UNITY AND CONTINUITY. 319 



in opposition to the Jewish practice of divorce, with 

 the comment, f( From the beginning it was not so." 

 This is not the only instance in which we have seen 

 archaic customs recorded in the Book of Genesis crop- 

 ping up in our investigations of pre-historic men, and 

 vindicating the statement that from the beginning 

 man was the same thinking and organizing being that 

 he still is. Perhaps some social reformers of our 

 own day might be more successful if, instead of look- 

 ing back to dreary ages of barbarism, out of which 

 we are supposed to have emerged, they could refer to 

 a " beginning " in which, if simpler, men were wiser 

 than they are now. If they will not go back as far 

 as Adam and paradise, it might even be profitable to 

 study the classificatory relationships of the old Turan- 

 ians and the tribal communism of the American 

 Indians, as the only possible kinds of community of 

 goods in the present imperfect condition of human 

 nature, and as having been successful even in the 

 great communistic tribes of the Pueblo Indians and 

 ancient Toltecans and Mexicans, to which I referred in 

 a previous chapter. 



In his recently published ff Etruscan Kesearches," 

 Isaac Taylor has arrived by other routes at many of 

 the conclusions sketched in this chapter. He regards 

 with much reason the ancient Etruscans as a Turanian 

 people, either aborigines of Italy or migrants into it 

 in pre-historic times, or partly of both origins. He 

 shows that among them descent was in the female 

 line, as among the Americans and Old World Tura- 



