IN THE SAURIAN AGE, WHEN THE WORLD’S INHABITANTS WERE GIGANTIC REPTILES

LARGER IMAGE

The Book of History

A History of all Nations

FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE PRESENT

WITH OVER 8000 ILLUSTRATIONS

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
VISCOUNT BRYCE, P.C., D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S.

CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS

W. M. Flinders Petrie, LL.D., F.R.S
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON

Hans F. Helmolt, Ph.D.
EDITOR, GERMAN “HISTORY OF THE WORLD”

Stanley Lane-Poole, M.A., Litt.D.
TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN

Robert Nisbet Bain
ASSISTANT LIBRARIAN, BRITISH MUSEUM

Hugo Winckler, Ph.D.
UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN

Archibald H. Sayce, D.Litt., LL.D.
OXFORD UNIVERSITY

Alfred Russel Wallace, LL.D., F.R.S.
AUTHOR, “MAN’S PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE”

Sir William Lee-Warner, K.C.S.I.
MEMBER OF COUNCIL OF INDIA

Holland Thompson, Ph.D.
THE COLLEGE OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK

W. Stewart Wallace, M.A.
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

Maurice Maeterlinck
ESSAYIST, POET, PHILOSOPHER

Dr. Emile J. Dillon
UNIVERSITY OF ST. PETERSBURG

Arthur Mee
EDITOR, “THE BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE”

Sir Harry H. Johnston, K.C.B., D.Sc.
LATE COMMISSIONER FOR UGANDA

Johannes Ranke
UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH

K. G. Brandis, Ph.D.
UNIVERSITY OF JENA

And many other Specialists

Volume I

MAN AND THE UNIVERSE

The World before History
The Great Steps in Man’s Development
Birth of Civilisation and the Growth of Races
Making of Nations and the Influence of Nature

JAPAN

The Country and the People

NEW YORK . . THE GROLIER SOCIETY

LONDON . THE EDUCATIONAL BOOK CO.

EDITORIAL AND CONTRIBUTING STAFF

OF

THE BOOK OF HISTORY

Rt. Hon. Viscount Bryce, F.R.S.
Formerly British Ambassador to the United States, Author of “The American Commonwealth”

Professor E. Ray Lankester, F.R.S.
President British Association, 1906–7; Past Director of South Kensington Museum of Natural History

Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, F.R.S.
Co-discoverer with Darwin of the Theory of Natural Selection; Author of “Man’s Place in the Universe”

Dr. William Johnson Sollas, F.R.S.
Professor of Geology at Oxford University

Dr. W. M. Flinders Petrie, F.R.S.
Professor of Egyptology, University College, London; Founder of British School of Archæology in Egypt

Professor Wm. Boyd Dawkins, F.R.S.
Professor of Geology at Victoria University, Manchester; Author of “Early Man in Britain”

Frederic Harrison, M.A.
Hon. Fellow and formerly Tutor of Wadham College, Oxford; Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society

Dr. Archibald H. Sayce
Professor of Assyriology at Oxford University

Sir Harry H. Johnston, K.C.B.
Doctor of Science of Cambridge University; late Commissioner and Consul-General for Uganda

Dr. J. Holland Rose
Cambridge University Lecturer on Modern History; Author of “Development of the European Nations”

Dr. Stanley Lane-Poole
Professor of Arabic at Trinity College, Dublin

Sir John Knox Laughton
Professor of Modern History at King’s College, London University; Editor of Lord Nelson’s Despatches

Oscar Browning, M.A.
Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge; University Lecturer in History

Professor Ronald M. Burrows
Professor of Greek at University College of South Wales; Author of “Discoveries in Crete”

David George Hogarth, M.A.
Director of Cretan Exploration Fund and Past Director of the British School at Athens

Herbert Paul, M.P.
Author of “A History of Modern England”

Sir Robert K. Douglas
Professor of Chinese at King’s College, University of London; late Keeper of Oriental Books, British Museum

Dr. Hugo Winckler
Professor of History and Oriental Languages at the University of Berlin

Sir William Lee-Warner, K.C.S.I.
Member of the Council of India; Formerly Scholar of St. John’s College, Cambridge

Dr. E. J. Dillon
Author and Journalist; Master of Oriental Languages at the University of St. Petersburg

William Romaine Paterson, M.A.
Author of “The Nemesis of Nations”

W. Warde Fowler, M.A.
Scholar and Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford; Author of “The City-State of the Greeks and Romans”

Dr. H. F. Helmolt
Author of “German History” and Editor of the German “History of the World”

Professor Konrad Haebler
Of the Imperial Library of Berlin

Professor Richard Mayr
Of the Vienna Academy of Commerce

Arthur Mee
Editor of The Book of Knowledge.

Professor Rudolf Scala
Of the Imperial University of Vienna

Professor Karl Weule
Director of the Leipzig Museum of Anthropology

Professor Wilhelm Walther
Of the University of Rostock

Arthur Christopher Benson, M.A.
Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge; Editor of The Correspondence of Queen Victoria

Major Martin Hume
Lecturer in Spanish History and Literature at Pembroke College, Cambridge

Robert Nisbet Bain
Traveller and Historian; Assistant Librarian at the British Museum

Richard Whiteing
Author of “The Life of Paris”

His Excellency Max von Brandt
Ex-German Ambassador to China and Minister in Japan

Francis H. Skrine
Traveller and Explorer; late of the Indian Civil Service

Holland Thompson, Ph. D.
The College of the City of New York.

Dr. Archdall Reid, F.R.S.E.
Author of “The Principles of Heredity”

Arthur Diósy
Founder of the Japan Society; Author of “The New Far East”

Dr. K. G. Brandis
Director of the University Libraries at Jena

Thomas Hodgkin, D.C.L.
Author of “A Political History of England”

Professor Joseph Kohler
Professor of Jurisprudence at Berlin University

Angus Hamilton
Late Educational Adviser to the Government of Siam

J. G. D. Campbell, M.A.
Traveller and Correspondent in the Far East; Author of “Afghanistan”

W. R. Carles, C.M.G.
Geographer; late British Consul at Tientsin, China

Professor Johannes Ranke
Professor of Anthropology, Physiology, and Natural History at Munich

W. S. Wallace, M. A.
University of Toronto.

Hon. Bernhard R. Wise
Scholar of Queen’s College, Oxford; Ex-Attorney-General of New South Wales

K. W. C. Davis, M.A.
Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford

CONTENTS OF VOLUME I

LIST OF SPECIAL PLATES IN THE BOOK OF HISTORY

LIST OF MAPS
APPEARING IN THE BOOK OF HISTORY

This is the story of the earth from the first thing we know of it to the time in which we live. It is the story of man from the first thing we know of him to the last thought that the vision of modern science can suggest.

T

THERE is no need here to discuss the question how far it is possible to write a universal history, or on what lines such a history should proceed. These points may well be left where Lord Bryce leaves them in his introduction to this book. Nor need we consider what history is; the plain man may be left to make up his own mind as to that while the philosophers are making up theirs. A word may be said, however, of the plan and purpose of this work, especially of that distinction of it which is at once the ground of its appeal and its justification.

A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE

It is a commonplace to say of a great work that it is unique, and there would at first sight seem to be peculiar presumption in making such a claim for a History of the World. It may be claimed, however, without any fear of contradiction, that this work has no rival in the English language.

There have been histories of the world before; there are available in large numbers histories of all countries well worthy of attention; but there is not, and it may be doubted if there has ever been attempted before, a scientific World-History. This work is, as far as it can possibly be in the present state of knowledge, a universal history of the universe.

SCIENCE AND HISTORY

That is a far reaching claim to make, but a mere glance through the names of those whose services have been enlisted for the work will make its basis clear. The contributors include some of the foremost students of science. Many men of eminence whose names do not usually come into historical works will be found here. Their function may be described as holding the Lamp of Science up to History. It is for these authorities to read the story of the earth and to tell the plain man what they read there, as Turner read the sunset and painted what he saw. The simile is not so unfortunate as it may appear, because, although our canvas has not the same room for the artist’s imagination as Turner’s had, it will probably be admitted that the imagination of the scientist is often nearer to the truth of things than the conventional belief.

THE LIFE-STORY OF ALL NATIONS

And the scientist will come into our History whenever and wherever science has any light to throw upon its problems. To the creators of this work the world is not merely an aggregation of countries under more or less settled governments, nor is a country merely the seat of a political system. They conceive the earth as a part of the universe, as one world among many; and this is the story of a huge ball flying in space, on which men and women live and move, on which mighty nations rise and rule and pass away, on which great empires crumble into dust. It is the entrancing book of man and the universe, the life-story of all nations. It begins with the beginning; it regards the universe, as modern science has taught us to regard it, as a vast unit, in which the life of man is the ultimate consummation.

A history of the world cannot be written in a day. It is like an institution—it must be allowed to grow. It would be a purposeless sacrifice in an undertaking of such magnitude to reject any work of building-up that is available, and this History has a rare privilege in being able to utilise the result of the matchless research, the tireless industry, the unequalled knowledge of Dr. Hans Helmolt and the distinguished staff of scholars and investigators who have been engaged with him for many years in preparing a history of the world on precisely the lines laid down in this work.

THE MATERIAL FOR A WORLD HISTORY

It would be impossible to exaggerate the value of the elaborate research made for Dr. Helmolt by such of his eminent collaborators as Professor Johannes Ranke, Professor Ratzel, Professor Joseph Kohler, and others whose names stand for foremost authority wherever the value of learning is understood, and it is one of the chief claims of this work to recognition that it has behind it all the material collected by Dr. Helmolt’s staff, with all the judgment and skill of Dr. Helmolt himself in co-ordinating the labour of his assistants.

A work so universal in time and place must engage many minds. Behind it there must be the labour and thought of many lives. The materials for a world-history cannot be amassed by one man, cannot be gathered together in the time that it is possible for one man to devote to them. A moment’s reflection reveals the vastness and complexity of the arrangements for such a work, the reaching-out into far corners of the earth, the ransacking of historical libraries and official archives; the placing of the result of all this research into the hands of a hundred trained historians, the analysing, sifting, and editing of each part as if it were in itself a perfect whole.

A BOOK OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE

All this labour can hardly be measured. And if we add to our reckoning the work of illustrating the world’s history in pictures, the task of finding illustrations where they are rare as precious stones, or of choosing them where their number is bewildering, the labour that a world-history involves is, indeed, incalculable. It can only be accomplished by the co-operation of many minds, working over a long period, drawing upon actual experience in every part of the world.

Especially is this so in the present work. There are histories that can be made up from books, but this is not one of them. The BOOK OF HISTORY is not only a great book of human experience, as every history is; it is the product of experience. It could never have been written if the men who write it had not helped to make the history that they write.

THE MAKERS OF THE BOOK

It is a book of history by writers and makers of history; it is a book of action by men of action; it is a book, that is, by men who know intimately the real life of the world. When Professor Ratzel writes of the making of nations, he writes with perhaps an unequalled knowledge of the conditions that have made for human progress; when Dr. Flinders Petrie writes of Egypt, when Dr. Sayce writes of Assyria, they write with the same authority that Sir Harry Johnston has in writing of those parts of the British Empire that he has helped to govern.

The real rulers of the world are not the princes, and among the makers of this book are men who, though the fierce light that beats upon a throne has not beat upon them, have borne the burden of empire and of ruling men. It is the ideal collaboration, that of the brilliant investigator, the scientific interpreter, and the man of affairs, and it makes possible the achievement of a History which we have claimed to be unique.

THE WORLD YESTERDAY, TO-DAY & TO-MORROW

We have the facts from the pens of the men who have dug them up fresh from the earth itself or who know them from experience; we have them treated by the men who can turn upon them the full light of modern science; we have the world as it moves in our own time described by the men who know it from the centre, and know it therefore best.

This is the story of the world, then, yesterday and to-day. And, as history goes on, as to-day becomes yesterday and to-morrow becomes to-day, we shall find in this book a vision of the things that lie before. Out of the deeps of Time came man. Through the mists of Time he grew. Down the ages of Time he goes. Whence he came we guess; how he lives we know; where he goes the wisdom of History does not tell. But the history of the world is young, and young men shall see visions.

THE EDITORS

THE BOOK OF HISTORY

The Life-Story of the Earth and of All Nations

TOLD IN SEVEN GRAND DIVISIONS

This plan provides a general scheme for the HISTORY, but is not intended for reference. It does not follow that the exact order of countries here given is maintained throughout the volumes. A full index appears at the end of the work

I—MAN AND THE UNIVERSE

THE WORLD AND ITS STORY

A View Across the Ages: Introduction

Summary of the History of the World

Chronology of 10,000 Years and Chart of Nations

MAKING OF THE EARTH AND THE COMING OF MAN

The Beginning of the Earth

How Life is Possible on the Earth

The Beginning of Life on the Earth

How Man Obtained the Mastery of the Earth

THE RISE OF MAN AND THE EVE OF HISTORY

The World Before History

The Great Steps in Man’s Development

BIRTH OF CIVILISATION & THE GROWTH OF RACES

The Beginnings of Civilisation

How Civilisation Came to Europe

The Triumph of Race

An Alphabet of the World’s Races

MAKING OF NATIONS & THE INFLUENCE OF NATURE

The Birth and Growth of Nations

Influence of Land and Water on National History

How Nations are Affected by Their Environment

The Size and Power of Nations

The Future History of Man

II—THE FAR EAST

The Interest and Importance of the Far East

Japan. Siberia. China. Korea

Malaysia

Philippines. Malay States. Straits Settlements. Borneo. Sarawak. Sumatra. Java. New Guinea, and other Islands of Malay Archipelago

Australia

New South Wales. Victoria. Queensland. South Australia. West Australia. Tasmania

Oceania

New Zealand. Fiji. Pitcairn. Hawaii. Samoa. Tonga and other Islands

The Influence of the Pacific Ocean in History

III—THE MIDDLE EAST

The Importance of the Middle East

India

Including Ceylon and the Native States

Further India

Siam. Annam. Burma. Tonking. Cochin China. Cambodia. Champa

The Influence of the Indian Ocean in History

Central Asia

Afghanistan. Baluchistan. Turkestan. Thibet

IV—THE NEAR EAST

The Ancient Empires of Western Asia

Babylonia. Assyria. Elam

Early Nations of Western Asia

Scythia. Sarmatia. Armenia. Syria. Phœnicia. Israel

Western Asia from the Rise of Persia to Mohammed

Persia. Asia Minor. Syria. Palestine. Arabia. Mediterranean Islands

Western Asia from the Time of Mohammed

The Saracen Dominion. The Turkish Empire in Asia. Persia. Arabia

V—AFRICA

Legacy of Ancient Empires to the Modern World

Egypt and the Egyptian Sudan

North Africa

Tripoli. Tunis. Morocco. Algeria and the French Territories. Sierra Leone. Liberia. Gold Coast. Nigeria. German West Africa. Abyssinia. Somaliland. Erythrea. British East Africa. Zanzibar

South Africa

Native Races. The Portuguese and Dutch in South Africa. British South Africa: Cape Colony. Natal. Transvaal. Orange River Colony. Rhodesia. Congo Free State. Portuguese East Africa. Angola. German East Africa. German South-West Africa. Madagascar

VI—EUROPE

1. EUROPE TO THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

Mediterranean Influence in the Making of Europe

The Ancient Spirit of Greece and Rome

Early Peoples of Europe. Ascendancy of the Greeks

The Rise of Rome and the World Empire

Social Fabric of the Ancient World: Slave States

2. EASTERN EUROPE TO FRENCH REVOLUTION

The Byzantine Empire and the Turk in Europe

The Middle Peoples

Russia, Poland, and the Baltic Provinces

The Social Fabric of the Mediæval World: The Twilight of Nations

3. WESTERN EUROPE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

A Survey of Western Mediæval Europe

The Peoples of Western Europe

The Importance of the Baltic Sea

The Emerging of the Nations

Frankish Dominion and the Empire of Charlemagne. England. Spanish Peninsula. Italy. The Papacy. Scandinavia

The Development of the Nations

The German or Holy Roman Empire. France. England. Spain and Portugal. Italy. The Papacy. Scandinavia

The Crusades. Industry and Commerce

4. WESTERN EUROPE FROM THE REFORMATION TO THE REVOLUTION

A Survey of Western Europe

The Reformation and Wars of Religion

The Age of Louis XIV.

From the Peace of Westphalia to the Treaty of Utrecht

The Ending of the Old Order

From the Treaty of Utrecht to the Revolution

The Importance of the Atlantic to the World Powers

Religion After the Reformation. Industry and Commerce

5. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Era

The Revolution. The Republic at War and the Rise of Napoleon. The Zenith of Napoleon and his Fall

Great Britain in the Napoleonic Era

6. THE RE-MAKING OF EUROPE

Europe After Waterloo

The Triumph of Despotism. The Revolt Against Despotism

Europe in Revolution

The Second French Republic and the Coup d’Etat. The Uprising of the Little Nations. National Movements in Germany

The Consolidation of the Powers

Europe and the Second Empire. The Unification of Italy. The Unification of Germany. The Franco-German War

Great Britain to 1871. Russia and Turkey to 1871. Europe since 1871

Great Britain. Germany. France. Austria-Hungary. Spain and Portugal. Italy. Russia. Turkey. Switzerland. Greece. Belgium. Holland. Denmark. Norway. Sweden. Bulgaria. Servia. Roumania. Montenegro. Luxemburg. Monaco. San Marino

7. THE EUROPEAN POWERS TO-DAY

Europe in Our Own Time

Great Britain. Germany. Austria-Hungary. France.

Italy. Russia. Turkey. Spain and Portugal

Minor States of Europe:

Switzerland. Greece. Belgium. Holland. Denmark. Norway. Sweden. Bulgaria. Servia. Roumania. Montenegro. Luxemburg. Monaco. San Marino

VII—AMERICA

America Before Columbus

The Primitive Races of America. The Ancient Civilisation of Central America. The Ancient Civilisation of South America

The European Colonisation

The Discovery. The Spanish Conquest. The Spanish and Portuguese Empire in America. The Independence of South and Central America. The Pilgrim Fathers and the English Settlement. The Development and Expansion of the British Colonies

The American Nation

The Revolt of the Thirteen Colonies. The Struggle for Independence and the War. The Creation of the United States. The Development of the American Nation. The United States in Our Own Time

British America

Canada. Newfoundland. British West Indies. British Honduras. Bermudas.

Central America in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Cuba. Haiti. Dominica. Porto Rico. Mexico. Guatemala. Honduras. San Salvador. Nicaragua. Costa Rica. Panama

South America in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Colombia. Venezuela. British, French and Dutch Guiana. Brazil. Ecuador. Peru. Chili. Bolivia. Paraguay. Argentina. Uruguay

The World Around the Poles

Greenland. Iceland. Arctic and Antarctic Oceans

THE BOOK OF HISTORY

FIRST GRAND DIVISION

MAN AND THE UNIVERSE

FIRST GRAND DIVISION

MAN AND THE UNIVERSE

There can, of course, be neither absolute finality nor entire unanimity in the subjects of these chapters, which are designed to enable the reader to follow the course of history with greater interest and understanding than would be possible without some scientific knowledge of life. They are presented as a symposium of modern thought on the problems concerning the origin and development of the earth and mankind

PLAN

THE WORLD AND ITS STORY

A VIEW ACROSS THE AGES

Rt. Hon. James Bryce

A SUMMARY OF THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD

Arthur D. Innes, M.A.

CHRONOLOGY OF 10,000 YEARS AND CHART OF NATIONS

MAKING OF THE EARTH & THE COMING OF MAN

THE BEGINNING OF THE EARTH

Dr. Wm. Johnson Sollas, F.R.S.

HOW LIFE BECAME POSSIBLE ON THE EARTH

Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, F.R.S.

HOW MAN OBTAINED THE MASTERY OF THE EARTH

Dr. Archdall Reid, F.R.S.E.

THE RISE OF MAN AND THE EVE OF HISTORY

THE WORLD BEFORE HISTORY

Professor Johannes Ranke

THE GREAT STEPS IN MAN’S DEVELOPMENT

Professor Joseph Kohler

BIRTH OF CIVILISATION & THE GROWTH OF RACES

THE BIRTH OF CIVILISATION

Dr. Flinders Petrie, F.R.S.

HOW CIVILISATION CAME TO EUROPE

David George Hogarth, M.A.

THE TRIUMPH OF RACE

Dr. Archdall Reid, F.R.S.E.

ALPHABET OF THE WORLD’S RACES

W. E. Garrett Fisher, M.A.

MAKING OF NATIONS & THE INFLUENCE OF NATURE

Professor Friedrich Ratzel

THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF NATIONS

INFLUENCE OF LAND & WATER ON NATIONAL HISTORY

EFFECT OF ENVIRONMENT ON NATIONS

THE SIZE AND POWER OF NATIONS

THE FUTURE HISTORY OF MAN

For full contents and page numbers see [Index]

Mr. Kipling’s “Recessional” is quoted in a Frontispiece from “The Five Nations,” by permission of the Author and the Publishers, Messrs. Methuen

THE WORLD

AND ITS STORY

A VIEW ACROSS THE AGES

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK OF HISTORY

BY THE RIGHT HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE

W

WHEN History, properly so called, has emerged from those tales of the feats of kings and heroes and those brief entries in the roll of a temple or a monastery in which we find the earliest records of the past, the idea of composing a narrative which shall not be confined to the fortunes of one nation soon presents itself.

The First True Historian

Herodotus—the first true historian, and a historian in his own line never yet surpassed—took for his subject the strife between Greeks and Barbarians which culminated in the Great Persian War of B.C. 480, and worked into his book all he could ascertain regarding most of the great peoples of the world—Babylonians and Egyptians, Persians and Scythians, as well as Greeks. Since his time many have essayed to write a Universal History; and as knowledge grew, so the compass of these treatises increased, till the outlying nations of the East were added to those of the Mediterranean and West European world which had formerly filled the whole canvas.

Scientific History only now Possible

None of these books, however, covered the field or presented an adequate view of the annals of mankind as a whole. It was indeed impossible to do this, because the data were insufficient. Till some time way down in the nineteenth century that part of ancient history which was preserved in written documents could be based upon the literature of Israel, upon such notices regarding Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Iran as had been preserved by Greek or Roman writers, and upon those writers themselves. It was only for some of the Greek cities, for the kingdoms of Alexander and his successors, and for the city and Empire of Rome that fairly abundant materials were then available. Of the world outside Europe and Western Asia, whether ancient or modern, scarcely anything was known, scarcely anything even of the earlier annals of comparatively civilised peoples, such as those of India, China, and Japan, and still less of the rudimentary civilisations of Mexico and Peru. Nor, indeed, had most of the students who occupied themselves with the subject perceived how important a part in the general progress of mankind the more backward races have played, or how essential to a true History of the World is an account of the semi-civilised and even of the barbarous peoples. Thus it was not possible, until quite recent times, that the great enterprise of preparing such a history should be attempted on a plan or with materials suitable to its magnitude.

The last seventy or eighty years have seen a vast increase in our materials, with a corresponding widening of the conception of what a History of the World should be. Accordingly, the time for trying to produce one upon a new plan and enlarged scale seems to have arrived; not, indeed, that the years to come will not continue to add to the historian’s resources, but that those resources have recently become so much ampler than they have ever been before that the moment may be deemed auspicious for a new departure.

The nineteenth century was marked by three changes of the utmost consequence for the writing of history.

THE WORLD AS KNOWN TO ITS FIRST HISTORIAN

The world as known to Herodotus is shown by the white part of this map, indicating the limited range of ancient geographical knowledge.

New Material and New Methods

That century, in the first place, has enormously widened our knowledge of the times hitherto called prehistoric. The discovery of methods for deciphering the inscriptions found in Egypt and Western Asia, the excavations in Assyria and Egypt, in Continental Greece and in Crete, and to a lesser extent in North Africa also, in the course of which many inscriptions have been collected and fragments of ancient art examined, have given us a mass of knowledge regarding the nations who dwelt in these countries larger and more exact than was possessed by the writers of classical antiquity who lived comparatively near to those remote times. We possess materials for the study not only of the political history but of the ethnology, the languages, and the culture of the nations which were first civilised incomparably better than were those at the disposal of the contemporaries of Vico or Gibbon or Herder. Similar results have followed as regards the Far East, from the opening up of Sanskrit literature and of the records of China and Japan. To a lesser degree, the same thing has happened as regards the semi-civilised peoples of tropical America both north and south of the Isthmus of Panama. And while long periods of time have thus been brought within the range of history, we have also learnt much more about the times that may still be called prehistoric. The investigations carried on in mounds and caves and tombs and lake-dwellings, the collection of early stone and bronze implements, and of human skulls and bones found along with those of other animals, have thrown a great deal of new light upon primitive man, his way of life, and his migrations from one region to another. As history proper has been carried back many centuries beyond its former limit, so has our knowledge of prehistoric times been extended centuries above the furthest point to which history can now reach back. And this applies not only to the countries previously little explored, but to such well-known districts as Western Europe and the Atlantic coast of America.

Secondly, there has been during the nineteenth century a notable improvement in the critical method of handling historical materials. Much more pains have been taken to examine all available documents and records, to obtain a perfect text of each by a comparison of manuscripts or of early printed copies, and to study each by the aid of other contemporary matter. It is true that, with the exception of Egyptian papyri and some manuscripts unearthed in Oriental monasteries (besides those Indian, Chinese, and other early Eastern sacred books to which I have already referred), not very much that is absolutely new has been brought to light. It is also true that a few of the most capable students in earlier days, in the ancient world as well as since the Renaissance, have fully seen the value of original authorities and have applied to them thoroughly critical methods. This is not a discovery of our own times. Still, it may be claimed that there was never before so great a zeal for collecting and investigating all possible kinds of original texts, nor so widely diffused a knowledge of the methods to be applied in turning them to account for the purposes of history. Both in Europe and in America an unprecedentedly large number of competent men have been employed upon researches of this kind, and the result of their labours on special topics has been to provide the writer who seeks to present a general view of history with materials not only larger but far fitter for his use than his predecessors ever enjoyed. Then with the improvement in critical apparatus, there has come a more cautious and exact habit of mind in the interpretation of facts.

“THE FATHER OF HISTORY”

Herodotus, the first historian, was born between B.C. 470–480 at Halicarnassus, a Greek colony in Asia Minor

Thirdly, the progress of the sciences of Nature has powerfully influenced history, both by providing new data and by affecting the mental attitude of all reflective men. This has happened in several ways. Geographical exploration has made known nearly every part of the surface of the habitable globe. The great natural features of every country, its mountain ranges and rivers, its forest or deserts, have been ascertained. Its flora and fauna have been described, and thereby its capacity for supporting human life approximately calculated. The other physical conditions which govern the development of man, such as temperature, rainfall, and the direction of prevalent winds have been examined. Thus we have acquired a treasury of facts relating to the causes and conditions which help the growth of civilisation and mould it into diverse forms, conditions whose importance I shall presently discuss in considering the relation of man to his natural environment. Although a few penetrating minds had long ago seen how much the career of each nation must have been affected by physical phenomena, it is only in the last two generations that men have begun to study these phenomena in their relation to history, and to appreciate their influence in the formation of national types and in determining the movement of races over the earth’s surface.

Not less remarkable has been the increase in our knowledge of the more remote and backward peoples. Nearly every one of these has now been visited by scientific travellers or missionaries, its language written down, its customs and religious rites, sometimes its folk lore also, recorded. Thus materials of the highest value have been secured, not only for completing our knowledge of mankind as a whole, but for comprehending in the early history of the now highly civilised peoples various facts which had previously remained obscure, but which became intelligible when compared with similar facts that can be studied in their actuality among tribes whom we find in the same stage to-day as were the ancestors of the civilised nations many centuries ago.

Progress of the Sciences

The progress thus achieved in the science of man regarded as a part of Nature has powerfully contributed to influence the study of human communities as they appear in history. The comparative method has become the basis for a truly scientific inquiry into the development of institutions, and the connection of religious beliefs and ceremonies with the first beginnings of institutions both social and political has been made clear by an accumulation of instances. Whether or no there be such a thing as a Science of History—a question which, since it is mainly verbal, one need not stop to discuss—there is such a thing as a scientific method applied to history; and the more familiar men have become with the methods of inquiry and canons of evidence used in physical investigations, so much the more have they tended to become exact and critical in historical investigations, and to examine the causes and the stages by and through which historical development is effected.

Historical Knowledge in Our Time

In noting this I do not suggest that what is popularly called the “Doctrine of Evolution” should be deemed a thing borrowed by history from the sciences of nature. Most of what is true or helpful in that doctrine was known long ago, and applied long ago by historical and political thinkers. You can find it in Aristotle, perhaps before Aristotle. Even as regards the biological sciences, the notion of what we call evolution is ancient; and the merit of Darwin and other great modern naturalists has lain, not in enouncing the idea as a general theory, but in elucidating, illustrating, and demonstrating the processes by which evolution takes place. The influence of the natural sciences on history is rather to be traced in the efforts we now see to accumulate a vast mass of facts relating to the social, economic, and political life of man, for the sake of discovering general laws running through them, and imparting to them order and unity.

Although the most philosophic and diligent historians have always aimed at and striven for this, still the general diffusion of the method in our own time, and the greatly increased scale on which it is applied, together with the higher standard of accuracy which is exacted by the opinion of competent judges, may be, in some measure, ascribed to the examples which those who work in the spheres of physics and biology and natural history have so effectively set.

Finally, the progress of natural science has in our time, by stimulating the production and exchange of commodities, drawn the different parts of the earth much nearer to one another, and thus brought nearly all its tribes and nations into relations with one another far closer and far more frequent than existed before.

Oneness of the Human Race

This has been done by the inventions that have given us steam and electricity as motive forces, making transport quicker and cheaper, and by the application of electricity to the transmission of words. No changes that have occurred in the past (except perhaps changes in the sphere of religion) are comparable in their importance as factors in history to those which have shortened the voyage from Western Europe to America to five and a half days, and made communication with Australia instantaneous. For the first time the human race, always essentially one, has begun to feel itself one, and civilised man has in every part of it become a contemporaneous observer of what passes in every other part.

The general result of these various changes has been that while the materials for writing a history of the world have been increased, the conception of what such a history should be has been at the same time both enlarged and defined. Its scope is wider; its lines are more clearly drawn. But what do we mean by a Universal History? Briefly, a History which shall, first, include all the races and tribes of man within its scope; and, secondly, shall bring all these races and tribes into a connection with one another such as to display their annals as an organic whole.

Importance of the Small Races

Universal history has to deal not only with the great nations, but also with the small nations; not only with the civilised, but also with the barbarous or savage peoples; not only with the times of movement and progress, but also with the times of silence and apparent stagnation. Every fraction of humanity has contributed something to the common stock, and has lived and laboured not for itself only, but for others also, through the influence which it has perforce exercised on its neighbours. The only exceptions we can imagine are the inhabitants of some remote isle, “far placed amid the melancholy main.” Yet they, too, must have once formed part of a race dwelling in the region whence they came, even if that race had died out in its old home before civilised man set foot on such an oceanic isle in a later age. The world would have been different, in however small a measure, had they never existed. As in the realm of physical science, so in that of history no fact is devoid of significance, though the true significance may remain long unnoticed. The history of the backward races presents exceptional difficulties, because they have no written records, and often scarcely any oral traditions. Sometimes it reduces itself to a description of their usages and state of life, their arts and their superstitions, at the time when civilised observers first visited them. Yet that history is instructive, not only because the phenomena observable among such races enlarge our knowledge, but also because through the study of those which survive we are able to interpret the scanty records we possess of the early condition of peoples now civilised, and to go some way towards writing the history of what we have hitherto called prehistoric man.

ANCIENT EGYPT’S STRANGE BOOKS AND PICTORIAL RECORDS, MADE OF PAPYRUS

Papyrus, a tall, graceful, sedgy plant, supplied the favourite writing material of the ancient world, and many priceless records of antiquity are preserved to us in papyri. The pith of the plant was pressed flat and thin and joined with others to form strips, on which records were written or painted. The above is a photograph of a piece of Egyptian papyrus, showing both hieroglyphics and picture-writing. The oldest piece of papyrus dates back to B.C. 3500.

Thus such tribes as the aborigines of Australia, the Fuegians of Magellan’s Straits, the Bushmen of South Africa, the Sakalavas of Madagascar, the Lapps of Northern Europe, the Ainos of Japan, the numerous “hill-tribes” of India, will all come within the historian’s ken. From each of them something may be learnt; and each of them has through contact with its more advanced neighbours affected those neighbours themselves, sometimes in blood, sometimes through superstitious beliefs or rites, frequently borrowed by the higher races from the lower (as the Norsemen learnt magic from the Lapps, and the Semites of Assyria from the Accadians), sometimes through the strife which has arisen between the savage and the more civilised man, whereby the institutions of the latter have been modified.

Obviously the historian cannot record everything. These lower races are comparatively unimportant. Their contributions to progress, their effect on the general march of events, have been but small. But they must not be wholly omitted from the picture, for without them it would have been different. One must never forget, in following the history of the great nations of antiquity, that they fought and thought and built up the fabric of their industry and art in the midst of a barbarous or savage population surrounding them on all sides, whence they drew the bulk of their slaves and some of their mercenary soldiers, and which sometimes avenged itself by sudden inroads, the fear of which kept the Greek cities, and at certain epochs even the power of Rome, watchful and anxious. So in modern times the savages among whom European colonies have been planted, or who have been transported as slaves to other colonies—sometimes, as in the case of Portugal in the fifteenth century, to

Europe itself—or those with whom Europeans have carried on trade, must not be omitted from a view of the causes which have determined the course of events in the civilised peoples.

Great Works of Little Peoples

To dwell on the part played by the small nations is less necessary here, for even a superficial student must be struck by the fact that some of them have counted for more than the larger nations to whose annals a larger space is commonly allotted. The instance of Israel is enough, so far as the ancient world is concerned, to show how little the numbers of a people have to do with the influence it may exert. For the modern world, I will take the case of Iceland.

The Culture of the Icelanders

The Icelanders are a people much smaller than even was Israel. They have never numbered more than about seventy thousand. They live in an isle so far remote, and so sundered from the rest of the world by an inhospitable ocean, that their relations both with Europe, to which ethnologically they belong, and with America, to which geographically they belong, have been comparatively scanty. But their history, from the first settlement of the island by Norwegian exiles in A.D. 874 to the extinction of the National Republic in A.D. 1264, is full of interest and instruction, in some respects a perfectly unique history. And the literature which this handful of people produced is certainly the most striking primitive literature which any modern people has produced, superior in literary quality to that of the Continental Teutons, or to that of the Romance nations, or to that of the Finns or Slavs, or even to that of the Celts. Yet most histories of Europe pass by Iceland altogether, and few persons in Continental Europe (outside Scandinavia) know anything about the inhabitants of this isle, who, amid glaciers and volcanoes, have maintained themselves at a high level of intelligence and culture for more than a thousand years.

The small peoples have no doubt been more potent in the spheres of intellect and emotion than in those of war, politics, or commerce. But the influences which belong to the sphere of creative intelligence—that is to say, of literature, philosophy, religion and art—are just those which it is peculiarly the function of a History of the World to disengage and follow out in their far-reaching consequence. They pass beyond the limits of the country where they arose. They survive, it may be, the race that gave birth to them. They pass into new forms, and through these they work in new ways upon subsequent ages.

The Wide Scope of History

It is also the task of universal history so to trace the march of humanity as to display the relation which each part of it bears to the others; to fit each race and tribe and nation into the main narrative. To do this, three things are needed—a comprehensive knowledge, a power of selecting the salient and significant points, and a talent for arrangement. Of these three qualifications, the first is the least rare. Ours is an age of specialists; but the more a man buries himself in special studies, the more risk does he incur of losing his sense of the place which the object of his own study fills in the general scheme of things. The highly trained historian is generally able to draw from those who have worked in particular departments the data he needs; while the master of one single department may be unable to carry his vision over the whole horizon, and see each part of the landscape in its relations to the rest.

In other words, a History of the World ought to be an account of the human family as an organic whole, showing how each race and state has affected other races or states, what each has brought into the common stock, and how the interaction among them has stimulated some, depressed or extinguished others, turned the main current this way or that. Even when the annals of one particular country are concerned, it needs no small measure of skill in expression as well as of constructive art to trace their connection with those of other countries. To take a familiar example, he who writes the history of England must have his eye always alive to what is passing in France on one side, and in Scotland on the other, not to speak of countries less closely connected with England, such as Germany and Spain. He must let the reader feel in what way the events that were happening in France and Scotland affected men’s minds, and through men’s minds affected the progress of events in England. Yet he cannot allow himself constantly to interrupt his English narrative in order to tell what was passing beyond the Channel or across the Tweed.

VIVID SCENES OF ANCIENT LIFE DEPICTED BY CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS

The walls of the tombs in Egypt form a great picture gallery of the vanished life of that country and are invaluable to the historian. This fragment from the British Museum shows how vividly the domestic figures were realised.

Unity of Universal History

Obviously, this difficulty is much increased when the canvas is widened to include all Europe, and when the aim is to give the reader a just impression of the general tendencies of a whole age, such an age as, for instance, the sixteenth century, over that vast area. If for a History of the World the old plan be adopted—that of telling the story of each nation separately, yet on lines generally similar, cross references and a copious use of chronological tables become helpful, for they enable the contemporaneity of events to be seen at a glance, and as the history of each nation is being written with a view to that of other nations, the tendencies at work in each can be explained and illustrated in a way which shows their parallelism, and gives to the whole that unity of meaning and tendency which a universal history must constantly endeavour to display. The connection between the progress or decline of different peoples is best understood by setting forth the various forms which similar tendencies take in each. To do this is a hard task when the historian is dealing with the ancient world, or with the world outside Europe even in mediæval and post-mediæval times. For the modern European nations it is easier, because, ever since the spread of Christianity made these nations parts of one great ecclesiastical community, similar forces have been at work upon each of them, and every intellectual movement which has told upon one has more or less told upon the others also.

THE MASTER-KEY TO THE HIEROGLYPHICS

The inscribed stone found at Rosetta, in the Nile delta, in 1799, now preserved in the British Museum. It gave the key to the hieroglyphic writings of Egypt. It is a decree of Ptolemy Epiphanes, promulgated at Memphis in B.C. 196, and as it is inscribed in hieroglyphic and in the script of the country as well as in Greek, it thus solved the long standing mystery of the hieroglyphics of the monuments, which before its discovery had been quite unintelligible.

Central Line of Human Development

Such a History of the World may be written on more than one plan, and in the light of more than one general theory of human progress. It might find the central line of human development in the increase of man’s knowledge, and in particular of his knowledge of Nature and his power of dealing with her. Or that which we call culture, the comprehensive unfolding and polishing of human faculty and of the power of intellectual creation and appreciation, might be taken as marking the most real and solid kind of progress, so that its growth would best represent the advance of man from a savage to a highly civilised condition. Or if the moral and political sphere were selected as that in which the onward march of man as a social being, made to live in a community, could best be studied, the idea of liberty might be made a pivot of the scheme; for in showing how the individual emerges from the family or the tribe, how first domestic and then also prædial slavery slowly disappears, how institutions are framed under which the will of one ruler or of a small group begins to be controlled, or replaced as a governing force, by the collective will of the members of the community, how the primordial rights of each human creature win their way to recognition—in tracing out all these things the history of human society is practically written, and the significance of all political changes is made clear. Another way, again, would be to take some concrete department of human activity, follow it down from its earliest to its latest stages, and group other departments round it. Thus one author might take religion, and in making the history of religion the main thread of his narrative might deal incidentally with the other phenomena which have influenced it or which it has influenced. Or, similarly, another author might take political institutions, or perhaps economic conditions—i.e., wealth, labour, capital, commerce, or, again, the fundamental social institutions, such as the family, and the relations of the ranks and classes in a community, and build up round one or other of these manifestations and embodiments of the creative energy of mankind the general story of man’s movement from barbarism to civilisation. Even art, even mechanical inventions, might be similarly handled, for both of these stand in a significant relation to all the rest of the life of each nation and of the world at large. Nevertheless, no one of these suggested lines on which a universal history might be constructed would quite meet the expectations which the name Universal History raises, because we have become accustomed to think of history as being primarily and pre-eminently a narrative of the growth and development of communities, nations, and states as organised political bodies, seeing that it is in their character as bodies so organised that they come into relation with other nations and states. It is therefore better to follow the familiar plan of dealing with the annals of each race and nation as a distinct entity, while endeavouring to show throughout the whole narrative the part which each fills in the general drama of human effort, conflict, and progress.

A universal history may, however, while conforming to this established method, follow it out along a special line, which shall give prominence to some one leading idea or principle. Such a line or point of view has been found for the present work in the relation of man to his physical environment—that is to say, to the geographical conditions which have always surrounded him, and always must surround him, conditions whose power and influence he has felt ever since he appeared upon the globe. This point of view is more comprehensive than any one of those above enumerated. Physical environment has told upon each and every one of the lines of human activity already enumerated that could be taken to form a central line for the writing of a history of mankind. It has influenced not only political institutions and economic phenomena, but also religion, and social institutions, and art, and inventions. No department of man’s life has been independent of it, for it works upon man not only materially but also intellectually and morally.

UNEARTHING THE RUINS OF ANCIENT BABYLON IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

This photograph illustrates how present-day exploration brings the remains of the ancient wonder cities of Babylonia to light after the sleep of ages. Much valuable knowledge of Babylon has been acquired quite recently as a result of excavations now being carried on under the supervision of English, American, French, and German explorers.

As this is the idea which has governed the preparation of the present book, as it is constructed upon a geographical rather than a purely chronological plan (though, of course, each particular country and nation needs to be treated chronologically), some few pages may properly be devoted here to a consideration of the way in which geography determines history, or, in other words, to an examination of the relations of Nature, inorganic and organic, to the life of man.

MAN’S PLACE IN NATURE’S KINGDOM

T

THOUGH we are accustomed to contrast man with Nature, and to look upon the world outside ourselves as an object to be studied by man, the conscious and intelligent subject, it is evident, and has been always recognised even by those thinkers who have most exalted the place man holds in the Cosmos, that man is also to be studied as a part of the physical universe. He belongs to the realm of Nature in respect of his bodily constitution, which links him with other animals, and in certain respects with all the phenomena that lie within the sphere of biology.

All creatures on our earth, since they have bodies formed from material constituents, are subject to the physical laws which govern matter; and the life of all is determined, so far as their bodies are concerned, by the physical conditions which foster, or depress, or destroy life. Plants need soil, moisture, sunshine, and certain constituents of the atmosphere. Their distribution over the earth’s surface depends not only upon the greater or less extent to which these things, essential to their existence, are present, but also upon the configuration of the earth’s surface (continents and oceans), upon the greater or less elevation above sea level of parts of it, upon such forces as winds and ocean currents (occasionally also upon volcanoes), upon the interposition of arid deserts between moister regions, or upon the flow of great rivers. The flora of each country is the resultant (until man appears upon the scene) of these natural conditions.

Natural Conditions of Life

We know that some plants are also affected by the presence of certain animals, particularly insects and birds. Similarly, animals depend upon these same conditions which regulate their distribution, partly directly, partly indirectly, or mediately through the dependence of the animal for food upon the plants whose presence or absence these conditions have determined. It would seem that animals, being capable of moving from place to place, and thus of finding conditions suitable for their life, and to some extent of modifying their life to suit the nature around them, are somewhat more independent than plants are, though plants, too, possess powers of adapting themselves to climatic surroundings; and there are some—such, for instance, as our common brake-fern and the grass of Parnassus—which seem able to thrive unmodified in very different parts of the globe.

Man the Servant of Nature

The primary needs of man which he shares with the other animals are an atmosphere which he can breathe, a temperature which he can support, water which he can drink, and food. In respect of these he is as much the product of geographical conditions as are the other living creatures. Presently he superadds another need, that of clothing. It is a sign that he is becoming less dependent on external conditions, for by means of clothing he can make his own temperature and succeed in enduring a degree of cold, or changes from heat to cold, which might otherwise shorten his life. The discovery of fire carries him a long step further, for it not only puts him less at the mercy of low temperatures, but extends the range of his food supplies, and enables him, by procuring better tools and weapons, to obtain his food more easily. We need not pursue his upward course, at every stage of which he finds himself better and still better able to escape from the thraldom of Nature, and to turn to account the forces which she puts at his disposal. But although he becomes more and more independent, more and more master not only of himself, but of her, he is none the less always for many purposes the creature of the conditions with which she surrounds him. He always needs what she gives him. He must always have regard to the laws which he finds operating through her realm. He always finds it the easiest course to obey, and to use rather than to attempt to resist her.

Here let me pause to notice a remarkable contrast between the earlier and the later stages of man’s relations to Nature. In the earlier stages he lies helpless before her, and must take what she chooses to bestow—food, shelter, materials for clothing, means of defence against the wild beasts, who are in strength far more than a match for him. He depends upon her from necessity, and is better or worse off according as she is more or less generous.

Man’s Advance in Knowledge

But in the later stages of his progress he has, by accumulating a store of knowledge, and by the development of his intelligence, energy, and self-confidence, raised himself out of his old difficulties. He no longer dreads the wild beasts. They, or such of them as remain, begin to dread him, for he is crafty, and can kill them at a distance. He erects dwellings which can withstand rain and tempest. He irrigates hitherto barren lands and raises abundant crops from them. When he has invented machinery, he produces in an hour clothing better than his hands could formerly have produced in a week. If at any given time he has not plenty of food, this happens only because he has allowed his species to multiply too fast. He is able to cross the sea against adverse winds and place himself in a more fertile soil or under more genial skies than those of his former home. As respects all the primary needs of his life, he has so subjected Nature to himself, that he can make his life what he will.

Neurdein

THE FIRST WANDERERS OF THE EARTH: TRIBAL MIGRATION IN PREHISTORIC TIMES

From the painting of “Cain” by Ferdinand Cormon

LARGER IMAGE

Man the Master of Nature

All this renders him independent. But he now also finds himself drawn into a new kind of dependence, for he has now come to take a new view of Nature. He perceives in her an enormous storehouse of wealth, by using which he can multiply his resources and gratify his always increasing desires to an extent practically unlimited. She provides forces, such as steam and electricity, which his knowledge enables him to employ for production and transport, so as to spare his own physical strength, needed now not so much for effort as for the direction of the efforts of Nature. She has in the forest, and still more beneath her own surface in the form of minerals, the materials by which these forces can be set in motion; and by using these forces man can, with comparatively little trouble, procure abundance of those materials.

Thus his relation to Nature is changed. It was that of a servant, or, indeed, rather of a beggar, needing the bounty of a sovereign. It is now that of a master needing the labour of a servant, a servant infinitely stronger than the master, but absolutely obedient to the master so long as the master uses the proper spell. Thus the connection of man with Nature, changed though his attitude be, is really as close as ever, and far more complex. If his needs had remained what they were in his primitive days—let us say, in those palæolithic days which we can faintly adumbrate to ourselves by an observation of the Australian or Fuegian aborigines now—he would have sat comparatively lightly to Nature, getting easily what he wanted, and not caring to trouble her for more. But his needs—that is to say, his desires, both his physical appetites and his intellectual tastes, his ambitions and his fondness for comfort, things that were once luxuries having become necessaries—have so immeasurably expanded that, since he asks much more from Nature, he is obliged to study her more closely than ever.

Man’s New Relations to Nature

Thus he enters into a new sort of dependence upon her, because it is only by understanding her capacities and the means of using them that he can get from her what he wants. Primitive man was satisfied if he could find spots where the trees gave edible fruit, where the sun was not too hot, nor the winds too cold, where the beasts easy of capture were abundant, and no tigers or pythons made the forest terrible. Civilised man has more complex problems to deal with, and wider fields to search. The study of Nature is not only still essential to him, but really more essential than ever. His life and action are conditioned by her. His industry and his commerce are directed by her to certain spots. That which she has to give is still, directly or indirectly, the source of strife, and a frequent cause of war. As men fought long ago with flint-headed arrows for a spring of water or a coconut grove, so they fight to-day for mineral treasures imbedded in the soil. It is mainly by Nature that the movements of emigration and the rise of populous centres of industry are determined.

Though Nature still rules for many purposes and in many ways the course of human affairs, the respective value of her various gifts changes from age to age, as man’s knowledge and power of turning them to account have changed. The things most prized by primitive man are not those which semi-civilised man chiefly prized, still less are they those most sought for now.

Using Natural Wealth

In primitive times the spots most attractive, because most favourable to human life, were those in which food could be most easily and safely obtained from fruit-bearing trees or by the chase, and where the climate was genial enough to make clothing and shelter needless, at least during the greater part of the year. Later, when the keeping of cattle and tillage had come into use, good pastures and a fertile soil in the valley of a river were the chief sources of material well-being. Wild beasts were less terrible, because man was better armed; but as human enemies were formidable, regions where hills and rocks facilitated defence by furnishing natural strongholds had their advantages.

Still later, forests came to be recognised as useful for fuel, and for carpentry and shipbuilding. Mineral deposits, usually found in hilly or mountainous districts, became pre-eminently important sources of wealth; and rivers were valued as highways of commerce and as sources of motive power by the force of their currents. To the Red Indians of the Ohio valley the places which were the most attractive camping-grounds were those whither the buffaloes came in vast herds to lick the rock salt exposed in the sides of the hills. It is now not the salt-licks, but the existence of immense deposits of coal and iron, that have determined the growth of huge communities in those regions whence the red man and the buffalo have both vanished. England was once, as New Zealand is now, a great wool-growing and wool-exporting country, whereas she is to-day a country which spins and weaves far more wool than she produces.

Ancient Harbours and Modern

So, too, the influence of the sea on man has changed. There was a time when towns were built upon heights some way off from the coast, because the sea was the broad high road of pirates who swooped down upon and pillaged the dwellings of those who lived near it. Now that the sea is safe, trading cities spring up upon its margin, and sandy tracts worthless for agriculture have gained an unexpected value as health resorts, or as places for playing games, places to which the inhabitants of inland districts flock in summer, as they do in England and Germany, or in winter, as they do on the Mediterranean coasts of France. The Greeks, when they began to compete with the Phœnicians in maritime commerce, sought for small and sheltered inlets in which their tiny vessels could lie safely—such inlets as Homer describes in the Odyssey, or as the Old Port of Marseilles, a city originally a colony from the Ionian Phocæa. Nowadays these pretty little rock harbours are useless for the large ships which carry our trade. The Old Port of Marseilles is abandoned to small coasters and fishing-boats, and the ocean steamers lie in a new harbour which is protected, partly by outlying islands, partly by artificial works.

The World-Importance of Medicine

So, too, river valleys, though still important as highways of traffic, are important not so much in respect of water carriage as because they furnish the easiest lines along which railways can be constructed. The two banks of the Rhine, each traversed by a railroad, carry far more traffic than the great stream itself carried a century ago; and the same remark applies to the Hudson. All these changes are due to the progress of invention, which may give us fresh changes in the future not less far-reaching than those the past has seen. Mountainous regions with a heavy rainfall, such as Western Norway or the coast of the Pacific in Washington and British Columbia, may, by the abundance of water power which they supply, which can be transmuted into electrical energy, become sources of previously unlooked-for wealth, especially if some cheap means can be devised of conveying electricity with less wastage in transmission than is at present incurred. Within the last few years considerable progress in this direction has been made. Should effective and easily applicable preventives against malarial fever be discovered, many districts now shunned, because dangerous to the life of white men, may become the homes of flourishing communities. The discovery of cinchona bark in the seventeenth century affected the course of events, because it provided a remedy against a disease that had previously baffled medical skill. If quinine had been at the disposal of the men of the Middle Ages, not only might the lives of many great men, as for instance of Dante, have been prolonged, but the Teutonic emperors would have been partially relieved of one of the chief obstacles which prevented them from establishing permanent control over their Italian dominions. Rome and the Papal power defended themselves against the hosts of the Franconian and Hohenstaufen sovereigns by the fevers of the Campagna more effectively than did the Roman people by their arms, and almost as effectively as did the Popes by their spiritual agencies.

Bearing in mind this principle, that the gifts of Nature to man not only increase, but also vary in their form, in proportion and correspondence to man’s capacity to use them, and remembering also that man is almost as much influenced by Nature when he has become her adroit master as when she was his stern mistress, we may now go on to examine more in detail the modes in which her influence has told and still tells upon him.

The Problem of Racial Distinctions

It has long been recognised that Nature must have been the principal factor in producing, that is to say, in differentiating, the various races of mankind as we find them differentiated when our records begin. How this happened is one of the darkest problems that history presents. By what steps and through what causes did the races of man acquire these diversities of physical and intellectual character which are now so marked and seem so persistent? It has been suggested that some of these diversities may date back to a time when man, as what is called a distinct species, had scarcely begun to exist. Assuming the Darwinian hypothesis of the development of man out of some pithecoid form to be correct—and those who are not themselves scientific naturalists can of course do no more than provisionally accept the conclusions at which the vast majority of scientific naturalists have arrived—it is conceivable that there may have been unconnected developments of creatures from intermediate forms into definitely human forms in different regions, and that some of the most marked types of humanity may therefore have had their first rudimentary and germinal beginning before any specifically human type had made its appearance. This, however, is not the view of the great majority of naturalists. They appear to hold that the passage either from some anthropoid apes, or from some long since extinct common ancestor of man and the existing anthropoid apes—this latter alternative representing what is now the dominant view—did not take place through several channels (so to speak), but through one only, and that there was a single specifically human type which subsequently diverged into the varieties we now see.

TREE DWELLERS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

We must remember that such terms as “The Stone Age,” “The Bronze Age,” and so forth, are only loosely applied. The ages so called did not close at certain periods. There are races now living in all the conditions of these past ages. This photograph, for example, shows the actual tree dwellings of the Papuans in New Guinea to-day—one of the most primitive forms of human habitation.

If this be so, it is plain that climate, and the conditions of life which depend upon climate, soil, and the presence of vegetables and of other animals besides man, must have been the forces which moulded and developed those varieties. From a remote antiquity, everybody has connected the dark colour of all, or nearly all, the races inhabiting the torrid zone with the power of the sun; and the fairer skin of the races of the temperate and arctic zones with the comparative feebleness of his rays in those regions. This may be explained on Darwinian principles by supposing that the darker varieties were found more capable of supporting the fierce heat of the tropics. What explanation is to be given of the other characteristics of the negro and negroid races, of the usually frizzled hair, of the peculiar nose and jaw, and so forth, is a question for the naturalist rather than for the historian. Although climate and food may be the chief factors in differentiation, the nature of the process is, as indeed is the case with the species of animals generally, sometimes very obscure. Take an instance from three African races which, so far as we can tell, were formed under similar climatic conditions—the Bushmen, the Hottentots, and the Bantu, the race including those whom we call Kaffirs. Their physical aspect and colour are different. Their size and the structure of their bodies are different. Their mental aptitudes are different; and one of the oddest points of difference is this, that whereas the Bushmen are the least advanced, intellectually, morally, and politically, of the three races, as well as the physically weakest, they show a talent for drawing which is not possessed by the other two.

THE HABITATIONS OF MAN IN ALL AGES OF THE WORLD’S HISTORY

At first man built twig huts in trees, but becoming better matched with his animal foes he took to caves and underground habitations. Our illustration of the latter shows a section through the soil. Lake dwellings marked a distinct advance. Other varieties of primitive habitations are the leaf hut, the tents of skin, the mud hut, and the beehive hut of stone. Roman villas are still models of beauty. American “skyscrapers” are peculiar to our time; but all early forms of dwellings, while marking progress, have existed contemporaneously throughout history.

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Is the Race Mystery Insoluble?

In this case there is, of course, a vast unknown fore-time during which we may imagine the Bantu race, probably originally formed in a region other than that which it now occupies (and under more favourable conditions for progress), to have become widely differentiated from those which are now the lower African races. We still know comparatively little about African ethnography. Let us, therefore, take another instance in which affinities of language give ground for believing that three races, whose differences are now marked, have diverged from a common stock. So far as language goes, the Celts, the Teutons, and the Slavs, all speaking Indo-European tongues, may be deemed to be all nearly connected in origin. They are marked by certain slight physical dissimilarities, and by perhaps rather more palpable dissimilarities in their respective intellectual and emotional characters. But so far as our knowledge goes, all three have lived for an immensely long period in the colder parts of the temperate zone, under similar external conditions, and following very much the same kind of pastoral and agricultural life. There is nothing in their environment which explains the divergences we perceive; so the origin of these divergences must apparently be sought either in admixture with other races or in some other historical causes which are, and will for ever remain, in the darkness of a recordless past.

Mixing of the World’s Peoples

How race admixture works, and how it forms a new definite character out of diverse elements, is a subject which anyone may find abundant materials for studying in the history of the last two thousand years. Nearly every modern European people has been so formed. The French, the Spaniards, and the English are all the products of a mixture, in different proportions, of at least three elements—Iberian (to use a current name), Celts, and Teutons, though the Celtic element is probably comparatively small in Spain, and the Teutonic comparatively small both in Spain and in Central and Southern France. No small part of those who to-day speak German and deem themselves Germans must be of Slavonic stock. Those who to-day speak Russian are very largely of Finnish, to some small extent of Tartar, blood. The Italians probably spring from an even larger number of race-sources, without mentioning the vast number of slaves brought from the East and the North into Italy between B.C. 100 and A.D. 300. In the cases of Switzerland and Scotland the process of fusion is not yet complete. The Celto-Burgundian Swiss of Neuchatel is still different from the Allemanian Swiss of Appenzell; as the Anglo-Celt of Fife is different from the Ibero-Celt of the Outer Hebrides. But in both these cases there is already a strong sense of national unity, and in another three hundred years there may have arisen a single type of character.

The Unique Case of Iceland

An interesting and almost unique case is furnished by Iceland, where isolation under peculiar conditions of climate, food, and social life has created a somewhat different type both of body and of mental character from that of the Norwegians, although so far as blood goes the two peoples are identical, Iceland having been colonised from Western Norway a thousand years ago, and both Icelanders and Norwegians having remained practically unmixed with any other race—save that some slight Celtic infusion came to Iceland with those who migrated thither from the Norse settlements in Ireland, Northern Scotland, and the Hebrides—since the separation took place. But by far the most remarkable instance of race admixture is that furnished in our own time by the United States of North America, where a people of predominantly English stock (although there were in the end of the eighteenth century a few descendants of Dutchmen, with Germans, Swedes, and Ulster Irishmen, in the country) has within the last sixty years received additions of many millions of Celts, of Germans and Scandinavians, and of various Slavonic races. At least a century must elapse before it can be seen how far this infusion of new blood will change the type of American character as it stood in 1840.

There are, however, two noteworthy differences between modern race fusions and those which belong to primitive times. One is that under modern conditions the influence of what may be called the social and political environment is probably very much greater than it was in early times. The American-born son of Irish parents is at forty years of age a very different creature from his cousin on the coast of Mayo. The other is that in modern times differences of colour retard or forbid the fusion of two races. So far as the Teutonic peoples are concerned, no one will intermarry with a negro; a very few with a Hindu, a Chinese, or a Malay. In the ancient world there was but little contact between white men and black or yellow ones, but the feeling of race aversion was apparently less strong than it is now, just as it was much less strong among the Spaniards and Portuguese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than it is among Americans or Englishmen to-day. It is less strong even now among the so-called “Latin races;” and as regards the Anglo-Americans, it is much less strong towards the Red Indians than towards negroes.

THE REMARKABLE INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT ON PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

Mr. Bryce points out that the physical features of a people are determined chiefly by their environment. These illustrations show (at top) a typical English settler in the old Colonial days of America, a native Red Indian (left) and a typical American of to-day (right). Without any intermingling of red men and white, the modern American, thanks to climatic conditions, resembles the Red Indian far more closely than he does his own ancestors of the Colonial days.

As Nature must have been the main agent in the formation of the various races of mankind from a common stock, so also Nature has been the chief cause of their movements from one part of the earth to another, these movements having been in their turn a potent influence in the admixture of the races. Some geographers have alleged climate—that is to say, the desire of those who inhabit an inclement region to enjoy a softer and warmer air—as a principal motive which has induced tribes of nations to transfer themselves from one region to another.

It is no doubt true that the direction of migrations has almost always been either from the north towards the south, or else along parallels of latitude, men rarely seeking for themselves conditions more severe than those under which they were born. But it is usually not so much the wish to escape cold that has been an effective motive as the wish to find more and better food, since this means an altogether easier life. Scarcity of the means of subsistence, which is, of course, most felt when population is increasing, has operated more frequently and powerfully than any other cause in bringing on displacements of the races of man over the globe. The movement of the primitive Aryans into India from the plateaux of West Central Asia, probably also the movement of the races which speak Dravidian languages from South Central Asia into Southern India, and probably also the mighty descent, in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., of the Teutonic races from the lands between the Baltic and the Alps into the Roman Empire, had this origin.

The Colonising Impulse

In more advanced states of society a like cause leads the surplus population of a civilised state to overflow into new lands, where there is more space, or the soil is more fertile. Thus the inhabitants of Southwestern Scotland, partly, no doubt, at the suggestion of their rulers, crossed over into Ulster, where they occupied the best lands, driving the aboriginal Celts into the rougher and higher districts, where their descendants remain in the glens of Antrim, and in the hilly parts of Down, Derry, and Tyrone. Thus the men of New England moved out to the West and settled in the Mississippi Valley, while the men of Virginia crossed the Alleghanies into Kentucky. Thus the English have colonised Canada and Australia and New Zealand and Natal. Thus the Russians have spread out from their ancient homes on the upper courses of the Dnieper and the Volga all over the vast steppes that stretch to the Black Sea and the Caucasus, as well as into the rich lands of Southwestern Siberia. Thus the surplus peasantry of Germany has gone not only to North America, but also to Southern Brazil and the shores of the Rio de la Plata.

The Need of Native Labour

In another form it is the excess of population over means of subsistence at home that has produced the remarkable outflow of the Chinese through the Eastern Archipelago and across the Pacific into North America, and that has carried the Japanese to the Hawaiian Islands. And here we touch another cause of migration which is indirectly traceable to Nature—namely, the demand in some countries for more labour or cheaper labour than the inhabitants of the country are able or willing to supply. Sometimes this demand is attributable to climatic causes. The Spaniards and Portuguese and English in the New World were unfitted by their physical constitutions for out-of-door labour under a tropical sun. Hence they imported negroes during the sixteenth and two following centuries in such numbers that there are now about eight millions of coloured people in the United States alone, and possibly (though no accurate figures exist) as many more in the West Indies and South America. To a much smaller extent the same need for foreign labour has recently brought Indian coolies to the shores of the Caribbean Sea, and to the hottest parts of Natal, as it brings Polynesians to the sugar plantations of Northern Queensland.

What Determines Race Movements

Two other causes which have been potent in bringing about displacements and mixtures of population are the desire for conquest and plunder and the sentiment of religion. But these belong less to the sphere of Nature than to that of human passion and emotion, so that they scarcely fall within this part of our inquiry, the aim of which has been to show how Nature has determined history by inducing a shifting of races from place to place. From this shifting there has come the contact of diverse elements, with changes in each race due to the influence of the other, or perhaps the absorption of one in the other, or the development of something new out of both. In considering these race movements we have been led from the remote periods in which they began, and of which we know scarcely anything except from archæological and linguistic data, to periods within the range of authentic history. So we may go on to see how Nature has determined the spots in which the industry of the more advanced races should build up the earliest civilisations, and the lines along which commerce, a principal agent in the extension of civilisation, should proceed to link one race with another.

THE MERCHANT MARINERS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

The earliest agents in the diffusion of trades and the arts were the Phœnicians, who from their great cities of Tyre, Sidon, and Carthage conducted a sea-borne traffic with lands as remote as England, and whose adventurous sailors, despite the smallness of their vessels, are believed even to have succeeded in rounding the Cape of Good Hope.

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Isolation of Eastern Peoples

It was long since observed that the first homes of a dense population and a highly developed civilisation lay in fertile river valleys, such as those of the Lower Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Ganges, the Yang-tse-kiang. All these are situate in the hotter parts of the temperate zone; all are regions of exceptional fertility. The soil, especially when tillage has become general, is the first source of wealth; and it is in the midst of a prosperous agricultural population that cities spring up where handicrafts and the arts arise and flourish. The basins of the Lower Nile and of the Lower Euphrates and Tigris are (as respects the West Asiatic and Mediterranean world) the fountain-heads of material, military, and artistic civilisation. From them it spreads over the adjacent countries and along the coasts of Europe and Africa. On the east, Egypt and Mesopotamia are cut off by the deserts of Arabia and Eastern Persia from the perhaps equally ancient civilisation of India, which again is cut off by lofty and savage mountains from the very ancient civilisation of China. Nature forbade intercourse between these far eastern regions and the West Asian peoples, while on the other hand Nature permitted Egypt, Phœnicia, and Babylon to influence and become teachers of the peoples of Asia Minor and of the Greeks on both sides of the Ægean Sea. The isolation and consequent independent development of India and of China is one of the most salient and significant facts of history. It was not till the end of the fifteenth century, when the Portuguese reached the Malabar coast, that the Indian peoples began to come into the general movement of the world; for the expedition of Alexander the Great left hardly any permanent result, except upon Buddhist art, and the conquests of Mahmud of Ghazni opened no road to the East from the Mediterranean West. Nor did China, though visited by Italian travellers in the thirteenth century, by Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth, come into effective contact with Europe till near our own time.

As the wastes of barren land formed an almost impassable eastern boundary to the West Asian civilisations, so on the west the expanse of sea brought Egypt and to a less extent Assyria (through Phœnicia) into touch with all the peoples who dwelt on the shores of the Mediterranean. The first agents in the diffusion of trade and the arts were the Phœnicians, established at Tyre, Sidon, and Carthage. The next were the Greeks. For more than two thousand years, from B.C. 700 onwards, the Mediterranean is practically the centre of the history of the world, because it is the highway both of commerce and of war. For seven hundred years after the end of the second century B.C., that is to say, while the Roman Empire remained strong, it was also the highway of civil administration. The Saracen conquests of the seventh century cut off North Africa and Syria from Europe, checked transmarine commerce, and created afresh the old opposition of East and West in which a thousand years earlier Herodotus had found the main thread of world history. But it was not till after the discovery of America that the Mediterranean began to yield to the Atlantic its primacy as the area of sea power and sea-borne trade.

Influence of the Seas in History

Bordered by far less fertile and climate-favoured countries, and closed to navigation during some months of winter, the Baltic has always held a place in history far below that of the Mediterranean. Yet it has determined the relations of the North European states and peoples. So, too, the North Sea has at one time exposed Britain to attack from the Danish and Norwegian lords of the sea, and at other times protected her from powerful continental enemies. It may indeed be said that in surrounding Europe by the sea on three sides, Nature has drawn the main lines which the course of events on this smallest but most important of the continents has had to follow.

Magellan and American Politics

Of the part which the great bodies of water have played, of the significance in the oceans of mighty currents like the Gulf Stream, the Polar Current, the Japan Current, the Mozambique Current, it would be impossible to speak within reasonable compass. But two remarks may be made before leaving this part of the subject. One is that man’s action in cutting through an isthmus may completely alter the conditions as given by Nature. The Suez Canal has of late years immensely enhanced the importance of the Mediterranean, already in some degree restored by the decay of Turkish power, by the industrial revival of Italy, and by the French conquests in North Africa. The cutting of a canal at Panama will change the relations of the seafaring and fleet-owning nations that are interested in the Atlantic and the Pacific. And the other remark is that the significance of a maritime discovery, however great at first, may become still greater with the lapse of time. Magellan, in his ever memorable voyage, not only penetrated to and crossed the Pacific, but discovered the Philippine Islands, and claimed them for the monarch who had sent him forth. His appropriation of them for the Crown of Spain, to which during these three centuries and a half they have brought no benefit, has been the cause which has led the republic of the United States to depart from its traditional policy of holding to its own continent by taking them as a prize—a distant and unexpected prize—of conquest.

HOW NATURE DETERMINES THE SITES OF CITIES

Most towns and communities founded more than 300 years ago were on easily defensible hills, by the side of navigable rivers, or inlets of the sea. Our illustrations show (1) Naples, (2) Bonsuna, (3) Old Port and hill of Marseilles, (4) Monaco, (5) St. Cézaire, and (6) the Greek Monastery of St. Balaam.

Photos. by Frith and Underwood & Underwood

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THE SHIFTING OF THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD’S COMMERCE

These two maps, which have been very carefully prepared from the most reliable authorities, indicate at a glance the relative importance of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic as highways of commerce in the time of Julius Cæsar, B.C. 102–44.

HOW THE MEDITERRANEAN HAS GIVEN PLACE TO THE ATLANTIC

Here is the contrast to the [opposite page]. In our time the Atlantic has become the centre of the world’s commerce, and the Mediterranean has sunk in importance. It would be almost deserted but for the routes to India via the Suez Canal.

A few words may suffice as to what Nature has done towards the formation of nations and States by the configuration of the surface of the dry land—that is to say, by mountain chains and by river valleys. The only natural boundaries, besides seas, are mountains and deserts. Rivers, though convenient frontier lines for the politician or the geographer, are not natural boundaries, but rather unite than dissever those who dwell on their opposite banks. Thus the great natural boundaries in Asia have been the deserts of Eastern Persia, of Turkestan, and of Northern Arabia, with the long Himalayan chain and the savage ranges apparently parallel to the Irawadi River, which separate the easternmost corner of India and Burmah from South-Western China. To a less extent the Altai and Thian Shan, and, to a still smaller extent, the Taurus in Eastern Asia Minor, have tended to divide peoples and States. The Caucasus, which fills the space between two great seas, has been at all times an extremely important factor in history, severing the nomad races of Scythia from the more civilised and settled inhabitants of the valleys of the Phasis and the Kura. Even to-day, when the Tsar holds sway on both sides of this chain, it constitutes a weakness in the position of Russia, and it helps to keep the Georgian races to the south from losing their identity in the mass of Russian subjects.

The Place of Mountains in History

Without the Alps and the Pyrenees, the annals of Europe must have been entirely different. The Alps, even more than the Italian climate, proved too much for the Romano-Germanic Emperors of the Middle Ages, who tried to rule both to the north and to the south of this wide mountain region. The Pyrenees have not only kept in existence the Basque people, but have repeatedly frustrated the attempts of monarchs to dominate both France and Spain. The mass of high moorland country which covers most of the space between the Solway Firth and the lower course of the Tweed has had something to do with the formation of a Scottish nation out of singularly diverse elements. The rugged mountains of Northern and Western Scotland, and the similar though less extensive hill country of Wales, have enabled Celtic races to retain their language and character in both these regions.

What Steam-power has Done

On the other hand, the vast open plains of Russia have allowed the Slavs of the districts which lie round Novgorod, Moscow, and Kiev to spread out among and Russify the Lithuanian and Finnish, to some extent also the Tartar, races, who originally held by far the larger part of that area. So, too, the Ural range, which, though long, is neither high nor difficult to pass, has opposed no serious obstacle to the overflow of population from Russia into Siberia. That in North America the Alleghanies have had a comparatively slight effect upon political history, although they did for a time arrest the march of colonisation, is due partly to the fact that they are a mass of comparatively low parallel ranges, with fertile valleys between, partly to the already advanced civilisation of the Anglo-Americans of the Atlantic seaboard, who found no great difficulty in making their way across, against the uncertain resistance of small and non-cohesive Indian tribes. A far more formidable natural barrier is formed between the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific slope by the Rocky Mountains, with the deserts of Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and Idaho. But the discovery of steam power has so much reduced the importance of this barrier that it does not seriously threaten the maintenance of a united American republic.

In one respect the New World presents a remarkable contrast to the Old. The earliest civilisations of the latter seem to have sprung up in fertile river valleys. Those of the former are found not on the banks of streams like the Nile or Euphrates, but on elevated plateaux, where the heat of a tropical sun is mitigated by height above sea level. It was in the lofty lake basin of Tezcuco and Mexico, and on the comparatively level ground which lies between the parallel ranges of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes, that American races had reached their finest intellectual development, not in the far richer, but also hotter and less healthy river valleys of Brazil, or (unless we are to except Yucatan) on the scorching shores of the Caribbean Sea. Nature was in those regions too strong for man, and held him down in savagery.

How Nature fixes Sites of Cities

In determining the courses of great rivers, Nature has determined the first highways of trade and fixed the sites of many cities. Nearly all the considerable towns founded more than three centuries ago owe their origin either to their possessing good havens on the sea-coast, or to the natural strength of their position on a defensible hill, or to their standing close to a navigable river. Marseilles, Alexandria, New York, Rio de Janeiro, are instances of the first; Athens, Edinburgh, Prague, Moscow, of the second; Bordeaux, Cologne, New Orleans, Calcutta, of the third. Rome and London, Budapest, and Lyons combine the advantages of the second with those of the third. This function of rivers in directing the lines of commerce and the growth of centres of population has become much less important since the construction of railroads, yet population tends to stay where it has been first gathered, so that the fluviatile cities are likely to retain their preponderance. Thus the river is as important to the historian as is the mountain range or the sea.

Climate and Commerce

From the physical features of a country it is an easy transition to the capacities of the soil. The character of the products of a region determines the numbers of its inhabitants and the kind of life they lead. A land of forests breeds hunters or lumbermen; a land of pasture, which is too rough or too arid or too sterile for tillage, supports shepherds or herdsmen probably more or less nomadic. Either kind of land supports inhabitants few in proportion to its area. Fertile and well-watered regions rear a denser, a more settled, and presumably a more civilised population. Norway and Tyrol, Tibet and Wyoming, and the Orange River Colony, can never become so densely peopled as Bengal or Illinois or Lombardy, yet the fisheries of its coast and the seafaring energy of its people have sensibly increased the population of Norway. Thus he who knows the climate and the productive capacity of the soil of any given country can calculate its prospects of prosperity. Political causes may, of course, intervene. Asia Minor and the Valley of the Euphrates, regions once populous and flourishing, are now thinly inhabited and poverty-stricken because they are ruled by the Turks.

But these cases are exceptional. Bengal and Lombardy and Egypt have supported large populations under all kinds of government. The products of each country tend, moreover, to establish definite relations between it and other countries, and do this all the more as population, commerce, and the arts advance. When England was a great wool-growing and wool-exporting country, her wool export brought her into close political connection with the wool-manufacturing Flemish towns. She is now a cotton-manufacturing country, needing cotton which she cannot grow at all, and consuming wheat which she does not grow in sufficient quantities. Hence she is in close commercial relations with the United States on one side, which give her most of her cotton and much of her wheat, and with India, from which she gets both these articles, and to which she exports a large part of her manufactured cotton goods.

Common Needs make for Peace

So Rome, because she needed the corn of Egypt, kept Egypt under a specially careful administration. The rest of her corn came from Sicily and North Africa, and the Vandal conquest of North Africa dealt a frightful blow to the declining Empire. In these cases the common interest of sellers and buyers makes for peace, but in other cases the competition of countries desiring to keep commerce to themselves occasions war. The Spanish and Dutch fought over the trade to India in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, when the Portuguese Indies belonged to Spain, as the English and French fought in the eighteenth. And a nation, especially an insular nation, whose arable soil is not large enough or fertile enough to provide all the food it needs, has a powerful inducement either to seek peace or else to be prepared for maritime war. If such a country does not grow enough corn or meat at home, she must have a navy strong enough to make sure that she will always be able to get these necessaries from abroad. Attica did not produce all the grain needed to feed the Athenians, so they depended on the corn ships which came down from the Euxine, and were practically at the mercy of an enemy who could stop those ships.

Of another natural source of wealth, the fisheries on the coast of a country, no more need be said than that they have been a frequent source of quarrels and even of war. The recognition of the right of each state to the exclusive control and enjoyment of the sea for three miles off its shores has reduced, but not entirely removed, the causes of friction between the fishermen of different countries.

Minerals and Civilisation

Until recently, the surface of the soil was a far more important source of wealth than was that which lies beneath the surface. There were iron mines among the Chalybes on the Asiatic coast of the Euxine in ancient times; there were silver mines here and there, the most famous being those at Laurium, from which the Athenians drew large revenues, gold mines in Spain and Dacia, copper mines in Elba, tin mines in the south-west corner of Britain. But the number of persons employed in mining and the industries connected therewith was relatively small both in the ancient world and, indeed, down till the close of the eighteenth century. The immense development of coal-mining and of iron-working in connection therewith has now doubled, trebled, or quadrupled the population of large areas in Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, and the United States, adding vastly to the wealth of these countries and stimulating in them the growth of many mechanical arts. This new population is quite different in character from the agricultural peasantry who in earlier days formed the principal substratum of society. Its appearance has changed the internal politics of these countries, disturbing the old balance of forces and accelerating the progress of democratic principles.

THE PLACE OF MOUNTAINS IN HISTORY: NATURE’S BARRIERS TO MAN’S EXPANSION

Without the Alps the annals of Europe must have been entirely different. The mountains were too much for the emperors of the Middle Ages, although Hannibal, the great Carthaginian general, succeeded in crossing them two centuries before Christ, a feat which Napoleon repeated 2,000 years later. Our engraving illustrates Napoleon crossing the Alps.

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Nor have minerals failed to affect the international relations of peoples and States. It was chiefly for the precious metals that the Spaniards explored the American Continent and conquered Mexico and Peru. It was for the sake of capturing the ships bringing those metals back to Europe that the English sea-rovers made their way to the American coasts and involved England in wars with Spain. It was the discovery in 1885 of extensive auriferous strata unexampled in the certainty of their yield that drew a swarm of foreign immigrants into the Transvaal, whence arose those difficulties between them and the Dutch inhabitants previously established there which, coupled with the action of the wealthy owners of the mines, led at last to the war of 1899 between Britain and the two South African Republics.

Man’s Fight with Nature

The productive capacity of a country is, however, in one respect very different from those great physical features—such as temperature, rainfall, coast configuration, surface character, geological structure, and river system—which have been previously noted. Those features are permanent qualities which man can affect only to a limited extent, as when he reduces the rainfall a little by cutting down forests, or increases it by planting them, or as when he unites an isle, like that of Cadiz, to the mainland, cuts through an isthmus, like that of Corinth, or clears away the bar at a river mouth, as that of the Mississippi has been cleared.

Exhausting the Mineral Wealth

But the natural products of a country may be exhausted and even the productive capacity of its soil diminished. Constant tillage, especially if the same crop be raised and no manure added, will wear out the richest soils. This has already happened in parts of Western America. Still the earth is there; and with rest and artificial help it will recover its strength. But timber destroyed cannot always be induced to grow again, or at least not so as to equal the vigour of primeval forests. Wild animals, once extirpated, are gone for ever. The buffalo and beaver of North America, the beautiful lynxes of South Africa and some of its large ruminants, are irrecoverably lost for the purposes of human use, just as much as the dinornis, though a few individuals may be kept alive as specimens. So, too, the mineral resources of a country are not only consumable, but obviously irreplaceable. Already some of the smaller coalfields of Europe have been worked out, while in others it has become necessary to sink much deeper shafts, at an increasing cost. There is not much tin left in Cornwall, not much gold in the gravel deposits of Northern California. The richest known goldfield of the world, that of the Transvaal Witwatersrand, can hardly last more than thirty or forty years. Thus in a few centuries the productive capacity of many regions may have become quite different from what it is now, with grave consequences to their inhabitants.

These are some of the ways in which Nature affects those economic, social, and political conditions of the life of man the changes in which make up history. As we have seen, that which Nature gives to man is always the same, in so far as Nature herself is always the same—an expression which is more popular than accurate, for Nature herself—that is to say, not the laws of Nature, but the physical environment of man on this planet—is in reality always changing. It is true that this environment changes so slowly that a thousand years may be too short a period in which man can note and record some forms of change—such, for instance, as that by which the temperature of Europe became colder during the approach of the glacial period and warmer during its recession—while ten thousand years may be too short to note any diminution in the heat which the sun pours upon the earth, or in the store of oxygen which the earth’s atmosphere holds.

Progress of Modern Invention

But as we have also seen, the relation to man of Nature’s gifts differs from age to age as man himself becomes different, and as his power of using these gifts increases, or his need of them becomes either less or greater. Every invention alters those relations. Water power became less relatively valuable when steam was applied to the generation of motive force. It has become more valuable with the new applications of electricity. With the discovery of mineral dyes, indigo and cochineal are now less wanted than they were. With the invention of the pneumatic tyre for bicycles and carriages, caoutchouc is more wanted. Mountains have become, since the making of railways, less of an obstacle to trade than they were, and they have also become more available as health resorts. Political circumstances may interfere with the ordinary and normal action of natural phenomena. A race may be attracted to or driven into a region for which it is not physically suited, as Europeans have gone to the West Indies, and negroes were once carried into New York and Pennsylvania. The course of trade which Nature prescribes between different countries may be hampered or stopped by protective tariffs; but in these cases Nature usually takes her eventual revenges. They are instances which show, not that man can disregard her, but that when he does so, he does so to his own loss.

It would be easy to add further illustrations, but those already given are sufficient to indicate how multiform and pervading is the action upon man of the physical environment, or in other words, how in all countries, and at all times, geography is the necessary foundation of history, so that neither the course of a nation’s growth, nor its relations with other nations, can be grasped by one who has not come to understand the climate, surface, and products of the country wherein that nation dwells.

There is no Unmixed Race left

This conception of the relation of geography to history is, as has been said, the leading idea of the present work, and has furnished the main lines which it follows. It deals with history in the light of physical environment. Its ground plan, so to speak, is primarily geographical, and secondarily chronological. But there is one difficulty in the way of such a scheme, and of the use of such a ground plan, which cannot be passed over. That difficulty is suggested by the fact already noted—that hardly any considerable race, and possibly no great nation, now inhabits the particular part of the earth’s surface on which it was dwelling when a history begins. Nearly every people has either migrated bodily from one region to another, or has received such large infusions of immigrants from other regions as to have become practically a new people. Hence it is rare to find any nation now living under the physical conditions which originally moulded its character, or the character of some at least of its component elements. And hence it follows that when we study the qualities, aptitudes, and institutions of a nation in connection with the land it inhabits, we must always have regard not merely to the features of that land, but also to those of the land which was its earlier dwelling-place. Obviously, this brings a disturbing element into the study of the relations between land and people, and makes the whole problem a far more complicated one than it appeared at first sight.

Nature’s Race Factory

Where a people has migrated from a country whose physical conditions were similar to those under which its later life is spent, or where it had reached only a comparatively low stage of economic and political development before the migration, the difficulties arising from this source are not serious. The fact that the English came into Britain from the lands round the mouth of the Elbe is not very material to an inquiry into their relations to their new home, because climate and soil were similar, and the emigrants were a rude, warlike race. But when we come to the second migration of the English, from Britain to North America, the case is altogether different. Groups of men from a people which had already become highly civilised, had formed a well-marked national character, and had created a body of peculiar institutions, planted themselves in a country whose climate and physical features are widely diverse from those of Britain.

If, for the sake of argument, we assume the Algonquin aborigines of Atlantic North America as they were in A.D. 1600 to have been the legitimate product of their physical environment—I say “for the sake of argument,” because it may be alleged that other forces than those of physical environment contributed to form them—what greater contrast can be imagined than the contrast between the inhabitants of New England in this present year and the inhabitants of the same district three centuries earlier, as Nature, and Nature alone, had turned them out of her factory? Plainly, therefore, the history of the United States cannot, so far as Nature and geography are concerned, be written with regard solely, or even chiefly, to the conditions of North American nature. The physical environment in which the English immigrants found themselves on that continent has no doubt affected their material progress and the course of their politics during the three centuries that have elapsed since settlements were founded in Virginia and on Massachusetts Bay.

Beginnings of Race History

But it is not to that environment, but to earlier days, and especially to the twelve centuries during which their ancestors lived in England, that their character and institutions are to be traced. Thus the history of the American people begins in the forests of Germany, where the foundations of their polity were laid, and is continued in England, where they set up kingdoms, embraced Christianity, became one nation, received an influx of Celtic, Danish, and Norman-French blood, formed for themselves that body of customs, laws, and institutions which they transplanted to the new soil of America, and most of which, though changed and always changing, they still retain. The same thing is true of the Spaniards (as also of the Portuguese) in Central and South America. The difference between the development of the Hispano-Americans and that of their English neighbours to the north is not wholly, or even mainly, due to the different physical conditions under which the two sets of colonists have lived.

It is due to the different antecedent history of the two races. So a history of America must be a history not only of America, but of the Spaniards, Portuguese, French, and English—one ought in strictness to add of the negroes also—before they crossed the Atlantic. The only true Americans, the only Americans for whom American nature can be deemed answerable, are the aboriginal red men whom we, perpetuating the mistake of Columbus, still call Indians.

Geography as a Basis of History

This objection to the geographical scheme of history writing is no doubt serious when a historical treatise is confined to one particular country or continent, as in the instance I have taken of the Continent of North America. It is, however, less formidable in a universal history, such as the present work, because, by referring to another volume of the series, the reader will find what he needs to know regarding the history of the Spaniards, English, and French in those respective European homes where they have grown to be that which they were when, with religion, slaughter, and slavery in their train, they descended upon the shores of America.

Accordingly the difficulty I have pointed out does not disparage the idea and plan of writing universal history on a geographical basis. It merely indicates a caution needed in applying that plan, and a condition indispensable to its utility—viz., the regard that must be had to the stage of progress at which a people has arrived when it is subjected to an environment different from that which had in the first instance helped to form its type.

THE GROWTH OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE

W

WE have now considered some of the ways in which a universal history, written with special reference to the physical phenomena of the earth as geographical science presents them, may bring into strong relief one large and permanent set of influences which determine the progress or retrogression of each several branch of mankind. Upon the other principles which preside over and direct the composition of such a work, not much need be said. They are, of course, in the main, those which all competent historians will follow in writing the history of any particular people.

But a universal history which endeavours to present in a short compass a record of the course of events in all regions and among all peoples, since none can safely be omitted, is specially exposed to two dangers. One is that of becoming sketchy and viewy. When a large object has to be dealt with on a small scale, it is natural to sum up in a few broad generalisations masses of facts which cannot be described or examined in detail. Broad generalisations are valuable when they proceed from a thoroughly trained mind—valuable, even if not completely verifiable, because they excite reflection. But it is seldom possible to make them exact. They necessarily omit most of the exceptions, and thus suggest a greater uniformity than exists.

Neurdein

THE STONE AGE: HUNTERS RETURNING FROM THE CHASE

From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon

LARGER IMAGE

Need of Care in History

The other danger is that of sacrificing brightness and charm of presentation. When an effort is made to avoid generalisations, and to squeeze into the narrative as many facts as the space will admit, the narrative is apt to become dry, because compression involves the curtailment of the personal and dramatic element. These are the rocks between which every historian has to steer. If he has ample space, he does well to prefer the course of giving all the salient facts and leaving the reader to generalise for himself. If, however, his space is limited, as must needs be the lot of those who write a universal history, the impossibility of going into minute detail makes generalisations inevitable, for it is through them that the result and significance of a multitude of minor facts must be conveyed in a condensed form.

New Minds and New Facts

All the greater, therefore, becomes the need for care and sobriety in the forming and setting forth every summarising statement and general conclusion or judgment. Probably the soundest guiding principle and best safeguard against error is to be found in shunning all preconceived hypotheses which seek to explain history by one set of causes, or to read it in the light of one idea. The habit of magnifying a single factor, such as the social factor, or the economic, or the religious, has been a fertile source of weakness in historical writing, because it has made the presentation of events one-sided, destroying that balance and proportion which it is the highest merit of any historian to have attained. Theory and generalisation are the life-blood of history. They make it intelligible. They give it unity. They convey to us the instruction which it always contains, together with so much of practical guidance in the management of communities as history is capable of rendering. But they need to be applied with reserve, and not only with an impartial mind, but after a painstaking examination of all the facts—whether or no they seem to make for the particular theory stated—and of all the theories which any competent predecessor has propounded.

For the historian, though he must keep himself from falling under the dominion of any one doctrine by which it is sought to connect and explain phenomena, must welcome all the light which any such doctrine can throw upon facts. Even if such a doctrine be imperfect, even if it be tainted by error, it may serve to indicate relations between facts, or to indicate the true importance of facts, which previous writers had failed to observe, or had passed too lightly over. It is thus that history always needs to be re-written. History is a progressive science, not merely because new facts are constantly being discovered, not merely because the changes in the world give to old facts a new significance, but also because every truly penetrating and original mind sees in the old facts something which had not been seen before.

A universal history is fitted to correct such defects as may be incident to that extreme specialism in historical writing which is now in fashion. The broad and concise treatment which a history of all times and peoples must adopt naturally leads to efforts to characterise the dominant features and tendency of an epoch or a movement, whether social, economic, or political.

The Side Streams of History

Yet even here there is a danger to be guarded against. No epoch, no movement, is so simple as it looks at first sight, or as one would gather from even the most honest contemporary writer. There is always an eddy at the side of the stream; and the stream itself is the resultant of a number of rivulets with different sources, whose waters, if the metaphor may be extended, are of different tints. Let any man study minutely a given epoch, such as that of the Reformation in Germany, or that of the Revolutionary War in America, and he will be surprised to find how much more complex were the forces at work than he had at first supposed, and on how much smaller a number of persons than he had fancied the principal forces did in fact directly operate. Or let any one—for this is perhaps the best, if the most difficult, method of getting at the roots of this complexity—study thoroughly and dispassionately the phenomena of his own time. Let him observe how many movements go on simultaneously, sometimes accelerating, sometimes retarding, one another, and mark how, the more fully he understands this complex interlacing, so much the less confident do his predictions of the future become. He will then realise how hard it is to find simple explanations and to deliver exact statements regarding critical epochs in the past.

Mercier

THE FIRST INDUSTRIES: POTTERY

From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon

LARGER IMAGE

Mercier

THE FIRST INDUSTRIES: THE FORGE

From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon

LARGER IMAGE

The Main Stream of History

Nevertheless, the task of summarising and explaining is one to which the writer of a History of the World must address himself. If he has the disadvantage of limited space, he has the advantage of being able to assume the reader’s knowledge of what has gone before, and to invite the reader’s attention to what will come after. Thus he stands in a better position than does the writer who deals with one country or one epoch only for making each part of history illustrate other parts, for showing how similar social tendencies, similar proclivities of human nature, work similarly under varying conditions and are followed by similar, though never identical, results. He is able to bring out the essential unity of history, expunging from the reader’s mind the conventional and often misleading distinctions that are commonly drawn between the ancient, the mediæval, and the modern time. He can bring the contemporaneous course of events in different countries into a fruitful relation. And in the case of the present work, which dwells more especially on the geographical side of history, he can illustrate from each country in succession the influence of physical environment on the formation of races and the progress of nations, the principles which determine the action of such environment being everywhere similar, though the forms which that action takes are infinitely various.

Is there, it may be asked, any central thread in following which the unity of history most plainly appears? Is there any process in tracing which we can feel that we are floating down the main stream of the world’s onward movement? If there be such a process, its study ought to help us to realise the unity of history by connecting the development of the numerous branches of the human family.

One such process has already been adverted to and illustrated. It is the gradual and constant increase in man’s power over Nature, whereby he is emancipated more and more from the conditions she imposes on his life, yet is brought into an always closer touch with her by the discovery of new methods of using her gifts. Two other such processes may be briefly examined. One goes on in the sphere of time, and consists in the accumulation from age to age of the strength, the knowledge, and the culture of mankind as a whole. The other goes on in space as well as in time, and may be described as the contraction of the world, relatively to man.

The Great Increase of Population

The accumulation of physical strength is most apparent in the increase of the human race. We have no trustworthy data for determining the population, even of any one civilised country, more than a century and a half ago; much less can we conjecture that of any country in primitive or prehistoric times. It is clear, however, that in prehistoric times—say, six or seven thousand years ago, there were very few men on the earth’s surface. The scarcity of food alone would be sufficient to prove that; and, indeed, all our data go to show it. Fifty years ago the world’s population used to be roughly conjectured at from seven to nine hundred millions, two-thirds of them in China and India. It is now estimated at over fifteen hundred millions. That of Europe alone must have tripled within a century, and can hardly be less than four hundred millions. That of North America may have scarcely exceeded four or five millions in the time of Christopher Columbus, or at the date of the first English settlements, though we have only the scantiest data for a guess. It may now be 130,000,000, for there are over a hundred millions in the United States alone, about fifteen in Mexico, and eight in Canada, besides the inhabitants of Central America.

The Prolific Power of White People

The increase has been most swift in the civilised countries, such as Britain, Germany, Russia, and the United States; but it has gone on in India also since India came under British rule (famines notwithstanding), and in the regions recently colonised by Europeans, such as Australia, Siberia, and Argentina, the disappearance of aborigines being far more than compensated for by the prolific power of the white immigrants. Some regions, such as Asia Minor and parts of North Africa, are more thinly peopled now than they were under the Roman Empire, and both China and Peru may have no larger population than they had five, or ten, or fifteen centuries ago. But taking the world at large, the increase is enormous, and will apparently continue. Even after the vacant cultivable spaces which remain in the two Americas, Northern Asia, and Australasia have been filled, the discovery of new modes of enlarging the annually available stock of food may maintain the increase. It is most conspicuous among the European races, and is, of course, due to the greater production in some regions of food, and in others of commodities wherewith food can be purchased. It means an immense addition to the physical force of mankind in the aggregate, and to the possibilities of intellectual force also—a point to be considered later. And, of course, it also means an immense and growing preponderance of the civilised white nations, which are now probably one half of mankind, and may, in another century, when they have risen from about five hundred to, possibly, one thousand or fifteen hundred millions, be nearly two-thirds.

Modern Man Stronger than his Ancestors

As respects the strength of the average individual man, the inquiry is less simple. Palæolithic man and neolithic man were apparently (though here and there may have been exceptions) comparatively feeble creatures, as are the relics of the most backward tribes known to us, such as the Veddas of Ceylon, the Bushmen, the Fuegians. Some savages, as, for instance, the Patagonians, are men of great stature, and some of the North American Indians possess amazing powers of endurance. The Greeks of the fifth century B.C., and the Teutons of the time of Julius Cæsar, had reached a high physical development. Pheidippides is said to have traversed one hundred and fifty miles on foot in forty-eight hours. But if we think of single feats of strength, feats have been performed in our own day—such as Captain Webb’s swimming across the Straits of Dover—equal to anything recorded from ancient or mediæval times. To swim across the much narrower Hellespont was then deemed a surprising exploit. Nor do we know of any race more to be commended for physical power and vigour of constitution than the American backwoodsmen of Kentucky or Oregon to-day. The swords used by the knights of the fifteenth century have usually handles too small for many a modern English or German hand to grasp.

America’s Mingled Races

Isolated feats do not prove very much, but there is good reason to believe that the average European is as strong as ever he was, and probably more healthy, at least if longevity is a test of health. One may fairly conclude that with better and more abundant food, the average of stature and strength has improved over the world at large, so that in this respect also the force of mankind as a whole has advanced. Whether this advance will continue is more doubtful. In modern industrial communities the law of the survival of the fittest may turn out to be reversed, for it is the poorer and lower sections of the population that marry at an early age, and have the largest families, while prudential considerations keep down the birth-rate among the upper middle-class. In Transylvania, for instance, the Saxons are dying out, because very few children are born to each pair, while the less educated and cultured Rumans increase fast. In North America, the Old New England stock of comparatively pure British blood has begun to be swamped by the offspring of the recent immigrants, mostly Irish or French Canadians; and although the sons of New England, who have gone West, continue to be prolific, it is probable that the phenomena of New England will recur in the Mississippi Valley, and that the newcomers from Europe who form the less cultivated strata of the population—Irish, Germans, Italians, Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, Rumans—will contribute an increasing proportion of the inhabitants. Some of these, and especially the Irish and the Germans and the Scandinavians, are among the best elements in the American population, and have produced men of the highest distinction. But the average level among them of versatile aptitude and of intellectual culture is slightly below that of the native Americans.

Now, the poorer sections are in most countries, though of course not always to the same extent, somewhat inferior in physical as well as in mental quality, and more prone to suffer from that greatest hindrance to physical improvement, the abuse of alcoholic drinks.

We come next to another form of the increase of human resources, the accumulation of knowledge, and of what may be called intellectual culture and capacity, for it is convenient to distinguish these two latter from knowledge.

PIONEERS OF MODERN CIVILISATION

The discovery of precious metals is a great factor in progress. Seekers after gold are chief among the pioneers who help to carry civilisation into new lands.

Inventions Mean Progress

In knowledge there has been an advance, not merely a tolerably steady and constant advance, but one which has gone on with a sort of geometrical progression, moving the faster the nearer we come to our own time. Whatever may have befallen in the prehistoric darkness, history knows of only one notable arrest or setback in the onward march—that which marks the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries of the Christian era. Even this set-back was practically confined to Southern and Western Europe, and affected only certain departments of knowledge. It did not, save, perhaps, as regards a few artistic processes, extinguish that extremely important part of the previously accumulated resources of mankind which consisted in the knowledge of inventions. It is in respect of inventions, especially mechanical and physical or chemical inventions, that the accumulation of knowledge has been most noteworthy and most easy to appreciate.

A history of inventions is a history of the progress of mankind, of a progress to which every race may have contributed in primitive times, though all the later contributions have come from a few of the most civilised. Every great invention marks one onward step, as one may see by enumerating a few, such as the use of fire, cooking, metal working, the domestication of wild animals, the tillage of the ground, the use of plough and mattock and harrow and fan, the discovery of plants or trees useful for food or for medicine, the cart, the wheel, the water-mill (overshot, undershot, and turbine), the windmill, the distaff (followed long, long after by the spinning-wheel), the loom, dyestuffs, the needle, the potter’s wheel, the hydraulic press, the axe-handle, the spear, the bow, the shield, the war-chariot, the sling, the cross-bow, the boat, the paddle, the oar, the helm, the sail, the mariner’s compass, the clock, picture-writing, the alphabet, parchment, paper, printing, photography, the sliding keel, the sounding-lead, the log, the brick, mortar, the column, the arch, the dome, till we come down to explosives, the microscope, the cantilever, and the Röntgen rays.

THE FIRST SETTLEMENT OF A NEW CITY

Many flourishing cities in South Africa, Australia, and America have grown up around the sites where the first gold-seekers pegged out their claims in unexploited territories and began digging for the precious metal.

The history of the successive discovery, commixture, and applications of the metals, from copper and bronze down to manganese, platinum, and aluminium, or of the successive discovery and utilisation of sources of power—the natural sources, such as water and wind, the artificially procured, such as steam, gas, and electricity—or of the production and manufacture of materials available for clothing, wool, hair, linen, silk, cotton, would show how every step becomes the basis for another step, and how inventions in one department suggest or facilitate inventions in another. Recent discoveries in surgery and medicine, such as the use of antiseptics, tend to improve health and to prolong life; and in doing so, they increase the chances of further discoveries being made.

The Prolonging of Life

Who can tell what the world may have lost by the early death of many a man of genius? One peculiar line of discovery which at first seemed to have nothing to do with practice has proved to be of signal service; the working out of mathematical methods of calculation by means of which the mechanical and physical sciences have in recent times made a progress in their practical application undreamt of by those who laid the foundations of geometry and algebra many centuries ago. It may, indeed, be said that all the sciences need one another, and that none has been without its utilities for practice, since even that which deals with the heavenly bodies has been used for the computation of time, was used by the agriculturist before he had any calendars to guide him, and has been of supreme value to the navigator. It has also been suggested that an observation of sun spots may enable the advent of specially hot seasons, involving droughts, to be predicted.

Another kind of knowledge also grows by the joint efforts of many peoples, that which records the condition of men in the past and the present, including history, economics, statistics, and the other so-called social sciences. This kind also is useful for practice, and has led to improvements by which nearly all nations have profited, such as an undebased currency, banking and insurance, better systems of taxation, corporations, and joint stock companies. With this we may couple the invention of improved political institutions.

The accumulation of knowledge, especially of scientific knowledge applied to the exploitation of the resources of Nature, means the accumulation of wealth—that is to say, of all the things which men need or use. The total wealth of the world must have at least quadrupled or quintupled within the last hundred years. Nearly all of it is in the hands or under the control of the civilised nations of European stock, among whom the United States stands foremost, both in rate of economic growth and in the absolute quantity of values possessed.

Knowledge Means Wealth

Two further observations belong to this part of the subject. One is that this stock of useful knowledge, the accumulation of which is the central fact of the material progress as well as of the intellectual history of mankind, now belongs to (practically) all races and states alike. Some, as we shall note presently, are more able to use it than others, but all have access to it. This is a new fact. It is true that most races have contributed something to the common stock; and that even among the civilised peoples, no one or two or three (except possibly the Greeks as respects ancient times) can claim to have contributed much more than the others. But in earlier ages there were peoples or groups of peoples who were for a time the sole possessors of inventions which gave them great advantages, especially for war. Superior weapons as well as superior drill enabled Alexander the Great, and afterward the Romans, to conquer most of the civilised world. Horses and firearms, with courage and discipline, enabled two Spanish adventurers to seize two ancient American empires with very scanty forces, as they enabled a handful of Dutch Boers to overcome the hosts of Mosilikatze and Dingaan. So there were formerly industrial arts known to or practised by a few peoples only. But now all inventions, even those relating to war, are available even to the more backward races, if they can learn how to use them or can hire white men to do so for them. The facilities of communication are so great, the means of publicity so abundant, that everything becomes speedily known everywhere.

Inventions are now Universal

The other observation is that there is now no risk that any valuable piece of knowledge will be lost. Every public event that happens, as well as every fact of scientific consequence, is put on record, and that not on a single stone or in a few manuscripts, but in books, of which so many copies exist that even the perishable nature of the material will not involve the loss of the contents, since, if these contents are valuable, they will be transferred to and issued in other books, and so ad infinitum. Thus every process of manufacture is known to so many persons that while it continues to be serviceable it is sure to be familiar and transmitted from generation to generation by practice as well as by description. We must imagine a world totally different from the world we know in order to imagine the possibility of any diminution, indeed of any discontinuance of the increase, of this stock of knowledge which the world has been acquiring, and which is not only knowledge but potential wealth.

When one passes from knowledge considered as a body of facts ascertained and available for use to the thing we call intellectual aptitude or culture—namely, the power of turning knowledge to account and of producing results in spheres other than material—and when we inquire whether mankind has made a parallel advance in this direction, it becomes necessary to distinguish three different kinds of intellectual capacity.

The first may be called the power of using scientific methods for investigating phenomena, whether physical or social.

No Decrease of Knowledge is now Likely

The second is the power of speculation, applied to matters which have not hitherto been found capable of examination by the methods of science, whether observational, experimental, or mathematical. The third is the power of intellectual creation, whether literary or artistic.

The methods of scientific inquiry may almost be classed with the ascertained facts of science or with inventions, as being parts of the stock of accumulated knowledge built up by the labour of many generations. They are known to everybody who cares to study them, and can be learnt and applied by everybody who will give due diligence. Just as every man can be taught to fire a gun, or steer a ship, or write a letter, though guns, helms, and letters are the result of discoveries made by exceptionally gifted men, so every graduate in science of a university can use the methods of induction, can observe and experiment with a correctness which a few centuries ago even the most vigorous minds could scarcely have reached.

Original Thinkers are still Rare

Because the methods have been so fully explained and illustrated as to have grown familiar, a vast host of investigators, very few of whom possess scientific genius, are at work to-day extending our scientific knowledge. So the methods of historical criticism—so the methods of using statistics—are to-day profitably applied by many men with no such original gift as would have made them competent critics or statisticians had not the paths been cut by a few great men and trodden since by hundreds of feet. All that is needed is imitation—intelligent and careful imitation. Nevertheless, there remains this sharp contrast between knowledge of the facts of applied science and knowledge of the methods, that whereas there is no radical difference between the ability of one man and that of another to use a mechanical invention, such as a steam plough or an electric motor-car, there is all the difference in the world between the power of one intellect and another to use a method for the purposes of fresh discovery. Knowledge fossilised in a concrete invention or even in a mathematical formula is a sort of tool ready to every hand. But a method, though serviceable to everybody, becomes eminently fruitful only when wielded by the same kind of original genius as that which made discoveries by the less perfect methods of older days. This is apparent even in inquiries which seem to reside chiefly in collection and computation. Everybody tries nowadays to use statistics. Many people do use them profitably. But the people who by means of statistics can throw really fresh and brilliant light on a problem are as few as ever they were.

Advantage of Modern over Old Thinkers

When we turn to the exercise of speculative thought on subjects not amenable to strictly scientific—that is to say, to exact—methods, the gain which has come to mankind by the labour of past ages is of a different order. Metaphysics, ethics, and theology, to take the most obvious examples, are all of them the richer for the thoughts of philosophers in the past. A number of distinctions have been drawn, and a number of classifications made, a number of confusions, often verbal, have been cleared up, a number of fallacies detected, a number of technical terms invented, whereby the modern speculator enjoys a great advantage over his predecessor. His mind has been clarified, and many new aspects of the old problems have been presented, so that he is better able to see all round the old problems.

The Living Thought of Past Ages

None of the great thinkers, from Pythagoras down to Hegel, has left metaphysics where he found it. Yet none can be said to have built on the foundations of his predecessors in the same way as the mathematicians and physicists and chemists have added to the edifice they found. What the philosophers have done is to accumulate materials for the study of man’s faculties and modes of thinking, and of his ideas regarding his relations to the universe, while also indicating various methods by which the study may be pursued. Each great product of speculative thought is itself a part of these materials, and for that reason never becomes obsolete, as the treatises of the old physicists and chemists have mostly become. Aristotle, for instance, has left us books on natural history, on metaphysics and ethics, and on politics. Those on natural history are mere curiosities, and no modern biologist or zoologist needs them. Those on metaphysics and ethics still deserve the attention of the student of philosophy, though he may in a certain sense be said to have got beyond them. The treatise on politics still keeps its place beside Montesquieu, Burke, and Tocqueville. Or, to take a thinker who like Aristotle seems very far removed from us, though fifteen hundred years later in date, St. Thomas of Aquinum discusses questions from many of which the modern world has moved away, and discusses them by methods which many do not now use, starting from premises which many do not accept. But he marks a remarkable stage in the history of human thought, and as a part of that history, and as an example of extraordinary dialectical ingenuity and subtlety, he remains an object of interest to those least in agreement with his conclusions.

Every Great Thinker Affects Others

Every great thinker affects other thinkers, and propagates the impulse he has received, though perhaps in a quite different direction. The teaching of Socrates was the starting point for nearly all the subsequent schools of Greek philosophy. Hume became the point of departure for Kant, who desired to lay a deeper foundation for philosophy than that which Hume seemed to have overturned. All these great ones have not only enriched us, but are still capable of stimulating us. But they have not improved our capacity for original thinking. The accumulation of scientific knowledge has, as already observed, put all mankind in a better position for solving further physical problems and establishing a more complete dominion over Nature. The accumulation of philosophic thought has had no similar effect. In the former case each man stands, so to speak, on the shoulders of his predecessors. In the latter he stands on his own feet. The value of future contributions to philosophy will depend on the original power of the minds that make them, and only to a small extent (except by way of stimulus) on what such minds may have drawn from those into whose labours they have entered.

Ebb-Tides of Intellectual Culture

When we come to the products of literary and artistic capacity, we find an even vaster accumulation of intellectual treasure available for enjoyment, but a still more marked absence of connection between the amount of treasures possessed and the power of adding fresh treasures to them. Since writing came into use, and, indeed, even in the days when memory alone preserved lays and tales, every age and many races have contributed to the stock. There have been ebbs and flows both in quantity and quality. The centuries between A.D. 600 and A.D. 1100 have left us very little of high merit in literature, though something in architecture; and the best of that little in literature did not come from the seats of Roman civilisation in Italy, France, Spain, and the East Roman Empire.

Some periods have seen an eclipse of poetry, others an eclipse of art or a sterility in music. Literature and the arts have not always flourished together, and musical genius in particular seems to have little to do with the contemporaneous development of other forms of intellectual power. The quantity of production bears no relation to the quality, not even an inverse relation; for the pessimistic notion that the larger the output the smaller is the part which possesses brilliant excellence, has not been proved. Still less does the amount of good work produced in any given area depend upon the number of persons living in that area. Florence, between A.D. 1250 and A.D. 1500 gave birth to more men of first-rate poetical and artistic genius than London has produced since 1250; yet Florence had in those two and a half centuries a population of probably only from forty to sixty thousand. And Florence herself has since A.D. 1500 given birth to scarcely any distinguished poets or artists, though her population has been larger than it was in the fifteenth century.

Mansell

THE MIND OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

Aristotle (B.C. 384–322) whose influence is greater in some lines than that of St. Thomas of Aquinum, who represents mediæval thought, 1500 years later.

The increase in the world’s stock of intellectual wealth is one of the most remarkable facts in history, for it represents a constant increase in the means of enjoyment. Such losses as there have been nearly all occurred during the Dark Ages; but there is now little risk that anything of high literary or musical value will perish, though, of course, works of art, and especially buildings and carvings, suffer or vanish.

The increase does not, however, tend to any strengthening of the creative faculty. There is a greater abundance of models of excellence, models of which form the taste, afford a stimulus to sensitive minds, and establish a sort of technique with well-known rules. The principles of criticism are more fully investigated. The power of analysis grows, and the appreciation both of literature and of art is more widely diffused. Their influence on the whole community becomes greater, but the creative imagination which is needed for the production of original work becomes no more abundant and no more powerful. It may, indeed, be urged, though our data are probably insufficient for a final judgment, that the finer qualities of poetry and of pictorial and plastic art tend rather to decline under the more analytic habit of mind which belongs to the modern world. Simplicity, freshness, spontaneity come less naturally to those who have fallen under the pervasive influence of this habit.

Mansell

THE MIND OF THE MEDIÆVAL WORLD

St. Thomas of Aquinum, 1500 years later than Aristotle, represents mediæval thought. St. Thomas, however, influences the life and thought of many thousands to-day.

Effect of Thought on Mankind

There remains one other way in which the incessant play of thought may be said to have increased or improved the resources of mankind. Certain principles or ideas belonging to the moral and social sphere—to the moral sphere by their origin, to the social sphere by their results—make their way to a more or less general acceptance, and exert a potent influence upon human life and action. They are absent in the earliest communities of which we know, or are present only in germ. They emerge, sometimes in the form of customs gradually built up in one or more peoples, sometimes in the utterances of one gifted mind. Sometimes they spread impalpably; sometimes they become matter for controversy, and are made the battle-cries of parties. Sometimes they end by being universally received, though not necessarily put into practice. Sometimes, on the other hand, they continue to be rejected in one country, or by one set of persons in a country, as vehemently as they are asserted by another. As instances of these principles or ideas or doctrines, whatever one is to call them, the following may be taken: The condemnation of piracy, of slavery, and of treaty-breaking, of outrages on the bodies of dead enemies, of cruelty to the lower animals, of the slaughter of prisoners in cold blood, of polygamy, of torture to witnesses or criminals; the recognition of the duty of citizens to obey the laws, and of the moral responsibility of rulers for the exercise of their power, of the right of each man to hold his own religious opinion and to worship accordingly, of the civil (though not necessarily of the political) equality of all citizens; the disapproval of intoxication, the value set upon female chastity, the acceptance of the social and civil (to which some would add the political) equality of women.

Men who Contributed to Progress

All these dogmas or ideas or opinions—some have become dogmas in all civilised peoples, others are rather to be described as opinions whose truth or worth is denied or only partially admitted—are the slow product of many generations. Most of them are due to what we may call the intelligence and sentiment of mankind at large, rather than to their advocacy by any prominent individual thinkers. The teachings of such thinkers have, of course, done much to advance them. Everybody would name Socrates and Confucius as among the men who have contributed to their progress; some would add such names as those of Mohammed and St. Francis of Assisi. Christianity has, of course, made the largest contributions. How much is due to moral feeling, how much to a sense of common utility, cannot be exactly estimated. Economic reasonings and practical experience would have probably in the long run destroyed slavery, but it was sentiment that did in fact destroy it in the civilised States where it had longest survived.

How much these doctrines, even in the partial and imperfect application which most of them have secured, have done for humanity may be perceived by anyone who will imagine what the world would be if they were unknown. They form one of the most substantial additions made to what may be called the intellectual and moral capital with which man has to work this planet and improve his own life upon it. And the most interesting and significant crises in history are those which have turned upon the recognition or application of principles of this kind. The Reformation of the sixteenth century, the French Revolution, the War of Secession in the United States, are familiar modern examples.

Intellect Mightier than Population

Putting all these forms of human achievement together—the extension of the scientific knowledge of Nature with consequent mastery over her, the scientific knowledge of social phenomena in the past and the present, the records of philosophic speculation, the mass of literary and artistic products, the establishment, however partial and imperfect, of regulative moral and political principles—it will be seen that the accumulation of this vast stock of intellectual wealth has been an even more important factor than the increase of population in giving man strength and dignity over against Nature, and in opening up to him an endless variety of modes of enjoying life—that is to say, of making it yield to him the most which its shortness and his own physical infirmities permit. The process by which this accumulation has been carried along is the central thread of history. The main aim of a history of the world must be to show what and how each race or people has contributed to the general stock. To this aim political history, ecclesiastical history, economic history, the history of philosophy, and the history of science, are each of them subordinate, though it is only through them that the process can be explained.

In these last few pages intellectual progress has been considered apart from the area in which it has gone on, and apart from the conditions imposed on it by the natural features of that area. A few words are, however, needed regarding its relation to the surface of the earth. The movement of civilisation must be considered from the side of space as well as from that of time.

Contraction of the World

Space is a material element in the inquiry because it has divided the families of mankind from one another. Some families, such as the Chinese and the Peruvians, have developed independently, some, such as the South and West European peoples, in connection with, or perhaps in dependence on, the development of other races or peoples. Hence that which each achieved was in some cases achieved for itself only, in other cases for its neighbours as well. The contributions made by different races have—at any rate during the last four thousand years, and probably in earlier days also—been very unequal; yet none can have failed to contribute something if only by way of influencing the others. Inequality in progress would seem to have become more marked in the later than in the earlier periods. Indeed, some races, such as those of Australia, appear during many centuries, possibly owing to their isolation, to have made no progress at all. They may even have receded.

When we regard the evolution and development of man from the side of his relations to space, three facts stand out—the contraction of the world, the overflow of the more advanced races, and the consequent diffusion all over the world of what is called civilisation.

By the contraction of the world, I mean the greater swiftness, ease, and safety with which men can pass from one part of it to another, or communicate with one another across great intervening spaces. This has the effect of making the world smaller for most practical purposes, while the absolute distance in latitude and longitude remains the same. The progress of discovery is worth tracing, for it shows how much larger the small earth, which was known to the early nations, must have seemed to them than the whole earth, which we know, seems to us.

THE ARTISTIC GENIUS OF TWO CITIES

A COMPARISON OF THE NATIVE POETS & ARTISTS OF FLORENCE & LONDON

“The quantity of production,” says Mr. Bryce, “bears no relation to the quality. Still less does the amount of good work produced in any given area depend upon the number of persons living in that area. Florence between A.D. 1250 and A.D. 1500 gave birth to more men of first-rate poetical and artistic genius than London has produced since 1250; yet Florence had in those two and a half centuries a population of probably only from forty to sixty thousand. And Florence herself has since A.D. 1500 given birth to scarcely any distinguished poets or artists, though her population has been larger than it was in the fifteenth century.”

THE GENIUS OF THE GOLDEN AGE OF FLORENCE, 1250 TO 1500, FAR EXCEEDED THAT OF LONDON FROM 1250 TO THE PRESENT DAY

Poets and Artists Born in Florence from 1250–1500

• Alberti, Leon Battista, 1404–1472, architect, painter
• Albertinelli, Mariotto, 1474–1515, painter
• Andrea del Sarto, 1487–1531, painter
• Angelico da Fiesole, Fra Giovanni, 1387–1455, painter
• Botticelli, Alessandro, 1447–1510, painter
• Cavalcanti, Guido, 1255–1300, poet, philosopher
• Cimabue, Giovanni, 1240–1302, painter
• Credi, Lorenzo di, 1459–1537, painter
• Dante, Alighieri, 1265–1321, poet
• Donatello, 1386–1466, sculptor and painter
• Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 1378–1455, sculptor
• Ghirlandajo, Domenico, 1449–1494, painter
• Gozzoli, Benozzo, 1420–1498, painter
• Leonardo da Vinci, 1452–1519, painter, sculptor
• Lippi, Fra Filippo, 1412–1469, painter
• Lippi, Filippino, 1459–1504, painter
• Lorenzo, Don, 1370–1425, painter
• Medici, Lorenzo de, 1448–1492, poet
• Orcagnia, Andrea di Cione, 1329–1368? sculptor, painter
• Perugino, Vannucci Pietro, 1446–1524, painter
• Pesellino, Francesco di, 1422–1457, painter
• Pesello, Giuliano, 1367–1446, painter, sculptor
• Pollajuolo, Antonio, 1429–1498, sculptor, painter
• Pollajuolo, Piero, 1443–1496, sculptor, painter
• Robbia, Andrea della, 1437–1528, sculptor
• Robbia, Luca della, 1399–1482, sculptor
• Rossi, Giovanni Battista de, 1494–1541, sculptor, painter
• Ruccellai, Giovanni, 1475–1525, poet
• Spinello, Aretino, 1334–1410, painter
• Ucello, Paolo, 1397–1475, painter
• Verocchio, Andrea, 1435–1488, sculptor, painter

THE LAST FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF FLORENTINE CULTURE HAVE BEEN LESS PRODUCTIVE THAN THE PRECEDING TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES

Poets and Artists Born in Florence since 1500

• Allori, Christofano, 1577–1621, painter
• Bronzino, Angelo, 1502–1572, painter
• Cellini, Benvenuto, 1500–1571, sculptor
• Cigoli, Luigi Cardi da, 1559–1613, painter
• Cortona, Pietro da, 1596–1669, architect, painter
• Dolci, Carlo, 1616–1686, painter
• Doni, Antonio Francesco, 1513–1574, author
• Furini, Francesco, 1604–1646, painter
• Ligozzi, Jacobino, 1543–1627, painter
• Poccetti, Bernardino, 1542–1612, painter
• Salviati, Francesco, 1510–1563, painter
• San Giovanni, Giovanni da, 1599–1636, painter
• Santi di Tito, 1538–1603, painter
• Tacco, Pietro, 1580–1640, sculptor
• Venusti, Marcello, 1515–1579, painter

The Only Great Poet Born in London from 1250–1500

• Chaucer, Geoffrey, 1328–1400

Poets and Artists Born in London since 1500

• Blake, William, 1757–1827, poet and painter
• Browning, Robert, 1812–1889, poet
• Byron, Geo. Gordon Noel, Lord, 1788–1824, poet
• Defoe, Daniel, 1659–1731, author
• Ford, Edward Onslow, 1852–1901, sculptor
• Gilbert, Alfred, R.A., 1854– —, sculptor
• Gray, Thomas, 1716–1771, poet
• Hogarth, William, 1697–1764, painter
• Hood, Thomas, 1799–1845, poet
• Hunt, William Holman, 1827–1910, painter
• Jonson, Ben, 1573–1637, poet and dramatist
• Keats, John, 1795–1821, poet
• Lamb, Charles, 1775–1834, essayist
• Linnell, John, 1792–1882, painter
• Lucas, John Seymour, 1849– —, painter
• Milton, John, 1608–1674, poet
• Morland, George, 1763–1804, painter
• Pope, Alexander, 1688–1744, poet
• Richmond, Sir William Blake, 1843– —, painter
• Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 1828–1882, poet, painter
• Ruskin, John, 1819–1900, author and art critic
• Spenser, Edmund, 1552–1599, poet
• Stothard, Thomas, 1755–1834, painter, illustrator
• Swinburne, Algernon, 1837–1909, poet
• Walker, Frederick, 1840–1875, painter
• Watts, George F., 1817–1904, painter, sculptor

The Small World of the Ancients

The most ancient records we possess from Assyria, Egypt, Palestine, and from the Homeric poems, show how very limited was the range of geographical knowledge possessed by that small civilised world from which our own civilisation has descended. Speaking roughly, that knowledge seems in the tenth century B.C. to have extended about one thousand miles in each direction from the Isthmus of Suez. However, the best point of departure for the peoples of antiquity is the era of Herodotus, who travelled and wrote B.C. 460–440. The limits of the world as he knew it were Cadiz and the Straits of Gibraltar on the west, the Danube and the Caspian on the north, the deserts of Eastern Persia on the east, and the Sahara on the south, with vague tales regarding peoples who lived beyond, such as Indians far beyond Persia, and pygmies beyond the Sahara. He reports, however, not without hesitation, a circumnavigation of Africa by Phœnicians in the service of Pharaoh Necho.

THE FIRST KNOWN MAP OF THE WORLD

This Babylonian map is probably of the eighth century B.C. The two circles are supposed to represent the ocean, while the River Euphrates and Babylon are shown inside them. The upper part of the tablet is a cuneiform inscription.

Discovery advanced very slowly for many centuries, though the march of Alexander opened up part of the East, while the Roman conquests brought the Far North-West, including Britain, within the range of civilisation; and occasional voyages, such as that of Hanno along the coast of West Africa, that of Nearchus through the Arabian Sea, and that of Pythias to the Baltic, added something to knowledge. Procopius in A.D. 540 can tell us little more regarding the regions beyond Roman influence than Strabo does five and a half centuries earlier. The journeys of Marco Polo and Rubruquis throw only a passing light on the Far East. It is with the Spanish occupation of the Canary Isles, beginning in 1602, and with the Portuguese voyages of the fifteenth century, that the era of modern discovery opens. The re-discovery of America in 1492, for it had been already visited by the Northmen of Greenland and Iceland in the eleventh century, and the opening of the Cape route to India in 1497–1498, were hardly equal to the exploit of Magellan, whose circumnavigation of the globe in 1519–1520 marks the close of this striking period. Thereafter discovery proceeds more slowly. Some of the isles of the central and southern Pacific were not visited till the middle of the eighteenth century, and the north-west coast of America as well as the north-east Coast of Asia, remained little known till an even later date. Those explorations of the interior of North America, of the interior of Africa, of the interior of Australia, and of East Central Asia, which have completed our knowledge of the earth, belong to the nineteenth century. The first crossing of the North American Continent north of latitude 40° was not effected till A.D. 1806.

The Thirst for New Territories

The desire for new territory, for the propagation of religion, and, above all, for the precious metals, were the chief motives which prompted the voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These motives have remained operative; and to them has been added in more recent times the spirit of pure adventure and the interest in science, together with, increasing measure, the effort to secure trade. But the extension of trade followed slowly in the wake of discovery. China and Japan remained almost closed. The policy of Spain sought to restrict her American waters to her own ships, and the commerce they carried was scanty. Communication remained slow and dangerous across the oceans till the introduction of steam vessels (1825–1830).

THE FIRST MAPS: SOME EARLY GEOGRAPHERS’ IDEAS OF THE WORLD

LARGER IMAGE

THE MODERN REPRESENTATION OF THE WORLD: SHOWN ON THREE DIFFERENT PROJECTIONS

In each case the British Empire is shaded

LARGER IMAGE

Modern Representation of the World; Western Part

Modern Representation of the World; Eastern Part

Round the World in 40 Days!

Land transport, though it had steadily increased in Europe, remained costly as well as slow till the era of railway construction began in 1829. The application of steam as a motive power and of electricity as a means of communicating thought has been by far the greatest factor in this long process of reducing the dimensions of the world, which dates back as far as the domestication of beasts of burden, and the invention, first of paddles and oars, and then of sails. The North American Continent can now be crossed in five days, the South American (from Valparaiso to Buenos Ayres) in under two, the Transandine tunnel having now been pierced. The Continent which stretches from the Baltic to the North Pacific can now be traversed in twelve days. By means of the Trans-Siberian line and its steamship connection with the ports of Japan, it is now possible to go round the globe in less than fifty days. Indeed, the journey has recently been done in forty days. Nor is this acceleration of transit more remarkable than its practical immunity, as compared with earlier times, not only from the dangers for which Nature is answerable, but from those also which man formerly interposed.

The increase of trade which has followed in the track first of discovery and latterly (with immensely larger volume) of the improvement of means of transport, has been accompanied not only by the seizure of transoceanic territories by the greater civilised States, but also by an outflow of population from those States into the more backward or more thinly-peopled parts of the earth. Sometimes, as in the case of North America, Siberia, and Australia, the emigrants extinguish or absorb the aboriginal population.

Europeanisation of the World

Sometimes, as in the case of India, Africa, and some parts of South America, they neither extinguish nor blend with the previous inhabitants, but rule them and spread what is called civilisation among them—this civilisation consisting chiefly in a knowledge of the mechanical arts and of deathful weapons accompanied by the destruction, more or less gradual, of their pre-existing beliefs and usages. Sometimes, again, as in the case of China, and to some extent also of the Mussulman East, though political dominion is not established, the process of substituting a new civilisation for the old one goes on despite the occasional efforts of the backward people to resist the process. The broad result is everywhere similar. The modern European type of civilisation is being diffused over the whole earth, superseding, or essentially modifying, the older local types. Thus, in a still more important sense than even that of communications, the world is contracted and becomes far more one than it has ever been before. The European who speaks three or four languages can travel over nearly all of it, and he can find on most of its habitable coasts, and in many parts of the lately-discovered interior, the appliances which are to him necessaries of life. The world is, in fact, becoming an enlarged Europe, so far as the externals of life and the material side of civilisation are concerned. The dissociative forces of Nature have been overcome.

Triumph of Natural Science

Putting together the two processes, the process in time and the process in space, which we have been reviewing, it will be seen that the main line of the development of mankind may be described as the transmission and the expansion of culture—that is to say, of knowledge and intellectual capacity. The stock of knowledge available for use and enjoyment has been steadily increased, and what each people accumulated has been made available for all. With this there has come assimilation, the destruction of weaker types of civilisation, the modification by constant interaction of the stronger types, the creation of a common type tending to absorb all the rest. Assimilation has been most complete in the sphere ruled by natural science—that is to say, in the material sphere, less complete in that ruled by the human sciences (including the sphere of political and social institutions), still less complete in the sphere of religious, moral, and social ideas, and as respects the products of literature and art. Or, in other words, where certainty of knowledge is attainable and utility in practice is incontestable, the process of assimilation has moved fastest and furthest.

Nature & the Unity of Mankind

The process has been a long one, for its beginnings reach back beyond our historical knowledge. So far as it lies within the range of history, it falls into two periods, the earlier of which supplies an instructive illustration of the later one which we know better. The effort which Nature—that is to say, the natural tendencies of man as a social being—has been making towards the unification of mankind during the last few centuries, is her second great effort. The first was in progress from the time when the most ancient records begin down to the sixth and seventh centuries of the Christian era.

THE FIRST TRAVELLER ROUND THE GLOBE

The great exploit of Ferdinand Magellan, who circumnavigated the globe in 1519–1520, ranks among the events of world importance, and was the culminating achievement of the greatest period of discovery in the world’s history.

Greek civilisation, which itself had drawn much from Egypt, as well as from Assyria, Phœnicia, and the peoples of Asia Minor, permeated the minds and institutions (except the legal institutions), of the Mediterranean and West European countries, and was propagated by the governing energy of the Romans. In its Romanised form it transformed or absorbed and superseded the less advanced civilisations of all those countries, creating one new type for the whole Roman world. With some local diversities, that type prevailed from the Northumbrian Wall of Hadrian to the Caucasus and the deserts of Arabia. The still independent races on the northern frontier of the Empire received a tincture of it, and would doubtless have been more deeply imbued had the Roman Empire stood longer.

Christianity, becoming dominant at a time when the Empire was already tottering, gave a new sense of unity to all whom the Greco-Roman type had formed, extended the influence of that type still further, and enabled much that belonged to it (especially its religious, its legal, and its literary elements) to survive the political dominion of the Emperors and to perpetuate itself among practically independent States which were springing up. The authority of Papal Rome helped to carry this sense of unity among civilised men through a period of ignorance, confusion, and semi-barbarism which might otherwise have extinguished it. Nevertheless, we may say, broadly speaking, that the first effort towards the establishment of a common type of civilisation was, if not closed, yet arrested by the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the West. Close thereupon came the rise of Islam, tearing away the Eastern provinces, and creating a rival type of civilisation—though a type largely influenced by the Greco-Roman—which held its ground for some centuries, and has only recently shown that it is destined to vanish.

Conquest and Civilisation

The beginnings of the second effort toward the unification of civilised mankind may be observed as far back as the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Its effective and decisive action may, however, be assigned to the fifteenth, when the spread of literary and philosophic culture, and the swift extension of maritime discovery, ushered in the modern phase wherein we have marked its irresistible advance. This phase differs from the earlier one both in its range—for it embraces the whole earth and not merely the Mediterranean lands—and in its basis, for it rests not so much upon conquest and religion as upon scientific knowledge, formative ideas, and commerce. Yet even here a parallelism may be noted between the ancient and the modern phase. Knowledge and ideas had brought about a marked assimilation of various parts of the ancient world to each other before Roman conquest completed the work, and what conquest did was done chiefly among the ruder races. So now, while it is knowledge and ideas that have worked for the creation of a common type among the peoples of European stock, conquest has been a potent means of spreading this type in the outlying countries and among the more backward races whose territories the European nations have seized.

THE EUROPEANISATION OF THE WORLD

European civilisation is being diffused all over the earth, superseding or essentially modifying the older local types. The solid black portions of this map represent territory under Anglo-Saxon control; the shaded parts are under other European control, and the dotted parts under Asiatic and African control.

Language a Unifying Influence

The diffusion of a few forms of speech has played a great part in both phases. Greek was spoken over the eastern half of the Roman world in the second century A.D., though not to the extinction of such tongues as Syriac and Egyptian. Latin was similarly spoken over the western half, though not to the extinction of the tongues we now call Basque and Breton and Welsh; and Latin continued to be the language of religion, of law, of philosophy, and of serious prose literature in general till the sixteenth century. So now, several of the leading European tongues are spoken far beyond the limits of their birthplace, and their wide range has become a powerful influence in diffusing European culture. German, English, Russian, Spanish, and French are available for the purposes of commerce, and for those who read books over nineteen-twentieths of the earth’s surface. The languages of the smaller non-European peoples are disappearing in those places where they have to compete with these greater European tongues, except in so far as they are a medium of domestic intercourse. Arabic, Chinese, and in less degree Persian are the only non-European languages which retain a world importance. English, German, and Spanish are pre-eminently the three leading commercial languages. They gain ground on the rest, and it is English that gains ground most swiftly. The German merchant is no doubt even more ubiquitous (if the expression be permitted) than is the English; but the German more frequently speaks English than the Englishman or American speaks German.

Linking the Nations Together

It has already been observed that assimilation has advanced least in the sphere of institutions, ideas, and literature. The question might, indeed, be raised whether the types of thought, of national character, and of literary activity represented by the five or six leading nations are not rather tending to become more accentuated. The self-consciousness of each nation, taking the form of pride or vanity, leads it to exalt its own type and to dwell with satisfaction on whatever differentiates it from other types. Nevertheless there are influences at work in the domain of practice as well as of thought, which, in creating a common body of opinion and a sense of common interest among large classes belonging to these leading nations, tend to link the nations themselves together. Religious sympathy, or a common attachment to certain doctrines, such as, for instance, those of Collectivism, works in this direction among the masses, as the love of science or of art does among sections of the more educated class. As regards the peoples not of European stock, who are, broadly speaking, the more backward, it is not yet possible to say what will be the influence of the European type of culture upon their intellectual development.

The material side of their civilisation will after a time conform to the European type, though, perhaps, to forms that are not the most progressive; and even such faiths as Buddhism and Islam may lose their hold on those who come most into contact with Europeans. But whether these peoples will produce any new types of thought or art under the stimulus of Europe, as the Teutons and Slavs did after they had been for centuries in contact with the relics of Greco-Roman culture, or whether they will be overborne by and merely imitate and reproduce what Europeans teach them—this is a question for conjecture only, since the data for predictions are wanting.

It is a question of special interest as regards the Japanese, the one non-European race which, having an old civilisation of its own, highly developed on the artistic side, has shown an amazing aptitude for appropriating European institutions and ideas. Already a Japanese physiologist has taken high rank among men of science by being one of the discoverers of the bacillus of the Oriental plague.

DOES HISTORY MAKE FOR PROGRESS?

O

ONE of the questions which both the writers and the readers of a History of the World must frequently ask themselves is whether the course of history establishes a general law of progress. Some thinkers have gone so far as to say that this must be the moral of history regarded as a whole, and a few have even suggested that without the recognition of such a principle and of a sort of general guidance of human affairs towards this goal, history would be unintelligible, and the doings of mankind would seem little better than the sport of chance.

What is the Test of Progress?

Whatever may be thought of these propositions as matters of theory, the doctrine of a general and steady law of progress is one to which no historian ought to commit himself. His business is to set forth and explain the facts exactly as they are; and if he writes in the light of a theory he is pretty certain to be unconsciously seduced into giving undue prominence to those facts which make for it. Moreover, the question is in itself a far more complex one than the simple word “progress” at first sight conveys. What is the test of progress? In what form of human advance is it to be deemed to consist? Which of these forms is of the highest value? There can be no doubt of the advance made by man in certain directions. There may be great doubt as to his advance in other directions. There may possibly be no advance but even retrogression, or at least signs of an approaching retrogression, in some few directions. The view to be taken of the relative importance of these lines of movement is a matter not so much for the historian as for the philosopher, and its discussion would carry us away into fields of thought not fitted for a book like the present. Although, therefore, it is true that one chief interest of history resides in its capacity for throwing light on this question, all that need here be said may be expressed as follows:

There has been a marvellous advance in man’s knowledge of the laws of Nature and of his consequent mastery over Nature.

There has been therewith a great increase in population, and, on the whole, in the physical vigour of the average individual man.

There has been, as a further consequence, an immense increase in the material comfort and well-being of the bulk of mankind, so that to most men necessaries have become easier of attainment, and many things which were once luxuries have become necessaries.

Against this is to be set the fact that some of the natural resources of the world are being rapidly exhausted. This would at one time have excited alarm; but scientific discoveries have so greatly extended man’s capacity to utilise other sources of natural energy, that people are disposed to assume that the loss of the resources aforesaid will be compensated by further discoveries.

The Gain and the Loss

As to progress other than material—that is to say, progress in intellectual capacity, in taste, in the power of enjoyment, in virtue, and generally in what is called happiness—every man’s view must depend on the ideal which he sets before himself of what constitutes happiness, and of the relative importance to happiness of the ethical and the non-ethical elements which enter into the conception. Until there is more agreement than now exists or has ever existed on these points, there is no use in trying to form conclusions regarding the progress man has made. Moreover, it is admitted that nearly every gain man makes is accompanied by some corresponding loss—perhaps a slight loss, yet a loss. When we attempt to estimate the comparative importance of these gains and losses, questions of great difficulty, both ethical and non-ethical, emerge; and in many cases our experience is not yet sufficient to determine the quantum of loss. There is room both for the optimist and for the pessimist, and in arguing such questions nearly everybody becomes an optimist or a pessimist. The historian has no business to be either.

There is another temptation besides that of delivering his opinion on these high matters, of which the historian does well to be aware—I mean the temptation to prophesy. The study of history as a whole, more inevitably than that of the history of any particular country or people, suggests forecasts of the future, because the broader the field which we survey the more do we learn to appreciate the great and wide-working forces that are guiding mankind, and the more therefore are we led to speculate on the results which these forces, some of them likely to be permanent, will tend to bring about.

Modern Mastery of Nature

This temptation can seldom have been stronger than it is now, when we see all mankind brought into closer relations than ever before, and more obviously dominated by forces which are essentially the same, though varying in their form. Yet it will appear, when the problem is closely examined, that the very novelty of the present situation of the world—the fact that our mastery of Nature has been so rapidly extended within the last century, and that the phenomena of the subjugation of the earth by Europeans and of the ubiquitous contact of the advanced and the backward races are so unexampled in respect of the area they cover—that all predictions must be uttered with the greatest caution, and due allowance made for elements which may disturb even the most careful calculations. It may, indeed, be doubted whether any predictions of a definitely positive kind—predictions that such and such things will happen—can be safely made, save the obvious ones which are based on the assumption that existing natural conditions remain for some time operative.

A Glimpse into the Future

Taking this assumption to be a legitimate one, it maybe predicted that population will continue to increase, at least till the now waste but habitable parts of the earth have been turned to account; that races, except where there is a marked colour line, will continue to become intermingled; that the small and weak races, and especially the lower set of savages, will be absorbed or die out; that fewer and fewer languages will be spoken; that communications will become even swifter, easier, and cheaper than they are at present; and that commerce and wealth will continue to grow, subject, perhaps, to occasional checks from political disturbance.

There are also some negative predictions on which one may venture, and with a little more confidence. No new race can appear, except possibly from a fusion of two or more existing races, or from the differentiation of a branch of an existing race under new conditions, as the Americans have been to some slight extent differentiated from the English, and the Brazilians from the Portuguese (there having been in the latter case a certain admixture of negro blood), and as the Siberians of the future may be a different sort of Russians. Neither is any new language likely to appear, except, mere trade jargons (like Chinook or pigeon English), because the existing languages of the great peoples are firmly established, and the process of change within each of these languages has, owing to the abundance of printed matter, become now extremely slow. Conditions can hardly be imagined under which such a phenomenon as the development of the Romance languages out of Latin, or of Danish and Swedish out of the common Northern tongue of the eleventh century, could recur.

THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD AT PEACE

From the statuary groups on the Albert Memorial.

LARGER IMAGE

It may seem natural to add the further prediction that the great States and the great religions will continue to grow and to absorb the small ones. But when we touch topics into which human opinion or emotion enters, we touch a new kind of matter, where the influences now at work may be too much affected by new influences to permit of any forecast. Conditions might conceivably come into action which would split up some or most of the present great States, and bring the world back to an age of small political communities.

So, too, though the lower forms of paganism are fast vanishing, and the four or five great religions are extending their sway, it is conceivable that new prophets may arise, founding new faiths, or that the existing religions may be split up into new sects widely diverse from one another. Even the supremacy of the European races, well assured as it now appears, may be reduced by a variety of causes, physiological or moral, when some centuries have passed.

THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD AT PEACE

From the statuary groups on the Albert Memorial.

LARGER IMAGE

Whoever examines the predictions made by the most observant and profound thinkers of the past will see reason to distrust almost all the predictions, especially those of a positive order, which shape themselves in our minds to-day.

JAMES BRYCE

SUMMARY OF WORLD HISTORY

WITH

A CHRONOLOGY OF TEN THOUSAND YEARS

By Arthur D. Innes, M.A.

W

WITHIN the memory of living men, the most advanced peoples of the world believed that the world itself had been created not 6,000 years ago. We have all learned now that the globe itself, that life—and long later mankind—came into being thousands, hundreds of thousands—it may be millions—of years ago.

How long precisely, none can tell. What we do know with certainty is that before the continents finally emerged in their present shape there was an Ice Age, immediately preceded by what is called the Drift Age, and that as early as the Drift Age man, the maker of implements, lived, and did battle with the cave bear and other monsters. Where man first came into being, how he spread over the globe, how the great races acquired their characteristics, we can only conjecture.

The Birth of the Nations

Wherever and whenever man appeared, the earliest traces show him to have been a sociable animal living in communities. The earliest unmistakable traces of civilisation, order, polity, are found in the basins of the Nile and the Euphrates, dating probably as far back as ten thousand years ago. The people who built the Pyramids had already advanced far in the knowledge which gives man the mastery over Nature; and the Pyramids were built certainly 3,000, and probably nearer 5,000, years before the Christian era. And while those pristine civilisations rose and fell in Egypt, civilisations were rising and passing away in Mesopotamia also.

In the fourth millennium there appears first a people with new characteristics—the Semitic race, gradually dominating the Mesopotamian civilisation, spreading westward in successive waves to the Mediterranean, surging into Egypt and out again; creating the Empires of Babylonia and of Assyria, and the Phœnician and Canaanite nations. And while the Semite Empires rose and fell, and Egypt held upon her ancient way, still mightier nations were coming to birth. The great Aryan or Indo-European migrations began, the Celt, the Latin, and the Hellene rolling westward by the Euxine and the Northern Mediterranean; while another group passed southward, to the East of the Semites, spreading the Aryan conquest over the greater part of the Indian peninsula.

Conflicts of Ancient Peoples

Of the doings of the great Semitic Powers in the second millennium B.C. we have some knowledge from the Hebrew records; and year by year fresh light is thrown on those records by inscriptions and tablets newly discovered or newly deciphered, Egyptian, Assyrian, or Hittite. Of the Hittite or early Syrian dominion we know little enough, except that it successfully defied the invading armies of Assyrian kings and Egyptian Pharaohs. Before 1500 the Semite conquerors of Egypt, the Hyksos, were driven out—an event associated by some authorities with the Hebrew Exodus. From this time the ebb and flow of Egyptian and Assyrian dynasties are more definitely recorded. In the closing centuries the prosperity of Tyre and Sidon reached its height, and the theocratic Hebrew nationality formed a kingdom. We become aware of Hellenic or kindred Powers in Asia Minor, at Troy, in Crete, at Mycenæ; of Achæans and Danaans in Egypt.

The First Formation of States

Before another five hundred years had passed, throughout the coasts and islands of the Ægean Sea, Æolians, Ionians, Dorians established themselves in cities, and every city rapidly grew into a highly-organised State. Over the Mediterranean, to Southern Italy, to Sicily, to Marseilles, the new Greek civilisation carried its commerce and its culture. In Italy the Latin races were in like manner forming themselves into city-states, developing conceptions of Government undreamed of by Oriental minds. Rome was founded, and acquired a leadership. Throughout the Hellenic and the Latin world the idea of civic freedom took root; the primitive monarchical systems disappeared, and, through revolutions and temporary despotisms, sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent, the States took on for the most part a Republican form.

In the East an Aryan Power overthrew the last of the Assyrian-Babylonian dynasties; but these Persian conquerors became assimilated to the conquered nations. Fundamentally their empire was of the same type as its predecessors. The Persian sway, however, extended not only into Egypt but over the partly Hellenised Asia Minor; and the Ionic revolt, in the first year of the fifth century B.C. brought the spirit of the East and the spirit of the West into fierce collision. The great king hurled his hosts against defiant Hellas; at Marathon and at Salamis, Athens shattered his army and his fleets. Thenceforth, for a thousand years, the West was the aggressor.

Athens and the Greek Immortals

But the rolling back of the “barbarian” tide was not the only glory that fell to Athens; in that same century the little state bore sons whose names stand in the front rank of the immortals for all time: Æschylus and Sophocles, Phidias, Pericles, Socrates, and Plato; in the next half century, Demosthenes; with others almost if not quite, on the same plane. The character of Athens, idealised, no doubt, is epitomised by Thucydides in the speech of Pericles. She was the sum of all that was best and noblest in Hellenism—its love of freedom, of beauty, of energy, of harmony, and its public spirit. Politically, the story of the period which followed Salamis is mainly one of the rivalry between Athens and Sparta; until the rise of Macedon, when King Philip made himself master of all Hellas.

The Coming-up of Alexander

Then, with the beginning of the last quarter of the fourth century, Alexander the Great blazed upon the world, toppled the empires of Western Asia before him, conquered Egypt, and swept over the great mountain-barriers into India, where Buddhism had already begun to displace the ancient Brahmanism of the first Aryans. The Greek influences did not long linger in the far East after the great conqueror’s death. His empire broke up. Asia west of the Euphrates remained, indeed, under the dominion mainly of one Grecian dynasty, the Seleucidæ; Egypt under that of another, the Ptolemies. Yet Alexander’s attempts to blend East and West failed. Orientalism abode, unconquered, ineradicable; Hellenism prevailed almost after the fashion of British domination in India to-day, in the land, but not of it.

Meanwhile, the struggle between Aryans and non-Aryans had been running a partly separate course in the West. The Phœnicians of Carthage and the pre-Aryan Etruscans, the dominant power in Italy, made a joint assault on the Greeks of Sicily and the Latins of the mainland at the beginning of the fifth century. They were beaten back, but for a century the struggle continued between Rome and Veii. The great Celtic incursion of the Gauls threatened destruction to Rome, but completed the destruction of Etruria. In the fourth century and the first half of the third century B.C. Rome was chiefly engaged in the double task of achieving supremacy, passing into actual dominion among the Latin states, and of establishing the great Senatorial oligarchy, against whose stubborn resolution the Epirote Pyrrhus hurled himself in vain.

Just sixty years after Alexander’s death began the sixty years’ struggle between Rome and Carthage, in the latter years of which the genius of Hannibal was pitted against the grim persistence of the Roman oligarchy. Carthage fell; Rome triumphed, and with her triumph entered on her career of extended conquest.

The Triumph of Rome

The organisation which had ruled the city-state itself not ill, and raised it to an immense pre-eminence, sufficed also to maintain its powers of conquest, but not its political virtue. Rome’s armies subdued the divided and disorganised realms which more or less recognised the over-lordship of Macedon; they made the Ptolemies and the Seleucidæ acknowledge their supremacy; they shattered the new barbarian hordes, which began to pour across the Alpine passes, and the African tribes of Numidia. But the lofty public spirit was gone which had made Rome so great when she was battling for life. Reformers arose, only to prove that there was no power in the constitution strong enough to enforce reform. Victorious generals with their legions behind them began to dictate legislation; Marius and Sulla, democrats or reactionaries, signalised their political successes by slaughtering hecatombs of their opponents.

At last, statesmanship and generalship found their supreme incarnation in one person, Julius Cæsar. For many years one of the two foremost men in the Republic, he finally crushed his rival Pompeius and became acknowledged head of the state. Before he could complete the work of reconstruction, Cæsar fell beneath the daggers of Republican enthusiasts; but ere many years had passed his adopted son Octavian triumphed over all rivals, and established the Principate or Empire, the absolute dominion of one ruler over the whole Roman world—although that dominion was still maintained under the Republican forms.

The Birth of Christ

A tremendous event in itself, the reign of Augustus also witnessed one which has had a great influence on the history of the world—the birth of Christ. His ministry, to which perhaps the term event should be applied, was during the reign of the second Emperor, Tiberius. The new faith born on the soil of Judæa was to modify profoundly all the ideals, social and political as well as theological and personal, of the entire Western world; but for many years its adherents remained nothing more than a persecuted yet steadily growing sect; suspected and hated as anarchists rather than as misbelievers, in a world where the rankest and wildest superstitions lived side by side with a general intellectual scepticism.

For four centuries the Imperial city ruled over nearly the whole known world. Beyond the Euphrates on the east, beyond the Rhine and the Danube, she could maintain no permanent footing; within her own borders it seemed as though her sway became a part of the natural order—so much so that when her power had passed away her very conquerors did her homage and took upon themselves titles as her officers.

Rome in her Decline

But the overthrow was yet a long way off. The reconstruction organised by Augustus and his Ministers was developed by able rulers—Tiberius, Trajan, Hadrian, the Antonines—during some two hundred years, in spite of intervals when a murderous tyranny or a feeble incompetence occupied the throne of the Cæsars. From the Pillars of Hercules to the river of Mesopotamia, northward as far as Britain, southward to the deserts of Africa, Roman civilisation, Roman law and justice, Roman military discipline, and Roman roads maintained the Roman peace.

Fall of Rome and Rise of Goths

Then came an era when the Imperial purple became the prize of successful generals acclaimed by their legions; and the frontier armies, themselves largely formed out of Teutonic or other semi-“barbarian” tribes, found themselves face to face with new barbarian hordes which for another century and a half they held in check. But the tremendous external pressure on frontiers so vast made it imperative that the Government should be somewhat decentralised. At the end of the third century Diocletian parted the empire into four great divisions. The new system could not endure; Constantine the Great again became sole emperor. Under him Christianity was at length adopted as the state religion; the Church herself became a fundamental factor in the political system; and the political centre of gravity was transferred from Rome to Byzantium.

Beginning of Byzantium

Again the empire was partitioned, and then, for a brief while before the end of the fourth century, united again under Theodosius. But the end was at hand. For a few years the great general Stilicho held the Teutonic Goths at bay in Italy, while Vandals and Sueves poured through Gaul into Spain. Then, early in the fifth century, Stilicho died. Alaric led his conquering hordes to the gates of Rome, and sacked the Eternal City. His successor, Ataulf, took his Goths away, to drive the Vandals out of Spain into Africa, and set up a great western kingdom on their own account. But after the Goths, fresh barbarians swarmed in—Tartar Huns under Attila, who wrought huge devastation and then vanished for ever; then fresh Teutonic armies, which took possession of Italy, though in the East the Empire still held its own. And in Gaul the (German) Franks under their king, Clovis (Chlodwig, Ludwig), established the dominion which was to give its name to France when the Frankish element had almost passed out of the country. Far-away Britain had already been abandoned, and was falling a prey to the Saxons and the Angles, the “English” who were driving the earlier Celtic inhabitants before them into the mountain fastnesses of the west and north. Again, in the East, in the sixth century, the empire centred at Byzantium asserted its power. Justinian is memorable for that great codification of Roman Law on which the legal systems of half the jurists in Europe have been based. His reign is famous also for the exploits of his brilliant general, Belisarius, who destroyed the Vandal kingdom in Africa, restored the Imperial rule in Italy, and recovered provinces in Asia which had been in danger of falling into the grip of the now aggressive rulers of Persia. But in the West, the success was only temporary. Under pressure of Tartar or Slavonic hosts from the East, a fresh Teutonic swarm, the Lombards, entered Italy and mastered the North. The significance of Rome now lay in the supremacy of her pontificate, unacknowledged in the East.

In Spain, the Gothic supremacy gave promise of an orderly and just government. In the wide realms of the Franks anarchy and bloodshed were almost ceaseless. In neither did the dominant Teutons drive out the older Iberian and Celtic populations, as the English were doing in the open lands of the northern island. In both, the German institutions were developing into that feudal system which was utterly incompatible with the maintenance of a strong central rule, since it enabled a powerful vassal to bid defiance to his nominal suzerain. Throughout the sixth and seventh centuries progress was stayed in ancient Gaul; in Spain it was to be revolutionised by a new invader.

Islam in Being

Eastward, at the end of the sixth century, the Slavonic wave was surging upon the empire’s northern frontier; in Asia, Persia was again forcing her way towards the Mediterranean. Both were checked by the Emperor Heraclius early in the seventh century. But, meantime, a new Power had come into being. Mohammed had arisen. Inspired by the fanatical fervour of Islam, the warriors of Arabia, soon to be known as the Saracens, swept all before them. They did not at first make Europe their objective; the Caliphs carried their conquering arms over Western Asia, into Egypt, and along the southern coasts of the Mediterranean. Then they began to beat against the empire itself. The eighth century had hardly opened when they poured into Spain; dissensions among the Gothic chiefs gave them prompt victory. They swept up to the Pyrenees; but their advance was stayed by Charles Martel, the virtual lord of the Frankish kingdom. On the East their armies assailed Constantinople, but were disastrously repulsed by the Emperor Leo the Isaurian.

Now, for the first time, Papal sanction was demanded and obtained for a change of dynasty. The last Merovingian king of the Franks was deposed in favour of Pepin, the son of Charles Martel. He was succeeded by his son, Karl, a German of the Germans, despite the French form of his popular title Charlemagne.

Charlemagne and His Empire

During his long reign the Moors in Spain were driven back beyond the Ebro; the Saxon tribes across the Rhine were forced to submit and to accept Christianity; the Lombard oppressors of Italy were vanquished; and on the Pope’s initiative, Charlemagne himself was acclaimed and crowned at Rome as emperor and successor of the Cæsars. All of the West that remained to Byzantium was Southern Italy. The revived empire came into being on Christmas Day, A.D. 800.

The great dominion and the organisation constructed by Charlemagne fell into divisions after his death. The lands east of the Rhine remained German; on the west, the Teutonic forces yielded to the Latinised Celtic spirit. Slowly France and Germany emerged. In England the supremacy among the rival peoples passed from the Angles of Northumbria or of the Midlands to the Saxon house of Wessex. Hungary was held by the Mongolian Avars, presently to be displaced by their Magyar kinsmen; otherwise Eastern Europe, Illyria, as well as the Trans-Danube districts, was being gradually possessed by the Slavonic races. Their westward movement was decisively stayed in the tenth century by Henry the Fowler and Otto the Great, who, for the second time, revived the “Holy Roman Empire” in the West in a form which effectively translated it into the “German Empire.” Meanwhile, the Vikings from the north first ravaged the western coasts, then wrung great provinces from the kings of England, and of “Francia,” preparing for the day when the Norman spirit should set the tone of Western Europe.

Birth of Feudalism in Europe

In the Eastern Mohammedan world the Saracen dominion was passing to Tartar races—to the Seljuk Turks or the Ghaznavid Turks, and later to the Ottomans; the genuine Saracens had seen their greatest days in the times of Harun-al-Raschid, when the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne was being dismembered. Europe in the eleventh century had passed, or was passing, into what is distinctively known as the Feudal Period, or later Middle Ages. Everywhere it became the object of the great rulers to establish a strong central government, and of the Papacy to establish a supremacy over all governments. Feudalism and the Papacy were the rivals of the centralising tendency.

England and France

In England, where a Norman dynasty and Norman aristocracy established themselves, the unifying process was astonishingly rapid. The country was comparatively shielded from Papal interposition by distance. A series of vigorous and able monarchs prevented pure feudalism from ever getting developed; it resulted that in the thirteenth century baronage and people made common cause in imposing not feudalism, but constitutional control over the kings. In France, the victory of the crown over feudalism was far slower; the feudatories were too powerful, and among them were the kings of England, as dukes or counts of great territories within France. The Hundred Years’ War was, in fact, not so much a contest for the French crown as a struggle between the French kings and their mightiest vassals. It was not till the English had been finally expelled that Louis XI. was enabled to make the crown supreme in France. There, as in England, the monarchy never submitted to the Papacy; it was so far victorious in that struggle that in the fourteenth century the seat of the Roman pontificate was transferred to Avignon, and the Pontiff himself became literally the creature of France.

Christendom and the Crusades

Spain and Byzantium alike remained for the most part outside the general European current. They were the buffers between Christendom and Islam. In the Spanish Peninsula the Moors were held more or less at bay, but the land was not freed from their dominion till the close of the fifteenth century. Byzantium held the Turks at bay till the middle of the same century; then she fell for ever. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, Christendom carried on against Islam the long contest of the Crusades; but the warriors who took part in those wars neither fought nor organised as though themselves forming an organic body; the Christian hosts in Palestine were mere miscellaneous gatherings, united only in the temporary fits of enthusiasm. The Holy Sepulchre was gained, but within a century it was lost again; the crusading cause was one to which not states, but individuals only, devoted themselves. Conquest would have been possible only if the Crusaders had gone forth prepared to make their own homes in Asia. The East could not be held by garrisons with no abiding interest there.

Islam, then, held, and more than held, its own against the West; while during these same centuries it swept east and south through the passes of the Punjab into India, establishing Turk and Afghan kingdoms over most of the great peninsula; though the vast bulk of the population there held to the Hinduism which, born of the earlier Brahmanism, had almost expelled the Buddhist religion, which, however, had established itself permanently in Further India and China.

Empire, Feudalism, & Papacy

The might of Islam could have been overthrown only by a united Christendom, and for that the disintegrating forces were too great. England and, more slowly, France freed themselves from feudalism. But Christendom required one head. If the Papacy had stood by the empire, feudalism might have been broken down, and the emperor have become that head. But the Papacy aimed at supremacy for itself—the spiritual power was at war with the temporal. Anti-imperial factions claimed the support of the Church; the efforts at consolidation of the great Hohenstaufen Emperors, Barbarossa and Frederick II., were unsuccessful. The empire itself became only a congeries of kingdoms and dukedoms, counties, bishoprics, free cities, and leagues of cities, under the Austrian house of Hapsburg; while Rome, mighty from the days of Gregory VII. to Innocent III., lost its prestige in the captivity at Avignon and by the Great Schism which followed. In England Wycliffe’s voice was raised; on the south-east of the empire the Hussite wars raged, premonitory of the Reformation.

End of the Middle Ages

In 1453 Constantinople fell, and the Turk was permanently established in the east of Europe. As a counterstroke, in the west, not forty years later, the Moorish dominion in Spain was wiped out, Spain emerging as a united Christian kingdom. Before the end of the century Columbus and Gama had discovered America, and virtually rediscovered India. Across the ocean a new, almost unlimited field for expansion, for enterprise, for rivalry had been opened to the European peoples. Already in the realms of intellect old forgotten knowledge had been gradually recovered by the Renascence, the revival of learning and letters; with the intellectual expansion and the invention of the printing press paths to new knowledge were being opened. Men were shaking themselves free from the shackles of authority and tradition. Hence, the sixteenth century witnessed that revolt of half Western Christendom from Rome which we call the Reformation; in its essence, though by no means in its form at the first, a revolt against the interposition of any human authority between the individual man and his Maker. With that revolt political and national divisions were inextricably blended, while the whole was complicated by the new conditions of political supremacy created by the New World.

Growth of Modern Nations

The next two centuries, then, saw France, already a consolidated state, develop into the first military Power under the most absolute monarch in Europe—through a stage of prolonged religious strife which ended by establishing the tolerationist Bourbon, Henry IV., on the throne, through the rule of the two great cardinals, Richelieu and Mazarin, to the intolerant autocracy of Louis XIV., with a close aristocracy no longer in opposition to the crown but allied to it.

In England the development was on different lines. There we find an absolutist movement, the outcome of the Wars of the Roses. But however autocratic the Tudors were, they held by constitutional forms, and preserved the intense loyalty of their people. On Elizabeth’s death, a century-old matrimonial alliance placed the sceptres of England and Scotland in a single hand.

Then, on the theory of Divine right, the Crown attempted to override the constitution; the Civil War gave the power neither to king nor parliament, but to a military dictator. On his death the country reverted to a compromise between Crown and Parliament; the Stuarts, again, with the aid of their cousin, the autocrat of France, attempted to recover absolutism. They were driven from the country, and constitutionalism—in effect, government by an oligarchy of landowners—was decisively established. The religious problem had found a decisively Protestant solution at an early stage; but Anglicanism and Puritanism soon grew mutually intolerant; it was only with the Revolution of 1688 that toleration and constitutionalism definitely triumphed together.

Europe in Development

Meanwhile, in the reign of Elizabeth, England had asserted her intellectual eminence by giving birth to Shakespeare and to Bacon; and had decisively displaced Spain from the rulership of the seas. In the next century her colonisation of North America counterbalanced the Spanish dominion in the south and centre of the Western Hemisphere, though it was not unchallenged by France. In the East a great commercial rivalry had grown up between English, Dutch, and French—a rivalry still to be fought out.

Collision of the Dynasties

In the early years of the sixteenth century matrimonial alliances had joined Spain, the Low Countries, and the empire under a single ruler, a Hapsburg of the (Austrian) Imperial house. The vast dominion was extended by the acquisition of the golden territories of the American continent. The Empire passed to one Hapsburg branch, Spain and her dependencies to another. In the empire, a temporary modus vivendi was established between Roman Catholics and Protestants; but Spain, the colossus which threatened to dominate Europe, was split by the revolt of the Netherlands, and her power shaken to its foundations by the collision with England. In the sixteenth century, Germany was devastated by the religious Thirty Years’ War; Austria emerged only as the chief among a number of German states, and Holland won a naval and commercial position second only to that of England. The Ottoman Turks, still aggressive, were still held in check. In India, a Turkish dynasty known as the Moguls (Mughàls, Mongols) extended its sway from Kabul to the mouth of the Ganges, and almost to Cape Comorin.

At the opening of the eighteenth century the aggressive Continental policy of Louis XIV. involved Europe in the “War of the Spanish Succession.” The French king’s armies were shattered by repeated blows at the hands of Marlborough and Eugene, but he finally obtained his primary object, the recognition of his grandson as king of Spain. The threat of a Hapsburg domination passed into the threat of a Bourbon domination. In the east of Europe a final limit was set to the Ottoman aggression. In Britain, the incorporation of Scotland was completed, formally by the Union of 1707, effectively by the suppression of Jacobitism in 1746.

Settling Down of the Powers

From 1739 to 1763 Europe was again plunged into wars, with an eight years’ interval. The motives of those wars, and of the combinations of states on either side, were complicated; the results were simple. Prussia, under Frederick the Great, emerged as a first-class Power; France lost her North American Colonies to Great Britain; the British East India Company defeated the attempt of the French to establish a paramount influence with the native princes, the Mogul Empire having broken up into a congeries of practically independent satrapies; and the British themselves became established as a territorial Power by the conquest of Bengal. Russia also, organised at the beginning of the century by Peter the Great, had taken her place definitely among the great Powers.

During the next twenty years (1763–1783) Poland was absorbed by her neighbours. The British Empire was sundered by the revolt of the older American Colonies, which were established as the United States of America; while Canada remained loyal. By this time the whole of Europe was practically governed by absolute monarchies; but a cataclysm was at hand. France became the scene of a tremendous revolution. Crown and aristocracy were toppled into the abyss.

Napoleon and the Revolution

France proclaimed herself the liberator of the peoples; the monarchs of Europe combined to suppress the proletariat. During the last decade of the century one revolutionary constitution after another was set up in Paris, while the revolutionary armies shattered monarchical armies, and turned the “liberated” peoples into subject dependencies of the Republic. On the seas, however, Britain successfully asserted her supremacy. Of the commanders of the Republic, the most brilliant was the Corsican Bonaparte. He dreamed of making Egypt the basis for achieving an Asiatic empire, and thence overwhelming Europe; but the dream was shattered when he found himself isolated by Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet at Aboukir in the Battle of the Nile. Returning to Paris, he transformed the republic into an empire; he set up his brothers or his generals as rulers over half the kingdoms in Europe; he dictated terms to every government except Britain. Britain annihilated his fleets, and fought and beat his generals in the Spanish Peninsula. He conquered the kings, but the nations rose against him, and overthrew him; his last effort was crushed at Waterloo.

Absolutism was reinstated, but the proletariats had learnt to demand freedom. Steam-power and steam-traction so changed the conditions of production as to revolutionise the relations between labour and capital, and between the landed and the manufacturing interests. In Great Britain political power passed from the landowners to the manufacturers with the great Reform Bill of 1832, and from the wealthy to the labouring classes with the Franchise Bills of 1867 and 1884. Every monarchy has been compelled to submit to limitations of its own powers more or less copied from Britain.

The World as it is

Britain herself, not untaught by the breach with America, has learned to establish responsible government in her Colonies, making them virtually free states; and among those states the idea of federation has taken root and is bearing fruit. In India, challenged by one native race after another, she has extended her sway over the whole peninsula, and has abolished the anomaly of governing her great dependency through a trading company. In the West her kinsmen have raised the United States into a mighty nation.

In Europe France has passed through monarchy and republic and second empire into a stable republic; Italy has revolted against foreign rulers, and become a united nation; the small peoples of the Balkan Peninsula have now achieved by arms their liberty from Turkish rule. Prussia has won the hegemony of the German states, and established a new German Empire. Russia, the bogey of the West, and of Britain in particular, has shown her weakness in collision with the sudden development of Japan.

Finally, the Dark Continent has been explored and partitioned: in the south, after a sharp conflict, British and Dutch are on the way to become a united people; in the north, Egypt has been reorganised under British administration. We end, as we began, with the land of the Pyramids.

ARTHUR D. INNES.

A TIME-TABLE OF THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD

FROM THE BEGINNING OF HISTORY TO THE PRESENT DAY

Showing at a glance the fate of all nations, their rise, their sway, their decline, and their successors

On this double-page are shown the empires of the ancient world to the rise of Rome, and on the succeeding double-page the ruling powers from Rome until the present day. The chronology is in divisions of a hundred years, except the first four, which, for convenience of space, are shown in longer periods

LARGER IMAGE

LARGER IMAGE

A TIME-TABLE OF THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD

continued from the preceding pages

FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA TO THE PRESENT DAY

CONTEMPORARY FIGURES IN HISTORY

MAKING OF THE EARTH

AND THE COMING OF MAN

THE BEGINNING OF THE EARTH

BY PROFESSOR SOLLAS

T

THE origin of our planet is a problem which has appealed to the intellect of thoughtful men from the most remote times, and the earliest recorded speculations concerning it—those of the Mosaic cosmogony—possess a peculiar interest, since they embody the views of the ancient Chaldeans, who were not only systematic observers of the heavens, but made practical use of their results.

Beginning of a Famous Theory

The Mosaic cosmogony is not unworthy of the great people among whom it took its rise; it recognises the fact that the earth had a history antecedent to the advent of man, and its account of the order of events in this history is not only remarkable as a feat of a priori reasoning, but accords in some respects with the results achieved after much labour by modern science.

It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that the reign of evolution began, and attempts were made to trace the history of a planetary system from its source in a primeval nebula on purely mechanical grounds. Swedenborg (1735) was the pioneer in this direction, then came Thomas Wright (1750) of Durham, whose work furnished inspiration to Emanuel Kant (1755), and led him to construct a consistent scheme of the Universe. The last of this group of cosmic philosophers is Laplace (1796), whose admirable description of the evolution of the solar system was arrived at independently, and without knowledge of the previous work of Kant.

Laplace assumed as his starting-point the existence of a nebula formed of incandescent gas, and extending beyond the limits of the outermost planet of our system. It was in rotation about a central axis, and possessed in consequence a disc-like or lenticular form. Radiating its heat away in all directions through surrounding space, it grew continually colder, and in cooling diminished in bulk. As a consequence of this contraction its rate of rotation increased, till at length the centrifugal force of the outermost part became so great that this could no longer continue to follow the contracting mass within, and thus remained behind as a great rotating ring. The continued contraction of the internal mass, and the resulting increase in the velocity of rotation, again brought about the same condition of things, and a fresh ring was left behind.

Cooling of the Nebula

This process was repeated time after time, till as many rings were formed as there are planets in the solar system; the central mass which survived within the innermost ring condensed to form the sun. The rings were highly unstable—that is to say, a slight disturbing force was sufficient to destroy their continuity; they broke across and rolled up into great nebulous globes, which revolved round the sun in the same direction as the original nebula, and rotated on their axes in the same direction as that in which they revolved. Most of them repeated the behaviour of the original nebulæ, leaving behind rings as they contracted, and these rings either rolled up to form moons or satellites, or, in the solitary instance of Saturn’s rings, retained their annular form. The rings are now known to consist of a multitude of solid bodies, as proved by Clerk-Maxwell.

The Temperature of the Earth

By this hypothesis, so beautiful in its simplicity, an explanation was afforded embracing all the more important facts of our system; the revolution of all the planets in nearly circular orbits and in the same direction as that in which the sun rotates, and the revolution of their satellites, also in circular orbits and in the same direction as their primaries; the comparatively high temperature and consequent low density of the larger planets and the sun, as well as a variety of other phenomena, all seem to follow naturally from it. The fundamental assumption seems to be in harmony with a number of known facts. Thus in the case of our own planet the volcanoes distributed around the margins of the oceans, and the hot springs scattered irregularly over the whole terrestrial surface, suggest that great stores of heat exist beneath our feet, a presumption which finds confirmation in the fact that whenever we descend towards the interior of the earth, as in deep mines or wells, the temperature continues steadily to rise after we have passed a depth below which seasonal and diurnal changes of temperature cease to be felt, the rise being in some cases as much as 3 deg. for 100 ft., in others only 1 deg. for the same distance, but on the average 1 deg. for 60 ft. or 70 ft. If this increase of temperature continues down to great depths, and there seems to be no reason why it should not, then a point will be reached, say, at thirty or forty miles down, where the interior will attain a white heat.

The Earth as a Star

Thus the earth might be regarded as a white hot body surrounded with a film of rock growing continually cooler towards the surface. But such a hot body suspended in space must be cooling, just as all bodies which are hotter than their surroundings. It is cooler to-day than it was yesterday, or—what is the same thing—it was hotter yesterday than it is to-day, and so of all previous yesterdays. And thus as we travel backwards in time we perceive that the earth will be growing hotter, the level of white heat will be mounting upwards towards the surface, and will at last reach it, so that the earth, instead of being, as it now is, a dark body shining only with the reflected light of the sun, will be self-luminous, a tiny star of a magnitude so diminutive as to have awakened resentment on the part of some terrestrial inhabitants, who have regarded it as disproportionate to their dignity. But we cannot arrest imagination at this stage; our thought still extends its retrospective glance into the abyss of past time, and we perceive the earth still growing hotter, till its temperature transcends those limits at which it can exist in the solid state. It becomes molten—nay, more, it becomes gaseous, and thus resumes the nebular state from which it sprang. Precisely the same argument applies to the sun; our mighty luminary is also a cooling body, and if we could restore to it the heat which it has lost in the course of past æons it would resume a completely gaseous state. Modified in one way or another, this chain of reasoning seemed irrefragable in those happy days which preceded the discovery of radium.

Universe still in Evolution

The question may be considered from another point of view. On searching the heavens we find that many of the stages which are assumed in Laplace’s hypothesis are still represented by actual existences. There are, to begin with, those immense diffused nebulæ, almost incapable of definition, which are proved, on spectroscopic examination, to emit that kind of light which is characteristic of glowing gas; from these we pass to others which are resolvable by the telescope into a central and more condensed nucleus, with two mighty nebulous arms whirled round in a spiral, and bearing more condensed masses in their midst; even ring nebulæ are known to exist; and, finally, there are nebulous halos which surround some of the stars. Then we come to the stars themselves, which are suns of various degrees of magnitude, some immensely larger than our own luminary, and these are evidently in various stages of existence. Some are blue, and afford evidence of a higher temperature than that of our sun; others are yellow, and make a nearer approach to the solar temperature; while, again, others are red, and certainly colder.

These, in conjunction with other considerations, lead to the conviction that the universe is in a state of evolution, and that the solar system at one time existed in a nebular state. But whether Laplace’s description of the series of events through which the original nebula passed is the true one or not is a very different matter; it presents so many difficulties that scarcely any student now supports it.

In the beginning, it is supposed that the earth was part of a vast nebula of gaseous matter and meteorites, resembling the nebula of Argo, illustrated above.

Later, as the cooling process advanced, the nebula assumed a rotatory movement in the form of a spiral. The nebula of Andromeda affords an excellent illustration of this.

Another stage would be as in the annular nebula of Aquaris, the mass forming into a ball with the outer ring attached.

Or, like the nebula of Cygni, with the central sun well formed and the gaseous ring far removed, the earth would begin to shape, and the ring would roll up to form the moon.

Jupiter, which is in a molten state, wreathed in thick vapour, with the “great red spot” indicating the beginning of the solidifying process, shows what the earth was like before it assumed its present solid condition.

This shows the earth and the moon in their relative sizes; while the diagram below it illustrates the distance apart.

HOW THE HEAVENS TELL THE STORY OF THE ORIGIN OF THE EARTH

Laplace’s Theory Abandoned

A fundamental difficulty is the extreme tenuity of the gas which is assumed to have formed the planetary rings. A second difficulty, which has been emphasised by Professors Chamberlin and Moulton, is to be found in the comparatively small amount of rotational energy which the system at present possesses, for this is less than 1⁄200 of that which, on the most favourable assumption, must have been contained within the original nebula. Less fundamental, but equally fatal, is the fact that one of the satellites of Saturn revolves round its primary in a direction opposed to that of the rotation of the planet itself. [Recently Mr. Stratton, following out a suggestion of Professor W. H. Pickering, has shown that this is quite consistent, and, indeed, is a natural deduction from Laplace’s hypothesis.] Hence for these and other reasons we are reluctantly compelled to abandon an hypothesis which for over a century has exercised an influence on our conception of the cosmos not less profound, penetrating, and far-reaching than that of the famous Darwinian doctrine of natural selection, now on its trial.

What are the Nebulæ?

At present, unanimity of opinion, even on questions of the most primary kind, is far to seek. Philosophers are not even agreed as to the constitution of the nebulæ. It is questioned whether even those least resolvable and most diffused forms which give bright line spectra really consist of masses of incandescent gas. Many observers, among them Sir Norman Lockyer, now maintain that they are formed of swarms of meteorites, which, moving with prodigious velocity, meet in frequent collision, and by their impact evolve sufficient heat to become self-luminous. Others, again, like the distinguished investigator Arrhenius, while admitting the gaseous nature of these nebulæ, deny that they are incandescent, and assert that their temperature is not much above that of surrounding space. Their exterior parts consist of the lighter gases in a highly rarefied state, and minute particles of negative electricity, which are always careering through space, on penetrating these gases produce a luminous discharge. A nebula composed of swarms of meteorites would, as Sir George Darwin has shown, behave very much in the same way as one composed of gas, and if in rotation would rotate as a solid mass. The meteorites would stand in the same relation to the nebula as molecules to a gas, and thus the question of the constitution of the nebula, although of great interest in itself, becomes of subsidiary importance in tracing its subsequent history.

Shaping of the Planets

One of the latest attempts to frame a nebular hypothesis is that of Professor J. H. Jeans. His reasoning is of a highly mathematical character, and his conclusions are expressed in the most general terms. Starting with a spherical nebula of gas or meteorites endowed with a small amount of rotation, he shows that as it cools or loses energy the temperature of the interior will not fall continuously in precise correspondence with the cooling of the outer parts, and this “lag” of the interior temperature will bring about a tendency to instability. The contraction of the nebula due to cooling will increase the velocity of rotation, and this again will tend to instability. As a result of the instability so produced the nebula will change its form, and become more or less pear-shaped. The narrow end of the pear will then separate from the body and assume an independent existence as a primitive planet. This process will recur again and again till the nebula is resolved into a sun with its attendant planets. The planets, existing at first as gaseous masses or quasi-gaseous masses, will be liable to the same kind of transformation, and may thus bud off moons or satellites.

If the nebula were not in rapid rotation, a slight disturbing cause, acting at the critical moment when a planet was being ejected, might determine the inclination of the planet’s orbit, which might thus be very oblique to the equatorial plane of the nebula. Thus the hypothesis is not open to one of the objections which have been urged against that of Laplace—namely, that the orbits of some of the planets in the solar system are inclined at a large angle with the plane of the sun’s equator.

This illustrates Laplace’s theory, which conceived of a vast nebula filling the whole space of the solar system and rotating around a central axis. The outer and thinner part had much greater movement than the denser central mass, finally being thrown off as a ring, which in turn rolled up into a ball, still following the same course as the ring had followed. Thus the earth broke off from the sun and the moon from the earth. The theory is, however, no longer credited by scientists.

The pear-shaped nebula is the theory of a young English mathematician, Professor J. H. Jeans. Starting with a spherical nebula, he argues that in cooling it will assume the form illustrated above, and that the smaller part will separate and form a satellite rotating independently but within a distance influenced by the parent mass.

The spiral nebula in Canes Venatici, a revolving mass of gas or meteorites, supplies, according to the nebular hypothesis of Messrs. Chamberlin and Moulton, an excellent example of how the earth and moon were formed. We may reasonably imagine the smaller spiral to represent the moon in the act of being thrown off by the earth.

THREE FAMOUS THEORIES OF THE BEGINNING OF THE EARTH

Heavenly Bodies in Collision

Jeans mentions two disturbing causes in particular which might easily arise—one the penetration of the nebula by a wandering meteorite, which might precipitate an event already on the verge of happening, and simultaneously determine both the birth of a planet and the obliquity of its orbit; the second, the presence of some distant mass, such as a star, which, by raising a quasi-tide in the nebula, would give the final touch required to overturn its equilibrium. The influence of a distant body, such as a passing star, has been invoked by Moulton in another version of the nebular hypothesis. In conjunction with Chamberlin, he calls special attention to the spiral nebulæ, which are by far the commonest kind, as presenting the closest approach to the conditions which obtain when planets are actually in course of formation. Chamberlin and Moulton enter on a detailed account of the manner in which they suppose the planets to have grown by the gradual accretion of meteoric masses as these encountered each other while moving in various elliptical orbits.

At present it would seem impossible to speak with certainty as to the precise history of the solar system. Meanwhile, we may console ourselves with the closing words of Professor Jeans’ paper, to the effect that “no difficulty need be experienced in referring existing planetary systems to a nebulous or meteoric origin on the ground that the configurations of these systems are not such as could have originated out of a rotating mass of liquid.”

An investigation by Sir George Darwin, which has furnished inspiration to such hypotheses as that of Jeans, brings us nearer the immediate subject of this essay, since it treats of one of the last acts in the great drama of planetary existence, and attempts to derive the earth and moon from a common origin in a single rotating sphere.

Why the Day is Growing Longer

It is well known that, owing to the frictional effects produced by the tides, the earth is being gradually slowed down as it rotates upon its axis. Thus the day is constantly getting longer, so that in a few millions of years it will have increased in length from twenty-four to twenty-five hours. On the other hand, in past time it must have been shorter than at present: a few millions of years ago it was only twenty-three hours in length, and many millions of years earlier it was still less, only some five hours or so. At that time the earth was hotter than it is now, less rigid, more yielding, and, owing to its rapid rotation, less stable. The action on the moon of the tides produced in it by the earth is similar, and the rotation of the moon has been so far diminished by them that its day has become as long as the month—i.e., our satellite only turns once round on its axis in the time that it takes to revolve once round the earth; it is for this reason that our satellite keeps always the same face turned towards us.

The Moon Was Part of Our Sphere

The retardation of the earth in its rotation has, however, a very remarkable effect on the revolution of the moon; it involves—by the principle of the conservation of moment of momentum—a corresponding acceleration of the moon in its orbit, and, as a consequence of this, an enlargement of this orbit—that is, the moon is pushed away from us, as it were, and thus becomes more remote. But if so, the moon must have been nearer to us in times past. It is possible to trace the approach of the moon to the earth as we go backwards in time till the distance between them was only two and a half terrestrial radii instead of the sixty radii which now separate them. Mathematics do not take us farther back than this. But it is difficult to resist the suggestion that in the immediately preceding stage of development the earth and moon formed together a single sphere.

If we may adopt this view, then we must regard the sphere as subject to the tidal influence of the sun. It was much hotter, and therefore more yielding, than the present earth; it was also rotating much faster, probably once in about four or five hours. It would be contracting as a consequence of cooling, and the contraction would lead to instability (gravitational instability); its rapid rotation would also tend toward instability (rotational instability). It is difficult to say which of these two, gravitational or rotational instability, would be the most effective; but the combined result would be to give a pear-shaped form to the rotating mass, and eventually to deepen the constriction between the narrow and the broad end, till the smaller protuberance became completely dissevered from the larger mass, and so entered on an independent existence as the moon. This final step in the process would probably depend on the tide-producing power of the sun; the larger mass remained behind as the earth, whose individual existence may be said to date from this event.

How the Moon Broke Away

The young earth would be subject to very much the same conditions after as before the ejection of the moon, and might very possibly again pass into a pear-shaped form, but without proceeding further through those subsequent changes, which would have led to the formation of another satellite; and while possessing some such form as this, she might very well have consolidated. With advancing years she would lose, as we have seen, the activity of her youth, the drag of the tides would cause her to spin ever more slowly on her axis, till the day would become prolonged to the twenty-four hours of the present. With this diminished rate of spin, the earth, if free to yield, would lose the pear-shaped form and become an oblate spheroid, and the oblateness of this spheroid would continually diminish, so that it would continually approach towards a true sphere. Suppose, however, that the earth as it cooled lost its power of readily yielding—and at present it is more rigid than a globe of steel—then it would pass from form to form, not by a flowing movement, but by a series of ruptures, and its form at any moment might be a little in arrear of that which it would have possessed if it had been in the fluid state.

Thus it might indeed be possible still to discover some trace of an old-fashioned form in the existing planet; and a careful examination of the distribution of land and sea as represented on a terrestrial globe does, in fact, reveal a remarkable symmetry, in which we seem to recognise a surviving vestige of its early state. The great continent of Africa projects like the narrow end of a pear; around it are oceans—the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea, which was once of far greater extent; then comes a great dismembered ring of land, the two Americas, the Antarctic continent, Australia, Asia, and Europe. Within these, on the side opposite to Africa, is the great Pacific Ocean, which covers over the broad end of the pear.

THE SHAPING OF THE FACE OF THE EARTH

Soon after the earth had cooled down, so that the oceans were formed, the shaping of the great continents began. The action of moving water in the making of new land is well illustrated by the vast delta of the Mississippi, where an area larger than Wales has been formed by debris deposited by the river.

Earth’s Unknown Changes

A line drawn from somewhere in Central Africa to its antipodes in the Pacific, through the centre of the earth, would correspond to the long axis of the pear; a second, at right angles to this, would correspond to its breadth; and a third, at right angles to both, would correspond to the axis on which it rotates. A diameter of the earth taken through the equator is almost 8,000 miles in length, the Polar diameter is about sixteen miles shorter, and this slight difference measures the oblateness of the spheroid, or the departure of the form of the earth from a true sphere. Further, it would appear that the diameter drawn through Africa is about half a mile longer than the equatorial diameter taken at right angles to it, and this insignificant quantity measures the departure of the form of the earth from that of an oblate spheroid to that of a pear, so nearly complete is the adjustment of its form to existing conditions. Before this nice adjustment was reached, the earth must have suffered many changes, passed through many times of stress and storm, and witnessed many geological revolutions.

An Age of Red-hot Rain!

If, at the beginning of her career, the earth was molten, or at a very high temperature, she must have been surrounded by a very deep and dense atmosphere, for all the waters which now rest on her surface—oceans, lakes, and rivers—would have contributed to it in the state of steam; and not till the temperature of the ground had fallen to 380 deg. C. could liquid water have begun to accumulate. Then a steady downpour of almost red-hot rain would have set in, filling up the neck of the pear and extending far and wide over its broad end.

The temperature would now fall somewhat rapidly, and in a short space of time the surface of the earth would have become as cool as it is at the present day. Directly the waters of the firmament had collected into the oceans, leaving behind an atmosphere like that which now exists, geological agencies of the kind we are now familiar with would begin their sway. Air and rain would exert their insidious power upon the rocks, sapping their strength, converting the hardest granite into soft sand and clay, which would be washed away by the rain through brooks and rivulets into the channels of many rivers, all hastening with their burden of sediment, to deposit it finally in the sea. Here it would accumulate, layer after layer, building up those mighty masses of strata which now form the greater part of the visible land. While this general action was everywhere in progress, wearing down continents and islands towards the level of the sea, more specialised activities were assisting to the same end.

TWO STAGES IN THE LIFE OF THE EARTH

This illustrates in striking manner, based on the calculations of the best authorities, the comparative sizes of the earth, first as a gaseous mass, and, second, after it had cooled down and solidified into the planet on which we live. The small dot represents 8,000 miles, the earth’s diameter.

The waves which fall upon our coasts are now constantly undermining the cliffs and extending the margin of the sea at the expense of the land, and rivers not only serve to transport sediment, but cut down their channels deep into the rock, and so carve out the most varied landscapes of hill and valley from monotonous tableland.

Action of Winds and Tides

When we enter into calculations we are astonished at the rapidity with which these agents perform their work even at the present day; but as we proceed farther back into the past, when the earth was full of youthful energy, their power must have been greatly enhanced. We might almost take the measure of the day as the measure of their work, for they probably accomplished as much during the eight hours’ day which once existed as they do now in twenty-four hours. A little consideration will make this clear. It is the winds which, blowing over the surface of the ocean, produce the sea waves, and it is these falling on our coasts that perform the work of marine denudation. But the winds are due in the first place to the heat of the sun, and the difference of temperature established at the equator and the poles; and, in the next place, to the rotation of the earth. Thus, with the increased rapidity of rotation which we know to have existed, and with increased radiation from the sun, a very probable contingency, the winds would increase in strength and more powerfully erode our coasts. Again, with the moon in greater proximity, and with a more rapid rotation of the earth, the tides would be much higher and more frequent, and these, raising and lowering the cutting edge of the sea, greatly assist it in its work of destruction. The winds and the tides produce various marine currents, and these help to distribute the sediment which the rivers deliver into the sea, so that when stronger currents flowed as a result of more powerful tides and more violent winds, the sediments would be strewn over wider areas; hence, the more ancient strata of our planet are far more widely distributed than are those of later time.

THREE VIEWS OF THE GLOBE SHOWING HOW THE GREAT MOUNTAIN RANGES WERE FORMED

In the days when the earth’s crust had formed but was still unstable, the process of cooling not having gone far enough, there would not be the mountains which now characterise it. These came when the earth contracted and crumpled up along certain well defined lines, which are now represented by the three great mountain chains of the world.

Building Up the Earth

Finally, a heavier rainfall would result from a more active atmospheric circulation, creating larger rivers, and thus, at the beginning, all those denuding agents which are engaged in wearing the land down into the sea would be working at a more rapid pace. Correspondingly, all the agents which are occupied in building up deposits of sediments would have extended their operations over a wider area, laying down a foundation broad and deep.

On the other hand, the contraction of the earth, due to the loss of its energy of rotation as well as of its internal heat, would also have proceeded more rapidly, new land would have emerged from the sea, old lands would have been submerged beneath it far less slowly than at the present day; ruptures of the crust, accompanied by earthquakes and volcanic action, would have been more frequent and thus, by the more rapid loss of its intrinsic energy, the renovation of the earth would have kept pace with its accelerated destruction.

One effect of the contraction of the earth which has manifested itself in even late geological times is the crumpling up of the terrestrial crust into the sharp folds of mountain chains; but at the beginning this crumpling must have been far more universal and energetic. In this connection it is interesting to observe that the most ancient rocks known to us—the Archæan—never present themselves under any other form than as intensely plicated masses. They originally consisted of lava flows and volcanic ashes, of ancient sediments and limestones, into which subterranean masses of granite and other molten, deep-seated rocks have been injected; but under the intense pressures to which they were subjected after their formation they and the invading granite have entirely lost their original character, and have been metamorphosed into gneisses, schists, and marble, all sharply and closely folded together. In any given district the direction of their folding is maintained with wonderful constancy over great distances. There is no succeeding system of rocks that has been so completely transformed, so universally plicated, as this ancient Archæan complex.

In later times we can pass from stratum to stratum of the sedimentary series and read their history almost as we turn over the pages of a book; in the Archæan all are kneaded together into a state of such desperate entanglement as to defy the powers of human ingenuity to unravel them. Thus the line of demarcation between the Archæan and subsequent sedimentary systems is the sharpest and most absolute that is known to us in the history of the earth. It marks the close of our planet’s infancy, the several events of which have passed into oblivion as profound as that of our own forgetfulness of our earliest days. Later events, on the other hand, are recorded in the stratified series with a faithfulness which increases as we approach existing times.

How We Know These Wonders

A history without dates must seem very unsatisfactory to a historian, and the question will naturally arise whether we can assign any definite time to the various critical events recorded in the evolution of the earth. At present we can only make more or less plausible estimates. Thus, from a consideration of the thickness of the sedimentary crust, and the rate at which sediments are now being deposited, it has been asserted that the interval which separates us from the close of the Archæan era may amount to about twenty-six millions of years. Professor Joly, basing his argument on the undoubted fact that the ocean derives the greater part of its salt from the dissolved material contributed to it by rivers, comes to the conclusion that the ocean first came into existence about one hundred millions of years ago. As regards the birth of the moon, Sir George Darwin has given a minimum limit of fifty-four millions of years, but he adds that it may have taken place many hundreds of millions of years before this. Lord Kelvin has attempted to determine the time which has elapsed since the earth first acquired a solid crust. If we only knew the rate at which the earth is cooling we might calculate back to this time with some assurance of certainty, always, however, on the assumption that the earth is simply a hot body cooling like any other hot body—such, say, as a red-hot cannonball. But a few years ago it began to be seriously suspected that this assumption was a very doubtful one, for a new element—radium—was discovered in 1898, which possesses the remarkable property of spontaneously liberating heat, and this not in small quantities, but at an astonishing rate. One gramme of radium, for example, gives out enough heat in one hour to raise the temperature of one gramme of water to boiling point; hour after hour, year in, year out, this wonderful substance is setting free the energy it contains, and will continue to do so until, some thousands of years hence, it has exhausted its store. If this element should happen to exist in sufficient quantity within the earth, then the earth could not be said to be cooling just like a piece of hot iron, and the increase of temperature we experience as we descend towards the interior of the earth might possibly be due to the heat set free from radium. Indeed, the argument is not confined to the earth; it may apply also to the sun, and much of the heat we derive from that luminary may be provided by bursting atoms of radium. This was pointed out by Sir George Darwin and Professor Joly in 1903.

It became obviously a question of the first importance to discover what proportion of the earth’s crust consists of radium, and an investigation was undertaken for this purpose by the Hon. R. J. Strutt, who finds that the rocks composing the earth’s crust contain a superabundance of radium—sufficient, if this element is uniformly distributed through the whole earth in the same proportion as it occurs at the surface, not only to make good the heat which is radiated away into space, but actually to raise the temperature of our planet, which, on this evidence, should, therefore, be growing not colder, but hotter.

This is a result as disconcerting at first sight as it is astonishing, and its effects are very wide-reaching. Of course, it completely destroys the validity of Lord Kelvin’s argument, but it also deprives the nebular hypothesis of one of its cherished lines of evidence—a loss which the force of the general argument enables us to bear with equanimity.

On the Eve of great Events

In any case, the vast body of facts bearing on the history of the earth suffices to show that its temperature cannot be rising. Mr. Strutt has, therefore, imagined that the radium is not uniformly distributed throughout the mass of the planet, and supposes that it is restricted to an external zone forty-five miles in thickness; this would suffice to maintain the earth at its existing temperature. If, however, we admit a restriction of this kind, we are in no way bound to fix the limit at forty-five miles. All we can say is that we do not know how far downwards the radium reaches—for aught we know five miles, or even less, is as likely a limit as forty-five miles. Professor Joly, indeed, maintains that the radium we meet with is not proper to the earth at all, but comes from the sun.

Radium is a short-lived element, its existence being limited to a few thousand years; but as fast as it decays it is reproduced at the expense of another element—uranium—the lifetime of which is measured by hundreds of millions of years.

The last quarter of a century has proved fertile in great discoveries—more so than any corresponding period in the past. As a result, the whole world of scientific thought has been thrown into commotion; old-established theories, and even the most fundamental notions, seem to be in a state of flux. Under the stimulus of new ideas great questions, such as the constitution of matter, the origin of species, and the birth of worlds are being re-investigated with renewed energy, and we seem to be on the eve of great events.

WILLIAM JOHNSON SOLLAS

FOUR PERIODS OF THE EARTH’S DEVELOPMENT

A Postscript to Professor Sollas’s Chapter on the Wonderful Story of the World’s Birth, beginning on [page 79]

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THE earth was once “a fluid haze of light.” The whole solar system once formed a vast nebula, consisting of glowing gas, or a swarm of meteoroids. Our planet was slowly shaped into a globe out of this primitive nebula.

This globe was at first intensely hot, and probably liquid. A solid crust formed on the surface as heat was lost by radiation, and this crust consisted of the oldest rocks of igneous formation like the granites and gneisses. During this Archæan or Eozoic Period, the earth acquired its atmosphere and its oceans, and it is probable that the mysterious origin of life took place.

The later history of the earth since the stratified rocks began to appear, and life existed, is divided into four main periods, of which the first is known as Primary, or Palæozoic.

The First Period of the Earth

CAMBRIAN SYSTEM. The rocks formed in the Cambrian Age are mainly grits, quartzites, and conglomerates, with shales, schists, and limestones. The earth was then mostly covered by seas, and the first well-defined forms of life were of marine origin.

SILURIAN SYSTEM. The Silurian rocks are mostly sandstones, shales, and slates deposited in the seas. The first vertebrates made their appearance as fishes, whilst insects began to flutter in the air, and occasionally to alight on the emerging land.

DEVONIAN SYSTEM. This was the age of the old red sandstone. Fishes reached a high state of development, whilst the first traces appeared of land vegetation, ferns and lycopods.

CARBONIFEROUS SYSTEM. This system is exceptionally important, because its chief rock is coal, the fossilised remains of the luxuriant vegetation which grew in tropical swamps. The first terrestrial animals, true air breathers, now appeared.

PERMIAN SYSTEM. The last of the primary systems gave us the new red sandstone, distinguished from the old by lying above the coal measures. The Permian Age was apparently unfavourable to life, and is only notable for the first appearance of the land reptiles into which the amphibians developed.

The Second Period of the Earth

The Secondary Period marks the emergence of the dry land into importance greater than that of the sea.

TRIASSIC SYSTEM. The Triassic rocks chiefly consist of sandstones and hardened clays laid down in shallow sea basins. Land vegetation now first began to assume a modern type, with conifers and cycads. The seas were still richly peopled, and the land first gave a home to huge reptiles, or dinosaurs.

JURASSIC SYSTEM. This system is marked by a great variety of limestones, the product of dead sea creatures. It is essentially the age of reptiles. The ichthyosaurus disputed the seas with the plesiosaurus; the pterodactyl ruled the air; whilst on land, huge monsters like the brontosaur and diplodocus browsed on tropical vegetation. From these reptiles the birds were developing, whilst small marsupials, the oldest of the great mammalian race, skipped under the branches.

CRETACEOUS SYSTEM. This was the age of the great chalk deposits. The birds, now emerging from their reptilian ancestry, dominated its life, and the first modern plants appeared on the land.

The Third Period of the Earth

The Tertiary Period marks the true beginning of modern geological history, when the great outlines of geography were laid down, and the first representatives of modern plants and animals made their appearance.

EOCENE SYSTEM. The Eocene rocks are mainly limestones, with sandstone and hardened clays. We owe them to the sea and its organisms. Modern evergreen trees now first appeared. The mammals come to the front, with the tapir-like palæotherium and the first recognisable ancestor of the horse.

MIOCENE SYSTEM. The Miocene Age was a mountain-building period, when the great chain which runs from the Alps into Central Asia received its final uplift. Deciduous trees, like the beech and elm, now made their appearance. The giant mastodon and the formidable sabre-toothed tiger roamed the Miocene forest, and true apes—man’s first forerunners—mopped and mowed in the boughs.

PLIOCENE SYSTEM. The last of the Tertiary ages set the final stamp on the geological moulding of the earth’s crust. Its plants were transitional to the flora of modern Europe. Great herds of herbivora now appeared.

The Fourth Period of the Earth

The Quaternary Period is that in which we are still living. Its outstanding feature is the appearance of man.

PLEISTOCENE OR GLACIAL SYSTEM. Its essential feature was the appearance of glacial conditions over most of the northern hemisphere, when great ice sheets rubbed our land into shape. The vegetation was Arctic, and only animals like the reindeer and the hairy mammoth could endure the cold.

HUMAN OR RECENT SYSTEM. The precise antiquity of man is still uncertain, but it was only after the close of the Glacial Period that he made his home in Europe, where he shared a precarious existence with mammoth, cave-bear, and rhinoceros. Man developed through the Palæolithic and Neolithic ages of stone implements to the Bronze and Iron ages, when metal was first worked. In the last of these we live.

GEOLOGICAL CLOCK OF THE WORLD’S LIFE

This page is an effort, based on Professor Lester Ward’s calculations in “Pure Sociology,” to show the comparative length of each geological period, and the thin white line between Tertiary and Archæan indicates the period of human history. Thin as this line is—and we could not show it thinner—it is too thick, and out of proportion to the rest of the clock. If we assume that from the beginning of the world—from its first forming into a solid sphere—to the present, time may be represented by a day of twenty-four hours, the time occupied by human history does not exceed twelve seconds. This is reckoning human history as ten thousand years. There is, of course, no possibility of obtaining more than relative figures for such a scheme as this, which should be regarded in connection with the [previous page] and the chart of the Beginnings of Life, [facing page 96]

The thin white line between the Tertiary and the Archæan periods represents the duration of human history

TABLE SHOWING PROPORTIONS OF YEARS AND HOURS

E

EARLY writers on the relation of man and animated nature to the material universe not only assumed that the latter existed for the former, but that both alike were the results of special acts of creation.

Furthermore, they usually took it for granted that all things were created very much in the condition in which we now see them, and that any changes that have since taken place are but slight superficial modifications of a permanent and unchanging whole. Not only were the sun and moon and stars created as appanages of the earth, but the earth itself in all its details of sea and land, hills and valleys, mountains and precipices, swamps and deserts, was made and fashioned just as we now see it, and every feature of its surface was supposed to have some purpose in connection with man.

The Old Ideas of Creation

These purposes we could, in some cases, understand, while in others they seemed wholly unintelligible, and much ingenuity was bestowed by the natural theologian and others to explain more and more of the observed facts from this point of view. The same opinions prevailed in regard to the infinite variety of animals and plants, each individual species being supposed to have been an independent creation, and all to have some definite and preordained purpose in relation to mankind.

These views, however absurd they seem to most people now, were almost universally held so recently as during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and were thus coincident with one of the most brilliant epochs of our literature and our dawning science. It was only towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, when geology became widely studied and its results were fully appreciated, that the more rational conception of a very slow development of the earth’s surface during countless ages began to be generally accepted.

Changing Conditions of the Earth

The grand nebular hypothesis of Laplace came to reinforce the views of the geologists, by showing how the earth itself may have originated as a gaseous or molten globe; and its slow process of cooling, with the reaction of the interior and exterior on each other, served to elucidate the facts of the heated interior, as shown by hot springs and volcanoes, as well as many of the phenomena presented by the distorted and metamorphosed strata which formed its crust. Hence it gradually came to be perceived that the condition of the earth, with all its endless variations of surface, of continents and oceans, of seas and islands, of vast plateaux and lofty mountain ranges and extensive low plains, with their ravines and cataracts, their great lakes and stately rivers, was subject to perpetual change from that remote epoch when it seems to have been actually the case that “the earth was without form and void,” and that owing to the greater density of the vapour-laden atmosphere, “darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

Changing Forms of Life

Another field of geological research forced us to the conclusion that the same continued process of change had affected the forms of life upon the earth. When carefully investigated, the crust was found to abound in the fossilised remains of animals and plants. Careful study of these showed that the oldest of all were of comparatively simple structure, and that the higher forms only appeared in more recent epochs; while the highest of all were probably very little older than man himself. It is only during the last half century that the theory of Evolution has been elaborated and has become generally accepted as applicable to the whole of the vast cosmic process—from the development of the nebulæ into stars and suns and systems, with a corresponding development of planets from an early condition of intense heat, through a more or less lengthy period of cooling and contraction, to an ultimate state of refrigeration, the earlier and later stages being alike unsuited to the existence of life.

Theory of Natural Selection

More important still, the discovery of the theory of Natural Selection by Darwin—and at a later period by myself—has led to a satisfactory explanation of the successive appearance of higher and more complex forms of life, and also of that wonderfully minute and complex adaptation of every species to its conditions of existence and to its organic as well as its inorganic environment, which all other theories—even the most recent—have failed to grapple with.

Wonderful Complexity of the Universe

The logical completeness as well as the extreme simplicity of this explanation of organic evolution has led great numbers of thoughtful but ill-informed persons to reject it, because it seems to render unnecessary the existence of a primary intelligent cause; while another equally large but, as I think, equally ill-informed class—the so-called monists—use it to demonstrate the non-existence, or, at all events, the needlessness, of any such cause. Both alike err, because they fail to take cognisance of the fact that every form of evolution, and pre-eminently that of the organic world, is an explanation of a process of change, a law of development, not in any sense or by any possibility an explanation of fundamental laws, causes, or origins. It presupposes the existence not only of matter—itself a thing whose nature is becoming more and more mysterious and unthinkable with the advance of physical science—but of all the vast complex of laws and forces which act upon it—mechanical, physical, chemical, and electrical laws and forces—all more or less dependent on the still more mysterious, all-pervading ether. Thus, the universe in its purely physical and inorganic aspect is now seen to be such an overwhelmingly complex organism as to suggest to most minds some vast intelligent power pervading and sustaining it.

Persons to whom this seems a logical necessity will not be much disturbed by the dilemma of the agnostics—that, however wonderful the material universe may be, a being who could bring it into existence must be more wonderful, and that they prefer to hold the lesser marvel to be self-existent rather than the greater. When, however, we pass from the inorganic to the organic world, governed by a new set of laws, and apparently by some regulating and controlling forces altogether distinct from those at work in inorganic nature; and when, further, we see that these organisms originated at some definite epoch when the earth had become adapted to sustain them, and thereafter developed into two great branches of non-sentient and sentient life, the latter gradually acquiring higher and higher senses and faculties till it culminated in man—a being whose higher intellectual and moral nature seems adapted for, even to call for, indefinite development—this logical necessity for some higher intelligence to which he himself owes his existence, and which alone rendered the origin of sentient life possible, will seem still more irresistible.

Mind Behind the World

The preceding remarks are intended to suggest that the theory of evolution, combined with the quite recent and very startling advances in physical science, so far from making the universe around us more intelligible as a self-sustaining and self-existent whole, has really rendered it less so, by showing that it is infinitely more complex than we had formerly supposed; and further, that matter itself, instead of being, as was once believed, a comparatively simple thing, eternal and indestructible, is in all its various forms subject to decay and disintegration. We now see that the only thing known to us that we can conceive as having unending existence is mind itself; and, just as Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection has opened up to us an infinite field of study and admiration in the forms and colours and mutual relations of the various species of animals and plants, so does modern science open up to us new and unfathomable depths in the inner structure of matter and of the cosmos, and thus compels us more and more to recognise a mental rather than a mere physical substratum to account for its existence.

There is, however, another set of relations which have been hitherto very little studied—those between the organic and the inorganic worlds in their broader aspects. These are now found to be very much more complex and more remarkable than is usually supposed, and they also have an important bearing upon the great problem of the origin and destiny of man. This is a subject which opens up a variety of considerations of extreme interest, showing that the exact adaptations of our earth—and presumably of any other planets—to enable it to sustain organic life, from its first appearance and through its long course of development, is as varied and complex and as much beyond the possibilities of chance coincidences as are any of the individual adaptations of animals and plants to their immediate environment. Most of these latter adaptations have been made known to us by Darwin and his followers, and they have excited the admiration and astonishment of all lovers of Nature. When the antecedent and grander relations of planet to life are studied with equal care, these also will, I believe, excite deeper admiration, still more profound astonishment, because any secondary laws that could have brought them about are less easy to discover, or even to imagine.

Essential Conditions of Life

Before we can form any adequate idea of the nature of a world which shall be able to support and develop organic life, we must consider what are the special conditions that alone render such life possible. We, of course, refer to the whole of the organic world, from the lowest to the highest, not to the few exceptional cases in which life may be possible under conditions that would be fatal to the higher as well as to most of the lower forms.

The Miracle of Human Life

The one striking speciality of the higher animals—and to a less degree of the higher plants—is that of continuous, all-pervading motion, every portion of their substance being in a state of flux: each particle itself moving, growing, living and dying, and being replaced by other particles of the same nature and fulfilling the same functions. To keep up this growth, and to enable every part of the structure to be continually renewed, food is required. This is taken into the stomach of animals in the solid or liquid form, is then decomposed and recomposed, that which is useless or superfluous being thrown off by the intestines, while what is needed for growth is transformed into blood and by a wonderfully intricate system of branching tubes is carried to every part of the body, furnishing nourishment and repair alike to bone and muscle, to all the internal organs and all the outward integuments, and to that marvellously complex nervous system which also permeates every part of the body and is essential to the higher manifestations of life—to the exertion of force, voluntary motion, and, apparently, to thought itself. Add to this the constant influx of air, which at once purifies the blood and supplies animal heat, and is so important that its cessation for a few minutes is usually fatal, and we have a machine so complex in its structure and mode of action that the most elaborate of human machines is but as a grain of sand to a world in comparison.

Basis of Physical Life

Now the very possibility of such a material organism as this depends upon a highly complex form of matter termed protoplasm, which is at once extremely plastic and of extreme instability, and is yet capable of secreting or building up its atoms into such solid and apparently durable forms as bone, horn, and hair, besides the various liquids and semi-solids which build up the organism. This fundamental organic substance consists of only four chemical elements—nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon, and almost all animal and vegetable structures and products have the same elemental constitution, though with such widely different characteristics. Four other elements—sulphur, lime, silicon, and phosphorus—also occur in small quantities in organic tissues, to supply special needs; but these are not essential to all forms of life, and are only taken up and utilised by the living protoplasm when required. Protoplasm is undoubtedly the basis of physical life, yet it only exists in, and is produced by, living organisms. The moment such an organism dies, disorganisation and decay set in, and the whole mass becomes gradually changed into more stable compounds, or into its constituent elements. It appears, therefore, that some agency—usually termed “vital force”—must be at work, first to produce this wonderful compound, then to form it into “cells”—the physiological units of all organisms—and afterwards to direct the energies supplied by heat and light so as to build up the excessively complex structures, with all their wonderful powers and potentialities, which we term animals and plants. All this seems to imply not “a force” only, but very many forces, all of which must have some kind of mind in or behind them, to direct these forces to such infinitely varied yet perfectly defined ends.

A Marvel of Every Day

Consider for a moment one of the simplest of these cases. Let us take the minute seed of one of the great tropical fig-trees, and another seed of a strawberry, or of garden cress. Both will be about the same size and shape, and the most acute microscopist would not find any difference in the internal structure that could intelligibly account for the different results when these little grains of protoplasm are exposed to identical conditions. For, even if planted near each other, and exposed to the same amount of heat and moisture, to the very same atmosphere, and the same kind of water, as well as identically the same soil, yet invariably the one will grow into a large tree, the other into a small herb, and in the course of time, still with no change whatever of the physical conditions to which both are exposed, each will produce its peculiar foliage, and flowers, and fruit, very different in all their characters from those of the other. Were this result not so common as to seem to us “natural,” we should call it a miracle; and it is really and essentially as inexplicable as many things which are termed miracles only because they are unfamiliar and inexplicable.

Now, this wonderful substance, the physical base of all life—and as it is the only base that exists, or has ever existed, on the earth, we may fairly assume that no other is possible—can only maintain itself and perform its functions under certain very definite conditions, which conditions are now maintained on our earth’s surface, and must have been maintained throughout the long geological periods during which life has been slowly developing. What these conditions are we will now proceed to show.

The First Essential for Life

The first essential for organic life is a certain very limited range of temperature. We are so accustomed to consider the change of temperature from winter to summer, from day to night, and that which occurs when we pass from the tropics to the Polar regions as being very great, that we do not realise what a small proportion such changes bear to the whole range of temperature that exists in the known universe. The absolute zero of temperature is calculated to be minus 461° F., while the heat of the sun has been determined to be over 10,000° F., and many of the stars are known to be much hotter than the sun. The actual range of temperature is therefore enormous; but any development of organic life is possible only within the very narrow limits of the freezing and boiling points of water, since within those temperatures only is the existence of liquid water possible. But a much less range than this is really required, because albumen, one of the commonest forms of protoplasm, is coagulated or solidified at a temperature of about 160° F. Now, if, as is generally believed, the earth has been once a liquid or even a gaseous mass and has since cooled to its present temperature on the surface, and the sun is undergoing a similar process of cooling, we are able to understand that the very limited range of temperature within which life development is possible implies an equally limited period of time as compared with that occupied by the whole process of solar and planetary development.

We Live by the Heat of the Sun

It must be understood, however, that the present temperature of the earth’s surface is due entirely to sun-heat, and that if that were withdrawn or greatly diminished the whole surface of the globe would be permanently far below the freezing point and all the oceans be frozen for a considerable depth; so that all organic life would become extinct. Under such conditions no renewed development of life would be possible; and it is therefore quite certain that the sun has actually maintained the uniform moderate temperature required, and must continue to maintain it for whatever future period man is destined to continue his existence upon the earth.

But it is not only a certain amount of heat that is required, but also a sufficient quantity of light; and this implies a further restriction of conditions, because light is due to vibrations of a limited range of wave-length, and without these particular rays plants cannot take the carbon from the carbonic acid in the atmosphere, and by its means build up the wonderful series of carbon compounds, including protoplasm, which are essential for the life of animals. What is commonly termed dark heat, therefore, would not be sufficient for the development of any but the lowest forms of life, even though it produced the necessary temperature during a sufficient period of time.

All organisms, from the lowest to the highest, whether plant or animal, consist very largely of water, and its constant presence either in the liquid or gaseous form is essential for organic life. On our earth oceans and seas occupy the greater part of the surface, while their average depth is so great that the quantity of water is sufficient to cover the whole of the globe free from inequalities two miles deep. It is this enormous amount of water that supplies the air with ample moisture, such as renders the life of the tropics so luxuriant. Yet even now the inequality of water-supply is such that large areas in all parts of the earth are what we term deserts, only supporting a very few forms of life that have become specially adapted to them, and certainly unfitted for the continuous development of life from lower to higher forms.

Water and the Atmosphere

Water is also of immense importance as an equaliser of temperature, the currents of the ocean conveying the warmth of the tropics to ameliorate the severity of temperate and Polar regions, while the amount of water-vapour in the atmosphere acts as a retainer of heat during the night, without which it is probable that the surface of the earth would freeze every night even in the tropics. When we consider that water consists of two gases—oxygen and hydrogen—in definite proportions, and that without their presence in these proportions and in the necessary quantity the development of organic life would have been impossible, we find that we have here a remarkable and very complex set of conditions which must be fulfilled in any planet to enable it to develop life.

But this is not all. The atmosphere is so intimately associated with water in its life-relations, and is itself so absolutely essential to the existence from moment to moment of the higher animals, that the two require to be duly proportioned to each other and to the globe of which they form a part.

How Water Protects Earth by Night

In the first place the atmosphere must be of a sufficient density, this being needed in order that it may be an adequate storer up of solar heat, and also in order that it may be able to supply sufficient oxygen, water-vapour, and carbonic-acid gas for the requirements of both vegetable and animal life. We have a striking example of the use of air as a storer-up and distributor of heat and moisture in the very different character of our south-west and north-east winds. The effect of the density of the air is equally well shown when we ascend lofty mountains where we find perpetual snow and ice, due simply to the fact that the air is not dense enough to retain the heat of the sun—which is actually greater than at low levels—so that at night the temperature regularly falls below the freezing point. On the other hand a very much denser atmosphere would absorb so much water vapour as probably to shut out the light of the sun, and thus have a prejudicial effect on vegetable life.

Again, there is good reason to believe that the proportions of the various gases in the atmosphere are, within certain narrow limits, such as are most favourable not only for the life that actually exists, but for any life that could be developed from the elements that constitute the universe. Oxygen has properties which seem absolutely essential to organic life; but nitrogen, though only serving to dilute the oxygen so far as the higher animals are directly concerned, is yet indirectly essential for them, since it is in vegetables a constituent of that protoplasm which is the very substance of their bodies.

Use of Thunderstorms

Now, plants obtain their nitrogen mainly from the minute proportion of ammonia that exists in the atmosphere, and this ammonia is formed by the union of the nitrogen of the air with the hydrogen of the water-vapour under the influence of electric discharges—that is, of thunderstorms. It is evident, then, that the required amount of this essential compound will depend upon a due adjustment of the quantities of nitrogen and aqueous vapour always present; while the electric discharges seem to be due to the friction of various strata of air with each other and with the earth’s surface, due to the winds and storms; and winds are due to highly complex causes, involving the rate of the earth’s rotation, the rise and fall of the tide, the density of the atmosphere, the quantity of its aqueous vapour, and the amount of solar heat which it receives. Unless all these very diverse factors existed in their due proportion, some of the results might be highly prejudicial if not quite inimical to the development of life. To these various adaptations of our gaseous envelope we must add one other. Carbonic acid gas in the atmosphere is absolutely essential to vegetable life, while it is directly antagonistic to that of the higher animals. Its quantity must, therefore, be strictly proportionate to the needs of both; and that beneficial proportion must have been preserved throughout the whole period of the existence of the higher air-breathing animals.

These various considerations show us that our atmosphere, consisting as it does mainly of two common gases mixed together, and therefore seeming to most people one of the simplest things possible, is really a wonderfully complex arrangement which is adapted to serve the purposes of living organisms in a great variety of ways. But this by no means exhausts the subject of its adaptation to support and develop organic life, because its very existence on the earth in a suitable quantity and composed of the essential elements can be shown to depend on other and deeper relations which will now be pointed out.

The older writers on the subject of the habitability of the planets took no account whatever of the importance of size, distance from the sun, period of rotation, and obliquity of the ecliptic as determining the possibility of organic life, but simply assumed that, because the earth possessed an abundant life-development, all the other planets must also possess it. But we know that the above-mentioned factors are of very high importance, as we will proceed briefly to point out.

Earth’s Envelope of Gas

It is now believed that the amount of atmosphere possessed by a planet is due mainly, perhaps entirely, to the planet’s mass, and its consequent gravitative power. Spectrum-analysis has shown that vast masses of gaseous matter exist in the universe, and it is probable that, in a state of extreme tenuity, these are very widely diffused. Just as meteoric dust is constantly attracted to the earth, and periodically in larger quantities, so are gases, and supposing the aggregations of free gaseous matter to have been distributed with some approach to uniformity, then, as planets grew in size, they would also tend to secure a larger amount of the diffused gases, thus forming deeper atmospheres. The observed facts agree with this view. The largest planets, Jupiter and Saturn, have such a depth of atmosphere as permanently to obscure any solid interior they may possess. The only planet closely approaching the earth in size and density—Venus—has an atmosphere which appears to be loftier than ours, but it may be composed of different gases. Mars, which has only one-ninth the mass of the earth, has a lofty but very tenuous atmosphere, and probably no water, the Polar snows being due probably to the freezing of some dense gas. The climate and physical condition of Mars is, however, still a subject of much controversy, which I hope to discuss in a separate work dealing with the arguments of Professor Lowell [see [page 105]]. In that volume the reader will find, fully set forth my reasons, on scientific grounds, against the supposed habitability of Mars.

The Earth Selects and Uses Gas

But, besides attracting cosmic masses of gaseous matter to form its atmosphere, there is another equally important function of the mass of a planet—its selective power on the kind of gases it can permanently retain in a free state. The molecules of gases are in a condition of rapid motion in all directions, which explains the elastic force they exhibit. The speed of this motion has been determined for all the chief gases, and also the gravitative force necessary to prevent them from continually escaping into space from the upper limit of the atmosphere. Thus the moon, which has a mass only one-eightieth that of the earth, can retain no free gas whatever on its surface. Mars can retain only the very heavy gases, but neither hydrogen nor water-vapour. The earth, however, has force enough to retain all the gases except hydrogen, which is just beyond its limit; and this may explain why it is that there is no free hydrogen in the atmosphere, although this gas is continually produced in small quantities by submarine volcanoes, is emitted sometimes from fissures in volcanic regions, and is a product of decaying vegetation. Once united with oxygen to form water, it becomes amenable to gravity in the form of invisible aqueous vapour, and is thenceforth a permanent possession for us in its most valuable form.

EARLY ICE AGE, WHEN MAMMOTHS ROAMED THE EARTH AND MAN WAS ARISING

LARGER IMAGE

The very accurate adjustments that render our earth suitable for the production and long-continued development of organic life, culminating in man, may be well shown by another consideration. If our earth had been 9,600 miles instead of 8,000 miles in diameter—a very small increase in view of the immense range of planetary magnitudes from Mercury to Jupiter—with a slight proportionate increase in density, due to its greater force of gravitative compression, its mass would have been about double what it is now. This would probably have led to its having attracted and retained double the amount of gases, in which case the water produced would have been double what it is—perhaps even more, because hydrogen gas would not then escape into space as it does now. But the surface of the globe would have been only one-half greater than at present; so that, unless the ocean cavities were twice as deep as they actually are, the whole surface of the earth—except, perhaps, a few tops of submarine volcanoes—would have been covered several miles deep in water, and all terrestrial life would have been impossible.

The Deep Atmosphere of Venus

From the various considerations here set forth it appears clear to me that no other planet of the solar system makes any approach to the conditions essential for the development of a rich and varied organic life such as adorns our earth. One only—Venus—has a sufficient bulk and density to give it the needful atmosphere; but as it receives about twice as much solar heat as does the earth, it is probable that its very deep atmosphere may be mainly due to the fact that a large proportion of its water is held in a state of vapour, its seas and oceans being proportionately reduced in extent. Judging from what happens on the earth, this would probably lead to an excessive area of deserts, and thus be inimical to life. But this planet appears to possess one feature which renders it fundamentally unsuitable for organic life.

Why there is no Life on Venus

Several modern observers have found that the older astronomers were all in error in giving Venus a rotation-period almost exactly the same as ours, an error due to the indefinite and variable markings of its surface. They have now deduced a period about equal to that of its revolution round the sun—a rate which has been confirmed by spectrum-analysis, and further confirmed by the fact that this planet has no measurable polar compression. As during transits of Venus over the sun’s disc the conditions for the accurate measurement of the compression, if any exist, are the best possible, and as none has been found, this alone affords a demonstration that the rate of rotation must be very slow, because the laws of motion necessitate a definite amount of equatorial protuberance corresponding to that rate. Half the surface has, therefore, perpetual day and the other half perpetual night, leading to violent contrasts of heat and cold for the two hemispheres with, in all probability, correspondingly violent winds, rains, and electrical disturbances—conditions so entirely opposed to the uniformity of temperatures and stability of meteorological phenomena during long geological epochs which are essential for the full development of organic life, that such development is perhaps less probable on this planet than on any other.

I think I have now shown not only that no other planet in the solar system makes any approach to the possession of the varied and complex adaptations which are essential for a full development of organic life, but also that on the Earth itself the conditions are so numerous and so nicely balanced that very moderate deviations in excess or defect of what actually exists in the case of any one of them—and of others not referred to here—might have rendered it equally unsuitable, so that either no organic life at all, or only a very low type of life, could have been developed or supported.

There is Purpose in our World

If, then, the more superficial indications of design in the relations of animals to their environment, and of man to the universe, have been shown by modern science to have required no special interference of a higher power to bring them about, but that they have been due to natural laws acting in accordance with and in subordination to the deeper laws and forces that determine the very constitution of matter and the unknown power and principle we term “life,”—yet, on the other hand, we find that a more careful study of the outer universe, or cosmos, reveals a new set of adaptations not less wonderful or more easily explicable by chance coincidence than those presented by the organic world.

Even the very brief sketch of the subject here given suggests the idea of purpose in a world so precisely and uniquely adapted to develop organic life, and to support that life during the countless ages required for the completed evolution of man. But that suggestion becomes a logical induction when the whole of the available evidence is set forth, as I have attempted to set it forth in my work on “Man’s Place in the Universe.” I have there shown not only that the cumulative evidence for the earth being the only supporter of a fully-developed organic life within the solar system is irresistible, but that there is some direct, and much more indirect, evidence that this uniqueness extends to the whole stellar universe; and it is certain that no particle of direct evidence for the existence of organic life elsewhere has been, or is likely to be, adduced.

I have also shown (in an appendix to the second edition of my book) that the purely biological argument for the uniqueness of the development of man—as the culminating point of one line of descent throughout the diverging ramifications of the animal kingdom—is overwhelmingly strong; hence the logical conclusion from the whole of the evidence is that man is the one supreme product of the whole material universe.

My object in the present essay has been limited to showing that, besides and beyond the special adaptations of the various kinds of animals and plants to their special environments, there exist in the earth as a planet, in its various physical and cosmical relations, a whole series of adaptations of a very remarkable character which, so far as we can judge, are essential to its function as a life-producing world. The study of these adaptations, therefore, may be considered to be appropriate here, as constituting a preliminary chapter in the natural history of the Earth and of Mankind.

ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE

IN THE DAYS OF THE SEA MONSTERS

Reproduced from a plate in Hawkins’ “Book of the Great Sea Dragons.”