460 Reports and Proceedings. . 
In judging of this antiquity, in counting the centuries which may 
have elapsed, since smoothed flints fitted with handles of wood were 
used as chisels and axes by the earliest people of Scandinavia or 
Helvetia, and flakes of flint were employed to cleanse the skins of 
the reindeer in the caves of the Dordogne, or stronger tools broke 
up the ice in the valley of the Somme, we must be careful not to 
take what is the mark of low civilization for the indication of very 
remote time. In every country, among every race of men, such rude 
weapons and tools are used now, or were used formerly. On the 
banks of the Ohio, no less than on the English hills, mounds of 
earth, rude pottery, and stone weapons occur in abundance; and 
indicate similar wants, contrivances, customs, ideas, in different 
races of men living in different periods. Even when in the same 
country, as in Switzerland, or England, or Denmark, successive 
deposits of instruments of stone, bronze, or iron,—successive burials 
of pines, beeches, and oaks,—successively extinguished races of 
elephants, elks, and reindeer, give us a real scale of elapsed time, it 
is one of which the divisions are not yet valued in years or centuries 
of years. 
Toward a right judgment of the length of this scale of human 
occupation, two other lines of evidence may be thought worthy of 
notice; one founded on the anatomical study of the remains of early 
men, the other on the laws of language. If the varieties of physical 
structure in man, and the deviations of language from an original 
type, be natural effects of time and circumstance, the length of time 
may be in some degree estimated by the amount of the diversities 
which are observed to have happened, compared with the variation 
which is now known to be happening. This process becomes imagi- 
nary, unless we assume all mankind to have had one local centre, and 
one original language. Its results must be erroneous, unless we take 
fully into account the superior fixity of languages which are repre- 
sented in writing, and the greater tendency to diversity of every 
kind which must have prevailed in early times, when geographical 
impediments were aggravated by dissocial habits of life. It appears, 
however, certain, that some differences of language, organization, 
and habits have separated men of apparently unlike races during 
periods longer than those which rest on historical facts.* 
Ever since the days of Aristotle, the analogy existing among all 
parts of the animal kingdom, and in a general sense we may say 
among all the forms of life, has become more and more the subject of 
special study. Related as all living beings are to the element in 
which they move and breathe, to the mechanical energies of nature 
which they employ or resist, and to the molecular forces which 
penetrate and transform them, some general conformity of structure, 
some frequently recurring resemblance of function, must be present, 
and cannot be overlooked. In the several classes this analogy grows 
stronger, and in the subdivisions of these classes real family affinity 
is recognised. In the smallest divisions which have this family- 
* Max Miller on the Science of Language. 
