Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/640

Rh 018 even more than silver, for without tin bronze cannot be produced. The Celts may have had some skill in metal lurgy, as they taught the Romans the art of tinning utensils, and were taught by them the fabrication of coins. Im portant mines were worked in the Scilly Islands and in Cornwall. If Carthaginian or Phoenician vessels ever reached the west coast of France or entered the Channel, they must have been in quest of tin, and probably too of debouches for their manufactured bronze. At all events there was intercourse between the northern countries and the Mediterranean by land. That such land traffic existed is proved by the early foundation and prosperity of Mar seilles; moreover, the lumps of tin ore which have been found among the Swiss relics of the bronze age must have reached Helvetia by inland commerce. It was owing to the presence of tin that the Celts of Gaul and Britain were of far higher social development than the Teutons of the time of Caesar. The possession of an article of export so indispensable, and the fact that tin was in such great request in the age of bronze, was in itself the means of promoting civilization, for commerce at a very early period brought the Britons into contact with the Medi terranean nations, and especially with the Etruscans, the great bronze-smiths of antiquity. The inhabitants of the coast of the North Sea, and still more of the Baltic, pos sessed an analogous property in amber. It is doubtless to this coveted substance that the numerous &quot; finds &quot; on the shores of the Baltic are due, where Greek and Roman coins, as well as bronze instruments, were brought, some by way of the Euxine and Pannonia, along the Danube, some along the Rhone and the Rhine, and even some few across the huge barrier of the Alps. The obsidian blades which are occasionally met with in ancient graves to the east of the Mississippi must have reached by barter the places where they are now discovered. We must not imagine that the Redskins had no intercourse but that of murderous feuds. Merchant boats passed along the great rivers, and transit dues were taken by the chiefs. In South America, curare, the arrow poison, the preparation of which was understood only by a few hordes, formed a valuable article of commerce among the Indians of the Amazon, so that people living near the Napo were obliged to make canoe voyages of three months duration in order to procure it. Even where bands of hawkers and pedlars did not wander through the country, goods, such as nephrit hatchets, salt, curious shells, colouring stuffs, were bartered between horde and horde ; and thus a system of intercourse might have extended throughout an entire quarter of the world. English wares, deposited at Mom- bas ou the eastern side of South Africa, have been recog nized at Mogador, on the west coast of Northern Africa. From these circumstances we assume that commerce has existed in remote ages and among most inhabitants of the world. And we must not lose sight of the fact that if we find trade and emporiums in one place, some corre sponding industries and manufactures must exist elsewhere in connexion with them. V. Family Development. To say that of all institutions the family is the oldest and most sacred, that from it all social rights and duties are derived, like branches from the parent stem, would be considered a truism. Nothing looks more plausible than the universal traditions, appa rently well founded on historical records, according to which the founder of the nation, the ancestor, as he is called, had sons, who founded families, which increasing at every generation, became so many tribes, which coalesced as time went on. Historians and moralists have not been slow to credit the poets whose idylls described in glorious colours these primitive families. It was the belief that, notwith- bUinding the expulsion of man from paradise, and the murder of Abel by his brother Cain, the progenies of our first parents led a gladsome life, scarcely less inno cent than it was when lambs and lions frolicked together on the banks of the Gihon and the Pison. Directly after the deluge the so-called patriarchal family is thought to have arisen. Perhaps even then it was a little tainted with polygamy and some other minor defects, but on the whole, it was a model of virtue, worthy to be set as an example to a degenerate posterity. Modern re search flatly contradicts this common-place romance, denies these self-evident propositions which have become historical axioms. Science is no longer of opinion that tribes and nations have been evolved from the family ; on the con trary, it holds that the family has been evolved from tribes and hordes. It is not denied that the first step in the path of material and moral progress began with the rear ing of a family, and that family cares have been the most powerful agents of civilization, but it is denied that the family has existed in a perfect state from the beginning. The family had to grow like every thing else. As we see it now, it is an institution of a comparatively recent date. In the same manner the belief, conscious or unconscious, has prevailed in most minds that monogamy was the first law of marriage, and that polygamy and polyandry have been wilful departures from a known rule. The reverse appears now to be the fact. In a book which was published as far back as 1861 Professor Bachofen of Basel pro pounded a theory, deduced from a careful study of classical literature, that true marriage, unknown to the hunting, the fishing, and the nomadic tribes, arose with the spreading of agriculture, the husbandman wedding the wife at the same time that he wedded the soil. Previous to &quot; husbandry &quot; in both senses of the word, pre vious to any regulation in the matter, the females and the children, he contends, were the common property of all the males of the tribe. In some legends this state of things was symbolized by the spontaneous vegetation of the marshes, rushes and wild asparagus. But the woman, spoil of the victors, passed or knocked about from man to man, and even from tribe to tribe, yearned after a better regulated state of things. Under her influence, the rudiments of the family grew into shape. Paternity was an idea which did not and could not have a place in such societies. A child had a hundred fathers or none, but he had one mother ; he knew the breasts which had given him suck. In this state of human relations, descent was traced exclusively through mothers. The first kinship was between the offspring of a common female ancestor. To trace descent through the male is an idea of far later date. By this discovery (for it deserves to be ranked as a dis covery) a flood of light was thrown on a whole region of the obscure past. It is assumed that under the influence of the then recent idea of motherhood diverse religions arose, all having as principle the worship of Mother Earth, Demeter. And starting from the supposition that religions have been always the expression of the deepest thought and the loftiest aspirations of their worshippers, that practice was the exact counterpart of philosophy, Professor Bachofen inferred that, the Divine Mother having been recognized as the fountain of existence and the source of all right, the human mother was likewise the fountain of authority ; and that in some places, and for a certain period at least, woman as such had exercised political power, and had enjoyed a certain degree of social supremacy, a startling conclusion, which the stories and traditions respecting Oriental queens did not sufficiently justify. In originating the theory of gynoccocracy so-called, the limit of valid deduction had been overstepped, but the great law of maternal filiation has proved sound, Mean while, in his Essay on Primitive Marriage, M Lennan