EXPLANATORY AND INTRODUCTORY. 5 



quity, to consort with the mythical anthropoid apes 

 from which the evolutionist proposes to derive our 

 species. 



Since, however, in the following chapters we shall be 

 occupied almost exclusively with American facts, and 

 must refer from them to the discoveries made in Europe, 

 and as the reader may not be familiar with the 

 aspects of pre-historic time to European geologists 

 and antiquarians, I may here shortly explain the 

 usually received views with reference to those times 

 anterior to history, and the terms by which they are 

 designated. 



We have the misfortune, according to archae- 

 ologists, to live in the " Iron Age/' a fact of which we 

 are also reminded by our roads and ships, and by the 

 too great prevalence of a cold, dead materialism, to 

 which all that is not iron and steel, or their equivalent 

 in money, is mere superstition, and which derides the 

 beliefs of the world's earlier times. This Iron Age 

 represents, in Europe at least, the period of written 

 history, for even in Greece the earliest literature goes 

 back merely to the time when the Iron Age of that 

 country was beginning. In the East a far earlier 

 literature exists, but this also does not go beyond the 

 earlier age of iron in that part of the world the 

 Iron Age of the East having apparently antedated 

 the Iron Age of Europe, much as the latter did that 

 of America. The date of the beginning of the Iron 

 Age is a point altogether indefinite. In Asia Tubal- 

 Cain may have inaugurated it before the Deluge. In 



