MODERN EVOLUTION. 249 



to have been preceded by barbarism; and that the 

 savage races of to-day represent not a degradation to 

 which man, as the result of a fall from primeval purity 

 and Eden-like ease, has sunk, but a condition out of 

 which all races above the savage have emerged. 



While Prehistoric Archaeology, with its enormous 

 mass of material remains gathered from " dens and 

 caves of the earth," from primitive work-shops, from 

 rude tombs and temples, thus adds its testimony to 

 the "great cloud of witnesses"; immaterial remains, 

 potent as embodying -the thought of man, are brought 

 by the twin sciences of Comparative Mythology and 

 Folklore, and Comparative Theology — remains of 

 paramount value, because existing to this day in 

 hitherto unsuspected form, as survivals in beliefs and 

 rites and customs. Readers of Tylor's Primitive 

 Culture, with its wealth of facts and their signifi- 

 cance; and of Lyall's Asiatic Studies, wherein is de- 

 scribed the making of myths to this day in the heart 

 of India; need not be told how the slow zigzag ad- 

 vance of man in material things has its parallel in 

 the stages of his intellectual and spiritual advance 

 all the world over; from the lower animism to the 

 higher conception of deity; from bewildering guesses 

 to assuring certainties. To this mode of progress 

 no civilized people has been the exception, as notably 

 in the case of the Hebrews, was once thought — " the 

 correspondence between the old Israelitic and other 

 archaic forms of theology extending to details." 



While, therefore, the discoveries of astronomers 

 17 



