12 Prehistoric Races. 



tecedents. Some parts of its eventful course have 

 been happy enough to find historians, and have been 

 described in the faithful reports of men living, observ- 

 ing and writing at the time that events happened, or 

 within a reasonable and speaking distance of men 

 who lived at the time. Such reports give us what is 

 called documentary or monumental history. But 

 there are parts also which are prior to certain lines 

 of documentary history, or which lie, some way or 

 other, outside of the margins of any local records. 

 They are like the portions which the Chinese com- 

 prise in their annals, but which they expressly desig- 

 nate " parts outside of history." Such unrecorded 

 antecedents of our history the present age has been 

 pleased to call " the prehistoric." 



5. Thus in France, Denmark and England, in 



America, North and South, we may 

 CiyHizatioii discern with the aid of archaeology the 



tidal remains of an ancient humanity, 

 which must have welled up from its primal springs 

 somewhere, probably in the East, but thence over- 

 flowed and rolled on to what were as yet but vacant 

 shores. Whether such relics are to be found in 

 China and Japan, we are not yet informed. As 

 that overflowing population rolled so far away from 

 its origin and its source, it lost in many instances 

 the best part of its civilization, just as we should 

 lose it now, with all our culture, nay, because of 

 our delicate culture, if we were stranded on barren 

 islands. It lost its social depth, and carried with 



