20 Prehistoric Races. 



be said of them that, if they are not progressive 

 peoples, one reason is this: they never retrograded 

 so far as to become nations of progress under the 

 spur of reaction. Had they fallen lower, they 

 might now stand higher. But their immobility 

 forbade progress. The conservatism of these sons 

 of Sem is not that recuperative power which the 

 sons of Japhet have, and which the sons of Ham 

 conspicuously have not. Yet they must have lost 

 something under the friction of ages. Their con- 

 servatism could not guarantee them against the 

 wear and tear of time. Hence that very immobil- 

 ity of theirs, so proverbial in history, serves this ex- 

 cellent purpose of showing that since they never 

 gained anything, for it was not in them, and yet they 

 must have lost not a little, for that is the condition 

 of all things human, they are a standing monument 

 of people who could not have come up from a state 

 of savagery to be what they are to-day. They, and 

 the rest of us too, have come down from a state of 

 higher civilization. It is so easy a matter to run 

 down, as every organism and every mechanism 

 shows us ! The whole history of our family comes 

 to this : it has done best when it kept what it had, and 

 next to best when it got back what it had lost. We 

 have yet to find the nation which, without the help 

 of revealed religion, shows signs of having still as 

 much as the family, by all accounts, possessed at 

 its origin. Some have never declined much, some 

 have declined to rise again, others never to rise 



