GROWTH AND DECLINE OP CULTURE. 159 



Moreover^ the historical value of early tradition does not lie 

 exclusively in tlie fragments of real history it may preserve. 

 Even the myths which it carries down to later times may be- 

 come important indirect evidence in the hands of the ethnolo- 

 gist. And ancient compositions handed down by memory from 

 generation to generation, especially if a poetic form helps to 

 keep them in their original shape, often give us, if not a sound 

 record of real events, at least a picture of the state of civiliza- 

 tion in which the compositions themselves had their origin. 

 Perhaps no branch of indirect evidence, bearing on the history 

 of culture, has been so well worked as the memorials of earlier 

 states of society, which have thus been unintentionally pre- 

 served, for instance, in the Homeric poems. Safer examples 

 than the following might be quoted ; but as so much has been 

 said of the history of the art of writing, the place may serve 

 to cite what seems to be a memorial of a time when, among 

 the ancient Greeks, picture-writing had not as yet been super- 

 seded by word-writing, in the tale of Bellerophon, whom 

 Prcetus would not kill, but he sent him into Lycia, and gave 

 him baneful signs, graving on a folded tablet many soul-de- 

 stroyiug things, and bade him show them to the king, that he 

 might perish at his hands. 



HenTve 8e fiLV AvKLTjv^e, nopev 8' oye cnqfiara \vypa, 

 Tpd'^as iv irlvaKL tttvktS dvfxocfiOopa noXka, 

 Aet^at S' rjVQiyei a> irevOepa, o(pp aTroXotro.* 



It happens unfortunately that but little evidence as to the 

 early history of civilization is to be got by direct obsei-vation, 

 that is, by contrasting the condition of a low race at different 

 times, so as to see whether its culture has altered in the mean- 

 while. The contact requisite for such an inspection of a savage 

 tribe by civilized men, has usually had much the same effect as 

 the experiment which an inquisitive child tries upon the root it 

 put in the ground the day before, by digging it up to see whe- 

 ther it has grown. It is a general rule that original and inde- 

 pendent progress is not found among a people of low civiliza- 



1 IL, vi. 168. Wolf, Proleg. iu Horn. ; Halle, 1859, 2ud ed. vol. i. p. 48, etc. 

 Liddell and Scott, a. v. a-rjp.a. 



