Z INTRODUCTION. 



as a product of our own times, but as a relic of a ruder mental 

 condition, one of tlie many cases in wliicli the result of progress 

 has been not positive in adding, but negative in taking away, 

 something belonging to an earlier state of things. 



It is indeed hardly too much to say that Civilization, being 

 a process of long and complex growth^ can only be thoroughly 

 understood when studied through its entu-e range ; that the 

 past is continually needed to explain the present, and the whole 

 to explain the part. A feeling of this may account in some 

 measure for the eager curiosity which is felt for descriptions of 

 the life and habits of strange and ancient races, in Cook's Voy- 

 ages, Catlin's ' North American Indians,' Prescott's 'Mexico' 

 and ' Peru,' even in the meagre details which antiquaries have 

 succeeded in recovering of the lives of the Lake-dwellers of 

 Switzerland and the Reindeer Tribes of Central France. For 

 matters of practical life these people may be nothing to us ; 

 but in reading of them we are consciously or unconsciously 

 completing the picture, and tracing out the course of life, of 

 what has been so well said to be after all our most interesting 

 object of study, mankind. 



Though, however, the Early History of Man is felt to be 

 an attractive subject, and g'reat masses of the materials needed 

 for working it out have long been foi-thcoming, they have as 

 yet been turned to but little account. The opinion that the 

 use of facts is to illustrate theories, the confusion between 

 History and Mythology, which is only now being partly cleared 

 up, an undue confidence in the statements of ancient writers, 

 whose means of information about times and places remote 

 from themselves were often much narrower than those which 

 are, ages later, at our own command, have been among the 

 hindrances to the growth of sound knowledge in this direction. 

 The time for writing a systematic treatise on the subject does 

 not seem yet to have come ; certainly nothing of the kind is 

 attempted in the present series of essays, whose contents, 

 somewhat miscellaneous as they are, scarcely come into contact 

 with great part of the most important problems involved, such 

 as the relation of the bodily characters of the various races, 

 the question of their origin and descent, the development of 



