Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/18

 6 EARLY PEOPLES AND EMPIRES Of the European Aryans, the first great group is that of the Celts, who went steadily westward. The Celtic languages fall into two divisions so distinct that we must recognise two separate European Celtic waves. They went steadily west, not stopping Aryans. to turn south into the Greek or Italian Penin- sulas, until the Atlantic Ocean stopped them, and they broke northward into the British Isles and southward into Spain. Although they migrated at an early stage there are no records of their history until at a much later date, when they came into collision with states which had grown up in the meanwhile in the lands of the Mediterranean Sea. Next we are concerned with the great group which parted into two divisions generally called the Hellenic or Greek and the Italian or Latin. These two divisions, when they estab- lished themselves in the Greek and Italian Peninsulas, roughly speaking between 1500 and 1000 B.C., soon acquired a high civilisation ; but the civilised Hellenes and Latins were not at all inclined to recognise their relationship to the tribes of their kinsmen who remained in wilder regions and clung to a wilder life. The third great group is the Teutonic, which in course of time spread itself over Germany and Scandinavia, but did not come into collision with its southern neighbours till about one hundred years before the Christian Era. The last great group is that of the Slavs, who ultimately peopled the greater part of Eastern Europe. Perhaps this is the same group of whom we hear in the course of Greek and Roman history under the names of Scythians, Sarmatians, and Cimmerians. Now how did these peoples come to be formed? Primitive man, man in the first few thousand years of his existence, was 3. Primitive verv much like any other wild beast j only, he had Man. more intelligence. He found that he could make fire serve him. He found out that he could make things, and that he could throw things ; and thereupon he began to use weapons wherewith to fight other beasts and other men. Also he made other tools in the same way that he had made weapons, out of stone and bone and wood. He kept himself alive by eating the fruits of the earth, and by killing beasts or birds or fishes when he had found out how to do so. He found out that he could use some