HIS HISTORICAL RELATIONS. Ill 



European history, the -want of reliable data as to 

 man's first appearance ceases to be matter of surprise. 

 Man must have struggled onward and upward for 

 ages before he became a recorder of his own history, 

 and when he became so all the early stages of his 

 ascent must have been irretrievably lost, even to 

 tradition itself, with all its fertility of fancies and 

 actions. Such, indeed, seems to be the unavoidable 

 course of human progress : — its earliest stages utterly 

 lost in the forgetfulness of barbarism, the middle 

 stages distorted and clouded by myths and fables, 

 and only the latest assuming the orderly sequence 

 and reliability of history. It is with the existence 

 of man as it is with the life of the individual. We 

 may commit to record from early youth, and carry 

 our recollections back to the days of childhood, but 

 there lies beyond these the blank of infancy, which 

 bears with it no remembrance of its acts and no 

 consciousness of its existence. It is in vain, there- 

 fore, to look for any chronology before man learned 

 to record ; hopeless to expect anything like certainty 

 from the tales and undated memories of tradition. 



As far, therefore, as history is concerned, we 

 appeal in vain for any intelligible response as to the 

 antiquity of the human race. We can trace back a 

 few of its latest and leading stages, as from Saxon to 

 Celt, from Celt to Roman, from Eoman to Greek, 



