1896. NOTES AND COMMENTS. 351 



has been made and new results reached. Some eminent botanists 

 have in late years followed a different course, and have worked over 

 the same studies into three or four different papers in different 

 journals. But if results are of real value one adequate publication is 

 all they need to receive recognition and all that ought to be unloaded 

 upon already burdened bibliographers. We go so far as to say that the 

 ' preliminary paper ' with its half prepared diagnoses or ill-digested 

 generalisations is an unmixed evil and ought to be suppressed by 

 botanical opinion. We are glad to join Natural Science in its vigorous 

 opposition to such makeshift methods." 



" Drunken with Writing." 



That was the picturesque phrase, descriptive of the present 

 intellectual position of civilised man, with which Professor Flinders 

 Petrie gained the hearty applause of those who heard his Liverpool 

 lecture on " Man before Writing." The position and importance of 

 writing, in contrast to the teaching through the senses, has been so 

 much overvalued that it has deadened the growth of the mind. This 

 mistake is like that which the Greeks made regarding language, in 

 supposing that words could be used as an algebra to reach the reality 

 of mind and of matter. Thought, however, is independent of words, 

 as is most plainly shown by the difficulty of finding words to express 

 thought exactly. As thus words have been formerly mistaken in 

 their function, so writing has been until very lately also mistaken as 

 the means of growth of the mind. The earliest writing, before the 

 mind of man was deadened by convention and imitation of past 

 literature, is the finest, as seen in the Homeric and other epics 

 of each land. That expresses the mind of man before writing. And 

 literature only lives by continual absorption of the unlettered man as 

 material for new growth. Each stage of literature in Greece and in 

 England has been a using up of a fresh stratum of man without 

 writing. And as literature requires to grow on the facts and feelings 

 unconventionalised, so history requires to grow on the facts as dis- 

 covered, either with or without writing, but independent of any version 

 of it written down. The tangible facts of man's art, life, constructions, 

 follies, and magnificence, form the reality of history. Such history 

 can be gathered as well from man before writing as from written 

 accounts. 



The nature and ability of man before writing can be seen as 

 regards his mind in the earliest literature, which is confessedly the 

 finest and most vivid. For his art, we see it in the magnificent vigour 

 and ability of the Mycenaean art, as shown on the gold cups of 

 Vapheio and the ornaments from Mycenae, and on the architecture of 

 Tiryns and Mycenae. And the grand ability of these is akin to tlie 

 spirited and natural carvings of animals done by the cave men of 



