186 ROBINSON— THE NEW HISTORY. [April 22, 



gave rise to them. It makes no difiference how dry a chronicle may 

 be if the occurrences that it reports can be brought into some assign- 

 able relation with the more or less permanent habits and environment 

 of a particular people or person. If it be the chief function of his- 

 tory to show how things come about — and something will be said of 

 this matter later — -then events become for the historian first and 

 foremost evidence of general conditions and changes affecting con- 

 siderable numbers of people. In this respect history is only fol- 

 lowing the example set by the older natural sciences — zoology dwells 

 on general principles not on exceptional and startling creatures or 

 on the lessons which their habits suggest for man. Mathematics 

 no longer lingers over the mystic qualities of numbers, nor does the 

 astronomer seek to read our personal fate in the positions of the 

 planets. Scientific truth has shown itself able to compete with fiction, 

 and there appears to be endless fascination for the mind in the con- 

 templation of what former ages would have regarded as the most 

 vulgar and tiresome commonplace. 



In addition to the characteristics of modern history just enum- 

 erated two great historical discoveries of the latter half of the 

 nineteenth century have served still further to revolutionize our atti- 

 tude towards the past of mankind. Curiously enough neither of 

 these discoveries are due to historians. I refer to the well substan- 

 tiated fact tliat man is sprung from the lower animals, and secondly, 

 that he has in all probability been sojourning on the globe for sev- 

 eral hundreds of thousands of years. These discoveries have grave- 

 ly influenced all speculations in regard to the earlier history of our race 

 and have placed the so-called " historical period " in a new setting. 

 The historian no longer believes that he knows anything about man 

 from the very first but realizes that what is commonly called history 

 comprises only a very recent and very brief period in man's develop- 

 ment. All history is modern history from the standpoint of pre- 

 historic anthropology. Lastly, a group of anthropological, psycho- 

 logical and social sciences have made their appearance during the 

 past fifty years which are furnishing the historian with many new 

 notions about man and are disabusing his mind of many old misap- 

 prehensions in regard to races, religion, social organization, and the 

 psychology of progress. The older historians used such words as 



