800 PRIMEVAL JAPANESE. 



mold and suggest great possibilities of muscular effort and endurance. 

 In siiort, though the aristocratic type has survived, and though its 

 superior beauty is universall}^ recognized, it has not unpressed itself 

 completely on the nation, and there is no difficulty in conceiving that 

 its representatives went down before the first rush of the southern 

 invaders, but su))sequently, by tenacity of resistance and l^y fortitude 

 under suffering, recovered from a shock which would have crushed a 

 lower grade of humanity. 



Histories that describe the manners and customs of a people have 

 been rare in all ages. The compilers of Japan's first annals, in the 

 eighth century, paid little attention to this part of their task. Were 

 it necessary to rely on their narrative solely for a knowledge of the 

 primeval Japanese, the student would be meagerly informed. But 

 archeology comes to his assistance. It raises these men of old from 

 their graves, and reveals many particulars of their civilization which 

 could never have been divined from the written records alone. 



The ancient Japanese — not the Koro-pok-guru or the Ainu, but the 

 ancestors of the Japanese proper — buried their dead iirst in barrows 

 and afterwards in dolmens. The barrow was merely a mound of earth 

 heaped over the remains, after the manner of the Chinese. The dol- 

 men was a stone chamber. It had walls constructed with blocks of 

 stone, generally unhewn and rudely laid, but sometimes hewn and 

 carefully titted; its roof consisted of huge and ponderous slabs. It 

 varied in form — sometimes taking the shape of a long gallery only, 

 sometimes of a gallery and a chamber, and sometimes of a gallery and 

 two chambers. Over it was built a mound of earth which occasionally 

 assumed enormous dimensions, covering a space of TO or 80 acres, 

 rising to a height of as many feet, and requiring the labor of thousands 

 of workmen. The ])uilders of the barrows were in the bronze age of 

 civilization, the constructors of the dolmens in the iron age. In the 

 barrows are found weapons and implements of bronze and vessels of 

 hand-made pottery; in the dolmens, weapons and implements of iron 

 and vessels of wheel-turned pottery. There is an absolute line of 

 division. No iron weapon nor any machine-made pottery occurs in a 

 barrow, no bronze weapon nor any hand-made pottery in a dolmen. 

 Are the barrow builders and the dolmen constructors to be regarded 

 as distinct races or as men of the same race at different stages of its 

 ci\ilization? Barrow and dolmen bear common testimony to the fact 

 that before the ancestors of the Japanese nation crossed the sea to 

 their inland home the}^ had already emerged from the stone age, for 

 neither in barrow nor in dolmen have stone weapons or implements been 

 found, though these abound in the shell heaps and kitchen middens that 

 constitute the relics of the Koro-pok-guru and the Ainu. But, on the 

 other hand, l)arrow and dolmen introduce their explorer to peoples 

 who stood on different planes of industrial development. 



