RECENT ANTHROPOLOGY. 147 



in the ancient grammars, it must be remembered that human custom is 

 hardly ever willfully absurd, its unreasonableness usually arising from 

 loss or confusion of old sense. Thus it can hardly be doubted that 

 the misused grammatical gender in Hebrew or Greek is the remains of 

 an older and reasonable phenomenon of language ; but, if so, this 

 must have belonged to a period earlier than we can assign to the theo- 

 retical parent language of either. Lastly, the development of civiliza- 

 tion requires a long period of prehistoric time. Experience and history 

 show that civilization grew up gradually, while every age preserves 

 recognizable traces of the ages which went before. The woodman's 

 axe of to-day still retains much of the form of its ancestor — the stone 

 celt in its wooden handle ; the mathematician's tables keep up in their 

 decimal rotation a record of the early ages when man's ten fingers first 

 taught him to count ; the very letters with which I wrote these lines 

 may be followed back to the figure of birds and beasts and other ob- 

 jects drawn by the ancient Egyptians, at first as mere picture-writing, 

 to denote the things represented. Yet, when we learn from the monu- 

 ments what ancient Egyptian life was like toward five thousand years 

 ago, it appears that civilization had already come on so far that there 

 was an elaborate system of government, an educated literary priest- 

 hood, a nation skilled in agriculture, architecture, and metal-work. 

 These ancient Egyptians, far from being near the beginning of civili- 

 zation, had, as the late Baron Bunsen held, already reached its half- 

 way house. This eminent Egyptologist's moderate estimate of man's 

 age on the earth at about twenty thousand years has the merit of 

 having been made on historical grounds alone, independently of geo- 

 logical evidence, for the proofs of the existence of man in the Quater- 

 nary or mammoth period had not yet gained acceptance. 



My purpose in briefly stating here the evidence of man's antiquity 

 derived from race, language, and culture, is to insist that these argu- 

 ments stand on their own ground. It is true that the geological argu- 

 ment from the implements in the drift-gravels and bone-caves, by 

 leading to a general belief that man is extremely ancient on the earth, 

 has now made it easier to anthropologists to maintain a rationally sat- 

 isfactory theory of the race-types and mental development of mankind. 

 But we should by no means give up this vantage-ground, though the 

 ladder we climbed by should break down. Even if it could be proved 

 that the flint implements of Abbeville or Torquay were really not so 

 ancient as the pyramids of Egypt, this would not prevent us from still 

 assuming, for other and sufiicient reasons, a period of human life on 

 earth extending many thousand years further back. 



It is an advantage of this state of the evidence that it to some 

 extent gets rid of the " sensational " element in the problem of fossil 

 man, which it leaves as merely an interesting inquiry into the earliest 

 known relics of savage tribes. Geological criticism has not yet abso- 

 lutely settled either way the claims of the Abbe Bourgeois's flints from 



