TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 909 
its first record in the West; and its diffusion, so far from having necessarily 
followed the lines of later geographical divisions, may well have begun at a time 
when the land bridges of ‘ Eurafrica’ were still unbroken. 
There is nothing, indeed, in all this to exclude the hypothesis that the original 
expansion took place from the East African side. That the earliest homes of 
primeval man lay in a warm region can hardly be doubted, and the abundant 
discovery by Mr. Seton Karr in Somaliland of Paleolithic implements reproducing 
many of the most characteristic forms of those of the grottoes of the Dordogne 
affords a new link of connexion between the Red Sea and the Atlantic littoral, 
When we recall the spontaneous artistic qualities of the ancient race which has 
left its records in the carvings on bone and ivory in the caves of the ‘ Reindeer 
Period,’ this evidence of at least partial continuity on the northern shores of the 
Mediterranean suggests speculations of the deepest interest. QOverlaid with new 
elements, swamped in the dull, though materially higher, Neolithic civilisation, 
may not the old xsthetic faculties which made Europe the earliest-known home of 
anything that can be called human art, as opposed to mere tools and mechanical 
contrivances, have finally emancipated themselves once more in the Southern 
regions, where the old stock most survived? In the extraordinary manifestations 
of artistic genius to which, at widely remote periods, and under the most diverse 
political conditions, the later populations of Greece and Italy have given birth, may 
we not be allowed to trace the re-emergence, as it were, after long underground 
meanderings, of streams whose upper waters had seen the daylight of that: earlier 
world ? 
But the vast gulf of time beyond which it is necessary to carry back our gaze 
in order to establish such connexions will hardly permit us to arrive at more 
than vague probabilities. The practical problems that concern the later culture 
of Europe from Neolithic times onwards connect themselves rather with its relation 
to that of the older civilisations on the southern and eastern Mediterranean shores. 
Anthropology, too, has its ‘ Eternal Eastern Question.’ Till within quite 
recent years, the glamour of the Orient pervaded all inquiries as to the genesis 
of European civilisation. The Biblical training of the northern nations prepared 
the ground. The imperfect realisation of the antiquity of European arts; on the 
ether hand, the imposing chronology of Egypt and Babylonia; the abiding force 
of classical tradition, which found in the Phoenician a deus ex machind for 
exotic importations; finally, the ‘Aryan Hypothesis,’ which brought in the 
dominant European races as immigrant wanderers from Central Asia, with a 
ready-made stock of culture in their wallets—these and other causes combined to 
create an exaggerated estimate of the part played by the East as the illuminator of 
the benighted West. 
More recent investigations have resulted in a natural reaction. The primitive 
‘Aryan’ can be no longer invoked as a kind of patriarchal missionary of Central 
Asian culture. From d’Halloy and Latham onwards to Penka and Schrader an 
array of eminent names has assigned to him an European origin. The means by 
which a kindred tongue diffused itself among the most heterogeneous ethnic 
factors still remain obscure; but the stricter application of phonetic laws and 
the increased detection of loan-words has cut down the original ‘ Aryan’ stock of 
culture to very narrow limits, and entirely stripped the members of this linguistic 
family of any trace of a common Pantheon. 
Whatever the character of the original ‘ Aryan’ stage, we may be very sure 
that it lies far back in the mists of the European Stone Age. The supposed 
common names for metals prove to be either a vanishing quantity or strikingly 
irrelevant. It may be interesting to learn on unimpeachable authority that the 
Celtic words for ‘gold’ are due to comparatively recent borrowing from the Latin; 
but nothing is more certain than that gold was one of the earliest metals known 
to the Celtic races, its knowledge going back to the limits of the pure Stone Age. 
We are told that the Latin ‘ensis, ‘a sword, is identical with the Sanskrit ¢ asi’ 
and Iranian ‘ahi, but the gradual evolution of the sword from the dagger, only 
completed at a late period of the Bronze Age, is a commonplace of prehistoric 
- archeology. If ‘ensis,’ then, in historical times an iron sword, originally meant a 
