Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/362

Rh 342 ARCHEOLOGY caves, where also the remains of still more gigantic herbi- vora confirm the idea of man s exhaustive struggle for exist ence. The nearest analogy to such a state of life is that of the modern Esquimaux, warring with the monstrous polar bear, and making a prey of the gigantic cetacese of Arctic seas. Through how many ages this unhistoric night of European man may have preceded the dawn of civilisa tion it is at present vain to speculate. But this is notice able, that there is no inherent element of progress in a people in the condition of the Esquimaux. To all appear ance, if uninfluenced by external impulse, or unaffected by any great amelioration of climate, they are likely to prolong the mere struggle for existence through unnumbered centuries, armed, as now, with weapons and implements ingeniously wrought of bone, ivory, and stone, the product of the neolithic arts of this 19th century. To this succeeds the second or pastoral state, with its flocks and herds, its domesticated animals, and its ideas of personal property, including in its earlier stages that of property in man himself. It pertains to the open regions and warmer climates of the temperate zone, and to the elevated steppes and valleys of semi-tropical countries, where the changing seasons involve of necessity the wan dering life of the shepherd. This accordingly prevents the development of the arts of settled life, especially those of architecture; and precludes all idea of personal property in the soil. But the conditions of pastoral life are by no means incompatible with frequent leisure, reflection, and consequent intellectual progress. Astronomy has its origin assigned to the ancient shepherds of Asia; and the con templative pastoral life of the patriarchs Job and Abraham has had its counterpart in many an Arab chief of later times. The third or agricultural stage is that of the tillers of the soil, the Aryans, the ploughers and lords of the earth, among whom are developed the elements of settled sucial life involved in the personal homestead and all the ideas of individual property in land. The process was gradual. The ancient Germans, according to the descrip tion of Tacitus, led the life of agricultural nomads; and such was the state of the Visigoths and Ostrogoths of later centuries. But this was in part due to the physical con ditions of trans-Alpine Europe in those earlier centimes. Long ages before that, as the ancient Sanscrit language proves, the great Aryan family, of which those are offshoots, had passed from the condition of agricultural nomads to that of lords of the soil among a settled agricultural people. They had followed up the art of ploughing the soil with that of shipbuilding and &quot;ploughing&quot; the waves. They were skilled in sewing, in weaving, in the potter s art, and in masonry. Their use of numbers was carried as high at least as a hundred before they settled down from their nomad life. They had domesticated the cow, the sheep, the horse, and the dog; and their pdsu or feeders already constituted their pecus, their wealth, before the pecunia assumed its later forms of currency. They had also passed through their bronze and into their iron period; for their language shows that they were already acquainted with the most useful metals as well as with the most valuable grains. The whole evidence of history points to the seats of earliest civilisation in warm climates, on the banks of the Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Indus, and the Ganges. The shores of the Mediterranean succeeded in later centuries to their inheritance, and were the seats of long-enduring empires, whose intellectual bequests are the life of all later civilisation. But trans- Alpine Europe, which is now yield ing up to us the records of its prehistoric ages, is entirely of modern growth so far as its historic civilisation is con cerned, and wherever it extends towards the northern verge of the temperate zone it is even now in its infancy. Here, then, we trace our way back to the first progressive efforts of reason, and find man primeval, in a state of nature, in the midst of the abundance pertaining to a genial and fertile climate, which rather stimulates his aesthetic faculty than enforces him by any rigorous necessity to cultivate the arts for the purposes of clothing and building. Thus em ploying his intellectual leisure, he begins that progressive elevation which is as consistent with his natural endow ments as a rational being as it is foreign to the instincts of all other animals. He increases and multiplies, spreads abroad over the face of the earth, clears its forests, drains its swamps, makes its rivers and seas his highways, and its valleys and plains his fertile fields and pasture-grounds. Cities rise, with all the fostering influences of accumulated wealth and settled leisure, and with all the stimulating influences of acquired tastes and luxurious desires. The rude pictorial art not ruder on the graven ivory of tho troglodytes of the Madelaine cave than on many a hiero glyphic drawing of the catacombs and temples of Egypt employed in picture-writing, passes by a natural and inevitable transition from the literal representations of objects to the symbolic suggestion of ideas, to a word- alphabet, and then to pure phonetic signs. The whole process is manifest from, the very infancy of Egyptian picture-writing, as crude as that with which the Indian savage still records his deeds of arms on his buffalo-robe, or carves the honours of the buried warrior on his grave-post Letters lie at the foundation of all high and enduring civilisation, yet we can thus trace them back to their in fantile origin ; and so onward in their slow transformations, as in the mingled pictorial and phonetic writing of the llosetta stone hieroglyphics of the age of the Ptolemies. Through Phoenician, Greek, and Roman modifications, they have come down to us as the arbitrary symbols of sounds which the voice combines into articulate speech. And as it is with letters so it is with man s arts, his drawing, carving, sculpture, architecture, weaving, potter), metallurgy; and so with his science, his astrology, astro nomy, geometry, alchemy, and all else. The beginnings of all of them lie within our reach. We can trace back the measurements of solar time to the crudest beginnings of more than one ancient nation, with a year of SCO days. This, corrected to the definite approximation to the true solar year of a period of 3G5 days, became the vague year of the Egyptians, with the great Sothiac cycle of 1460 years, clearly pointing to a system of chronology which could not have been perpetuated through many centuries without conflicting with the most obvious astronomical phenomena as well as with the recurring seasons of the year. Man is, after all, according to the boldest speculations of the geologist, among the most modern of living creatures. If indeed the theory of evolution from lower forms of animal life is accepted as the true history of his origin, time may well be prolonged through unnumbered ages to admit of the process which is to develop the irrational brute into man. But regarding him still as a being called into existence as the lord of creation, endowed with reason, the demonstration of a prolonged existence of the race, with all its known varieties, its diversities of language, and its wide geographical distribution under conditions so diverse, tends to remove greater difficulties than it creates. No essential doctrine, or principle in morals, is involved in the acceptance or rejection of any term of duration for the human race; and the idea of its unity, which for a time was scornfully rejected from the creed of the ethnologist, is now advocated by the evolutionist as alone consistent with the physical, mental, and moral characteristics common to savage and civilised man, whether we study him amid