DIFFICULTIES OF DEVELOPMENT, ETC. 71 



Now these admitted facts about the Great Pyramid are surely re- 

 markable, and worthy of the deepest consideration. They are facts 

 which, in the pregnant words of the late Sir John Herschel, "accord- 

 ing to received theories ought not to happen," and which, he tells us, 

 should therefore be kept ever present to our minds, since " they belong- 

 to the class of facts which serve as the clew to new discoveries." Ac- 

 cording to modern theories, the higher civilization is ever a growth 

 and an outcome from a preceding lower state ; and it is inferred that 

 this progress is visible to us throughout all history and in all the ma- 

 terial records of human intellect. But here we have a building which 

 marks the very dawn of history which is the oldest authentic mon- 

 ument of man's genius and skill, and which, instead of being far infe- 

 rior, is very much superior to all which followed it. Great men are 

 the products of their age and country, and the designer and con- 

 structors of this wonderful monument could never have arisen among 

 an unintellectual and half-barbarous people. So perfect a work im- 

 plies many preceding less perfect works which have disappeared. It 

 marks the culminating point of an ancient civilization, of the early 

 stages of which we have no record whatever. 



The three cases to which I have now adverted (and there are many 

 others) seem to require for their satisfactory interpretation a some- 

 what different view of human progress from that which is now gener- 

 ally accepted. Taken in connection with the great intellectual power 

 of the ancient Greeks which Mr. Galton believes to have been far 

 above that of the average of any modern nation and the elevation, 

 at once intellectual and moral, displayed in the writings of Confucius, 

 Zoroaster, and the Vedas, they point to the conclusion that, while in 

 material progress there has been a tolerably steady advance, man's 

 intellectual and moral development reached almost its highest level in 

 a very remote past. The lower, the more animal, but often the more 

 energetic types, have, however, always been far the more numerous ; 

 hence such established societies as have here and there arisen under 

 the guidance of higher minds have always been liable to be swept, 

 away by the incursions of barbarians. Thus, in almost every part of 

 the globe there may have been a long succession of partial civiliza- 

 tion, each in turn succeeded by a period of barbarism ; and this view 

 seems supported by the occurrence of degraded types of skull along 

 with such " as might have belonged to a philosopher "at a time 

 when the mammoth and the reindeer inhabited Southern France. 



Nor need we fear that there is not time enough for the rise and 

 decay of so many successive civilizations as this view would imply ; 

 for the opinion is now gaining ground among geologists that paleo- 

 lithic man was really preglacial, and that the great gap marked 

 alike by a change of physical conditions, and of animal life which in 

 Europe always separates him from his neolithic successor, was caused 

 by the coming on and passing away of the great Ice age. 



