5 86 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



formed by conquest without incorporation, like aboriginal Peru or 

 ancient Assyria. In the lower stages we see captives tortured to 

 death, then at a later stage sacrificed to the tutelar deities, then 

 later on enslaved and compelled to till the soil. Through all the 

 earlier stages of culture, as in Australasia and aboriginal America, 

 we find the marriage tie so loose and paternity so uncertain that 

 kinship is reckoned only through the mother. But in the highest 

 stage of barbarism, as among the earliest Greeks, Romans, and 

 Jews, the more definite patriarchal family is developed and kin- 

 ship begins to be reckoned through the father. It is only after 

 that stage is reached that inheritance of property becomes fully 

 developed, with the substitution of individual ownership for clan 

 ownership, and so on to the development of testamentary succes- 

 sion, individual responsibility for delict and crime, and the sub- 

 stitution of contract for status. In all such instances, and count- 

 less others might be cited, we see the marks of an intelligible pro- 

 gression, a line of development which human ideas and institutions 

 have followed. But in the most advanced societies we find nu- 

 merous traces of such states of things as now exist only among 

 savage or barbarous societies. Our own ancestors were once poly- 

 theists, with plenty of traces of fetichism. They were organized 

 in clans, phratries, and tribes. There was a time when they used 

 none but stone tools and weapons, when there was no private 

 property in land, and no political structure higher than the tribe. 

 Among the forefathers of the present civilized inhabitants of Eu- 

 rope are unmistakable traces of human sacrifices and of the reck- 

 oning of kinship through the mother only. When we have come 

 to survey large groups of facts of this sort, the conclusion is irre- 

 sistibly driven home to us that the more advanced societies have 

 gone through various stages now represented here and there by 

 less advanced societies ; that there is a general path of social de- 

 velopment, along which, owing to special circumstances, some 

 peoples have advanced a great way, some a less way, some but a 

 very little way ; and that, by studying existing savages and bar- 

 barians, we get a valuable clew to the interpretation of prehistoric 

 times. All these things are to-day commonplaces among students 

 of history and archaeology : sixty years ago they would have been 

 scouted as unintelligible and idle vagaries. Yet to this change is 

 entirely due the superior power of modern historical methods. 

 Formerly the historian told anecdotes or discussed particular lines 

 of policy ; now he can do that as much as ever, but he can also 

 study nation-building and discern some features of the general 

 drift of events from the earliest to the most recent times. 



If we leave the earth and its inhabitants and turn our atten- 

 tion to the starry heavens, we find plenty of subjects for compari- 

 son indicating that there is a general process going on, and that 



