THE METHODS OF ARCH^OLOGICAL RESEARCH. 595 



distance beyond the occurrence of regular annals in tliose countries — 

 back, in fact, to the Stone Age in each, and similarly with the mythology, 

 and the result is that, instead of apparently roachiug a common origin 

 and common elements in them, the gap between them seems to get 

 wider as we go further back, until we have to confess that if there was 

 a common fountain to the various streams it must have been at a period 

 so remote that we have no material at present by which to trace them 

 to it. The men who wrote the Book of the Dead, those who wrote the 

 Ei)ic of Sargon the First, those who wrote the Vedas, and those who 

 wrote the Chinese classics, if they were descended, as we believe, from 

 common parents, must have been isolated from each other for a long- 

 period in order to become so differentiated at such an early date. 

 These are only mere samples. 



If we range further afield we shall find the same lesson meeting us 

 everywhere. It is said that among the Indians of !N"orth and South 

 America there are ninety languages sj)oken which are unintelligible to 

 each other. The same problem meets us in the Caucasus, in Siberia, in 

 Indo-China, and elsewhere. The existence of these languages is a per- 

 petual warning to us to be careful of dogmatizing. How can we explain 

 them except by postulating a long period, during which they have been 

 gradually diverging from each other ? We can not measure this period 

 by any scale or measure. When we compare Icelandic with I^s^orwegian, 

 and remember how long ago it is that Iceland was colonized — when we 

 compare the Mongol language, still spoken b}^ the Buriats in Mongolia, 

 with the language of the letters of the Mongol Khans written to the 

 French kings in the thirteenth century, we shall have a measure of the 

 slowness with which these changes sometimes accrue. If it has taken 

 sixteen centuries to convert Latin into the various Eoman languages 

 bow long has it taken for the diversion of the various Aryan forms of 

 speech from one original language, and how much longer to converge 

 the Aryan, Semitic, and other families of language upon a common 

 mother? The very question is full of romantic difficulty, and assuredly 

 we are a long way from any satisfactory answer to it. The evidence of 

 language and mythology is supplemented and confirmed l)y that of the 

 l)hysical features of our race — features which seem to be so conservative 

 and so difficult to alter. If we examine the very earliest human pic- 

 tures which have been preserved in the tombs of Egypt we shall find 

 representatives of the various races which then bordered the valley of the 

 Nile, and we shall find that in the features and x>hysique they areundis- 

 tinguishable trom the tribes still occupying the same districts. The 

 Kegro, the Nubian, the Coptic Fellaheen, the Semetic inhabitants of 

 Palestine and Arabia, are there pictured as we know them now. 



The earliest monuments of Babylonia similarly discriminate clearly 

 the various types of men in Mesopotamia. It is so, also, with the 

 early monuments of China, of India, of Mexico, and Peru, and of the 

 borders of the Mediterranean, and this evidence of the monuments is 



