212 A Century of Science 



was still unknown, and the countryman had not 

 yet become a bucolic or &quot; tender of cows,&quot; and 

 butter and cheese were still in the future ! No 

 written records can ever take us back to that time 

 in that place ; for there, as everywhere in the 

 eastern hemisphere, the art of writing came many 

 years later than the domestication of animals, and 

 some ages later than the first building of towns. 

 But in spite of the lack of written records, the 

 comparative study of institutions, especially com 

 parative jurisprudence, throws back upon those pre 

 historic times a light that is often dim, but some 

 times wonderfully suggestive and instructive. It 

 is a light that reveals among primeval Greeks ideas 

 and customs essentially similar to those of the 

 Iroquois. It is a light that grows steadier and 

 brighter as it leads us to the conclusion that five 

 or six thousand years before Christ white men 

 around the ^Egean Sea had advanced about as far 

 as the red men in the Mohawk Valley two centu 

 ries ago. The one phase of this primitive society 

 illuminates the other, though extreme caution is 

 necessary in drawing our inferences. Now Park- 

 man s minute and vivid description of primitive 

 society among red men is full of lessons that may 

 be applied with profit to the study of preclassic 

 antiquity in the Old World. No other historian 



