and the Visi-Goths; the Bavarians who settled in the Roman provinces of Vindelicia and Noricum, the English (Saxons, Angles, and Jutes) who settled in the Roman province of Britain. All these nations carved for themselves new states out of the fragments of the Roman empire, and these states have for the most part remained unchanged till our day. And of all those other German states, many of which were acquired by driving back the Slavs (e.g. modern Saxony, Prussia), we need not speak here. For we have already said what are the modern nations which compose the Teutonic, or be it, for the words are the same, the Deutsch, or Dutch family. They are the Scandinavians—that is to say, the inhabitants of Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland, the English, the Dutch and Flemings (most of the old Keltic inhabitants of Belgium were subsequently driven out by Teutonic invaders), and the Germans.

Lastly, we come to the Slavonians (Slavs), about whom and the Panslavonic movement which is to weld all the Slavonic peoples into one great nationality we have heard so much in recent years. The word Slav comes from slowan, which in old Slavonian meant to ‘speak,’ and was given by the Slavonians to themselves as the people who alone, in their view, spoke intelligibly. Just so the Greek word βάρβαροι (barbaroi), from which we get our word barbarians, arose, in obedience to a like prejudice, only from the imitation of people babbling or making unintelligible sounds—‘bar-bar-bar.’ But among the Germans who conquered and enslaved the people, Slav became synonymous with the Latin servus, and from them it passed on to express the idea of slave—esclave, schiavo, etc. The Slavonic people once extended much farther to the west in Northern Europe than they do at present—as far, for instance, as the Elbe in Northern Germany. We begin to hear of them in history about the age of Charlemagne—a little, that is, before the end of the eighth century, A.D. The Obotriti and the Wiltzi are the names of two Slavonic nations on the Baltic, of whom we hear much about this time. But they can no longer be identified as the ancestors of any existing race. In the reign of Charlemagne’s grandson, called Lewis the German, we hear much of other Slavonic peoples whose names have more meaning for us—the Sorabians, the Czechs (i.e. Bohemians), the Mähren or Moravians, and the Carinthians, who, if they have as separate peoples ceased to exist, have left behind them their names in the lands they inhabited.

The same has been the case with other Slavonic peoples who appear later in history—the Pomeranians and the Prussians (earlier Borussians) and the Silesians. The people who now bear these names and inhabit these countries are by origin almost exclusively Teutonic; but the names themselves and the earlier inhabitants were not Teutons, but Slavs.

The existing Slavonic nationalities are the Russians, Lithuanians (incorporated in Russia), the Poles, the Czechs or Bohemians, the Bulgarians, Servians, Montenegrins, etc.,—most, in fact, of the nations of the Southern Danube.

Pre-historic
research
through
language.

This is the classification of nationalities by their language. No classification is perfect; and we know, as an historical fact, that many nations have abandoned their original tongue, and adopted that of some other people—their conquerors probably,—as the Gauls and Goths (or Iberians) of France and Spain have adopted the Latin of the Romans, as the Highland Scottish, the Irish, the Welsh and Cornishmen have adopted English.

But a classification by language is far more satisfactory than any other sort of classification of nations. For when we think of nations we do not think first of all of their physique. The most important thing to know about them is not their hair was dark or red, their eyes brown or blue. What we care most to learn are their national character, their thoughts, their beliefs, their forms of social life. And for the days when we have no national literature, no history, to guide us, almost the only means of gaining reliable information upon these points is by a study of the language of the people in question. Language holds within it far better than do tumuli or weapons, or articles of pottery or woven-stuffs or ornaments, the records of long-past times, records of material civilization and mental culture likewise. It holds these records, as a chemist would say, in solution in it; not visible perhaps to the mere passer-by; but if we know how to precipitate the solution it is wonderful what results we obtain.

No sooner has he finished his classification of languages than a mine of almost exhaustless wealth then opens before the philologist—a mine, too, which has at present been only broached. He soon learns the laws governing the changes of sound from one tongue into another. We have noted experimentally some of these laws in the more simple relationships of language, as between English and German, where ‘tag’ becomes ‘day,’ ‘dorf’ ‘thorpe,’ and the like; and all relationships of language are answerable to similar rules. There are laws for the change of sound from Sanskrit into the primitive forms of Greek, Latin, German, English, etc., just as there are laws of change between the first two or the last two.[34] So we soon learn to recognize a word in one language which reappears in altered guise in another. And it may be well imagined how valuable such knowledge can be made. If we find a word common say to Greek and Latin, signifying some simple object, a weapon, a tool, an animal, a house, it is not over-likely that it will have changed from the time when it was first employed: the words of this kind which are now in use have, we know, little tendency to change. So that the time when this word was first used is in all probability the time when the thing was first known to primitive man; and if the word is common to the whole Aryan family, or if it is peculiar to a portion only, then it is argued that the thing was known or unknown before the separation of the Aryan folk. I do not, of course, say that rule is never at fault, only that this is a better criterion than any other sort of research would afford us, and that by this method of word-comparison we get no bad picture of the world of our earliest Aryan ancestors.

It might well have happened that when the migrations began our ancestors were still like the stone-age men of the shell-mounds, still in the hunter condition; that they knew nothing of domesticated animals, or of pastures and husbandmen: or it might be, again, that they had left the pastoral state long behind, and that all their ideas associated themselves with agriculture, with the division of the land, and with the recurring seasons for planting. The evidence of language, dealt with after the fashion we have described, points to the belief that the ancient Aryans had only made some beginnings of agriculture, as a supplement to their natural means of livelihood, their flocks and herds: for among the words common to the whole Aryan race there are very few connected with farming, whereas their vocabulary is redolent of the herd, the cattle-fold, the herdsman, the milking-time. Even the word daughter, which corresponds to the Greek thugatêr and the Sanskrit duhitar, means in the last language ‘the milker,’ and that seems to throw back the practice of milking to a vastly remote antiquity.[35]

On the other hand, the various Indo-European branches have different names for the plough, one name for the German races, another for the Græco-Italic, and for the Sanskrit. And though aratrum has a clear connection with a Sanskrit root ar, it is not absolutely certain that it ever had in this language the sense of ploughing, and not merely of wounding, which is a still more primitive meaning of the same root, whence came the expression for ploughing as of wounding the earth.

Or say we wish to form some notion of the social life of the Aryans. Had they extended ideas of tribal government? Had they kings, or were they held together only by the units of family life? Our answer would come from an examination of their common word for ‘king.’ If they have no common word, then we may guess that the title and office of kingship arose among the separate Aryan people and received a name from each. Or is it that their common word for king had first some simpler signification, ‘father,’ perhaps, showing that among the Aryan folk the social bond was still confined within the real or imaginary boundary of the family? In fact we do find a common word for king in several of the Aryan languages which has no subsidiary meaning less than that of directing, or keeping straight. This is the Latin rex, the Gothic rîks, Sanskrit rîg, etc., and its earliest ascertainable meaning was ‘the director.’ The Aryans then, even in those days, acknowledged as supreme[36] some director chosen (probably) from out of the tribe, a chief to lead their common warlike or migratory expeditions.

These are but illustrations of the method upon which are founded all conclusions touching these our ancestors, and the manner of our knowledge concerning them; far better obtained than merely by gazing upon the instruments which have fallen from their hands, or the monuments they might have raised to commemorate the dead. The difference, in truth, between relics such as these which lie enclosed in language, and the weapons and tombs of the Stone Ages, is exactly the difference between Shakespeare’s statue in Westminster Abbey or his bust at Stratford, and that ‘livelong monument’ whereof Milton spoke. By perfecting beyond the power of any other race the wonderfully complex faculty of speech the Aryans secured that their memory should be handed on the more certainly, and with far greater completeness, than by records left palpable to men’s eyes and hands. Many of their secret thoughts might be unlocked by the same key. Already the same means are being used to give us glimpses of their religious ideas. For the names of the common Aryan gods can be arrived at by just the same comparative method: it may well happen that a name which is only a proper name in one language, can in another be traced to a root which unravels its original meaning. It was so, we saw, with the word daughter. Here the Sanskrit root seems to unravel the hidden—the lost, and so hidden—meaning in the Greek or English words. So with a god, the meaning of a name, concealed from the sight of those who used it in prayer or praise, becomes revealed to us by the divining rod of the science of language.

And it is true, nevertheless, that the mine of wealth thus opened has as yet been but cursorily explored.[37] There are far more and greater fish in this sea than ever came out of it. Some day, perhaps, a strictly scientific method may be found for classifying and tracing the changes which words undergo. Sometimes a word is found greatly modified; sometimes it survives almost intact between the different tongues. Is there any reason for this? At present we cannot say.

The question might be answered by means of an elaborate classification under the head of the alterations which words have undergone,[38] and such a comparative vocabulary would lead to the solution of infinite questions concerning the growth of nations. We should be able to look almost into the minds of people long ago, better than we can examine the minds of contemporary races in a lower mental condition, and see what ideas took a strong hold upon them, what things they treated as realities, what metaphorically, and how large for them was the empire of imagination.

Next there is the boundless field of proper names, both those of persons and geographical names. These last in every country bear a certain witness to the races who have passed through that country, and show—roughly at least—the order of their appearance there. The older geographical names will be those of natural features, rivers, mountains, lakes, which have been never absent from the scene; the newer names will be those bestowed upon the works of man. In our own country this is the case. The names of our rivers (Thames, Ouse, Severn, Wye) are nearly all Keltic, i.e. British; those of our towns are Teutonic, Saxon or Norse. Some few Roman names linger on, as in the name and termination ‘Chester;’ but this, as meaning a place of strength, shows us clearly the reason of its survival. Every European country has changed hands, as ours has done; nay, every country in the world.[39] So here again we have promise of plenty of work for the philologist in compiling a ‘Glossary of Proper Names’ with etymologies.

Lastly, let it not be forgotten that a great part of all that has been done for the Aryan can be done likewise for the Semitic languages—a field as yet little turned by the plough; and the reader will confess the debt the world is likely some day to owe to Comparative Philology.

CHAPTER V.
THE NATIONS OF THE OLD WORLD.

Prehistoric
nationalities.

When we try and gather into one view the results of our inquiries upon the kindreds and nations of the old world, it must be confessed we are struck rather by the extent of our ignorance than of our knowledge. For all the light we are able to shed, the movements and the passage of the various races in this prehistoric time appear to the eye of the mind most like the movement of great hosts of men seen dimly through a mist. Or shall we say that we are in the position of persons living upon some one of many great military highways, while before their eyes pass continually bodies of troops in doubtful progress to and fro, affording to them, where they stand, no indication of the order of battle or the plan of the campaign? Still, to men in such a position there would be more or less of intelligence possible in the way in which they watched the steps of those who passed before them; and we, too, though we cannot attempt really to follow the track of mankind down from the earliest times, may yet gather some idea of the changing positions which from age to age have been occupied by the larger divisions of our race.

In the Bible narrative continuous history begins, at the earliest, not before the time of Abraham. In the earlier chapters of Genesis we find only scattered notices of individuals who dwelt in one particular corner of the world, nothing to indicate the general distribution of races, or the continuous lapse of time. It is, moreover, a fact that, owing partly to the associations of childhood, we are apt, by a too literal interpretation, to rob the narrative of some part of its historical value. Here, proper names, which we might be inclined to take for the names of single individuals, often stand for whole races, and sometimes for the countries which gave their names to the people dwelling in them. ‘Son of,’ too, must not be taken in its most literal meaning, but in the wider, and in old languages the perfectly natural, sense of ‘descended from.’ When nations kept the idea of a common ancestor before their minds, in a way with which we of the present day are quite unfamiliar, it was very customary to describe any one person of that people as the ‘son of’ the common ancestor. Thus a Greek who wished to bring before his hearers the common nationality of the Greek people—the Hellenes—would speak of them as being the sons of Hellen, of the Æolians or Ionians as sons of Æolus or Ion. In another way, again, an Athenian or Theban might speak of his fellow-citizens as sons of Athens or of Thebes. Such language among any ancient people is not poetical or hyperbolical language, but the usual speech of every day. It is in a similar fashion that in the Bible narrative, centuries are passed rapidly over. And if the remains of the stone ages lift a little the veil which hides man’s earliest doings upon earth, it must be confessed that the light which these can shed is but slight and partial. We catch sight of a portion of the human race making their rude implements of stone and bone, living in caves as hunters and fishers, without domestic animals and without agriculture, but not without faculties which raise them far above the level of the beasts by which they are surrounded. Yet of these early men we may say we know not whence they come or whither they go. We cannot tell whether the picture which we are able to form of man of the earliest time—of the first stone age—is a general or a partial picture; whether it represents the majority of his fellow-creatures, or only a particular race strayed from the first home of man.

Black,
yellow, red,
and white
races.

We must therefore be content to resign the hope of anything like a review of man’s life since the beginning. Before we see him clearly, he had probably spread far and wide over the earth, and already separated into the three or four most important divisions of the race. It is usual to divide the human race into four divisions named after, but not entirely founded upon, the colour of their skins. These divisions are the black, yellow, red, and white races. I do not propose to go into any elaborate description either of the peculiarities or the habitat of these four sections of humanity. The greater part of mankind have no place in history properly so called. We know them only in the present, their past is lost for ever. And the present volume being designed to open the door to history is really not concerned with races such as these. It will be enough very briefly to indicate the main characteristics of the four races of mankind, and to refer the reader for more information to the chapter in Mr. Tylor’s Anthropology dealing with the subject.

The Black
Races.

The black or negro race, then, consists of two divisions the negroes of Africa, and the negroes of certain among the islands of the Pacific bordering upon Australia and called Melanesia. This Melanesia, or ‘the negro islands’ as we might call them, include Tasmania, New Guinea, and a great number of smaller islands. But they do not include Australia and New Zealand, the inhabitants of both which countries have physical features differing from those of the genuine negro, though the Australian type approaches very near to his. The colour of the skin is not really the chief characteristic of this race, but far more so is the very crisp hair (what is called wool), the very flat and broadened nose, the broad lips, and the advanced under-jaw, or, as it is called, the prognathism of the face. This black race has never had anything that deserves to be called either a literature or a history.

The Red
Races.

The red race, which we will take next, is that which inhabits or, till the Europeans came, inhabited the whole of America, North and South, except the extreme North, the country of the Eskimo. We take these people next because they are almost as unknown to history as are the negroes. The peculiarities of the red races are their red skin, their high cheek-bones, the straight black hair which, exactly opposite to that of the negro, never curls.[40] This race has not been quite so stationary as the negro. Some of its members, the Aztecs of Mexico, the Incas of Peru, did attain to a considerable civilization. But they had advanced no way in the art of writing or keeping records of their past, which is thus wholly lost to us; and we have no means of connecting the civilization of the red races with the civilization of that part of the world which has had a history.

We are therefore left to deal with the two remaining classes, the yellow and the white. The oldest, that is to say apparently the least changed, of these is the yellow

The Yellow
Races.

race, and perhaps their most typical representatives are the Chinese. The type is a sufficiently familiar one. ‘The skull of the yellow race is rounded in form. The oval of the head is larger than with Europeans. The cheek-bones are very projecting; the cheeks rise towards the temples, so that the outer corners of the eyes are elevated; the eyelids seem half closed. The forehead is flat above the eyes. The bridge of the nose is flat, the chin short, the ears disproportionately large and projecting from the head. The colour of the skin is generally yellow, and in some branches turns to brown. There is little hair on the body; beard is rare. The hair of the head is coarse, and, like the eyes, almost always black.’[41] In the present day the different families of the globe have gone through the changes which time and variety of climate slowly bring about in all; and the yellow race has not escaped these influences. While some of its members have by a mixture with white races or by gradual improvement, reached a type not easily distinguishable from the European, others have, through the effect of climate, approached more nearly to the characteristics of the black family. We may, however, still class these divergent types under the head of the yellow race, which we consequently find extending over a vast portion of our globe. Round the North Pole the Eskimo, the Lapps, and the Finns form a belt of people belonging to this division of mankind. Over all Northern and Central Asia the various tribes of Mongolian or Turanian race inhabiting the plains of Siberia and of Tartary, and again the Thibetans, the Chinese, Siamese, and other kindred peoples of Eastern Asia, are members of this yellow family. From the Malay peninsula the same race has spread southward, passing from land to land over the countless isles which cover the South Pacific, until they have reached the islands which lie around the Australian continent, the islands of Polynesia in the South Pacific, and have mingled with the negro race that had preceded them there and that remains unmixed in the Melanesian islands. The Maoris, the inhabitants of New Zealand, belong to this yellow race; and the Australians, perhaps, represent a mixture of negro and yellow races. In all, this division of mankind covers an immense portion of the globe stretching from Greenland in a curved line, through North America and China, downwards to New Zealand, and again westward from China through Tartary or Siberia, up to Lapland in the north of Europe. And it must be added that many anthropologists consider the red races of America only a variety of this wide-spread yellow race.

The White
Races.

From the results of the previous chapter we see that to the yellow race must be attributed all those peoples of Europe and Asia which speak agglutinative languages, and therefore that for the white race are left the inflected tongues. These it will be remembered, we divided into two great families, the Semitic and the Aryan or Japhetic. We thus see that from the earliest times to which we are able to point we have living in Europe and Asia these three divisions of the human family, whom some have looked upon as the descendants of Ham, Shem, and Japhet. What relationship the other excluded races of mankind, the black and red, bear to the Hamites, Shemites, and Japhetites, has not been suggested. It seems more reasonable to consider Noah as merely the ancestor of the white races, and, therefore, so far as our linguistic knowledge goes, of the Semitic and Aryan families of speech only. But outside the pure Semites there lived a race of a less pure nationality, springing, probably, from a mixture of Semites with earlier black and yellow races. These people we may distinguish as Hamites. A division of this race were the Cushites, the stock from which the Egyptian, the Chaldæan, and many of the Canaanite nations were mainly formed.

But though from the earliest times there were probably in Asia these three divisions of mankind, their relative position and importance was very different from what it is now. At the present time the Turanian races are everywhere shrinking and dwindling before the descendants of Japhet. At the moment at which I write it is the Aryan Slavs who are pushing the yellow-skinned Tartars farther and farther back in Siberia and Central Asia, and are endeavouring to push the Mongolian Turks from their last foothold in Europe.[42] The Tartar races have had their era of great conquest too, for to them belong those races—Huns, Avars, Magyars—who have spread such devastation in Europe, to them belong such conquerors as Attila, Genghis Khan, and Timûr Lenk (Tamerlane). In the first few centuries after Mohammedism was introduced among them, the Turanians of Central Asia rose into power. Several different Tartar races in succession—Seljûks, Ayyûbites, Mongols (Moghuls), etc.—rose upon the ruins of the Arab Chalifate, and invaded India, Persia, Africa, and Europe. The last of these is the race of the Osmanlîs, or, as we call them simply, the Turks. Their days of conquest are past, and therefore, great as is the space which the Turanian people now occupy over the face of the globe, there is reason to believe that in early prehistoric times they were still more widely extended. In all probability the men of the polished-stone age in Europe and Asia were of this yellow-skinned Mongolian type. We know that the human remains of this period seem to have come from a short and round-skulled people; and this roundness of the skull is one of the chief marks of the Mongolians as distinguished from the white races of mankind.

We know, too, that the earliest inhabitants of India belonged to a Turanian, and therefore to a yellow, race; and that Turanians mingled with one of the oldest historical Semitic peoples, and helped to produce the civilization of the Chaldæans. And as, moreover, we find in various parts of Asia traces of a civilization similar to that of Europe during the latter part of the polished-stone age, it seems not unreasonable, in casting our eyes back upon the remotest antiquity on which research sheds any light, to suppose an early widespread Turanian or Mongolian family extending over the greater part of Europe and Asia. These Turanians were in various stages of civilization or barbarism, from the rude condition of the hunters and fishers of the Danish shell-mounds to a higher state reigning in Central and Southern Asia, and similar to that which was afterwards attained towards the end of the polished-stone age in Europe. The earliest home of these pure Turanians was probably a region lying somewhere to the east of Lake Aral. ‘There,’ says a writer from whom we have already quoted, ‘from very remote antiquity they had possessed a peculiar civilization, characterized by gross Sabeism, peculiarly materialistic tendencies, and complete want of moral elevation; but at the same time, by an extraordinary development in some branches of knowledge, great progress in material culture in some respects, while in others they remained in an entirely rudimentary state. This strange and incomplete civilization exercised over great part of Asia an absolute preponderance, lasting, according to the historian Justin, 1500 years.’[43]

As regards its pre-historic remains, we know that this civilization, or half-civilization, was especially distinguished by the raising of enormous grave-mounds and altar-stones, and it must have been characterized by strong, if not by the most elevated, religious ideas, and by a peculiar reverence paid to the dead. Now, we have seen that it is by characteristics very similar to these that the civilization of Egypt is distinguished, and Egypt, of all nations which have possessed a history, is the oldest.

Egypt.

These are reasons, therefore, for considering the Egyptian civilization, which is in some sort the dawn of history in the world, as the continuation—the improvement, no doubt, but still the continuation—of the half-civilization of the age of stone, a culture handed on from the Turanian to the Cushite peoples. We may look upon this very primitive form of culture as spreading first through Asia, and later on outwards to the west. Four thousand and five thousand years before Christ are the dates disputed over as those of Menes, the first recorded King of Egypt.[44] And Egypt even at this early time seems to have emerged from the age of stone, and been possessed, at least, of bronze, possibly of iron. The later date, 4000 B.C., probably marks the beginning of the stone-age life corresponding to the more extensive remains in Europe. It was therefore with this early culture as it has been with subsequent fuller civilizations—

‘Nosque ubi primus equis Oriens afflavit anhelis
Illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper.’

The Egyptian civilization which (for us) begins with Menes, say 5000 B.C., reaches its zenith under the third and fourth dynasty, under the builders of the pyramids some eight hundred or a thousand years afterwards. Then in its full strength the Egyptian life rises out of the past like a giant peak, or like its own pyramids out of the sandy plains. It is cold and rigid, like a mass of granite, but it is so great that it seems to defy all efforts of time. Even when the Egyptians first come before us everything seems to point them out as a people already old; whether it be their enormous tombs and temples, their elaborately ordered social life, or their complicated religious system, with its long mysterious ritual. For all this, the Egyptian life and thought present two elements of character which may well spring from the union of two distinct nationalities. Its enormous tombs and temples and its excessive care for the bodies of the dead—for what are the pyramids but exaggerations of the stone-age grave-mounds, and the temples but improvements upon the megalithic dolmens?—recall the era of stone-age culture. The evident remains of an early animal worship show a descent from a low form of religion, such a religion as we find among Turanian or African races. But with these co-existed some much grander features. The Egyptians were intellectual in the highest degree,—in the highest degree then known to the world; and, unlike the stone-age men, succeeded in other than merely mechanical arts. In astronomy they were rivalled by but one nation, the Chaldæans; in painting and sculpture they were at the head of the world, and were as nearly the inventors of history as of writing itself,—not quite of either, as will be seen hereafter. Mixed, too, with their animal worship were some lofty religious conceptions stretching not only beyond it—the animal worship—but beyond that ‘natural’ polytheism which was the earliest creed of our own ancestors the Aryans, and a noble hope and ambition for the future of the soul. Were these higher features due to the influx of Semitic blood? It seems likely, when we remember how from the same race came a chosen people to whom the world is indebted for all that is greatest in religious thought.

Chaldæa.

During the fourth and fifth dynasties, or some three or four thousand years before Christ, Egypt and the Egyptians do, as we have said, rise up distinctly out of the region of mere conjecture. Three or four thousand years before Christ—five or six thousand years ago: this is no small distance through which to look back to the place where the first mountain-peak of history appears in view. What was doing in the other unseen regions round this mountain? Only probably in one other part of the globe could there have been found at this date a civilization in the smallest degree comparable to that of the Egyptians. This region is the valley of the Tigrus and Euphrates.

The Tigro-Euphrates valley, or Mesopotamia, was in early days as regards appearance and position very similar to the land of Egypt. These two territories are in fact two oases in an immense band of desert, which stretches from the western edge of the great Sahara (which is almost the edge of Africa itself) in a curved sweep, through part of Arabia, part of Persia, up to the great plains of central Asia; in other words, it stretches across more than one-third of the circumference of the globe. The Tigro-Euphrates oasis which the Greeks called Mesopotamia is in the Bible called Chaldæa or the country of the Chaldees. In days known to history, its inhabitants were a mixed people, of whom the oldest element was undoubtedly Turanian; and this section of the nation had probably descended from the country afterwards called Iran to the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates. These people are called by modern scholars the Accadians, or the Shûmîro-Accadians.[45] They are the Accad of the Bible. Mixed with them were a people of Semitic, or half-Semitic origin, whose language is closely allied to the Hebrew and the Aramæan. If we take the Biblical name for them, we should call them Hamites or Cushites. But the best ethnological name would be that of Aramæans.

These two races mingled, and formed the nation of Chaldæans as known to history; and in time the Semitic element predominated over the Turanian. Nevertheless it was the Accadians who had brought to the common stock the earliest elements of civilization. Their earliest tombs show them in possession of both the metals bronze and iron, though of the latter in such small quantities that it took with them the position of a precious metal; ornaments were made from it as much as from gold. What is far more important, the Accadians possessed a hieroglyphic writing similar in character to that of the Egyptians, and, after their junction with the Semite people, that developed into a syllabic alphabet.[46] We may date the fusion of the Accadian and Aramæan peoples at about 4000 B.C.

It is in this country, be it remembered, in the Tigro-Euphrates basin, that the Bible places the earliest history of the human race. ‘And it came to pass that as they journeyed from the East they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.’[47] Here, too, is placed the building of Babel, and the subsequent dispersion of the human family. Here ruled Nimrod, ‘the son of Cush,’ the first of the kings of this region of whom any authentic mention is made; though we have dynastic lists of supernatural beings who were supposed to have reigned in Chaldæa in far distant ages of the world, as we have in the case of Egypt. Even of Nimrod’s reign no monumental records have yet come to light. The cities which Nimrod built, says the Bible, were Erech [in Accadian, Ounoug, or Ûrûk] and Ur [Accad. Urû]—these two are the present Warkah and Mugheir,—Accad [Agadê] and Calneh. But the earliest human king of whom we have anything like an authentic date is either Sargon I., who may have reigned as early as 3800 B.C., or Ûrbagûs, who seems to have ruled over all Mesopotamia, contemporaneously with the fifth Egyptian dynasty (3900 or 2900 B.C.).

The Chaldean buildings of this period, like the contemporary Egyptian ones, are of gigantic proportions, and like them seem to recall bygone days, the grandiose conceptions of the later stone-age, those tumuli and cromlechs which, spread over the face of the world, most undoubtedly have suggested to subsequent nations of mankind the belief in a giant race which had preceded them on earth—

‘The far-famed hold,
Piled by the hands of giants
For god-like kings of old.’

And thus, as has already been often said, this earliest civilization in the world looks back to pre-historic days as much as forward to historic ones.

Close beside Chaldæa, in the more mountainous country to the east, but not far from the Persian Gulf, rose another civilization, that of the Elamites, which may possibly have been not much later than the Chaldæan. This, too, we may believe, was in its origin Turanian. The capital of the country of Elam was Susa. Between 2300 and 2280 B.C., a king of Susa, Kurdur-Nankunty, conquered the reigning king of Chaldæa, and henceforward the two districts were incorporated into one country. The accession of strength thus gained to his crown induced one of the kings of the Elamitic line, Kudur-lagomer (Chedorlaomer) by name, to aspire towards a wider empire (c. 2200 B.C.). He sent his armies against the Semitic nations on his west, who were now beginning to settle down in cities, and to enjoy their share of the civilization of Egypt and Chaldæa. These he subdued, but after sixteen years they rebelled; and it was after a second expedition to punish their recalcitrancy, wherein he had conquered the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, and had among the prisoners taken Lot, the nephew of Abraham, that Chedorlaomer was pursued and defeated by the patriarch. ‘And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them unto Dan. And he divided himself against them, he and his servants, by night, and smote them, and pursued them unto Hobah, which is on the left hand of Damascus. And he brought back all the goods, and also brought again his brother Lot, and his goods, and the women also, and the people.’[48]

The conquest of a powerful Chaldæan king by a handful of wandering Semites seems extraordinary, and might have sounded a note of warning to the ear of the Chaldæans. Their kingdom was destined soon to be overthrown by another Semitic people. After a duration of about half a thousand years for the Elamite kingdom, and some seven hundred years since the time of Nimrod, the Chaldæan dynasty was overthrown and succeeded by an Arabian one, that is, by a race of nomadic Shemites from the Arabian plains; and after two hundred and forty-five years they in their turn succumbed to another more powerful people of the same Semitic race, the Assyrians. The empire thus founded upon the ruins of the old Chaldæan was one of the greatest of the ancient world, as we well know from the records which meet us in the Bible. Politically it may be said to have balanced the power of Egypt. But the stability of this monarchy rested upon a basis much less firm than that of Egypt; the southern portion—the old Chaldæa—of which Babylon was the capital, was always ready for revolt, and after about seven hundred years the Babylonians and Medes succeeded in overthrowing their former conquerors. All this belongs to history—or at least to chronicle—and is therefore scarcely a part of our present inquiry.

To these primitive civilizations of Egypt, Chaldæa, and Susa we might, if we could put faith in native records, be inclined to add a fourth.

China.

The Chinese profess to extend their lists of dynasties seven, eight, or even ten thousand years backward, but there is nothing on which to rest such extravagant pretensions. Their earliest known book is believed to date from the twelfth century before Christ. It is therefore not probable that they possessed the art of writing more than fifteen hundred years before our era, and before writing is invented there can be no reliable history. The best record of early times then is to be found in the popular songs of a country, and of these China possessed a considerable number, which were collected into a book—the Book of Odes—by their sage Confucius.[49] The picture which these odes present is of a society so very different from that of the time from which their earliest book—the Book of Changes—dates, that we cannot refuse to credit it with a high antiquity. From the songs we learn that before China coalesced into the monarchy which has lasted so many years, its inhabitants lived in a sort of feudal state, governed by a number of petty princes and lords. The pastoral life which distinguished the surrounding Turanian nations had already been exchanged for a settled agricultural one, to which houses, and all the civilization which these imply, had long been familiar. For the rest, their life seems to have been then, as now, a simple, slow-moving life, not devoid of piety and domestic affection. But it should be mentioned here that recent researches seem to point to the conclusion, strange as it may appear, that the Chinese civilization is closely connected with that of the Accadians, and may have had an origin from some contact with the Accadian peoples in their earliest homes in Central Asia. In any case it hardly seems likely that this can be classed as the fourth civilization which may have existed in the world when the pyramids were being built. But it is without doubt after these three the next oldest of the civilizations which the world has known. It seems to be remote alike from the half-civilization of the other Mongolian people of the stone age, and from the mixed Turanian-Semitic civilizations of Egypt and Chaldæa.

To these early civilizations in the old world, may we add any from the new, and believe in a great antiquity of the highest civilization of the red race? The trace of an early civilization in Mexico and Peru, bearing many remarkable points of resemblance to the civilization of Chaldæa, is undoubted. This may have been passed on by the Chinese at a very early date. But there is nothing to show that the identity in some of the features of their culture extended to an identity in their respective epochs.

Assyrians,
Phœnicians,
Hebrews.

A greater destiny, though a more tardy development, awaited the pure Semitic and Japhetic races. Among the former we might notice many nations which started into life during the thousand years following that date of 3000 B.C., which we have taken as our starting-point. Of the Assyrians we have already spoken. The next most conspicuous stand the Phœnicians, who, either in their early home upon the seacoast of Syria, or in their second home, the sea itself, or in one of their countless colonies, came into contact with almost every one of the great nations of antiquity, from the Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the Israelites, to the Greeks and Romans.

But it is upon the life and history of the nomadic Shemites, and among them of one chosen people, that our thoughts chiefly rest. Among the prouder citied nations which inhabited the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates, from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea, dwelt a numerous people, more or less nomadic in their habits, under the patriarchal form of government which belonged to their mode of life. Among such a people the chief of one particular family or clan was summoned by a Divine call to escape from the influence of the idolatrous nations around, and to live that vagrant pastoral life which was in such an age most fitted for the needs of purity and religious contemplation. It is as something like a wandering Bedouin chieftain that we must picture Abraham, while we watch him, now joining with one small city king against another, now driven by famine to travel with his flocks and herds as far as Egypt. Then again he returns, and settles in the fertile valley of the Jordan, where Lot leaves him, and, seduced by the luxuries of a town life, quits his flocks and herds and settles in Sodom, till driven out again by the destruction of that city. And we are not now reading dry dynastic lists, but the very life and thought of an early time.[50] To us—whose lives are so unsimple—the mere picture of this simple nomadic life of early days would have an interest and a charm; but it has a double charm and interest viewed by the light of the high destiny to which Abraham and his descendants were called. Plying the homely, slighted shepherd’s trade, these people lived poor and despised beside the rich monarchies of Egypt or Chaldæa; one more example, if one more were needed, how wide apart lie the empires of spiritual and of material things.

Up to very late times the Children of Israel bore many of the characteristics of a nomadic people. It was as a nation of shepherds that they were excluded from the national life of Egypt. For long years after their departure thence they led a wandering life; and though, when they entered Palestine, they found cities ready for their occupation—for the nations which they dispossessed were for the most part settled people, builders of cities—and inhabited them, and, growing corn and wine, settled partly into an agricultural life, yet the chief wealth of the nation still probably consisted in their flocks, and the greater portion of the people still dwelt in tents. This was, perhaps, especially the case with the people of the north, for even so late as the separation, when the ten tribes determined to free themselves from the tyranny of Rehoboam, we know how Jeroboam cried out, ‘To your tents, O Israel.’ ‘So Israel departed unto their tents,’ the narrative continues. After the separation we are told that Jeroboam built several cities in his own dominions. The history of the Israelites generally may be summed up as the constant expression and the ultimate triumph of a wish to exchange their simple life and theocratic government for one which might place them more on a level with their neighbour states. At first it is their religion which they wish to change, whether for the gorgeous ritual of Egypt or for the vicious creeds of Asiatic nations; and after a while, madly forgetful of the tyrannies of a Ramses or a Tiglath-Pileser, they desire a king to reign over them in order that they may ‘take their place’ among the other Oriental monarchies. Still their first two kings have rather the character of military leaders, the monarchy not having become hereditary; the second, the warrior-poet, the greatest of Israel’s sons, was himself in the beginning no more than a shepherd. But under his son Solomon the monarchical government becomes assured, the country attains (like Rome under Augustus) the summit of its splendour and power, and then enters upon its career of slow and inevitable decline.

The Aryans.

Now let us turn to the Japhetic people—the Aryans. It is curious that the date of three thousand years before Christ, from which we started in our glance over the world, should also be considered about that of the separation of the Aryan people. Till that time they had continued to live—since when we know not—in their early home near the Oxus and Jaxartes, and we are able by the help of comparative philology to gain some little picture of their life at the time immediately preceding the separation. We have already seen how this picture is obtained; how, taking a word out of one of the Aryan languages and making allowance for the changed form which it would wear in the other tongues, if we find the same word with the same meaning reappearing in all the languages of the family, we may fairly assume that the thing for which it stands was known to the old Aryans before the separation. If, again, we find a word which runs through all the European languages, but is not found in the Sanskrit and Persian, we guess that in this case the thing was known only to the Yavanas, the first separating body of younger Aryans, from whom it will be remembered all the European branches are descended. Thus we get a very interesting list of words, and the means of drawing a picture of the life of our primæval ancestors. The earliest appearance of the Aryans is as a pastoral people, for words derived from the pastoral life have left the deepest traces on their language. Daughter, we saw, meant originally ‘the milker;’ the name of money, and of booty, in many Aryan languages is derived from that of cattle;[51] words which have since come to mean lord or prince originally meant the guardian of the cattle;[52] and others which have expanded into words for district or country, or even for the whole earth, meant at first simply the pasturage. So not without reason did we say that the king had grown out of the head of the family, and the pens of sheepfolds expanded into walled cities.

But though a pastoral, the ancient Aryans do not seem to have been a nomadic race, and in this respect they differed from the Shemites of the same period, and from the Turanians, by whom they were surrounded. For the Turanian civilization had pretty well departed from Asia by that time, and having taught its lessons to Egypt and Chaldæa, lived on, if at all, in Europe only. There it faded before the advance of the Celts and other Aryan people, who came bringing with them the use of bronze weapons and the civilization which belonged to the bronze age. The stone age lingered in the lake dwellings of Switzerland, as we thought, till about two thousand years before Christ or perhaps later, and it may be that this date, B.C. 2000, which is also nearly that of Abraham, represents within a few hundred years the entry of the Aryans into Europe. The Greeks are generally believed to have appeared in Greece, or at least in Asia Minor, about the nineteenth century before our era, and they were probably preceded by the Latin branch of the Aryan family, as well as by the Celts in the north of Europe. So that the period of one thousand years which intervened between our starting-point and the call of Abraham, the starting-point of the Hebrew history, and which saw the growth and change of many great Asiatic monarchies, must for the Aryans be only darkly filled up by the gradual separation of the different nations, and their unknown life between this separation and the time when they again become vaguely known to history.

Summary.

The general result, then, of our inquiries into the grouping of nations of the world in pre-historic times may be sketched in rough outline. At a very early date, say 4000 or 5000 B.C., arose an extensive Turanian half-civilization, which, flourishing probably in Central and Southern Asia, spread in time and through devious routes to India and China upon one side, on the other side to Europe. This was, at first at any rate, a stone age, and was especially distinguished by the raising of great stones and grave-mounds. This civilization was communicated to the Egyptians and Chaldæans, a mixed people—Semite, Turanian, Ethiopian—who were not strangers to the use of metals. As early as 3000 years before our era the civilization of Egypt had attained its full growth, and had probably even then a considerable past. Chaldæa, too, and the neighbouring Elam were both advanced out of their primitive state; possibly so also were China, Peru, and Mexico. But the pure Semite peoples, the ancestors of the Jews, and the Aryans, were still pastoral races, the one by the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, the other by the banks of the Jaxartes and the Oxus. The first of these continued pastoral and nomadic for hundreds of years, but about this time the Western Aryans separated from those of the East, and soon after added some use of agriculture to their shepherd life. Then between 3000 and 2000 B.C. came the separation of the various peoples of the Western Aryans and their migration towards Europe, where they began to appear at the latter date. After all the Western Aryans had left the East, the older Aryans seem to have lived on for some little time together, and at last to have separated into the nations of Iranians and Hindus, the first migrating southward, and the second crossing the Hindoo-Koosh and descending into the plains of the Indus and the Ganges. Thence they drove away or exterminated most of the older Turanian inhabitants, as their brethren had a short time before done to the Turanians whom they found in Europe. Such, so far as we can surmise, were in rough outline the doings of the different kindreds and nations and languages of the old world in times long before history.

CHAPTER VI.
EARLY SOCIAL LIFE.

Formation of
settlements.

We have seen, so far, that the early traces of man’s existence point to a gradual improvement in the state of his civilization, to the acquirement of fresh knowledge, and the practice of fresh arts. The rude stone implements of the early drift-period are replaced by the more carefully manufactured ones of the polished-stone age, and these again are succeeded by implements of bronze and of iron. By degrees also the arts of domesticating animals and of tilling the land are learnt; and by steps, which we shall hereafter describe, the art of writing is developed from the early pictorial rock-sculptures. Now, in order that each step in this process of civilization should be preserved for the benefit of the next generation, and that the people of each period should start from the vantage-ground obtained by their predecessors, there must have been frequent intercommunication between the different individuals who lived at the same time; so that the discovery or improvement of each one should be made known to others, and become part of the common stock of human knowledge. In the very earliest times, then, men probably lived collected together in societies of greater or less extent. We know that this is the case now with all savage tribes; and as in many respects the early races of the drift-beds seem to have resembled some now existing savage tribes in their mode of life, employing, to a certain extent, the same implements, and living on the same sort of food, this adds to the probability of their gregariousness. The fact, too, that the stone implements of the first stone period have generally been found collected near together in particular places, indicates these places as the sites of early settlements. Beyond this, however, we can say very little of the social state of these early stone-age people. Small traces of any burial-ground or tomb of so great an antiquity have yet been found, and all that we can say of them with any certainty is, that their life must have been very rude and primitive. Although they were collected together in groups, these groups could not have been large, and each must have been generally situated at a considerable distance from the next, for the only means of support for the men of that time was derived from hunting and fishing. Now it requires a very large space of land to support a man who lives entirely by hunting; and this must have been more particularly the case in those times when the weapons used by the huntsman were so rude, that it is difficult for us now to understand how he could ever have succeeded in obtaining an adequate supply of food by such means. Supposing that the same extent of territory were required for the support of a man in those times as was required in Australia by the native population, the whole of Europe could only have supported about seventy-six thousand inhabitants, or about one person to every four thousand now in existence.

Next to the cave-dwellings the earliest traces of anything like fixed settlements which have been found are the ‘kitchen-middens.’ The extent of some of these clearly shows that they mark the dwelling-place of considerable numbers of people collected together. But here only the rudest sort of civilization could have existed, and the bonds of society must have been as primitive and simple as they are among those savage tribes at the present time, who support existence in much the same way as the shell-mound people did. In order that social customs should attain any development, the means of existence must be sufficiently abundant and easily procurable to permit some time to be devoted to the accumulation of superfluities, or of supplies not immediately required for use. The life of the primitive hunter and fisher is so precarious and arduous, that he has rarely either the opportunity or the will for any other employment than the supply of his immediate wants. The very uncertainty of that supply seems rather to create recklessness than providence, and the successful chase is generally followed by a period of idleness and gluttony, till exhaustion of supplies once more compels men to activity. That the shell-mound people were subject to such fluctuations of supply we may gather from the fact that bones of foxes and other carnivorous animals are frequently found in those mounds; and as these animals are rarely eaten by human beings, except under the pressure of necessity, we may conclude that the shell-mound people were driven to support existence by this means, through their ill-success in fishing and hunting, and their want of any accumulation of stores to supply deficiencies.

The next token of social improvement that is observable is in the tumuli, or grave-mounds, which may be referred to a period somewhat later than that of the shell-mounds. These contain indications that the people who constructed them possessed some important elements necessary to their social progress. They had a certain amount of time to spare after providing for their daily wants, and they did not spend that time exclusively in idleness. The erection of these mounds must have been a work of considerable labour, and they often contain highly finished implements and ornaments, which must have been put there for the use of the dead. They are evidences that no little honour was sometimes shown to the dead; so that some sort of religion must have existed amongst the people who constructed the ancient grave-mounds. The importance of this element in early society is evident if we inquire further for whom and by whom these mounds were erected. Now, they are not sufficiently numerous, and are far too laborious in their construction, to have been the ordinary tombs of the common people. They were probably tombs erected for chiefs or captains of tribes to whom the tribes were anxious to pay especial honour. We do not know at all how these separate tribes or clans came into existence, and what bonds united their members together; but so soon as we find a tribe erecting monuments in honour of its chiefs, we conclude that it has attained a certain amount of compactness and solidity in its internal relations. Amongst an uneducated people there is probably no stronger tie than that of a common faith, or a common subject of reverence. It is impossible not to believe, then, that the people who made these great, and in some cases elaborately constructed tombs, would continue ever after to regard them as in some sort consecrated to the great chiefs who were buried under them. Each tribe would have its own specially sacred tombs, and perhaps we may here see a germ of that ancestor-worship which may be traced in every variety of religious belief.

It has been supposed by some that a certain amount of