xvi PREFACE 



all study of child-psychology and of animal mind, or the 

 biologist who attempted to understand bird or insect lit 

 without a knowledge of the stages of life lying below 

 these. Indeed, when we consider that the human race 

 is one, that the human mind is everywhere much the 

 same, and that human practices are everywhere of the 

 same general pattern, it appears that the neglect of tin- 

 biologist or psychologist to study types of life lower than 

 those in which he is immediately interested could hardly 

 be so serious as the neglect of the historian to familiari/e 

 himself with the institutional life of savage society." 



Professor J. H. Robinson lias recognized this necessity 

 and says : " ' Prehistoric ' is a word that must go the way 

 of 'preadamite,' which we used to hear. They both in- 

 dicate a suspicion that we are in some way gaining illicit 

 information about what happened before the footlights 

 were turned on and the curtain rose on the great human 

 drama. Of the so-called * prehistoric ' period we of course 

 know as yet very little indeed, but the bare fact that 

 there was such a period constitutes in itself the most 

 momentous of historical discoveries. The earliest, some- 

 what abundant, traces of mankind can hardly be placed 

 earlier than six thousand years ago. They indicate, how- 

 ever, a very elaborate and advanced civilization, and it is 

 quite gratuitous to assume that they represent the first 

 occasions on which man rose to such a stage of culture. 

 Even if they do, the wonderful tales of how these condi- 

 tions of which we find hints in Babylonia, Egypt, ;md 

 < p te came about are lost. . . . 



"From this point of view the historian's gaze, instead 

 of sweeping back into remote ages when the earth was 

 young, seems now to be confined to his own epoch. 

 Rameses the Great, Tiglath-Pileser, and Solomon appear 



