PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS OP PRE-HISTORIC MEN. 203 



remnants of a noble organisation degraded by moral 

 evil. They thus justify the tradition of a golden and 

 Edenic age, and mutely protest against the philosophy 

 of progressive development as applied to man, while 

 they bear witness to the identity in all important 

 characters of the oldest pre-historic men, with that 

 variety of our species which is at the present day at 

 once the most widely extended, and the most primi- 

 tive in its manner and usages, the great Turanian or 

 Tartar race of Northern Asia and America. 



We have seen, or shall see in subsequent chapters, 

 that this race underlies in Europe and Asia, and 

 probably in Africa as well as in America, the older 

 historic peoples, and that it presents throughout an 

 animistic religion, a great and marked devotion to the 

 doctrine of immortality in connection with certain 

 forms of sepulture, the classificatory system of relation- 

 ships, a permanent and unchanging temperament, and 

 great constructive and artistic tendencies. In this 

 division of the human family also, we find as in the 

 Peruvians, the Natchez, and the Flatheads in America, 

 and in the ancient Macrocephali and more modern 

 tribes in Asia the singular practice of artificially 

 distorting the head. In other words, we find in that 

 post-diluvian, or historic race, which most nearly 

 coincides with the ante-diluvian or palaeocosmic type 

 of man, and which is the most widely diffused of all, 

 characteristics which indicate its place as the main 

 stem of humanity in historic times, from which the 

 Semitic and Aryan civilizations budded out, and to 



