Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/389

Rh the couvade, and others, such as the wide-spread superstitions connected with sneezing, on which Mr. Haliburton gave a lecture, in 1863, at Halifax, Nova Scotia, may be adduced as facts for the occurrence of which in so many distant times and places it is hard to account on any other hypothesis than that of deep-lying connexions by blood or intercourse, among races which history, and even philology, only know as isolated sections of the population of the world. Whether such customs had one or several original sources, their present diffusion seems in great measure due to propagation from district to district.

On the whole, it does not seem to be an unreasonable, or even an over-sanguine view, that the mass of analogies in Art and Knowledge, Mythology and Custom, confused and indistinct as they at present are, may already be taken to indicate that the civilizations of many races, whose history even the evidence of Language has not succeeded in bringing into connexion, have really grown up under one another's influences, or derived common material from a common source. But that such lines of argument should ever be found to converge in the last instance towards a single point, so as to enable the student to infer from reasoning on a basis of observed facts that the civilization of the whole world has its origin in one parent stock, is a state of things of which not even the most dim and distant view is to be obtained.

On another subject, on which it would not be prudent to offer a definite opinion, a few words may nevertheless be said. Every attempt to trace back the early history of civilization tends, however remotely, towards an ultimate limit—the primary condition of the human race, as regards their knowledge of the laws of nature and their power of modifying the outer world for their own ends. Such lines of investigation as go back from the Bronze or Iron Ages to the time of the use of implements of stone, from the higher to the lower methods of fire-making, from the boat to the raft, from the use of the spindle to the art of hand-twisting, and so on, seem to enable the student to see back through the history of human culture to a state of art and science somewhat resembling that of the