Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/18



character of a people is their history as written in their own subconscious mind, and to understand that character we have to turn on it the lime-light of their history. Then each anomaly is explained, and the whole becomes a clear and consistent result of causes traced to their very root. In the same way the geographical distribution of ideas falls under the same explanation as absolutely as that of plants or animals. A map of a country is only a script produced by all the ages of its making. In the beautiful maps of the past, in which rivers are seen with their true value as the high roads of nature, the veins and arteries of civilisations, this fact was still more apparent than to-day, when the outstanding lines of connection between cities are railways, the channels of the drainage of wealth being of more importance than those of its production. Yet even now it is the