THE AIMS OF ANTHROPOLOGY. 61 



to that part of archseology 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 archaeology 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 tanght us by incon- 

 trovertible 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 archaeology 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 back- 

 ground of the race is relieved by rays of glory, for with knowl- 

 edge 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 stand- 

 ard has been certain and steady, " ne'er known retiring ebb, but 

 kept due on." 



Archaeology, 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 mean- 

 ing 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 recog- 

 nition is the corner stone of true anthropology. In this connec- 

 tion 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. 



