PRE-ARYAN AMERICAN MAN. 39 
ence to the whole history of American man. In Europe the student of primitive antiquity 
is habitually required to discriminate between products of ingenious skill belonging to 
periods and races widely separated alike by time and by essentially diverse stages of pro- 
eress in art; for not only do its paleolithic and neolithic periods long precede the oldest 
written chronicles, but even its Aryan colonization lies beyond any record of historic 
beginnings. The civilization which had already grown up around the Mediterranean Sea 
while the classic nations were in their infancy, extended its influences not only to what 
was strictly regarded as transalpine Europe, but beyond the English Channel and the 
Baltic, centuries before the Rhine and Danube formed the boundary of the Roman world. 
Voltaire remarked long ago when treating ofthe morals and spirit ofnations: “It isnotin 
the nature of man to desire that which he does not know.” But it is certainly in his nature, 
at any rate, to desire much that he does not possess; and the cravings of the rudest out- 
lying tribes of ancient Europe must have been stimulated by many desires of which 
those of the New World were all unconscious, till the advent of Europeans in the fifteenth 
century brought them into rude contact with a long matured civilization. 
The archeology of the American continent is, in this respect, at least, simple. Its 
student is nowhere exposed to misleading or obscuring elements such as bafñile the Euro- 
pean explorer from the intermingling of relics of widely diverse eras; or even the succes- 
sion of arts of the most dissimilar character, such as Dr. Schliemann found on the site of 
the classic Ilium. The history of America cannot repeat that of Europe. Its great river 
valleys and vast prairies present a totally different condition of things from that in which the 
distinctive arts, languages and nationalities of Europe have been matured. The physical 
geography of the latter has necessarily fostered isolation, and so tended to develop the 
peculiarities of national character, as well as to protect incipient civilization and immature 
arts from the constant erasures of barbarism, such as made the steppes of Asia in older 
centuries the nurseries of hordes of rude warriors, powerful only for spoliation. The evi- 
dence of the isolation of the different nations of Europe in early centuries is unmistaka- 
ble. Scarcely any feature in the history of the ancient world is more strange to us now 
than the absence of all direct intercourse between countries separated only by the Alps, or 
even by the Danube or the Rhine. “The geography of Greek experience as exhibited by 
Homer, is limited, speaking generally, to the Algean and its coasts, with the Propontis as 
its limit in the northeast, with Crete for a southern boundary ; and with the addition of the 
western coast of the peninsula and its islands as far northwards as the Leucadian rock. 
. ... +... . The key to the great contrast between the outer geography and the 
facts of nature lies in the belief of Homer that a great sea occupied the space where we 
know the heart of the European continent to lie.”* To the early Romans the Celtic 
nations, closely allied though they were to them in race and language, were known only 
as warlike nomads whose incursions from beyond the Alpine frontier of their little world 
were perpetuated in the half legendary tales of their own national childhood. To the 
Greek even of the days of Herodotus no more was known of them than the rumours 
brought by seamen and traders whose farthest voyage was to the mouth of the Rhone. 
It is, indeed, difficult for us now, amid the intimate relations of the modern world, 
and the interchange of products of the remotest east and west, to realize a condition of 

* Gladstone, Juventus Mundi, pp. 474, 479, 
