The researches of Schmerling, of Boucher de Perth, of Lyell himself, and of a host of later workers demonstrated that fossil remains of man were found commingled in embedded strata and in cave bottoms under conditions that demonstrated their extreme antiquity; and in the course of the quarter century after 1865, in which year Lyell had published his epoch-marking work on the antiquity of man, the new idea had made a complete conquest, until now no one any more thinks of disputing the extreme antiquity of man than he thinks of questioning the great age of the earth itself. To be sure, no one pretends any longer to put a precise date upon man’s first appearance. The new figures take on something of the vagueness that characterise the estimates of the Babylonians; but it is accepted as clearly proven that the racial age of man is at least to be numbered in tens of thousands of years. The only clues at present accessible that tend to give anything like definiteness to the computations are the researches of Egyptologists and Assyriologists.
In Egypt remains are found, as we shall see, which carry the history of civilisation back to something like 5000 B.C., and in Mesopotamia the latest finds are believed to extend the record by yet another two thousand years. Man then existed in a state of high civilisation at a period antedating the Christian era by about twice the length of time formerly admitted for the age of earth itself.
How much more ancient the remains of barbaric man, as preserved in the oldest caves, may be, it would be but vague guess work and serve no useful purpose, to attempt to estimate. History proper, as usually conceived, is concerned only with the doings of civilised man; and, indeed, in one sense, such a restricted view is absolutely forced upon the historian, for it is only civilised man who is able to produce records that are preserved through the ages in such manner as to tell a connected story to after generations. The arrow-heads and charred sticks of the stone age of man are indeed proofs that this man existed, and that he led his certain manner of life, some clear intimations as to which are given by these mementoes; but they point to no path by which we may hope to follow the precise history of those succeeding generations by which the man of the stone age was connected with, for example, the builder of the Egyptian Pyramids. We can, indeed, trace in general terms the course of human progress. We know that from using rough stone implements chipped into shape, man came finally to acquire the art of polishing stones by friction, thus making more finished implements. We know that later on he learned to smelt metals, marvellous achievement that it was; and when this had been accomplished, we may suppose that he pretty rapidly developed cognate arts that led to higher civilisation.
Reasoning from this knowledge, we speak of the palæolithic or rough stone age, of the neolithic or polished stone age, of the age of bronze, and finally of the age of iron, as representing great epochs in human progress. But it is only in the vaguest terms that we can connect one of these ages with another, and any attempt at a definite chronology in relation to them utterly fails us. This would not so much matter if we were sure in any given case that we were tracing the history of the same individual race through the successive periods; but, in point of fact, no such unity of race can be predicated. There is every reason to believe that each and every race that ever attained to higher civilisation passed through these various stages, but the familiar examples of the American Indians, who were in the rough stone age when their continent was discovered by Columbus, and of the African and Australian races, who, even now, have advanced no farther, illustrate the fact that different races have passed through these various stages of development in widely separated periods of time, and take away all certainty from any attempts to compute exact chronologies.
CHAPTER V
THE RACES OF MAN AND THE ARYAN QUESTION
The question of races of mankind is one that has given rise to great diversity of opinion among scientists and students of ethnology, and it may as well be admitted at the outset that no very definite conclusions have as yet been arrived at. One set of ethnologists have been disposed to look to physical characters as the basis of a classification; others have been guided more by language. In the earlier stages of the inquiry the Biblical traditions have entered into the case with prejudicial effect, and with the advances of science this subject as a whole has seemed to grow more confused rather than clearer. For a time there was a certain unanimity in regarding the Egyptians and their allies as Hamites, the Babylonians, Hebrews, Phœnicians, and their allies as Semites, and in bringing all other non-Aryan races into a conglomerate class under the title of Turanians. Latterly, however, the artificial character of such a classification as this has been more and more apparent, and a growing belief tends to consider all the peoples grouped about the Mediterranean as forming a single race, including within that race, as is apparent, members of the old races of Hamites, Semites, and Aryans. Yet another classification would group the peoples of the earth according to their several stages of civilisation. But, without attempting a complete enumeration of all the various systems that have been suggested, one may summarise them all by repeating that there is no complete uniformity of classification accepted by all authoritative students of the subject.
Here as elsewhere, however, there is a tendency for old systems and old names to maintain their hold, and notwithstanding the disavowals of the most recent schools of ethnology, the classification into Hamites, Semites, Aryans, and Turanians is doubtless the one that has still the widest vogue. In particular the Aryan race, to which all modern European races belong, has seemed more and more to make good its claims to recognition. Thanks to the relatively new science of comparative philology, it has been shown, and has now come to be familiarly understood, that the languages of the Hindu and the Persian in the far East are based upon the same principles of phonation as the Greek and Latin and their daughter languages, and the language of the great Teutonic race.
It is this affinity of languages that is the one defining feature of the Aryan race. Since historical studies have made it more and more plain that a nation in its wanderings, whether as a conquering or a conquered people, may adopt the language of another nation, it has become clear that a classification of mankind based on ethnic features would have no necessary correspondence with a classification based upon language. The philologists, therefore, who cling to the word “Aryan,” or to the idea which it connotes, have latterly been disposed to urge, as for example Professor Max Müller does in the most strenuous terms, that in contending for an Aryan race they refer solely to a set of people speaking the Aryan language, quite regardless of the physical affinities of these people. And it is in this sense of the word, and this alone, that the dark-skinned race of India is to be considered brother to the fair-skinned Scandinavian; that, in short, all the nations of modern Europe and the classical nations of antiquity are to be jumbled together in an arbitrary union with the people of far-off Persia and India.
While this classification establishing an Aryan race on the basis of language has the support of all philologists, and, indeed, is susceptible of the readiest verification, there is a growing tendency to frown upon the use of the word “Aryan” itself. The word came into vogue at a time when it was supposed on all hands that the original home of the people to whom it was applied was Central Asia; that this was the cradle of the Aryan race was long accepted quite as a matter of course—hence the general acceptance of the name. But, in the course of the last century, the supposed fact of the Asiatic origin of the Aryans has been placed in dispute, and there is a seemingly growing school of students, who, basing their claims on the evidence of philology, are disposed to believe that the cradle of this race—if race it be—was not Central Asia, but perhaps Western or Northwestern Europe. We must not pause to discuss the evidence for this new view here; suffice it that the evidence seems highly suggestive, if not conclusive.