Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/71

Rh to that part of archæology called prehistoric, for that concerns itself with the most ancient; and the most ancient is the simplest, and the simplest is the most transparent, and therefore the most instructive.

Prehistoric archæology is a new science. I can remember when neither its name nor its methods were known to the most learned anthropologists. But it has already taught us by incontrovertible arguments a wonderful truth—a truth opposing and reducing to naught many teachings of the sages and seers of past generations. They imagined that the primal man had fallen from some high estate; that he had forfeited by his own falseness, or been driven by some hard fate, from a pristine paradise, an Eden garden, an Arcadia; that his ancestors were demigods and heroes, himself their degenerate descendant.

How has prehistoric archæology reversed this picture? We know beyond cavil or question that the earliest was also the lowest man, the most ignorant, the most brutish, naked, homeless, half speechless. But the gloom surrounding this distant background of the race is relieved by rays of glory, for with knowledge not less positive are we assured that through all hither time, through seeming retrogressions and darkened epochs, the advance of the race in the main toward a condition better by every standard has been certain and steady, "ne'er known retiring ebb, but kept due on."

Archæology, however, is, after all, a dealing with dry bones, a series of inferences from inanimate objects. The color and the warmth of life it never has. How can we divine the real meaning of the fragments and ruins, the forgotten symbols and the perished gods, it shows us?

The means has been found, and this through a discovery little less than marvelous, the most pregnant of all that anthropology has yet offered, not yet appreciated even by the learned. This discovery is that of the physical unity of man, the parallelism of his development everywhere and in all time; any, more, the nigh absolute uniformity of his thoughts and actions, his aims and methods, when in the same degree of development, no matter where he is or in what epoch living. Scarcely anything but his geographical environment, using that term in its larger sense, seems to modify the monotonous sameness of his creations.

I shall refer more than once to this discovery, for its full recognition is the corner stone of true anthropology. In this connection I refer to it for its application to archaeology. It teaches us this: That when we find a living nation of low culture we are safe in taking its modes of thought and feeling as analogous to those of extinct tribes whose remains show them to have been in about the same stage of culture.