111111 
 
MAN'S 
 ORIGIN AND DESTINY 
 
 SKETCHED FROM 
 
 THE PLATFORM OF THE SCIENCES, 
 
 IN A COURSE OF LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE THE 
 
 LOWELL INSTITUTE, IN BOSTON, 
 
 IN THE WINTER OF 1865-6. 
 
 BY 
 
 J. P. LESLEY, 
 
 MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OP THE UNITED STATES, 
 SECRETARY OP THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 
 
 1868. 
 

 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by 
 
 J. P. LESLEY, 
 
 in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Eastern 
 
 District of Pennsylvania. 
 
 tmp 96 026223 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The lectures contained in this volume were written in the sum- 
 mer of 1865, at a distance from the author's notes and library. This 
 will account for the paucity of special references, observable through- 
 out the greater part of the book. 
 
 When delivered in the lecture-room of the Lowell Institute, the 
 following winter, they were illustrated by numerous wall pictures, 
 tables of statistics, maps and diagrams of various kinds, only a few of 
 which are given as woodcuts in the text. 
 
 It is proper to add that, owing to the very judicious restriction of 
 time to one hour by the rules of the Institute, not much more than 
 the half of each lecture was read, except in the case of the last two, 
 which occupied four evenings ; the course being courteously extended 
 by the honourable trustee to thirteen for that purpose. The twelfth 
 lecture was, therefore, never written out, and is committed for the 
 present to the imagination of the reader, with the suggestion, that it 
 would better justify one portion of the title chosen for the book than 
 anything actually to be found between its covers. 
 
 Circumstances made it impossible to print the lectures at the time 
 they were delivered. Two years, in fact, have passed. New and 
 important discoveries in archaeology have intervened. A good many 
 paragraphs have been inserted, therefore, in the text, and numerous 
 foot-notes added. The simplicity of the original arrangement has 
 been lost. The separate subjects of the different lectures have become, 
 to a certain extent, confused ; and portions of the book take on the 
 aspect of detailed discussion, suitable only to a scientific memoir, 
 while other portions retain their original character of bird's-eye view. 
 
 The author never contemplated anything beyond a general sketch 
 of the present bearings of science upon the vexed question of the 
 origin and earliest history of man. But the question has many sub- 
 divisions. He intended the several lectures to be separate sketches 
 of these subdivisions of the field of discussion, mere introductions to 
 their proper study. His views are stated, therefore, in round terms. 
 Nothing is closely reasoned out. Much is left to the logical instinct, 
 
IV PREFACE. 
 
 and more to the literary education of the reader. Reference is every- 
 where made to sources of information within easy reach of all. Even 
 the style of an essay has been avoided. The book is merely a series 
 of familiar conversations upon the current topics of interest in the 
 scientific world. 
 
 If its perusal start a single youthful mind upon the track of an 
 original investigation — as the perusal of Harcourt on the Deluge, 
 twenty years ago, opened before the author a new series of combina- 
 tions of the facts of history and science — or if, without any deeper 
 study of the facts alleged upon its pages, its general views inspire a 
 single reader with more reverence for science, less fear of fresh 
 opinions, a more intelligent curiosity about forgotten things, which 
 still are at their old work in the modern world, and with a surer faith 
 in the growth of human happiness, the author will be more than 
 satisfied. 
 
 But even the mere retrospect of the labours of men of science upon 
 the theme of this book has been so great a pleasure to him that he 
 cannot repress the feeling that others must enjoy it likewise. 
 
 J. P. L. 
 
 La Tour de Teitz, Yevay, Switzerland. 
 Nov. 20, 1867. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LECT. PAGE 
 
 I. ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES . . 1 
 
 II. ON THE GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, AN- 
 CIENT AND MODEEN ■ 20 
 
 III. THE GEOLOGICAL ANTIQUITY OF MAN . . . . 43 
 
 IV. ON THE DIGNITY OF MANKIND 68 
 
 V. ON THE UNITY OF MANKIND . . . . . . 94 
 
 VI. ON THE EAELY SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN . . . . 122 
 
 VII. ON LANGUAGE AS A TEST OF EACE . . . . 158 
 
 VIII. THE OEIGIN OF AECHITECTUEE 183 
 
 IX. THE GEOWTH OF THE ALPHABET 214 
 
 X. THE FOUE TYPES OF RELIGIOUS WOESHIP . . 253 
 
 XI. ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM 295 
 
 APPENDIX 353 
 
MAN'S ORIGIN. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES. 
 
 In considering how I can best open the subject of the 
 present course of Lectures, I am reminded of a favourite 
 saying of the greatest Lecturer that ever lived, and one 
 whose lightest recorde'd thought has sunk, with the weight 
 of a great principle of truth, into the consciousness of 
 modern times : — 
 
 ' He that hath, ears to hear, let him hear ! ' 
 
 One of the artists of New England told me that, in his 
 opinion, no man could successfully paint a tree, a deer, or 
 a dog, unless he first became one himself; unless he had 
 pursued and been pursued ; felt the freedom of the winds 
 and waters, and that intimate brotherhood and fellowship 
 with living things, which sharpens every sense to the 
 quick impressions of nature. Enthusiasm is the mother 
 of art. 
 
 Russell Smith, certainly the master scenist of America, 
 built himself a cottage on the summit of the Alleghanies, 
 in the heart of the primeval forest, and brought down 
 from thence a friend, the finest elm tree in the world, 
 painting it, as large as life, upon the great drop-scene of 
 the Academy of Music in Philadelphia ; where it still 
 stands, spreading out its gigantic stem and splendid plume 
 against a background of blue sky ; and every branch and 
 twig and leaf of it is real, for it was drawn in love. The 
 artist summered it and wintered it as his bosom friend, 
 
 1 
 
2 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [lECT. 
 
 until he knew how every vein of sap which fed it, ran ; 
 until he could distinguish the voice of its particular foliage 
 from the whole music of that wilderness, as a nice ear 
 picks out and follows the part of some dear instrument in 
 an orchestra, until he could recognize afar off every scar 
 and moss-spot on it, as a lover can detect his heart's de- 
 light among a thousand other beauties at a ball. Love is 
 the law of knowledge ; and love is life in the beloved. 
 
 Rosa Bonheur in the cattle-yard ; Hinckley among his 
 dogs ; Church sailing through ice-bergs and drinking into 
 his soul the naming northern skies ; Espy upon his house- 
 roof at Harrisburg watching live-long nights the forma- 
 tion and dissolution of clouds ; Agassiz and Desor in their 
 cave-house on the medial moraine watching through eight 
 successive summers the motions of the glacier of the Aar; 
 Hammond for eighteen months weighing his meat and drink 
 to discover and explain the exact effects of whisky and to- 
 bacco upon the growth and decay of the living tissues of 
 the human body ; or that noble Frenchman, who, instead of 
 flying, like the rest, from the mysterious plague, or fight- 
 ing with it hopelessly and desperately because its nature 
 was unknown, rather chose to make love to it ; took it, 
 as Delilah took Samson on her lap, to shear his locks of 
 demon strength; shut himself in with it; watched the 
 progress of the disease in his own body ; recorded all its 
 symptoms; explained its methods of attack; discovered 
 its weak point, and gave with his dying hand to the world 
 a remedy : — such men as these teach us the noblest of all 
 arts — the art of Enthusiasm. 
 
 When the thinker becomes a speaker, he becomes an 
 artist. His audience can justly criticise his subject only 
 as they pardon his enthusiasm by sharing in it. He intro- 
 duces to your acquaintance his oldest and dearest friends — 
 thoughts, which to him are great thoughts, because they 
 have commanded his best years. He paints in words 
 before you the scenery of his soul's home ; a mingled 
 landscape, where the reason has ploughed and reaped by 
 day, and the fancy loitered and listened and made love by 
 night. He gives you water from a spring, the equal of 
 which, he fain would have you say, exists not anywhere. 
 He names you over all his orchard trees, and looks wist- 
 fully to see how their fruit hits your taste. He leads you 
 
I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 3 
 
 by his well-worn paths of argument,, to points of view 
 which have become the delight of his spirit; seats you 
 where he has sat himself a thousand times entranced, and 
 mutely begs you to worship with him before his wondrous 
 Oberland. If he fails to inspire you with that delicious 
 enthusiasm, he loses your friendship, and you lose his. If 
 what to him are mountains of eternal truth, to you seem 
 mist and fog, nothing is gained, and everything is lost; 
 to you, the present effort ; to him, the entire past. The 
 teacher must be believed in — for the present moment, at 
 all events ; let the conclusion determine how justly. Cor- 
 diality is of more avail for the discovery and appreciation 
 of truth than curiosity. Only when all cried, Io Bacche ! 
 together, the god appeared. And even the Divine Lecturer 
 could only tell what the world already knew or was well 
 prepared to know. 
 
 We all, no doubt, have favourite sciences. "We all, no 
 doubt, consider each one his own the flower and perfect 
 consummation of the intellectual world. Does not the 
 visible universe concentrate its glories in the individual 
 eyeball ? It is only by numberless shiftings of position 
 that the human mind can obtain a generous perspective of 
 all truths. Each science has its own domain, and is para- 
 mount lord within those limits. When it visits neighbour- 
 ing potentates, it may be received with all the honours ; 
 but, when seated, sits subordinate, and must hold its 
 sceptre with diminished dignity. The king is the first at 
 court, but the general is first in the field. And what are 
 king and general but no-bodies in the laboratory of Liebig 
 or Faraday ? And what are Liebig and Faraday but ex- 
 press packages to the mind of Captain Anderson in an ice- 
 fog off the banks ? Everything in its place, — everything to 
 its purpose : that is the prime law. That differentiates the 
 universe, gives it living activities, intense energies, precise 
 results, variety of beauties, individual worth. But all for 
 each and each for all, is God's grand spell upon his uni- 
 verse, by which he marshals its forces against disorder, 
 and establishes eternal harmony ; drawing slowly forth 
 his silken rainbow- coloured ribbon from that mist of 
 threads which hovers behind the loom. This is the charm 
 of the science of the nineteenth century ; harmony in di- 
 versity ; multiplicity in unity. Never was the dissection 
 
4 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [LECT; 
 
 of single objects carried so far as by our special natural- 
 ists ; and yet the dreams of the ancients were not so 
 grandly universal as the panorama unrolled for contempla- 
 tion and elucidation by modern philosophers. 
 
 Yet there is being established, with all this, a real order 
 of precedency among our sciences. Some of them take 
 naturally a wider range than others : geology, for instance. 
 Some grow daily more and more departmental, functional, 
 and ancillary. 
 
 The history of empires is the history of science. Their 
 boundaries shift. Smaller states are absorbed into king- 
 doms. On the other hand, empires which have been in- 
 discreetly enlarged by an agglomeration of hostile or un- 
 sympathizing nationalities, fall asunder, and out of the 
 debris are instituted separate and almost independent 
 regimes. 
 
 I will speak of Geology as illustrating both these tend- 
 encies. At first it was like one of those wild tribes of Ger- 
 many that conquered the Roman Empire. It was a rude, 
 undisciplined study of a few of the most prominent features 
 of the ground. But gathering strength as it developed 
 the observing faculties, and emancipating itself from its 
 aboriginal superstition of the Lusus Natures, adopting the 
 purer faith in Cause and Effect, it conquered and subju- 
 gated, one by one, all the other branches of human know- 
 ledge. The dukes of this new Burgundy outshone and 
 outweighed their liege lords — kings and emperors. Its 
 later princes — Von Such, De Beaumont, Murchison, and 
 Lyell, formed a splendid dynasty. The w ealth of the whole 
 world of science flowed into its public treasury. They were 
 even not afraid to wage war against the world of meta- 
 physics, and it seemed as though Church as well as State 
 would be absorbed into one great, upstart, irresponsible 
 despotism. 
 
 But how is it now ? Geology, as an empire, exists no 
 longer. Instead, we see three kingdoms: three kingdoms 
 so separated, that no one who rules in the one is accounted 
 of the highest authority in the other two. 1st, We have 
 the science of Structural Geology, which may be said to 
 represent, somewhat, the old science before it was divided. 
 2nd, We have the science of Palaeontology or Fossil Geo- 
 logy, which first succeeded to the power of the old empire. 
 
I.] OP THE SCIENCES. 5 
 
 and has 'for some time past been dominating, with a tonch 
 of arrogance too, its structural neighbour. And 3rd, We 
 have the science of Chemical Geology, a new and rising 
 state, full of enterprise, and destined to absorb the con- 
 federate states, known, in scientific parlance, by the name 
 of Physics. 
 
 And yet these three are one. Nor can a student of na- 
 ture account himself well-bred unless he travels through 
 them all ; although he will accomplish nothing great unless 
 he naturalizes himself, and makes a home for himself, in 
 only one of them. But what will not then that home of his 
 become ! What a castle of intellectual strength ! What a 
 cloister of various learnings ! What a museum of antiqui- 
 ties ! What a rendezvous of the choicest spirits of the 
 age ! 
 
 Let me imagine myself for one moment a geologist, well 
 established in such a place, occupied with the study of the 
 formation of this earth, its sedimentary and metamorphic 
 and volcanic rocks, the faults it has committed, the plica- 
 tions and contortions it has endured, the mineral veins 
 deposited in its fissures, the organic forms it has entombed, 
 its reservoirs of brine and oil, its burning mountains, its 
 earthquakes, its changes of sea level, its glaciers and mo- 
 raines, its golden gravel, its meteoric stones, its ossuary 
 caves and deposits of worked flints, its motions through 
 space, its influxes from the sun, its beginnings in eternity. 
 Can any theme be more capital, more universal ? Is any 
 science excluded ? Is any question impertinent ? Must I 
 not subpoena everything that lives, and that does not live, 
 before this case is through ? Has not every savant of the 
 Academy something to tell about it ? 
 
 The architect and civil engineer begin by relating their 
 experience of the choice of granites and clays, the weight 
 and strength of building materials. The miner and the 
 metallurgist recount me their latest improvements in rais- 
 ing, selecting, and reducing the various ores. The chemist 
 hangs upon my wall his nicest table of equivalents, and 
 explains me why the magnesian limestones were \hQ first 
 ones formed. The zoologist and the botanist lay upon the 
 table, on each side of me, their latest enlarged and cor-, 
 rected synopses of fossil and recent synonymes. The Arch-, 
 deacon of Calcutta employs his heaviest mathematical sym-. 
 
6 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [LECT. 
 
 "bols in weighing for me the plateau of Central Asia, while 
 Thompson and Hennesy are calculating the maximum and 
 minimum possible thickness of the crust. With his new 
 automatic tide gauges, and with the waves produced by 
 the earthquake of Simoda, Bache gets for me the mean 
 depth of the Pacific, while Darwin and Dana decide, from 
 the arrangement of their coral reefs, the number and direc- 
 tion of its belts of alternate elevation and depression ; Sa- 
 bine and De Struve report the progress they are making in 
 determining the earth's exact departure from a globular 
 form. Astronomers swarm about me with their specula- 
 tions upon cosmogony, and assign various reasons why the 
 earth's nucleus is hot or cold, is fluid or solid, and why 
 it must have sprung from the consolidation of a nebula, or 
 why from the conglomeration of an infinite number of 
 meteors. The Alpine Club petition for the pleasure of 
 my company on their next ascent of Mont Blanc; and 
 even Ruskin, the artist, insists on fixing me in a good 
 light, so that I may catch the genuine bedplate lines on 
 the precipices of the Arve, and never again make the ab- 
 surd blunder of mistaking the cleavage of the shists for 
 original stratification. 
 
 Is it any wonder that the poor geologist's head is turned 
 by so much attention ? That he accounts his own par- 
 ticular science the summum bonum of truth? Yet in 
 almost an equal degree may the physicist, the astronomer, 
 the naturalist, the archaeologist, the metaphysician cheat 
 himself with the sweet delusion, that he sits at the centre 
 while others stand around. For let a soul, by purity, 
 patience, and love, tame but one science, and it will have, 
 like Una with her lion, the freedom of the whole forest. 
 
 What, then, is the real order of the sciences ? Or is 
 there such a thing ? Or is knowledge like a hollow sphere, 
 within which the soul of man feels itself floating between 
 equal attractions in all directions ? Is there any hierarchy 
 of the sciences ? Is it as noble to know, as ennobling to 
 determine, the number of rings constituting a genus 
 among myriopoda, as it is to discover the number of 
 vibrations corresponding to a given colour in the rainbow, 
 or the number of formations deposited with their suc- 
 cessive florae and faunae in all the ages from the Lawrentian 
 era to the present time ? Or, setting this aesthetic ques- 
 
I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 7 
 
 tion on one side, can the human reason find no just ar- 
 rangement of the sciences, by which our ideas of progress 
 and development may be realized, and their natural sub- 
 ordination and interdependence so shown forth as to satisfy 
 our love of perspective ? 
 
 Others may answer this question in other ways. The 
 remaining time, which your politeness will allow to this 
 lecture, cannot perhaps be better consumed than in stat- 
 ing, as clearly as I may, the order which appears most 
 natural to me, when I attempt to classify the various de- 
 partments of human knowledge. And I find myself in a 
 manner compelled to make this preliminary statement, 
 since I have chosen for the subject of the present course 
 of lectures, f the relation of the modern sciences to the 
 primeval history of man/ 
 
 Do not imagine, from this title, that I intend to develop 
 in formal style, after the manner of the German meta- 
 physicians, a history of philosophy. I willingly leave that 
 immense task to the vivacious eloquence of Erdmann, 
 prince of Hegelians, and to the golden pen of Whewell, 
 vice-chancellor of induction. I have a much more special 
 design : to show how the bonfires we have lighted and are 
 feeding with fresh fuel every day, cast back their illumina- 
 tion through the forest and over the moors of history; 
 bringing out from the thick night and distance, bizarre 
 but moving forms, progenitors of our progenitors a hun- 
 dred times removed ; lighting up their savage features, 
 not wholly bestial nor insane, not wholly destitute perhaps 
 of some angelic or Adamic excellence; so that we may 
 specify some of those earlier forms of soul, to which was 
 given this planet for a habitation, and be able to make out 
 the original nature of many things which gibber and 
 mowe at us, through the dim past, as if they were super- 
 natural attachments to our history, evil genii, imperti- 
 nences and intrusions on the premises of our race, and 
 not amenable to any exorcism except that performed with 
 fasting and prayer. It is my firm belief that the time 
 comes for explaining the beginnings of human life upon 
 the earth ; that if all the sciences can be brought to act 
 in concert, they can do much towards already setting up 
 primeval archeology upon its future throne. I shall en- 
 deavour to show — I am sorry I can only do it sketch-wise 
 
8 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [lECT. 
 
 — liow we can combine the results of the geologists, the 
 ethnologists, and the linguists, with the creations of the 
 priest, the poet, and the architect, to restore and re-colour 
 the faded, broken fresco-painting of the ages on the walls 
 of the temple of history. But to accumulate evidence, we 
 must examine the value of each witness. And the first step 
 is to call the roll and swear them in by name and residence. 
 
 The earliest attempts to classify knowledge distinguished 
 between the natural and supernatural ; between the phy- 
 sical and metaphysical ; between that which relates to 
 phenomena appreciable by the bodily senses, and that 
 which relates to the essence and power of things, the 
 moods of intellect, and the status and intentions of Deity. 
 Of the first-named distinction of the subject-matter of 
 human knowledge into the natural and supernatural I 
 may have occasion to speak at large in a future lecture, 
 because it has been much misunderstood. The second 
 distinction, viz. into physical and metaphysical, although 
 it maintains its importance, in a measure, to the present 
 day, is felt by every thinker to be so general and so 
 vague, so indistinct in the light of modern investigations, 
 that it remains in use only as a popular convenience for 
 common conversation. 
 
 The word physics, from the Greek verb fud, I grow, 
 means the science of nature seen under the conditions of 
 growth.. But we need to introduce among the sciences of 
 nature's growths the sciences of nature's for ces, with many 
 of which we have become experimentally acquainted. These 
 forces are no longer considered as outside of nature, or 
 above nature (metaphysical), they are no longer gods and 
 demons, but laws. In fact, modern science has trans- 
 ferred the name physics entirely to the discussion of this 
 class of sciences, including the knowledge and use of num- 
 bers and quantities. The word ' physics ' now means the 
 teaching of the growth-causing agencies; light, heat, elec- 
 tricity, galvanism, magnetism, gravity, &c. And the ut- 
 most to which the meaning of the word is ever extended 
 only takes in the application of the experimental know- 
 ledge of these forces to the sub-sciences of astronomy, me- 
 teorology, and geodesy. All true (fyvcrts is now no longer 
 discussed as ' physics/ but as ' natural history;' the 
 growth of plants ; the growth of animals and man. And 
 
I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 9 
 
 yet this growth is effected by a force which has .not been 
 enumerated among the physical forces, and is not even 
 alluded to in the science of physics proper, viz. the form 
 force, the forma formans of the schoolmen; that idea of 
 itself, which every growing being has, how it shall form 
 itself in growing. This has nothing (so far as we know) 
 to do with what we call mind, reason, instinct, or any of 
 those fruits of brain- structure or nervous organization, 
 which are the special objects of study of the intellectual 
 sciences ; but underlies and antedates them ; inasmuch 
 as the form-force even determines in each family, genus, 
 and species of beings, whether there shall be a brain or 
 not, and what rank its intelligence, reason, or instinct 
 shall take. 
 
 This living form-force is the true basis of the sciences 
 of natural history, 'distinguishing them from the science of 
 the imponderables, or the so-called physical forces of 
 space. 
 
 But there is also what may be called the dead form- 
 force, which acts (equally beyond our comprehension) 
 through the inorganic or non-growing world, producing all 
 kinds of crystals, minerals, and rocks ; determining their 
 shapes also, with as despotic a decree as that which fatal- 
 izes the shape of a tulip tree, or of the panther that 
 stretches himself in ambush along its branches. In fact 
 all the crystalline world is as much a ' growing ' part of 
 nature as are the vegetable and animal kingdoms.* But 
 we suppose them to grow under the operation of the 
 purely physical forces only; and therefore we place their 
 sciences of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology, between 
 pure physics and pure natural history. 
 
 In the historical development of all the sciences, lies are 
 the beginnings of truth. That Helen, whose beauty set 
 the world at arms, began existence in a shape so hideous 
 as to be concealed for nine long months from every eye. 
 Criticism then, even the criticism of love, would have 
 been fatal to her. So has it been with each embryo 
 science. Hidden in the ignorance of Plato and of Aristotle, 
 in the so-called history of Herodotus and geography of 
 Strabo, were the germs of some of our grandest sciences ; 
 
 * See the beautiful sap-growth of Arragomte in the caves of Derby- 
 shire. — Q. J. Geol, Society, Lond. xxi. 
 
10 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [LECT. 
 
 ethnology, philology, sociology, theology; the natures of 
 which being nobler than those of the physical and natural 
 sciences, inasmuch as they deal entirely with man, man's 
 soul and God, God's providence and institutions for the 
 future, require longer to mature, and are therefore still 
 not So far advanced as they might be ; but in those early 
 days they were like the Hebrew poet's chaos, bohu-va-vohu, 
 without form and void. 
 
 Those tales of the Makrobioi, or long-lived happy patri- 
 archs ; of the Lotophagoi, nature's own epicures ; of Pig- 
 mies and Troglodytes ; of men with tails, and men with but 
 one foot, and that one large enough to be of use at noon 
 for an umbrella ; of Arimaspians and cannibal Massagetes ; 
 of satyrs and ogres ; of Niobe and Lot's wife, and whole 
 nations turned for their pride into marble statues ; of 
 Deucalion and Pyrrha, Nimrod and the Tower of Babel, 
 Cadmus and his dragon's teeth, Pelasgus, Dorus, and 
 ^Eneas, and the numerous lying genealogies of nations, 
 accepted then as all-sufficient explanations of the course 
 of events preceding the times of their authors, and re- 
 jected by us as figments of the imagination, — were these 
 not the faint first flutterings of the unborn and yet un- 
 fashioned foetus, which has grown in course of ages to be 
 that thing of strength and beauty which we name ethnology, 
 the science of nations ? that queen regnant of the human 
 sciences, daughter of chronology, and mother of history, 
 whose two fair sisters sit at eacli hand of her— mythology 
 and archaeology — an imperial group ! 
 
 It is impossible not to feel that we are taking human 
 studies in their natural order. First, thoughts; then, things. 
 In the beginning was the Word ; then the Word was made 
 flesh, and dwelt among us. We must go backward, not 
 forward, to obtain the absolute ; for out of the abstract con- 
 ception comes forth the concrete reality. Before the uni- 
 verse was, God was ; and with him dwelt the eternal and 
 immutable relations of number. Mathematics and Physics 
 give us tho prime postulates of all creation. This is the 
 group of sciences which must necessarily lead the pro- 
 cession. 
 
 Then follow the incarnations of numbers and forces in 
 matter, giving us chemical and geological laws for the 
 
I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 11 
 
 creation of the lowest and oldest, the inorganic world. 
 Thus we have our second group. 
 
 Then come the organic sciences as a third group, carry- 
 ing up the scheme of life to man. 
 
 Fourthly, we have the historic sciences ; discussing what 
 man's life has been, from his appearance on the planet 
 until now. 
 
 Then rise grave questionings — what man's life ought to 
 be. From these questionings, begun by Pythagoras and 
 Plato long ago, and continued by philosophers of all ages, 
 a steadily thickening crowd (become at last so great that 
 we may affirm with truth, in this year of 1865, that all the 
 thinking men and women of Europe and America are in it), 
 there has been elaborated a new science, Sociology, the 
 doctrine of Bight Society; or, rather, a fifth group of allied 
 sciences under the various names of Statistics, Finance, 
 Construction, National Defence, and Equity. Each of these 
 has its facts and its theories, its principles and its history 
 of practice. Mankind was made gregarious ; society has 
 always existed ; manufactures, commerce, war, and law 
 have always been, and must always continue to be, its four 
 methods of self-expression. No others can be named. On 
 their well-collated statistics must be established all our just 
 explanations of history, all our successful schemes of phi- 
 lanthropy, all politics that may escape reproach. Statistics 
 are the mathematics of Sociology ; and the Treadwells and 
 Stephensons, the Barings and Girards, the Napoleons and 
 Grants, the Blackstones and Marshalls of modern times, are 
 as much men of science, if not of as high a grade, as Pascal 
 and Descartes, Leibnitz and Newton, Pierce and Henry, 
 Berzelius and Dumas, Owen and Agassiz, in the sW?.alled 
 world of science. To freight a Great Eastern with living- 
 souls for a land of liberty is a grander achievement of the 
 centuries than to transmit the price of American gold by 
 submarine telegraph to the Brokers' Board in London, to 
 be used in behalf of vested wrongs for back-holding the 
 progress of humanity. Nor is it to be doubted for a mo- 
 ment by a Boston audience, at the close of the Great Re- 
 bellion, that the Atlantis of Plato was a crude boy's dream 
 compared with that splendid vision of a justified and sanc- 
 tified Republic, founded on the experience of the Saxon 
 
12 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [LECT. 
 
 race in a new world, equipped by all the arts and sciences^ 
 instructed by Christianity, and invested with liberty, pro- 
 phesied for the last thirty years by your own immortal 
 William Lloyd Garrison, and now almost fulfilled. In this 
 large workshop of the Free States of America, the whole 
 rolling stock of civilization is being reinvented, tested, and 
 started off afresh upon the track of history. In the schools, 
 and courts, and legislatures of these commonwealths, the 
 social sciences are rapidly attaining that nice precision and 
 that generous scope which already characterize the mathe- 
 matical, the organic, and historical sciences, with all of 
 which they are so closely allied. 
 
 And now, if I have not already wearied your patience, I 
 must instance still another — the last and noblest class of 
 all the group of the intellectual sciences. Those which I 
 have already described relate to the measurement of space 
 and time, to the attributes of matter, to the growth of 
 plants and animals, to mankind as part of the animal world, 
 and, finally, to mankind in masses, obedient to physical ne- 
 cessity and planetic circumstances. But these relate to 
 Man. These teach the expressions of a supernatural na- 
 ture; of a spirit which we believe to be immortal, self- 
 conscious, self- studious, inventive and creative, open-eyed, 
 and tongued for speech, responsive to all mysteries, and 
 destined for all glories. 
 
 The base and platform of this pre-eminent group of 
 sciences is Language. Philology is the mathematics of 
 the soul, teaching us the rudiments of utterance. The 
 sciences of feeling are named Belles Lettres and the Fine 
 Arts ; Logic is the science of thought ; Ethics the science 
 of conscience. All these are old. Modern Christianity 
 has added two more to the list, the sciences of Education 
 and of Philanthropy. And, to make the whole complete, 
 we must end the long catalogue with the science of wor- 
 ship, that is, Religion. 
 
 In order to refresh our memories, and keep perfectly 
 distinct these different groups, with their elements, I have 
 hung upon the wall the chart which you see before you. 
 It was a scheme constructed to classify the books of a 
 large and miscellaneous library. And for practical use its 
 different sub-divisions or classes were distinguished by the 
 primary colours of the rainbow, in their natural order from 
 

 I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 13 
 
 red to violet. The backs of the books were marked with 
 these colours, and the cards on which the titles of the 
 books were separately catalogued were also of correspond- 
 ing hues. But you have probably already noticed that 
 instead of six classes, the scheme upon the wall has eight ; 
 the first one, white, for science as such, or human know- 
 ledge in the general ; the eighth one, violet, containing but 
 one name, and one which I have omitted to mention in my 
 foregoing remarks. It is not a science, properly speaking, 
 yet. But you will all perhaps agree with me that it ought 
 to be. "We may, however, well despair of it when we remem- 
 ber that the greatest of fools, Boswell, wrote the most de- 
 lightful of biographies. Yet it is so far forth a science that 
 it stands apart from the rest ; dealing not with mankind 
 as animals, nor with mankind as a race, nor with mankind 
 in society ; nor with man's life in the studio, in the lecture- 
 room, or in the church ; but with men, as men ; each mortal 
 by himself, sitting for his picture before the lens of Truth. 
 In its intensest form, as Autobiography, it is the science of 
 one's self; the summation of knowledge, for God is un- 
 knowable, except as reflected in his image, man ; and 
 man's individual life collates into a personal history the 
 entire circle of celestial and terrestrial phenomena, mimick- 
 ing like a falling raindrop the surrounding universe. 
 
 In all ages, since the invention of letters, attempts have 
 been made to immortalize the heroes and prophets of the 
 world by writing out their lives ; and most of the know- 
 ledge of the ancient world which remains to us, has de- 
 scended in the form of biography. The pictures which 
 forgotten scribes have painted of Moses, and Joshua, and 
 David, and Isaiah, and the Maccabees, are among the 
 most precious legacies of antiquity. What is more exciting 
 • than the life of Pythagoras by lamblicus ? or more delight- 
 ful than Plutarch/ s Lives of noble Greeks and Romans who 
 had lived before his day ? Yet after all that scholars can 
 say of them, the biographies of the ancients were failures, 
 in comparison with the best of modern times, because of 
 the meagreness of ancient life, the difficulties of inter- 
 course, and above all, the narrow range of ideas, owing to 
 the limited education of the writers. 
 
 In this, pre-eminently, the difference shows itself 
 between ancient and modern davs. We skim the ocean and 
 
14 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [LECT. 
 
 devour the land, collecting facts by steam and transmitting 
 them by telegraph. They consumed half their lives in a 
 few snail-pace journeys and baffling voyages, confined 
 within the compass of a thousand miles, a prey to terrify- 
 ing accidents, victims of unblushing falsehood and un- 
 bounded ignorance. 
 
 The crowd of modern travellers and writers is so great 
 that every lapse from honest observation, every mistake of 
 eye or ear, every inept construction, every misquotation, 
 every false assumption, every distortion of word or deed 
 through pride or prejudice, every failure of appreciation by 
 stupidity, every undue exaggeration by affection, every 
 mistake of superstition, is sure to be corrected, almost as 
 soon as made. 
 
 But in those ancient days the lonely priest went plod- 
 ding on, year after year, reaching occasionally some 
 monastic home where he could find a week's or a month's 
 repose, as a rare and welcome guest from foreign lands. 
 And there he heard, without the power or wish to criticise, 
 extraordinary tales, incredible to modern minds. None had 
 been there before him by whose judgment he could guide 
 his own belief. He wrote all down. And. for a century, 
 perhaps for twenty centuries, no traveller would follow him 
 to verify or falsify his stories. You see how little chance 
 Sesostris, Cyrus, Zoroaster, or Lycurgus had to get their 
 biographies recorded properly. But even if the truth about 
 them could have been attained to, and even could we 
 summon them in person before our Niebuhrs, Macaulays, 
 Michelets, and Prescotts, to be cross-examined, on their 
 oath and honour, would not each of them be apt to answer 
 in the words of the knife-grinder : 'Lord ! Pve no tale to 
 tell, sir ! ' For the manifold relations which men of mark 
 and genius in the nineteenth century hold to all depart- 
 ments of art and knowledge, constitute the chief difficulty 
 in the way of writing their biographies. And at the same 
 time this difficulty, well wrestled with, by men of equal 
 mark and genius, has carried up the tone of life-writing to 
 the pitch at which we have it. 
 
 Had there been an Edward Forbes in Plutarch's day, 
 we should have had a Wilson or a Geikie in Plutarch to 
 describe him. For Nature is the best Quarter-master, and 
 never hesitates to fill an order when it is properly red- 
 
I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 15 
 
 taped. But there could be no Edward Forbes in ancient 
 days, for the same reason that there were no elephants 
 nor monkeys in the Jurassic age, nor pterodactyles in the 
 Devonian era, nor lepidodendra in Silurian times. All 
 things wait their turn. The genius of development is a 
 fine scene- shifter. The Demiurge works leisurely, and 
 hates to be hurried. Time is of no account, but circum- 
 stance is indispensable. A perfect Biography requires a 
 type Man. Men are just now beginning to write the Life 
 of Jesus, because the life of Jesus holds closer relationship 
 with the millennium than with the middle or the heroic 
 ages, and demands for its comprehension the knowledge 
 of universals, rather than particulars. The general work- 
 ing of his spirit upon and within the constitution of the 
 world, had to be, not tested, but testified by the experi- 
 ments of twice a thousand years before its all-embracing 
 applicability, its never-failing certainty, its infinite many- 
 sidedness could be assented to by science. Crichton must 
 visit all the courts and universities, and conquer in every 
 contest of etiquette or eloquence, before he can be called 
 the Admirable. And each of the centuries is itself a separate 
 court and university, at which the growing humanity takes 
 some new degree. 
 
 The true science of biography is professed by the great 
 novelists of the day. We see its growth in reading the 
 works of Goethe, and Scott, and Thackeray, and Victor Hugo, 
 and their thousand pupils in the divinest of all arts, the 
 picturing of human life. These are the teachers of the 
 nineteenth century. These are the books into which have 
 fallen all the treasures of learning and wisdom of all the 
 ages. Christianity, honour, politeness, wit, and humour 
 are taught now chiefly through novels. They are the 
 mirrors in which the many-sided power of the modern 
 world contemplates itself. Each man, each woman goes 
 to the novel now to get such glimpses of their inner life, 
 and their outward relations to nature and mankind, as 
 thrill them with emotions of pride and love, plunge them 
 in remorse, lift them again with hope, confirm their fresh- 
 born resolutions, and warn them against insidious dangers. 
 The good that Charles Dickens has done the world is in- 
 calculably great. I should rather be Charles Bead, and 
 have written ' The Cloister and the Hearth/ than have 
 
16 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [lECT. 
 
 been Gibbon, and have written 'The Kise and Fall of the 
 Roman Empire.' One American city now is larger than 
 the whole Roman Empire was in the days of its splendour. 
 We must measure matter spiritually, to get its just dimen- 
 sions. Compare Horace with Tennyson, or Cicero with 
 Sumner, or Augustus Caesar with Abraham Lincoln, if you 
 wish to see how the world has grown in the richness of its 
 relationships, and how the development of man as an 
 individual has kept pace with it. Barren enough would 
 be, even could it be written, the biography of an aboriginal 
 savage. 
 
 How far backward we shall hereafter be able to trace 
 this law of human development ifc would be rash for me> 
 or for any other man, to say with dogmatism. 'Nor do I 
 desire to take up the vexed question here this evening. 
 The sciences which it has been the object of this lecture to 
 classify, are not themselves sufficiently developed to settle 
 it. Mankind still wear too disagreeable a resemblance to 
 their apes, the quadrumana, to argue it. From that eleva- 
 tion which the Christian strives to reach, where the last 
 trace of hog and tiger and baboon will leave his nature, 
 and he shall rest, transfigured, at his Master's feet, and 
 feel himself a worthy friend of angels — perhaps he may 
 hereafter look down, without those uncomfortable emo- 
 tions, which even the fairest discussion of the origin of 
 man gives rise to now. Enough, that so far as written 
 history is concerned, and some dim glimpses into pre-his- 
 toric times can be obtained, the law of human progress, of 
 social, mental, and moral development, is a great cer- 
 tainty; on which all our learned histories and philosophies 
 are based ; and without its clear and consistent recogni- 
 tion, all reference to the early ages of mankind will be 
 mere losing ourselves in Sorbonian bogs and Hercynian 
 forests, filled with 
 
 1 Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, 
 Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire.' 
 
 It is my intention in this course of lectures to attempt 
 to show how far the sciences, as they are now advanced, 
 succeed in throwing light upon the early history of our 
 race. I do not know that I need make any apology for 
 the choice of this subject in preference to one more strictly 
 
I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 17 
 
 professional : although it is by no means, in the language 
 of the world, a useful one. But I feel sensibly the tend- 
 ency of our times to utilitarianism and materialism. I 
 think it is wise sometimes to shut up shop and walk in the 
 twilight, and look up at the stars, or down upon the sea. 
 The end and object of all science is, not to print calicoes, 
 but to brighten up the face of man. And if the thought 
 of ages long ago can breed within the human heart one 
 sentiment of pious contentment with its lot, or one hope 
 of future happiness, or any increase of that faith which 
 believes that all things are well ordered and sure, and work 
 together for the good of those that love God, — that 
 thought of ages long gone by is useful. 
 
 But the mere attempt to reconstruct the past is favour- 
 able to our knowledge of the present. In no way can we 
 better judge of tools than by building with them. I pur- 
 pose in this course of lectures to test the temper of our 
 sciences, to see if they will break on one of the hardest of 
 all subjects of discussion. In doing this we will pass in 
 review, as it were, their capabilities. This of itself will 
 well repay our time. 
 
 The chief charm of all such subjects as the one I have 
 chosen, lies in a sort of super-naturalism which floats 
 about them like a haze ; tinting them purple and gold as 
 the air at sunset tints the distant mountain- tops. In our 
 daily life we feel the hardness and roughness of matter, 
 until our souls are sore and faint. But when we turn to 
 the far distant past, we feel this hard and rough material 
 world melting and mixing with strange fancies, pliant 
 laws, conjectural processions of events, cloudy possibili- 
 ties, and over all, the bending form and earnest face of 
 the All-Father at His work. So sang the old Hebrew 
 bard : — ( I am Sophia ; I am the abstract wisdom ; I was 
 with Him in the beginning, when He laid the foundations 
 of the earth, and the morning stars shouted for joy/ 
 
 The ancient histories, like the primary rocks of the 
 North, are all rounded and polished and streaked and 
 beautified by the slow movements of the Recent over them. 
 We may find columbines here and there blooming in their 
 rifts. 
 
 It does us good to cultivate the grand superstitions 
 which are indigenous to that mountain-land. What is 
 
 2 
 
18 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [LECT. 
 
 superstition, but the posture of the human soul when it 
 stands erect and treads brute matter under foot. We talk 
 of our under- standings : Yes — but what of our over- stand- 
 ings ? We men of science of the nineteenth century are 
 becoming too exclusively men of understanding. ' I 
 will speak/ said Paul, ' I will speak with the understanding 
 and the spirit also.' 
 
 All I would say in this introductory lecture is this ; that 
 I do not believe in a beginning without God, any more 
 than in an end without Christ ; and therefore you may ex- 
 pect to hear me treat all the parts and details of the in- 
 vestigation into the early life of mankind on the earth, not 
 only by the rules of the Naturalist, but also in the spirit 
 of the Spiritualist ; and with a profound faith in Christi- 
 anity as the blooming of the century-plant. 
 
 The modern sciences conspire to prove that man is an 
 animal, and that his history is bound up with the zoolo- 
 gical developments of the remotest geological times. But 
 this does not injure the discussion of his spiritual faculties 
 and his immortal future. 
 
 The sciences agree in impressing us with man's subjec- 
 tion to the physical laws which are so despotic over all 
 other departments of nature. But this need not blind our 
 eyes to the function of the Will ; to the laws of right and 
 wrong ; the reality of responsibility, and the alliance of 
 the soul with superior natures, unseen as well as seen. 
 
 The sciences enjoy together a code of criticism, which 
 they make obligatory upon the scholar of the past ; a code 
 too little known, too long neglected by the scholars of the 
 past. By this criticism we will find all written history 
 false or defective ; and all human language so overcharged 
 with the effete decomposition of ancient ideas and prac- 
 tices, as to make philology rather a barrier against, than 
 an avenue towards, the knowledge of antiquity. But on 
 the other hand, is that to overthrow our faith in the 
 sublime traditions which we have from those old times ? 
 The light of antiquity streams into our Church of the 
 Present through wonderful stained windows — and is all 
 the more ravishingly beautiful, and quite as useful for all 
 that. While we learn that no ancient Scripture is to be 
 believed, — we learn also that all ancient Scripture is to 
 be believed. When we turn towards the future we see as 
 
I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 19 
 
 through, a glass darkly, but still we see ; and all the better by 
 the nearer we bring our eyes to the glass that stops our 
 vision. So when we turn towards that other eternity, the 
 past, we see as through a glass darkly, but still we see ; 
 and all the better for the criticism which has been reduced 
 to such perfection by the labours of men of science in our 
 day. 
 
 I repeat then, that for the truthful and useful discussion 
 of the relations of the modern sciences to the early history 
 of man, it is necessary for your lecturer to believe as pro- 
 foundly in the essential and indestructible principles of the 
 Christian religion as in the axioms of Euclid or the law of 
 chemical equivalents. Nor has the slow progress of the 
 sciences of geology and comparative anatomy done more 
 to retard our knowledge of primeval antiquity, than has 
 the unchristian state of the theological and social sciences. 
 
 In my next lecture I will illustrate the difference be- 
 tween the ancient forms of knowledge and our modern 
 sciences ; and show how impossible it is, without the help 
 of a cultivated fancy, to investigate the natural history of 
 an age of human existence, over which an uncultivated 
 fancy bore entire sway. 
 
 In the third, the fourth, and the fifth lectures of the 
 course, I will treat of the antiquity, the dignity, and the 
 unity of the human race. I will devote the sixth lecture 
 to the social life of the ancients. The seventh lecture will 
 be on the origin of language. The eighth on the origin 
 of taste and the development especially of architecture. 
 In the ninth I will give you my theory of the origin of 
 letters ; the invention of the alphabet ; and the nature of 
 those spiritual fancies which became concrete in the 
 mythological traditions of the world. My tenth lecture 
 will treat of the religious instinct, and its embodiment in 
 ceremonial worships. The eleventh will be devoted to what 
 I consider the most ancient symbolism of the priesthood. 
 
 If I make my views clear to an audience so exacting of 
 precision and completeness as this is sure to be, it will be 
 more than I dare to hope. But at all events I can give 
 you some faint sketch of the expanse of the knowable 
 which lies before the so til that reverently and lovingly un- 
 dertakes to question Heaven and Nature about the begin- 
 ning of its kind. 
 
20 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 ON THE GENIUS OE THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, ANCIENT AND 
 MODEKN. 
 
 In the last lecture I gave yon a classification of the 
 modern sciences in eight groups, the first group represent- 
 ing science in the general; and the second group com- 
 prising the mathematical, exact or physical sciences proper. 
 
 My lecture this evening should show you the relations 
 of this second group to the early history of man. In other 
 words, should answer the question, how much information 
 the mathematicians, the astronomers, the meteorologists, 
 the geodesists, or physical geographers, and the students 
 of light, heat, electricity, motion, &c, can. give us respect- 
 ing the planting of human society upon the earth. 
 
 Not much. No! not much. But yet a little. 
 
 Before I recount this little, I have something more, in- 
 troductory, to say respecting the right which modern 
 science has to speak at all upon this subject ; a right, as 
 you are probably well aware, denied ; denied by the pul- 
 pit; I mean, of course, from the uneducated and more 
 ignoble side of the pulpit. For science has already won 
 stalwart champions from among the clergy ; and we less 
 seldom now are forced to listen to those storms of mingled 
 arrogance, absurdity, and bad taste, which formerly made 
 of the pulpit a very cave of Eolus ; those discordant de- 
 nunciations of dangerous novelties, through the loud up- 
 roar of which were ever to be more easily distinguished 
 than any other words, the warning words of Paul to 
 Timothy : ' Keep that which is committed to thy trust, 
 avoiding profane and vain babblings and oppositions of 
 science falsely so called, which some professing, have erred 
 concerning the faith/ 
 
 A thorough-bred and noble-minded theologian will scorn 
 
ON THE GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES. 21 
 
 to turn against himself this beautiful apostrophe of the 
 philosophic and great-minded apostle,, this wide and ten- 
 der appeal to the fresh heart of Christianity to keep itself 
 from the intellectual idols of that day, the demoralizing 
 sophisms of Athens, and the beastly Gnosticism of An- 
 tioch and Alexandria ; — against his own inner life ; against 
 the education of the 19th century ; against these ennobling 
 and refining sciences which have been born of Christianity 
 in her best estate, and glorify her on earth, as the spotless 
 robes of her elect will glorify her in the heavens. 
 
 Let us comprehend, then, before we go one step further 
 in this course, the difference between the so-called science 
 of the ancients, of which Paul spoke, and the sciences of 
 modern times, which he knew nothing about. 
 
 They differ in two respects, the most essential possible : 
 1, In their genius, or animus ; 2, In their method, or ap- 
 paratus. 
 
 1. The genius, or animus, of the ancient science was 
 essentially fanciful ; childish ; cared little for consistency ; 
 was inexperienced; preferred to believe; was impatient 
 of criticism ; had no purpose in its investigations ; no use 
 for their results. 
 
 The spirit of modern science is just the contrary; — 
 practical and manly ; at once critical and comprehensive ; 
 more disposed to deny than to affirm; insists upon all 
 things being put upon their trial ; rejects even truth her- 
 self if she stammers before the court ; cross-examines 
 without pity ; insists upon absolute consistency ; is regard- 
 less of consequences ; takes nothing for granted; worships 
 cause and effect ; investigates always in the light of some 
 hypothesis, and applies every discovery instantly to use. 
 
 2. In the second point, of Method, the difference is 
 equally patent to observation. The method employed of 
 old was as fanciful as the spirit. The only intellectual 
 tool above the level of their senses, which the ancients had 
 to work with, was their quick and fertile imagination. 
 With this they reasoned. Their powers of observation 
 were fine, but they neither knew what to look for nor how 
 to correct false observations, nor how to combine what 
 they knew, so as to frame laws by which to carry on the 
 work. What little they got, the most of it was worthless ; 
 and what was valuable they soon lost. There was no con- 
 
22 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [LECT. 
 
 cert among their sages. They washed the gravel, but 
 could not crush the quartz. They merely worked the 
 out-crops of knowledge, because they had neither engines 
 for deep mining, nor railways to take away the ore, nor 
 furnaces wherein to bring the metal to nature, nor labora- 
 tories for assaying its purity. They wrote books, but 
 there were no reviewers. In a word, true science was as 
 impossible a product of the human mind so long as the 
 fancy fished and hunted through its primeval wilderness, 
 as commerce and luxury and art are impossible until the 
 invention of the axe, the plough, the anvil, and the loom, 
 cause the physical forest to disappear with its wild deni- 
 zens, and farmers, artisans, and townsmen to take their 
 place. 
 
 The whole story is told in one sentence, when we say 
 that modern science replaces Fancy by Experiment. Its 
 whole profession is inquisitorial. It tortures the dumb 
 truth. To say what you can prove is the only passport to 
 its favour. None of your suppositions, is the only response 
 it deigns to give the sciolist. It is harder on contractors 
 than any army -inspect or at Springfield. It cares for no 
 expense in renewing and improving its machinery, and 
 keeps selling off its condemned material to — the clergy. 
 'Be sure you are right; then go ahead/ is its favourite 
 saying. It may wink at the fancies or inaccuracies of a 
 favourite over-night, but woe be to him in the morning ! 
 With its whole soul modern science hates idols — those 
 that Lord Bacon classified, and all others, — and despises 
 hero worship. It encourages predictions as stimulants, 
 but murders the prophet whose vision comes not to pass ; 
 yet it has great patience when the prophecy is both very 
 new and very grand. 
 
 You will notice then that the great distinction between 
 ancient and modern science is this : that the former was 
 the product of undisciplined fancy, and the latter is the 
 product of careful, repeated, and systematic experiment ; 
 simply the difference between conjecture and knowledge. 
 For fancy and experiment are the two poles on which the 
 world of human knowledge turns. Or, to change the 
 simile, fancy is the steam which lifts the piston-rod of 
 intellectual progress ; experiment, the guides in which it 
 moves. 
 
II.] ANCIENT AND MODERN. 23 
 
 Now let me apply these ideas to tlie first member of tlie 
 group of mathematical sciences with, which we are dealing 
 to-night; the science of numbers. It affords us a fine 
 illustration of the difference between ancient and modern 
 science. I do not speak just now of the aboriginal ideas 
 of numbers which the earliest tribes of men obtained in 
 their savage state. I shall speak of that directly. And I 
 use the term ' ancients ' in its common sense, meaning the 
 classical ancients, of whose life and doings we have some 
 traditional history. 
 
 The ancients invented arithmetic and geometry, but the 
 moderns have possessed themselves of that all-powerful 
 apparatus of investigation, the differential calculus. The 
 ancients had a fanciful or superstitious reverence for num- 
 bers, believing them to embody an occult and fearful magic, 
 according to which the universe was originally created, and 
 under the influence of which all life was thought to move. 
 The moderns love numbers, because by them they can work 
 out in a reasonable and precise manner both the darkest 
 and the noblest problems of creation — the distance of the 
 stars, the weight of the planets, the velocity of light, the 
 composition of matter, the progress of population, the rate 
 of insurance on life and property.* The mathematics of the 
 ancients could produce nothing higher than astrology ; 
 that of the moderns has produced astronomy, meteorology, 
 geodesy. Its last and crowning triumph has been the 
 establishment of the law of the ' convertibility of forces/ 
 by which we now know that not the smallest portion of the 
 universe is ever lost ; that motion, when it stops, becomes 
 so much light and heat ; that light and heat, when they 
 distribute themselves, supply to nature an equal quantity 
 of electricity or galvanism ; that galvanism becomes mag- 
 netism ; and that magnetism gives place again to motion. 
 Did St Paul mean to say that all this is ' science falsely so 
 called ' ? Is this the yvaxns that he denounced so vehe- 
 mently, as opposing itself to all that Jesus Christ had given 
 him to hold in trust until he should come again to judge 
 the world in righteousness ? I trow not. 
 
 Let me call up before your imagination that great vision 
 
 * The truthfulness, the reverence of exact statement and description, 
 which distinguishes the occidental from the oriental man, may be deduced, 
 perhaps, rather from this influence than from any other source. 
 
24 GENIUS OP THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [LECT. 
 
 which stood to the ancient philosophic world for the sum 
 of all speculation upon the way God made the worlds. It 
 was their yixao-Ls ; the doctrine of the Gnostic or Oriental 
 world. I leave you to judge yourselves how much science 
 there was in it ; and how wisely, seeing its intense, proud, 
 irreconcilable opposition to the Gospel of Christ, Paul 
 warned his followers not to be seduced from their holy 
 faith by it. In one form or other the whole mathematico- 
 physical science of the ancient world consisted in this cos- 
 mogony. It stated its fanciful principles thus : — 
 
 1 . That matter and spirit are the two hostile elements of 
 the universe. 
 
 2. That there can be no intimate intercourse between 
 the Absolute, pure spirit, God, and the Material, gross, 
 vile, sin-producing, chaotic, rebellious, and insane stuff out 
 of which bodies are made. 
 
 3. That therefore the universe must have resulted from 
 the existence and operations of energies or intelligences 
 holding an intermediate place between the Absolute and 
 the Material, filling up or bridging over the awful chasm 
 between God and Matter. 
 
 Upon these assumptions, and this comprehensive syllo- 
 gism, a thousand fanciful philosophers erected their cos- 
 mogonies ; like the cathedrals of the middle ages, all dif- 
 ferent, but all belonging to one style ; some smaller and 
 plainer, others imposing for their immensity, bewilderingly 
 complicated, and covered over with elaborate ornamenta- 
 tion . The central idea of all of them was that of emana- 
 tion. Eons came forth from the Divine essence as deftly 
 and numerously various as ribbons from a juggler's mouth. 
 Down slid the long Jacob's ladder, with an angel or arch- 
 angel standing upon every rung, until its foot touched 
 and rested firm upon the mass of crudity to be informed. 
 High at its summit stood, waving her wings, the Celestial 
 Sophia, and at its foot the Demiourgos or Creator of the 
 earth, the Jewish Jehovah, with face downcast, and brawny 
 arms, the Terrestrial Sophia always by his side. And this 
 was the most advanced philosophical statement of the 
 origin of men and things that the science of the ancients 
 ever succeeded in making ; and modern science can detect 
 in it neither rhyme nor reason, because it was neither based 
 on observation, nor calculation, nor experiment. 
 
II.] ANCIENT AND MODERN. 25 
 
 Let me set before you now another and far different 
 picture. That was ' science falsely so called ; * this is 
 true science. It may not be scientific truth, for its de- 
 monstration has not yet been completed. But it is true 
 science for all that ; because it is the product of a Fancy 
 disciplined, mathematical, experimental, and observant. 
 I allude of course to the Nebular Hypothesis. 
 
 The Nebular Hypothesis is to us modern naturalists 
 what the gnostic cosmogonies were to the cabbalists of 
 yore, and is illustrated in a perfect manner by the genius of 
 modern science. It has swelled rapidly to its present pro- 
 portions by insensible degrees ; by yearly accessions of 
 facts, discovered and recorded in the different departments 
 of inquiry. Its constitution is purely mathematical. 
 Grant its one postulate, — That space was originally full of 
 homogeneous matter obedient to the laws of physics — and 
 its whole argument follows logically to the close ; and it 
 accounts for everything we see and know about the visible 
 world. And this first postulate is strictly reasonable; 
 even if it turn out in the end not to have been true ; for 
 1, It agrees with all experimental observation as thus far 
 made ; and 2, It is based upon a set of observations of its 
 own. I mean the observations of telescopic nebulae. 
 Nor can it be finally disproved and laid aside until more 
 powerful telescopes shall have been made to resolve into 
 separate stars the last remaining nebulae. And even then 
 the a 'priori possibility stands good. Saturn's rings will 
 continue to discuss the question with any comet that may 
 happen to drop in. 
 
 Emanation was the genius of the old cosmogony ; 
 Evolution is the genius of the nebular hypothesis. It 
 paints the universe as either at first created an infinite 
 mist of unequally distributed elemental atoms ; or else as, 
 at stated intervals, becoming such. It sees great move- 
 ments beginning, or re-beginning, in this unformed but 
 living infinite ; centres of growing aggregation ; and tend- 
 encies towards those centres. It calculates the conse- 
 quences of these tendencies, and proves that great gyra- 
 tions must result from them. It shows how the laws of 
 heat will bring about consolidation ; and how the laws of 
 motion will effect at first a ring and then a planetary 
 system, in each vortex, throughout infinite space. Thus 
 
26 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [LECT. 
 
 stars and suns, nebulae and comets, earths and their satel- 
 lites, appear upon the scene; each with its proper 
 motions ; each destined to work out a different history, 
 according to its circumstances. Then it takes up our 
 solar system, and calculates, and weighs, and keeps per- 
 petual watch upon it. It suspects the existence of an 
 extra member of the system, and by pure dint of numbers 
 finds it. It proves the molecular discreteness of Saturn's 
 rings, and the aqueous character of the envelopes of 
 Jupiter and Mars. It invents the thermo-electric pile, and 
 proves that the sun's spots are not so hot as the rest of 
 its face, and that the body of the moon is as utterly cold 
 as space itself. It invents the spectroscope, and makes 
 out with it five of our metals in the sun, and two of them 
 in Sirius. Then it takes up our earth, and shows how 
 once it more than filled the entire orbit of the moon, first 
 throwing off a ring which became our moon, and finally 
 condensing to its present form, a globe of lava, with a 
 crust of rock, a skin of water, and an envelope of air. 
 It sketches out the story of this crust: how its first flakes 
 emerged and joined, and were re- enforced and thickened 
 from below, compressed, turned up, re-melted and re-form- 
 ed : how a steady torrent of hot acid waters rained down 
 constantly upon all portions of this forming crust, disin- 
 tegrating it as fast as it was consolidated, and flying np 
 again in steam, to carry off its heat into surrounding 
 space : how in due course of time the seas became cool 
 enough to retain both their waters and the alkaline and 
 acid sediments which they brought into it : how the 
 chlorates and carbonates of the land changed partners 
 when they reached the sea, and formed the salt which 
 gives it sweetness, and the dolomite which made its an- 
 cient bed : and how, as time went on, changing the pro- 
 portions and relations of terrestrial elements, form after 
 form of life appeared, each suitable to the exact amount of 
 heat or cold, of light or darkness, moisture or drought, 
 acidity or alkalinity, of its place of birth, and changing then 
 to something else, or something better, when it could no 
 longer live a life conformable to its own nature ; each form 
 superior to the one preceding it ; until at last man came, 
 to find a world grown firm enough to live on, cooled to the 
 temperate point, soiled, shaded, lighted, watered properly, 
 
II.] ANCIENT AND MODERN. 27 
 
 sprinkled with gold and precious stones, inlaid with iron 
 and brass, and floating through what is to him a finished 
 universe. 
 
 Have we not here a procession of realities, where before 
 we had a mist of dreams filled with the fantastic gibbering 
 of ghosts ? That is just the distinction between the ancient 
 Gnosis, and, in a less degree, all ancient knowledge, and 
 the modern sciences. 
 
 Let me now turn your attention to the same strong con- 
 trast between ancient and modern thought which the prac- 
 tical application of these cosmological views exhibit. I 
 mean the application of the old Gnostic theories to the 
 practice of astrology, and the applications of modern astro- 
 nomical science to the discovery of the laws of climate, to 
 the practice of navigation, and to the measurement of land, 
 forming what we call the sciences of Physical Geography, 
 Navigation, Geodesy, and Civil Engineering. 
 
 The essential element of the contrast still is, that the one 
 is a system of fancy, the other a system of facts ; the one 
 exercised habitually a cruel power over the lives of men by 
 its claims to magic; the other blesses mankind, not only 
 with the purest lessons of universal law and order, but with 
 comfort in the house, and safety on the sea. 
 
 Take a well-known example from the history of the 
 founding of the Christian Church. In the Acts of the 
 Apostles we read that, at Ephesus, an uproar threatened 
 the best part of its citizens with fire and sword for doubt- 
 ing that the stone, which the worst part worshipped, fell 
 from Jupiter. It would be hard to raise a riot now-a-days, 
 in Washington, by any story our astronomers could tell 
 about the great ring-meteorite which forms the central ob- 
 ject of attraction in the Museum of the Smithsonian Insti- 
 tution. Modern science calculates that five millions of 
 these bodies strike the outer stratum of our atmosphere 
 every day ; and that the major part of them, driven by 
 their own or the earth's velocity to various depths in it, 
 are triturated, smelted, evaporated, distributed by the 
 winds, and slowly settle to increase the size of the earth. 
 An occasional larger mass, becoming incandescent only on 
 its outside, throws off a cloud of volatilized matter as it 
 passes through the atmosphere, and then resumes its dark, 
 cold flight through space — space that is full of such. Now 
 
28 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [LECT. 
 
 and then one hits the earth in its orbit so fairly that it 
 succeeds in reaching the bottom of the atmosphere, and 
 buries itself in the soil, or in the broad expanse of the 
 ocean. In the old days of astrology men would have built 
 a temple over it, and organized a priesthood for its worship, 
 and regulated politics by its magnetic auguries ; but in our 
 days of astronomy, the finder cuts it up into pieces and 
 sells them for five dollars a-piece, to be labelled and stowed 
 away in cabinets with bottled tarantulas, Indian arrow- 
 heads, and coprolites from the chalk. 
 
 One perhaps is powwowed over at a meeting of the 
 Meteorological Society, where an interesting paper is read 
 by Mr A. on the observed height, length, direction, ve- 
 locity, and luminousness of the meteor's flight, as seen 
 from half-a-dozen small villages in different parts of the 
 country; and another piece may form the subject, per- 
 haps, at a meeting of the Chemical Society, of an equally 
 instructive paper by Mr B., showing the probable consti- 
 tution of the meteor, from a careful analysis of the frag- 
 ment ; disclosing the presence of so much iron, so much 
 nickel, so much schreibersite, with remarkable traces of 
 carbon; suggesting the possible existence of unknown 
 organisms, whether animal or vegetable, the author cannot 
 say, upon the planetic body of which this meteor seems to 
 have formed a part. A third perhaps goes over to Vienna, 
 where, at a meeting of the Imperial Academy, the vener- 
 able Herr Hoffrath Hai dinger draws attention to certain 
 impressions, as it were, of human fingers, in the at-one- 
 time plastic mass, but only at one end, and shows that the 
 end so marked must have been the backside of the meteor 
 as it flew, behind which, as in a ship's wake just abaft the 
 rudder-post, an eddy of incandescent air and gases had 
 been formed, reducing the metal to plasticity and leaving 
 upon it these impressions ; at the same time he shows how 
 the solid banking up of the air in front of this frightful 
 projectile must have brought its forward career to a sud- 
 den stop, when the earth's gravity would take effect and 
 bring it, almost at a right angle, to the ground. 
 
 Such are the two different ways in which ancient and 
 modern science would treat the objects of science, show- 
 ing always the same preponderance of a helpless and 
 therefore fearful fancy on the one side, and of a bold and 
 
II.] ANCIENT AND MODEHN. 29 
 
 powerful criticism on the other. The human race was 
 placed upon the earth at the same disadvantage through 
 ignorance, which prevents a traveller from sleeping the 
 first night he spends in a strange inn. The human heart 
 grows timid in the dark, while familiarity with the obscure 
 breeds contempt. The human race regard old heathen 
 terrors now with the same nonchalance with which a 
 family, born under its roof, hear noises in a haunted 
 house ; or rather with that staunch, earnest, watchful in- 
 telligence with which an engine-driver walks round and 
 round his well-regulated and thoroughly comprehended, 
 yet tremendous, machine. 
 
 You will not of course mistake my meaning so far as 
 to imagine that I contrast the ancient and the modern 
 worlds ! I am only contrasting the ancient gnosis with 
 modern science. Superstitions of the lowest kind still 
 fill the earth. I speak of the genius of the learned world. 
 The same uncultivated fancy keeps alive in our day, among 
 the uneducated classes and races of men, astrological and 
 all other ancient absurdities. They float daily to us across 
 the Atlantic, like cloud-rack, to be absorbed and made to 
 vanish in the clear, dry intellectual air, which, thank God, 
 we w T ere born to breathe. The education of the w T orld as 
 a whole has hardly yet commenced. It might well strike 
 us with astonishment to see a we W- educated world fight- 
 ing for slavery instead of for liberty, reeling with drunk- 
 enness, reeking with squalid vice, roaring with obscene 
 profanity, as so much of ours does ! No, we are simply 
 considering the contrast between the intellectual condition 
 and habits of the philosophic world as it existed a few 
 thousand years ago, with what its intellectual habits are 
 now ; and what is the actual Christian value of the science 
 of nearly the entire population of these Northern States, of 
 Scotland, Switzerland, and Prussia, of the upper classes 
 in England, France, and Italy, and in fact of the wealthy 
 everywhere. 
 
 About six months ago a letter, addressed to me in Bos- 
 ton, reached me, I know not by what means, through the 
 Office in Philadelphia. It had been written by some 
 motherly body down in Maine, and enclosed an old one- 
 dollar bill. It gave the hour and minute of the woman's 
 birth, and begged me to return the horoscope in diagram, 
 
30 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [LECT. 
 
 with the prediction founded on its figure. And in a 
 touching little postscript, as badly spelled and written as 
 the letter itself, she added the birth-date of her favourite 
 son, and begged me to include his fortune in her own. 
 
 Now it is a very curious question : on what principle the 
 notion of the government of human fortune by the stars 
 could have been so early, widely, and permanently estab- 
 lished. The idea of cause and effect, or of antecedence 
 and consequence, not to go into its metaphysical dis- 
 cussion, seems inherent in intelligence. Even the lower 
 animals exhibit it. The reason why our ponies are alarmed 
 at wheelbarrows and dummy engines, is evidently because 
 they cannot comprehend how anything can go unless it be 
 preceded by a horse. They seem to be infected with the 
 same horror of the prodigious, which we would tremble 
 under were we to observe St Denis marching off from 
 martyrdom with his head under his arm. Our savage an- 
 cestors never became intellectually reconciled to an eclipse 
 of the sun or of the moon because they could suggest no 
 benevolent cause for it ; it seemed to them like some 
 deadly swooning of a father or a mother, threatening 
 themselves with orphanage. The worship of the heavenly 
 bodies must have borne exact proportion to the daily and 
 nightly benefits they bestowed upon mankind. At the 
 equator the sun was an enemy, at the poles a friend. The 
 Arab addressed his praises to ' the great rock in a weary 
 land/ because it protected him from the solar rays. The 
 Scandinavian, on the contrary, watched the declining sun 
 from June to December with undisguised anxiety, erected 
 slanting dolmens to detect the first certainty of its ap- 
 proaching return ; and when assured that its face was once 
 more set towards their habitations, over which their enemy 
 the snow had already begun to heap itself, they dragged 
 the yule log to the hearth, and danced and sung and drank 
 the grand carouse of all the year, making the frozen air 
 resound with their Christmas carols under the mistletoe, 
 long before Christ was born, or a mass had ever been said 
 in honour of the Sun of Eighteousness. The celebrated 
 contest between sun-worship and pyramid- or water-wor- 
 ship which characterized a part of the monumental history 
 of Egypt was a conflict of sentiment between the equatorial 
 and the polar zones, the iconoclastic sun- worshippers 
 
II.] ANCIENT AND MODEEN. 31 
 
 coming into the valley of the Nile from the mountains of 
 Armenia and the distant steppes of Scythia, at the close of 
 the 14th* dynasty, 2000 years more or less B.C., as they did 
 again under Cambyses about the year 500 B.C., and again, 
 to take permanent possession, as the Turks of the 13th f 
 century of the Christian era, long after the old sun-worship 
 had been exchanged for the rational religion of Mahommed. 
 
 In like manner the worship of the moon must have 
 sprung from that dependence on her lovely light which was 
 inevitable in an age of forests, when men had neither 
 lamps nor clocks to live by, and were surrounded by such 
 wild beasts as bows and arrows could do little to offend, 
 lions and tigers, hysenas, auroxen, and the great horned 
 Irish elk, wolves and wild boars, and the immense cave 
 bear, the elephant, and the rhinoceros. 
 
 Without the waxing and waning moon man would have 
 taken no account of time ; no weeks, no months, nothing 
 but the long cycle of the year. The idea of sequence was 
 bound up with the moon ; she became the goddess of or- 
 der, made story-telling possible, and lovers' assignations, 
 and parliaments. On the worship of the moon the whole 
 Druidic system of law, as well as ceremonial, leaned ; and 
 when its canons were abrogated and its usages were sup- 
 pressed by Christianity, they still continued to exist as 
 popular superstitions. The majority of farmers, to this 
 very day, regulate their planting and felling of timber, 
 their pruning and grafting, by the phases of the moon ; 
 while their wives in the kitchen would find all their yarn 
 untwist, and all their soap go back, unless they consulted 
 the almanac. 
 
 In one or two instances modern experimental science has 
 actually reinforced the ancient superstitious observance of 
 the moon. It is now well understood that young plants, 
 like human babies, must have plenty of rest. If they shoot 
 
 * Mariette (Apercu, &c, 1867) accounts for the lack of monuments of 
 the 15th and 16th dynasties by the invasion of the Hyksos. Bunsen 
 agrees that they came in with the 4th king of the 13th dynasty, but they 
 did not become legitimate sovereigns until the 1 7th dynasty. See Renan, 
 quoted below at the beginning of the 6th lecture.) The actual solar disc 
 fanatic who did the mischief was Axen-aten, who followed Thutmosis I. 
 of the 17th dynasty, his mother being a foreigner. — Indigenous Races, 
 Gliddon, 1857, p. il6. 
 
 f The Turkish dynasty of Ottoman sultans commenced in 1258. 
 
32 GENIUS OP THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [lECT. 
 
 up from the seed in the waning of the moon they enjoy 
 the repose of long, dark nights ; if in the growing moon, 
 their young life, over-stimulated, perishes, or suffers dete- 
 rioration, more or less. The latest observations make it cer- 
 tain that the sun-heat reflected from the full-moon's face is 
 sufficient to dispel clouds, and it must modify, therefore, 
 notably, the climate of the kitchen-garden. One of the 
 most brilliant astronomical discoveries of the last ten years 
 is that of the so-called Eleven- Year Cycle, during which 
 Jupiter and the other planets alternately collect upon one 
 side of the sun, and then at other times disperse themselves 
 around it; producing, in the one case, an abundant supply 
 of spots upon the sun's disc, with a corresponding lowering 
 of the climate of the earth; and, in the other case, the dis- 
 persion and disappearance of spots, and a higher mean 
 temperature for the earth. 
 
 These are merely instances showing how the instinct of 
 man may sometimes anticipate the final deductions of his 
 reasoning faculties ; and we are thus taught to despise 
 nothing, not even the follies of superstition. 
 
 Still less ought we to despise the ancient worships of the 
 sun and moon, inasmuch as our own notorious irreligion is 
 due to an insensibility to the benefits which we receive all 
 the time, and on all sides, from Nature, caused by our mo- 
 dern mastership of Nature. The slave-holder feels no gra- 
 titude to his slave ; the magician cannot worship the devils 
 who do his bidding ; therefore I have always thought that 
 the poet only showed his ignorance of human nature and of 
 the tendencies of natural science, when he wrote — f The 
 undevout astronomer is mad ! ' Ignorance has always been 
 the mother of devotion. The man who can hold the solar 
 system in his fist, and measure and weigh it with his scale 
 and compasses, and predict with accurate certainty what 
 its changed aspect will be a hundred thousand years be- 
 yond the term of his own appointed career upon the earth 
 — this man may worship his wife, his emperor, his coun- 
 try's flag, his science, justice and honour, and the Great 
 God of the invisible universe ; but certainly not any hea- 
 venly object, nor even God on account of the mere wonders 
 of His sky. 
 
 But in old times it was not so. The procession of planets 
 went on to and fro with the mystery and grandeur of a 
 
II.] ANCIENT AND HODEEN. 33 
 
 procession of priests ; and was so worshipped. The myste- 
 rious pole-star was the savage man's best friend, and the 
 sailor's also. The dog-star, rising as the snn went down, 
 just when the blessed inundation of the Nile promised a 
 harvest for the coming year, came in, of course, for a large 
 share of Egyptian love and reverence. Shepherds of 
 Persia and Arabia had nothing else to do, whole nights, 
 whole years, whole lifetimes, but to watch and wonder at 
 the many-coloured, slowly- shifting stars. They saw the 
 satellites of Jupiter without a telescope ; and by dividing 
 up a few hundred revolutions of each satellite by the num- 
 ber of nights of observation, they could arrive at its rate 
 of motion to a minute of time. The strange diversity of 
 names given to the constellations, the utter absence of 
 any harmonious system in the zodiac or out of it, the 
 purely fanciful and oftentimes inexplicable groupings of 
 the principal stars, all go to show how many minds, in 
 how many ages, helped the old astrology to assume the 
 shape in which we know it now. 
 
 Comets were a terror to the ancients because their 
 shape suggested war, and their flaming glare pestilence, 
 rushing through the sky like warriors with dishevelled 
 hair, and always at some epoch of convulsion, either 
 during the invasion of some bloody conqueror, or at the 
 death of some great leader. Volcanoes were, for the same 
 reason, or rather by the construction of the same unin- 
 stmcted fancy, made the abodes of malignant deities, per- 
 sonifications of those forces of nature not yet subjugated 
 by man's intellect. High mountain-peaks, the inaccessible 
 thrones of ice and snow, sources of thunder and lightning, 
 avalanches, and devastating floods, became the homes of 
 other gods, the enemies rather than the friends of man. 
 But, above all, the all-devouring ocean inspired terror in 
 the human breast, and this terror generated some of the 
 widest-spread superstitions connected with the ancient 
 mythologies. Serpent- worship, and Siva-worship, and 
 devil-worship in general, can be distinctly traced to it, as 
 I will show in a future lecture. The ship, which carried 
 man, and the stars which guided him across the trackless 
 sea, became personified into his favouring* deities, and 
 
 * ' If, most venerable man ! it is a disgrace and sin to forget God, it 
 is also a stain upon the virtue, and a dishonour upon the judgment, of 
 
 3 
 
34 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [LECT. 
 
 thus astrology linked itself with physical geography, as 
 astronomy has done in our day, to much better purpose. 
 
 Let me touch, in passing, upon the curious etymology of 
 the word 'star/ It is supposed to be explained by a 
 Sanscrit root signifying to stand, in Latin stare, alluding, 
 of course, to the immovable positions of the stars. But 
 the use of the star-shaped diagram in astrology suggests 
 another idea. The word for mountain is tor, expressed in 
 writing by a triangle, our letter D, the Greek A.* The 
 symbolic star with six points (for the heraldic star with 
 five points is not a star at all, but a mullet or spur), was 
 
 made by crossing two triangles )A (, and called the Sacred 
 
 Tor, S'toe, and was used thus, abundantly, by the ma- 
 gicians and cabbalists, as the background or framework of 
 their horoscopes. It seems to be one of those numerous 
 implantations of a later astrological mythology upon an 
 older pyramid or mountain- worship, with which I should 
 be loth just now to interrupt the subject of this lecture. 
 
 Confining our attention to the group of sciences to which 
 this lecture is devoted, it is plainly to be seen that their 
 utterly embryonic condition in ancient times, and the ab- 
 stract and cosmical character which they bear, make it 
 unlikely that we can get from them many concrete facts 
 respecting the earliest times of man. 
 
 I will begin with the science of Numbers. From what 
 we know of the notation of savage tribes of the present 
 day, we may infer with great certainty some of the intel- 
 lectual conditions of man's earliest residence upon the 
 planet. I leave to the next lecture the question how long 
 man has lived upon the earth. I take for granted also this 
 evening that his first appearance was in an undeveloped 
 condition of mind. The ideas of number which savages 
 of the present day possess are strangely limited : some of 
 the lowest tribes cannot count above three ; the Australians 
 
 any one, who has virtue and judgment, not to reverence you, who are a 
 very target of wonders, into which the stars, contending in your favour, 
 have shot all the arrows of their gifts.' — Letter of Arretino to Michael 
 Angelo, in Perkins 5 Tuscan Sculptors, vol. ii. p. 50. 
 
 * See Rawlinson's picture of the hill Koukab ('the star') in his Baby- 
 lon (about page 140). See also the fact that sb, a star -^- means not 
 only to adore, but a gate (or door). Bunsen, p. 537, Egypt, vol. i., 7th 
 determinative. 
 
II.] ANCIENT AND MODERN. 35 
 
 count only to four, and after that all numbers are to them 
 merely Kauwol-Kauwol, 'many/ or Bungu Galang, f very 
 many/ Many stop at five ; others count up to ten before 
 they begin again. The Sioux Indians, Dr Hayden tells 
 me, count upon their ten fingers and their ten toes, and 
 call that one man ; their first unit is therefore one, and 
 their second unit is twenty. Pliny Chase has discussed this 
 curious subject with great skill, to develope the funda- 
 mental ideas of the numbers on the basis of the names 
 which are given to them in many languages. He finds 
 that their very names show how feeble the mathematical 
 faculty of the savage must be. In some of these wild lan- 
 guages even the word for three means two and one ; four 
 means twice two ; five, three and two ; six and eight mean 
 the second three or the second four, &c. 
 
 Imagine, if you can, the barrier to mental development 
 which such an embryonic notation must be. Think of the 
 difference between making nine strokes, as the old Egyptian 
 had to do, and writing our Arabic numeral 9. Progress in 
 mathematical machinery was at first very slow ; yet our 
 cypher 8 is merely a more convenient form of the old 
 
 Egyptian ; " In some respects their notation seems 
 
 simpler than ours, as when they represented 10 by (), 100 
 
 by (D, 1000 by ^ , 10,000 by ^, 1,000,000 by 2) , and 
 
 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 by 4*. 
 
 But it was not really so ; for nothing can excel the utility 
 and simplicity of our decimal system, unless it be a similar 
 system with a decimal of 8, or 12, or 16, instead of 10. 
 Any advance in true physical science was impossible in 
 early times merely for want of some such counting machine. 
 The first ages of humanity were devoted to darkness be- 
 cause all numbers beyond a score or a hundred were alike 
 uncountable. In fact, there is a natural dislike to mathe- 
 matics in the untutored mind ; it brings too great a strain 
 upon the intellect. You remember the Arab Sheik's reply 
 to Layard's friend : — c Although I have passed all my days f 
 in this place, I have neither counted the houses, nor in- 
 quired into the number of the inhabitants. Shall we say, 
 
36 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [LECT. 
 
 Behold this star spinneth round that star, and this other 
 star with a tail goeth and cometh in so many years ? Let 
 it go ! God will guide it.' This of itself is sufficient to 
 explain the reckless chronologies of early days, and the 
 unblushing coolness with which thousands of years were 
 , lavished on the reigns (or life-times) of half-a-dozen genera- 
 / tions. 
 
 And yet, the occurrence of those immense numbers at 
 the beginning of the Egyptian and Indian history hints to 
 us the existence of some profound consciousness of an im- 
 mense preceding antiquity, residing in the ancient mind. 
 The old bards were aware that the race had been tens of 
 thousands of years upon the earth, from considerations of 
 architecture, and traditions, now lost, just as we have been 
 made aware of it by considerations of a geological nature. 
 Hence it was natural for them to make a rude calculation 
 of the precession of the equinoxes, and fix the date of the 
 beginning of the Egyptian empire at 35,000 years. 
 
 Now it is in taking up such rude calculations of the an- 
 cients, and making them more precise, and applying them 
 with a cultivated common sense, that modern Mathematics 
 and Astronomy find a chance to employ themselves about 
 the question of the original conditions of our race. The 
 discussions over the zodiac of Denderah, although they 
 resulted in proving it to be a mere astrological diagram of 
 no astronomical value whatever, and therefore useless to 
 the historian, were still of use in opening up other and 
 more fruitful resources. The fables of antiquity are often 
 good ethnological guides, and some of these come within 
 challenge of this mathematic group of sciences. 
 
 Take for an example one of Kepler's most happy hits. 
 It is rather too modern an instance, for it relates to an 
 event dating less than 2000 years back. But it is a fine 
 illustration of the treatment which the modern sciences 
 are prepared to give to any ancient record that may be 
 brought under their notice. Kepler was engaged in cal- 
 culating backwards the orbits of our two largest planets, 
 Saturn and Jupiter, when, to his astonishment and great 
 delight, he saw that one of their conjunctions, and one of 
 the very closest and most splendid that they had ever 
 had, happened, under the most favourable circumstances 
 for seeing it, precisely at the birth of Christ, as given in 
 
II.] ANCIENT AND MODERN. 37 
 
 tlie books. Of course the legend of the star in the East 
 was at once explained in its most essential features. 
 
 In like manner, taking an example a few centuries 
 farther back, the recalculation of the eclipse of Thales has 
 become the starting-point of the chronologists in their 
 rectification of the old Greek tables. 
 
 Going back much farther, some of the most important 
 Egyptian dates have been obtained by calculating the 
 heliacal rising of Sirius, and other stars, watched by the 
 Egyptians on account of their connection with that vitally 
 interesting event to them, the beginning inundation of the 
 Nile. Much of that old mythology receives an easy ex- 
 planation in this way. 
 
 I have just alluded to the use made of the precession of 
 the equinoxes. A similar use is made of the ellipticity of 
 the earth's orbit. A discussion is going on (at present) 
 respecting the effect upon old climates, which a regular 
 variation in the shape of the orbit of the earth must have 
 produced. Laplace calculated the maximum and minimum 
 of this ellipticity, and commenced the calculation of the 
 length of time required to lengthen it out to its longest, 
 and then to reduce it to its roundest, form. The subject 
 has been taken up lately by others, to show that while 
 the corrected mean distance of the earth from the sun is 
 just now about 93 millions of miles, there must have oc- 
 curred, at enormous intervals of time, periodically, such 
 elongations and contractions of the orbit as to bring the 
 earth during one season of the year within 85 millions of 
 miles of the sun, and during another part of the year to 
 carry it off 105 millions. This extreme ellipticity, how- 
 ever, must take place in a different direction each time, so 
 that the closeness of the earth to the sun will sometimes 
 coincide with the summer of the northern hemisphere, and 
 sometimes with its winter. When it coincides with sum- 
 mer, then the northern hemisphere must suffer the most 
 extraordinary variations of temperature, the absolute ex- 
 tremes of both summer and winter, during which it is hard 
 to see how human life could be successfully preserved 
 upon the earth. Such was the glacial epoch — all the 
 glacial epochs. On the other hand, when the earth re- 
 cedes farthest during summer, and approaches nearest 
 during winter, in the northern hemisphere, the amount of 
 
/ 
 
 38 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES,, [LECT. 
 
 "heat received from day to day from the sun must be almost 
 invariable round the whole year. Then reigns perennial 
 spring. Then animal and vegetable life holds its millennial 
 holiday. Such was the carboniferous era — all the car- 
 boniferous eras. 
 
 I did not mean this evening to touch upon the geological 
 antiquity of man, reserving that for the next lecture, but 
 you will see at once that this astronomical question of 
 the ellipticity of the earth's orbit bears directly and 
 heavily upon the date of man's origin. If the last max- 
 imum ellipticity happened, say 100,000 years ago, causing 
 the last glacialism of the northern hemisphere, and if we 
 can find any facts connecting that glacial condition of the 
 earth with the remains of man, then the conclusions so 
 derived must influence other lines of inquiry. And yet it 
 is but one very little streak of light, mere candle-light, 
 which astronomy throws in among the shadows of those 
 Robin Hood and Robinson Crusoe days of mankind. 
 
 2. Another such glimmer of poor information is furnished 
 by Physical Geography, the marvellously zealous and pro- 
 ductive pursuit of which, within the present century, bears 
 to the geography of the ancients about the same propor- 
 tions, which the results of modern astronomy bear to the 
 dreams of ancient astrology. To feel the full force of this 
 comparison you need only lay upon your table the poor 
 little sketch-map of Ptolemy; then spread abroad upon 
 your floor the sheets of the Swiss, French, Swedish, or 
 British topographical surveys. In the former all is mon- 
 strous and confused, not a latitude or longitude correct ; 
 not a line or part of a line in any portion of it represent- 
 ative of truth ; the small is large, the large is small ; and 
 fancy fills up spaces where the scanty and untrustworthy 
 reports of travellers have failed. In the latter every moun- 
 tain-peak is established by a reference to some measured 
 base line ; every stream is traced with compass and level 
 up to its tiny rivulets; every man's possessions are de- 
 fined as if the entire map was but a recorded deed of 
 purchase ; his house, his garden, even the footpath which 
 has at its stile the warning sign-board, ' beware of spring- 
 guns/ is laid down. Four miles beyond the walls of the 
 city of Bourges the geographers of France have erected 
 a pyramidal monument which marks, with true French 
 
XI.] ANCIENT AND MODEKN. 39 
 
 idealism but with French mathematical accuracy, the pre- 
 cise centre of France as it was before the annexation 
 of Nice and Savoy. At every mile along the southern 
 boundary of Pennsylvania, Mason and Dixon planted pillars 
 of stone which still remain. On the top of Mount Desert, 
 Wachusett, the Blue Hill in Milton, and a thousand other 
 eminences along the Atlantic seaboard, stand the remains 
 of the heliotropes of Hassler, Bache, and Borden, their 
 relative positions determined by hundreds of thousands of 
 observations, to the fraction of a linear foot.* Russia and 
 India are being mapped with the same accuracy and par- 
 ticularity. Even the hideous deserts of Asia, and the 
 hitherto inaccessible interior table-lands of Africa, are 
 falling into shape under the analytical studies which 
 Murchison and the men of the London Royal Geographical 
 Society are incessantly making from the itineraries and 
 sketches and astronomical observations of Mann and Liv- 
 ingstone, Burton and Speke, and Grant and Barr, and the 
 brothers Schlagintweit, and a hundred other daring ex- 
 plorers, too many of whom have already paid the forfeit 
 of their enthusiasm with their lives. 
 
 We look in vain for any analogue of this accurate science 
 in ancient days. 
 
 It is true, Col. Vyse, Mr Turner, and the Astronomer 
 Royal of Scotland, Mr Piazzi Smith, have published the 
 most remarkable things concerning the great pyramid of 
 Cheops. For, according to them, it must have been laid 
 out, not by Benjamin Franklin's great-grandson, but by 
 his great-grandfather, 250 generations removed. They 
 find its base to be a precise aliquot part of the circumfer- 
 ence of the earth. They find all its proportions to be geo- 
 metrical and astronomical. The angle of its sides, the 
 slope of its galleries, the distances from chamber to cham- 
 ber within it they show to be obtainable by compass and 
 scale. The granite chest in its central chamber, they say, 
 is no sarcophagus : it is a vast standard bushel, containing 
 
 * Eight hundred counties in the Northern States have been mapped 
 so as to show every house and the owner's name ; and a complete set of 
 these maps is preserved in the Library of the British Museum. 
 
 The whole valley of the Mississippi has been crossbarred by the sur- 
 veyors of the government of the United States at intervals of six miles, 
 north and south, east and west. 
 
40 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [LECT. 
 
 precisely four English quarterns of corn. And, more than 
 all, they think they prove that the builders of this gigantic 
 meter for all time must have come from a distance (per- 
 haps from Mesopotamia), in search of some such place as 
 Memphis, where the relations of latitude could come har- 
 moniously in among the other geometrical relationships 
 which were to be made constants for all science, in this 
 pyramid.* 
 
 However true all this may be, it goes but a short dis- 
 tance towards our purpose. It is certainly equally true 
 that no practical applications of such sequence, if it really 
 existed, was ever made in ancient times on any scale de- 
 serving of mention by a modern man. The maps which 
 ancient Hindu and Chinese books contain are caricatures. 
 The oceans, as we know them, were to the ancients a river 
 coiled seven times round the entire world inhabited by man ; 
 or, at best, a rim of water round an island continent, up from 
 which, and down again into which, the sun and heavenly 
 systems rose and sank from day to day. A few grand 
 thinkers had indeed concluded that the earth was not a 
 circular plate, but a globe hung in space : but nothing 
 came of this conjecture but that which was in its turn con- 
 jecture. The Chinese early knew the magnetic needle ; • but 
 not how to work out their geography with it, in combina- 
 tion with the telescope and spirit-level. Each traveller had 
 a different story to tell: the geographer was bewildered 
 with their contradictory reports. The skein could never 
 be unravelled, because the beginning of it could not be 
 found ; for the sine qua non of modern topography is a 
 measured base to start with, and the ancients were not up 
 to that, although their Euclid is our God of Cambridge. 
 But Euclid is one of the moderns. 
 
 It is a very great pity that the ancient world has left us 
 no records of physical geography to compare with our own 
 observations. Had we correct hypsometrical tables of the 
 heights of the Alps as they were 5000 years ago, what 
 light that would throw, not only upon the rate and amount 
 of the submergence or emergence of the European Conti- 
 
 * The beautiful applicatiou of physical science, in the double shape of 
 the magnesium light and the sensitive photographic plate, to the elucida- 
 tion of the ancient mysteries of the chambers and galleries of the great 
 pyramid, should not be passed unnoticed. 
 
II.] ANCIENT AND MODEEN. 41 
 
 nent, but upon the migrations of its early inhabitants. 
 Eight centuries ago, for instance, those dangerous passes 
 in the Alps, which the traveller now can hardly find a guide 
 to pilot him through, were common highroads of communi- 
 cation between the Swiss and the Italian villages. A suc- 
 cession of cold seasons lengthens all the Swiss glaciers 
 sensibly, and increases the privations of the mountaineers. 
 There was a time when the isolated glaciers of the Alps 
 formed one; covered the whole watershed; spread its edges 
 over the low lands, filled up the lakes, banked against the 
 Jura, and probably connected themselves with vast sheets 
 of ice and snow around the world, to the detriment, if not 
 to an almost complete destruction, of sections of the human 
 race. The science of Meteorology, has much to teach us 
 on this subject. Then there are all the questions of climate 
 connecting themselves with the rise of mountains, the 
 formation of new sea-currents by fresh volcanic submarine 
 obstructions, and the spread and disappearance of great 
 forests, all of them determining some fresh investigation 
 into the earlier state of man, both in historic and in pre- 
 historic times. 
 
 What we most miss and need are ancient records of 
 these physical changes. 
 
 Had we even a rough outline of the delta of the Nile, 
 made no farther back than the twelfth dynasty of the pyra- 
 mid-builders, how much nearer we could come to the an- 
 swer of that vexed question, whether Egypt was settled 
 from Asia, or from Africa ; whether the black man or the 
 white "man be the elder brother. If the Rig- Veda, instead 
 of being a jumble of ceremonial hymns to fire and water, 
 were a single tolerably well-constructed map of the valley 
 of the Ganges, and the country behind the Sunderbunds, 
 how much vain argument respecting the value of the Yug 
 chronology and the antiquity of the Turanian tribes of 
 the Ghauts and Deccan would have been saved ! All 
 science, to become efficient, must become comparative ; 
 this is its second stage. To settle the earliest history we 
 need the combined efforts of comparative geography, com- 
 parative zoology, and comparative philology. But compara- 
 tive geography, or, as we usually call it, Physical Geography, 
 which, after describing the present status of the earth's 
 features, argues back to what they have been, and seeks 
 
42 GENIUS OP THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES. 
 
 out both the laws which governed the change, and the 
 effects which it produced upon living beings, especially on 
 man — Comparative Geography is, after all, only one phase 
 of Geology. I will therefore close this lecture here, and 
 promise to take up in the course of the next the points 
 which have been just suggested. 
 
 I shall discuss the Geological Antiquity of Man, as proved 
 by his fossil remains, in connection with the relics of ex- 
 tinct animals ; the proofs we have of great geographical 
 changes during the human period ; the value of various 
 scales of years which geologists have endeavoured to apply 
 to the residence of man upon the earth, and the ground of 
 the now commonly accepted division of antiquity into three 
 definite periods — the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the 
 Iron Age. And I shall endeavour to make these questions 
 clear by diagrams to the eye, although I may not be able 
 to make their answers wholly convincing to the judgment 
 of my audience. 
 
43 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 THE GEOLOGICAL ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 
 
 The antiquity of mankind, — the dignity of mankind, — 
 the unity of mankind : — these are the three great prelimi- 
 nary questions of ancient history. Three separate sciences 
 take charge of them. The antiquity of mankind is a geo- 
 logical problem. The dignity of mankind in the scale of 
 nature is to be chiefly decided by zoology, or comparative 
 anatomy. The moot question of the unity or diversity of 
 the race begins the studies of the ethnologist. 
 
 All three questions have been settled for us, as you are 
 probably but too well aware, many centuries ago, by that 
 ' science falsely so called/ Theology. And it really seems 
 to be a work of clear supererogation to commence the in- 
 vestigation again. Are we not assured that the world is 
 only about 6000 years old ? That man was made on the 
 sixth day of its existence ? Does it not stand so written 
 in the books of Moses ? Do we not also know that man 
 was created upright before he fell, and of a grade but little 
 lower than the angels ; and that his spirit goeth upwards, 
 while that of the beast goeth downwards ? All this is too 
 distinctly written by holy men of old, who wrote as they 
 were moved by the Holy Ghost, to be called in question 
 for a moment. Even the smallest particulars are put at 
 the service of our curiosity to be received with implicit 
 faith : — how that God made one Adam first ; then cast him 
 into sleep, took from his side a rib and made a woman of it, 
 and how, from these twain, sprang all nations, and peoples, 
 and kindreds, and tongues, that dwell upon the surface 
 of the whole earth, white and black, yellow and brown, 
 dwarfish Esquimaux, and gigantic Patagonians, woolly- 
 haired Melanesians and beautiful Greeks, Jews with great 
 noses and Chinese with cat-like eyes, upon every con- 
 
44 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 
 
 tinent and in every remote island of the sea. The books 
 of Moses are believed to inform us absolutely of these 
 facts, in language as unmistakably plain as we could 
 desire to have it; as plainly, in fact, as they inform us 
 that the earth was made three days before the sun, thus 
 settling for us the nebular hypothesis, and various other 
 little difficulties, of an astronomical nature, which arise 
 out of the rotation of the earth and planets, according to 
 the Oopernican system. 
 
 It is surprising how indifferent men of science seem to be 
 to these great statements ! Thousands of preachers proclaim 
 them from the pulpit every Sunday in the year; and 
 millions of communicants respond — Amen ! And yet our 
 men of science continue sceptical, and call them, as the 
 apostles did, old-wives' fables. They believe them in- 
 deed to be old Jew-legends, so palpably heathenish and 
 contrary to all we now know, that it is not worth while to 
 try to show their absurdity. But they add, more seriously, 
 that these old fables are no part of Christian theology; 
 that they have been foisted into the body of Christian 
 divinity to save the brains of the silly, to sustain the 
 tyranny of the clergy, and to excuse the vices of the 
 laity; and that they are already disappearing frOm the 
 public faith so fast under the influence of public school- 
 education, that no especial notice need any more be taken 
 of them. It is a noteworthy fact that the books which 
 periodically appear in the shops upon the Harmony of 
 Science and Eeligion, or upon the Eelations of Genesis to 
 Geology, are written by clergymen ; and all of them in the 
 service of Jewish theology. All alike, men of science will 
 no longer even read them, but look with as despairing an 
 eye upon those who write them as Christiana's party did 
 upon the man whom they found asleep upon the enchanted 
 ground. 
 
 ' And that place was all grown over with briars and 
 thorns, excepting here and there where was an enchanted 
 arbour,* upon which if a man sits, or in which if a man 
 sleeps, it is a question, some say, whether ever he shall rise 
 or wake again in this world. Over this forest therefore 
 they went, both one and another, and Mr Greatheart went 
 
 * Yiz. a pulpit. 
 
II J.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 45 
 
 before, for that he was the guide; and Mr Valiant-for- 
 Truth came behind, being rear-guard. Now they had not 
 gone far, but a great mist and darkness fell upon them all. 
 Wherefore they were forced for some time to feel for one 
 another by words, for they walked not by sight. But any 
 one must think that here was but sorry going for the best 
 of them all ; but how much worse for the women and chil- 
 dren, who both of feet and heart were but tender. They 
 went on till they came to where there was an arbour, 
 wherein lay two men whose names were Heedless and 
 Too-bold. Then the guide did shake them, and do what 
 he could to disturb them. Then said one of them, I will 
 pay you when I take my money. At which the guide 
 shook his head. I will fight so long as I can hold the 
 sword in my hand, said the other. At that one of the 
 children laughed/ 
 
 Through this enchanted land men of science have learned 
 to hurry on, without any longer even making such benevo- 
 lent but futile efforts to awaken the sleepers in its arbours. 
 Let us start fair this evening with the discussion of the 
 first of the three problems which I have mentioned, viz. 
 the geological antiquity of man. To do this we must make 
 up our minds to part company with the schoolmen. There 
 is no alliance possible between Jewish Theology and 
 Modern Science. They are irreconcilable enemies. Ge- 
 ology in its present advancement cannot be brought more 
 easily into harmony with the Mosaic cosmogony than with 
 the Gnostic, the Vedic, or the Scandinavian. It has 
 escaped fully and finally from its subjection to the Creed. 
 Sindbad has made the little red man of the sea, who sat 
 so long on his shoulders, tipsy with new wine, tossed him 
 to the ground, and crushed his wicked old head with a 
 stone. Sindbad is free. Geologists have won the right 
 to be Christians without first becoming Jews. 
 
 The arguments for any geological fact, which is at all a 
 comprehensive one, are gathered only by years of patient 
 and laborious observation, not in the closet, but in the 
 field, the cabinet and the laboratory. A thousand fruitless 
 journeys before success can crown the search ! A thousand 
 false hypotheses before the true theory is established ! A 
 thousand mistakes of observation published before they 
 can get corrected ! Consequently, the literature of the 
 
46 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 
 
 science is something enormous and appalling. Every new 
 step in advance, while it becomes in one sense easier, in 
 another sense becomes more difficult to make. Outsiders, 
 charlatans, tyros, sciolists, have no chance at all. They 
 must take everything on testimony. There was a time 
 when the Dean of Westminster in his study could be a 
 tolerable geologist. That time is past. No man who does 
 not go out and grapple with nature, wrestling with this 
 angel through the long dark night, receives the blessing 
 when the sun is up. The knight who will take initiation 
 into these mysteries, must make his vigil on the floor of 
 the great church, equipped in full armour, fasting and 
 alone, chaste, silent, brave. It is impossible for a mere 
 reader of LyelPs Elements, or a mere listener to Sedge- 
 wick's lectures, to get that profound faith, that overpower- 
 ing conviction of the reality of former creations, and of 
 their incalculably great antiquity, which is as natural to 
 the working field-hand in palaeontology, as is his faith in 
 the good God, or in his own past life. If I speak, there- 
 fore, dogmatically, to-night, you will understand that the 
 great first truths of Geology have been so seen and touched, 
 and tasted, that they are no longer speculations, but expe- 
 riences ; no longer objects of belief, but of absolute know- 
 ledge. Geology is not in its infancy ; it has reached a ripe 
 maturity. Its greater truths need no further testimony, 
 no more copious illustration than they already have. And 
 it is only of such that I will just now speak. Doubtful 
 things will come up afterwards. 
 
 Before touching the antiquity of man, I must give you 
 a clear conception of the immense antiquity of the earth. 
 
 If you see a stone house a-building, you know that the 
 foundation walls were built first, and that the cut courses 
 must have been laid in an ascending order. You know 
 this with absolute certainty. The most direct outside re- 
 velation from God could not make it plainer, nor add to 
 the force of your conviction. Nor could the worker of a 
 thousand miracles before your eyes shake this conviction 
 for an instant. Now, Geology is the science of this convic- 
 tion applied to the crust of the earth, as an unfinished build- 
 ing of stone, the courses of which have been laid in suc- 
 cessive days. It has its Metamorphic foundations, its 
 Palaeozoic surbase story, its stately superstructure of Se- 
 
III.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 47 
 
 condary and Tertiary rocks, and its Volcanic pinnacles. 
 The workmen with their tools are still upon its highest 
 scaffolding. The forms of Lapithse and Centaurs fill all 
 the metopes of its entablature. The pediment is even now 
 receiving its Olympic synod in low and high relief. Created 
 6000 years ago, and in a single day ! You might as well 
 affirm that Coin cathedral was begun and finished before 
 breakfast yesterday. You might as well believe that 
 other oriental story of Aladdin's palace. 
 
 Three points claim especial attention. The first point 
 is the characteristic geological feature of superposition. 
 The waters of the globe have been spreading 'one layer 
 of sand and gravel over another, one layer of mud over 
 another, one layer of limestone and marl over another, 
 without intermission, without haste, with the greatest re- 
 gularity, for many millions of years, until the whole thick- 
 ness of such aqueous sediments as are known to us, 
 amounts to no less than 16,000 fathoms, say 20 miles, from 
 top to bottom. And when we remember that what we call 
 the bottom of these sediments is no true bottom layer, but 
 merely the lowest limit of our observations thus far pos- 
 sible, we feel ourselves at liberty to carry back the era of 
 commencement to an indefinite distance. 
 
 The next point to be insisted upon is the division of the 
 time, represented by this 20 miles of sediment, into four or 
 five successive ages ; and the subdivision of each of these 
 ages into successive systems ; each system into successive 
 formations ; each formation into successive beds ; and each 
 bed into laminse or fine layers, no thicker in some cases 
 than a sheet of foreign letter-paper. All these different 
 ages are as well characterized by distinctive features as 
 the ages of architecture are by different styles. No tra- 
 veller thinks of disputing with a local archaeologist while 
 he is showing him the curiosities and beauties of a cathe- 
 dral or abbey church, founded in one century, enlarged in 
 another, partially rebuilt in another, and restored and 
 beautified in his own day. There is no mistaking the 
 Eoman age of the towers of Jumieges, nor the Norman 
 age of its roofless nave, nor the later date of its ruined 
 pointed Gothic choir. A glance is sufficient to decide that 
 the facade of the Chateau de Galliou could not have been 
 designed by any architect who lived when the baths of 
 
48 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 
 
 Nero were put up. So a glance from the stage-coach is 
 sufficient for the experienced geologist to tell whether he 
 be riding through an old Laurentian or Huronian region, 
 or among Palseozoic mountains, or over the later estuary 
 sands of the New Red, or over the still more modern plains 
 of the Chalk and Greensand formations. And this char- 
 acterization of sediments of different ages is carried out in 
 nature so completely, and to such minuteness of detail, 
 that the good local geologist can recognize, by the very 
 surface soil and incidental shapings of the hill- sides, upon 
 what particular belt of one formation he is riding, whether 
 the rocks around him belong, for instance, to the Upper 
 coal measures, or to the Lower ; to the upper, the middle,, 
 or the lower Silurian. You can easily imagine what an 
 impression of time this makes upon the thoughtful mind. 
 
 The Hebrew legend of the creation describes the separa- 
 tion of the waters from the dry land as having been de- 
 termined by a creative act upon the third day, and fixed 
 for all time. The fact is, that no fixed relation of land and 
 water has ever been established for the surface of the globe. 
 From the beginning land and water have been exchanging 
 places. Every acre of the land-surface of the earth, which 
 geology has examined, bears indubitable marks of having 
 been not simply overflowed, but actually created at the 
 bottom of the ocean. And it is needless for me to tell this 
 audience what proofs we have that every part of every coast 
 of every ocean is, this evening, while I say it, either rising 
 slowly from the waters, or sinking slowly into them. Can 
 any phenomenon enhance more highly than this our ideas of 
 geological time ? Yet when we come to feel the full force 
 of the terms Erosion, Denudation, as applied to the present 
 surface of the earth, by which, through the slow wear and 
 tear of centuries — millenniums — of fiery summer suns and 
 wintry frosts, sedate glaciers and mad torrents, trickling 
 rills and mouldering damps, sharp rootlets thrust in cracks 
 and lichens softening the toughest rock, the very Alps 
 have been wasted half away, and where once even mightier 
 Alpine ranges ran, now nothing but a continent of rounded, 
 grassy, forest-covered hills, remains; — still more, were I to 
 give you proofs at hand of the repetition of this work in 
 all the past ages of the world, and show you the wasted 
 outlines of hills and valleys in the inside of the crust itself, 
 
III.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN, 49 
 
 fossil erosions, hills and valleys embedded like bones and 
 shells under whole formations of rock sediment,— you 
 would begin to feel the overwhelming weight of geological 
 time, and be disposed to cry— 'Tis but another name for 
 an eternity. 
 
 . I might illustrate this subject of erosion by many 
 beautiful instances,— such as ravines a thousand feet deep 
 through prismatic lava fields ; caves which were once but 
 one, now separated by a river with cliff walls; fissures 
 filled with what was once rock-oil, afterwards dried into a 
 vein of bituminous coal, and now exposed to view on both 
 sides of a wide deep valley. If anything has taken time 
 it has been this mouldering down of the successive surfaces 
 of the planet. 
 
 The third point of prime importance is one that brings 
 us close to the subject of our lecture. Every geological 
 age has had its own different and special inhabitants, — its 
 successive creations of life-forms. Each geological system, 
 even each successive formation, has entombed the remains 
 of millions of zoophites, plants and animals, peculiar to 
 that particular stage of the earth's history, and to no 
 other. I say nothing now of any supposed progression of 
 ideas in the creative intelligence embodied in these forms : 
 this would come in better* shape before us in the next 
 lecture. I argue nothing here for or against the theory of 
 instantaneous creation ; or the opposite theory of spon- 
 taneous development of one set of forms out of another. I 
 wish to confine your attention just now to the established 
 fact, that no geologist can possibly mistake Silurian rocks 
 for Devonian, or Devonian for Permian, or Permian for 
 Cretaceous, or Cretaceous for Postpleiocene, when he has 
 once caught sight of even only a small collection of their 
 fossils. Nature is no Brummagem manufacturer of old 
 Greek coins or Pharaonic scarabasi to be re-sold to travel- 
 lers at the foot of the Pyramids, or in the great hall at 
 Carnac. In fact, as if to prevent the possibility of such 
 deception, the truth-loving Creator has marked shells of 
 similar shapes,* but of different ages, with such delicate but 
 unmistakable variations of detail, that we must stand more 
 and more amazed, not only at the infinite resources, but 
 
 . * E.g. the microscopic dentation discovered by Agassiz in the interior 
 lamellae of one of two shells in all outward respects undistinguishable. 
 
 4 
 
50 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 
 
 at the inflexible integrity of his skill. Surely lie designed 
 that men should not deceive themselves. 
 
 Do you not see what a mistake was made by the fine 
 old Hebrew poet who sang the Mosaic song when he 
 separated the creation of the land and waters, from the 
 creation of the fish and air-breathing animals, fixing the 
 former on the third day, and the latter on the fifth and 
 sixth ? But let us do him justice. His is a poem, not a 
 text-book. He could only see the phenomena of the world 
 in the twilight of his times; but his genius grasped them, 
 even thus half seen, in a poetic order, wonderfully like the 
 actual. Nor was it possible for him to describe them, 
 complicated as they are in nature. With the same ample 
 grandeur, but without the horrors that surround the circu- 
 lar stages of Dante's Hell, he has resumed under seven 
 heads the wonders of the universe ; and the order of 
 ascending worth which they bore in -his own mind tallied 
 with that which in the Divine idea compelled the suc- 
 cessive stages of development in the history of the earth. 
 
 Conceive now the illimitable stretch of ages upon ages, 
 occupied in the production, establishment, increase, de- 
 cline, extinction, and substitution, of these grand ranges 
 of successive worlds of vegetable and animal organisms, 
 all perfect in themselves, all differing from one another, 
 all harmonizing with the growing physics of the planet, 
 and leading slowly, but surely, up to man. Could God 
 have made all this at once ? I speak not of a puckish, 
 brutal Demiurge, fond of such practical jokes ; he could. 
 I speak of the Christian's Cod of truth, the loving ' Father 
 who is in heaven/ Would it not have been a flagrant 
 imposition upon intelligence, — a complicated and most 
 flagitious forgery ? Heaven could scarcely have devised 
 such a barmecide feast to set before the hungry intellect 
 of man. 
 
 Nor is the difficulty diminished by calling a day a thou^ 
 sand years. We have in palseontology the records of a 
 thousand ages. Many of the old limestone strata are en- 
 tirely made up of corals, and their triturated debris. Some 
 of the old Devonian mud-rocks are mere masses of the 
 casts of brachiopods, of every size from the youngest to 
 the oldest. Some of the coal-measure shales are leaved 
 
III.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 51 
 
 like a book, and every leaf glistens with delicate* fresh- 
 water shells. In the Deep-river basin of North Carolina 
 millions of fish-teeth lie packed away between two layers 
 of coal which lie but two feet apart. There are more than 
 a hundred beds of coal in a single coal-system, each of 
 which is the result of the growth of a peat-bog, swamp, 
 and forest, of a separate age ; to say nothing of the many 
 fathoms of rocks which intervene between each one coal-bed 
 and the next in order over it; during which long interval 
 of time the land must have been too deep beneath the 
 water level to permit of vegetation.* The fossil dung of 
 the fish which swam the seas during the deposition of the 
 chalk of England, was so abundant, that the farmers about 
 Cambridge collect it, as it is set free from the mother-rock 
 by denudation, and use it to manure their lands. 
 
 Professor Heer, of Zurich, has lately published, in his 
 admirable Geology of Switzerland, a minute history of one 
 single formation, only 36 feet thick, which he divides into 
 18 beds. It tells a striking story of change and time, 
 which we need only multiply by thousands to get some 
 adequate notion of the antiquity of the earth. 
 
 Until about 30 years ago the great geological question 
 for those who busied themselves with the higher problems 
 of life was this : Why do not the remains of man appear 
 among the fossil treasures of the earth ? Here the theo- 
 logians always had the geologists upon the hip. If the 
 earth is so old, they triumphantly clamoured, why does not 
 man share in its antiquity ? Show us a fossil human bone 
 — a fragment of his skull ; a single tooth will satisfy us, if 
 it be imbedded fairly in one of your fossiliferous rocks. 
 
 To this there was but one reply : Wait ! 
 
 The ethnologists, the archaeologists, the egyptologists, 
 were in the same predicament, and shared to some extent 
 in the embarrassment of the paleontologists. They had 
 
 * There are reasons, in my opinion, to believe that many of the inter- 
 vals, where they consist of sand, were rather raised above than lowered 
 into the water. The calamites, rooted at different heights in the sandy 
 strata of the Glass Bay coast of Cape Breton, seem to argue in that di- 
 rection. Either emergence or submergence would necessarily put a stop 
 to a coal-bed's growth. Probably both explanations are equally admissible 
 in their proper places. 
 
52 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 
 
 found human skeletons in ancient caves, mixed with bones 
 of animals, some of them foreign to the countries in which 
 the caves existed. But there was no date to be assigned 
 with any certainty to these ossuary deposits ; there was no 
 proof positive that they were not swept into these caves by 
 comparatively modern freshets. It was easy to assert, and 
 hard to disprove, that the caves were not the habitations, 
 or at all events places of refuge, for the early races of man- 
 kind, and that these fed upon the animals whose bones 
 were mixed with their own skeletons; or, on the other 
 hand, the caves might have been the dens of hyenas, whose 
 bones were found in some of them in great numbers ; and 
 it was reasonable to suppose that these predatory creatures 
 might have added human victims to the other evidences of 
 their omnivorous rapacity. The whole phenomenon was 
 one of such complexity and difficulty that it required a long 
 examination. These caves were discovered one by one in 
 England, in France, in Sicily, in Brazil, in fact, in all coun- 
 tries which, contain limestone regions. They are very nu- 
 merous ; they differ much in the number, kind, proportion, 
 and condition of their fossils ; but they almost all agree in 
 one principal feature — their bones are preserved from at- 
 mospheric decomposition by deposits of carbonate of lime, 
 slowly introduced by the infiltration of waters through their 
 roofs, forming stalactites above, and a floor of stalagmite, 
 which covers a red earth, in which the bones are buried. 
 The bones of man were rare compared with those of other 
 animals ; but, on the other hand, the instances of the dis- 
 covery of marks of t)iG presence of mtm were numerous, and 
 the number of stone and flint implements collected from 
 all the caves was very great. Yet it is not too strong an 
 affirmation, that after all the researches of Buckland and 
 Lyell, and Tournal and Schmerling, no one was satisfiel 
 how the thing would turn out ; what the age of the caves, 
 or of their contents, might be ; or what relation the human 
 relics really might bear to the remains of animals with 
 which they were intermixed, or to the geological sequence 
 of aqueous formations constituting the crust of the earth. 
 The individual explorers had their own opinions, but the 
 world of science, watching their labours, was not satisfied. 
 Buckland published his Reliquiae Diluvianse in 1823, in 
 which, he discussed the whole subject of organic forms 
 
III.] ANTIQUITY OF MAX. 53 
 
 found in the caves, the fissures, and the gravel-beds of 
 England, and concluded that the human remains which he 
 had found therein were not so old as the accompanying 
 fossils. It was a theological conclusion, and was accepted 
 with delight by the conservative science of England. In- 
 deed, it remained a shibboleth of geological orthodoxy in 
 England until about seven years ago,* when the acceptation 
 of a new series of discovered facts on the Continent broke 
 down the bigotry of the British school, and a general 
 stampede of the younger geologists took place to the other 
 side of the question. 
 
 In 1828, that is, five years after the appearance of 
 Buckland's book, two French gentlemen in the south of 
 France, MM. Tournal and Christol, examined and re- 
 ported on fbone caves atBize, and at Pondres nearMsmes, 
 in the Valley of the Gard. They had found human bones 
 and teeth, fragments of pottery in two styles, pointed 
 bones and flint hatchets and arrow-heads, cemented in a 
 mud breccia with living land shells, and the remains of both 
 recent and extinct animals, such as the hyena, rhinoceros, 
 stag, antelope, goat, Lithuanian Aurochs and Lapland 
 reindeer, the last of which is almost everywhere found 
 associated with the mammoth of France in ancient allu- 
 viums and cavern muds. These gentlemen also thought 
 they perceived unmistakable evidences of a time arrange- 
 ment, or stratification of the remains, such as quite set 
 aside the idea that the human relics were introduced 
 subsequently.^ 
 
 But there were Bucklandites in France also. M. 
 Desnoyers pointed to the Druid tumuli and dolmens of 
 the primitive inhabitants of Gaul, under which he had 
 found quantities of such flint hatchets and arrow-heads, 
 pointed bones and coarse pottery, mingled with the sacri- 
 
 * Although Priest M'Enery had early found flint tools under stalag- 
 mite in Kent's Hole, near Torquay ,• and Godwin Austen had published 
 in Trans. Geol. Soc. (vi. 1842), flints widely distributed in loam under 
 the Kent's Hole stalagmite. In 1858 the new Brixham Cave was ex- 
 amined by the Hoyal Society, and made Prestwich and Falconer antedi- 
 luvianists. 
 
 f Annales de Chimie et de Physique, p. 161, 1833, Christol. Notice 
 sur les ossements humains des cavernes du Gard. Montpellier, 1S29, 
 
 % Lyell, Antiq. of Maa, chap. iv. 1863. 
 
 c 
 
54 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 
 
 ficial bones of deer, sheep, dogs, wild boars, oxen, and 
 horses ; but no elephant, rhinoceros, hyena, tiger, or other 
 extinct species found in caves, had ever shown that these 
 aboriginal Celts had been their contemporaries.* 
 
 In 1833 appeared the great work f of Dr Schnierling of 
 Liege, in Belgium, who had been devoting several years 
 to the exploration of forty caverns in the valleys of the 
 river Meuse, the stalagmite floors of which had never 
 before been broken up. Here, mingled indiscriminately 
 with extinct bear, hyena, elephant, and rhinoceros, and 
 modern beaver, cat, wildboar, roebuck, hedgehog, and 
 wolf, above them and below them; and in the same degree 
 of preservation in all respects he found the rolled and 
 scattered bones of men. None of the common marks of 
 burial were seen. None of the bones were gnawed, as if 
 by animals. No coprolites, or fossil dung, of predatory 
 beasts were found ; the caves had not been dens. . The 
 osseous stratum was an undoubted aqueous deposit, 
 brought into the caverns, through fissures communicating 
 with the surface. Thousands of snail shells, and one 
 snake, a few fresh-water fish-bones, and the bones of 
 several birds, led to the same conclusion. 
 
 In the Engis cave, eight miles S.W. of Liege, fragments 
 of three human bodies (chiefly skulls) were found. The 
 now celebrated Engis skull lay buried, five feet deep, in 
 the mud beneath the alabaster covering, along with a 
 rhinoceros tooth and reindeer bones. 
 
 In the Engihoul cavern opposite, remains of at least 
 three bodies were discovered, chiefly belonging to the arms 
 and le'gs. 
 
 The Chokier cavern, two and a-half miles S.W. of 
 Liege, afforded many fragments of the bodies and limbs of 
 bears, but skulls were rare ; in other caves bear- skulls 
 were numerous, and trunk and limb bones rare ; at Goffon- 
 taine all parts were in proportion. In the Chokier cave he 
 found a polished bone needle with a hole pierced through 
 its base for an eye. Another cut bone was found in the 
 
 * Desnoyer, Bull, de la Soc. Geol. ii. 252. And S. Y. Caverne, Diet. 
 Univ. d'Hist. Nat. Paris, 1845. 
 
 f "Reclierches sur les ossements fossiles decouverts dans les cavernes 
 de la Provinee de Liege, 1833-1834. 
 
III.] ANTIQUITY OP MAN. 55 
 
 Engis cave ; and rude flint instruments, distributed through 
 red loam, were common in all the other caves. 
 
 Mankind were obviously then contemporary with the ex- 
 tinct carnivora and pachyderms. So much was certainly 
 made out. But still, it had not been proved that these 
 tropical creatures had ever lived in Europe. Schmerling 
 imagined therefore (that panacea for all geological difficult- 
 ies) a cataclysm or deluge, of undetermined date, which 
 had swept their bodies over from Africa, to bury them upon 
 the shores of the Northern seas. Whether they had first 
 been left as a diluvial deposit on the surface of the land, 
 and afterwards found their way into the caves, he did not 
 undertake to determine. And he still further puzzled the 
 whole question by asserting, that among the various re- 
 mains of other animals, he had found those of the South 
 American agouti, which, however, afterwards turned out 
 to be those of an extinct species of French porcupine. 
 
 Eight more years parsed in fruitless speculation ; during 
 which the patient Belgian continued to be let down by 
 ropes from the top of the crags, which make the valleys of 
 the Meuse the most picturesque in the world, and to crawl 
 on his hands and knees, pick in hand, through the drip- 
 ping caves and fissures, which penetrate the Devonian 
 limestone in every direction; visited by geologists and 
 archasologists, from all parts of Europe, who could only 
 tell him stories of similar discoveries, made by themselves 
 in other regions, but nothing new ; nothing to shed light 
 upon his splendid cabinet; nothing to solve the riddle by. 
 Then Isis smiled upon her puzzled priests, lifted another 
 corner of her veil, and made a new suggestion. The 
 answer to the conundrum began to shape itself at last in 
 intelligible words. 
 
 It was now 1841, when an old antiquary, walking out 
 from his chateau in the little city of Abbeville, through 
 which the highway runs from Boulogne-sur-mer to Paris, 
 where it crosses the river Somme, watched one day work- 
 men shovelling gravel from the quarries on the heights 
 beyond the city walls. Among the fantastic forms of 
 flint which they threw out, his quick, experienced eye 
 detected, as he thought, one that looked unnatural. He 
 picked it up and looked at it more carefully. Could he be 
 mistaken ? Had he not seen such in cabinets of anti- 
 
58 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 
 
 quities ? The more lie looked at it tlie more lie was con- 
 vinced that it had been tampered with; in fact, manu- 
 factured by the hands of man. Yet how could that be ? 
 He asked the workman to show him the exact spot from 
 which it had been shovelled. It was a bed of waterworn 
 and broken flints, deep beneath the surface, covered by a 
 deposit of loam, several yards in thickness.* None of the 
 other flints showed the same marks. They were rounded, 
 except where broken across, knobbed like potatoes when 
 they grow in a bunch attached together, and coated with a 
 crust of dull white substance due to the decomposition of 
 their surfaces. The piece he held in his hand, on the con- 
 trary, was of a regular shape, chipped to an edge on both 
 sides, and brought to a point at one end by the loss of a 
 multitude of little flakes, such as no attrition or percussion 
 in running waters could possibly effect. The other end 
 was round and still retained the dull white crust which 
 characterized the unmanufactured flints among which it 
 had lain embedded. He took it home. He went into his 
 museum. He compared it with stone hatchets, arrow- 
 points, spear-heads, chisels, and pointed tools of various 
 kinds which he had got from the Druid barrows and dol- 
 mens of Normandy. There was no mistaking its resem- 
 blance to these works of human art, some of which were 
 more carefully prepared, and were even polished ; but 
 others of them were quite as rude as the one' which he had 
 found, f 
 
 Here then was a discovery ! But he was enough of a 
 geologist to see all its difficulties. He must be still more 
 sure that it was a genuine inhabitant of that bed of flints 
 beneath the bed of loam. Nay, his specimen would be 
 laughed to scorn if he presented it to the learned world 
 by itself. All the world would say that he had dropped it 
 
 * Eor a section and description of this famous locality, see Lyell's 
 Ant. of Man, p. 135. See Prestwich's section of the valley in the 
 Journal of Geol. Soc„ London. For section of description of Menche- 
 court quarries see Proceedings of Amer. Phil. Soc, 1864. 
 
 f There are also deeper cavities flaked out for the ends of the thumb 
 and index finger to be noticed in many of these tools, while some are 
 shown in this way to have been used alternately or at pleasure by grasp- 
 ing either end. — See also Mr Ramsay's testimony, in Lyell's Antiquity of 
 Man. 
 
III.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. . . 57 
 
 accidentally from his pocket in among the debris "of the 
 quarry, even if politeness or good nature prevented a more 
 damaging insinuation. Perhaps some workman had 
 picked it up upon the surface of the ground, and dropped 
 it in the quarry. All cabinet collectors know how often 
 specimens get into wrong boxes. All geologists know 
 how easy it is to mistake the situation of a fossil. He 
 must find more of them, or say nothing more about it. 
 
 For six long years Boucher des Perthes became as 
 sedulous a hanger-on about the quarries in the valley of 
 the Somme, as any seedy old nobleman in the Quartier 
 Latin about the Luxembourg. And he was rewarded. As 
 the workmen advanced the headings of their pits, and 
 opened back the flint bed, which had the loam above it 
 and the solid chalk below it, the antiquary stood by (or his 
 servants for him when he was sick), and selected out the 
 manufactured flints, one by one as they appeared. He fed 
 the workmen themselves to vigilance. When a flint in- 
 strument appeared they would leave it in its place and 
 send for the old crazy man, as they thought him, to come 
 from the city and take it out of its long resting-place him- 
 self. The number thus obtained was immense. At last 
 he could contain his knowledge no longer. He took a 
 thousand of them up to Paris, and showed them to the 
 'Academicians. But what did these men know ? It was a 
 favourite jest of a French wit that all the science of the 
 Royal Academy of France was in the head of its 41st 
 member. It had but 40 members. Boucher des Perthes 
 was as much the old crazy man at Paris as at Abbeville. 
 
 In 1847 he published the first volume of his great book, 
 Antiquites Celtiques, in which he gave a full account of 
 his discoveries, calling them antediluvian, because they 
 were made in the bottom layers of what all geologists had 
 called the great Diluvium, or Diluvial Drift, taking their 
 terminology from the science of the Middle Ages, based 
 on the stories of the Sacred Scriptures of the Jews. His 
 account produced no impression. It was puzzling enough 
 to solve the riddle of the caves ; this man had proposed a 
 still more tremendous problem : how the remains of man 
 came to be buried in the rocks themselves. The easiest 
 way was to ignore the whole affair. Some denied that the 
 tools were anything more than natural fragments. Others 
 
58 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 
 
 denied that they were found 30 feet beneath the surface. 
 Elie de Beaumont, the disciple of Cuvier, and the head of 
 the geologists in France, reasserted Cuvier' s opinion that 
 the old gravel-beds of the valley of the Somme had 
 slipped down the hill-sides to their present situation; 
 therefore he did not care whether the flints were manu- 
 factured or not ; whether they were found 30 feet below 
 the surface or not. The quarries were only worked in 
 winter ; nobody in his senses would leave Paris in winter- 
 time to prove the assertions of a provincial antiquarian, 
 whose whole story was improbable, and if true would 
 upset all preconceived opinions. Even Dr Rigollet, who 
 lived in the same valley, at Amiens, not 30 miles from 
 Abbeville, and who had written in 1819 a memoir on the 
 fossil mammalia of the valley, took no pains to verify his 
 neighbour's facts for more than three years after the 
 Antiquites Celtiques appeared in press, but denied them 
 heartily, until he one day paid Boucher des Perthes a 
 visit, and returned to his own home only to find similar 
 evidences of man's early existence in its immediate 
 vicinity ; nor did he publish his recantation for four more 
 years, after he had made a large collection for himself. 
 
 And so the matter rested. Boucher des Perthes went 
 on collecting specimens, and enlarging and arranging his 
 cabinet, biding his time. It came at last. He is now the 
 great man of the day in geological archaeology ; for, like 
 Linnaeus, and Cuvier, and Lavoisier, and Hunter, he has 
 started one of the sciences on a new career. Let no man 
 doubt his own genius ! it is the suicide of immortality ! 
 
 The final impulse came at last, not from Germany, the 
 land of abstract ideas, nor from France, the land of wit 
 and mathematics, but from conservative, plodding, snob- 
 bish, prosaic old England, the land of tardy, ungraceful, 
 but staunch, indomitable love of justice and the truth. 
 
 It had got to be now 1858, when the mouth of a new bone- 
 cave was discovered at Brixham,* five miles west of the old 
 Kent's Hole,t and the Royal Society deputed its two most 
 
 * Three or four miles west of Torquay. 
 
 f One mile east of Torquay. In this cave Priest M'Enery had found 
 about 1830, in red loam under stalagmite, mammoth, tichorine rhinoceros, 
 cave bear, &c. &c, with flint ; and Lyell thinks he was only prevented by 
 his respect for Euckland from expressing then his conviction that these 
 were contemporary fossils. (Note on p. 97 of Lyell' s Ant. of Man.) 
 
III.l ANTIQUITY GP MAN. . 59 
 
 famous diluvial fossil hunters, Mr Prestwich arid Dr 
 Falconer (returned from a glorious career in India, and 
 now, alas, lost to us, just as he had become one of the 
 masters in our Israel), to examine it. They came, — they 
 saw, — and they were conquered. The united length of 
 five galleries, cleared and examined, was several hundred 
 feet. Their width nowhere exceeded eight feet. Some- 
 times they were filled to the very roof with gravel, bones, 
 and mud, the latter always covered with stalagmite, from 
 1 to 15 inches thick, itself sometimes containing bones, 
 e. g. a perfect antler of a reindeer, and an entire humerus 
 of a bear. The loam or bone -earth under it was from 1 to 
 15 feet in depth. The gravel at the bottom contained no 
 relics, and was sometimes more than 20 feet in depth. 
 No human bones were found, but many flint knives, chiefly 
 in the lowest part of the red loam, one of the most perfect 
 having 13 feet of bone-dirt over it, and some of them found 
 directly underneath the extinct forms embedded in the 
 stalagmite covering, and therefore necessarily of an older 
 age. To add certainty to the date, a perfect knife was 
 found close to and on a level with the left hind-leg of a 
 cave-bear, which had all its parts arranged in such complete 
 order, that they must have been held together by the tis- 
 sues, when they were floated into their resting-place be- 
 side the knife. 
 
 One more step taken, and Boucher des Perthes was vindi- 
 cated and revenged. The step had to be taken. The ex- 
 plorers could not help noticing that the country about the 
 Brixham cave had suffered great changes to permit the cave 
 to be thus filled. The valleys had been lowered at least 60 
 feet since the introduction of the gravel to the cave. Then, 
 a strong stream ran through it, rolling stones along. As 
 the waters became more quiet the red mud was deposited; 
 finally, the alabaster drippings had their day, interrupted 
 by recurrences of rainy eras, of unknown duration. The 
 geological age of the deposit was therefore immense.* 
 
 Dr Falconer, shortly afterwards, on his way to Sicily, 
 stopped at Abbeville, and wrote to Mr Prestwich that 
 it was now high time to do something about the much-dis- 
 
 * See Lyell's discussion of the change of climate, based on the character 
 of the Ci/rena flumi/ialis, and of the change of sea level, Ant. Man, pp. 
 143, 177. 
 
60 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 
 
 puted flints of Boucher des Perthes. Immediately a crowd 
 of people, John Evans, Mr Flower, Sir Charles Lyell, 
 Prof. Eogers, Mr George Pouchet, M. Gaudry, M. Hebert, 
 Desnoyers, Quatrefages, everybody, now rushed down to 
 Abbeville, to St Acheul, to Rouen, and to other places in 
 the valley of the Somme, to pick out flint implements with 
 their own hands from the diluvium. Soon a trade sprung 
 up between the quarrymen and travellers of all kinds. 
 The demand began to exceed the supply. The workmen 
 made experiments, and finding themselves as good as 
 savages, forged ancient knives with modern hammers out 
 of the diluvial flints. The cabinets of Europe and America 
 became stocked from Moulin Quignon and Menchecourt, 
 and the whole valley of the Somme fell once more into 
 disrepute. 
 
 But the whole thing was now un fait accompli. People 
 were at last convinced that man was no exception to the 
 fossil world. Englishmen, who had fought so long against 
 the ante- diluvial age, spread themselves through the libra- 
 ries of Oxford and Cambridge, and over the bogs and deltas 
 and downs of Great Britain, only to discover similar worked 
 flint deposits in diluvium with extinct animal remains, in 
 many places themselves, and records of such discoveries 
 by others more than two centuries before. 
 
 A new impetus also was imparted to the exploration of 
 new caves, which is still carried on with unabated energy 
 and fine results. I have already tasked your patience too 
 severely this evening to impose upon you further, even a 
 rude sketch of what these last seven years have produced : 
 the labours of Lartet in the south of France ; the discovery 
 of the Neanderthal skull ; the explorations carried on in 
 the lake villages of Switzerland; the cleaning out of a 
 great fissure in the Gibraltar mountain, and the curious 
 skeletons found therein ; the discovery of human bones in 
 the diluvium of Abbeville ; * the claim of Desnoyers to 
 
 * For the discussion on the jaw, see Quatrefages in the Contes Rendus 
 Lyell, Vogt, &c. In the Bullet. Soc. Geologique de Prance, xxviii., Nov., 
 Dec., 1864, p. 93, M. de Mercey refers to the discovery of the jaw, 28th 
 March, 1863, and subsequent discoveries by Boucher des Perthes of others 
 at the base of the diluvium and in the top sand-layers. He adds that he 
 himself, with Dr Dubois and M. Buteux, saw others taken out from the base 
 of the deposit, July 16th, 1864; and with Boucher des Perthes, Dubois, 
 and Rene Yion, Sept. 27th, 1864, a metacarpal bone and left index per- 
 
HI.] ANTIQUITY OP MAN. 61 
 
 the determination of tertiary human relics, far older than 
 the post-tertiary flint instruments of St Acheul and Abbe- 
 ville.* Some of these topics should come up again in my 
 next lecture, on the comparative dignity of man. 
 
 But I cannot close to-night without making certain that 
 the gist of the question, of man's comparative antiquity, 
 is clearly understood. It is not a question of a definite 
 number of years. No geologist pretends to fix an exact 
 date to any event in geology. It is one of the comparative 
 sciences, essentially so. The difference between tertiary 
 and post-tertiary counts for almost nothing in the entire 
 column of formations which compose the crust of the earth, 
 as the tabular view next page will show. Yet it is immense, 
 enormous, shocking to the mind of man when applied to 
 his historic life on earth. It is considered a triumph of 
 discovery when we succeed in finding a reptile, or a fish, 
 or a plant, in a subordinate formation only one degree 
 older than the oldest stratum in which as yet we have dis- 
 covered it. The whole creation has seemed as if creeping 
 backward, — downward in the column of rocks, backward 
 in the ages, — by such discoveries, annually, nay, daily, 
 made by that busy crowd of lonely explorers whom, if we 
 had Uriel's eyesight, we might see creeping, and climbing, 
 and hammering, and picking, and pocketing for home* ex- 
 amination, note-book in hand, dispersed all over the civil- 
 ized, and here and there to be descried in the most remote 
 corners of the uncivilized, world. These men are poets, 
 working out the rhymes and the rhythm of that great 
 psalm of life, which is to be sung in chorus when all work 
 is done ; when the young men will have much to say to 
 
 fectly preserved, ascribed by Gaudry to an adult man of ordinary size. 
 His whole paper, pp. 69—104, is full of interest ; it is entitled, Note sur 
 les elements du terrain quaternaire aux environs de Paris, et specialement 
 dans le bassin de la Somme ; par M. N. de Mercey. It is illustrated with 
 numerous excellent sections, &c. Also Troyon'sL'homme Possile, p. 30. 
 * I say nothing of the human pelvis found at Natchez, and too confidently 
 accepted by Sir'Charles Lyell (p. 200), because grave doubts still hover 
 about its authenticity. Bat while putting these pages to press the news 
 from Paris was received that at the meeting of the International An- 
 thropological Society in that city in August of this year, ' two memoirs 
 due to the Abbe Bourgeois and "the Abbe Delaunay have established be- 
 yond doubt, that man was already in existence at the epoch of the Lower 
 Pleiocene.'— See also Ly ell's discussion of the Lava Man of Denise (Ant. 
 Man, p. 194). 
 
62 
 
 THE GEOLOGICAL 
 
 [lect. 
 
 LyelVs Tabular View of the Fossiliferous Strata. 
 
 1 
 2 
 3 
 4 
 5 
 6 
 7 
 8 
 9 
 
 10 
 11 
 12 
 13 
 14 
 15 
 16 
 17 
 18 
 
 Recent 
 Post-pliocene 
 Newer-! 1 . 
 Older- }P ll0celle 
 
 Upper-1 . 
 
 T rr S>miocene 
 
 Lower-J 
 
 Upper- I 
 
 Middle- feocene 
 
 Lower- J 
 
 Maestricht beds 
 
 " White chalk 
 
 [•Post-tertiary. 
 
 ► Tertiary or Cainozoic. 
 
 Lower-J 
 
 Upper-1 
 
 Gault > green sand 
 
 Lower- J 
 
 Wealden 
 
 Purbeck beds 
 
 Portland stone 
 
 19 Kimmeridge clay 
 
 20 Coral rag 
 
 21 Oxford clay 
 
 22 Great Bath-1 r , 
 
 23 Inferior- j° ollte 
 
 24 Lias 
 
 25 Upper- 
 
 26 Muschelkalk 
 
 27 Lower- 
 
 !>Cretaceous 
 
 Secondary or 
 Mesozoic. 
 
 Jurassic 
 
 •Triassic 
 
 28 Magnesian limestone or Permian 
 
 29 Coal measures 1 n , .? 
 
 on n -u -e r a ^Carboniferous 
 
 Si) Carboniferous limestone J 
 
 82 Lo^etJDe-ian 
 
 33 y P per-| giluriaii 
 o4 Lower-j 
 
 35 ypper-| 0ambrian?==Hnroiliflll 
 
 oo Lower-J 
 
 38 Swerl} Laurentian 
 
 Primary or 
 Palaeozoic. 
 
 * Antiquity of Man, p. 7. 
 complete the column. 
 
 The Huronian and Laurentian are added to 
 
III.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 63 
 
 the prophets that will astonish them. And nothing will 
 more astonish them than what they shall hear sung of the 
 antiquity of the race which they belonged to, and glorified, 
 but which they imagined had been created only two or 
 three thousand years before their individual selves. 
 
 I said, no scale of years ! I must modify the expression. 
 I should have said no scale of years in a condition to be 
 used. Imagine a corps of detectives, belonging to the 
 secret police, excited by the news of the commission of 
 some masterpiece of felony, and stimulated by profes- 
 sional zeal, ambition, and the hopes of a large reward, who 
 have come upon the trail of the criminals, have found 
 traces of their work, have collected a little heap of letters 
 torn into minute fragments by the rascals, and are now 
 sitting round a table sorting the tiny shreds, all crumbled 
 up and half illegible with lying in the mud. See them 
 examine piece after piece and utter a suppressed exclama- 
 tion when they detect a part of a word that they can 
 recognize ! See them lay the ragged edges of a dozen of 
 them together and shift and turn them about until they fit 
 and form a larger piece ! See them hand jJieir odd pieces 
 across the table to each other, that what one man cannot 
 use another may be more fortunate with ! Until the hours 
 go by, and the documents begin to assume a form, and 
 the handwriting begins to make sense, and the key is got, 
 and they break up the midnight party, tired, but jolly, 
 and masters of the evidence that shall hang the rogues ! 
 
 Such, if you will believe it, is the condition of the scale 
 of years, which (originally, perfect and abundant evidence 
 of the work which sunlight and moon-attraction have 
 been doing on the surface of the earth) has been all torn 
 to pieces, defaced and covered up by the same cunning 
 sun and moon, — is now being picked up and washed and 
 put together and restored by the geologists. The rings 
 of bark in trees submerged in deltas ; the rain-drop, 
 worm-trail, footstep impressions, left on the thin laminae of 
 tidal estuary mud ; the growth of peat in ditches cut for 
 fuel at the present day; the wear and tear of basaltic 
 columns against which abut the arches of a Roman bridge ; 
 the number of lava currents and intervening vegetable 
 moulds over buried cities ; the height of belts of teredo 
 holes around the columns of Jupiter Serapis at BaiaB ; the 
 
64 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 
 
 annual rate of emergence of well-known boulders in the 
 waters of the Gulf of Bothnia, and of submergence of the 
 missionary villages of Greenland;* the measurement of 
 the three arches of black mould in the railway cutting 
 through the cone of the Tiniere in the Canton de Yaud, 
 the upper arch containing iron relics of the Roman age, 
 the middle arch containing bronze relics of the copper age, 
 and the lowest arch containing only hammers and arrow- 
 heads of the stone age, and calculated by Morlot to be 
 from 5000 to 7000 years old ; the rate of growth of suc- 
 cessive layers of cypress forests found in probing the plain 
 of New Orleans; the rate of growth of the concentric 
 coral reefs of Florida ; the annual rate of increase of the 
 Nile sediment obtained by many scores of borings, made 
 across the valley ; the rate at which old Sanscrit books 
 inform us of the settlement of the valley of the Ganges, 
 and the filling up of the marsh lands of Bengal ; — all these 
 and many more are fragmentary shreds of a scale of years, 
 which we hope some day to put together, so that we can 
 read and use it to determine the length of time between 
 the close of the tertiary era and the present day ; between 
 the close of the tertiary era and the glacial drift ; or if 
 nothing more, the date of the glacial epoch itself, previous 
 to which it seems that man existed on the earth. f 
 
 * Here would come in the whole subject of terrace formations, much too 
 extensive a theme to be meddled with in a lecture. See, for example, 
 those of Quain Clubbe, in Lyell's Antiquity of Man, p. 240. See also J. 
 E. Campbell's Erost and Fire, i. p. 357. Lond. 1845. Lyell's Principles, 
 xxx. ch. Chambers made the Quain Clubbe terraces respectively, 56, 65, 
 and 155 above the sea ; but at Trondjim there is one 522 feet above sea- 
 level. According to Celsius and the ancient geographers, Scandinavia 
 was an island after the time of Pliny and before the 9th century. (Lyell, 
 p. 52.) 
 
 f But Lyell seems to assert the contrary, w 7 hen he says (Antiq. Man, 
 p. 241), ' This period [of continental ice], probably anterior to the earliest 
 traces yet brought to light of the human race, may have coincided with 
 the submergence of England. 5 ' And the accumulation of the boulder-clay 
 of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Bedfordshire ' (p. 218). On the other hand, it is 
 very evident from Heer's account of the Utznach (Zurich) peat-coal 
 beds (in his ITrwelt der Schweiz) occurring, as they do, between two 
 boulder-clay formations, that there were two separate glacial periods with 
 a modern climate period intervening. So too the Sahara seems, by 
 Desor's account of Mares's discoveries of fresh-water shells (planorbis) 
 92 m - down the artesian wells, to have been twice submerged, to correspond 
 with the two glacial eras. Desor shows by the New Zealand glaciers, 
 &c, the improbability of any universal glacial era. 
 
HI.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 65 
 
 In conclusion, I will adduce one more such fragment. 
 It is not only a remarkable example of the method to be 
 used, but to show you how well based* our hopes must be. 
 It is, in fact, the latest, the finest, and if it were proved 
 genuine, an absolutely perfect demonstration of the great 
 antiquity of man. It is not in any of the books ; I trust 
 that M. Agassiz on his return from South America will be 
 able to set before us its full value. I obtain it through my 
 friend, Dr Henderson, of the United States navy, himself 
 an experienced geologist. But the actual observer of the 
 fact was a Naturalist of Rio Janeiro, Dr Ildefonso, formerly 
 well known to the scientific world. 
 
 Dr Ildefonso, with his amiable daughters, had been 
 amusing themselves for a number of years before Dr H.'s 
 visit, in exploring the stalagmite caves which are scattered 
 over a considerable region around the harbour of Rio. 
 He had obtained a multitude of fossils from a bone-clay 
 beneath the stalagmite floor, similar to that which charac- 
 terizes the ossuary caves of Europe. Among these fossils 
 I understand that he had found the vestiges of man. But 
 the important point lies here. The stalagmite deposit 
 over the bone-mud is not an amorphous and irregular 
 plate, as it necessarily must be, in climates like ours, where 
 rain falls at all seasons of the year, and the dripping of 
 carbonated waters from the roof must needs be, therefore, 
 continual. The climate of the tropics is humid only half 
 the year and dry the rest. Consequently the alabaster of 
 Brazilian caves shows annual laminae of growth, analogous 
 to the ring- growth in trees. Now Dr Ildefonso asserted 
 that he and his daughters had repeatedly counted these 
 annual layers and found them number as high as twenty 
 thousand. 
 
 I leave you to draw the inference. Agassiz estimates 
 the age of some fragments of a human skeleton, which 
 Count Pourtalis found embedded in a coral reef in Florida, 
 at 10,000 years.* Dr Dowler estimates the age of a 
 human skeleton found beneath the fourth cypress forest at 
 New Orleans at 50,000 years. f The borings of Linant 
 
 * The southern half of the peninsula is post-tertiary, and Agassiz 
 says 135,000 years were needful for its formation. See Nott and 
 Gliddon, p. 52. 
 
 f Types of Mankind, p. 352. 
 
 5 
 
66 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 
 
 Bey brought up works of Egyptian art from a depth of 72 
 feet, which M. Rosiere estimates at 30,000 years. If 
 GirarcPs estimate of the growth of the Nile mud be con- 
 sidered more correct, the burnt bricks found to the depth 
 of 60 feet below the surface in the borings of Hake Kyan 
 Bey must have been 14,000 years old. Yet these are mere 
 modern alluvions compared with the diluvium of Abbe- 
 ville. And this again can bear no comparison in antiquity 
 with the least ancient of the true tertiary strata. My own 
 belief is but the reflection of the growing sentiment of 
 the whole geological world — a conviction strengthening 
 every day, as you may with little trouble see for your- 
 selves by glancing through the magazines of current 
 scientific literature — that our race has been upon the earth 
 for hundreds of thousands of years. 
 
 In what condition I will endeavour to suggest in the 
 next lecture. 
 
 But as I have given a general scheme of formations on 
 page 62, and as I have referred repeatedly to the fossil 
 species with which the remains of man are found in the 
 ossuary cave mud and the diluvium, I shall add here the 
 latest classification of the subdivisions of the human epoch, 
 based on contemporary animal remains, and given by Prof. 
 E. E-enevier, of Lausanne, in a note supplementary to the 
 posthumous work of M. Troyon, entitled L'homme fossile, 
 and published in July of 1867. 
 
 M. Lartet distinguishes four ages of mankind : — 1. the 
 age of the great cave bear; 2. of the elephant and rhino- 
 ceros ; 3. of the reindeer ; 4. of the aurochs. 
 
 M. Troyon, following M. d'Archiac, describes in his 
 chapter of the four epochs of the age of Stone : — 1. the 
 epoch of the great bear; 2. the epoch of the mammoth; 
 3. the epoch of the reindeer; 4. the epoch of the Urus. 
 
 M. Renevier's scheme is as follows : — 
 
 I. Epoch Ante-glacial, in which man was contemporary 
 with the Elephas antiquus, Rhinoceros hemitoechus, and 
 Ursus spelceus. During this period man has not been 
 proved to exist in the Alpine regions of Europe. 
 
 II. Epoch Glacial, during which man was contemporary 
 with the Elephas primigenius, Rhinoceros tichorldnus, Ursus 
 spelceus, &c. Switzerland desert and covered with glaciers, 
 to the exclusion of man. 
 
ITI.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 67 
 
 III. Epoch Post-glacial, during which, man, contempo- 
 rary of the Elephas primigenius and Gervus tarandus, had 
 approached the Alpine countries as near as Schussenried 
 in Wurtemberg. 
 
 IV. Epoch Actual, during which man had penetrated 
 Switzerland, with the Gervus elaphus, Bos primigenius, &c, 
 and begun to construct plank villages, on piles, in lakes, 
 which had the same water-level as at present. 
 
68 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 ON THE DIGNITY OP MANKIND. 
 
 Man walks enveloped in the mystery of his own exist- 
 ence. How lie exists he knows not. Why he exists he 
 can only conjecture. "What he is, is the last question ever 
 answered to his satisfaction, by Grod, by nature, or by his 
 own heart. All philosophies have been poor inventions to 
 manufacture weak replies to it. To-night we stand as 
 helplessly aghast at our creation as if no generations had 
 preceded us. We look into each others' faces and wonder 
 how it comes that we are formed erect, intelligent ; while 
 things around us creep, or swim, or fly, speechless and 
 servile. 
 
 Out of this wonderment has sprung the science of Com- 
 parative Zoology. Anxious to know ourselves, we turn 
 from side to side to examine curiously the living' creatures 
 in the world about us. Perhaps comparison with them 
 will teach us something. 
 
 Among the endowments of our human nature must be 
 numbered a keen sense of its own dignity. It is possible 
 that animals may enjoy and be benefited by a like con- 
 sciousness. Some of their actions intimate as much. You 
 remember the fable of the Artist and the Lion. 
 
 The artist showed the lion his last picture, a lion slain 
 by a man who stood in a conquering attitude o^er him. 
 ' It is a very fine painting/ remarked the lion; c that is, 
 considering that the painter was a man ; but if we lions 
 were artists we should manage the subject more agreeably 
 to the truth and fitness of things ; the posture of the two 
 principal figures would be reversed.-' 
 
 In ancient times apologue and allegory was the favourite 
 
ON THE DIGNITY OF MANKIND. 69 
 
 form of uttered wisdom. Euclid and iEsop ruled the 
 world of intellect together ; and were as truly the masters 
 of the masters of the portico and the grove as the child is 
 father to the man. The fable is a key to the transition of 
 man from a state of barbarism to a state of civilization. 
 It marks the joining line where the quick observant fancy 
 meets the reflecting intellect. The vivacity of nature is 
 not yet lost ; the majesty of knowledge is not yet quite 
 assumed. The poet, the philosopher has been born, but 
 the funicidum uteris is not yet cut. The fable is a constant 
 quantity in the Development Theory ; and rules as mightily 
 to-day among the Red Indians of America, and among 
 the boys of the public schools of Boston, as ever it did in 
 the days of Samson and Abimelech. 
 
 Necessity is the mother of that invention which we call 
 Natural History. Whatever the exigencies of the savage 
 life demand, that, of course, monopolizes all its energies 
 of observation. The Indian tribes of our North- West, 
 when asked the name of any one of the thousand flowers 
 which bloom upon their prairies, answer simply, ( flower.' 
 They have but this one name for all of them, for all of 
 them are useless. But if you ask these savages the name 
 of any of their trees you will receive a score where we have 
 only one, for they employ a separate name for every slight 
 variety of every species of growing wood ; because their 
 very lives depend on knowing which will serve them best. 
 Consequently, the names they give describe utilities. It 
 is a mistake to suppose that savages have keener senses, 
 or superior powers of observation, than the highly- educated 
 and more intellectually endowed civilized man. For dis- 
 crimination is more the product of systematic language 
 than of eyesight. Yet, on certain sides, the sides of life 
 and death we may well call them, the unhappy savage 
 makes himself amazingly acute. His names for things 
 which interest him are a study of precise description. 
 But he always seizes his victim by the hair of the head ; 
 he calls things only by their initials; therein he differs 
 from our naturalist, who must give Christian, middle, and 
 surname in full, and loves to add the title and address 
 besides. The savage lights up his subject with a flash ; 
 in the dark chamber of the pyramid, his living tomb, he 
 
70 ON THE DIGNITY [LECT. 
 
 walks by matchlight, not by sunlight. But bis match is a 
 magnesium wire ; and for the moment that it lasts, it shines 
 forth like the sun itself. 
 
 When the Cherokees first saw the horse bestrode by 
 De Soto they were as much amazed as were the soldiers of 
 Fabricius when they first beheld the elephants of Pyrrhus. 
 But they named it instantly " the animal with a single 
 finger-nail/'' Modern science has made no better general- 
 ization than this uniungulics. If there be a characteristic 
 posture for a frog or lizard, the Algonquin will be sure to 
 show it on the bowl of his tobacco-pipe, the Mexican on 
 the temple sculptures in honour of his god. Ethnologists 
 have made great capital out of this. The oblique eye and 
 elevated ear of the Egyptian effigy is one of the archaeo- 
 logical puzzles yet unsolved. 
 
 The same instantaneous play of instinct, through the 
 observant fancy of the deaf and dumb, sparkles upon the 
 whole surface of their poetic nomenclature. They catch 
 the slightest peculiarity of each individual for whom they 
 need a name, and name him from it by some appropriate, 
 imitative, or descriptive gesture : — one from a mole in the 
 cheek ; another from his height or dwarfishness ; another 
 from always sitting cross-legged ; another from an habitual 
 pensiveness. We grade nations in the scale of civilization 
 by this propensity. People who are given to gesticulation 
 when they talk, the Italians and the French, for instance, 
 are set down as imperfectly cultivated nations ; for gesti- 
 culation when spontaneous is imitative, the supplement of 
 language, making its shortcomings good. The well-bred 
 gentleman has a quiet mien, because in his position the 
 brain relieves the body of all responsibility ; because 
 abstract ideas take the place of concrete examples, not 
 only in his solitary hours of thought, but in his intercourse 
 with gentlemen. The highest conversation goes on by 
 hints, not by descriptions of things. The intercourse of 
 low-bred people, and of the savage world of man in every 
 age, must ever be the prosy iteration of details. 
 
 The development of the savage faculty of observation 
 under the tuition of our modern information makes the 
 technical naturalist, the describer of details, the mere 
 determiner and namer of species of animate and inanimate 
 things. This is the lowest order among men of science, 
 
17.] OP MANKIND. 71 
 
 constituting a class which represents the savage or prim- 
 eval man in the circle of the highest civilization ; a class 
 characterized also by two other well-marked traits, common 
 to savages — an inordinate jealousy and love for personal 
 reputation in details — and a materialism, springing from 
 too close and too uninterrupted dealings with flesh and 
 blood alone. Even the laws which this class of naturalists 
 discover are laws of form, and are soon personified by them 
 as the sole deities. 
 
 No student of nature is competent to be ennobled until 
 he has begun to reason largely upon his observations, and 
 to put his well-bred fancy to its higher trials, with courage, 
 hope, and modesty. The genuine man of science is like 
 the new spider which they are studying at the Cambridge 
 Botanical Gardens. It has two spinnerets. With one it 
 spins a coarse, strong, silvery- coloured thread which it uses 
 for the radii and stanchions of its web. Then afterwards 
 with the other it spins a finer, golden-coloured silk, with 
 which it fills-in all the intervals, and so completes the har- 
 mony and beauty of its web, establishes unity, and makes 
 a net for every kind of flies. We tie our observations 
 together with our theories. We strengthen science by dis- 
 cussing facts ; but we must reason on them or they bring 
 us in no food. And the food we need is not barren facts 
 for the understanding, so much as noble fertile ideas for 
 the soul. 
 
 An entomologist who neither knows nor cares to know 
 the divine effusions of the Christian heart — who speaks 
 with contempt of all philosophy — scoffs at the mention of 
 the spiritual — hoots metaphysics out of the academy — and 
 is even petulant with his brother nomenclators, if they ex- 
 press some natural aspirations of the human heart for freer 
 space than that afforded by the limits of a memoir on the 
 comparative anatomy of Holothuria Sinensis or Spirifer 
 semireticulata — such a naturalist (and there are plenty of 
 them) is as ridiculous to the eye of science as is the clergy- 
 man who not only does not know, but does not want to 
 know, the normal number of legs in the, fly that buzzes 
 about his sermon, or in the sedate old lady spider that 
 spins in the corner of his ceiling. 
 
 In nothing is the narrowing tendency of mere termino- 
 logical natural science more clearly seen in our day than in 
 
72 ON THE DIGNITY [LECT. 
 
 the copious and often heated discussions to which the 
 Development Theory, as applied to man, has given rise. 
 At the risk of being accounted either prosy or else unin- 
 telligible,, I must endeavour to give some account of this 
 theory, which, whether right or wrong, is too important to 
 be overlooked, too noble to be despised, too nearly related 
 to the truth to be treated by friend or foe with anything 
 but the highest respect. It is, in fact, a supplement to the 
 ! Nebular Hypothesis. What that proposed to do for the 
 worlds in space, the solar system, our earth and its whole 
 inorganic constitution, this purposes to do for the organic 
 kingdoms, taking the subject of creation up where its 
 first chapter ends — where life begins. Together, the two 
 theories form one tremendous whole, one scheme of 
 thought, the highest reaching after transcendental truth 
 which the intellect of man has ever made. 
 
 The subject has been regarded from three points of view. 
 Three questions may be asked respecting the. plan of 
 creation. One is a German question ; one is a French 
 question ; one is an English question. Let them come in 
 that order. 
 
 Hegel, the master of modern German philosophy, until 
 recently — and to a greater or less extent all the rest of the 
 German metaphysicians — consider matter a mere pheno- 
 menon of mind. They believe, as Bishop Berkeley 
 taught, that all thiugs are ideas. They ask : What Plan 
 had the creative intellect within itself ? What was the 
 primeval order of the Creator's thoughts ? They say : If 
 we can discover that, we need ask no more, for what we 
 look at is not real ; things are not what they seem ; 
 creation is the dream, the reverie, the phantasia of the 
 Infinite Intelligence. 
 
 Opposed to this transcendental school stands the po- 
 sitivism of Comte and his numerous followers, perfectly 
 characteristic of French thought, French life, French 
 taste, French science. According to this, we know what 
 we know because it is knowable fact, because the visible 
 universe is a great reality, because its actions towards us 
 are genuine and complete instruction. But of God and 
 his intelligence we know nothing. The plan of creation 
 is a catalogue of the actual sequences and consequences in 
 nature. 
 
IV.] OF MANKIND. 73 
 
 In England, that clear, wise, gentle writer of our day, 
 Herbert Spencer, is just now busy resuming all that a third 
 class of. thinkers have been saying, in what may be called, 
 with some propriety, an eclectic system ; somewhat uncer- 
 tain, as all eclectics must be ; but eminently practical, as 
 all Englishmen must also be. On the one hand, they deny 
 that we can learn the secrets of the Divine Will ; on the 
 other hand, they deny that we can prove the truth of facts 
 as everlasting facts. They prefer to say that we can only 
 see with the eyes given us, and reason with the logic of a 
 man. They demand only what is that best mode of organ- 
 izing our observations in a reasonable manner, so as to 
 produce the most harmonious and satisfying system of 
 nature, as it seems to us ; leaving the questions of reality, 
 certainty, divine intention, and all that, entirely out of 
 mind for the present. 
 
 You will not be displeased if I decline to enter more 
 deeply into explanations or discussions of these various 
 philosophic stand-points, in a lecture devoted to a special 
 subject. It would be easy to point out the numerous absurd- 
 ities and inconsistencies which the uncommitted thinker 
 cannot be blind to in their advocates, even while he finds 
 himself bending more favourably to one than to another, 
 according to the constitution of his mind and the subject 
 nature of his studies. Yet it is by the counterblasts of 
 these three great winds of doctrine that the waves have 
 been tossed so high about the double question of the 
 Nebular Hypothesis and Development Theory. The grand 
 debate is, on the one hand, whether God had any forth- 
 going, consistent, consecutive, advancing, and developing 
 plan in his own mind before he created the universe ; or 
 whether he fixed such a law of development in its nature ; 
 or, on the other hand, whether all such supposed plans are 
 merely in man's eye ; the useful but vain endeavour of us 
 intelligent spectators to grasp the details of this divine in- 
 vention in some systematic mode, to avoid confusing our 
 own intelligence. If there be no plan except such as each 
 man can feign unto himself, science has nothing to do with 
 it. But if there be one, then science cannot rest until it 
 be made out precisely, completely. If it be in nature, 
 nature will show it by her works, or rather by her growth. 
 If it be in God, God will declare it, seriatim, by miracle or 
 
 
74 ON THE DIGNITY [lECT. 
 
 otherwise. ■ If it be in both, man cannot fail to learn it 
 sooner or later ; even if its most perfect comprehension be 
 reserved for higher intelligences. 
 
 Yon will say that this is all words ! words ! I grant it. 
 And yet this represents the first stage of the controversy ; 
 and makes those who offer ' divine plans ' for considera- 
 tion the enemies of those who deny all possibility of a 
 divine plan ontside of the hnman mind. The hostility of 
 supporters of different divine plans towards each other has 
 a different foundation. One school accuses the other of 
 excluding God from nature ; of refusing the Creator access 
 to his own creation. The other school retorts that it is 
 superstition, not reverence, to require the painful, toil- 
 some, endless supervision and revision of the Deity, if his 
 work be perfectly constructed at the outset, and full of 
 living, moving, renovating, growing forces, like a tree or 
 human brain. Between these combatants who can me- 
 diate ? None but Deity itself. Science has no argument 
 paramount to close the lists or proclaim the victor. Science 
 is the study of phenomena, not of essences ; the measurer, 
 not the explainer of forces ; the observer, not the com- 
 prehender of the laws of nature. 
 
 But even when we abandon, as we must, all transcend- 
 ental considerations, and confine the subject strictly within 
 the pale of science, we still hear vehement debating. If 
 we ask men 'of science whether, when they examine the 
 universe, the world we live in, the life of the planet, they 
 discover traces of confusion and disorder, they answer 
 unanimously, No ! Everything works according to fixed 
 laws now ; everything seems to have come into being in an 
 orderly manner through all past ages. 
 
 But if we ask them what particular order, or plan, or 
 system can be made out according to which the progress 
 of events can be classified, they begin at once to contra- 
 dict each other. 
 
 Remember that I am only speaking of the world of life, 
 of the organic forms of living beings. Setting aside 
 minor differences of view among botanists and zoologists, 
 I will designate three principal divergent theories of the 
 development of life upon the planet, based all of them upon 
 that record which is written in the rocks, and which you 
 will find imperfectly described in the best and latest works 
 
IV.] OF MANKIND. 75 
 
 on geology. All agree, 1. That there is an evident progress 
 in the appearance of higher and higher forms upon the 
 planet, through the geological ages. All agree, 2. That 
 the exact epoch of the appearance of this or that form can- 
 not be made certain; first, because the record in the rocks 
 is itself not complete ; and, secondly, because our examin- 
 ation of the record is still less complete. New discoveries 
 every day teach us to be careful how we dogmatize about 
 one shell having been created before another, or about the 
 absolute non-existence of any bird during the previous 
 reptilian era, &c. All agree, 3. That a multitude of inter- 
 mediate or synthetic types (as they are now called) will be 
 discovered, making the series more complete, filling up 
 gaps between widely different kinds or genera, to say 
 nothing of species, of animals and plants. There have 
 lately been found, for instance, fossil horses with deer's 
 feet, mammoths with the marsupial pouch, a lizard with 
 feathered wings and tail, showing how little prepared we 
 are yet to establish our schedule of organic forms. 
 
 But all agree, nevertheless, 4. That taking what has been 
 discovered altogether, there is a marked order in point of 
 time, not to be mistaken. The most numerous fossils in 
 the earliest rocks are corals, sea- weeds, bivalve shells, and 
 such low forms of animated nature. In the formations 
 over those we find land plants and fishes of low forms in 
 vast abundance. In still higher rocks we first find multi- 
 tudes of reptiles, and cephalopods among the shells. Still 
 later comes the age of birds ; later still that of the mam- 
 mals and deciduous trees ; last of all, as a characteristic 
 feature, man. 
 
 All agree, however, 5. That this order of events is 
 general, not special ; and only appears on a grand sketch, 
 from which a multitude of inconsistent or confusing or 
 doubtful details are left out. 
 
 Still all agree, 6. To accept this general system of devel- 
 opment as a rude, rough whole ; a kind of blocking out 
 the statue ; and that it must mean something. 
 
 But now for what it means. Now they begin to disagree, 
 coming to particulars. 
 
 The first debate arises over the question of the solidarity 
 of the system. One party contending that there is no 
 breah in it. The other party takes exactly the opposite 
 
76 ON THE DIGNITY 
 
 [lect. 
 
 ground, contending that there can be no real connection in 
 it ; that the breaks in the line are infinite ; that they are 
 patent to every eye, and form, in fact, the very basis of the 
 science of geology. Mr Agassiz has gone so far as to as- 
 sert that two fossils, although exactly similar to the human 
 eye, cannot be of the same species if they are found in 
 different formations, however near ; and he has applied 
 the same canon to the subject of different localities in one 
 age, affirming that two shells, although to all appearance 
 of the same species, cannot be in reality the same if found 
 on both sides of the Atlantic* On the other hand, Mr 
 Darwin, following up the arguments of Lord Monboddo, 
 M. Lamarck, and Mr Chambers, and followed in his turn 
 by Grey, and Huxley, and other first-class botanists and 
 zoologists, — Mr Darwin has astonished the world with the 
 opinion, that there can be no radical disconnection between 
 any two living beings ; and that all geological gaps would 
 be filled up and bridged over with intermediate forms, if 
 our search after them were but sufficiently shrewd and pro- 
 tracted. He asserts, in fact, that nature started with the idea 
 of simple cell-life, which gradually increased, combined, im- 
 proved, and perfected itself through an infinity of forms of 
 plant and animal, until we see all things as they stand and 
 move to-day. Monboddo and Lamarck, indeed, gave fan- 
 ciful accounts of this extensive and mysterious process ; 
 applying their theories chiefly to the case of man, to ex- 
 plain why he had left the trees or the shore, and how he 
 had lost his tail. To the great naturalist of the Pacific 
 Ocean belongs the honour of organizing in a reasonable 
 manner this side of the question. It has therefore come 
 to be known by the name of the Darwinian hypothesis as 
 well as by any other. I must refer you to his own descrip- 
 tion of that theory of ' Natural Selection/ by which he 
 tries to account for the transition steps along the line of 
 change, and to explain the sudden and frequent breaks 
 which are apparent in its course. It is a great thought, 
 and deserves the honours heaped upon it. And all allow 
 that it is true if kept within the regions of variety. But 
 whether it be true for actual specific differences, and there- 
 fore for changes of genus, family, or class, there are vehe- 
 
 * Mr Conrad, who not two years ago opposed this view as extravagant, 
 now seems inclined to acquiesce in it as probably correct. 
 
IY.] OP MANKIND. 77 
 
 ment disputings. And I can see no mode of settlingthem, 
 if we cannot take nature in the very act of exchanging one 
 species for another, or converting one species into another. 
 
 The second subject of debate respects the unity of the 
 system. Is there but one series; or are there several 
 parallel series of organic forms ? 
 
 The Immortal Cuvier established the grand quaternion 
 of types which all modern comparative zoology virtually 
 accepts. He divided the animal world into Badiata, or 
 creatures constructed as if branching out from a centre 
 in several directions, like star-fish, — Articulata, creatures 
 constructed by addition lengthwise, like the worms, — Mol- 
 lusca, creatures with two parts symmetrically fitting along 
 a vertical line, like the clam, — Vertebrata, creatures with a 
 backbone, or, as Agassiz would have it, with two parts 
 unsymmetrically fitting along a horizontal line. 
 
 The question then comes up, whether between these 
 four plans on which all animals are made, there can be 
 discovered any logical distinction as to worth or dignity. 
 The radiates, it is true, are all low creatures. But among 
 the articulates we find the b>ee ; and among the molluscs 
 the cuttlefish, both of them creatures of high breeding and 
 intelligence. The great development of brain, indeed, be- 
 longs exclusively to the vertebrates; but so far as we 
 can see, there was yet no inherent impossibility in the at- 
 tachment of such a brain to any radiated or annulated body. | 
 In fact, the backbone of a vertebrate is itself an annulated 
 system, giving off nervous branches from a series of gangli- 
 onic nodes. It is argued then with some plausibility, that 
 these four capital types of animal creation have no com- 
 parative dignity in themselves ; and that that is an idio- 
 syncrasy of man. They are each and all perfectly and 
 beautifully adapted to their circumstances, — the mollusca 
 to the waters, the articulata to the air, the vertebrata to 
 the land, and the radiates to the planes and lines where 
 air and land and water meet. It ought not, therefore, to 
 be expected that one or other of them should take pre- 
 cedency in the creation, either in respect to government 
 or in respect to seniority. In other words, the earliest 
 dawn of life should show us at the same time molluscs 
 inhabiting the sea, insects in the air, vertebrates on land, 
 ^and radiates where land and water meet. 
 
78 ON THE DIGNITY [LECT. 
 
 Now how stand the facts ? In the Potsdam sandstone, 
 the rock at the base of the Lower Silurian system, and the 
 oldest rock in which fossils have been found in both variety 
 and abundance, there are multitudes of corals and seaweed, 
 multitudes of worms and trilobites, multitudes of bivalves 
 and univalves, and the foot-prints, at least, of vertebrate 
 animals, which make the representation of all the four 
 kingdoms complete. 
 
 If there has been a Darwinian development of animal life 
 upon the planet, then it looks as if it had been carried out 
 along four lines rather than one. Four stand-points of creat- 
 ive energy must have been assumed ; four startings out of 
 life must be accounted for ; four mysteries, four miracles, 
 four beginnings of creation, to be developed instead of one ! 
 But where all is mystery and miracle additions are hardly 
 noticeable. It becomes Mr Darwin's business, then, not only 
 to suggest some plausibly rational mode by which one spe- 
 cies could gradually or suddenly pass the short interval 
 which separates it from another ; his explanation must suf- 
 fice to bridge the awful chasms which have always kept 
 these four great plans of structure separate, along the lines 
 ' of their development. He must show us how an animal of 
 radial growth could be developed into one of linear growth. 
 Nay, he must fill up the immense interval between the 
 plant* and the animal; and, finally, the chasm between the 
 atom of carbon or hydrogen, and the nucleated cell of albu- 
 men or fibrin. He must explain the genius of life itself before 
 he can make his law of natural selection stand for anything 
 more than a beautifully-worded description of the ills that 
 all flesh falls heir to when it is born upon this planet. How 
 it is born upon the planet is another matter, and remains 
 unexplained by his hypothesis. We do not get rid of mira- 
 cles by chasing them back along the ages to the starting- 
 point, and concentrating them there. A line of battle is 
 not necessarily vanquished and annihilated when it is rolled 
 -up by an attack upon one flank, when there is a reserved 
 force at the other end. 
 
 You see, this train of argument attacks not so much the 
 
 special statements of the Darwinian hypothesis, as its very 
 
 foundations. It says to Mr Darwin, My dear sir, you have 
 
 [ four times as much to do as you thought you had. You 
 
 must not only explain how a man came from a monkey, 
 
IV.] OF MANKIND. 79 
 
 and a monkey from a squirrel, and a squirrel from. a bat, 
 and a bat from a bird, and a bird from a lizard, and a lizard 
 from a fish ; but you must suggest some possible means of 
 transforming a vertebrate fish out of a shell fish, or out of 
 a jelly fish, or out of a lobworm or trilobite ; then you must 
 go on to show us how the first trilobite, or the first coral 
 animal, or the first rhizopod was obtained by your process 
 of natural selection out of still earlier vegetable species. 
 Nay, you cannot even stop there. You must explain the 
 very first appearance of living tissue out of the inorganic 
 elements of dead matter. The world is not a unit ; it is 
 like the magic ivory balls of the Chinese shops, globes 
 within globes, worlds within worlds — all visible through 
 the holes in each other's peripheries. 
 
 Now what is the Darwinian answer to this objection, de- 
 rived from Cuvier' s four-fold classification of the animal 
 kingdom ? This : — Cuvier may not have made an abso- 
 lutely perfect classification. There may be intermediate 
 forms, which we cannot yet be certain where to place; 
 which, when discovered, will fall as naturally under one 
 plan as under another. We are not yet quite sure that 
 there are just four distinct and sharply defined lines of 
 living type-form; we are not sure that nature lays out her 
 work in lines at all. She is not as linear, at all events, as 
 our literality would have her be. 
 
 There is a just tendency in the new schools to establish 
 rather a circular classification. The great disciple of Cuvier, 
 whom you have had the good fortune to attach to your 
 own city and university, and whose impulse all American 
 science has been feeling now for twenty years, has elucidated 
 the four types of animal life and their common appearance 
 at the beginning, in lectures which he has delivered in this 
 room. I have not the courage even to saunter through 
 the meadows which he owns. I refer you to his own 
 masterly arguments. He is a vehement an ti- Darwinian. 
 But even agaiust this master of the subject I must warn 
 you. He has great opponents. And the most recent dis 
 coveries are also against him. There have lately been dis- 
 covered infinitely older fossils than those I just now al- 
 luded to in the Potsdam sandstone. I hold in my hand a 
 specimen of the oldest fossil in the world ; and lo, it is a 
 rhizopod, a creature belonging to the very lowest forms of 
 
80 ON THE DIGNITY [lECT. 
 
 life. It is true these lowest forms are peculiarly fitted for 
 preservation in the fossil state ; others of higher form may 
 have co-existed with them and been destroyed. But when 
 we see these lowest of all known forms standing alone at 
 the very beginning of time, and man, the highest and 
 noblest form, appearing at the end, and an unmistakable 
 gradation, always upward, through the long ages, and 
 along all the four lines of plan — what open mind can help 
 imbibing, if not the Darwinian doctrine, at least the spirit 
 of the Theory of Development ? 
 
 But this leads me to the third head of the discussion : 
 the always upward direction of the development of life- 
 forms. This also has not been left unquestioned. One of 
 the most popular and powerful thinkers that geology ever 
 owned was the lamented Hugh Miller. Large-minded 
 and erudite, trained by patient, personal investigation in 
 the field, with a great brain, and a great love of truth, he 
 was also a religious enthusiast, bigotedly orthodox in the 
 sense of Geneva. His views therefore as a speculative 
 geologist were peculiar, but none the less worthy of con- 
 sideration, for they insisted upon the introduction of such 
 exceptional phenomena as the advocates of the Develop- 
 ment Theory were too much inclined to ignore. He op- 
 posed the theory ; and upon the ground that it was not 
 complete ; that not only were there breaks in the series of 
 life-forms which could not be got over, but actual reversals 
 of direction. He argued for a law of development actually 
 downwards, or backwards, as well as for a law of develop- 
 ment forwards and upwards. It is true that he made the 
 law of degeneracy subordinate; but he still insisted that 
 it was not exceptional, but universal, and included in the 
 other. His notion was, that life advanced, not in an ob- 
 liquely rising straight line, but in a succession of higher and 
 higher parabolic curves. Each type as a whole he allowed 
 to be nobler than the type preceding it, but not in every 
 part, or throughout its whole career. He preferred to 
 imagine each type beginning below the maximum dignity 
 of the type preceding it; then rising forward to a maximum 
 dignity superior to that of the type preceding it; then 
 falling away, degenerating and decaying to extinction. 
 He instanced our varieties of fruits, and the rise and decay 
 of families of men, as examples of this law, subject to 
 
IV.] OF MANKIND. 8l 
 
 inspection in our day. Including size and number 'among 
 the elements of dignity he showed how the fossil Irish elk 
 excelled in size and strength any now-existing ruminant ; 
 how the cave-bear, the aurochs, the mammoth, the Siva- 
 lensian turtle, the dinodon, each and all excelled the bears 
 and oxen, elephants, turtles, and kangaroos of the present 
 day ; how the mosses of the coal-measures were as large 
 as our trees; the frogs of the middle secondary age as 
 large as modern elepFants. Each age, said he, has been 
 indeed an advance upon the previous age, and has brought 
 forth new illustrations and finer ones of the Creator's 
 skill. But each age has had its own superior glories, not 
 to be dimmed by any exhibitions of a later date. Each 
 type has been quite perfect in itself, was made entirely 
 suitable for the time and place of its creation ; rose up to 
 power ; took full possession of its whole inheritance ; grew 
 to its utmost size ; completely did its work ; but when its 
 time was past fell off and withered ; grew small and weak, 
 and, perished, to give place to the next type, ordained to 
 a like destiny. The appearance of man upon the earth, 
 clad in beauty, armed with dominion, but after a time of 
 glory, falling from his first estate, and becoming savage 
 and degenerate, seemed to his eyes a natural illustration 
 of this law. And in like manner he would explain the 
 coming of Christ at the end of the old dispensation ; and 
 the rise of the Christian Church followed by its decay. In 
 the same spirit he anticipated a millennium, and the appear- 
 ance of angelic men, perhaps to fall in tarn, like Lucifer 
 and all his angels. 
 
 Geologists read Hugh Miller's book with as much de- 
 light as do other people. But they do not accept his 
 Theory of Development ; the facts on which it was ap- 
 parently based, when critically examined, do not sustain 
 it. And every geologist must feel that such a theory could 
 never have been suggested by a summary of all known 
 facts relating to the subject, to any mind not prepossessed 
 by a certain set of theological ideas. It was the last 
 struggle of orthodoxy against natural science embodied in 
 geology. Orthodoxy may well be proud of its advocate, 
 and apotheosize his memory; but no cause could be 
 won so. 
 
 I would not dare to £0 into a detailed discussion of the 
 
82 ON THE DIGNITY [LECT. 
 
 doctrine of development this evening. The literature of 
 the subject is already copious, learned, well and clearly- 
 argued, and within easy reach of every one who feels 
 desirous to arrive at some conclusion. I have only aimed 
 at stating the question, and suggesting, that it is an open 
 question not only between theologians and geologists, but 
 between one class of men of science and another, and that 
 it ought to be no bugbear in the path of generous and 
 truthful minds. 
 
 The aim of the Creator seems to be to fill out all the 
 possible details of his great plan, to realize all possible 
 plans, modes, conditions, forms, powers, accidents, and 
 relations. The highest artist wears the least mannerism. 
 Infinite variety is the clue to the labyrinth of the universe. 
 Infinite variety is, in fact, the only law of natural history 
 as yet fully and completely established to the satisfaction 
 of the mind of the naturalist. It has been made the law 
 of every individual life. 
 
 First let us look within. Does not our education pro- 
 ceed by alternate synthesis and analysis of perceptions ? 
 We collect facts ; we combine and compare them ; we 
 perceive their likeness, and discover what we call laws. 
 Then we take these synthetic laws, and go to work again, 
 seeking new illustrations and confirmations of. them. In- 
 stead of that we perceive exceptions and denials. We leara 
 to contrast and discover differences; we analyze, or separ- 
 ate, or tear to pieces what we had put together and con- 
 solidated. We have to do it. We find that bad bricks 
 have got into our wall ; inharmonious tints have been 
 chosen for our pattern. We build, we weave again, now 
 more successfully. Thus we advance ; thus we enrich our 
 life, the world, and history. 
 
 Turning our eyes again towards God, do we not see 
 Him at the same kind of alternate synthetic and analytic 
 creation ? Herbert Spencer calls it the law of Differentia- 
 tion ; and shows u^ how the forces of matter first aggre- 
 gate and then disintegrate the solid parts of the world, 
 condensing the gases, combining the bases, dissolving the 
 salts, crystalizing the deposits, tearing down the moun- 
 tains, building up the valleys, alternately consolidating and 
 dispersing, arranging and disturbing, forming and re- 
 forming, until that variety has been produced which char- 
 
IV.] OF MANKIND. 83 
 
 acterizes the present state of things. He shows how the 
 present variety of hnman society has been accomplished 
 on the same principles; the endless variety of art, of 
 thought. 
 
 But we are only concerned now in seeing how truly the 
 law holds good in Natural History proper. Whether we 
 suppose one or another classification best, it all comes to 
 this in the end : every nook and cranny of the world has 
 got itself somehow filled with living forms, all fashioned 
 agreeably to the circumstances of the place of their exist- 
 ence. As these circumstances vary infinitely, so must the 
 living forms.* If there be an apparent advancement and 
 ennoblement of living forms through the ages, it must be 
 dependent in some reasonable manner upon some slow ad- 
 vancing movement in the physics of the globe, with which 
 the living forms must stand in amicable harmony. In 
 geology, therefore, there must be some explanation for all 
 the phenomena of palaeontology. If man did not exist 
 until quite recently, we must conclude that the earth was 
 not prepared for him till recently. And so of all the other 
 and lower creatures. This teaches us the needlessness of 
 any transcendental treatment of the development theory ; 
 and the wisdom of those who keep the discussion of it 
 down to pure Natural History facts. 
 
 One of the most remarkable and important consequences 
 of the law of Differentiation bears directly upon the his- 
 tory of Man. Differentiation is not only the production of 
 variety, but the production of multitude. Both are der 
 pendent (but in different ways) upon the bewildering net- 
 work of cross acting physical forces, which support and 
 also destroy life. If these physical forces actually produce 
 living forms, we see at once that they must generate them 
 in multitudinous crowds. If they do not, but only sus- 
 tain them and destroy them, we see that the Creator was 
 under a physical necessity to place in existence great mul- 
 titudes of living forms if he desired any of them to con- 
 tinue to exist. This is true not only respecting the mul- 
 
 * If there be 90 per cent, of carbonate of lime in the sea, there must 
 be a vast over-proportion of infusorial forms to appropriate it, while 
 a corresponding; proportion of infusorial life of another kind appropriates 
 the remaining 10 per cent, of silica. (See Jukes' Manual, p. 134, 135, f.) 
 
84 ON THE DIGNITY [LECT, 
 
 titude of individuals, but respecting the multitude of 
 varieties or species. 
 
 What do we see, then, when we look around us^ ? First, 
 as to the multitude of individuals. There are . supposed, 
 indeed, to be a thousand millions of human beings on the 
 earth : but this is nothing. There are a thousand millions 
 of mosquitoes in a single swamp. Each female fish pro- 
 duces a million of young fry per annum. Is this a law of 
 life ? Yes ! but it is still more a law of death. The final 
 cause of this fecundity must be discovered rather among 
 the destroying agencies of nature than among its sustain- 
 ing harmonies. We notice, therefore, that those animals 
 are most prolific whose individual lives are least secure ; 
 and these are what we call the lowest forms of life. We 
 call them so because daily wholesale destruction gives us 
 the sense of waste, and consequently of worthlessness. 
 These are the forms which would exist during the earlier 
 and more adventurous days, when quaking lands, and hiss- 
 ing seas, and steam-filled skies, made the vexed earth a 
 most unnatural mother; quite unsafe to trust her with 
 children of a riper nature than corals and sea-weed. 
 
 What is true of the multitudes of individuals is equally 
 and for the same reason true of the multitudes of specific 
 forms. Each species has a habitat and is fitted to it. The 
 development theory supposes the habitat to have fitted up 
 its own specific forms. Whether that supposition be true 
 or false matters little ; the fact remains unchanged in 
 either case that each change of circumstances causes, or 
 necessitates, or is accompanied by, some specific differ- 
 ence. Now if an animal can only change its nature to 
 suit a change in its circumstances it need not perish. 
 But this is a high faculty, scarcely exercised by any plant 
 or animal excepting man and a few of the mammalia which 
 keep about him. Even these exert the power of adapta- 
 tion so imperfectly that they are sure to perish in the long 
 run when taken from one climate to another ; and man 
 himself can only accomplish the immense feat of per- 
 manent migration at the risk of individual destruction, and 
 by calling to his help the whole physical, intellectual, and 
 spiritual worlds to be his body guards. 
 
 Nature grants the right of selecting its own food to 
 every creature that consents to remain within the limits of 
 
IV 1 OP MANKIND. , 85 
 
 its own habitat. There and there only nature has provided 
 exactly for the demands of its stomach, and its stomach is 
 the wise guardian of the interests of the rest of its consti- 
 tution. Liberty is perfect, because the necessary and the 
 pleasant can be secured by the mere exercise of will. Mi- 
 gration must destroy or at least limit this freedom of the 
 will. The animal that invades territory destined to sup- 
 port the life of other animals unlike its own, finds poisons 
 when it seeks for meat, and must endure the consequences. 
 'Tis now a choice of evils. The right to roam and choose 
 at its own sweet will is gone. The will is now subjected 
 by a judgment rendered anxious and unhappy by self-evi- 
 dent want of harmony between its suffering desires and 
 nature's strange provisions. To this law all animals must be 
 subjected which attach themselves to man. But in the high- 
 est degree it is the key to the development of man in history. 
 The wider the migration, the greater the embarrassment, 
 the keener the suffering ; the more subjected the will, the 
 more unfolded the intellect and passions ; for hunger is | 
 fierce and cunning, while satiety is unobservant as an oyster 
 and gentle as a lamb. 
 
 Thus it happens that every possible slightest shade of 
 variation in the conditions of existence must be a trump 
 of doom, or else must be provided against in the plan of 
 the Creation by some equally subtile variation in the 
 organs of life. This is the only explanation for that in- 
 credible number of specific forms distinguishable among 
 the lowest ranks of animated nature. Think of it ! A 
 German entomologist has made out 820 species of insects, 
 preserved in the pieces of amber which form his cabinet, 
 all of them, mites, gnats, mosquitoes, proboscidians or 
 sucking flies, who met their fate by sticking fast in a gum 
 which exuded from trees of tertiary age, growing in moist, 
 low places sheltered from the wind. Of all these species 
 only 30 were such as now belong to the mosquito tribes of 
 Europe ; 100 were species which we have at present living 
 in America ; but not one out of the whole 820 was like any 
 of the numerous species of mosquitoes known in the south 
 of Africa. 
 
 Think again of the numberless species of corals belong- 
 ing only to one age. Mr Sj^dney S. Lyons' cabinet of 
 Devonian and Silurian crinoids at Louisville, in Kentucky, 
 
86 ON THE DIGNITY [LECT. 
 
 magnificently furnished as it is with genera and species, 
 gives but a faint conception of the multitudes of separate 
 beautiful forms which specify the various physical condi- 
 tions under which that family of the radiated animals has 
 struggled so bravely, but often so unsuccessfully, to con^ 
 tinue to exist.* 
 
 But as we approach our own times, and a quieter bosom 
 gives suck to worthier embodiments of the wisdom of the 
 divine, more self-sustaining, more adaptable to circum- 
 stances, more hardy, more migratory, or more inventive, 
 we see how these countless multitudes become more moder- 
 ate swarms, vast herds become small flocks, flocks turn 
 to single pairs. Life has grown safe. A genus need no 
 longer put forth its hundred specific forms, like tentacles, 
 to cling withal to the tempestuous earth. Instead of one 
 bear for the summer and another for the winter, one bear 
 will do for both, provided he may hybernate. *« One set of 
 birds for north and south will be enough, if you will teach 
 them to migrate twice every year. Let man be but a 
 single species, yet if you give him a mind to be his own 
 tailor, shoemaker, house-carpenter, shipbuilder, farmer, 
 and gunsmith, he may inhabit the whole earth from pole 
 to pole. This is the great argument for unity of species 
 in the case of man ; a subject, however, to be taken up in 
 my next lecture. We are speaking now of the dignity of 
 man ; and of the likelihood that his numbers will be small 
 in inverse proportion to his powers of resistance to those 
 fatal forces of surrounding life, beneath the blows of which 
 all meaner images of God have been in past times over- 
 thrown and utterly destroyed. 
 
 It is this ability of man to protect himself against nature 
 that affords us an explanation of the paucity of his remains 
 as fossilized. For, in the first place, as I have just ex- 
 plained, the race of man has been a scanty race. And, in 
 the second place, the individual man has been a cunning 
 fellow } always on his guard : foresighted against the ma- 
 licious tricks and brutal damages of nature ; wisely sus- 
 picious of the quagmires and quicksands in which the 
 stupid mammoths were entombed; prompt to devise ex- 
 
 * The promised work of Professor Agassiz will give us another mag- 
 nificent example from the basin of the Amazon, where he has discovered; 
 hundreds of species of fish in a single lake. 
 
IV.] OF MANKIND. 87 
 
 pedients for recovery in disaster, and, above all, able to 
 form leagues for mutual life insurance. Yet with all bis 
 superior advantage, nature was sometimes too much for 
 bim. As I narrated in my last lecture, men bave been 
 fossilized just like inferior brutes. As tbe eruption of 
 Vesuvius in Pliny's days caught a few sleepers and a 
 sick man or two, when all the rest of the inhabitants of 
 Herculaneum and Pompeii made good their escape ; so in 
 an age immensely older than the pyramids, a torrent of 
 volcanic mud captured one of the flying aborigines of cen- 
 tral France, part of whose skeleton is now in the museum 
 of Le Puy. The crater from which the torrent came be- 
 longs to a group, the fires of which have been extinct since 
 the days when the rhinoceros and lion were at home in 
 western Europe, before the glacial epoch. 
 
 The care which men have always taken to secure the bodies 
 of their relatives and friends from decay has been the chief 
 cause of their utter disappearance from the earth. Eeli- 
 gious veneration has produced the same effect in ages when 
 dead bodies were burned instead of buried. The supersti- 
 tious dread of being devoured by wild beasts after death 
 has caused many races to suspend their corpses in baskets 
 from the boughs of trees, ensuring speedy dissolution. 
 Yet the buried bones of ancient heroes, as we have already 
 seen, have been occasionally exhumed by floods and swept 
 into caves and buried again in a broad common alabaster 
 sarcophagus in the most effectual manner. 
 
 In spite, then, of the paucity of human beings to be fos- 
 silized, and in spite of the care which they have always 
 taken not to be fossilized, they have not always escaped 
 fossilization. But the conditions under which human fos- 
 silization became possible were so hard to realize, that every 
 case was an exception to that law which has made the strata 
 of the earth so many celneteries of the past, so many 
 museums for the present. Every new discovery of a fossil 
 human bone of ancient date is a sort of natural miracle 
 wrought specially for science. 
 
 In studying out man's role in the great drama of the 
 Development of Animal Life, we depend greatly upon 
 these precious relics of his existence in an older era than 
 the present. But in determining man's relative dignity 
 in the grand scale of animal life, we have other and abund- 
 
88 ON THE DIGNITY [LECT. 
 
 ant materials for thought. That scale not only ascends 
 through all the ages, but stands to-day before us. The 
 earth is still crowded with the representatives of most of 
 the departed forms. Details are changed, but Natural 
 History continues still the same. Man can be classified by 
 what he is, as well as' by what he has been. If we need 
 see all that he can be, we need but travel from land to 
 land, from city to country, from continent to island, from 
 field to forest, from mountain to desert, from the ice-fields 
 of Greenland to the jungles of India and the swamps of 
 the gulf of Guinea; everywhere some new variety of man 
 will offer itself for our examination, — surrounded by as 
 various forms of lower life, with which to be compared. 
 
 In spite of all this wealth of opportunity zoologists have 
 found it a most difficult task to give an adequate and satis- 
 factory definition of the animal called Man. 
 
 i Linnseus led the way in this field of inquiry by compar- 
 ing man and the apes in the same manner as he compared 
 these last with the Carnivores, Ruminants, Rodents, or 
 any other division of warm-blooded quadrupeds. After 
 several modifications of his original scheme, he ended by 
 placing Man as one of the many genera in his Order 
 Primates, which embraced the apes and lemurs, and also 
 the bats ; for he found these last to be nearly allied to some 
 of the lowest forms of monkeys. But all those modern 
 naturalists who retain Linnseus's order Primates, agree to 
 exclude the bats (cheiroptera), and most of them class 
 Man as one of the families of this order Primates/* 
 
 Blumenbach (following Linnseus in 1779) proposed, on 
 the other hand, to separate Man entirely from the Mon- 
 keys. He called the latter ' fourhanded ' quadrumana-. 
 His definition of Man was short and simple enough : 
 animal, erectum, bimanum. Buffon had used the same 
 terms in a somewhat different way 13 years before. 
 Ouvier used them again 12 years later. He placed the 
 apes, monkeys, and lemurs together in one grand order, 
 and man in another order by himself. 
 
 In spite of the authority of these four great names, 
 modern zoologists have preferred to make man stand alone, 
 not indeed as an order, but simply as a family. Professor 
 
 * Lyell, Ant. of Man, ch. xxiv. 
 
IV.] OF MANKIND. 89 
 
 Huxley * even repudiates the very term quadrumanous. 
 He takes the ground that the hind extremities of monkeys, 
 apes, and lemurs, bear no true resemblance at all to the 
 hand of man. They are in all respects not hands but feet. 
 On the other side he affirms that there is no anatomical 
 difference of type between the hand of a gorilla and the 
 hand of a man. The hand of the gorilla is merely clum- 
 sier, heavier, and furnished with a shorter thumb. The 
 foot of the gorilla he shows to possess also the three char- 
 acteristic features of the human foot : 1. By the same 
 arrangement of the tarsal bones ; 2. By the presence of 
 the same short flexor muscle and short extensor muscle of 
 the digits ; and, 3. By the presence of the same peculiar 
 muscle called the peronoeus longus. The only difference 
 which can be mentioned is merely formal, viz. that the 
 great toe of the gorilla is more movable than man's. In 
 fact, there would be, according to this, less difference 
 between the extremities of man and the gorilla than 
 between those of the gorilla and orang-outang ;f an d yet 
 others of the monkey tribe have still more ^widely diver- 
 gent extremities. 
 
 In like manner a comparison of the teeth of man with 
 those of the apes and monkeys has failed to establish them 
 in separate orders. ' The number of teeth in the gorilla 
 and in all the Old World monkeys,, except the lemurs, is 
 32, the same number as in man. The general pattern of 
 the crown of the tooth is also the same. All the American 
 apes, however, have 38 teeth. The only real distinction 
 between the jaw of the apes and the human jaw consists 
 in the fact that the eye-teeth of the apes project almost 
 like tusks/ 
 
 If we institute a like comparison as to other portions of 
 the frame we are led to the same results. There are 
 sometimes remarkable differences between one human race 
 
 * Huxley's third ' Lecture on the motor organs of man compared 
 with those of other animals/ It. School of Mines (March, 1861), embo- 
 died in his 'Evidence as to man's place in Nature.' Williams and 
 Norgate, Loudon, 1804. [In Lyell, Ant. of Man, ch. xxiv.] 
 
 f The thumb of the orang differs by its shortness and absence of any 
 special long flexor muscle from that of a gorilla more than it differs from 
 that of man. The carpus of the orang and of most of the lower apes 
 contains nine bones; that of a chimpanzee, gorilla, and man, only eight. 
 
90 ON THE DIGNITY. [LECT. 
 
 and another. Two years ago, Dr Broca, the Secretary of 
 the Anthropological Society of Paris, was good enough to 
 show me nearly 100 human skeletons which he hacl recently 
 procured from a cave of the Stone age, discovered by an 
 English gentleman, in preparing a park for his new country- 
 house, about ten leagues north-east of Paris. Dr Broca 
 pointed out to me one striking peculiarity in the anatomy of 
 the arm-bones of this ancient race. There was a round 
 foramen pierced through the thin curtain of bone which 
 connects the two processes at the elbow. He assured me 
 that he had examined hundreds of arm-bones obtained from 
 cemeteries of the Merovingian age, but none of them ex- 
 hibited this hole. Nor is it to be found in the modern 
 human skeleton, except among the Hottentots. But it is 
 a characteristic mark of the ape and monkey anatomy. 
 
 There is a fourth ground of comparison. If we can 
 learn nothing from the hands, the feet, the teeth, the bones, 
 cannot we succeed better by comparing the shape and the 
 size of the skull with its containing brain ? Professor 
 Dana, of New Haven, dissatisfied like the rest with all other 
 tests, finds refuge in this. He thinks he has established 
 for the whole range of life -development a common law, 
 which he names the law of Cephalization. All animal 
 forms are worth precisely their weight in brain. Man is 
 the noblest creature because in him the digestive and the 
 locomotive systems become at last subordinate to the per- 
 ceptive and the reasoning faculties. I cannot give you the 
 details of his ingenious reasoning. The tendency of zoology 
 has for a long time been to this conclusion. But even 
 here there appears no distinction of kind but only of 
 degree. 
 
 Owen, in 1857, unable, as he says, to appreciate or con- 
 ceive of the distinction between the psychical phenomena 
 of a chimpanzee and of a Boschisman, or of an Aztec with 
 arrested brain-growth, proclaimed his return to Blumen- 
 bach's and Cuvier's old classification, making man a 
 separate sub-class, based upon three cerebral characters. 
 Owen's assertion was that man differs from the three 
 mammalian classes, represented by the ape, the beaver, 
 and the kangaroo, — 1. in the overlapping of his cerebral 
 hemispheres forward so as to cover the olfactory lobes, and 
 backward so as to cover and quite conceal the cerebellum, 
 
IV.] OF MANKIND. 91 
 
 when looked down upon from above ; 2. In the presence 
 of what is called the ' posterior horn of the lateral ven- 
 tricle ; ' and, 3. In the addition to the hind lobe of each 
 hemisphere of what is called the 'hippocampus minor.'* 
 
 Upon the publication of this theory a storm arose. It 
 was shown that Owen's picture of the brain of a chimpanzee, 
 which he took from a Dutch work, printed in 1849, and on 
 which he based his comparison, was worthless, because it 
 had been drawn from a shrunk specimen. M. Gratiolet, 
 ( the highest authority in cerebral anatomy of our age,' 
 showed by new drawingsf from fresh specimens, that no 
 such distinctions between the brain forms of man and the 
 chimpanzee could at all be made out. The human brain 
 which he dissected was that of a Bushwoman exhibited in 
 London. He showed that the human and the simian 
 brains, however convoluted in man, however smooth in the 
 marmoset, instead of having Owen's distinctions, have four 
 grand characters in common : 1. a rudimentary olfactory 
 lobe; 2. A posterior lobe, not uncovering, but completely 
 covering the cerebellum ; 3. A well-defined ( fissure of 
 Silvius ; ' and, 4. A posterior horn in the lateral ventricle. 
 
 To settle the dispute which, upon this, broke out afresh 
 fifteen genera of Old World and New World apes and 
 monkeys, dying in the Zoological Gardens of London, 
 were dissected ; representing almost all the forms in dis- 
 pute, from that of the chimpanzee, the next to man, to 
 that of the lemur, farthest removed from man. The con- 
 clusion arrived at from these and from other Continental 
 examinations which were made at the same time, was, that 
 Owen's distinctions had no foundation in point of fact. J 
 
 Nothing remains but the superior volume of the human 
 brain, 1. Absolutely, i. e. when compared with the volume 
 of the ape's brain ; and, 2. Eelatively, i. e. when we com- 
 pare the brain of a man with the bulk and weight of his 
 body ; and the brain of an ape with the bulk and weight of 
 its body. 
 
 Now Professor Huxley says that, so far as he is aware, 
 
 t * Owen, Proc. Linn. Soc. Lond., vol. viii. p. 20. Archencephala was 
 his new sub-class name. (Lyell, Ant. Man, xxiv. p. 481.) 
 
 f The false and true drawings are placed opposite each other in 
 Lyell, pp. 482, 483. 
 
 X See Rolliston's summary on p. 489 of Lyell. 
 
92 ON THE DIGNITY [lECT. 
 
 no human adult cranium contains less than 62 cubic inches, 
 and that the most capacious gorilla skull measured no more 
 than 34 \ ; a difference between them of say two- to one — a 
 tremendous difference ! The difference between the small- 
 est human skull measured by Morton, viz. 63 cubic inches, 
 and the largest human skull, which measured 114, is also 
 something tremendous — nearly two to one. If volume of 
 brain, then, be the criterion, the mathematical statement 
 of man's relation to the ape will be expressed by the series 
 
 114 : 63 : 34J. 
 But the series will not be complete until we add the size 
 of the smallest gorilla adult skull yet measured, which was 
 24 cubic inches. It is, you see, a descending series, and 
 nothing more — 114 : 63 : 34 J : 24. We may add, however, 
 still lower figures, and keep very nearly the same propor- 
 tions, from among the crania of the lower orders of apes. 
 
 Language is no criterion, for every animal has a language 
 of its own. The sense of the ridiculous is possessed by 
 brutes, who laugh with their eyes, or tail, if not with their 
 whole face, as man does. The faculty of worship in itself 
 is no distinction ; for the devotion of a dog to his master, 
 of a lover to his mistress, of a Christian to his Saviour, of 
 an angel to his God, has the same essential root so far as 
 we can see. Susceptibility to improvement is not peculiar 
 to man ; nor the natural law by which there occurs an he- 
 reditary accumulation of acquired powers. This also, and 
 all the before-mentioned criteria are only available for a 
 difference in degree, but not for a difference in kind, distin- 
 guishing man above the rest of the creation. 
 
 When we notice the intelligence of the dog, and the ele- 
 phant, whose type of brain is more remote from man, and 
 see how they manifest the possession of the moral faculties, 
 displaying, as they do, the sense of shame, of justice, of 
 loyalty, of compassion, we find out how little distance our 
 reasoning can go ; how imperfect are our data, how myste- 
 rious are the functions of all brain matter, how temperate 
 we ought to be in entertaining convictions in regard to the 
 relationship of man to other animals, how sound and high 
 our hope of self-improvement should become, and what 
 grandeur resides in the Apostle's words — ' forgetting the 
 things that are behind, and pressing forward to those that 
 are before.'' 
 
IV.] OF MANKIND. 93 
 
 Here, as in so many other similar cases, science- is en- 
 tirely at fault,— Bass elas sitting at the foot of the wall 
 that surrounds his happy valley. I think I can see 
 around me in society sufficient evidences that man is a de- 
 veloped monkey. But what of that ? Shall a wise man 
 kill himself for shame because his ancestor, ten generations 
 back removed, was hung for felony ? What does it con- 
 cern us that our naked and painted forefathers danced their 
 devilish orgies round shrieking victims, set on fire in towers 
 of wicker-work, making night hideous, and the angels hide 
 their faces in pity, horror, and disgust ! I confess, for my 
 own part, aside from all considerations of actual science, I 
 like to see every tub stand upon its own bottom. This 
 pride of civilization seems to me the pride of parvenus. 
 If mankind were originally apes, they have, at all events, 
 acquired the right to be so no longer. The ape-like skull 
 of the Stone age has been replaced by the skull of the poet, 
 the philosopher, and the statesman. Let us be satisfied ; 
 Christ has come. I only wish that I could present before 
 your eyes, as a worthy close to our train of thought to-night, 
 a picture of some aboriginal savage of the Stone age, and 
 then, in divine contrast to its humiliating ugliness and base 
 brutality, a copy of that immortal statue of the highest 
 type of man, the Christ of Dannecker. I see you love, 
 like the old Greeks, to adorn your city, and honour your 
 great men with statues : why have you not indulged your- 
 selves in the joy of having always before your eyes the 
 wonder of the age — the greatest statue of the greatest 
 Being of all ages ? St Petersburg has obtained a copy of 
 it in marble. Why should Boston be behind St Peters- 
 burg ? It is worth an annual pilgrimage to Stuttgard to 
 behold it. Such majesty ! such tenderness ! such intellect 
 and wisdom in the brow and face ! Such grace and beauty 
 in the form, seen through the flowing robe ! Of more than 
 mortal size, it seems no more than man, — no less than all 
 the blessed gospels say of him ! the flower of the long de- 
 velopment ! the very incarnation of the Deity. 
 
94 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 ON THE UNITY OF MANKIND, 
 
 "We are now to consider what light the modern sciences 
 can throw upon the question of the oneness or the many- 
 ness of mankind. 
 
 It has been common to use with great looseness of 
 meaning the terms race, family, species, in their applica- 
 tion to mankind. 
 
 The c race of man' is contrasted with the animal races, 
 and the race of angels, — the word race being the English 
 form of the Latin word radix, root, and implying a common 
 origin to all the human inhabitants of this planet. 
 
 The ' human species ' is an expression even more common 
 in late literature than the l human race/ but quite as in- 
 definite. The word species in Latin (specto, spy, &c), 
 like the word speech (sprechen) in English, has reference 
 to the expressiomof the inner nature outwardly, upon the 
 face and form, so that it can be understood and sympa- 
 thized with. 
 
 The e human family' is an expression merely implying 
 the common interests of mankind, as against the forest 
 and the flood, wild beasts and hostile elements ; while it 
 includes the ideas of possible fraternity, consanguinity, 
 intermarriage, and fellowships of every spiritual grade. 
 When the apostle wrote ' for of one blood he hath made 
 all the dwellers upon earth/ he shared the indefinite no- 
 tions of that and every other age, and expressed his Chris- 
 tian philanthropy in the usual way, quite sufficient for his 
 purpose. 
 
 Our inquiry is of another order. Science is obliged to 
 restrict words to one meaning. At the outset of a mathe- 
 matical discussion the value of x is unknown ; but at the 
 close of it, the value of x is made out to be some one 
 
ON THE UNITY OF MANKIND. 95 
 
 certain quantity, and no other, We have not yet made 
 out the value of x in the discussion of species. We still 
 use the terms race and. family in a loose way. We talk of 
 the various races of mankind, — the black race, the white 
 race, the yellow race, the red race. We even subdivide 
 these, and speak of four or five black races, i. e. the Caribs 
 of S. America, the blacks of Northern Africa, the blacks of 
 Southern Africa, the Negrito race of the Andaman islands, 
 and the Milanesians of the Eastern Archipelago. Some- 
 times our subdivisions become small and numerous ; e. g. 
 we divide the white race into the Arian and , Shemitic 
 branches ; and then subdivide the Shemitic branch into 
 the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Coptic, the Phoenician, and 
 other races. Ethnologists, therefore, differ in their classi- 
 fication of human races so much, that the number ranges 
 from three to thirty. The questions which start up for 
 their consideration are questions of detail, and the word 
 race has, in common ethnology, got to confining itself to 
 these details. 
 
 But it carries a larger significance ; it has the same 
 scope with the word species, with this difference : viz. that 
 the word species reminds us of other animals beside man, 
 and excites the question of their possible consanguinity 
 with him ; while the word race excites only the question ^ 
 of one man's relationship to another. 
 
 My lecture this evening will therefore deal with these 
 two subjects : race and species ; or, in other words, with the 
 distinctions of human races, and their origins. I state it 
 in this form, so as to get rid of the transcendental discus- 
 sion of speciesj9er.se, which would absorb the whole even- 
 ing and lead us to no results after all. And I take them 
 in this reversed order of time because I do not believe in 
 a priori science. We must take existing facts first, and 
 argue back from them to what has been fact in times past. 
 
 But before investigating the facts of the case, I must 
 state the condition of our apparatus for the investigation. 
 Taking the sciences in their order : what means do they 
 afford us for determining the unity of the human race ? 
 
 From the group of the mathematical sciences we get our 
 calculations of the increase of human population ; our 
 knowledge of the relations established between physical 
 geography and human migrations ; and between climate 
 
96 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 
 
 and character. We get also certain wonderful glimpses 
 into the mystery of change of organic form, which, whether 
 retained by the Creator in his own hand, or deposited by 
 him as an efficient cause in nature, is, in any view you 
 may take of it, the great central subject of this investiga- 
 tion. 
 
 From the group of the inorganic sciences we receive the 
 discussion of facts only hinted at in the last lecture ; the 
 fossil remains of primeval men and of contemporaneous 
 animals, and, moreover, our ideas of time. 
 
 From the organic sciences we get our laws of species- 
 variation ; laws which rule over both kingdoms, the veget- 
 able and the animal, and therefore over man. Compara- 
 tive anatomy, describing its collections, defines for us the 
 limits of similarity and dissimilarity between the fossil 
 species and those now existing; between the monkey 
 tribes and the tribes of mankind • between the skulls found 
 in the bone-caverns, and the skulls of Casper Hauser and 
 Daniel Webster; between the skeleton and the skin of 
 Hottentots and of Englishmen. 
 
 From the historical sciences, of which Ethnology is one, 
 we get those facts which, on the one hand, teach the per- 
 manence of those great distinctions upon which our largest 
 classification of human races is founded ; and, on the other 
 hand, teach those easy and rapid modifications of the human 
 form and features, through civilization or decivilization, 
 which may well make us liberal in our judgments, both 
 towards those, who insist upon one Adam from whom all 
 blacks and whites, yellow men and red men, have descended, 
 and also towards those who insist upon the generation of 
 man from the ape. Herewith come in those volumes of 
 archseological suggestions ; pictures of men and dogs upon 
 the tombs of the Pharaohs ; images of ancient Hindu aud 
 Chinese deities ; skeletons of Greeks and Romans, Gauls 
 and Finns, buried in tombs and tumuli of every age, back 
 through the Modern, the Iron, the Bronze, and the Stone 
 periods. Surely we ought to be able to come to some con- 
 clusion, however modestly, as to whether mankind is and 
 has always been of one race ; and whether there are signs 
 of a transition from degraded ape-like forms, up to the 
 noblest figure of a man. But the list of our opportunities 
 is not yet complete. 
 
V.] OF MANKIND. 97 
 
 From the social sciences we get statistics, not 'only of 
 the present, but of the past conditions of human life; we 
 see how the arts and arms of men have come into existence 
 and been improved, increased, and perfected, in striking 
 parallelism with human form and human intellect ; part of 
 that development of the idea of man, which itself forms 
 but a part of a still grander development of the idea of 
 universal nature. The study of ancient commerce reflects 
 light upon the theory of migrations, and helps to distin- 
 guish the characteristics of races. The study of ancient 
 war is, in fact, the tracing of migrations as they became 
 accomplished facts, influencing mixtures of races, and ex- 
 plaining the reappearance of Mongol faces in Western 
 Pennsylvania. By the study of ancient law (as the mag- 
 nificent book of Lewis, just published, proves) we get 
 laws of natural selection, which even Darwin hardly 
 dreamed of; by which races were subdivided, and new 
 forms contracted for, to become permanent in after times. 
 Lastly, from the intellectual sciences, we learn: 1. how 
 to distinguish the races of mankind through language, 
 and to track them in their lat&r marchings and counter- 
 marchings across the continents and seas; 2. how to dis- 
 tinguish races by their fine arts, their ethics, their wor- 
 ships ; bat above all, 3. we get some clear notion of man's 
 relation to the brute, and are thus enabled to introduce 
 into the purely materialistic discussion of the development 
 theory, based on fossils, and on comparative anatomy, 
 those higher considerations which naturally and properly 
 must have most weight with sensible, religious, Christian 
 people. 
 
 The last condition of mankind, namely, that in which 
 we see it now existing, resembles the last condition of the 
 rock-crust of the earth, namely, that in which we see it 
 constituting the deltas and the valley-terraces of existing 
 rivers. What is this condition ? It is one of disintegra- 
 tion, confusion, intermixture. Examine a handful of the 
 gravel which comes in daily from Roxbury to be dumped 
 into the Back Bay, and say what are its constituent ele- 
 ments ? and where they originated ? Pebbles of quartz, 
 of porphyry, of micaslate, of gneiss, of syenite, white, 
 black, red, green, and blue are there ; tell me their several 
 ages, their ancient starting-points, the course of the ice- 
 
 7 
 
98 ON THE UNITY [liECT* 
 
 berg, the glacier, or the current which brought them to 
 the quarry. The data exist. Guyot has traced the ancient 
 moraines of Switzerland back to the existing glaciers, and 
 thus to their mother peaks among the Alps. Nature 
 writes out in full all her family trees. With care you can 
 interpret them to a certainty. A labourer collecting 
 cobble-stones at the falls of the Delaware near Trenton, 
 for the pavements of Philadelphia, may wonder how this or 
 that one can happen to differ so widely from those about it. 
 Vanuxem, or Conrad, or James Hall would tell him, by 
 certain marks upon it, that it was a piece of coral ; that it 
 .grew originally in what is now the valley of the Mohawk ; 
 that ice and rain had carried it down the whole course of 
 the river Delaware from Cooperstown to tide ; and that 
 the pebbles, among which it lies, are red sand- stones of a 
 later age from Newburgh, quartzites of an older age from 
 Easton, blue slates from the Water Gap, iron-stones from 
 Milford, and copper- slates from Port Deposit. 
 
 Modern cities are the gravel-banks of humanity. Dis- 
 integrated races of mankind are drifted into them. Of the 
 600,000 inhabitants of Philadelphia, a rude one-tenth have 
 been brought to it on those pitiless ice-bergs, the slave- 
 ships, from the southern continent of the old world, and 
 represent all the principal subdivisions of the black races. 
 A second tenth has been supplied by Suabia, Switzerland, 
 Bohemia, Moravia, Austria, Hungary, and other native 
 lands of the Sclavonic race. A third tenth has come from 
 Northern Germany and Scandinavia, and represents the 
 Teutonic race, in its two branches. A fourth and fifth are 
 Celts, from Ireland and Wales, the west of Scotland, and 
 the north and west of France, mixed in with Celt Iberians 
 of Spain and Italy. The rest are lowland Scotch and 
 English, a mongrel people made up of Celtic Britons, and 
 Teutonic Franks and Saxons, Scandinavian Normans, with 
 Slavic, Finnish, Tartar, and Shemitic streaks of blood. 
 The Shemitic race is represented by thousands of Jews. 
 And on the wharves are seen Cooleys from India and 
 China, Malays from Singapore, and Canakas from Hawaii. 
 
 Two opposing laws work mightily and incessantly over 
 the ethnology of such a place. One is the law of mixture, 
 tending to obliterate all distinctions of race and to produce 
 new types ; the other is the law of segregation, tending to 
 
y.] OF MANKIND. 99 
 
 draw tlie individuals of each stock together and to repro- 
 duce those original distinctions. 
 
 Under the first law, and by the intermarriage of the 
 black race with the whites, we have mulattoes of every 
 grade of colour, stature, and facial angle. Whether an 
 improvement be the consequence men are not yet agreed. 
 The circumstances have not yet been favourable for settling 
 that question, nor will be until black and white can mix 
 on terms of reasonable equality, each bringing to the 
 other its own peculiar characteristics in full and free de- 
 velopment. With regard to the races not so widely separ- 
 ated by nature or by circumstances, improvement by in- 
 termixture is an established truth. In middle Pennsylvania 
 and Virginia, for example, wherever intermarriage has 
 taken place between North-Irish presbyterian Saxons, and 
 the families of the old Swope and Hessian emigrants, a 
 magnificent mongrel breed of people fills the valleys of the 
 Susquehanna, Juniata, and Potomac, with frames of steel 
 and brains of flame, the stuff of which heroes, poets, and 
 philosophers are made. No one can avoid observing the 
 rapid improvement of the Celtic race in the United States, 
 wherever it is free to cross itself with Teutonic blood. 
 Let all due weight be given to the other elements of pro- 
 gress, superior food, superior labour, superior education, 
 still we cannot fail to recognize the crossing of the breeds 
 as the chief hope of the nation. Civilization is the flower 
 of migration. Every great history has sprung from some 
 barbaric invasion. A new humanity follows every deluge. 
 Arts and learnings are the electric lights about the wire- 
 points where two races approximate. One kind of blood 
 is metal to the acid of another : mix them in generous 
 proportions and you have Hare's calorimotor on a cosmical 
 scale; you can burn up with it the past, or electrotype 
 with it the future. When the effervescence ceases the 
 Creator walks away ; the apparatus is useless until it is 
 charged anew. 
 
 By the law of segregation, on the other hand, the Ger- 
 mans of Philadelphia have drawn off into the north- 
 eastern quarter of the city, and made a Frankfort-on-the- 
 Maine of it. The blacks have appropriated the southern 
 wards and made a Timbuctoo of them. The Irish cluster 
 about their churches, the Jews about their synagogues, 
 
100 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 
 
 without need of legislative enactments. The west end of 
 one of the finest streets in Cincinnati is formed by rows of 
 palaces, built since the middle of the war, and all inhabited 
 by Jews. The principal Quaker families of Philadelphia 
 still reside in Arch-street — a beautiful meeting-house, a 
 mile long, and so monotonous that you might turn it end 
 for end, or upside down, and nobody should perceive the 
 difference. 
 
 But when groups of tourmaline or spinel segregate in 
 the old or metamorphic rocks, they are signs of age or 
 long stagnation. A city with established quarters of dis- 
 tinct nationalities cannot improve at the same rate with a 
 city like Chicago or St Louis, where confusion of races 
 pervades the place. Arch- street has been an iron bar 
 between its legs to the city of William Penn. The pro- 
 hibitory tariff which the south so long laid against the im- 
 portation of Yankee blood was that which made Charles 
 Sumner's speech so dreadfully true. The Indian tribes of 
 North America fossilized themselves by isolation ; and now 
 they perish because they cannot marry into a stronger 
 family. In the earlier ages of mankind this law of segre- 
 gation ruled despotically. And why ? Because it is the 
 law which guards the individual life, without regard to the 
 improvement of the race. That other law of disintegra- 
 tion and intermixture patronizes the improvement of the 
 race and disregards the life of the individual. What do 
 the forces of civilization care for the happiness or misery 
 of the individual coal-miner that furnishes fuel for its 
 steam-engine, or the sailor who brings it over the sea, or 
 the engine-driver who is smashed on the experimental trip, 
 or the factory girl, or the telescopic-lens grinder, or the 
 Lord Premier who commits suicide, or the First Consul 
 who eats his broken heart at St Helena ? Nothing. 
 Christianity, indeed, sympathizes with each, and at the 
 same time with all, and thus observes both laws, and em- 
 ploys them, both for the happiness of the individual and 
 for the progress of the race. But Christianity is a recent 
 device of the Deity. Our theme antedates it a million 
 years, if Desnoyer's tertiary bones were really scratched 
 and split by the hands of men. 
 
 Questions to-night will come up such as these : Of what 
 race of men are Desnoyer's tertiary human bones the 
 
V.] OF MANKIND. 101 
 
 vestiges ? In what street of Paris or Boston will you find 
 their present representatives ? Was it that primeval race 
 which afterwards fashioned the flint implements buried in 
 the post-tertiary diluvium of Abbeville ; and those found 
 in the bone-caverns of Belgium? Was it the race whose 
 skeletons lie mouldering in the tumuli of the Stone period 
 here or there ? Is it one of the great existing races of 
 the present day ? How many existing races really are 
 there ? How can we distinguish them apart now that they 
 are so intermixed ? And if we can distinguish them apart, 
 can we also arrange them in any hierarchy, or natural order 
 of mutual excellence ? Are any of them essentially and 
 incurably bestial ? Can there be established any rational 
 connection between the lowest races of mankind existing 
 now and the oldest skulls and skeletons ? Can we in any 
 way make these an intermediate link between the Christian 
 gentleman and the abominable chimpanzee ? 
 
 These questions have been discussed by many writers, 
 and been taken up in almost every order. Each writer has 
 given greater prominence to one or other of them, accord- 
 ing to the special nature of his studies. Perhaps the clear- 
 est statement of them has been made by Carl Yogt, Pro- 
 fessor of Comparative Anatomy in the Academy at Geneva, 
 in a series of lectures delivered at Neuenburg, in one of the 
 valleys of the Swiss Jura, and published in two volumes at 
 Giessen, in 1864. His collection of facts, down to the 
 most recent discoveries of last year, is comprehensive. 
 His searching criticism of the various and opposite 
 opinions held still by men of science, illustrate the whole 
 subject. His reputation as an anatomist is of the highest 
 rank. His independence is as admirable as his scientific 
 method is clear and straightforward. Whether his classi- 
 fication of the human races will fare better than those of 
 his predecessors or not, the strong ground of his general 
 conclusions, I think, cannot be shaken. They are not, in 
 fact, his conclusions ; they are the provisional sentiments 
 of a large number of the leaders of science, for the 
 moment produced by the sum total of our information up 
 to date, and subject of course to constitutional amendment 
 according to law. As such I offer them for your con- 
 sideration this evening. 
 
 I stated in general terms in my last lecture that no dif- 
 
102 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 
 
 ference could be made out between man and the monkey 
 as to the ground-plan of their forms. Their hands are 
 planned like human hands, their feet like human feet, their 
 brains like human brains, their jaws and teeth like human 
 jaws and teeth, and so of all other parts of their organiza- 
 tion. 
 
 The same, of course, can be asserted respecting the dif- 
 ferent races of men ; they are all built upon one plan. If 
 this makes them all of one race, then it becomes also 
 necessary to assert that men and monkeys are of one race, 
 because they are built upon a common plan. 
 
 The differences which do exist, both between men and 
 monkeys, and between one race of men and another, as 
 well as between one race of monkeys and another, are 
 differences in the development of this ground-plan common 
 to all. Take the idea of the skull for an instance : it may 
 be more ape-like or more man-like ; it may be brachy- 
 cephalic, i. e. short for its width, or dolichocephalic, i. e. 
 long for its width ; it may have a low, retreating fore- 
 head, or a high, erect forehead ; it may show a perfectly 
 symmetrical curve, when seen sidewise or endwise, or it 
 may be lumpy and knobby, like a laurel root ; it may be 
 high and pointed; or immensely developed behind the 
 ears ; or all brought forwards over the eyes ; or bulging 
 over the ears sideways ; it may be marked by ridges and 
 crests, fore and aft, and from side to side. All these differ- 
 ences you are accustomed to meet in your daily walks ; and 
 these same kinds of differences you would see if you ex- 
 tended your walks to the forests of the tropics. The sub- 
 ject is one of degrees, or rather one of details. Just as, 
 to use one of Vogt's illustrations, when an architect is 
 showing his scholars the essential unity of plan which re- 
 sides in all Gothic domes he explains the various ways in 
 which the idea of this plan is unfolded in the different 
 cathedrals of Europe. 
 
 And so of all other parts of the human organism as of 
 all other members of the Gothic edifice. We cannot take 
 one part as our criterion ; we must take the whole animal, 
 the whole man. The shape of the skull is very important, 
 because very changeable, and because skulls are attainable 
 when no other vestige of man remains to be examined. 
 But the shape of the limbs, the colour of the skin and 
 
T-] 
 
 OF MANKIND. 
 
 103 
 
 e3^es, the growth of tlie hair — in a word, the entire aspect 
 of the person must, in the end, decide for ns his affinities, 
 and enable us to fix those limits of variation which con- 
 stitute a race. Any other method of classification would 
 be empirical and not natural. 
 
 To show you how careful we must be to take every part 
 of the phenomenon into consideration, and to give you an 
 additional illustration of the delicacy and shrewdness of 
 modern methods of investigation, I will adduce a couple of 
 facts connected with the measurement of human skulls. 
 It does not necessarily follow that small skulls contain 
 feeble brains, nor that small brains in one century may not 
 become larger in another century. 
 
 The action of the brain seems dependent upon its folded 
 surface. ■ Wagner has shown by the following table that 
 women's brains weigh less than men's, but that their sur- 
 faces when unfolded and spread out equal or exceed those 
 of men : — 
 
 Number. 
 
 Weight in 
 gramms. 
 
 Convex surface in 
 16 Dram of great squares. 
 
 1. (Dirichlet) 
 
 1520 
 
 2553 
 
 2. (Fuchs) 
 
 1499 
 
 2489 
 
 3. (Gauss) 
 
 1492 
 
 2419 
 
 4. (Hermann) 
 
 1358 
 
 2406 
 
 5. Man 
 
 1340 
 
 2451 
 
 6. ■» 
 
 1330 
 
 2309 
 
 7. „ 
 
 1273 
 
 2117 
 
 8. Woman 
 
 1254 
 
 2498 
 
 9. (Hausmann) 
 
 1226 
 
 3065 
 
 10. Woman 
 
 1223 
 
 2272 
 
 11 » 
 
 1185 
 
 2300 
 
 12. Mikrocephalus (ic 
 
 liot) 300 
 
 896 
 
 Man, 1499 gramms weight and 2489 of surface. 
 Woman, 1254 „ „ 2498 of surface. 
 
 It is possible thus to explain the small head and womanly 
 intellectuality of the Hindu race.* 
 
 Another such fact is one that Brocaf discovered by his 
 measurement of skulls obtained from two, Parisian grave- 
 yards as old or older than the time of Philip Augustus, i. e. 
 of the twelfth century. It goes to show that the average 
 
 Vogt, vol. i. p. 137. 
 
 f Ibid. pp. 106, 108. 
 
104 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 
 
 size of the skull of the same race may increase in the 
 course of time. 115 of these skulls from one graveyard 
 gave the mean size of 1461.53 cubic centimetres; 117 
 skulls from another graveyard gave 1409.31 cubic centi- 
 metres; while that of 125 skulls of paupers, buried in a 
 modern Parisian cemetery (1788 — 1824) in spite of the 
 debasing influences of poverty, measured 1484.23. 
 
 Morlot in comparing the shape and size of a multitude 
 of ancient Helvetian skulls which he examined, with the 
 skulls of their descendants, the Genevese of the present 
 day, comes to the same conclusion, and ascribes the im- 
 provement to the influence of Christianity. 
 
 Great discussion has been had over this matter of change 
 in the form of the human skull, on the one side under the 
 influence of favourable circumstances, and of unfavourable 
 circumstances on the other. The factitious reputation 
 which the English^ Pritchard acquired came from his 
 assiduous collection and collation of supposed examples of 
 the degeneracy of people through misfortune, and of the 
 improvement of other people through good fortune. His 
 instances of the Turks, of the Jews, of the Irish, are well 
 known. He thought that facts warranted him in assert- 
 ing that the bow-legged and savage-featured horsemen of 
 Independent Tartary had become in two or three centuries 
 the straight-legged handsome aristocrats of Constanti- 
 nople. That the white Jews of Palestine had become under 
 an Indian sky the black Jews of Madras. That the tall, 
 stout, clever Irish of Meath, when driven by the English 
 from their farms to huddle half- starved in mud-huts in the 
 south-west corner of the Green Isle, became in a few 
 generations the ugly, low-browed, meagre-limbed, pot- 
 bellied, brutal creatures, whom the famine drove in crowds 
 to this country, and whose well-fed children now constitute 
 a class of our society not at all inferior to any other, as far 
 as physical and mental development is concerned. 
 
 This story of the Irish has been again taken up by one 
 of the most exact ethnologists of our own day, M. Quatre- 
 fages of Paris. I will give it in his own words : — 
 
 'When the British suppressed the Irish rebellions of 
 1649 and 1689, great crowds of native Irish were driven 
 out from Armagh and the south of county Down, in one di- 
 rection, into the mountains between Flews and the sea, 
 
V.] OP MANKIND. . 105 
 
 and in the other, into Leitrim, Sligo, and Mayo.' From 
 that time on, these people suffered the evil influence of 
 hunger and ignorance, those two great spoilers of man- 
 kind. Their descendants may be easily distinguished at 
 the present day from their relatives left in Meath in good 
 estate. They are marked by open, protruding mouths, 
 projecting teeth, and fletschendern gums, high cheek- 
 bones, suppressed noses, and barbarous foreheads. In 
 Sligo and northern Mayo, two centuries of wretchedness 
 have stamped themselves upon the whole bodily constitu- 
 tion, within and without, furnishing us with an example of 
 human degeneration through known causes, so instructive 
 for the future, as to compensate for the misery of the past. 
 Their mean height is about 5 ft 2 inches ; they are thick- 
 bellied, crook-legged, like mis-begotten children ; clad in 
 rags they go about, the ghosts of a once full- sized, well- 
 bodied, and courageous people. In other quarters of the 
 island where this same Irish race has suffered no such 
 lamentable miseries, it furnishes the fairest examples of 
 human strength and beauty, not only physical but intel- 
 lectual also. Yet this account, which makes one's hair 
 bristle with horror, is sufhcient to show how easily it can 
 be lowered to a level with, and be made to show all the 
 characteristics of, the lowest negro races, the most aban- 
 doned Australian tribes.'' 
 
 I have selected from a great many others and given you 
 in full this description of a case, which has made perhaps 
 the profoundest impression upon the imagination of eth- 
 nologists, because it will not only make the question before 
 us plain, but will show how differently different investi- 
 gators conclude their inferences from the same facts. 
 
 Pritchard, and his numerous old- school followers, see in 
 this history only a fine example of man's susceptibility to 
 change, and they prove by it and other like examples, that 
 satiety and hunger, heat and cold, field-life and forest-life, 
 mountain-air and sea-air, have been ample means for 
 changing the descendants of the first pair, Adam and Eve, 
 or of the second pair, Noah and Anna, into all the black, 
 white, yellow, and red descriptions of mankind which now 
 inhabit the globe. But in order to maintain this theory 
 they are obliged to ignore or explain away a multitude 
 of adverse facts, going to show that this capacity of man 
 
106 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 
 
 for change is so limited that any race subjected to ad- 
 versity beyond a certain point, not only degenerates but 
 perishes entirely, like any other kind of animal. 
 
 This opposite view has been taken up with the same ex- 
 cessive advocacy, and want of logical balance, by Dr Knox 
 and his school, who go to the extent of maintaining that 
 no migration is possible ; that the number of original 
 human races is very great ; that each of them was created 
 to occupy a certain definite area and can occupy no other ; 
 that any translation of it from that area to another is 
 necessarily fatal ; and that the degeneration of the Irish 
 vagabonds from Meath was as certain a premonition of 
 extinction as the degeneration of the European emigrants 
 to these United States must end in the extinction of our 
 race, unless it be enabled to drag out a lingering existence 
 here by large and constant accessions of fresh life from 
 Europe. 
 
 Such speculations are not scientific. We call Prit chard 
 an old fogy ; we . call Knox a crazy fellow. We must not 
 only have alleged facts, we must have actual facts, sifted, 
 analyzed, weighed, and measured, before we can begin to 
 see our way through such a world of mystery as is this 
 question of races. This sifting of facts is what character- 
 izes the ethnology of the last few years. 
 
 You will ask, what opinion does Quatrefages entertain 
 of the case which he cites so eloquently, and as if he fully 
 coincided with Pritchard's cherished sentiments ? Be not 
 surprised when I tell you that he doubts the facts them- 
 selves. He quietly asks if it be not possible that the two 
 classes of Irish peasantry thus contrasted, the one de- 
 graded to a level with Australians, the other allied to the 
 most favoured Caucasians, ever really had anything to do 
 with each other. ( No/ says he, ( the Irishman of Meath 
 alone i*epresents the old stock, he has remained at home, 
 he has remained unaltered. The Irishman of Flews, on 
 the contrary, placed in other circumstances, has changed 
 himself and formed a new race out of the old one, in har- 
 mony with its unhappy surroundings. There are therefore 
 now two races in these neighbouring counties.'' 
 
 And what has Vogt, again, to say to this ? Vogt smiles 
 at Quatrefages' ingenious subterfuge. Supposing the 
 details of the Irish story to be -true, how does it affect the 
 
V.] OF MANKIND. . 107 
 
 question of the radical distinction between the skull of a 
 white Celt and the skull of an Australian negro ? Who 
 has examined the skulls of these degraded Irishmen of 
 Flews, and compared them in the light of the latest science 
 with the skulls of the Irishmen of Meath, their alleged 
 cousins on the one side, to make out the differences, and 
 with the skulls of Australians on the other side to make 
 out the resemblance ? Has Pritchard ? Has Quatrefages ? 
 Has Broca ? Has Morton or Bachman ? Has Scherzer and 
 Schwarz ? Has Busk, or Camper, or Welcker, or Yon 
 Baer, or Virchow, or Lucas, or Gratiolet, or Huschke, or 
 Aiken Meigs, or anybody ? Nobody ! Then what does our 
 actual knowledge about it amount to after all ? To nothing. 
 There being no competent witnesses the case is ruled out 
 of court. 
 
 We might spend much time in showing how all the old 
 and well-established points of controversy are broken off, 
 in pretty much the same manner, by want of proper pre- 
 liminary criticism. In the Turkish case, for instance : 
 who knows how much of the old Turkoman element still 
 lingers at Constantinople ? And where did the Turks 
 obtain mothers for their children but from the population 
 of the empire, which they spent more than one lifetime in 
 overthrowing ; to say nothing about the mountain beauties 
 of the Caucasus. 
 
 In the case of the black Jews of India : who does not 
 know that the black Jews of Abyssinia boast that they are 
 the descendants, not of the patriarchs, but of the Queen 
 of Sheba ? Their Judaism is therefore a superstition over- [ 
 laid upon their blood, and cannot be adduced in proof 
 that their Israelitish blood has ever changed even by the 
 thousandth part of an atom of iron. 
 
 Take the case of the negroes in America, of which Lyell, 
 and Reiset, and Reclus have written so glibly; and who 
 knows anything with certainty about it ? A land, indeed, 
 of darkness and of the valley of death. We must wait 
 until the negroes take up the question themselves ; until 
 a truth-telling census gives us facts; until a thorough 
 and searching discrimination has been exercised. Men 
 pretend to say that the negro race has been marvellously 
 modified by mere change of habitat, by new climates, soils, 
 and foods ; or as they are sometimes inclined to fancy, by 
 
108 ON THE UNITY [lECT. 
 
 mysterious or, at least, unknown agencies. Reclus asserts 
 his positive knowledge of the fact that, as a race, the 
 negroes have advanced one-fourth way towards the form 
 and appearance of the whites. Reiset opines that the 
 pure-blooded Africans of the Antilles retain their native 
 character, only weakened. Some writers confidently insist 
 that the negro skin is not so black, his nose not so small, 
 his forehead higher, his lips thinner, than they used to be. 
 Even if it were possible to discover and prove all this to 
 be true, what would it signify when we consider the con- 
 sistent and universal profligacy of the whites who have 
 lived among them, and have been their absolute masters ; 
 when we consider the immense variety of thick and thin 
 lipped, high and low browed, large and small nosed tribes 
 in Africa, from which the dreadful sum of all that evil was 
 made up ; and lastly, when we consider the operation of 
 the internal slave trade, that Virginian pudding- stick, 
 stirred by the hand of Mammon, for ever mixing up these 
 various original and derived ingredients together, to pro- 
 duce a chaos of results, before which any man, were he 
 not a Charleston clergyman or a foreign tourist, would 
 stand awe- struck and silent. 
 
 Lastly, take our own Yankee case. Listen, if you can, 
 without indulging in a hearty laugh, to the following de- 
 scription, by Pruner Bey, of the results of European emi- 
 gration to America. ' Already, after the second genera- 
 tion/ says this shrewd observer, c the Yankee shows the 
 features of the Indian type. Later still, his lymphatic 
 system becomes reduced to the minimum of its normal de- 
 velopment. The skin grows dry as leather ; the warmth 
 of the complexion and the ruddiness of the cheeks are 
 lost — exchanged, in the man, for a clayey tint ; in the 
 woman, for a sickly paleness. The head grows smaller, 
 round or even pointed, and covers itself with straight, 
 dark hair; the neck elongates, and one can see a great 
 development of muscle in the cheek and jaw. The temples 
 deepen ; the cheek-bones grow massive ; the eyes sink 
 into deep orbits and lie close together. The iris is dark ; 
 the glance grows piercing and wild. The long bones be- 
 come still longer, especially those of the upper limbs, so 
 that gloves of a peculiar shape, with very long fingers, 
 are manufactured in France and England for the American 
 
V.] OP MANKIND. .109 
 
 market. The inner holes of these bones become narrow ; 
 the nails grow light, long, and pointed; the woman's pel- 
 vis approximates in shape to that of the man/ ' And 
 thus/ adds Quatrefages, ( the Anglo-Saxon type in America 
 has become changed, and a new white race has sprung out 
 of the old English race, to which we may give the name of 
 Yankee race/ 
 
 Now all this, to one accustomed to see the beautiful 
 women of New England and the fine-looking men of the 
 middle States, is sheer nonsense. Every intelligent citizen 
 of the United States has travelled enough to know that 
 the picture which Pruner Bey has given us represents no 
 such general reality as to be of the least ethnological im- 
 portance. It is a picture of individual heads, faces, and 
 forms, which contrast strongly with other and widely dif- 
 ferent heads, faces, and forms among whom they live, and, 
 moreover, such as may be seen all over Europe. There is 
 not even a well-marked class of society in the United 
 States to answer the description. And as for a Yankee 
 race, no such thing exists, in the sense assigned to the 
 word by these authors. Even in New England there are 
 recognized nearly half a dozen varieties of man. I could 
 take you to a valley in Pennsylvania, fifty miles long by 
 five miles wide, crossed by an invisible ethnological line, 
 north-east of which the inhabitants are stout, strong- 
 headed, handsome descendants of north Irish Presby- 
 terians ; while south-west from it the inhabitants are 
 Awmish descendants of Swiss mountaineers, equally good- 
 looking in their way. Behind this valley, and on the 
 summit of the Alleghany mountains, 3000 feet above the 
 sea, Count Galitzin established his colony of Polish 
 Catholics, and their monastery is still in use, and so is 
 their cathedral. Twenty miles farther north, in the heart 
 of the forest, is the settlement of a wealthy Englishman. 
 Thirty miles farther north, still deeper in the forest, and 
 on still higher ground, spread out the fields of St Mary's, 
 tilled by over ten thousand French Catholics. Forty miles 
 north-east of this, and in the centre of the great forests of 
 the Sinnemahoning, Ole Bull founded his unhappy colony 
 of Swedes. Forty miles to the north of this again would 
 bring us to the settlements of the Connecticut men, up on 
 the head waters of the Alleghany river ; and an equal dis- 
 
110 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 
 
 tance to the south would return us among the descendants 
 of the race which inhabited the Black Forest and the 
 Vosges. 
 
 Go from State to State,, and such facts will face you 
 everywhere. You may draw two lines across the State of 
 Ohio., so as to cut it into three regions, each with a separate 
 ethnological development, distinct in appearance, in their 
 manners and customs, in peculiarities of language, and in 
 their religious habits. 
 
 But what is that Anglo-Saxon race, concerning which 
 we have heard so much, and to which no one has yet suc- 
 ceeded in giving a form ? Yogt well says that it has no 
 existence ; Max Miiller confirms the statement, if it 
 needed confirmation. It is a chaos of races, this so-called 
 Anglo-Saxon race. And so is the population of the United 
 States a chaos of races ; an ethnological moraine, or gravel 
 terrace, or delta deposit, to recur to the illustration already 
 used. We cannot yet learn from it anything respecting 
 those great laws of human variation which, sooner or later, 
 will be discovered. 
 
 What the other sciences wait for is this ; that ethnology 
 should adopt some correct method of investigation. It 
 has been well said that ofttimes a proper method of in- 
 vestigating is a grander and more useful discovery than 
 any which the investigation itself may yield. For the 
 discovery of a right method is so much absolute abstract 
 science accomplished, involving as it does the knowledge 
 of principal truths in their prime relations ; whilst the dis- 
 coveries which result from an investigation are commonly 
 themselves mere isolated facts ; and facts are good for no- 
 thing until they are synthetically converted into laws. 
 
 Now the difficulty of devising a proper method for ethno- 
 logical research arises from the fact that there are two oppo- 
 site tendencies in nature — the one towards differentiation or 
 individualization, the other towards integration or gener- 
 alization. Nature is for ever at war with herself, pulling 
 down with one hand while building up with the other. 
 She obeys blindly the law of Christ, not to let her left 
 hand know what her right hand doeth. She keeps races 
 separate ; she mixes them together. She gives to man an 
 intense love of home, a powerful associative principle, the 
 rage of love, the fire of friendship, the pride of country, 
 
y.] OF MANKIND. Ill 
 
 the bigotry of worship, the jealous guardianship of property 
 — all this to develope the family and preserve the local 
 type. On the other hand, she inspires the soul with a 
 thirst for change, with curiosity concerning the distant and 
 the new, with the love of conquests, with the hopes of 
 betterment — all these to develope the powers of the indi- 
 vidual man, and at the same time to spread out population 
 as widely as possible. 
 
 These are at home with the natural law that offspring 
 should bear the characteristic features of both father and 
 mother. And if this were the only law of inheritance, it 
 would be easy enough to make out the exact forms and 
 limits of each race, for its individuals would be alike. 
 But there is another law in force, by which each child 
 inherits only a limited selection of the characteristic 
 features of father and mother ; and one child more of one, 
 and another child more of another. One child takes on 
 the physical form of the father with the mental character of 
 the mother ; another child reverses the order, and resem- 
 bles the father in mind, and the mother in body. This 
 latter law, therefore, modifies and confuses the former, 
 establishing individual variety in the midst of stirpal uni- 
 formity. But in doing so it also provides a potent means 
 for bringing into the history of a family a more or less 
 complete divergence from the original type ; in fact, the 
 production of a new race out of an old one. Were this 
 the only law, ethnology would be an impossible science. 
 Utter confusion would attend the history of human life. 
 
 But a third law has been moreover discovered. It is 
 called in the natural history of the lower creatures, the 
 law of alternate generation, by which the jelly-fish begets 
 a star-fish, and the star-fish in turn begets a jelly-fish. 
 This law is strangely powerful over human character. 
 I think that, as a rule, a child is more likely to resemble [ 
 its grandparents than its parents. By this law hereditary ( 
 diseases, like scrofula and insanity, and mental and bodily 
 peculiarities of every kind, appear, lie hid, and re-appear, 
 in a series of alternate generations. This is, in fact, that 
 conservative force in nature which strives perpetually 
 against abnormal variation, and insists upon a return to 
 the old idea. This is the-mysterious under-current by 
 which Mongol heads and faces are forced to the surface of 
 
112 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 
 
 some Teutonic or Celtic stream. 1 have seen profiles in Phi- 
 ladelphia which might have been copied from the alabas- 
 ter tablets of Khorsabad — pure Assyrian faces, no doubt 
 the product of Hebrew blood, descended through forty 
 centuries from Ur of the Chaldees. 
 
 The power of this preserving force of type, whatever 
 may be its nature, stamps the great areas of the earth/ s 
 surface with those unmistakable generalizations, to which 
 no amount or intensity of individual variation can make us 
 blind. It is the genius of the race. On the oldest monu- 
 ments of the Pharaohs, the pictures of different kinds of 
 dog are recognized by any child as the pictures of the dogs 
 with which he plays to-day. The pictures of the Negro, 
 the Jew, the Egyptian, the Scythian, are perfect likenesses 
 of the Nubians, Fellahs, Jews, and Turks of to-day. There 
 you may see, portrayed in colours 6000 years old, the same 
 slave-traders driving down the same slave conies as in the 
 same valley of the Nile to-day. If all the races of mankind 
 are variants by the law of variation, from the form of Noah 
 or of Adam, then how infinitely remote must have been /the 
 time when Noah or Adam lived. On the other hand, if 
 the law of constancy in form has kept the races apart from 
 the beginning, how numerous must be the list of actual 
 human races ; how closely must they have been confined 
 to their respective centres of creation ; and how difficult 
 it becomes for ethnology to devise any efficient and reliable 
 method of research, for explaining the mixture of races in 
 the more civilized portions of the earth ! 
 
 Let me fix your attention for a moment on this curious 
 map of France, published in the memoirs of the Eoyal 
 Asiatic Society many years ago. It exhibits the depart- 
 ments of the French empire, each overspread with a dif- 
 ferent shade of colour, and marked with a certain cypher. 
 This map affords a brilliant example of ethnological method. 
 You are perhaps aware that the French, as a people, are 
 mulattoes ; but a general observation like that, advances us 
 scarcely a step in true science, although it may be quite 
 sufficient to stifle the clamour which slaveholders have 
 raised against the possibility of l miscegenation/ It is in 
 the highest degree desirable to know in what sense and to 
 what extent the French people are mulattoes ; in what pro- 
 vinces and departments they are most dark, and in what 
 
V.] OF MANKIND. 113 
 
 other provinces and departments they are mostr white. 
 If we could discover by some accurate method — say by 
 that of percentages — some law of increase of the dark 
 element in French blood in some one direction, and of the 
 white element in some other, we should come into posses- 
 sion of means for tracing the mixture to the former seats 
 of a dark race in the first direction or on that side of 
 France ; and of a white race whose seat was in the other 
 direction on the opposite side of France. Now that is pre- 
 cisely what this map enables us to do. You observe how 
 the percentage-shades form belts running across the king- 
 dom from N.W. to S.E., and how the darker belts are 
 those upon the S.W. or Spanish side, while the lighter 
 belts are on the N.E., or towards Germany. Until this 
 map was constructed it was supposed that the abori- 
 ginal population of France was to be sought for in the 
 central region of the Cantal and the mountains of Auvergne. 
 But you see how steadily and equally the aboriginal dark 
 or '' brown ' race of France, as it is called, has been pressed 
 down from the Rhine and the Channel, towards the Bay 
 of Biscay and the Pyrenees. You see how the increase of 
 its mixture with the fair German race has been in propor- 
 tion to the. distance from the Rhine. As for the white 
 race, it of course belonged to central Europe, and was 
 either Sclavic or Teutonic, perhaps both, certainly in part 
 Teutonic. But the dark race with which it mixed, — what 
 shall we think of it ? Where shall we find it pure ? The 
 map suggests the only answer to these questions. The 
 colour deepens to a maximum where the Pyrenean 
 mountains meet the sea. These mountains are the home of 
 three divisions of one race, speaking three dialects of one 
 language, called the Basque; a language possessing no 
 well-proven affinities with any European tongue ; but sug- 
 gesting some resemblances with the language of the Finns, 
 a people perhaps related to the same circumpolar race to 
 which the Esquimaux belong. These Basques are sturdy 
 mountaineers and have never been driven from their homes ; 
 but their mountains stood with their feet in the sea, and 
 the Basques became great fishermen; the Cabots found 
 the banks of Newfoundland covered with their boats, and 
 it is said that they sold cod by name in the markets of 
 Hamburg and Havre, before Columbus made his first voy- 
 
114 ON THE UNITY [lECT. 
 
 age. The native word is not c Basque ' but f Escamara;' 
 almost identical with Esquimaux. The west end of Brittany 
 is peopled by a fragment of this same race, preserved in the 
 same manner among rocks and in the surf, but who have 
 exchanged their language for a Celtic dialect. St Malo was 
 celebrated in the middle ages for its breed of sailors, who 
 shared with the southern Basques in the fisheries of La- 
 brador. Another, and exceedingly small, fragment of this 
 mysterious and most ancient brown race exists in Ireland, 
 in the shape of a group of hamlets on the northern shore 
 of Galway bay ; the people intermarry among themselves 
 and have little in common with the Celtic population of the 
 country. Now if we track the brown race southward, we 
 find it as a modifying element in all the Spanish peninsula, 
 especially among the Sierras and in secluded Portugal. 
 Whatever was its mixture with the Celtic blood of France, 
 it formed with Celtic blood the entire humanity of Spain, 
 and hence the name which the Eomans gave it, Celt Iberia. 
 If we take this latter name Iberia, and compare it with 
 a multitude of others, — I will not weary you with the de- 
 tails, — we arrive at the conclusion, that in the brown race of 
 western Europe we have a division of the great aboriginal 
 Berber race of northern Africa ; a conclusion which it 
 would have been impossible for the best ethnologist to 
 have advanced with any confidence, until some such method 
 of investigation had been adopted as this map illustrates.* 
 Not by suppositions and conjectures, but only by a 
 rigorous self-denial of the imagination, and by restricting 
 it to its proper function, the invention of true methods of 
 investigation, can the questions be answered which eth- 
 
 * But after such investigations have been made, these direct observa- 
 tions are of value. For example, in 1862, MM. Martins, Desor, and Escher 
 de la Linth studied the Berbers in their native haunts. ' The Sufites/ 
 writes Desor, ' are genuine Berbers, and, as such, white with clack hair, 
 like the southern Europeans ; and were it not for their burnus, Martins 
 might have recognized them for a troop of scholars from some village 
 of Provence or Languedoc. But one thing drew our attention, the very 
 extended form of the head ; they are true longheads (dolicho-cephaloi), as 
 one sees chiefly only so well pronounced from the ancient graves ; the 
 face is angular and thin, the teeth vertical and beautifully white like those 
 of all these peoples. The body is lank, and capable of marvellous endur- 
 ance.' (Letter to Liebig, p. 29.) I say nothing here of the superb train 
 of argument coming out of the recent researches into the dolmen or Druid 
 architecture of Europe and Africa. 
 
V.J OF MANKIND. .. 115 
 
 nologists are asking of each other respecting similar mix- 
 tures of the white and black races, in other parts of the 
 world ; in India and Burmah, for example, where also the 
 aboriginal element seems to have been black, and to have 
 been mixed first with yellow Turanian blood from the north- 
 east, and afterwards with white Arian blood from the north- 
 west. Were this a course of lectures on Ethnology proper, 
 I would gladly take up these questions one by one. But 
 I must occupy the few minutes I have left, in sketching out 
 the direction which the inquiry takes in bearing upon 
 the connection of the present races with those of the Stone 
 or Diluvial age, and with the apes and monkey tribes. 
 
 The most nobly organized races are the most migratory, 
 because they have the faculties of self-protection in the 
 highest state of efficiency. The white Shemite,the Arab 
 merchant, traffics in person every year from Morocco to 
 Singapore. He has imprinted his alphabet, his cipher, his 
 unitarianism, upon a belt of the earth's surface extending 
 from the Senegal and Gambia to Lake Baikal. He has 
 ennobled, by mixture with his own blood, the Khoord, the 
 Nubian, the Berber, and the Celt. How far back this be- 
 ginning of his influence would go, if we could follow it, 
 we cannot yet make out. But what is true of this sub- 
 division of the great white race is true of the white race 
 as an entire whole. It has mowed a broad historic swath 
 along the temperate zone, subjugating, proselyting, ele- 
 vating the darker and poorer races which had previous 
 possession of the earth, the less mixed and fragmentary 
 remains of which we find among the mountains, or on pro- 
 montories, or in islands in the sea. 
 
 North of the belt of this historic white race lies the 
 nearly undisturbed population of the Arctic zone. To the 
 south of it dwell enormous separated masses of black men. 
 I omit all mention here of the red Indians of America, so 
 as not to complicate the subject.* 
 
 * De Gobineau, in his ' Essai sur l'inegalite des Races Humaines/ 
 Paris, 1853 (Phil. Lib.), devotes the 16th chapter of vol. i. to a descrip- 
 tion of the characteristic features of the three type races ; but adds that 
 at the earliest date we see them they were not pure, and that now they 
 have been mixed a hundred times. (See foot-note to Lecture 8, p. 3.) 
 
 The Melanian variety, he says, is at the bottom of the scale. The 
 animal form of its pelvis fixes its destiny from the moment of conception. 
 
116 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 
 
 These races seem to be as different in species as wolves 
 and foxes differ from jackals and dogs. There is abso- 
 
 (A "French, jeu d' esprit.) It never leaves the limits of restricted intel- 
 lectuality. But it is no, brute, pure and simple, this negro with narrow, 
 retreating forehead, carrying in the middle skull indications of certain 
 grossly powerful energies. If its thinking faculties are middling, or re- 
 duced to nothing, it possesses in desire, and therefore in its will, a terrible 
 intensity. Many of its senses are developed with a vigour unknown to 
 the two other races, especially the senses of taste and smell. But pre- 
 cisely on the avidity of its sensations lies the stamp of its inferiority. 
 All aliments are good for it ; nothing disgusts, nothing repulses it. 
 (Primer, i. 133.) Its lust is to eat, to eat excessively, with fury. No 
 carrion is unworthy of its stomach. Its lust for gross odours accommo- 
 dates itself to those most odious. To these chief traits is added an un- 
 stable humour, a fixless variability of sentiment, annulling the distinction 
 between vice and virtue for this race. The very rage with which it pursues 
 the object which has put its sensitivity into vibration and inflamed its 
 cupidity, is a gauge for the prompt appeasing of the one and the rapid 
 forgetfulness of the other. Lastly, it values as little its own life as 
 another's. It kills to kill ; and so this human machine, so easy to set in 
 motion, is, in the presence of suffering, of a cowardice taking refuge in 
 death, or of a monstrous impassibility. 
 
 The yellow race presents the antithesis of all this. The cranium pro- 
 jects in front. Large, bony, salient often, developed well in height, ver- 
 tical over a triangular face, wherein the nose and chin have none of those 
 gross and rude projections of the negro. A tendency to obesity, though 
 not a special trait, recurs more frequently in the yellow than in the other 
 races. Little of physical vigour ; dispositions to apathy ; none of those 
 strange moral excesses so common to the blacks. Feeble desires ; a will 
 obstinate rather than extreme ; a taste perpetual but tranquil for material 
 pleasures ; rarely gluttonous, but with more choice of aliments than the 
 negro has. In all this, a tendency to mediocrity ; a comprehension quick 
 enough, but neither elevated nor profound (quoting Cams, Weber Ung. 
 etc., p. 60) ; a love of the useful ; respect for law ; conscious of the ad- 
 vantages of a certain dose of liberty ; a practical race, in the narrow 
 meaning of the word ; no dreamers nor lovers of theories ; inventing 
 little, but able to appreciate and adopt what serves its turn ; their desires 
 limited to living as softly and commodiously as they can ; a populace and 
 small bourgeoisie, which every civilizer should choose for the basis of 
 his society ; but not to give society nerve, beauty, or action. 
 
 The white race has reflecting energy, or energetic intelligence ; the 
 sense of the useful in a larger, higher, more courageous, more ideal sense ; 
 a perseverance in plain view of obstacles, able to find means for removing 
 them out of the way ; with a greater physical power ; an extraordinary 
 instinct for order, not only as the gauge of peace and rest, but as the in- 
 dispensable means of conservation ; and yet a well pronounced taste for 
 liberty, even in extreme ; a declared hostility to that formal sleepy 
 Chinese organization, as well as to a haughty despotism, the only bridle 
 for the blacks. The white men are distinguished by a singular love of 
 life, prized more because put to its proper uses by them. Their cruelty, 
 
V.] OF MANKIND. 117 
 
 lutely no reason for supposing them to be of one' species, 
 except an absurd legend, ascribed to an ancient Shemitic 
 law-giver, and preserved among a number of similar 
 legends of various dates, inconsistent with themselves, 
 with each other, and with the legends of surrounding 
 nations. The legend of Adam and Eve makes all man- 
 kind descend from Cain first and Seth afterwards, and yet 
 says that Cain obtained his wife before Seth was born, and 
 in a country whither he had fled from Adam and Eve, the 
 only other human beings at that time on the earth. 
 Then the descendants of Seth are made to live, each one, 
 a thousand years, and when the earth was peopled, partly 
 by a crossing of the human stock with angelic blood, the 
 work of the Creator was entirely spoilt, and had to be 
 begun again ; the Antediluvians were all destroyed ; and 
 Noah and his family became in their turn the sole progeni- 
 tors of all our present races. As one of Adam's three 
 sons was murdered by his brother, so one of Noah's three 
 sons was cursed by his father, and his descendants handed 
 over into bondage to the descendants of the other two. 
 Of this most orthodox adventure a most diabolical handle 
 has been made to justify the enslavement of the black 
 race by the white. This hotchpotch of old Hebrew legends, 
 made sacred to our hearts by lectures from the pulpit and 
 recitations at the mother's knee — this tissue of absurdity, 
 called the biblical history of the origin of mankind, is ab- 
 solutely the sole and entire argument for not considering* 
 the human jraces as much distinct in kind and origin as are 
 the llama and alpaca, or the vicuna and alpaca, or the 
 springbok and the goat, or the hare and the rabbit, or the 
 American bison and the European cow, or the wolf and 
 
 when exercised, is conscious of its own excesses, a sentiment very proble- 
 matical among the blacks. Yet they find reasons for leaving this occupied 
 existence without a murmur — for honour, first, which under slightly va- 
 rious names has occupied an enormous place in their ideas since the be- 
 ginning of the race. Honour and its fruit, civilization, are not known to 
 the yellow and black races. But this intellectual superiority is matched 
 by an inferiority in their sensations. The white race is far more poorly 
 endowed in sensual faculties than the other two. It is, therefore, less 
 solicited and absorbed by corporal action, although its structure is 
 remarkably more vigorous. (Martins says the European surpasses the 
 black in the intensity of the nerve fluid. Rei&e in Brazilien, i. 259.) 
 
 Here Gobineau has his tertiary and quaternary mixtures of these three 
 grand secondary types. 
 
118 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 
 
 the dog, or the dog and the jackal, or the camel and the 
 dromedary; for all these acknowledged species not only 
 breed together, but produce, under certain conditions, 
 fertile offspring.* 
 
 The Swiss naturalists thought that they had established 
 four well-defined types of Helvetic skulls : the Sion type, 
 rather long, and low in the crown ; the Hohberg type, with 
 a pent-roof shape; the Dissentis type, bullet-headed, or 
 square as it is usually called ; and the Belle-air type, of so 
 mixed a character that ifc was soon discarded. The other 
 three are still under discussion. The Sion type is identi- 
 fied by the German naturalists as that of the Hiigel-graber, 
 or grave-mounds of the valley of the Rhine ; and the Hoh- 
 berg type (once supposed to be Roman) with that of the 
 Reihen-graber skulls. The Sion type is common in the 
 caverns of Belgium and elsewhere. But in the caves of the 
 south of France appears another type, a small round head, 
 like that of the Laplander's ; and this is the head associated 
 with the rein- deer and other animals of that remote epoch. 
 Pruner Bey. therefore, in the congress of 1867, at Paris, 
 insisted strenuously upon the necessity for recognizing 
 this small round head as the earliest type of man known 
 to us. But Professor Vogt objected that the round form 
 is theoretically the most perfect of all forms, giving most 
 weight and least superficial exposure ; but he especially 
 recalled to view the fact never to be forgotten, that the 
 low Neanderthal skull (with others of a similar but not so 
 excessively degraded a form) is equally ancient, and of a 
 wholly opposite type. If the Hyperborean race followed 
 (or led) the rein-deer to the south during the coming on 
 of the glacial period, there must have been some other race 
 also already in the field, to meet, and perhaps to disappear 
 for a time before it, and then perhaps to reappear, after the 
 worlds of ice had melted, and the Arctic zone had retreated 
 within its polar circle. The encomiums lavished on the 
 Engis skull are not only a little extravagant (for although 
 it is finely shaped, it is not large), but its exact age also 
 has never been satisfactorily determined. If, however, it 
 be both very ancient and also Caucasian, then it establishes 
 a third, superior, ancient race ; or, much more probably, 
 
 * Vogt, vol. ii. 216. The only case of sterility, well authenticated, is 
 that of the mule proper, the offspring of the horse and ass. 
 
V.] OF MANKIND. 119 
 
 it merely proclaims the eternal possibility of individual 
 greatness even in the worst of times. 
 
 I account it probable, then, that the races of mankind 
 have always been distinct ; and that they probably made 
 their appearance on the planet successively ; perhaps the 
 black and meagre races first and the white races last. It 
 would not be strange also to find their history running pa- 
 rallel with that of the apes and monkeys. For it is not to 
 be denied that in the three types of manlike ape, viz. the 
 orang, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla, the three principal 
 divisions of the family of apes have found their last and 
 highest development. Whether we split up the orangs 
 and the gorillas into separate species, or only recognize 
 in them varieties like those which separate the affiliated 
 races of mankind, it is certain that each of the three man- 
 like ape-forms presents its own characteristic manlike 
 feature. The chimpanzee approaches man more closely in 
 the form of the skull and in the character of its teeth. 
 The orang approximates the human ideal especially in the 
 construction of its brain. The gorilla resembles man rather 
 in the make of his extremities. Neither one of the fhree 
 can be said to stand absolutely nearer to man than the 
 other two. All three strive to reach the human ideal, but 
 on different sides of the common development. The orang, 
 says Gratiolet, stands at the head of the family of gibbons 
 and babboons, on account of the size of its forehead, the 
 relative smallness of its backhead, and the development of 
 its upper lobes : in other words, it has a better developed 
 gibbon brain. The chimpanzee shows unmistakable anal- 
 ogies of brain, skull, and face, with the makaken, and 
 especially with the magot, and stands in the same well- 
 developed relation to the makakos and pavians that the 
 orang does to the gibbons and babboons. The gorilla is a 
 mandrill by force of similar analogies, by its lack of tail, 
 its breadth of breast-bone, its singularity of gait, walking 
 upon the back or outer side of its two last finger-joints. 
 There has been, then, an unmistakable, threefold, and 
 parallel development of the ape ideal, along three historic 
 lines from three original family groups.* I do not myself 
 see what forbids us from supposing that the process of 
 
 * See Schroder van der Kolk and Vrolik's fivefold resemblance in Vogt, 
 ii. 283. 
 
120 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 
 
 development went on to the production of those human 
 forms of an acknowledged want of beauty and spirituality , 
 of an acknowledged ape-like appearance, which we find 
 populating the very regions of the chimpanzee, gorilla, 
 and orang, viz. the brutal black races of tropical Africa, 
 and the negritoes of Anderman and New Holland. 
 
 The objection, I know, is at hand, that there are no in- 
 termediate forms existing between those man-like apes 
 and these ape-like men. But I think the force of this ob- 
 jection is broken by several considerations. And first, by 
 the consideration that such intermediate forms need not, 
 for the sake of the argument, exist in masses or tribes. 
 Individuals scattered all over the world, through all the 
 human races, with low foreheads, small brains, long arms, 
 thin legs, projecting, tusk-like teeth, suppressed noses, 
 and other marks of arrested development ; to say nothing 
 of millions of idiots and cretins produced by the same 
 arrest in every generation of mankind, sustain the argu- 
 ment. 
 
 Then, secondly, we must consider that such intermediate 
 forms may have existed in immense numbers and then 
 disappeared, for all we know to the contrary. Nay, mul- 
 titudes of them may exist in the fossil state, still undis- 
 covered. Vogt has well observed that 20 years ago 
 not a single fossil ape had been made out. During these 
 20 years nearly a dozen have been found. One year ago 
 no intermediate form between the schlankaffen and maka- 
 ken was known ; now we have the whole skeleton of one.* 
 Such intermediate types are continually turning up. 
 
 And, thirdly, we must keep in mind most carefully that 
 skulls have been found in caves, which would have been 
 undoubtedly assigned to apes, had not other parts of the 
 skeleton been found at the same time, compelling the 
 anatomist to assign them to some ancient form of humanity ; 
 precisely as, in the instance of the fossil ape discovered in 
 Greece, by its skull it would have been pronounced a pure 
 babboon, had not its limbs been those belonging to a 
 species of makaken. 
 
 And, fourthly, when we compare the cave and lake and 
 diluvial skulls, as yet discovered, with the skulls of the Aus- 
 tralian natives (accepted as the most degraded or apelike 
 * Vogt, ii. 279! 
 
V.] OF MANKIND. 121 
 
 race now living on the earth), the resemblance in most 
 cases (setting the Engis skull aside) is so extraordinary, 
 that we may be reasonably excused for suspecting that the 
 early races of mankind were farther removed in the order 
 of development from the noblest races now existing, than 
 the apes are removed from them.* 
 
 Let us praise God for our place in this procession of 
 mysteries. If natural history should hereafter teach the 
 truth of our descent from these inferior beings, Christianity 
 will always teach humility. Let us comfort our pride by 
 remembering, that everything has been good and perfect 
 in its day and generation. 
 
 * For more recent discussions of this subject, a propos of the two re- 
 markable human jaw-bones found by Mr Dupont at Dinant, see Appendix. 
 
122 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 
 ON THE EARLY SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 
 
 The tree is known by its fruit. We have been con- 
 sidering man as a being ; henceforth we are to regard him 
 as a worker : first, as a social being, a worker in brass and 
 iron, a maker of boats and bridges, an inventor of weapons, 
 and a framer of laws ; then, as an intellectual being, a 
 poet, or maker par excellence; an artist, a philosopher, a 
 priest. 
 
 It is not as easy to distinguish races by degrees of facial 
 angle as by grades of civilization. Perhaps we have a 
 right to say : as only some races of animals are tamable, so 
 only certain races of mankind are civilizable. As the car- 
 nivora love blood, and the ruminants and pachyderms love 
 foliage and grass, so do some races of mankind love tents 
 and waggons, while others prefer cities and ships. But 
 after all our efforts to include these social tendencies 
 among the anatomical or physiological characteristics of 
 mankind, they recoil upon us as mere harmonies of man 
 with nature. So long as large areas of the earth's surface 
 consist of desert sands or grassy plains, so long will there 
 be nomade races to inhabit them; mountains will breed 
 mountaineers ; deltas grow cities. The fishing races do not 
 seek the seashore, they are produced by it. The forest 
 gives birth to the hunter, as it does to the deer and wild- 
 boar after which he stalks. 
 
 If this be so, and if forests have disappeared from civil- 
 ized lands by the agency of man, it follows, that, when 
 the earliest races of mankind appeared, they appeared in 
 the form of fishing and hunting savages, the form most in 
 harmony with the physical condition of the greater part 
 of the earth's surface at that time. There were, no doubt, 
 then as now, natural paradises existing here and there 
 
ON THE EAELY SOCIAL LIFE OP MAN. 123 
 
 wherein some section of a single race would take- on a 
 quicker civilization than elsewhere. But he must be blind 
 who cannot detect the traces of that long, hard, desperate, 
 bloody, cruel, demon-like conflict between the earliest 
 men and all the adverse powers of the air and earth, — a 
 conflict in which all the advantage was on nature's side, — 
 but the victory on man's, because the genii of mind came 
 to his relief. 
 
 All civilization comes of work. The race that will not 
 work cannot get civilized. Yet mere work is not a civil- 
 izer. Leisure is indispensable. The French- Canadian 
 works from four in the morning until six and seven at 
 night, but his civilization is not high. Civilization is like 
 navigation. It makes all the difference in the world 
 whether there be a current with you, or a current against 
 you. In the tropics and at the poles the powers of nature 
 are too many for man. If he barely sleep he will do well. 
 So also in the early ages, even in the temperate zone, man- 
 kind needed reinforcement. The black race, which can- 
 not advance under the equator any more than can the 
 pigmy race around the pole, civilizes itself when it is 
 transferred to the 40th parallel of latitude, provided there 
 be given to it a chance to work. The progress of the 
 black race in the United States, under all its disadvantages, 
 has been respectable. Give it the freedom of the plough, 
 the anvil, and the loom, that is, the right to enjoy the 
 results of varied and honest labour, and you will give it 
 the enjoyment of so much leisure afterwards as the high- 
 est civilization needs. 
 
 No race has ever yet consented to work for nothing 
 cheerfully. All the sense of justice man has comes from 
 resistance to that attempt. If the reconstruction of South- 
 ern society is to be a success, it can be so only on condi- 
 tion that the white man share the soil, the shop, the 
 schoolroom, and the forum with the black. That the 
 black race is willing to buy civilization at its natural 
 price, that is, with work, has been demonstrated. But to 
 show you how delicate a test of justice work can be, I will 
 tell you a story, which a friend of mine, an engineer upon 
 a Southern railroad, told to me. 
 
 A railroad was projected through the swamp -lands of 
 Florida. Slaves were hired from the planters of Georgia 
 
124 ON THE EARLY [LECT. 
 
 to do the work. A day's task for every man was measured 
 with a ten-foot pole. The slaves rose early and by work- 
 ing diligently could complete their tale of work by two or 
 three o'clock, and have the rest of the day for their amuse- 
 ment. They soon discovered this advantage, and threw 
 their whole soul into the business. Before noon nothing 
 was to be seen but the flying dirt ; afternoon nothing but 
 song and dance and general cheer. This was too good to 
 last. The avaricious contractors made new poles, 1 3 inches 
 instead of 12 to the foot. The day's task was unaccount- 
 ably lengthened by an hour or more. The blacks could 
 offer no explanation, and made no resistance, for the 
 work was still within the range of cheerful diligence. 
 Another month passed by and a third set of poles were 
 distributed. The foot had now become 14 inches long, 
 and the day's task lasted until sunset.* The defrauded 
 labourers, seeing that there was no use struggling with an 
 unjust despotism, returned to plantation-habits, shirked 
 all the work they could, lost heart, and fell back into that 
 barbarism, the essence of which consists in giving up the 
 soul a prey to the forces of nature. The contractors had 
 overshot their mark ; and so one of these monuments of the 
 high civilization of the nineteenth century served only to 
 remind the spectator of the aboriginal condition of the 
 races of mankind before they had learned to hope to better 
 their miserable plight. 
 
 Rain, hail, and snow, and the furious, piercing north 
 wind were the slave-drivers of that age. The perpetual 
 growth of the forest, and the rapid increase of wild ani- 
 mals, were the measuring-rods which mysteriously length- 
 ened out their task. No wonder that despondency grew 
 out of ignorance, and barbarity out of despair. It is hard 
 to comprehend the possible beginnings of civilization in a 
 wilderness of forests and mountains, pelted with storms, 
 and horrible with the cries of wild beasts. Yet such was 
 
 * The difference in the tasks, it should be remembered, is to be estimated 
 in cubic measure. 
 
 in. cub. in. 
 
 One cubic foot 12 x 12 x 12 = 1728 
 „ „ measure 13 x 13 X 13 = 2197, nearly 28 per cent. more 
 
 than a true cubic foot. 
 One cubic measure 14 X 14 X 14 — 2794, nearly 60 per cent, more 
 
 than a true cubic foot. 
 
VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 125 
 
 Europe down to a recent date, i. e. to within a few centu- 
 ries of the Christian era. Such was all North America 
 two hundred years ago, with the exception of a few river 
 bottoms, a few glades, and a few estuary marshes on the 
 seacoast. In Europe also such places early became refuges 
 and nurseries for man. It is therefore in the open plain 
 of Languedoc, on the borders of the delta of the Rhone, 
 and on the great chalk basin of central and northern 
 France and southern England that relics of the most 
 ancient races have been chiefly found. But even here 
 they are commingled with the remains of tigers and 
 hyenas, wild boars and bulls, the bear, the wolf, and the 
 deer, and even of the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and 
 the elephant, in such numbers and of such a size as to tell 
 a plain story of the most savage existence. When we re- 
 member that the only weapons which the men of the cave 
 had at their command were fire, and the bow and arrow, the 
 flint hatchet, fastened to its wooden handle with a willow- 
 withe or a shrunken piece of deer- skin, or the pike pointed 
 with a reindeer prong, or a wild boar's tusk ; and that the 
 only farming implement they knew of was a paddle of 
 flint, chipped thin and broad and worked by hand without 
 a handle, our wonder grows how civilization could have 
 found a time and starting-point. 
 
 It was, no doubt, in order to avoid their natural 
 enemies, the wild beasts, and perhaps also to defend 
 themselves against each other, that some tribes, whose 
 hunting-grounds lay neighbouring to lakes, betook them- 
 selves to a peculiar mode of life. They planted upright 
 logs in the . lake bottom, supporting them with heaps of 
 stones, and lashing them together with wicker-work. On 
 these they laid a wooden platform, communicating with 
 the shore by a wooden bridge or causeway. On this 
 platform stood their wigwams. Here the women aud 
 children were comparatively safe when the men were on 
 shore hunting, or farming, or at war. On the edges of the 
 platform they sat to fish. In the centre of each wigwam 
 perhaps was a layer of earth to cook their fish upon. 
 Trap-doors in the village floor received the offal, the bones 
 of animals after the marrow had been extracted, fragments 
 of broken pottery, the waste of spoiled nets, and ruined 
 weapons. Hundreds of the sites of these villages have 
 
126 ON THE EAELY [LECT. 
 
 been recently discovered* in the lakes of Switzerland, 
 Bavaria, and Austria, and thousands of such relics of their 
 domestic life, but as yet only two skulls. t It is, therefore, 
 certain, that these people were not habitual cannibals ; for 
 in that case human skeletons would be abundant. It is 
 equally evident that they either burned their dead, or 
 buried them on shore. That both these customs were pur- 
 sued at different times we have good evidence. It is 
 remarkable that the oldest skull yet found in these lake- 
 dwellings presents us again with all the low-type features 
 of the Neanderthal cranium; great ridges over the orbits 
 of the eyes, a suddenly retreating forehead, and extremely 
 small capacity. It contained what seems an undeveloped 
 brain ; but yet it could not have been (as some were in- 
 clined to consider the Neanderthal cranium) the skull of an 
 idiot. These people were far from being idiots. They 
 were only animals. The essential difference between an 
 idiot and an animal consists in this fact : the idiot, like 
 the unborn foetus, is not aware of his relations to sur- 
 rounding nature; his life goes on chemically, not con- 
 sciously ; the animal, on the contrary, is wide-awake to his 
 position and its demands. Indeed, the quickness and 
 many-sidedness of this self-consciousness is the nicest scale 
 we have by which to grade the animal creation. Behold 
 the deer, for instance; how alive to every sound and 
 motion ! how skilful to hide ! how prompt to fly ! And 
 yet I have myself stood for half an hour, by my transit 
 instrument, in the woods of the Towanda Mountains, wait- 
 ing until my men cut out a line down the long steep slope 
 into a valley ; and during all this time I have seen a deer 
 stand motionless, watching the brilliant spot of light which 
 the sunbeams through the trees made on the brass cylinder 
 of my telescope, not fifty paces distant, unaware of my 
 presence, and unconscious of danger. In vain, says the 
 poet of old, is the net spread in the sight of any bird. 
 The consciousness of its relations is not complete in any 
 
 * Beginning with the dry winter of 1853-4, Meilen, on Lake Zurich. 
 
 f One (mentioned in Rutimeyer's Die Fauna der Pfahlbauten in der 
 Schweitz, p. 181. Basel, 1861), at Meilen, on Lake Zurich, early stone 
 period, called by Prof. His an intermediate type between the long and 
 short-headed forms ; and, therefore, not like the small round heads of the 
 Danish peat-mosses ; the other found by Desor, 1864, and referred to in 
 the text. 
 
VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. . 127 
 
 animal; but it is more complete in some than in' others. 
 The horse is superior to the deer ; yet the horse rushes 
 into, not out of a burning stable. The ape is superior to 
 all animals below man, because his powers of observation 
 have more scope, his comprehension of emergencies is 
 more logical; he shows an inventive genius harmonizing 
 with this higher degree of self-consciousness, and hence 
 he more perfectly imitates the brutal customs, the virtues, 
 and the vices of mankind. The difference between the ape 
 and the civilized man lies in the limitation of the conscious- 
 ness of the ape to his physical and passional relationships 
 to nature ; while the self-consciousness of the civilized 
 man deals also with the subjects of abstract thought, and 
 with the invisible and eternal worlds.* But this is the 
 precise distinction between the cave or lake-dwellers of 
 early Europe, and the Londoner or Bostonian of to-day; 
 and thus we are returned once more to the idea of the 
 affiliation of the apes with mankind in the early stages of 
 its existence. 
 
 That these old lake-dwellers were in no respects idiotic 
 is evident from the very nature of the case : a race of 
 idiots could no more continue to exist than unborn chil- 
 dren could. But their handicraft is still more conclusive 
 evidence. In the museum of M. Troy on of Lausanne I 
 had the pleasure of examining a piece of a door, half- 
 burned, consisting of three boards, two of which lay side 
 by side, but not rabbited together ; the third board crossed 
 the other two at right angles, to hold them together ; but 
 instead of being nailed or pegged fast to them, it was as 
 regularly dovetailed into them as a carpenter of our days 
 would have done it. I saw also among these curious 
 objects pieces of twisted thread and knotted net. Their 
 clothes were probably of skins, and loom-weaving was as 
 yet unknown, but specimens of plaited cloth have been 
 found. I saw needles of bone to sew with ; and pieces of 
 charred baked bread in the form of flat round cakes ; and 
 grains of wheat and barley. The small wild apple and 
 pear of the Swiss woods have also been dredged up, wild 
 plum-stones, and beech and hazel-nuts in great abund- 
 ance. 
 
 * I will return to this subject in the beginning of the Tenth Lecture. 
 
128 ON THE EARLY [LECT. 
 
 How pleasant it would be to have a dinner- scene of 
 those days by Teniers, or a page of table-talk by Cole- 
 ridge ! What a contrast would it present to the Round 
 Table of Arthur and his paladins ! or to a dejewier at 
 the Maison Dore'in 1865 ! The table can be seen, with its 
 dish, in the Museum of the Irish Academy ; but where are 
 the guests ? It was discovered in a peat-bog, in County 
 Tyrone, ten feet beneath the surface. The table and the 
 dish were each scooped out of a solid piece of wood, 
 apparently fir. An oblong table, with its ends curved in- 
 ward, and set on four short legs, four and a half inches 
 high, truncated cones, connected at their bases by a low 
 rim, in which are two cord holes ; and an oval dish four or 
 five inches deep, in its edge two holes answering to the 
 two holes in the rim of the table, and probably slung to it 
 on the back in travelling. Beside the dish lay a large heap 
 of hazel-nuts, probably an autumnal hoard just gathered 
 for winter's use. Perhaps they were uproariously enjoy- 
 ing their repast, when interrupted by the rush of some 
 carnivorous beast, scattering their merriment.* 
 
 How long the ages were during which these lake- dwell- 
 ings were inhabited we do not know. We know that they 
 existed still in the days of Herodotus ; and the Swiss 
 antiquaries believe that those of Neville and Chavannes 
 in the Canton de Yaud continued to be dwelt on to the 
 YIth century after Christ. There are sufficient evidences 
 in the articles found to distinguish them as of very differ- 
 ent ages. The iron age of the Romans is represented ; 
 the preceding age of bronze ; and a still more ancient age 
 of stone, perhaps going back to the times succeeding the 
 retreat of the Swiss glaciers. We cannot tell, therefore, 
 at what time wild apples, plums, and berries were ex- 
 changed for wheat and barley bread ; nor when the skins 
 of beasts were replaced by plaited cloth. The best scale 
 of years we have is got from Rutimeyer's list of the 
 animals on which these ancients fed, and especially by the 
 marked change from wild to domestic flesh. In all of the 
 lake-dwelling deposits, even the oldest, we find the bones 
 of the domesticated ox, sheep, goat, and dog; and inter- 
 mixed with these in various localities, bones of the horse 
 and ass, bones of the elk and stag, the roe and fallow-deer, 
 
 * O'Callighan. Proc. Geol. and P. S., W. R. Yorkshire, p. 315,1863-4. 
 
VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. -. 129 
 
 the ibex and the chamois, the bison and wild bull, the 
 small swamp -hog and the great wild boar, the wolf and 
 fox, the bear and the badger, the marten, polecat, ermine, 
 and weasel, the otter and the beaver, the hedgehog, 
 squirrel, and fieldmouse, the wildcat and the hare, the 
 frog and the tortoise, the wild swan, goose, two kinds of 
 ducks, and fifteen other kinds of birds. All that contained 
 marrow are found split open : this is invariably the case 
 with those of the bull and bison. In the most ancient 
 villages, like those of Wangen and Moosseedorf, the 
 greater predominance of bones of the wild stag and roe, 
 over those of tame cattle, show a decided preference of the 
 chase to a more civilized mode of life ; the tame pig is 
 wanting, goats outnumber sheep, the fox was an habitual 
 dish. 
 
 When the bronze age opened, the Lithuanian aurochs or 
 bison (bos bison, bos priscus) ceased to be eaten,* and the 
 savages began to tame the great wild bull (bos urus, or 
 primogenius), which Cassar describes as still existing in his 
 day, fierce, swift, and strong, and scarcely inferior to the 
 elephant in size ; in its tamed state its bones became some- 
 what less massive and heavy, and its horns somewhat 
 smaller. At this time they added to the common dog, which 
 seems to have been their companion from the beginning^ a 
 new large hunting dog ; and with it a small horse, which 
 however must have been very rare among them. By this 
 time the elk and beaver had become extirpated ; and the 
 fox had ceased to be a fashionable article of diet. 
 
 In looking over this list it seems very remarkable that 
 two animals are absent from it, which we should have sup- 
 posed almost the very first to be discovered. Of the hare 
 only one single fragment of a bone has as yet been found ; 
 and we can only explain its absence by Caesar's account 
 of the holy horror with which the Britons of his day re- 
 garded it, and with which the Laplanders, who represent 
 the ancient hyperborean race in Europe, still regard it. Of 
 the domestic cat also there is not a trace, until we come 
 down to the very youngest villages, those' assigned to the 
 Vlth century. J And this, again, is in curious harmony with 
 
 * Protected by Czars in one Lithuanian forest, to the present day. 
 
 f The oldest of man's gods, the Anubis of Egypt. 
 
 J Lyell, Ant. of Man, p. 26. Desor's Palahttes. Smithson, Cont. 1866. 
 
130 ON THE EARLY [LECT. 
 
 the fact, that no trace of the cat exists on the most ancient 
 monuments of Egypt.* 
 
 The absence of the reindeer, on the other hand, is merely 
 an evidence of the far inferior antiquity of these lake- 
 dwellings to those remains of man which have been found 
 in the caves of France. 
 
 I have said enough to give you a picture of long middle 
 stages in the primeval history of European humanity in 
 Switzerland. But it is necessary to say a few more words 
 about its phases farther north. Let us look for a moment 
 at a more inhospitable region. Let me ask you to keep in 
 mind, that in every age, no matter how far back we go, we 
 find men living everywhere ; living under different circum- 
 stances, but living everywhere. I shall say something in 
 due time about migrations. But I wish you to observe 
 just now, that theories of migration are the most unsatis- 
 factory products of science. In days preceding the oldest 
 migrations, of which we can obtain any glimpse, the entire 
 surface of the earth seems to have been just as completely 
 settled as it is to-day. In the Stone age, while the 
 Helvetian aborigines were platting cloth and cooking 
 domestic cattle on elaborately constructed platforms in the 
 lake-waters of the south, a race of utter savages were 
 sitting around fires, on the shores of the Baltic ; with not 
 a single domesticated animal to call their own, except the 
 dog, and that a smaller species ; gnawing the flesh and 
 splitting the marrow-bones of wild bulls, now extinct, of 
 foxes, wolves, and lynxes, red-deer and roes -, beavers long 
 since extinct, and seals now very rare; with penguins and 
 capercailzies, both now extinct in Scandinavia. But I am 
 wrong to call them utter savages, for they had already 
 learned the art of boat-building, f and were bold fishermen, 
 as we can see by the bones of herring, cod, and flounders, 
 which are found among the mounds of kitchen tra3h which 
 line the shores and mark their haunts. But they were not 
 
 * Mariette's Researches. Kenan's article in the Revue des Deux 
 Mondes, April, 1865. 
 
 f Rude canoes scooped from trunks are often found in British peat- 
 bogs, sometimes with their short clumsy paddles, and in rare instances, a 
 rope of moss or heather, attached to a stone close by, showing the primi- 
 tive mode of anchorage. A very perfect specimen lately discovered in the 
 valley of the Aire, is in the museum at Leeds. But such canoes are of 
 all ages. (O'Callighan, Proc. Geol. Pol. S. W. R. York. 18634, p. 314. 
 
VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 131 
 
 cannibals. No human bones make these heaps horrible. 
 In spite of the over-confident assertion of Mr John Craw- 
 ford, who said in a recent debate upon the carnivorous 
 Esquimaux, that so far as his researches went, they were 
 the only exception to the fact that the ancestors of every 
 race of man had been at one time or another cannibals. 
 The occasional eating of human flesh by shipwrecked 
 mariners does not make a British nation a race of canni- 
 bals.* Skulls have been disinterred from peat-bogs and 
 from graves believed to be of the same period, — which 
 skulls are small and round, with massive bones above the 
 eyes, resembling those of the pigmy race of modern Lap- 
 landers. The skulls of the bronze and iron ages found in 
 the upper layers of the Danish peat-bogs are both longer 
 and larger, and belonged no doubt to a race that invaded 
 the Baltic regions afterwards. 
 
 We have the means at hand for reconstructing in imagin- 
 ation the three different conditions of those northern 
 lands during their inhabitation by three successive races. 
 Taking the last first, — in Eoman times the Danish isles 
 were covered with a magnificent forest of beech, whi'ch still 
 exists. This is the tree of the iron age. Its logs are 
 abundant in the topmost layers of those peat-bogs which 
 are so numerous in the north, and in which the skeletons 
 of lost men, with large long skulls, are sometimes found, 
 with iron arms and implements. Beneath these top layers 
 lie others deeper down, but how much older we know not, 
 the logs in which are all of oak. Oak was the forest of the 
 age of bronze. In the peat-layers no iron is found, and 
 very few skeletons; because the people of that age burned 
 their dead, and buried their ashes in urns, beneath grave 
 mounds. How many thousands of years this age of oak 
 woods and funereal fires stretched backward we know not. 
 But behind it lie the vaster ages of the stone period. The 
 lowest layers of peat contain neither logs of beech nor logs 
 of oak; their embedded trunks are chiefly of Scotch fir. 
 
 * Proc. 11. Geog. Soc, Jan. 23, 1805. Kane and others have testified 
 to the improvidence of the Esquimaux, and to their actually starving in 
 midwinter when calm weather and the neap-tides permit the sea to freeze 
 over, and the walrus have to seek water in the offing. In 1854-5 they 
 were compelled to eat their dogs, but not a case of cannibalism is known 
 to have occurred among them. — But see facts stated in Lecture X. 
 
132 ON THE EARLY [LECT. 
 
 The savages of those remote times lived in the true Cim- 
 merian darkness of the pines ; and their relics are the long 
 heaps of oyster-shells, cockles, and other edible molluscs, 
 plentifully mixed in with the remains of quadrupeds, birds, 
 and fish, the catalogue of which I have already given you. 
 Scattered throughout these heaps are found flint knives 
 and instruments of bone and horn, coarse potsherds, char- 
 coal and cinders, but not a trace of either iron or bronze. 
 Yet the polish given to the stone knives and hatchets show 
 that even this ancient age is not so infinitely remote from 
 ours, either in time or in barbarism, as that of the people 
 of the diluvium and earlier caves, to say nothing of possible 
 relics in the tertiary deposits.* 
 
 See how all civilization is relative. As we look down 
 these slopes of a foregone eternity, deeps yawn in deeps, in 
 each a deeper still. 
 
 See also on what delicate threads of evidence such demon- 
 strations hang. A single herring-bone in a hundred acres 
 of oyster- shells, — a single file-scratch on a golden torque, 
 found in a Druid barrow, tells the whole story. It is the 
 master-trick of genuine science ; Agassiz constructing the 
 whole fish from a single scale ; Leverrier detecting the 
 skulking Neptune by a ripple in the orbit of Uranus. But, 
 as I have said already, the method must be sound, the 
 starting-point well known, or the result will be a He. 
 What I have given you this evening are the well-estab- 
 lished and universally accepted results of many years of 
 careful investigation, by all the archaeologists of northern 
 Europe, led by such masters as Worsae, Nilsson, Steenstrup 
 and Thompson, Wilson and Lubbock,f and Busk, and with 
 all the resources of geology at their command. Hundreds 
 
 * The oyster is no longer to be found in the Baltic shores ; and the 
 periwinkle' (cardium edule) which still grows there is a variety dwarfed by 
 the brackishness of the Baltic water since the ocean was shut out from it, 
 by the gradual rise of the Scandinavian peninsula, at the observed rate of 
 two or three inches in a century. The absence from these kitchen heaps 
 of the mammoth and rhinoceros is not so extraordinary as is that of the 
 aurochs and reindeer, for the first two may have become extinct at an ear- 
 lier period in this latitude. 
 
 f See Morlot's Mem, in Bull Soc. Yaud, vi. 1860, Lausanne ; trans- 
 lated in 8th contrib. Smith. Inst., Washington, and abstracted by Lyeli 
 in Ant. Man, p. 8. 
 
VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OP MAN". -. 133 
 
 of peat-bogs liave been searched, thousands of turiiuli have 
 been opened, miles of shell-heaps have been explored, and 
 that beneath the jealous criticism of all Europe. In the 
 sober judgment of well-informed men this much may be 
 considered settled : that a general advance in civilization 
 is perceptible in the past history of man during what may 
 be roughly stated as the stone, the bronze, and the iron 
 periods, or, if you prefer to call them so, the ages of the 
 pine, the oak, and the beech woods ; that the men of the 
 stone age were savage hunters and fishermen, of small 
 stature and low intellect ; that the men of the bronze age 
 came in from other lands, bringing with them the know- 
 ledge of metallurgy, a taste for beauty, and religious feel- 
 ings which led them to burn their dead ; and that the men 
 of the iron age were of still another race and country, 
 large of stature, long-headed, warriors, with iron swords, 
 and iron ploughs, builders of forts and ships, restless in- 
 vaders, fond of state, accumulators of property, oppressors 
 of the ancient peoples, and the natural progenitors of the 
 Berseckers and Jarl kings who, in the years of written 
 history, conquered the west and south of Europe, and laid 
 the basis broad for the eminent civilization of our modern 
 times.* 
 
 Will any one be so far influenced by the prejudices of 
 scholastic education as to insist on a reversal of this order 
 of civil development ? Will any one maintain that man- 
 kind, although at first created, in some Eden, a little lower 
 than the angels, full of strength and beauty and endowed 
 with supernatural intelligence, lords of the fowl and the 
 brute, tilling the soil and adorning their homes with beau- 
 tiful works of art, were nevertheless compelled by wrath 
 divine against a mythical sin, to wander out towards the in- 
 hospitable north, fell into want and misery and lost their high 
 prerogatives, abandoned their generous habits, forgot their 
 faculties, grew savage, and became at last the wretched 
 outcasts whose remains are mingled with the bones of ex- 
 tinct beasts and fishes of the sea on the Scandinavian 
 shores ? Let such a one remember that so far as our 
 knowledge of history goes, so far as all the facts have been 
 
 * Nat. Hist. Review, 1861, &c. And two volumes published 1865, 
 'Prehistoric Times.' Williams and Norgate, Lond. 2 Vols. See 'West- 
 minster lie view/ July, p. 126. 
 
134 ON THE EAELY [LECT. 
 
 collected, no single instances of such a degradation can be 
 cited in support of such a theory. Men, so far as we know, 
 have always increased their stock of knowledge and power, 
 instead of losing it. The law of invasion has been a law 
 of development. Races have always elevated and ennobled 
 each other. Their wanderings have been like the steps of 
 a conflagration, the farther it goes the fiercer it burns. 
 The Persian love of flowers becomes a national mania 
 when transplanted to the icy banks of the Neva. The 
 smelting of copper once discovered in Armenia, could no 
 more be forgotten in Sweden and Norway, than the love 
 of Christ can become extinct in California. A race may 
 die out, but not its ideas ; except by giving place to truer 
 truths and lovelier lovelinesses. Civilizations, to be edu- 
 cated, may be forced to make the tour of the world ; but 
 they are not rolling stones that gather no moss. The 
 mariner' s needle of the distant east may have to wait a 
 thousand years before it finds a box and dial-plate in Italy; 
 but sooner or later it will be rectified for iron ships upon 
 the Atlantic. It maybe the year of our Lord 1862, before 
 Blake and Pompelly shall teach the miners of Japan how 
 to make a blast with their own gunpowder ; but do you 
 suppose those islanders will ever, to the end of time, allow 
 that splendid trick to be again forgotten ? Has not the 
 whole movement of the human race been from the poles 
 towards the equator ? From ice and darkness and misery, 
 towards the sunlight and the grape ? Have we a single 
 fact to show that the movement was ever in the other 
 direction ? Science cannot resign to a theological con- 
 jecture. Until incontrovertible facts are offered as an 
 argument against it we must continue, in our reasonings, 
 to follow the course of nature as we know it, and say that 
 barbarism everywhere on earth preceded civilization ; and 
 accept the order of the Danish peat-bogs as the symbol of 
 the order of the aboriginal development of the races of 
 mankind. 
 
 ' As has been truly observed/ says Mr Lubbock in a 
 speech before the R. Geographical Society,* ' man, in the 
 earlier times of which we have any relics, appears to have 
 been not only a savage, but a savage living under Arctic 
 
 * Jan. 23, 1865, p. 61 
 
VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. . 135 
 
 conditions/ Therefore the accounts which Kane, and Ross 
 before him, have given us of the isolated race of Esquimaux, 
 living on the west coast of Greenland, between the two 
 great prongs of the Humboldt glacier, and so completely- 
 cut off from the rest of the world that they would not be- 
 lieve Ross when he said he had come to them from the 
 south — are of surpassing interest to us. These Arctic 
 Highlanders contend with nature for a chance to live under 
 the extremest disabilities. They have no boats, and there- 
 fore cannot follow their food when it migrates. They have 
 no fish-hooks, and therefore cannot live on fish. They have 
 neither bow nor arrow, and therefore to them the herds of 
 reindeer, which range unmolested on the barren uplands at 
 the base of the great glaciers, the Sernik Soak, or great Ice- 
 wall, as they call it, which hems them in, are valueless. l They 
 have never been seen to partake of a single herb, or grass, 
 or berry grown upon the shore,'' says Osborne,* i and of 
 vegetables and sereals they have of course no conception/ 
 No other people on earth are known to be so entirely carni- 
 vorous. Kane calls them an expiring race ; but he furnishes 
 for the support of this assertion no good evidence. As Ross 
 found them in 1818, Kane saw them in 1854 ; only, they had 
 become friendly instead of being hostile to their visitors. 
 Without driftwood, except a fragment of wreck at rare in- 
 tervals, and with only a small supply of meteoric iron, and 
 a few wrecked iron hoops, they could make no weapons 
 but bone knives, bone harpoons, and bone lances, with 
 which they attack and kill white bears and seals and wal- 
 ruses, with the help of dogs. With nets they catch in 
 summer vast numbers of the delicious little auk or penguin. 
 They have in use the identical form of skin-scrapiug tools 
 which have been found so abundantly in the diluvial and 
 cave deposits of Europe, flat on one side, convex on the 
 other, round at one end, and pointed at the other. But 
 as supplies of meat in such cold countries can be preserved 
 for a long time, we may find in these carnivorous habits of 
 the present Esquimaux a new and more satisfactory ex- 
 planation of the vast numbers of animal- skeletons which 
 are found in the old caves, if we suppose the ancient in- 
 habitants of Europe to have been an Arctic and carnivorous 
 
 * Jan. 23, 1865, p. 50. 
 
136 ON THE EAELT [lECT. 
 
 race.* In spite of all the disadvantages of their situation, 
 ' all who have seen these people describe the men as square 
 built, hearty fellows, deep-chested, bass-voiced, and merry- 
 hearted ; and the women, good souls, as tender and sympa- 
 thetic in their quaint way; for it's not every European mother 
 who would lend a nice warm babe to make a soft pillow for a 
 weary traveller, as the ladies of Etah did ; and fair enough 
 to win the hearts of some on board of the Advance. 
 Kane's faithful hunter Hans abandoned him for love of 
 Shanghu's pretty daughter, who had nursed him when 
 wounded in a walrus hunt. These people live as far north 
 as 80°, and there are indications that Esquimaux settlements 
 may even be found at the very pole.f 
 
 In strong contrast with the well-authenticated, well-com- 
 pacted, and in all respects sober mass of information which 
 the northern antiquarians have put at our disposal, stand 
 the isolated and ill-confirmed reports of tertiary men, such 
 as those of the Abbe Bourgeois and M. Desnoyers ; and 
 also the extraordinary theories of enthusiasts like MM. 
 Brouillet and Meillet, based upon — mistakes. But when 
 we remember the wild conjectures to which Phoenician 
 letters on the Grave-mound amulet in western Virginia 
 gave rise, and the numerous forgeries of Oriental human 
 relics in our Western States, which have been reported from 
 time to time, it is not unuseful to observe how such aber- 
 rations may be possible even to the most advanced science 
 of Europe. These gentlemen have lately published an ac- 
 count of certain bone-caves in Poitou,J from which they 
 have obtained animal remains, similar to those found in 
 
 * Kane and others found that the Esquimaux kill the walrus rapidly 
 in the spring, and heap their bodies on the shore, piling rocks over the 
 heap, while they kill more ; but like all savages, they are so thoughtless 
 that these caches putrify in the summer ; for they never seem to think of 
 making them in the ice-caves of the adjacent glaciers. All this proves 
 how tenacious human life is. Kane says that the Arctic winter temper- 
 ature stood for three months at — 60° to 75° Fahrenheit. But human life 
 is tenacious of the earth only where animal life is so ; the enormous walrus 
 suckles its young in midwinter at 77° lat. ; so do the herds of seals feed- 
 ing on fish. But the walrus seems to feed on sea-weed alone. At any 
 rate the glacial period in Europe could no more extirpate the cave- dwell- 
 ing race than the Arctic winters can the Esquimaux. (Proc. R. Geog. 
 Soc, p. 65, Jan. 23, 1865.) 
 
 t Reiterated by Mr C. R. Markham, Proc. Geog. Soc, Jan. 23, 1865. 
 
 X See Westminster Review, July, 1865, p. 121. 
 
VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. .. 137 
 
 other caverns in France, scratched and marked by man. 
 On some of them are Sanscrit letters, not so arranged, 
 however, as to be pronounceable in words or syllables; 
 and two of them are scratched upon a bone representing 
 a phallus. From, these assumed Sanscrit letters they con- 
 clude that the cave-people of France were emigrants from 
 Asia ; that the written language of Arya was of enormous 
 antiquity; that the probable date of the relics is 24,000 
 years B.C. ; that at that time there occurred one of those 
 periodical cataclysms which desolate the earth and drive 
 the races to and fro ; that another, taking place about 
 14,000 B.C., was the debacle produced by the breaking up 
 of the antarctic polar ice; and that a third was brought 
 about in 2350 B.C. by a similar breaking up of the ice- 
 cope around the Arctic pole. 
 
 Unfortunately for this fine theory, M. Pictet, of Geneva, 
 pronounces that these letters, although actually Sanscrit, 
 have been unskilfully selected from one of the more modern 
 forms of that alphabet ! Setting aside, however, the stu- 
 pidity of the forgery, the hypothesis, judged upon its own 
 merits, melange as it is of scientific and unscientific ele- 
 ments, can hardly hold together long enough for us to 
 look at it. We might almost as well accept the Greek 
 or Hebrew fables of a universal deluge; a phenomenon 
 which we well know to be physically impossible ; for the 
 most tremendous rain-fall does not exceed six inches per 
 hour, and so completely desiccates the atmosphere, that it 
 can last but a short time ; whereas, even if it continued in 
 full force for forty days and nights, the entire amount 
 would only be some 6000 inches, or 500 feet. If all the 
 aqueous vapour in the atmosphere were to be condensed at 
 once, it could not elevate the sea level by 50 feet. Nor is 
 modern science aware of the existence of any 'fountains of 
 the great deep ' to be broken up, to supplement the defi- 
 ciency. And if, as some have been willing to suppose, the 
 divine hand could have pressed down some one area of the 
 crust of the earth, so as to permit the ocean to rush in and 
 cover it, the only consequence of that would have been to 
 drain off extensive areas elsewhere, and thus increase the 
 amount of land left dry. 
 
 When we introduce the idea of cataclysms, therefore, 
 into ethnology, we must carefully limit their magnitude, 
 
138 ON THE EAELY [lECT. 
 
 and define their causes, wholly irrespective of the fanciful 
 or allegorical stories of the ancient poets ; rememberings 
 moreover, how the ignorance of men predisposes them to 
 enlarge and dignify their personal and local misadventures 
 into universal disasters to the human race. 
 
 Too great a cataclysm would extirpate nations, instead 
 of transferring them from one domain to another. We 
 must lessen the cause if we wish to produce the required 
 effect. Had the melting of the Swiss glaciers been the 
 sudden result of the instantaneous emergence of the Sahara 
 desert and the immediate creation of the Sirocco winds, 
 the aboriginal population of Europe would have been 
 swept by a double deluge into the surrounding seas. But, 
 as we know, the African portion of the ancient Mediter- 
 ranean was cut off from the European portion of it so 
 slowly, by the gradual accumulation of gravel bars between 
 the Carthaginian and Cyrenian coasts ; and the drying up 
 of the African waters must have been a process so de- 
 liberate, and so apart from any noticeable change of level as 
 to land and sea, that the melting of the glaciers may have 
 occupied the lifetime of a generation of cave-dwellers, and 
 produced no change of climate, nor of soil, to which they 
 were not amply competent to adapt themselves. 
 
 Truth needs a good perspective. A hill looks always 
 steeper from its foot, or from its summit, than when we 
 are upon its sides. So the foreshortening of time, re- 
 garded with a backward glance, piles up the thousand 
 minor incidents of some slow change into one mighty 
 crisis, and we stand amazed and terrified at the possibility 
 of the recurrence in our day, of what, were it really to 
 happen, would no more trouble us than any of the ordi- 
 nary common-place experiences of life. 
 
 It is not a general deluge then, it is an ordinary inun- 
 dation, which mankind has to fear. A freshet, as we call 
 it, a famine, a pestilence, a murrain in their flocks and 
 herds, the loss of timber by the conflagrations of a year of 
 drought — these are real cataclysms of human history ; pro- 
 ducing poverty and desperation, exciting insurrections 
 against established governments, bursting into a blaze of 
 civil war, and ending with the expulsion of the unfortunate 
 to seek and settle upon other lands. When once the im- 
 pulse is established in some distant and perhaps unheard- 
 
VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. ■ 139 
 
 of portion of the population of the world, it propagates 
 itself from tribe to tribe and from race to race, those be- 
 hind precipitating themselves upon those in front, and those 
 attacking having the usual advantage over those attacked, 
 until a whole continent is ethnologically shifted forward 
 one degree, while some pre-eminently vigorous stock may 
 have even penetrated through half of the moving mass and 
 planted itself in the very heart of an entirely alien race. 
 Such was the case of the hyperborean Hungarians, now 
 surrounded by Sclavonians ; and such was every way the 
 case with the establishment of the Yandals in northern 
 Africa, of the Saracens in Spain and southern France, of 
 the Turkomans in Greece, and of the Hyksos in ancient 
 Egypt, who probably crossed, like the Turks of modern 
 days, the whole of central Asia, from the northern borders 
 of the Chinese empire. 
 
 We are too apt to regard political revolutions as the 
 work of politicians. Far from it. Websters and Calhoun s 
 are merely maggots in the fermenting cheese, bred of it, 
 and feeding on it, but not much more than illustrations of 
 its liveliness. We must find the causes of political revo- 
 lutions in the masses of the people. Fat folks love ease 
 and hate the clash of arms. The wolves of the Pyrenees 
 descend into the villages not until they are gaunt-ribbed 
 and hollow-eyed with famine. Throw multitudes out of 
 employment, — it is like dipping a handful of cotton-wool 
 into sulphuric acid ; you turn it into gun-cotton, and any 
 spark will explode it, so as to tear your hand in pieces. 
 Thus are governments destroyed. 
 
 Look at any good chart of the region of China around 
 the capital city of Pekin. You will notice there the course 
 of the mightiest river in the world, the Yellow River, 
 Hoang-ho, which drains the central parts of Asia. You 
 will notice also a range of mountains (running north and 
 south directly in its path to the gulf of Pechele), which one 
 of our geologists, Mr Pompelly, believes to have been 
 elevated at a recent date. Through this range the river 
 once passed directly to the sea by what is now the bed of 
 another river, the Pei-ho. But by a subsequent re-eleva- 
 tion of this mountain- chain the great river, turned at a right 
 angle southward, has been compelled to seek, along the west- 
 ern foot of the ridge, its passage 850 miles farther south 
 
140 ON THE EAELT [LECT. 
 
 than the gap through which it used to go before. Here it 
 turns east, goes through, and takes its unobstructed way 
 to the Yellow Sea. The country between the mountains 
 and the sea is a low plain traversed by numerous ancient 
 river-beds, a vast delta which the river has been slowly 
 and steadily reclaiming from the ocean for no one knows 
 how long. In old Chinese municipal records many of the 
 ancient cities which now stand miles and even leagues 
 back from the shore, are described as seaports, with good 
 harbours, when they were first built. You will also notice 
 a high mountainous promontory projecting from the middle 
 of the delta into the sea ; this was an island once. The 
 delta has been formed around its western end by the Yel- 
 low River, changing its bed alternately to the right and to 
 the left, with a motion precisely like that of the head of a 
 silkworm when spinning its cocoon. At the last meeting 
 of the National Academy at Northampton, Mr Pompelly 
 exhibited a chart of this delta, constructed for him by a 
 learned Chinese scholar, whom he employed to search the 
 historical records of the province, so that he could lay 
 down the different courses which the mighty stream had 
 taken under the different dynasties of Chinese emperors, 
 debouching alternately on the two sides of the central 
 promontory. There is a Chinese story, that after a deluge, 
 which destroyed mankind, the great king, Yu, first em- 
 peror of the first dynasty, B.C. 2100, built dykes to confine 
 the river to its then existing bed. This care of the Yellow 
 River became the hereditary policy of all succeeding em- 
 perors, a sine qua non for any dynasty, however powerful. 
 For, as the river filled up its bed, until its surface level 
 stood 50 and 60, and, as the Jesuits say, even 90 feet above 
 the surrounding country, the least remissness threatened 
 incredible calamities. The delta was exceedingly fertile ; 
 its population was the densest in the world; its level 
 surface could afford no shelter from destruction were the 
 banks to break ; flight might save individuals, but in 
 a state of utter destitution, for the highlands were a hun- 
 dred miles away ; the flocks and herds would surely perish ; 
 and the river, swollen for the occasion, would plough a 
 broad, deep avenue of annihilation through the sites of 
 towns and cities, to its new month upon the farther side 
 of the peninsula. In the face of all these terrors, and they 
 
VI.] SOCIAL LIEE OF MAN. •• 141 
 
 were no imaginations, for they had been repeatedly realized, 
 the government officials would periodically grow careless 
 and venal ; the misappropriation to themselves of taxes, 
 levied to keep up the banks, allowed those banks to be- 
 come slowly weaker at every point, until some winter of 
 uncommon snow upon the mountains would be followed 
 by a late spring of uncommon heat ; the river would sud- 
 denly overtop its insufficient banks and spread destruction 
 over the whole delta. The destruction of life alone, to this 
 over-populated region, although appalling, would be rather 
 a blessing than a curse. English ships have been known 
 to steam up all the way from Whampoa to Canton through 
 a sheet of dead bodies like drift ice, after such an inunda- 
 tion of the Canton river. But the worst terrors of the 
 event lay in the millions of unburied, putrifying corpses, 
 covering the fields; the starving myriads, women and 
 children; and the desperate ferocity of armed brigands, 
 wifeless, and childless, and houseless, and landless, and 
 moneyless, moving from the scene of wrath and woe out- 
 ward in all directions, to spread disturbance through 
 surrounding provinces. To suppress these armies of vaga- 
 bonds armies of regulars and volunteers had to be em- 
 ployed, which only increased the evils of the land. Con- 
 tinual fighting turned the robbers into warriors, and the 
 imbecility of the decaying dynasty which had been the 
 original cause of failure in the river-dykes, became now 
 the cause of its military overthrow. The records of China 
 show that these changes in the course of the Yellow River, 
 happening at regular intervals of three or four centuries, 
 have corresponded with as many imperial revolutions. We 
 need not doubt that some of these revolutions, commenc- 
 ing at the Yellow Sea, have set in motion waves of war and 
 wandering, which never stopped until they broke upon the 
 Atlantic coast. 
 
 But we are not to think that a millionth part of the 
 water follows the wave. The form advances, but the equi- 
 librium must be maintained. Persons, families, armies 
 migrate ; but not the race. Were this not true we should 
 see to-day the cat-eyed Mongol tethering his horse on the 
 lands of western France. Hang up a row of ivory balls ; 
 strike the first one ; what happens ? Do they all rush 
 forward in a heap ? No, the last one only flies ; the rest 
 
142 ON THE EAELY [LECT. 
 
 remain in place. Thus the races of mankind have, in the 
 main, retained their original seats by virtue of an elasticity- 
 inherent in all organized society, even of the lowest grade ; 
 yet propagating tidal waves of agriculture, commerce, 
 mechanics, arts, politics, and religion from east to west, 
 fusing the different races practically into one. 
 
 There are other, less striking, but more powerful, phy- 
 sical causes of the out-wanderings of races; such as the 
 change of fertile countries into deserts, or of salubrious 
 into pestilential air. But the physical sciences have not 
 yet made these causes indisputably clear, and history has 
 not preserved sufficiently plain records to enable us to 
 judge of the events. Two instances of such, however, 
 may be cited as well worthy of consideration. 
 
 There is a range of desert country stretching across the 
 map of the old world, from the Atlantic shores of northern 
 Africa, by Egypt and Arabia, Persia and Independent 
 Tartary, to the Chinese Wall. Its drought, and conse- 
 quent sterility, connect themselves with certain grand and 
 constant currents of the atmosphere ; as also do those 
 similar but more restricted deserts lying on each side of 
 the Andes and the Rocky Mountains in America. 
 
 But the removal of forests also has much to do with the 
 production of desert lands ; for the forests modify the 
 rain-fall. The Kalahari desert, in southern Africa, is gain- 
 ing in extent, its rivers drying up, as Mr James F. Wilson 
 says, because of the indiscriminate felling of timber by the 
 natives and colonists combined ; the land once occupied by 
 the frugal, thrifty Hottentots is now possessed by wasteful 
 Caffres ; and iron axes are in everybody's hand, where 
 formerly an iron axe was a great rarity. Thus even an 
 improvement of the highest value in the arts may give oc- 
 casion for a fatal wrong to a portion of mankind. 
 
 Mr Cyril Graham has shown that the anciently populous 
 region of Hauran, to the east of Damascus, full of the ruins 
 of great cities, became the uninhabitable desert it now is 
 from the same cause. Generals Humphreys and Abbot, 
 of the United States army, have demonstrated, in the case 
 of the Mississippi, what Sir Roderick Murchison asserts 
 of the Volga, that its volume of water has diminished by 
 the settling and clearing of the upper country. The 
 French revolution let loose the axe in the Pyrenees., and 
 
VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 143 
 
 the people were fast turning the south of France into a 
 desert, when Napoleon restored the ancient law to protect 
 the woods. Colonel Balfour has shown how the replanting 
 of trees in India has re-opened its lost springs. Lord 
 Stratford de Eedcliffe tells us that after speculators had 
 obtained permission to cut the forest of Belgrade, the 
 contract had to be annulled ; for the reservoirs at Con- 
 stantinople, in consequence, began to fail.* How much of 
 the spread of the Ar^aixjrace was due to the formation of 
 the Persian deserts, and that of the Hebrew race to the 
 new sterility of Syria and Palestine, are curious questions 
 for the cultivators of almost every branch of physical 
 science to take some part in settling satisfactorily. 
 
 There is still another class of causes affecting the migra- 
 tion of races, to illustrate the nature of which it is only 
 needful to refer to the alleged destruction of the Indians 
 of the United States by a universal pestilence, previous 
 to the appearance of the English colonists at Plymouth 
 Hock j and to that less apocryphal destruction of the same 
 ill-fated race subsequently by syphilis, and smallpox, and 
 scarlet fever, and fire-water, imported among the tribes 
 from the homesteads of the whites. 
 
 But as nature never repeats herself, so every migration 
 that has ever taken place in history, or before history, had 
 features of its own ; varying, as it did, from all others in its 
 force and velocity, in its brilliancy, in its scope and out- 
 spread, in its influence for good or evil, and therefore in 
 its consequences at the present day. 
 
 From the background of written history, two great mi- 
 grations stand out pre-eminent — one which affected the 
 religious development of the human mind ; and one, in- 
 
 * Proc. R. Geog. Soc, p. 106. May, 1865. Dr Livingstone, however, has 
 refused his assent to this explanation. He vouches, indeed, for the facts, 
 and gives instances of the drought of springs in his own garden, and names 
 old water-beds, now dry, still called ' rivers ' by the natives ; but he ascribed 
 the phenomenon to the rise of the western edge of the continent to a 
 higher level above the sea, and to the production of fissures, like that of 
 the Victoria Falls, draining interior lakes, changing their levels, and 
 making humid winds dry. Dr Kirk objects that wood in Central Africa 
 is abundant on the Zambesi, and that there is an average amount of popu- 
 lation, but insufficient to extirpate the forest, only using wood for fuel. 
 He is, therefore, inclined to ascribe the dryness of Southern as well as 
 Northern Africa to atmospheric currents. 
 
144 ON THE EARLY [LECT 
 
 augurating the new era of universal liberty and Christian 
 philanthropy : — the migration of the Abrahamic race into 
 Palestine, two thousand years before the advent of Christ ; 
 and the emigration of Anglo-Saxon colonists to the New 
 World and to Australia. Of the latter, it is not here the 
 place to speak; but the other is more closely connected 
 with our subject, as it relates directly to the earliest civil- 
 ization of the globe. I do not myself believe with entire 
 confidence in the personal existence of the Jewish patriarchs. 
 For you will find in the old Hindoo mythologies the names 
 of Abram, Isaac, and Judah, ranged in a similar order and 
 connection. Brahma's son, Ikswaka, was the great-grand- 
 father of Yadu.* The Hebrews of Palestine were but a 
 single twig of that wide-spreading branch of the Shemitic 
 tree which had its original seats in central Asia, and mi- 
 grating southward and westward over Persia, Mesopotamia, 
 Arabia, and Syria, entered Egypt under the name of 
 Hyksos. We read in Genesis that Abram came from Ur of 
 the Chaldees, which all the Fathers have considered to be 
 Edessa or Orfa, in the western division of northern Meso- 
 potamia, nine miles from the Euphrates^ but which the 
 excavations of the British consul, Mr Taylor, have shown 
 to be in the south, near the junction of the Tigris and 
 
 Euphrates.^ 
 
 We are also told in the book of Numbers (xiii. 22) that 
 Hebron, the city of the Hebrews, and the head- quarters of 
 the Abrahamites, was built by them seven years before 
 Zoan, or Tanis, in Egypt, where are now to be seen the 
 masterpieces of Hyksos architecture. 
 
 You remember that Isaac had a legendary brother Esau, 
 the father of the Arabian nomades. 
 
 We must not judge this people by the Jew sutlers in 
 the army of the Potomac ; nor by the three- crowned hat- 
 pedlers, crying ' O'Clo' ! ' along the slums and stews of 
 
 * Icswaca, Surya (the sun), Soma or Chandra (the moon), Yadu (Judah), 
 Chahuman, Pramara, &c. Ant. Radjpoot MSS. A Sanscrit edition gives 
 Icshwaca, Soma, Yadu, Pramara, &c. MSS. Index, H. 20. 
 
 f Callirrhoe in Pliny, v. 21 ; Antiochia ; Justinopolis ; and supposed 
 to be the ark (ereck) fe? of Gen. x. 10. ■ Two days' journey S.E. of it is 
 Charrse (Harran),the hrn (Harran) pp of Gen. xi. 31, xii. 5, xxvii. 43, 
 xxviii. 10, xxix. 4 ; 2 Kings xix. 12 ; Isaiah xxxvii. 12, and Ezekiel 
 xxvii. 23. Here Crassus was defeated. 
 
 t Proc. Geog. Soc. 1865, Jan. 9, p. 39= 
 
VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 145 
 
 London. We must seek it in its native place, where it is 
 a king. Not crouched against the walls of the mosque of 
 Omar at Jerusalem, but on horseback in the desert, swing- 
 ing the scimitar or hurling the lance of the Saracen ; or 
 in the professor's chair at Cordova, translating, expound- 
 ing, and enlarging all the philosophies of foregoing ages. 
 We must regard those fine processions of tall, grave, long- 
 robed merchants, entering the villages of Liberia and Sierra 
 Leone ; each man a judge of righteousness, incapable of 
 levity or meanness, noble in speech and conduct, and propa- 
 gating the faith of Islam to-day with the same zeal with 
 which their fathers fought for it a thousand years ago. 
 Study the Arabs in the Indian Ocean, on the islands of 
 Java and Sumatra, surrounded by other races — Malays, 
 Hindoos, Negroes, and Chinese, — and you will not only 
 acknowledge their superior blood, but remark their con- 
 sciousness of this superiority. To this Arab or typical 
 Hebrew Shemite the old prophecy gives the tent ; and the 
 Hamite and the Japhetite are to come into it to serve him. 
 Arabs are the commercial masters of the tropics. Hebrews 
 rule the politics of every government in Christendom by | 
 slips of paper from their counting-rooms. They have 
 stamped their religious conceptions upon the written his- 
 tory of half the globe. They have afforded to the world 
 its noblest thinkers, its grandest poets, its most fiery 
 orators, its sweetest musicians, its largest-minded mer- 
 chants, and its most absolute martyrs to patriotism and 
 conscience. Whence came, then, this grand race, and 
 where did it make its first appearance in history ? 
 
 The recent discoveries of M. Mariette, perhaps the ablest 
 and most successful of all explorers in the valley of the 
 Nile, have conferred upon ethnology two inestimable boons. 
 First, he has opened up a world of monuments relating to 
 a part of Egyptian history about which we knew nothing, 
 and the most interesting part of all — the earliest. And 
 secondly, he has dispelled the last shades of doubt 
 which hung about the authenticity of Manetho's lists of 
 kings. His discovery of the monuments of the early 
 Memphite dynasties will become important to us here- 
 after, when we discuss the architectural ideas of the ear- 
 liest men. 
 
 But the second point is of importance here. For M. 
 
 10 
 
146 ON THE EAELY [LECT. 
 
 Mariette, by placing it beyond dispute that the list of 
 Egyptian dynasties and kings which Manetho gives us, is 
 not only genuine, but constructed in the ordinary manner 
 in which all governmental or official lists are constituted, 
 viz. by taking only the legitimate sovereigns of the whole 
 realm, and each one only for that time during which he 
 reigned the acknowledged legal monarch, — has put an end 
 to all attempts to shorten the Egyptian chronology upon 
 the supposition that many of Manetho's kings and even 
 dynasties were contemporaneous, — attempts made of 
 course solely in the interest of the Rabbinical age of the 
 world. The 6th dynasty, for instance, it was long supposed 
 reigned at Elephantine in southern Egypt, while the 7th 
 was reigning with independent powers at Memphis in the 
 north. But M. Mariette has disinterred monuments of 
 both those dynasties on the sites of both their capitals, viz. 
 at Elephantine in Upper Egypt, and at Sakkara near Mem- 
 phis at the head of the Delta. Each dynasty therefore 
 must have ruled over the whole kingdom ; and conse- 
 quently the two dynasties could not have been contempo- 
 raneous. 
 
 In like manner the 13th dynasty, which had its seat 
 at Thebes, must have preceded the 14th dynasty, which 
 had its seat at Xois, because from the colossal statues of 
 its kings discovered at San near Xois, it must have reigned 
 there also. 
 
 For 1700 years before Christ, that is, from the end of 
 the 17th dynasty, that of the Hyksos, onwards, the his- 
 tory of Egypt is well known ; and in all this length of re- ; 
 cord Manetho has been found correct ; he has not doubled 
 any reign by inserting a contemporaneous ruler before or 
 after it. We have no right, therefore, to suspect him of 
 having committed this blunder in the earlier portion of his 
 list. But such a blunder could only be intentional ; and 
 he could have had no prejudice to serve by such a wilful 
 sacrifice of truth, in favour of a long chronology. His 
 reputation is but just recovering from the load of obloquy 
 which the Jews, and their disciples the Protestant chrono- 
 logists, have heaped upon it, for no better reason than that 
 they think they must make the history of all nations upon 
 earth draw up its knees to lie within the child's cradle of 
 the Hebrew scriptures. Father Jerome tells us how the 
 
VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF- MAN. 147 
 
 Rabbis of Tiberias doctored these Hebrew scriptures, 
 by slipping back the birth of the firstborn of each of the 
 antediluvian patriarchs one hundred years upon his 
 father's life, in order to bring the birth of Christ at the 
 year 4000 of the world's creation, instead of at the year 
 6000. He tells us that their motive was to take the millen- 
 nium argument out of the Christians' mouths. For the 
 early Christians claimed against the Jews that Jesus must 
 be the Messiah, because he had come according to 
 prophecy current among the Jews themselves, at the dawn 
 of the great Sabbath, the seven thousandth year. When 
 we reject Manetho' s list, we do it in behalf of the Jews, 
 who chuckle at our simplicity ; and we do it also in the 
 face of the old Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures, the 
 chronology of which is 2000 years longer than that of King 
 James' translation, showing us how the trick of the Jews 
 was played. 
 
 One of the most satisfactory evidences we have that 
 Manetho did not double either his dynasties or his reigns, 
 is the fact that the hieroglyphic lists of kings, especi- 
 ally the new list lately discovered at Abydos, contain a 
 multitude of kings' names which do not appear on 
 Manetho's list at all.* During the rule of those fierce 
 strangers, the Hyksos, there were several native dynasties 
 maintaining a precarious existence in various sections of the 
 Valley of the Nile ; but the great historian, true to his 
 principle, that kings de facto were the only kings de jure, 
 refuses to insert in his list the names of these little native 
 pretenders ; he engrosses only the names of the Hyksos 
 monarchs, although foreigners and tyrants in his list of the 
 17th dynasty, because they really reigned, f 
 
 A learned lady of England has exerted herself to prove 
 
 * Consult not only Manetho, but Eratosthenes, and the tablets of 
 Abydos, of Thebes, and of Sakkara, and the papyrus of Turin. The grand 
 temple at Abydos.. just discovered by Mariette, presents a new list, 
 analogous to those we have already had, but admirably preserved. It is 
 of the time of Sethos I., 1200 B.C. Sethos has selected "77 names of pre- 
 decessors to make up his list, which ends like those of Manetho, and the 
 Turin papyrus with Menes and Atothis, Touthmes III. (1500 B.C.) 
 makes offerings to 61 predecessors, on the tablet in the Imperial Library 
 at Paris (Renan). 
 
 f Renan, Revue des Deux Mondes, April, 1865, p. 664. Mariette' s 
 Apercu. 
 
148 ON THE EAELY [LECT. 
 
 that these mysterious intruders into Egyptian history, the 
 Hyksos, were the same people who are called in the early 
 Hebrew writings the Susim (Hak-Sus, meaning f king of 
 the Susim '), a • mighty nation first heard of as inhabit- 
 ing the Hauran country, south of Damascus, and east of 
 the Upper Jordan. Whether this be true or not, the first 
 appearance of these nomades seems to be described upon 
 the walls of the tombs of Beni Hassan, built under the 
 12th dynasty, nearly 3000 years B.C. There the traveller 
 beholds, for the first time, the pictures of processions of 
 patriarchs with great eyes and aquiline noses,* coming with 
 their wives and little oues, their poor utensils, and instru- 
 ments of music, to request the governor of Egypt to give 
 them lands to dwell in, to escape a famine in their own. 
 It is the story of Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph, told by 
 Egyptians ; the first pacific modest appearance of that ter- 
 rible race which was to throw all Asia afterwards into dis- 
 order, take possession of the land that succoured it, and 
 finally give the human race the grandest, the holiest, and 
 the most enduring part of its history. 
 
 The distinguished Egyptologist, Dr Brugsch, and an 
 advocate for the authenticity of the Mosaic account of the 
 Exodus, states the accordance of the monuments with that 
 account in a much better and more conclusive manner than 
 Hengstenberg has done, and introduces into its scenery 
 fresher tints. One chapter of his charming little book, 
 Aus dem Orient, is entitled ' Moses and the Monuments/ 
 and in this chapter he resumes all that the hieroglyphics 
 are as yet known to teach about the Hebrews. Tanis, the 
 Hyksos capital, called hieroglyphically hauar, Avaris, was 
 besieged and taken by the first king of the 18th dynasty. 
 Its Pharaohs effected the conquest of Asia, planting their 
 furthest triumphal obelisks on the borders of Armenia, and 
 returned with armies of captives to build innumerable 
 monuments along both banks of the Nile. Pictures remain 
 
 * But the Hyksos are described as red haired and blue eyed, which 
 gives origin to the theory that they were the earliest appearance of the 
 Gothic or Scandinavian race of the Iron age. Kenan remarks that the 
 Hyksos monuments are at San, Tanis, or Zoan, B" 1 ^ 1 ? ^X which was 
 founded seven years after Hebron, according to ^ Numbers xiii. 22. 
 Hebron was held by 1-pTS (ahimn) ^v (ssi) and ^p (Olmi) the sons 
 ("H"^) of Anak (p^n). Here again we have Susim. 
 
VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OP MAN. 149 
 
 to us of these captives drawing water, treading clay, 
 spreading out and piling up their tales of bricks to build a 
 temple with, under the supervision of Egyptian figures 
 armed with rods. The 19th dynasty had for its first three 
 kings, Ramses I., Seti I., and Ramses II., the great 
 Sesostris, who reigned 66 years, and pushed his conquests 
 north, east, south, and west. To guard his frontier against 
 the Hittites of Palestine, he forced his native Hyksos serfs 
 and foreign military slaves to build a chain of forts across 
 the isthmus of Suez, of which the principal were Ramses 
 and Pithom (Pachtum, Pelusium), names mentioned in 
 Exodus i., ii., as built by Hebrews, under the tyrannical 
 oppression of a Pharaoh (Theban per-aa, Memphite 
 puee-ao, means high house, or sublime porte), who knew 
 not Joseph. One of the papyri of the British Museum, of 
 the date of Ramses II. (1250 — 1300 B.C., Anastasi, iii. p. 1) 
 is a description, by a scribe named Pinebsa to his master 
 Amenemaput, of the aspect of things in and around the 
 new city Ramses, — of the entrance into it of the great 
 Pharaoh, — and of the petitions for relief against their 
 overseers, which they thronged about him to present. 
 Another papyrus reads : ' Sum of buildings 12, by people 
 brought from their residences to make brick in the city ; 
 they made their tale of bricks daily, without stopping, 
 until finished. Thus the task given me by my master has 
 been accomplished.'' These conscripts were not Egyptians ; 
 they were called apuru, Hebrews. They are often men- 
 tioned, on the stones and in papyri, as at work, guarded by 
 Mazai, the Libyan gendarmerie of Egypt. In a papyrus of 
 the Leyden Museum, an employe of Ramses II., Kauitzir, 
 reports to his upper scribe Bakenptah : ' May my lord be 
 pleased with my execution of his assigned work, as follows : 
 distribution of food to the soldiers, and to the Hebrews 
 dragging stones for the great city Ramses Meiamoun the 
 truth-loving, under the oversight of police chief Amena- 
 man. I gave them food monthly, according to my master's 
 excellent arrangement/ A second papyrus in the same 
 museum is written by one Keniaman to his superior, the 
 Katena or general Hui : ' I have fulfilled my lord's orders 
 to give food to the soldiers as well as to the Hebrews who 
 drag stones, &c' In the rock valley Hamamat, along 
 which the great commercial route of Egypt from Coptos 
 
150 ON THE EAELY [lECT. 
 
 on the Nile to Berenice on the Red Sea, is an inscription 
 describing the quarry work done by 9000 men, among 
 whom was a squad of 800 Hebrews under escort of Mazai 
 police, who had- brought the poor devils probably all the 
 way from Goshen in the Delta. 
 
 Now if the Hebrews' story of their own wrongs and of 
 their deliverance is to be believed, we must suppose Joseph 
 to have come down into Egypt under one of the Hyksos 
 kings of the 1 7th dynasty, a Shemite like himself. When 
 the native Pharaohs suppressed the Hyksos government, 
 they oppressed the Hyksos colonists, who remained, forming 
 perhaps nearly the whole population of the eastern wing of 
 the Delta. Moses was born, say in the sixth year of 
 Ramses II., 300 years after Joseph's day. In his tenth 
 year Ramses entered his new city, built with Hebrew 
 hands. Add to the remaining 60 years of his reign the 
 20 years which his son Menephtha reigned, and we get 
 the 80 years of age which Moses had when he led his 
 people forth. 
 
 Ramses II., like Cassar and Napoleon afterwards, was 
 always in trouble, sitting on a throne planted over mines 
 which any moment might explode. He made an ' extradi- 
 tion treaty ' with Chetasar, king of the Hittites, who bound 
 himself to return to Egypt all fugitive Hebrews found in 
 Palestine ; and the same fearful policy might have actually 
 gone the length of an edict of universal male Hebrew child- 
 murder, in view of the eventuality which the Hebrew 
 Scripture thus expresses : c for when a war arises, they may 
 join our enemies and fight against us, and escape out of the 
 land/ Ramses and his successor added to this fierce 
 oppression a religious seduction; they instituted an 
 ostentatious worship of the sun-god Baal of the Shemite 
 race. Ramses presented his own colossus (now in the 
 Berlin Museum) to the temple of the sun in Zoan, where, 
 says the poet of Psalms lxxviii. 12, 43, Jehovah (by Moses) 
 ( showed his wonders.'' Menephtha built no temples, but 
 inscribed his own name on his fathers' monuments with 
 the title ( Worshipper of Sutech-Baal of Tanis/ and cut the 
 image of Baal on the back of one of his own colossi with 
 the figure of his son worshipping before it. 
 
 The name Moses is now identified with the Egyptian 
 mas or masstj, meaning ' the child/ a name borne by many 
 
VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OFJM. .. 151 
 
 personages of that age, one of whom is entitled on a monu- 
 ment of the reign of Menephtha, ' Viceroy of Ethiopia;' 
 and this inscription probably gave rise to the assertion of 
 Josephus, that Moses, when a young man, led an Egyptian 
 army into Ethiopia to besiege Meroe, and married the 
 princess Tharbe out of gratitude for her assistance in 
 entering that city. The Hebrew story makes him the 
 adopted son -of Ramses' daughter, and says that he was 
 learned in all the customs of the Egyptians, as in fact 
 might be inferred from the Hebrew ceremonial which 
 bears his name, and the restricted monotheism which 
 idealizes all the writings going by his name ; for in the 
 roll of the dead deposited in Egyptian graves, God is not 
 named, but only designated as the nuk pu nuk, ' I Am 
 what I Am/ precisely the title 'Jehovah' of the Pentateuch. 
 
 At this point, however, all alliance between the monu- 
 ments and the Mosaic story ceases. Several centuries 
 elapse before the Sheshonk of the 22nd dynasty appears 
 in Hebrew history as the Shishak who besieged Jerusalem. 
 Of the Exodus, of the wanderings in the wilderness, of the 
 settlement in Palestine, the monuments say not one word. 
 Coming directly from the land of hieroglyphic writing upon 
 stone, and learned in the art, — leading a people who had 
 not only had memorial sculpture before their eyes all their 
 lifetime, but had themselves built up the walls and set the 
 statues, steles, and obelisks, which bore descriptions of 
 every public event, is it not an incredible supposition that 
 Moses should have wrought such wonders, traversed such 
 a length of route, encamped beneath the granite cliffs of the 
 peninsula, and in the defiles of Mount Hor so many years, 
 without leaving a trace of his existence, a line of writing, 
 a letter, a scratch to authenticate his story, not even the 
 two tablets on which he is said to have inscribed his deca- 
 logue ! There are thousands of rude figures in the val- 
 ley Mokatteb, and in other ravines descending from 
 Mount Serbal, and they have been studied carefully by a 
 multitude of scholars, under the strongest temptation to 
 make them out Mosaic, but it has not been done. No 
 Egyptologist can speak with patience of Mr Forster's 
 book. 
 
 Our faith is always in degrees. We believe in Alfred 
 more than in Arthur, — more in the Gracchi than in 
 
152 ON THE EARLY [LECT. 
 
 Romulus and Remus. Time and distance have great 
 dominion over historic faith. Alexander is to us a real 
 personage ; we believe in Socrates not quite so clearly, but 
 yet more confidently than in Lycurgus ; in Lycurgus more 
 than in Cadmus ; in Cadmus more than in Hercules ; and 
 not at all in Jupiter and Semele. But time is but a single 
 element in the constitution of the Credence that we give to 
 past events, and not at all the most important one ; other- 
 wise Ramses II. would not be to the mind of scholars of 
 the present day as solid a reality as Cassar or Napoleon. 
 
 Time goes for nothing when we have contemporary docu- 
 ments. These are the legitimate masters of our faith. In 
 their absence there must always be more or less of anarchy 
 in history, more or less doubt mixed with our faith. 
 Ramses as Sesostris, that is, before his monuments were 
 discovered, was the fanciful hero of a Greek fable, — quite 
 on a par with Hercules. The traveller who deciphers 
 Bonivard's signature on the stone column to which he was 
 chained in the Chateau of Chillon, — or the half-finished 
 couplet of Byron at the top of the Giralda of Seville, — who 
 stands alone in the desert of Murgab, before the marble 
 fragment which bears the winged relief of the old Persian 
 king', and reads the words : ' 1 am Cyrus the king, the 
 Achasmenian/ — or who catches a glimpse of some noble 
 record in the valley of the Nile, such as that of the an- 
 cient governor of Lycopolis : ' Never have I taken the child 
 from the mother's breast, nor the poor man from the side 
 of his wife/ — he feels the full meaning of the term contem- 
 porary testimony by means of monuments. 
 
 But there is a third element of history which regulates 
 the other two, and by which we criticise and limit the 
 value of contemporary monuments, — it is the vraisemblable. 
 A tale told by the mountain (tel) itself cannot be believed 
 unless it represents events as flowing in that self-same cur- 
 rent of the commonplace in which our lives flow on. The es- 
 sential sameness of the manners and customs of mankind — 
 the long-enduring unchangeableness of the social life of 
 man — the steadfastness of man's relationships to nature — 
 must not be violated, or we cannot believe. Even when 
 Sesostris was a myth like Hercules, there was this differ- 
 ence : the story of Sesostris was extraordinary, but proba- 
 ble were there but records left : but that of Hercules 
 
VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. -. 153 
 
 would be incredible however many monuments were left. 
 
 Now, judging the Mosaic story by these canons, in which 
 all agree, we find it of an age far antedating all precise 
 history, — we find it utterly unsupported by contemporary 
 monumental records, — and we feel it to be a splendid series 
 of incredibilities from first to last. His birth, his miracles, 
 his exodus, his converse with Jehovah, and his mysterious 
 disappearance, — all stamp the history with an indelible 
 character of myth, which not a single discovery of any 
 branch of science has yet repaid the endeavour to efface. 
 
 In less degree — in a far less degree — but still in essen- 
 tially the same mode, the legends of the Jews of a date 
 previous to the reign of Solomon are utterly unhistorical, 
 although the stories of the Judges are probable enough. 
 Nothing prevents us from identifying the Hebrews of the 
 monarchy as descendants of the Hyksos race, nor from 
 supposing that the Mosaic records were inventions of a 
 later age, based on a mixture of Hyksos traditions, Arabian 
 poetry, Zoroastrian mythology, and genuine Egyptian and 
 Assyrian monumental history. Nothing prevents us from 
 concluding that the Egyptian inscriptions record merely a 
 local and temporary eddy through the isthmus of Suez, of 
 that master flood of migration, which, starting from the 
 centres of Arianism, about the Hindu Koosh, in Afghan- 
 istan, and allying itself originally with the movements of 
 the Children of the Sun and the Children of the Moon in 
 north-western India, spread itself over Palestine, and 
 Syria, and Arabia, and then, through the dispersion of the 
 Jews, into all the countries of the modern world ; a migra- 
 tion which, as I have said, is the most important of all that 
 have occurred since man was placed by his Creator on the 
 earth. 
 
 But in an anthropological sense the history of the He- 
 brews is of far inferior importance when compared with that 
 of the early Egyptians, for of this last we have a world of 
 contemporary documents, and therefore the most precise 
 information. It is to the earliest monuments of Egypt 
 that we must turn for pictures of the social state of a 
 race of men, standing in the boldest contrast with all that 
 we know, by inference from the relics of the diluvium and 
 the cave deposits and the palafittes, of the social state of 
 far more ancient and more savage races, living under less 
 
154 
 
 ON THE EARLY 
 
 [lect. 
 
 CHART 
 
 Ancient Empire: 
 Thinis Dynasty 
 Thinis ; 
 Memphis 
 Memphis 
 Memphis 
 Elephantine 
 Memphis 
 Memphis 
 Heliopolis 
 Heliopolis 
 
 OF EGYPTIAN HISTOEY. 
 
 lasted 1940 years (? Manetho.) 
 Menes.^ Pyramid of Cochome. 
 
 ^Monuments rare. 769 vears. 
 
 J 
 Cheops. Pyramids. Mt Sinai (Wady Magara). 
 
 Tombs at Saqqara. 
 Nitocris; Apappus. 
 
 rMonuments wanting. 436 years. 
 J Egypt perhaps overrun by foreigners. 
 The end of the old writing, religion, 
 civil service, &c. 
 
 V 
 
 Middle Empire : lasted 1361 years (? Manetho). 
 
 Thebes XI. Entef, Mentouhotep. ) Obelisks oldest known. 
 
 Thebes XII, Osortasen, Amenemha. } Beni Hassan. Lake Mosris. 
 
 Thebes XIII. Nofrehotep, Sebekhotep. 60 kings, 463 years. 
 
 Xosi XIV. Nothing known, of this. At its close commenced 
 
 Entef XV. invasions of the Hyksos, lasting 400 years ; 
 
 Entef XVI. ended with the establishment of the Hyksos. 
 
 San XVII. Saites (Hyksos). Colossi. Sphinxes. 
 
 Classic Empire. 
 
 Thebes 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 Thebes XIX, 
 
 Thebes XX. 
 
 Thebes; S&n. XXI. 
 Tell-basta XXII. 
 San XXIII. 
 
 Sa'is 
 Sais 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 XXV. 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 Amosis (Ahmes). Amenophis. Thoutmes. Queer 
 Hatasou. Thebes illustrated. Asia conquered 
 Sun worship introduced by Khou-en-aten. 
 
 Ramses I. Seti. Sesostris (Pentaour). Menephtha, 
 
 Ramses III. (Sea tight.) Asiatic influences. 
 
 Priest dynasty at Thebes. Manetho's kings at San. 
 
 Sheshonk (takes Jerusalem). Egypt a part of Asia. 
 
 Twelve barons divide Lower Egypt. Upper Egypt 
 becomes a province of Soudan. 
 
 Bocchoris, reigning six years, the only king. 
 
 Sabacon(Cush) conquers Egypt. 50 years. Tahraka. 
 
 Psammiticus, the Libyan ? Greek mercenaries. 
 Periplus of Africa. Canal of Suez reattempted. 
 
 Persian, Greek, and Roman Empires. 
 
 XXVII. Cambyses. Darius. 121 years. 
 Sa'is XXVIII. Wars with the Persians. 
 
 Mendes XXIX. Wars with the Persians. 
 
 Sebennytes XXX. Nectanebo I. Last king expelled by the Persians 
 
 XXXI. Darius III. Six years. 
 Alexandria XXXII. Alexander I., II. 
 
 Alexandria XXXIII. Ptolemies, Cleopatra, Berenice, Arsinoe. 
 Alexandria XXXIV. Roman proconsuls. 
 
VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. -. 155 
 
 favourable auspices for health, of body, peace of mind, and 
 growth in human culture. This picture I will now endea- 
 vour to place before your eyes. 
 
 But to make the matter as plain as possible, I must put 
 it in a graphical form, and show by a chronological chart 
 the true relationship in point of time between the Hyksos 
 episode, and the beginnings of Egyptian civilization. This 
 chart will show the four great empires of Egypt, beginning 
 with that of the Pyramids and ancient tombs of Memphis, 
 5000 years B.C. And you will notice at a glance, that the 
 17th dynasty, that of the Hyksos, comes midway in the 
 column between the time of that ancient empire with its 
 oldest of earthly monuments and our own day. Perhaps 
 3300 years preceded the fall of the Hyksos dynasty, and 
 3500 years have succeeded it.* 
 
 Such has been the history of Egypt. Seven thousand 
 years have passed since the fourth king of the first dynasty 
 built the first pyramid of Cochome, the first which greets 
 the traveller going forth into the desert from the gates of 
 Cairo. f Yet, even then, Egypt was an old country; its 
 people civilized ; its architecture grand in idea and perfect 
 in execution; its statuary as natural as any group of 
 Rogers' statuettes; its language not only formed but re- 
 duced to writing ; its agricultural life rich with oxen, asses, 
 dogs, and monkeys, antelopes, and gazelles, geese, ducks, 
 and swans, and slaves of Numidia. But the horse and the 
 camel of Arabia were wanting ; they knew nothing either 
 of the elephant or the giraffe of Africa ; the sheep of Eu- 
 rope and the poultry of China are nowhere to be seen ; nor 
 had the house cat yet assumed her witch-role on the hearth. 
 
 * See Appendix B to this lecture. 
 
 f In his paper on the Antiquity of Man, read before the last meeting 
 of the Ethnological Section of the British Association, meeting at Dundee, 
 August, 1867, Mr Crawfurd, who is a believer in the multiple origin of 
 our race, adopts Champolleon's date for the beginning of Egyptian history, 
 9000 years before Christ, and argues for an immensely older history, upon 
 the ground that language, civilization, letters, arts, agriculture, and the 
 domestication of animals are slow processes. Too much stress, however, 
 must not be laid upon this consideration, for when genius speaks the times 
 obey and hasten to realize its propositions, and to fulfil its prophecies. 
 Sir J. Lubbock, although an advocate of the unity of origin, agreed with 
 him upon the point of the antiquity of Egyptian civilization, and the 
 necessity for previous ages of emergence from the savage life of the cave- 
 dwellers. 
 
156 ON THE EARLY [lECT. 
 
 But these people at the beginning of written history had 
 no ships for commerce, and could not have introduced 
 what existed around the shores of the Mediterranean, or 
 along the Indian Ocean. But what did then exist ? The 
 rest of mankind seem to have been savages, without cats 
 also. Probably neither the horse, nor camel, nor elephant, 
 nor sheep, nor pheasant, had yet been tamed, at all events 
 not within reasonable reach of these rich farmers of the 
 Nile. That they enjoyed a happy, peaceful, and sometimes 
 a jolly life, is easy to see, for the walls of the Memphite 
 tombs are covered with pictures of feasts, and games, and 
 dances, and boat tournaments, such as amuse the populace 
 of Paris in July ; there you see poets chanting verses, and 
 dancing girls with hair tressed up with plates of gold. 
 But you may look around in vain for the symbols of any 
 kind of warfare. Not a trace of military life is visible on 
 any monument previous to the 12th dynasty : and very 
 little trace of religion. How the dynasties were founded, 
 or how they were overthrown, or changed, we cannot 
 learn ; nor how the priests, if any then existed, turned an 
 honest penny. The deity had neither name nor image. 
 Osiris was unknown. The dog Anubis is the only guardian 
 of these primeval mansions of the dead, the first deity, as 
 the first friend, of man. We can make out only the signs 
 of a purely patriarchal civilization, in a land of peace and 
 plenty. Each tomb is built by each farmer for his eternal 
 residence. His effigy is seen in it, surrounded by the 
 pictures of his wife, his children, his servants, his scribes, 
 his dogs and green monkeys, and his household goods. 
 And all this 3000 years before Solomon built his temple on 
 Mount Moriah, or the Assyrian his palace on the platform 
 of Koujunjik. 
 
 We may speculate upon the assertion that the Egyptians 
 of the delta of the Nile sailed up the Adriatic and settled 
 the delta of the Po, then crossed the Alps and descended 
 to settle anew upon the delta of the Ehine, from whence 
 they seized on all the smaller deltas of the British islands. 
 We have nothing but fancy to guide us in determining 
 how far the older civilization of the Egyptians modified the 
 influence of the great emigrant race — the Phoenician — in 
 forming the civilization of Europe. We have no sufficient 
 demonstration of any such influence radiating from ancient 
 
VI. SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 157 
 
 Egypt, except in matters of religion,, and through -the in- 
 termediation of other races, of which more hereafter. For 
 the present let me leave, impressed npon your imagina- 
 tions, one clear image — the contrast, the marvellous con- 
 trast, between the two pictures I have drawn. On the 
 one hand we have this picture of peace and plenty among 
 the ancient landholders of the valley of the Nile. On the 
 other hand, we have that picture of want and warfare 
 dominating the life of the wretched savages in the pine- 
 woods of Scandinavia, and standing for the condition of 
 the human race, or rather of all the other human races 
 existing at that ancient epoch, outside of the valley of the 
 Sphinx. 
 
 Yet such a contrast still exists in all its grim integrity 
 upon the earth. Compare the palaces and parks of Eng- 
 land and New England with the wigwams of the west or 
 the slave cabins of the south ; with the utter homelessness of 
 the Hottentot and Australian in the one hemisphere, or the 
 wretched reflection of primeval barbarism among ' Jes 
 miserables' in Paris or in London. And so the world 
 hoards up its old letters, although they can be only re-read 
 with shudderings and tears. 
 
158 
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 
 ON LANGUAGE AS A TEST OF KACE. 
 
 The subject of the language of man will engross our 
 attention this evening. 
 
 Those who believed in the origin of all the human races 
 from a single pair, found the question of the probable lan- 
 guage spoken by that pair and their immediate descendants 
 considerably simplified. The fathers of the Church took 
 for granted that the language of the oldest writings which 
 the Church accepted as sacred and divine was the language 
 in which Adam and Eve addressed each other in Paradise. 
 When the critics of a later age began to find reasons for 
 believing that the Mosaic records had been compiled from 
 the most worthy scraps of the most ancient written tradi- 
 tions, it only strengthened the claims of the Hebrew to be 
 the language of the antediluvian patriarchs. 
 
 But when the science of comparative philology was dis- 
 covered, the special students of certain special languages, 
 in their enthusiastic devotion to their special studies, 
 began to put in other claims for this high honour, and to 
 dispute the pre-eminence of the Hebrew, contending that it 
 must have suffered so many changes, no one could tell what 
 it had been in the beginning. 
 
 As the learned world woke up to an appreciation of the 
 beautiful structure and great antiquity of the Sanscrit, 
 many were disposed to consider that sacred language of 
 southern Asia the mother language of mankind. 
 
 Then came the Egyptologists, with their monumental 
 
 letters, and improved chronology, antedating that of the 
 
 i Hebrews by severaljthousands of years. They proved that 
 
 the Coptic language, although allied to the Hebrew, was in 
 
 fact the language of the Pharaohs, before Abram had come 
 
ON LANGUAGE AS A TEST OF RACE. 159 
 
 out of Ur of the Chaldees. Coptic must therefore have 
 been the speech of Paradise. 
 
 There were some to demand for the Armenian language 
 the credit of being the oldest in the world. And there have 
 been most learned Welshmen to parade the fact that their 
 British mother tongue could afford a reasonable etymology 
 for every one of its own words, in proof that it alone could 
 be the aboriginal speech of the world. 
 
 But the progress of the science of comparative philology 
 has extinguished, one by one, all these absurd pretensions, 
 even without the necessity of a reference to the goodness 
 of the foundation on which they rested, viz. the truth of 
 the legend of a Paradise and a first human pair. 
 
 But although the science of comparative philology has 
 been able to extinguish the claims set up by each individual 
 language to be that which the earliest people on the earth 
 spoke, it has not been able, on the other hand, to point 
 out what was the original language. We are just as far 
 removed to-day from knowing that as we ever were. 
 
 Comparative philology is one of the most beautiful and 
 attractive of all the modern sciences. It is fresh and 
 vigorous. It has an immense coterie of disciples and many 
 masters. It has conquered a large territory and set up a 
 -splendid throne. It makes advances every year. It has 
 established laws which are unshakable. It is a world of 
 truth ; no one doubts it. It is, in some respects, fully the 
 equal of the other sciences. But in saying thus much, we 
 have said all we dare to say. 
 
 In other and very important respects, the science of com- 
 parative philology is young and raw, undisciplined and 
 disorganized ; or rather, rising, as it has, like a Phoenix 
 from the ashes of its predecessor, out of the cinders of what 
 was known in the middle ages as the science of Language, 
 it still retains, involved in its constitution, quantities of 
 that unorganized magma, all the elements of which it is, 
 bound some day to reduce to perfect order. In this 
 respect it is far behind the so-called physical and natural 
 history sciences. Some of its most important principles 
 have yet to be settled. Some of its grandest questions 
 have hardly been announced. Its doctors still pursue the 
 most opposite methods. Its books are not only full of 
 irreconcilable contradictions; they do not yet state any 
 
160 ON LANGUAGE. [lECT. 
 
 grand body of universally accepted facts out of which fresh 
 investigations can deduce acceptable generalizations. 
 
 The true principle for a correct classification of the lan- 
 guages, for instance, has not yet been established. Philo- 
 logists have indeed worked out a number of fine groups, 
 and settled to some extent their boundaries. They can 
 talk to you about the Indo- Germanic family, and show you 
 how it is broadly distinguished from the Shemitic family 
 on the one side, and from the Tartar family on the other. 
 They can separate the Teutonic languages from the Celtic 
 and classic groups on the one side, and from the Slavonic 
 group on the other. They can distinguish the southern 
 or Teutonic from the northern Gothic or Scandinavian 
 sub-families. They can designate seven or eight chief 
 subdivisions of a single language, like the French. They 
 can go much farther even than that, and count up its patois 
 or local variations until they reach an incredible number.* 
 And all this amounts to something certainly. It repre- 
 sents a vast amount of hard work. But it does not repre- 
 sent, as yet, a law of classification. There is no established 
 and accepted classification of the four or five thousand lan- 
 guages of the earth. There is even the greatest difference 
 of opinion among philologists as to the true principles 
 upon which we are to decide whether a language actually 
 belongs, and why it must be considered as belonging, to 
 one group rather than to another. Some base the classifi- 
 cation upon the grammar : others upon the dictionary. 
 The science of comparative philology is now in the same 
 state in which comparative zoology was before the days of 
 Cuvier, when the bats were classed among the birds, 
 because they lived by flying in the air ; and cetaceans, 
 whales, seals, walruses, &c, with fishes, although they 
 breathed the air and suckled their young; and lemurs 
 with squirrels, instead of with the monkeys, where they 
 actually belong. 
 
 And, in fact, we may as well say at the outset, that all the 
 great questions which have come up for settlement in the 
 other older and maturer sciences come up again in some 
 analogous form for settlement in this young raw science of 
 
 * See the variations on the words ' deux fils ' in the Transactions of the 
 Antiquarian Society of France (C. 9. 13). 
 
VII.] AS A TEST OP RACE. •• 161 
 
 comparative pliilology. And how indeed conld it happen 
 otherwise ? For the things which we call words, are 
 organic things, like animals and vegetables. They have 
 roots and "branches. They grow and decay. They have 
 fixed laws to govern their existence, like all other beings. 
 They do not leap from onr months, helter-skelter, as the 
 toads and jewels dropped from the mouths of the daughters 
 of the cruel stepmother in the fairy tale. They are not 
 accidentally created. We are not their voluntary creators. 
 They breed in us and issue from us, not only from our lips, 
 but from our brains, by laws as regular and permanent as 
 those which govern the conception and birth of broods of 
 fishes, birds, or serpents. Language therefore must be a 
 department of natural history. New expressions or idioms 
 appear upon the face of human society just as new species 
 and varieties of animals and vegetables have successively 
 made their appearance upon the surface of the earth, and 
 in the waters of the sea. And words and languages perish 
 and are preserved in the history of literature, precisely like 
 those fossil forms of extinct plants and animals which we 
 study in the geological deposits of the past. 
 
 With the great fundamental principles of natural history 
 therefore, which we have had before us already more than 
 once daring the course of these lectures, we have again 
 to deal to-night. Philology finds the same lions in 
 its path to the House Beautiful which have frightened 
 the other sciences, that have preceded it in pilgrimage. 
 
 In the first place, there is the great possibility of spon- 
 taneous production, or equivocal generation, as the natur- 
 alists call it. Mr Crosse took certain mineral matter, 
 boxed it up carefully so as to exclude the air, heated it so 
 as to destroy all germs of previous life, and sent, for many 
 weeks, a perpetual current of galvanism through it, so as 
 to arouse the dormant powers of organic life. The result 
 was, as he declares, that living insects made their appearance 
 in great numbers. But the rest of the world doubts the 
 fact ; a few only believe. Now what say philologists as to 
 the possibility of a similarly spontaneous origin of a ivord 
 out of the raw stuff of thought ? Some affirm that new 
 words are continually appearing in all languages like Mr 
 Crosse's acari. Others, on the contrary, stand by the old 
 doctrine, that like breeds like, and that all living forms 
 
 11 
 
162 ON LANGUAGE [LECT. 
 
 must come from germs or living cells, which are already 
 organized nuclei of vital forces, or rather, in the language 
 of the schoolmen, vital forms, formce formantes. Such 
 philologists affirm, therefore, the necessary previous exist- 
 ence of linguistic roots, and believe that all words must be 
 developed out of roots ; that the great business of phi- 
 lologists is to investigate roots in languages, to restrict the 
 number of these roots in any language to the smallest 
 quantity, and to compare the roots of different languages 
 together, so as to obtain a true classification. A school of 
 oologists exists, therefore, as really in the science of com- 
 parative philology, as in that of comparative zoology. 
 
 But when you come to consider these roots or germs of 
 words, you find nothing in the shape of a settled principle. 
 Some philologists consider all the roots of words as originally 
 verbal, such as : to be, to go, to strike, to cut, to breathe. 
 Others restrict this verbal character to a few roots, and call all 
 the rest nouns, out of which verbs have been made. Some 
 consider the root of a word reached when it is reduced to 
 three letters ; others despise roots which consist of more 
 than two letters. But nothing tells more plainly against 
 the existence of any well-made-out law than the different 
 number of roots to which different philologues reduce a 
 given language. The Sanscrit, for instance, is said to have 
 500 or 600 roots. But Kraitsir, before he died, had re- 
 duced the number, in his own opinion, to a little over 200. 
 Haldeman thinks no language can show more than 300. 
 
 But the great question is about the spontaneous gener- 
 ation of these germs, or roots. Then, at what age in the 
 history of man did they appear ? Were there a certain 
 number of aboriginal roots spoken by the tertiary, post- 
 tertiary, or stone-age men ? or have word-roots been 
 making their appearance all down through history, one 
 at a time, or in groups, sufficiently numerous to institute 
 new branches of language, or new languages ? Then again, 
 by what law of life did the roots of words get created at 
 first? or by what law do they continue to get created ? 
 And if there be such a law of life for these word-roots, 
 does it include in itself a law of permanence, and a law of 
 universality, i. e. does it secure the creation of a given 
 root-word in all languages ; and then, does it secure the 
 continued existence of that root-word to the end of time ? 
 
VII.] AS A TEST OP RACE. -. 163 
 
 Or, on the contrary, is there a law of change, by which no 
 original root-word has been able to maintain its integrity, 
 but has fallen from its first estate and become depraved ? 
 or, to state in other words this last question, do we find, 
 raging in this science of comparative philology, the same 
 warfare respecting ' a law of development/ by which one 
 word-form- species gradually changes to another, and so 
 one language to another, by old roots dying out and new 
 roots striking in to the common soil ? 
 
 Let me take up two or three only of these questions, and 
 state what I think is wanting to the science of philology 
 to place it on a footing to do something for us in our in- 
 vestigations into the early history of the human races and 
 their migrations. For, at present, in spite of the high 
 pretensions of its disciples, I do not think that we get any 
 ethnological light from Philology worth speaking of ; but, 
 on the contrary, I think that in the position which the 
 science occupies, it casts a deep shadow of obscurity upon 
 the whole subject of the human races. Whatever else, 
 therefore, I must hurry over or omit to-night for want of 
 time, or to avoid confusing your attention, this one thing, 
 I wish to make clear, my reasons for believing that the 
 method of philologists must be amended, and to a great 
 extent re-modelled, before we can get rid of some of the 
 grossest errors in ethnology, or really obtain a complete 
 view of the relations which the human races hold to one 
 another and to the present state of things. 
 
 The origin of language may be regarded either, 1. as a 
 supernatural revelation of a language already perfect to 
 the first human beings; or, 2. as a power of language given 
 to the first human beings in addition to all their other pe- 
 culiar faculties as human beings ; or, 3. as merely a superior 
 human development of a general power of language (or 
 faculty of expression) possessed by the whole animal world, 
 inherent, in fact, in the constitution of all animated beings 
 as well as man. 
 
 The first of these modes of conceiving the possible origin 
 of language, as a divine revelation, was almost universally 
 adopted by heathen philosophers and Christian theologians 
 to a very recent date, and is still indulged by those who 
 believe in Adam and Eve in Paradise. Although the most 
 natural way of understanding the old legend that Jehovah 
 
164 ON LANGUAGE [LECT. 
 
 brought to Adam all the birds and beasts and creeping 
 things, that he might give to each of them its nam e, would be 
 to suppose existing in Adam's mental constitution a myste- 
 rious faculty of 'representing what he saw and knew, by 
 audible sounds, intelligible to his wife and children. 
 Science, however, can take no note of the supernatural, 
 unless it becomes natural and takes the oath of allegiance 
 to nature. Nature itself is too supernatural to require any 
 additions from the realms of human ignorance. And 
 moreover, if there were more aboriginal human races than 
 one, there would be needed as many repetitions of the 
 same revelation of language ; unless to each race a different 
 language were revealed ; in which case the confusion of 
 tongues, at the building of the Tower of Babel, would have 
 been anticipated. 
 
 The "second and third modes of conceiving of the origin 
 of language are the modes now adopted by men of science. 
 And they only differ in degree according to our views of 
 the relative dignity of man and the brutes. All philolo- 
 gists are more or less disposed to place among the natural 
 attributes of man a faculty for expressing himself, and ex- 
 pressing the outside world also, in appropriate words. 
 
 Some go farther and say, that this faculty for vocal 
 utterance of mental feeling is common to man with the 
 brutes; that the brutes are not brutes, i. e. mutes; that the 
 animals all have parts of speech ; and that man has the 
 faculty of speech only and simply because he is one of the 
 animals. His faculty is larger and finer than theirs be- 
 cause his brain is larger and finer than theirs ; because his 
 mental, moral, and spiritual nature is more angelic; because 
 his senses deal with a larger world, and his tastes are 
 refined by civilization. But, however his poetry may soar, 
 and his eloquence burn, and his prayers go up as accept- 
 able incense before Him that sitteth upon the throne, and 
 before the Lamb, these glorious phenomena of thought 
 made flesh in language are as closely and eternally related 
 to the bleating of the flocks and the warbling of birds as 
 the infinite scope and sweep of solar systems in the heavenly 
 spaces are closely and eternally related to the spiral flight 
 of a bee when the hunter liberates it from his box, in a 
 dingle of the forest, to guide him on to rob its hive. 
 
 It makes no difference to the main question of the origin 
 
XII. 7 ] AS A TEST OF KACE. . 165 
 
 of language, whether man takes the animals into partner- 
 ship or not, provided he considers his faculty of language 
 constitutional. 
 
 But now we approach the difficulties. How is human 
 language constitutional ? 
 
 It may be asked in reply : How is taste constitutional ? 
 How is conscience constitutional ? How is any one of the 
 bodily senses constitutional ? The schoolmen have an- 
 swered this as they have answered the other question, by 
 saying that conscience is a gift from God. Religious peo- 
 ple get over a similar difficulty by preaching and praying 
 for a change of heart. The old philosophers went farther 
 and very logically, when they made Taste a supernatural 
 revelation ; and we retain a fragment of their superstition 
 in our popular use of their word Genius, by which they 
 understood a veritable divine possession, analogous (but 
 opposite) to diabolical possession. But no one has gone 
 so far as to make our bodily senses supernatural. ' We let 
 the physiologists alone and wait patiently for their newest 
 and best descriptions of how these faculties are constitu- 
 tional. In like manner we read Paley and Locke, and 
 Kant and Conte, and Sir William Hamilton, and Mill and 
 Spenser, and all the rest of the psychologists, to get the 
 latest and clearest and most consistent views of the con- 
 stitutionality of our higher powers, taste or the faculty of 
 liking, conscience or the faculty of judging, worship or 
 the faculty of serving. Why, then, should we not hear 
 Schlegel and William von Humboldt and Max Muller 
 describe the latest and best modes of conceiving how lan- 
 guage, or the faculty of self-utterance, enters as a har- 
 monious part into the human constitution ? 
 
 I say modes, and not mode, of conceiving, because these 
 highest philologists are not agreed. There are four 
 theories of the way in which a constitutional tendency to 
 language in man may work itself out, and produce words, 
 or if you please roots, or germs of words. 
 
 Without asking you to take my names as perfectly de- 
 scriptive of these four methods, but only .as sufficiently 
 suggestive to make my descriptions plain, I will call 
 these four ways : — 
 , 1. The method by imitation. 
 
 2. The method by interjection. 
 
166 ON LANGUAGE , [lECT. 
 
 3. The method by sympathy. 
 
 4. The method by invention. 
 
 The first theory of the formation of words, by imitation, 
 supposes that men were originally children, or, if you please, 
 monkeys with superior vocal organs, capable of reproducing 
 all the sounds of nature which fell upon the ear ; and that 
 they necessarily called the dog ' bow/ and the cow ' moo/ 
 and the sheep ( baa/ before they could discover their pro- 
 perties and invent other and higher names. You are 
 aware that the ancient grammarians termed the whole 
 class of such imitations f onomatopoeic } words, and that 
 this term is still in constant use. Our boys are taught at 
 school that such words as hiss, rattle, clatter, splash, and 
 many others, are natural attempts to make language out of 
 the noises of nature. And it is no doubt so. All lan- 
 guages have this kind of words. Everybody betakes him- 
 self to imitation when he hears a new sound in nature 
 which has not before been named.* But, on the other 
 hand, it is curious to see how little resemblance exists be- 
 tween the names of a natural sound in different languages. 
 It is as if the ears of different races heard these sounds 
 differently. To understand why, let any one listen to 
 some inarticulate sound — for example, the roar of a bull, — 
 and observe how circumstances alter its character, — how 
 it is one thing when near, and another when far away, — 
 how one might think at this moment that it sounded like 
 low, at that moment like ho, at another like mm, at a 
 fourth as if it had no consonantal beginning, at a fifth as if 
 it had a consonantal ending, &c. It is impossible that all 
 human language should have arisen from so meagre and so 
 indefinite a stock of primary imitations of natural noises. 
 To say nothing of the necessary expression of purely 
 mental creations — the intransitive verbs to he and to have, 
 for instances, — and a hundred other equally aboriginal and 
 indispensable words in every language, for which no sound 
 in nature ever could have stood as model. 
 
 The second theory, that of interjection, provides for the 
 
 * I have a little cousin three years old who began to call a pencil rex 
 (rech), and has continued to do so ever since. I know of no other origin 
 for this word than an attempt to imitate the harsh scratch of a slate 
 pencil on a slate, although his parents are not aware that it had such an 
 
VII.] AS A TEST OF RACE. 167 
 
 difficulties which are raised in the way of accepting the. 
 theory of imitation. It is supposed by many that the 
 rational soul of man struggled into speech, as the Chris- 
 tian enters the kingdom of heaven, by violence. That at 
 first the communication of man with nature and with his 
 fellow man was like that of the animals, and like that of 
 idiots, by cries and yells, by groanings and sighings, by 
 rude attempts at varied musical notes, by hissings and 
 mutterings and murmurs, gradually getting modulations 
 of their own, and falling into series under the government 
 of the memory and the judgment, as these became culti- 
 vated by exercise. Certainly there are interjections in all 
 languages, ohs ! and ahs ! for wonder and admiration and 
 complaint. But when we compare the interjections of 
 different languages, we soon perceive that there exist but 
 half-a-dozen which can be called universal, or could serve 
 as a starting-point for language. The moment this narrow 
 charmed circle is past, all uniformity ceases, and some 
 other law of word-making must be supposed to interfere. 
 What resemblance, for instance, can be traced between the 
 English interjection alas I and its German synonym 
 leider ! The English wo ! is the same as the Latin vue ! 
 (pronounced wai), but the French helas ! has not the least 
 likeness to the Pennsylvania-Dutch autsch ! If there be 
 an interjectional common language for mankind, then it 
 must be so beclouded by differences in the vocal organs, 
 in the passions, and in the mental experiences of the differ- 
 ent races, and its root-words must have suffered so much 
 change, that all attempts to use it as a guide in ethnology 
 must prove futile. At the same time, the interjectional 
 efforts of the soul in the direction of language cannot be 
 lost sight of in attempting to explain some of the mys- 
 teries and curiosities of literature, as I will have occasion 
 hereafter to show. And Dr Kraitsir was perhaps nearer 
 the truth than many of us imagine, when he taught that 
 the native interjections of the voice went forth from the 
 mouth under the influence of a genuine entente cordiale, 
 or permanent good understanding between, first, the 
 body of man and his mind, and secondly, between the 
 mind and surrounding nature. 
 
 For the third theory of language, then, I use the term 
 sympathy. Dr Kraitsir' s interpretation of it is only one 
 
168 ON LANGUAGE [LECT. 
 
 of several. Other philologists describe it and illustrate it 
 in somewhat different ways, but they all come to the 
 same thing in the end. Now the nature of this sympa- 
 thetic relationship existing between man and nature is 
 perfectly mysterious, and we may well be prepared for 
 complete mysteries in its vocal manifestations. The first 
 formation of language must be a great mystery on any 
 theory. But it is a phenomenon no stranger than the 
 newborn child's knowing how to suck. When I give you 
 one or two illustrations of Dr Kraitsir's views, then you 
 will remember how deep into nature these magic influences 
 penetrate; and how the automatic adjustment of the 
 crystalline lens of the eye to objects of sight according to 
 their distance from us, is as inexplicable an act of the 
 brain as any automatic adjustment of the tracheae to the 
 objects of conversation. 
 
 To see, then, how an act could be expressed in a word, 
 let us take for an example the act of going out. What is 
 the going to be referred to ? Dr Kraitsir answered : to 
 the breath; and what the out ? Answer: to the mouth. If 
 now we can make the breath perceptible to the ear, first 
 while still within the mouth, and then after it has issued 
 from the mouth, and if we can give our auditor a clear idea 
 of these two things in connection, we shall have expressed 
 ' going out. 3 Let us then first make a noise in our throat, 
 i. e. pronounce the guttural k ; then let us make a noise of 
 wind issuing from our lips, or rather issuing from between 
 the tongue and the teeth, i. e. pronounce the sibilant s. 
 The word for going out will then be simply the two letters 
 Tc-s, pronounced together, lis. This is the actual Latin 
 word ex, out of. 
 
 If you wish a more complicated instance, I will give you 
 Kraitsir's favourite example, which always made me smile, 
 I confess, but which furnishes a very perfect example of 
 the mode in which this theory of the sympathetic formation 
 of language applies its principles. 
 
 How can we imagine that the human mind would act 
 upon the larynx and mouth so as to give an outsider the 
 idea of abstract solidity, matter, body ? A body is matter 
 in three dimensions, vertical, horizontal forwards, and 
 horizontal sideways. Now the organs of speech consist 
 chiefly of the throat, the tongue, and the lips ; the first is 
 
VII.] AS A TEST OF EACE. 169 
 
 vertical, the second horizontal forwards, and the third 
 horizontal sideways. If we take, therefore, a guttural, a 
 lingual, and a labial, we can with these three sound the 
 three dimensions of matter, i. e. express the idea of a body 
 in the general. Thus : — K'R'P, corpus, the Latin word for 
 body. From this word can now be formed nouns, verbs, 
 adjectives, adverbs, &c, expressing modifications of this 
 idea of solid body, ad libitem ; such as grip, grab, grave, 
 engrave, &c. 
 
 The difficulty in the way of accepting such a system of 
 etymology is exactly the objection we feel to letting 
 children drive a fast horse, — it will run away with them 
 and smash everything to flinders. All the most accom- 
 plished philologists of our day, all the patient and success- 
 ful investigators into the historical etymologies of words, — ■ 
 beginning with Jacob Grimm, the father of the modern science 
 of comparative philology, and including such men as Bopp 
 and Pott, and Schott, and Kahlgren, and Rochrig, Halde- 
 man, Whitney, Max Miiller, Ernest Renan, — set their faces 
 dead against what they consider to be only a revival of the 
 wild vagaries of the fanciful philologists of past- times, 
 from the old Cratylus of Greece to the new Cratylus of 
 Oxford, the Evanses, the Pocockes, the Davises, the 
 Cannes, and a host of other names, most erudite and in- 
 genious people, but working on the old and false system 
 of mere analogy, a system which we dare not now return 
 to, because it would be subversive of all the laws of 
 letter-variation and word-derivation, which have got them- 
 selves established and illustrated within the last thirty 
 years as fully as any of the laws of physics or natural 
 history. 
 
 If you wish to see how the old system of etymologies is 
 abhorred and repudiated by the masters of the new system 
 of linguistic mutation and derivation, I would refer you to 
 the second series of Max Miiller's Lectures on Language. 
 He is particularly severe upon the first two theories which 
 I have enumerated, — the method by imitation, which he 
 calls the f bow-wow theory/ and the method by interjec- 
 tion, which he calls the ' pooh-pooh theory/ Speaking of 
 the first, or bow-wow theory, he says, ' the onomatopoeic 
 theory goes very smoothly as long as it deals with cackling 
 hens and quacking ducks; but round that poultry yard 
 
170 ON LANGUAGE [lECT. 
 
 there is a dead wall, and we soon find that it is behind that 
 wall that language really begins/' 
 
 To illustrate the ridiculous excess to which the second 
 or pooh-pooh theory may be driven by its ignorant advo- 
 cates, he recites from the Honolulu newspaper, the Polyne- 
 sian, of 1862, an etymology of the Hawaian word Hooiaioai, 
 to testify, viz. from five roots hoo-o-ia-io-ai, meaning causa- 
 tion, interjection, pronoun definite, rapid and thorough 
 movement resulting in realization and completion, — or in 
 English words, make that completely out to be a fact, 
 Hooiaioai ; testify to its truth. Nothing could well be more 
 ridiculous. And yet our libraries are filled with old 
 volumes on language containing literally myriads of etymo- 
 logies as ridiculous, and more ridiculous than that. 
 
 To take another class of etymologies, from the list of 
 proper names of persons in the Hebrew Scriptures : when 
 their compilers explain the change from Abram to Abra- 
 ham, by the announcement that he was to be the father of 
 many nations, because in the Hebrew of Solomon's day oh, 
 rah, and am were the three words for father, many, and 
 people, without reference to the fact that his original con- 
 nection was with central Asia and its languages, why should 
 we accept their etymology? How evidently has the story 
 of Sarah's laughter been inserted in the legend of Isaac's 
 birth, in order to support the etymology of his name from 
 the Hebrew verb to laugh ! The explanation of the name of 
 Moses : ' because he was drawn out of the water,' — are we 
 to prefer it to that of the monumental Egyptian proper 
 name mas, which means a child ? or must we seek still other 
 fanciful resemblances to other Egyptian roots ? All such 
 etymologies, unsupported by well-known facts, capable of 
 comparative investigation, it is a waste of time to quote, 
 and a drawback if employed in the study of ancient history. 
 The method is a false one, — radically false. 
 
 But let us not be frightened away from our dinner of 
 honest mutton chops or noble roast beef because French 
 cooks can deceive the traveller with ragouts of cat when 
 they call for hare. A Cuvier will eat his cat with great 
 nonchalance, and hold up one of the bones to the landlord 
 after dinner, remarking with a smile that his hare must 
 have been a most singular specimen, having an anatomy 
 analogous to the carnivores. 
 
VII.] AS A TEST OF KACE. 171 
 
 When a transcendental philologue constructs an etymo- 
 logy for such a word as bersil, the Hebrew word for iron, 
 out of the Hebrew verb peres, to pierce or cut, and a sup- 
 posed determinative final letter I meaning through, the 
 conclusion is as empirical and unscientific as fanciful and 
 untrustworthy, as when the ancient Talmudists derived 
 bersil from the initial letters of the names of Jacob's four 
 wives, Bilhah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Leah. But when a com- 
 parative philologist, obeying the canon of modern science, 
 that ' no scripture is of private interpretation,' takes up the 
 study of all the names of iron in various languages, and 
 as one of a whole group of metals, and perceives, first, that 
 when reversed, the Shemite name for iron is the Indo- 
 Germanic name for another of the metals, silber ; and 
 secondly, that its first syllable, ber, is also represented 
 by the Latin word for gold, aur, the German baar, the 
 English bullion, the French bague (originally balg, a golden 
 ring), and other similar analogues, — and that the second 
 syllable, sil, has similar relationships with cesel, chalhos, 
 &c, &c. ; he is on the high road to some valuable result, 
 which his investigations will be sure to reach if patiently 
 and carefully pursued. 
 
 The question is not what etymologists who are ignorant 
 of, or indifferent to, Grimm's laws of mutation have done 
 with the roots of language ; but the question is, how did 
 the roots or germs of language originate ? Miiller himself 
 distinguishes between these questions. ' There is one class 
 of scholars/ he says, ' who derive all words from roots 
 according to the strictest rules of comparative grammar, 
 but who look upon the roots, in their original character, as 
 either interjectional or onomatopoeic. There are others 
 who derive words straight from interjections and the cries of 
 animals, and who claim in their etymologies all the liberty 
 the cow claims in saying mooh, booh, or ooh, or that man 
 claims in saying pooh,fi, pfui. With regard to the former 
 theory, I should wish to remain entirely neutral.' It is 
 only the latter that he opposes. He does not pretend to 
 say how much of the language of the first savages of the 
 earth consisted of imitative cries and interjections ; but of 
 this he is quite sure, that the historical languages of after 
 times obey laws of mental growth and rational arrange- 
 
172 ON LANGUAGE [LECT. 
 
 ment, which are our only guides through the forest of 
 etymology. 
 
 Professor Pott even denies that the root-words of lan- 
 guages ever were words — spoken words. He thinks that 
 they are mere abstractions, obtained by our analysis of 
 languages now spoken. He says, if they existed at all in 
 early ages, they existed merely as dim, vague, floating, 
 formless ideas in the savage brain, and came out in that 
 ancient savage speech, sometimes in one form, sometimes 
 in another, at the whim of the speaker, or the promptings 
 of the moment.* 
 
 But Miiller cannot take so German a view of roots. He 
 has imbibed in Oxford too much of the practical genius of 
 the English. He leaves the ghosts of words behind him, 
 with all the other ghost faith of his fatherland. He thinks 
 the ancient roots of words were the first actual words in 
 use ; but then, they were used without any grammatical 
 definition. ' I think/ says he, ' that there was a stage in 
 the growth of language, in which that sharp distinction 
 which we make between the different parts of speech had 
 not yet been fixed, and when even that fundamental dis- 
 tinction between subject and predicate, on which all the 
 parts of speech are based, had not yet been realized in its 
 fullness, and had not yet received a corresponding outward 
 expression/f He refers to languages at the present day in 
 this germinal condition. In Chinese, for instance, ly means 
 an ox, a plough, and the act of ploughing ; ta means great, 
 greatness, and greatly. In Egyptian an'h meant life, living, 
 lively, and to live.% Other languages are seen just coming 
 out of this first stage into a second, where the root is 
 retained, and another root is attached to it to show the 
 mental distinctions. In the Polynesian dialects any verb 
 may be used unchanged as a noun or adjective, by adding 
 kua, or particles of affirmation, and ho, or particles of the 
 agent. § In our own English we speak in the same way; 
 we say make, mahe-r, mahe-ing. Miiller gives a still more 
 striking illustration from the language of children^ that 
 
 * Etymolog. forschungen, ii. 95, in Miiller, p. 95. 
 f Second Series of Lectures, p. 95. 
 % Bunsen's Egypt, i. 324, in same. 
 § Hale, p. 263, in same. 
 
VII.] AS A TEST OF RACE. 173 
 
 world of perennial savagery, tliafc fountain of antiquity 
 welling up for ever at our feet. And let me'here assure 
 you that some of the finest laws of comparative language 
 have been discovered by watching the speech of children. 
 Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings He hath ordained 
 praise. And he who thinks that he can settle the laws of 
 morality, or of reason, or of language, without the closest 
 and most patient investigation of infants and young people, 
 will never become a master in any of the schools of the 
 future, — of that he may rest well assured. 
 
 What, then, is the process of forming word-roots in the 
 mouth of children ? A child says ' up ! up ! 9 meaning, 1 1 
 want to get up on my mother's lap/ In his mind noun, 
 verb, adjective are completely confounded and form an 
 ideal unit. It will be months or years before he can 
 separate the subjective I from the objective mother's lap, 
 or the want from the action of getting up into it. 
 
 But, after all, we do not get an idea of the origin of this 
 word up, which stands for so much. Our children take it 
 from ourselves. We got it from our English ancestors ; 
 they from their Saxon forbears. How far back it can be 
 traced we do not know. We know of no sound in nature 
 of which it could have been an imitation. We know of no 
 explosion of feeling to produce such an interjection. It 
 would be hard for Dr Kraitsir to devise a spiritual explana- 
 tion of its sympathy with what it represents, whether as 
 up, upward, or upon ; and if he could, the explanation would 
 not stand good for its correspondeuces in other languages, 
 such as auf in German, su in Italian, or avu> in Greek.* 
 And what is true of this word is true of all other unimita- 
 tive and uninterjectional roots, the world round, and the 
 ages through. 
 
 Have we no explanation, then, for the origin of the great 
 body of aboriginal root-words, and for the numerous pri- 
 mary monosyllables which we use every day? I must re- 
 peat what I said at the beginning of this lecture, that the 
 
 * The sound of up {ab, pronounced ap) is employed by the Germans 
 to express the very opposite sense of down. The French have no word 
 at all corresponding to the English tip, for their en haut is the English on 
 high; and their sus is never used but in composition. That curious ex- 
 ample of ' polar meaniugs,' au dessus and au dessous, is repeated in a wholly 
 different form in the German auf and ab. 
 
174 ON LANGUAGE [lECT. 
 
 science of language is in its infancy. But still we are not 
 wholly helpless. You remember that I enumerated four 
 theories of the origin of words ; but I have described only 
 three thus far : the method by interjection, the method by 
 imitation, and the method by sympathy. ■ Each of these 
 methods are available for some words ; and the method by 
 sympathy plays an important part in the construction of 
 large sections of the historical languages, as I may perhaps 
 make clear hereafter, in discussing the formation of the 
 alphabet; But I must now describe to you the fourth 
 theory, or the method by invention. 
 
 It is denied by many philologists that a new word is ever 
 invented. If by this be meant out of the head, as we say, 
 that is, without any reference to existing words and things, 
 it may possibly be true, although I doubt it. But if it be 
 meant that no new words have ever been deliberately con- 
 structed and put into circulation by intelligent human be- 
 ings, words which had no connection with the organic 
 development of language, I think that all human experi- 
 ence, certainly all literary history, proves the contrary. 
 Nay, I think that I can show that the majority of the words 
 now used by civilized people are inventions, or modifications 
 of purely invented words . Nay more — and this is the princi- 
 pal thought which I wish this lecture to leave impressed 
 upon your minds — there is a vast, a dominant element in 
 language which I call the bardic element, because it con- 
 sists of words invented by. bards (poet-historians and poet- 
 priests of old times), by druids, if you like that title better, — 
 an element which has superseded and overgrown the more 
 ancient and savage elements of language, just as the oak 
 forests of the Bronze age superseded the pine forests of 
 the Stone age, and as the beech woods of the Iron age 
 superseded the oak forests of the Bronze age — an element 
 produced by the cultivation of the civilized intellect ; an 
 element of religious, moral, and social terminology, which 
 now forms the chief and almost the sole bond of communion 
 between the various languages of the earth. And philolo- 
 gists have so far ignored, despised, or overlooked this ele- 
 ment, as to throw, as I have said, a profound shadow over 
 the early history of man, and a well-entertained suspicion 
 upon the best conclusions, not only of linguistic ethnology, 
 
VII.] AS A TEST OF RACE. 175 
 
 but of their own science of comparative grammar itself.* 
 I shall attempt nothing more this evening than to illus- 
 trate these assertions, trusting to the incidental topics of 
 the remaining lectures of my course for something like a 
 reasonable demonstration. 
 
 The great effort of linguistic science has been to prove 
 that the present races of men came from one original race, 
 by showing how all languages now spoken by these races 
 can be traced back to root-words which must be supposed 
 to have formed one original language. I have already 
 said how many difficulties start up in the way of any such 
 showing, and how little prepared our system of linguistic 
 principles are for such an undertaking. But furthermore, 
 language is the utterance of man's spiritual nature. It 
 must therefore be commensurate with that nature. It must 
 vary as that nature varies. It must grow with its growth. 
 We see the process of development of language parallel 
 with the development of mind in every child. Every child 
 drops the first language it has learned to speak and takes 
 a new and better language suited to its advancing years. 
 Again, the language of the boy is exchanged afterwards for 
 the language of the man, when observation, reading, and so- 
 ciety have enlarged the mind still farther. f See how the 
 turgid style of the poetic youth disappears before the solid 
 matter-of-fact style of the man of business. See how the 
 Johnsonian polysyllabic Latinism of five-and-twenty gives 
 place to the nervous Saxon monosyllables of fifty. How 
 smooth and fluent are Carlisle's first pages ! how harsh and 
 unreadable his later books ! On the other hand, see Edmund 
 Burke give up his chaste and simple early English for 
 flowery and fantastic periods in his later years. All lan- 
 guage is a daguerreotype of the soul. It is inconceivable 
 that the men of the Bronze age, even if they were lineal 
 descendants (which they probably were not) of the nien of 
 
 * Prof. Whitney, in his lectures on Linguistic Science delivered at the 
 Smithsonian Institution, in March, 1864, says, ' It has quite recently been 
 found that language is the principal means' of ethnological investigation, 
 of tracing out the deeds and fates of men during thepre-historic ages,' &c. 
 All this ought to be true, but it is not yet true. 
 
 f The boy swears in Basque, by Jingo ! (Jinco, Basque for God), and the 
 man in Greek, by Jove ! * 
 
176 ON LANGUAGE [LECT. 
 
 tlie Stone age, could have spoken the same language with 
 that of their ancestors. Later civilizations must have in- 
 stituted still different languages. All language is in a 
 state of flux. Savage languages, as has been often asserted, 
 change rapidly from generation to generation. Our north- 
 west Indians, we have been assured, could not comprehend 
 their great grandfathers if now alive, and hardly their own 
 grandfathers.* Nothing but writing down a language 
 can save it from destruction. Nay, that will not do it'. 
 The Hebrew is gone ; the Sanscrit is gone ; the ancient 
 Syriac is gone; the Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian are 
 all gone ; and all we know of these mammoths of past mind, 
 we learn only from scattered fragments of them fossil- 
 ized in parchment or in stone. Look at the changes which 
 English has sustained since Magna Chartawas engrossed. 
 ) Nothing but printing will save a language from decay. 
 Stop the growth or prevent the change of mind, and you 
 can stop the growth and prevent the change of language. 
 Printing does this in part. Printing fossilizes mind. The 
 newspaper is an epidemic of paralysis. When 30,000,000 
 of people wake up in the morning together, sit down to 
 their breakfast at the same hour, call for 5,000,000 of copies 
 of the same column of telegraphic despatch-news printed 
 over-night, and one half of them make their remarks upon 
 the news in the same democratic terms, and the other half 
 in the same aristocratic terms, the good God has arrived 
 at the end of his individual creations. Individuality is 
 gone. One language at least is fixed. 
 
 Now, if in all times this law of the growth and change 
 of language in dependance upon the elevation of man's 
 life out of savagery by civilization, and of the development 
 of his intellect by culture, has been in action, how absurd 
 is it for philologists to suppose that they can recover, by 
 the examination of either present grammars or present 
 vocabularies, the primeval languages of the Stone age; or 
 determine the alliances of pre-historic tribes ; or trace the 
 migrations and intermixtures of these tribes from one side 
 to the other of the globe ! All those primeval languages 
 are buried up, deep underneath a mass of pre-historic lan- 
 
 * This was positively denied, however, by one of the first missionaries 
 of the Hudson Bay stations, who told me he formulated the northern 
 languages, and found them rich and harmonious and almost invariable. 
 
VII.] AS A TEST OF EACE. 177 
 
 guages, which in their turn have been overlaid -by the 
 old historic tongues, which in their turn have been over- 
 laid by the dialects now spoken. As well might the geo- 
 logist expect to make out the lithology and structure of 
 that inaccessible primeval crust which we must believe to 
 exist beneath the Laurentian system the base of which we 
 have never yet seen. As well might he expect to study 
 the old Silurian and Devonian limestone, slate, and sand 
 deposits by analyzing the cretaceous and tertiary marls 
 and clays which have succeeded and replaced them in the 
 present surface. The philologist is even worse off than the 
 geologist ; for there are no Laurentian, or Huronian, or 
 Silurian mountains of language, outcropping from and 
 overhanging the more modern tide-water plains of literary 
 history. The oldest language we have any chance to study 
 is the Egyptian, a language of only 8000 years' standing, J 
 and therefore, in geological phrase, a quaternary deposit be- 
 longing to the present order of things, a language already 
 civilized, full of the terms of home and farm life, capable 
 of moral and religious expressions, and so nearly akin to 
 English in its staple that I might have taken from it my 
 illustration of the word f up/ a few minutes ago, instead 
 of from the English, for the Egyptian word was ' ap ! 3 
 
 When Professor Whitney therefore — one of the best 
 philologists of the new school now living, and an honour, 
 as he certainly is, to the science of comparative grammar — 
 asserts, as he did in his Smithsonian lectures of last year, 
 c that it has been recently found that language is the prin- 
 cipal means of ethnological investigation, of tracing out the 
 deeds and fates of men during the pre-historic ages/ I 
 demur emphatically to the allegation. I do not believe it. 
 Unless by pre-historic ages he means merely the ages which 
 immediately preceded the opening of monumental and lite- 
 rary history ; unless he is willing to exclude entirely from 
 the discussion that immense, back-stretching line of ages ; 
 during which the human races were unlettered, unhistoric, \ 
 uncivilized, and undevout, all record of which is lost beyond 
 redemption by philology, and only to be recovered as a 
 part of the geological history of the earth and its inhabit- 
 ants by the combined efforts of the geologists, the palse- 
 ontologists, zoologists, and archaeologists, who have it 
 entirely and justly in their charge. The philologists have 
 
 12 
 
178 ON LANGUAGE [LECT. 
 
 nothing whatever as yet to do with it. Nor will they have, 
 until among the fossil remains of primeval men some trace 
 of letters shall be discovered. If, for instance, bones in 
 some Poitou cave be really found scratched with Sanscrit 
 letters, then let philologists step in and join the conclave. 
 But even then language will not be, as Professor Whitney 
 says, ( the principal means of ethnological investigation.'' 
 
 The great mistake made by the new school of linguistics 
 is in supposing that there is no fourth theory of language; 
 no fourth way in which words originated : viz. by actual 
 invention ; no part of language which encrusts and conceals 
 the organic structure. The fact is, mankind may be 
 divided into two parts, like the body and its skin. Rich- 
 ardson says that the characters in his splendid old novel of 
 ' Sir Charles Grandison - ' are men, women, and Italians. 
 History says that the characters in its drama of human life 
 are men, women, and priests. Philologists of Professor 
 Whitney's school busy themselves entirely about the men 
 and women, but forget all about the priests. 
 
 There is a language peculiar to every bird and beast. 
 There was a language peculiar to every human race. 
 There is a dialect characteristic of each village, township, 
 city, province of each nation, of each tribe of men now 
 living. These are great studies for the philologist. 
 They can be separately analyzed, and they can be com- 
 pared together. Their individual histories can be worked 
 out to a certain distance back, as far as there are any 
 literary records. They can be grouped, and to a certain 
 extent — a very moderate extent — classified. They even 
 afford stuff for most ingenious and perfectly scientific and 
 trustworthy conclusions, such as Grimm's laws of mutation 
 and derivation. But they will not make of the philologist 
 a trustworthy ethnologist. Why ? 
 
 Because there is something else which he forgets to 
 study, which he refuses to believe in. There is a language 
 of 'priests. Because this language of priestcraft exists in 
 among local dialects and national languages. Nay, be- 
 cause it is so interfused with them as to form a component 
 part of their constitution. Every language of modern 
 times is stamped with this priest-language all over on the 
 outside, is full of it inside, in its flesh and in the marrow 
 of its bones. No anatomical preparation to be seen in a 
 
VII.] AS A TEST OF RACE. 179 
 
 museum is more completely streaked and analyzed to the 
 eye, by the red substance of injection, than is the English, 
 the French, the Arabic, the Hindu, the Zingali, the Bur- 
 mese, the Japanese, the Tasmanian, injected and confused 
 with a priestly language to the eye of the philologist who 
 will consent to recognize its existence. 
 
 What this priestly language is, and how it seems to 
 have originated, and why it is thus disseminated through 
 all the various languages which are spoken by the various 
 races of mankind, I shall endeavour to explain in my next 
 two lectures on architecture, and on the alphabet. But 
 you will agree with me, that, if such an element can be 
 proved to exist in various languages, it must have the 
 effect of greatly confusing and mystifying philologists who 
 ignore its existence. And still more, if this element, com- 
 mon, to many languages, is in fact the principal or pre- 
 dominant one of the elements which constitute their 
 vocabularies, you can imagine how it must obliterate the 
 original distinctions between languages, and render the 
 task of tracing the descent of races and their migrations 
 previous to the introduction of this priestcraft, almost if 
 not entirely hopeless. 
 
 Here I should properly end the lecture of this evening ; 
 but a few words, before we part, on the classification of 
 languages found in the books. The text books of philology 
 distinguish languages as of three kinds: — 1. The mono- 
 syllabic, 2. The agglutinate, and, 3. The inflected. 
 
 The first kind are those which speak each word-root by 
 itself, preceded and followed by other word-roots, each 
 carrying its own idea in full, and leaving the hearer to find 
 out the grammatical relation between them by his own 
 wits, or by some accent or emphasis or musical modulation 
 of the speaker's voice. The specimen of this kind usually 
 given is the Chinese. 
 
 The second or agglutinate varieties of language combine 
 the monosyllables which grammatically belong together 
 into polysyllabic words, like the Saxon words for-bear, 
 cart-horse, and into fixed grammatical idioms like to be, to 
 do, to insist, according unto, &c. And this process can be 
 carried on to any extent. Words which have been com- 
 pounded of three or four words can be contracted to 
 monosyllables and then compounded anew, as an economi- 
 
180 ON LANGUAGE [LECT. 
 
 cal family can live three days on a single round of beef, by 
 rehashing it with other portions of their meals, from day 
 to day. I may find occasion to illustrate this boiling-down 
 and cooking-up • process in language hereafter. Its phe- 
 nomena are very curious and instructive. 
 
 The third class of languages, the inflected, are so called 
 because their words are not served up pure and simple, 
 alone or in courses, but garnished with prefixes and affixes, 
 which are as variable as Soyer's recipes. The old gram- 
 marians called these variations ' cases,' or fallings-off from 
 the upright simplicity of the word-root; and they gave 
 names to these cases, nominative, genitive, dative, &c, for 
 the purpose (apparently) of rendering it as difficult as pos- 
 sible for the grammar-school boys of Boston to pass their 
 examination at Harvard. Our own grammatical grand- 
 fathers, in their wisdom, saw fit to transplant that bar- 
 barous Greek paradism into an English soil, where nothing 
 but the hop-pole support of the birch rod has ever availed to 
 keep it in sickly existence. Yet we still teach our wonder- 
 ing babes to poll-parrot ' nominative, a man/ e genitive, of 
 a man/ c dative, to a man/ ' accusative, a man/ ' vocative, 
 oh man ! 9 ' ablative — non est inventus ' — although the whole 
 genius of our language, which belongs to the second or 
 agglutinate class, cries shame so audibly that the babes 
 themselves have heard it. English ' cases ! } there are no 
 such things ! In Latin and Hebrew and Sanscrit inflec- 
 tional forms have been dread realities. How such a bur- 
 den could have been borne by the educated classes at 
 Rome and Athens and Jerusalem it is hard to compre- 
 hend. Some philologues have doubted that the Latin of 
 \ the schools ever got spoken by any class below Hortensius 
 and Cicero. But when we turn to our North American 
 Indians and see how complicated the grammatical com- 
 binations and inflections of their dialects have been, we 
 may believe that the very shepherds of Ephraim knew how 
 to use the seven forms of the Hebrew verb — kal, he cuts ; 
 niphal, he is cut ; piel, he cuts hard ; pual, he is cut hard ; 
 hiphil, he causes to cut; hophal, he is made to cut; and 
 hithpael, he cuts himself — as glibly as the oldest rabbi of 
 the Bagdad or Tiberias schools. In fact, there is no limit 
 to the ability of an educated boy, in the direction in which 
 that education goes. Some of the most difficult languages, 
 
VII.] AS A TEST OF KACE. 181 
 
 completely artificial, and admirably adapted for ' variety 
 and precision in their use, are the languages of savage 
 tribes existing at the present day. There is no good 
 reason therefore for denying that the most ancient men of 
 the oldest Stone periods had languages as complicated and 
 as inflectional as any now known to exist, and with a 
 vocabulary commensurate with the variety of things by 
 which they were surrounded, and of actions which their 
 life gave birth to. 
 
 It is not to be admitted for a moment, that we must 
 trace back the existing languages to their word-roots, and 
 suppose these word-roots to have constituted the early 
 language or languages of man. We have no liberty to 
 suppose that the earliest languages were monosyllabic. 
 As I have said before, it is not at all established that lan- 
 guages become monosyllabic as we trace them backward. 
 On the contrary, there are many things to show that the 
 tendency of all languages is to grow more and more mono- 
 syllabic in the course of time, that is, in the direction 
 towards our day, not backward towards the beginning. It 
 is not proved that ' China and Further India/ as Prof. 
 Whitney, and many others with him maintain, ( are occu- 
 pied by races whose languages are monosyllabic because 
 they have never grown out of that original stage in which 
 In do- Germanic speech had its beginning.-' * The great 
 Orientalist, Abel Remusat, even refuses to admit that the 
 Chinese is entirely a monosyllabic tongue, and instances 
 such compound words as tsiang-jin, workman (Zimmer- 
 mann), and tsehung-sse, bell-master, to justify his doubts. 
 Beste shows that there are only 100 real monosyllabic 
 words out of 8000 which the Chinese scholars use ; and 
 although he thinks that the old Chinese was monosyllabic, 
 he shows that the modern has 15 kinds of composition. 
 Ampere condemns the doctrine of Chinese monosyllabism 
 based merely on the ground of single characters. Abel 
 Remusat shows how the Chinese terminal -jan in adjectives 
 is exactly equivalent to the terminations -ment in French 
 (from mens, mentis), and -Uch in German. Plath explains 
 how early introduction of Chinese monosyllabic writing 
 prevented the rise of grammatical inflexions ; and while 
 maintaining that the meanings of affixes remain apparent, 
 * P. Ill, Smith Rep., 1863. 
 
182 ON LANGUAGE AS A TEST OP EACE. 
 
 gives many instances of one root retaining many meanings, 
 instead of receiving new meanings by affixes.* 
 
 I have shown in a paper read before the American Phi- 
 losophical Society of Philadelphia not long ago, and pub- 
 lished in their Proceedings, that when one classifies the 
 names which have been given, by people speaking many 
 different dialects and languages, to some one common and 
 familiar and unmistakable object in nature, such as wind, 
 or fire, or a stone, or the human head, or hand, this remark- 
 able result is obtained : namely, that every organic utter- 
 ance and shade of utterance possible to the human organs 
 of speech, labial, lingual, dental, nasal, and guttural, has 
 been employed to express the self- same object. I pursued 
 the inquiry only through two or three hundred of the 
 several thousand dialects and languages of the present or 
 comparatively modern days ; and yet in this small and 
 hap-hazard collection it is perfectly apparent, that while in 
 one country an object may be called ha, in another it will 
 be called da, in a third la, in a fourth na, in a fifth ga ; in 
 others ap, at, ar, an, ah ; in others hour, or dar, or lar, or 
 nar, or gar ; in others dah, or nal, or pad, or lag ; in others 
 other combinations of these elements will be in use, in the 
 form of a simple monosyllable ; in others a more complicated 
 system of dissyllables or trissyllables will exist ; and here 
 and there long words will have grown up out of one or other 
 of the original simple elemental organic sounds ; — and all 
 these forms are in existence and in daily use in one age; 
 and all these numerous modifications of utterly diverse 
 lingual elements are in constant employment to express 
 one thing, and that one thing a simple, unmistakable ob- 
 ject of nature, affecting the senses of all mankind alike. 
 
 I will close this lecture, then, by stating again, and upon 
 this new basis, my conviction that most of the generaliza- 
 tions of the science of Comparative Philology — those which 
 take hold of all the larger problems of human history, the 
 origin of languages, the migrations of nations, the diversity 
 of races, the development of mythologies — are as yet grand 
 failures ; and that a much more thorough-going method, a 
 much profounder synthesis of facts, is needed to lead us to 
 the desired end of our researches in this field. 
 
 * See his theory at the bottom of page 216, Sitzimgbe : R. Bair., Acad. 
 1861, II. iii., and top of p. 217. On the Tone Speech of the old Chinese 
 with two pages of radicals, 161 in number (p. 212). 
 
183 
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 THE OBIGIN OF ARCHITECTURE. 
 
 The Fine Arts preceded Belles Lettres in the order of 
 time as well as in the order of a philosophical classification 
 of the Intellectual Sciences. Men knew how to build be- 
 fore they knew how to v/rite. You may be surprised that 
 I interpolate this lecture on Architecture, between my last 
 lecture on Language and my next lecture on Literature. 
 But I follow the order of nature. The soul of man en- 
 dowed with language utters itself first in sculpture and 
 painting, then in literature, then in moral and beneficent 
 deeds, and finally in acts of worship, — successively em- 
 ploying higher and higher faculties upon better and nobler 
 materials, In the first stages of his savage existence man 
 wasted most of his time and energies waiting on nature ; 
 watching patiently for the rise of a trout, or for the 
 approach of a deer. Much of this time was whiled away 
 in reverie. The hunter lived an inner life of mere per- 
 ception; a continual stream of paltry observations flowed 
 through him, having merely leaves and twigs, spiders and 
 butterflies, occasional startings of bird and beast and 
 glimpses of the outside sky and distant landscape, for 
 their only objects. This was no miserable life ! It would 
 be maligning the Divine Creating Charity to suppose it. 
 It is the life of all animals — and they are all happy. So 
 were the early races of mankind. So are all men yet. 
 Come we to speak of Happiness, we speak of that which 
 God has made universal. It is a synonym for Life. 
 Therefore we call God good. And the young man who 
 leaves Harvard or Yale to tramp through the woods of the 
 Alleghanies with a transit over his shoulder, or a level-rod 
 in his hand, will soon learn how happy his first ancestors 
 must commonly have been ; and why the grave and me- 
 
184 THE OKIGEST OE [LECT. 
 
 lancholy Indians (as we call them, in our ignorance) are so 
 full of fun and frolic at all times when not subdued by 
 hunger, fear, or drunkenness. 
 
 Now, the first and most natural and easy language of 
 this animal happiness, after gesticulation, is sculpture. 
 Hence all active savages amuse themselves with whittling. 
 Witness all our boys, and all the grown-up boys of our 
 Western country. The practice has been universal to all 
 races, through all ages, from the beginning. It is the 
 origin of sculpture, which in its turn made literature pos- 
 sible ; for one of the oldest forms of writing which we 
 know, the Irish Ogham character, was whittled out on 
 sticks ; and the early Egyptian characters were cut in 
 stone. The tendency to employ the hands while the body 
 rests is greater in cold climates than in hot ones ; and 
 therefore we should expect to find earlier traces of sculp- 
 ture in the temperate zones. But sculpture is absolutely 
 universal, and commenced with the appearance of man 
 upon the earth.* 
 
 The earliest traces of it which we have (as yet) dis- 
 covered, are on the scratched bones of the diluvium and 
 
 * The ingenious author of Essai sur lTnegalite des Races Humaines, 
 M. A. de Gobineau (Paris, 1853, Phil. Lib., vol. i. p. 356), has a theory that 
 the artistic genius was equally foreign to the natures of the three great 
 type races, yellow, white, and black, into which he divides mankind ; and 
 that it did not make its appearance until the white and black race mingled. 
 ' Thus, also, by the birth of the Malay variety there sprang from the yel- 
 low and black races a family more intelligent than its double parentage ; 
 and again, from the alliance of the yellow and the' white there issued 
 means very superior to the populations purely Finnish, as well as to the 
 Melanian tribes. I do not deny it,' he continues, ' these are good results. 
 The world of arts and noble literature result from mixtures of blood, in- 
 ferior races ameliorated, ennobled : these are marvels to applaud. The 
 small are elevated. But, alas, the great at the same time are abased, and 
 this is an irreparable ill not to be compensated. Prom the mixture of 
 race come also refinements of manners, ideas, faiths, especially sweetenings 
 of the passions and desires. Put these are transitory benefits ; and if I 
 must recognize the fact that the mulatto, of whom one can make a lawyer, 
 doctor, merchant, is better than his negro grandfather, wholly uncultivated 
 and good for nought, I must avow also that the Bramans of primitive 
 India, the heroes of the Iliad, and those of the Schahnameh, the warriors 
 of Scandinavia, all phantoms so glorious of races the most beautiful long 
 since vanished, offering an image of humanity more brilliant and more 
 noble, were especially the agents of civilization and grandeur more active, 
 more intelligent, more sure than the mixed peoples, mixed one hundred 
 times of the present epoch, and yet already they were not pure. 5 
 
VIII. J ARCHITECTURE-. 185 
 
 the cave-mud deposits. Many of these are merely marks 
 left by the flint tools with which the savages removed the 
 flesh from the surface of the bone, but some are indubi- 
 tably patterns of the fancy, scratched in that dolce far 
 niente mood in which a savage digests his dinner. Some 
 are actually cut into imitative shapes. The most interest- 
 ing specimens of Stone-age art which I have ever seen are 
 those of roots preserved in the cabinet of M. Boucher des 
 Perthes at Abbeville.* They were found in the peat-bogs of 
 the river-bottom, and are therefore of less extreme an- 
 tiquity than the flint instruments of the diluvium. But 
 they are old enough, heaven knows ! and very curious. 
 They are in the form sometimes of men, with straddling 
 legs and arms ; sometimes of ducks, or snakes, or frogs. 
 But whatever shape it may be, some artificial addition has 
 been made to it, by the joking savage, to increase its like- 
 liness, and to express his appreciation of its oddity, or per- 
 haps we ought to add, in his eyes, to its beauty. For 
 when we see how evidently, how inexpressibly lovely, to 
 the enthusiastic little mother-heart of one of our baby 
 daughters, her dirty, black, old, hideous doll can be, we 
 may believe that, to the art sentiment just sown and hardly 
 yet sprouting in those aboriginal savage souls, a black 
 forked eSigy of humanity, with the addition of a cut with 
 a flint knife for a mouth, and a peck on each side of its 
 head for two eyes, would represent Venus the goddess of 
 loveliness, if not indeed Jupiter the awful thunderer. 
 There is a good deal of accounting for tastes — when we 
 consider circumstances. 
 
 The next stage in sculpture was, probably, imitations in 
 stone of the marks of wet feet and hands. These would 
 first be made at river fordings, and afterwards on the tops 
 of look-out mountains. Such sculpturings are described 
 in books of travels all over the world. The savage crosses 
 a stream by swimming, and dries his dripping body on 
 some sun-lit rock. Then he waits for his companions, or 
 for his prey, or for his enemy. Meanwhile he pecks away 
 at one of the damp footsteps on the rock/ Others notice 
 what he has left undone, and finish it. The footprint 
 becomes a permanent landmark. Some battle there in 
 
 * The sculptured bcnes of the caves of the Dordogne had nGt been 
 found when this was written. 
 
186 THE OEIGIN OF [lECT. 
 
 subsequent days shall make it famous. Some deified hero 
 shall be propitiated there by sacrifices. The footprint 
 becomes a symbol of worship. You have all heard of the 
 two footprints sculptured on the summit of Mount Olivet, 
 and worshipped by pilgrims, as the marks left when Jesus 
 sprang into the sky at his ascension. There is another 
 footprint of Jesus preserved on a stone in the Mosque of 
 Omar, at the extremity of the eastern aisle.* At Poitiers, 
 in France, the traveller may see two footprints of the Lord, 
 upon a slab enshrined in the south wall of the church of St 
 Kadigonde, made when he stood before her to inform her 
 of her coming martyrdom. 
 
 The prints of the two feet of Ishmael are preserved on a 
 stone in the temple of Mecca, which tradition says was the 
 threshold of the palace of his father-in-law, the king of the 
 Dhorhamides.f Others say that they are the prints of his 
 father Abraham's feet, when IshmaeFs termagant wife 
 drove the old patriarch away from the threshold of her 
 husband's house. 
 
 On the top of the highest mountain in Ceylon are the 
 prints of Adam's feet. There are two immense foot- 
 prints, 200 feet apart, on the rocks of Magdesprung, a 
 village in the Hartz mountains of Germany, which tradition 
 says were made when a huge giantess leaped down from 
 the clouds to save one of her beautiful maidens from the 
 violence of a baron of the olden times. J The holiest object 
 in the great temple of Burmah is the so-called footprint of 
 Gaudama, seven feet long, divided into compartments, and 
 sculptured in an extraordinary manner in the fashion of an 
 astrological charm. 
 
 My purpose is not to lead you into the dark chambers of 
 heathen imagery. I might not be able to explain at all to 
 vour satisfaction this disposition of the human race to 
 worship the human foot and everything belonging to it, 
 though I have my theory for it. We will stick to our 
 subject, which is sculpture and its origin. 
 
 But I wish I could transport this audience to a moun- 
 tain top, where I stood one day last spring, and show them 
 a specimen of savage sculpture of the most primeval type. 
 
 * E. 33, 21, 4 index. 
 
 f Weil's Legends of Mohammed, 36, 23 h. $ 32, 2. 
 
VIII.] ARCHITECTURE. 187 
 
 It is a broad-backed, flat-topped mountain in western 
 Pennsylvania, the westernmost of those which compose 
 the Alleghanies. It is cleft from summit to base, a depth 
 of 1300 feet, by a narrow gorge through which flows, roar- 
 ing on towards the west to join the Ohio, one of the 
 fairest rivers in the world, the Youghioghany. On the 
 southern brow of this gorge, looking down fearfully into 
 it, and also looking broadly out over all the western 
 country, with a sweep of horizon taking in the blue 
 distance of the Pittsburg hills, there is a table of bare 
 sandstone rock. The people call it, as the Indians did 
 before them, the Cows' rock. The road runs over it ; and 
 the tracks of wheels are scratched upon it. But ages 
 before old Heckew elder's daughter was born, the first 
 white child west of the Alleghany mountains, the Indian's 
 trail went over this same rock. And here the red men, 
 weary with the hot and long ascent, rested themselves ; 
 pitched pebbles down into the abyss of the river gorge, 
 and looked out over the illimitable forests of Westmoreland 
 county, to catch the distant smoke of the fires of their 
 tribes. And while they sat, they cut those fanciful figures 
 in the face of the rock which still remain, half obliterated 
 by the wheels of the white man's waggons, but still kept 
 clean by the rains. There you may see the cloven foot of 
 cows or buffalo, and human feet, and three-toed marks of 
 birds, like Deane's and Hitchcock's ornothichnites, and 
 waviug snakes, and others not so easy to decipher. I went 
 to see the place, hoping that the imagination of the farmers 
 had misled them, and that the works would prove to be 
 the casts of fossils ; but there was no mistaking their arti- 
 ficial character.* 
 
 In the same way the human hand is stamped and cut 
 upon a thousand cliffs, and on the walls of temples. It was 
 a favourite subject of art in Central America. You know 
 it was used by the Eoman legions as a sacred standard. 
 
 * Similar, more numerous, and more perfectly executed rock sculptur- 
 ings, covering the stoss sides and backs of some granite islets, in the bed 
 of the Susquehanna river, at Safe Harbour, below Columbia, in Pennsyl- 
 vania, have been photographed and described, from plaster casts taken of 
 them by Prof. Thomas Porter, the president, and other members of the 
 Linnean Society, at Lancaster, and published recently in the Proceedings 
 of the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia. 
 
188 THE ORIGIN OP [lECT. 
 
 The two hands of man were his two great gods, his pro- 
 viders, his defenders. In the Thracian mythology they 
 were the Cabiri, the great gods workers, and their children 
 were the ten dactyloi, or fingers. Then, when men in old 
 times grew tired' of worshipping their own hands, they 
 began to worship the uplifted hand of the bard-priest 
 blessing them, and of the bard-baron crushing them. 
 Afterwards its beauty seized upon the aesthetic sense of the 
 artist, and men drew it and sculptured it for its own sake, 
 rather than for what it had accomplished. When the pope 
 sent a commission to Michael Angelo to examine his 
 ability, he refused to be examined; but, seizing a piece of 
 chalk, he drew a human hand so boldly and with such 
 grace and such expression that no further question could 
 be asked ; and so he built St Peter's.* Finally science 
 drew the hand, and proved by it, in a Bridgewater Treatise, 
 that there must be an all-wise and beneficent Creator. 
 
 Such is the history of all the fine arts. — There is an 
 insensible graduation of art for imitation into art for 
 ornament. The tools of one age become the amulets of a 
 succeeding age ; as in the case of the Swiss flints. The 
 phallus found in the Poitou cave was either an idol or an 
 amulet. The ladies of Eome wore such as breastpins in 
 the Augustan age. The miniature hand lies as a paper- 
 weight on modern tables, and as a tablet on the wristlace 
 of our ladies. The selection of odd forms of roots by the 
 people of the Abbeville bogs is paralleled by the selection 
 of bizarre laurel-root walking-sticks by modern young men. 
 And the same love of the rare and beautiful, which sets so 
 high a value on the emerald and diamond now, caused the 
 Stone age savage to string together round his neck the 
 floating bits of amber which he saw, and to perforate and 
 hang about his loins beautiful small shells. The same 
 feelings induced the Druid warrior to wrap a golden torque 
 around his arm, that induces an underbred American to 
 set three California nuggets in his shirtstuds.f The per- 
 petual search for proper and perfect slingstones must have 
 cultivated to the highest pitch, and at the earliest periods, 
 man's faculty for form and colour in the materials of art. 
 
 * See the story in detail, in Grimm's Life of Michael Angelo, Buimet's 
 translation, vol. 'i. pp. 158—160. (Littell and Brown, Boston, 1865.) 
 f For the early use of gold see Appendix to Lecture VIII. 
 
VIII.] ARCHITECTURE. 189 
 
 Some of the works of savages strike us with astonishment, 
 such as the perforation of the precious stones by the in- 
 habitants of Central America. But we must remember 
 that the savage was never in a hurry ; time was not money 
 then ; and what was made was kept and valued long. The 
 ivory work of the Chinese is quite as wonderful. 
 
 But why should we waste time with the earlier stages of 
 man's effort to express his appreciation of the forms of 
 nature ? We have in architecture the summation of all his 
 efforts ; the trial of his matured powers ; the efflorescence 
 not only of his taste for form and colour, but of his sense of 
 grandeur and sublimity, of his ideas of the invisible powers 
 by which he is surrounded, and of his hopes of future hap- 
 piness. 
 
 I wish to confine this lecture chiefly to a discussion of 
 the rise and meaning of ancient architecture. And I shall 
 use the term architecture in its most ancient and not in its 
 more modern sense. No two meanings attached to the 
 same word could well be more different. To the imagina- 
 tion of a man of the 19th century the word architecture 
 conjures up a splendid vista of roofs and towers, with 
 battlements or spires, castles and churches, palaces and 
 stores with marble fronts and decorated windows from the 
 pavement to the eve ; parliament houses and city halls, in 
 parks laid out for public recreation ; hotels of a thousand 
 separate rooms ; vast railway stations, each blocking up 
 the end of some wide avenue, one exit of the city, with 
 long hanging vaults of wood and iron, under which inter- 
 minable trains of cars may load and unload thousands of 
 travellers ; factories, mountainous piles of furnace-stack 
 and hollow archways, girt with gigantic flues and capped 
 with curious brickwork, black iron cylinders vomiting fire, 
 and taller chimneys smoking in the upper air; bridges 
 like spider-webs, and viaducts with wonderful arcades, 
 spanning the streams ; observatories crowned with domes 
 like eastern mosques ; theatres and halls for music, with 
 organs, seeming like the slumbering winds of Eolus, wait- 
 ing to rouse the world ; great, many-storied public schools, 
 each with its tide of life ebbing and flowing with tumultu- 
 ous regularity four times each day, as if they were the 
 ventricles of a great nation's heart : all these and innumer- 
 able private residences and villas urban and suburban, in 
 
190 THE ORIGIN OF [LECT. 
 
 streets, on hill-tops, and beside the shore, or buried in 
 sweet vales ; all these combine to make up architecture 
 now. 
 
 In ancient times it was not so. The so-called ancients, 
 Greeks and Romans of the times of Christ, only 2000 years 
 ago, they had their architects for triumphal arches, aque- 
 ducts, bridges, forts and palaces, as well as for religious 
 shrines. Even the Assyrians and Babylonians, of an age a 
 thousand years earlier, built palaces as well as temples ; if 
 their palaces were not indeed their only temples, as their 
 kings were named after and worshipped for their gods. 
 But in the real old ancient times, preceding all those really 
 modern or grandly mediaeval histories, I mean the times 
 of ancient Egypt, the times when British Stonehenge, and 
 the Armorican Carnak, and the North African cromlechs, 
 and the Cyclopean walls of Italy and Greece were built ; 
 in those old days there was nothing but religious architec- 
 ture. The people lived in tents or cottages. Their kings 
 were merely chieftains, heads of tribes, living among 
 their people like Arab sheiks, or like the kings in Western 
 Africa. How many ages from the beginning passed before 
 the building of temples began, we cannot know. All be- 
 fore the rise of architecture was an age of unconscious art, 
 mixed with uncertain superstitions ; an age of fetichism, 
 with its vulgar sorceries, like those which form the sole 
 religious ceremonies of our Esquimaux ; and with its rude 
 stone idols, wooden painted posts, sacred trees, haunted 
 mounds, and amulets. 
 
 The original root of all architecture can be found in the 
 sepulchral mound. The Druid barrow or the Tartar tumu- 
 lus, became first the pyramid, then the propylon of the 
 Egyptian temple, then the pagoda of India and China, and 
 finally the Parthenon and Pantheon of Greece and Italy. 
 The pyramids of Nubia and Egypt, with one exception, 
 and that one not undisputed, are undoubtedly the Mausolea 
 of the early Pharaohs ; while all the other primeval Egyp- 
 tian monuments are private tombs. The earlier Egyptian 
 temples were avowedly erected in honour of deceased 
 monarchs by their sons. The custom was transplanted 
 from the soil of the valley of the Nile to all surrounding 
 lands. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in Asia Minor 
 was one of the wonders of the world. No trace of it re- 
 
YIIT.] ARCHITECTURE. 191 
 
 mains. But the vast tomb of Massinissa in Numidia, 200 
 yards in diameter, and the tomb of Hadrian at Borne,, still 
 challenge the admiration of mankind. But why select ex- 
 amples here and there, when the grave-mounds of forgotten 
 princes covered the entire surface of the earth, and furnish 
 to our antiquaries their oldest and most precious curiosi- 
 ties. Nor is it needful to go back to the youthful days of 
 Mitzraim to study fragments which escaped the iconoclastic 
 hammer of Cambyse's only to be submerged by the Libyan 
 or Arabian sands. The greatest living empire of the world 
 is to-day practising and illustrating throughout its 16 pro- 
 vinces, each one a mighty kingdom in itself, that architec- 
 ture of ancestral worship which, having antedated, will 
 survive and swallow up all other works of men. The tombs 
 of the Ming dynasty near Pekin show that the self-same sen- 
 timents and ideas continue to rule the human heart and 
 direct the artist's hand which called into magnificent ex- 
 istence five thousand years ago the Colossi of Benihassan 
 and the Necropolis of Thebes. A thousand things in Chi- 
 nese life impress the traveller strangely with the devotion 
 of the entire nation to these tender and reverential tastes 
 and feelings for the dead. To the father nothing is refused. 
 The most acceptable present that a son can make him is a 
 coffin. He knows that death will be no bar to his advance- 
 ment in honours, for the merit of his child will illuminate 
 his name. Nobility is not prospective but retrospective in 
 the Central kingdom. The hero's deeds, the sage's wisdom, 
 the statesman's success ennobles not his descendants but his 
 ancestry. The degenerate barbarism of Europe has sub- 
 stituted the sordid interests of property for gratitude and 
 piety. 
 
 Ancestral worship, or the homage which the living offer j 
 to the dead, is not only the most extensive, but the only uni- 
 versal form of religion upon the earth, and the oldest of 
 which any traces remain in early history. It was natural, 
 therefore, that the first tomb should be the first temple, 
 and vice versa. That desire to live which was given to 
 mankind in common with the other animals, as a safeguard 
 to his life, contained within it germs of thought and senti- 
 ment, which were in process of time developed into a thirst 
 for immortality. This caused the living to erect their own 
 tombs; and civilization has done little to change the 
 
192 THE ORIGIN OP [LECT. 
 
 ancient custom. True, circumstances may render indi- 
 viduals reckless ; and, if long enough adverse and charged 
 with sufficient misery, may even obliterate from families 
 and tribes the acquired instinct of ancestral worship. 
 Livingstone represents the Makololo as totally careless 
 about the bodies of their dead, and hostile to every re- 
 membrance of their past existence.* Yet such are rare ex- 
 ceptions to the general rule. 
 
 In ancient days the father was not only the giver of life, 
 but the lawgiver who could order it away. Abraham sa- 
 crificing Isaac to Jehovah, or sending away Ishmael and 
 his mother into the desert ; Jephthah paroling his daughter 
 for a month ; the king of Moab slaying his first-born on the 
 city wall in sight of the hosts of Israel : — we read these 
 stories so often that they cease to make their natural im- 
 pression on us. The ancient father was in fact .both family 
 priest and king ; and when he died he became the family 
 deity. The chief of a tribe was but the greater father of a 
 larger family ; and when he died a grander fane arose in 
 homage of his power and virtues. I am not one of those 
 who entertain the theory, that all the deities of ancient 
 times were monarchs, or benefactors, or emigrating chief- 
 tains deified. No ! the worship of a man ceased with the 
 generation who succeeded him ; as only one pope at a time 
 can occupy the sarcophagus over the doorway in St Peter's. 
 But nevertheless there is no denying or mistaking the 
 combined action of the two causes which I have just named 
 upon the rise of architecture, viz. the man's own desire for 
 an eternal mansion, and the honours which his children 
 voted him. 
 
 The most ancient specimens of architecture whose date 
 we know, are certain tombs of Memphis, which M. Mariette 
 has recently uncovered from the sands of the great plain, 
 on the edge of which stand their next descendants in 
 architectural age, the pyramids. These tombs were built 
 originally, like the houses of a city, in rows, separated by 
 narrow streets, some of which are cul-de-sacs, or courts. 
 The tombs themselves have all one form, that of a small 
 pylon, or truncated pyramid ; the facade, or front towards 
 
 * See Livingstone's curious account of ' hiding the dead ' on the Zam- 
 besi. 
 
VIII.] AECHITECTUEE. . 193 
 
 the street, decorated witli long prismatic mouldings, ter- 
 minate in lotus leaves tied together by the peduncles. 
 This is M. Kenan' s description : and he refers for illustra- 
 tion to Lepsius' Denkmaeler aus ^Egypten und ^Ethiopien, 
 prem. part, pi 25, 26. You will hereafter see the import- 
 ance of this ornamentation to a correct theory of archi- 
 tecture; but at present let me continue the description 
 of these interesting monuments. The door of each tomb 
 is very narrow, and never in the centre of the front. Over 
 it is cut the hieroglyphic guitar, a cylindrical drum or 
 tabret, carrying J the name of the dead. Here he lives for 
 evermore, always at home. It is his c everlasting home/ 
 the very term the old Egyptians used to designate a tomb. 
 And the interior arrangement agreed with this idea. It 
 was arranged for the reception of his surviving friends on 
 certain days of the year. Therefore in the oldest times — ■ 
 at the extreme dawn of history — the first — absolutely the 
 first scene which is presented to our eyes, is precisely 
 that which the modern traveller beholds when he visits on 
 All Souls' Day the Parisian cemetery of Pere la Chaise, 
 or the tombs of the Ming dynasty near Pekin. Ancestral 
 worship was the first and will be the last religion of man- 
 kind. 
 
 Entering now one of these old Memphite tombs *one sees 
 engraved upon the walls the master of the house in the 
 bosom of his family ; his wife, his children, his servants, 
 his scribes, his household furniture, around him. His own 
 portrait in bas-relief occupies the post of honour, and is 
 commonly repeated in several places ; while a large stele, 
 or obelisk-like pyramid, gives his titles and sometimes 
 his biography, his characteristic traits, even his infirmities, 
 to ensure the continuance of his personality. How strong 
 must have been the lust for immortality which ruled the 
 breasts of those old people ! I mentioned in a former 
 lecture with what detail the agricultural habits and man- 
 ners, tools and animals, of this primitive Egyptian race 
 was given in these family picture-galleries ; and how no 
 trace of war or of religion is apparent in them. 
 
 This we must dwell on here a little ; not to discuss the 
 origin of the religious sentiment or its realization in wor- 
 ship, to which I shall devote a future lecture ; but for the 
 
 13 
 
194 THE ORIGIN OF [LECT. 
 
 bearing of the fact upon the theory of architecture. In 
 these tombs we find, I say, no trace of those chapters of 
 the ritual of the dead, which, under subsequent dynasties 
 of kings and priests in Egypt, came at last to constitute 
 the obligatory ornamentation of all tombs.* In the an- 
 cienter times of the Memphite tomb -builders, the deity 
 seems to have had neither name nor image. The dog 
 Anubis, on whom the trinitarian spirit of a later date be- 
 stowed three heads, the Cerberus Of Greek mythology, 
 appears indeed upon the walls as the guardian or watch- 
 dog of the tomb. But where is Osiris — that special 
 funeral god of the later dynasties ? For these more ancient 
 Memphite f everlasting homes/ he has as yet no existence. 
 They are in no respects funereal chapels consecrated to a 
 divinity. Death, is the only deity acknowledged here. 
 We are in the rear of all mythologies ; behind the curtain 
 the drama of religion has not yet commenced. We are 
 still in the primeval age of man's existence upon earth, 
 before the birth of kingdoms and priesthoods, as we know 
 those things ; yet also, at the end of that great age, just 
 when it is about to breed another age, and pass, itself, into 
 its f everlasting home/ 
 
 But we have here true architecture and the fine arts 
 
 * ' The tombs of Memphis are all dated in the six first dynasties ; and 
 without this they would still indicate their relative age by their style and 
 the order of their ideas. Compare them with the grottoes of Beni Haman 
 (2500 B.C.) where the ideas are the same, death the only deity of an eter- 
 nal home, a grand, gay chamber alive with pictures, but with neither 
 superstitions nor terrors. Then compare them with the tombs of Biban- 
 el-molouk, near Thebes (1500 B.C.), and see the sudden and complete 
 change! A Christian and a pagan tomb could not more differ. The dead is 
 no longer at home ; a pantheon of gods have usurped his place ; images of 
 Osiris, and chapters of the ritual cover the walls ; graved with a care as if 
 the world must read them, and yet shut up in everlasting darkness, but 
 supernaturally powerful. Horrible fictions, the foolishest vagaries of the 
 human brain. The priest has got the better of the situation; these 
 death-trials are good alms for him, he can abridge the poor soul's tor- 
 ments. What a nightmare is this tomb of Sethos ! How far we have got 
 from the primeval faith in death and survivance after it, without the cere- 
 monial of the priest, or long list of names divine, ending in sordid super- 
 stition. One of our Gothic cathedrals differs less from one of the tombs 
 on the Appian Way than do the old tombs of Sakkara from those which 
 fill the strange valley of Biban-el-molouk.' (Eenan.) 
 
VIII.] ARCHITECTURE. 195 
 
 already born; nay, more, already perfect in one of their 
 careers. 
 
 Nothing, in fact, would so thoroughly dispel the scep- 
 ticism of religious people respecting the antiquity of man- 
 kind as a good examination of these monuments. They say 
 themselves that they belong to the first dynasties of Egypt, 
 and yet their construction is as perfectly beautiful as if 
 they bore over their doors names of the monarchs of the 
 18th or 22nd dynasties, 2000 years later of date. What is 
 so astonishing, so bewildering, is this : that art and archi- 
 tecture, when we see it first, is in its full maturity. The 
 painting, carving, and building-arts (to judge by these 
 Memphite tombs) have had apparently no infancy. And 
 it is only by turning from Egypt to other lands, and from 
 these wonderful treasures preserved beneath the sand, to 
 the cyclopean walls, to the circles of standing stones, and 
 to the Druid barrows, that we are reminded of those vast 
 stretches of time before Memphis and its people had ex- 
 istence, ages of night and wandering for races of mankind, 
 whose only monuments were some stray boulder poised 
 upon a hill, or some smooth rock beside a stream, on 
 which they could engrave a few rude effigies ; — races 
 which have all perished, without one name engraved in 
 legible characters ; without one shrine to keep alive the 
 remembrance of a single deity. 
 
 But were we to dogmatise in this fashion about the early 
 and sudden blooming out of Egyptian art, or Chinese 
 civilization, as if they were created perfect, and had no be- 
 ginning, simply because we can find no records of such 
 beginning, we must forget that a record is impossible 
 without a scribe to make it. Mankind without arts have 
 no means of recording the history of their arts. Art is a 
 self-recording instrument indeed, but not until it is itself 
 completed. And when we examine the Egyptian record a 
 little closer, we can perceive in it a confession of improve- 
 ment and progress, which relieves us of historical embar- 
 rassment. If Mariette can say of the fourth dynasty that 
 its opening reigns yield us prodigies of an unexampled 
 civilization, unexampled at that moment in the world, a 
 society definitely constituted, a development of art at a 
 height hardly to be topped by the most brilliant epochs 
 afterwards, and an architecture elegant, he must add that 
 
196 THE origin or [lect. 
 
 all this marks a sudden and extraordinary movement, the 
 cause of which is hidden from our research ; and we must 
 remember that three dynasties had preceded, numbering 
 as many centuries as have elapsed between the Norman 
 conquest and the present day; time enough, one would 
 imagine, for the growth of all the arts and ail the 
 sciences. 
 
 It is admirable to see with what fidelity the builders of 
 the Memphite tombs did all their work. It reminds one 
 of the enthusiasm of the builders of the Middle Ages. And 
 yet M. Mariette has distinguished in the early tombs of 
 Egypt three classes. The most ancient, like that of Amten, 
 exhibit art and literature in process of formation, the 
 hieroglyphs widely separated (clair-seme) and in relief. 
 Rude forms abound. The statues are thick and short, with 
 all their anatomical details exaggerated. The second class, 
 the best example of which is Ti's tomb at Saqqarah, are 
 better placed, with hieroglyphs less boldly striking, and 
 more harmoniously grouped, making the text more legible. 
 The alphabeti element begins little by little to substitute 
 itself for the syllabic, which forms so large a part of the 
 older legends. Ascending genealogies become rare. The 
 formulae of invocation are addressed to Anubis alone. 
 The third class, contemporary with the 6th dynasty, begin 
 to show the name of Osiris, and the formula of justifica- 
 tion, in text more lengthened out, with beautiful forms of 
 prayer, and biographical recitals, to vary a little the mo- 
 notony of representation. In these, and in the tombs of 
 the second class of the time of Ti, are found those beautiful 
 and smoothly worked-out statues, with visage round and 
 smiling mouth, fine nose, large shoulders, and stout limbs, 
 which form so numerous and precious a collection in the 
 Boulaq Museum. And in these tombs are also found those 
 enormous monolithic steles cut into the form of a facade, of 
 which the Museum has so rich a collection also. These 
 are, then, the three stages of the oldest Egyptian art. 
 Then came a long break, perhaps the Dark Ages of the 
 ancient empire. We pass down through five more centu- 
 ries to the 11th dynasty, when a Renaissance appears, with 
 Isis for its deity, and marks which cut it off from any di- 
 rect inheritance from the art that had preceded it by so 
 long an interval. The steles, formerly square at top, have 
 
VIII.] ARCHITECTURE. 197 
 
 now become rounded. The hieroglyphics have a particu- 
 lar awkwardness resembling not at all those of the tombs 
 of the 3rd dynasty. The sarcophagi are also different, 
 and colours are in vogue. Then comes the splendid age 
 of obelisks, colossal statues, grand grotto-temples, and all 
 that make the borders of the Nile and Thebes the wonder 
 of the world. 
 
 I once enjoyed the rare opportunity of getting upon 
 the roof of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, in company 
 of the architect to whom was intrusted the superintend- 
 ence of its restoration, under Louis Philipe. After I had 
 feasted my eyes upon that glorious panorama — which I 
 think is finer from this point of view than from the top 
 of Notre Dame — I occupied myself with the bits of carving 
 which surround the pinnacles of the buttresses, and which 
 are entirely invisible to persons in the street, — hundreds 
 of leaves and flowers, and delicate morsels of fretwork, 
 which no eye had seen for centuries, even since the stone- 
 cutters had hoisted the blocks unchiselled to their places, 
 and yet as nicely wrought as if they were intended for 
 the doorway in the porch. And I could not help asking 
 myself the question, When will our architects get such a 
 conscience as those old masons had?* And I wondered 
 also when the time would come for a public taste impatient 
 of our meretricious sham shop-fronts on Chesnut-street or 
 Broadway, showing their ragged edges and unfinished 
 cornice-ends, and soft brick- side walls, up and down the 
 street as shamelessly as harlots in the evening flaunt their 
 tawdry. 
 
 The old Memphite tombs were built to last, and to last 
 beautiful. They were to be homes always. They bore no 
 resemblance at all to our family tombs, crowded with 
 coffins, hideous with mildew and fungous vegetation, 
 generating horrors of the imagination to be surpassed 
 only by those which breed within the modern so-called 
 Christian doctrine of eternal damnation. There is nothing 
 to suggest the Columbaria, or pigeon-cote burial-places, of 
 the Hebrews, Phoenicians, and Christians of the Roman day; 
 nor those vast catacombs in which whole congregations 
 of believers in a future life were laid away to sleep together, 
 
 * See Renan's beautiful description of this perfect conscientious art, p. 
 673 (Revue des Deux Mondes, 1st April, 1S65). 
 
198 THE OEIGIN OF [lECT. 
 
 until the archangel's trump should wake them up together 
 for the judgment-day. 
 
 The Egyptian farmer's soul lived all alone in his ' eternal 
 mansion/ Each tomb was individual. Except in some 
 few cases, even the wife had no admission with her husband 
 to it. He was satisfied with her picture, among those of 
 all his other domestic animals. Except on the solemn 
 anniversary, the narrow door was shut, and darkness ob- 
 literated the pictures, except to the departed ghost. He 
 was supposed to regale himself with the offered fruits and 
 cooked food which his friends left in his chamber. Some 
 of these touching proofs that love and veneration have 
 always swelled the human bosom have remained there un- 
 touched all those thousands of years, until M. Mariette 
 opened once more the doors. 
 
 But the prime point for our reflection is the fact that 
 there is nothing of the tomb about these tombs ; they are 
 houses — homes. They feared but one thing — disturbance. 
 With what horror must the ejection from his tomb have been 
 contemplated by the old man of the Nile ! The possible loss 
 of his hereditary lands could not more shock an English 
 nobleman. To be turned out and sent adrift, homeless 
 for ever, a poor ghost unable to build but once and never 
 more ! Imagine his feelings in view of such an irreme- 
 diable and infinite calamity ! I believe that these Egyptian 
 sentiments, entertained as they were by all the early races 
 of mankind, were the originals of all those superstitions of 
 Hades, and haunted places, and uneasy spirits, which 
 exist to-day. How different the dying Christian's thoughts ! 
 To him there is no isolation in the tomb. He sees 
 heaven opened, and flies to join the great congregation of 
 the first-born in the kingdom of the Lord who rules the 
 heavens and the earth under the new dispensation. And 
 as the old Egyptians had the idea of immortality, so even 
 the cave-dwellers of the south of France must have been 
 led by it to make their burnt- offerings to the dead, as M. 
 Lartet has shown. The peculiarity of Christianity consists 
 in the fact that it was both life and immortality which were 
 brought to light by Jesus Christ. 
 
 The care with which the body of the dead was preserved 
 in a sarcophagus,* and the care with which the sarco- 
 
 * The sarcophagus is an immense cube of granite or white marble, the 
 
Vni.] ARCHITECTURE. 199 
 
 phagus was concealed in a chamber of its own nearly 100 
 feet underground, approached by a well sunk in the thickest 
 part of the masonry, and then by a horizontal gallery, so 
 arranged as to make it extremely difficult to discover the 
 whereabouts of the sarcophagus — all show how dreadful 
 an idea the profanation or disturbance of his body must 
 have been to the living Egyptian.* To derange his repose 
 was to compromise his eternal salvation. How his body 
 was to share in his soul's immortality, perhaps, was never 
 a clearly formulated dogma in the Egyptian creed, if there 
 was such a creed. But mummification became afterwards 
 one of the fine arts, and combined sculpture and painting 
 with all the most shameless tricks both of priestcraft and 
 of trade. It would be a perfect farce to tell you of the 
 shrewd devices of the Egyptian undertakers in a later age, 
 to say nothing of the grim mistakes which have been made 
 in lecture-rooms in this country. I remember when a 
 mummy-case, purporting to be that of a Pharaoh's daughter, 
 was solemnly opened and unwrapped before a crowded 
 audience ; I think Mr Agassiz was present and took part 
 in the proceedings ; the case contained the body of a boy, 
 and nobody has ever been able to explain the misad- 
 venture, except on general principles — that the Egyptian 
 undertakers were great rascals. 
 
 In the earliest times there were also images made of the 
 deceased, but they were exquisitely well done, and the 
 sole intention seems to have been to preserve the personal 
 identity of the departed, to make sure that his ownership 
 of his own ' everlasting home 9 could always be identified, 
 that no false claimant might ever eject him from it. These 
 images are now found concealed in little wells in the masonry 
 of the tomb. The number of them already collected is 
 
 walls of which are sometimes decorated with prism-shaped reeds 
 (rainures), and other ornaments analogous to those of the facade of the 
 tomb. 
 
 * The same spirit presides over the queer construction of the pyramids. 
 Each was the inaccessible, eternal home of a king. Their entrances were 
 never in the middle of a side, and carefully sealed up. The galleries 
 within were filled with rocks, from the tumbling in of the roofs, after 
 accomplishing which the workmen escaped by curiously constructed shafts 
 of exit. These precautions were so successful that the chamber of Cheops 
 was not reached by any explorer until the days of Caliph Mamoud, 5000 
 years and more after it was built. (Rinan.) 
 
200 THE OEIGIN OF [lECT. 
 
 very great.* Some are of wood, some of granite, some of 
 marble. One, to be seen in the Museum of Charles X., 
 represents a scribe, executed with the minute finesse of a 
 
 * Museum of Bou'laq. Some are in the Louvre. ' It is ugly, common, 
 vulgar assuredly, but nothing ever came up nearer to the intention of the 
 maker. It is an unequalled prodigy, this wooden statue of the Museum 
 of Boulaq, to which the fellahs gave unanimously, on its discovery, the 
 name of Scheickh-el-bilad, " The Village Sheik." It is the statue of a 
 certain Phtah-se, cousin to the king. His wife's statue was found near 
 it. The expression of naif contentment spreading itself over the smiling 
 figures of these two good folks is plain enough to see. One would call 
 them two Dutchmen of the times of Louis XIV. One may not doubt, 
 looking at these statues, that before the period of royal despotism and 
 sumptuousness, Egypt had an epoch of patriarchal liberty. The pomp- 
 ous official art of the Thouthmes and the Rameses did not lower itself to 
 represent such bonhommie any more than the artists of Versailles bent 
 down their dignities to paint "Magots" (boobies, puppies). In fact 
 these two astonishing morceaux are of the 4th or 5th dynasty. Will you 
 say that here we have primitive art starting on its career with such mi- 
 nutiae ? Consider first, I pray you, that Egyptian art was not at its 
 debut but in its perfection then. What is most extraordinary in this 
 civilization is, that it had no infancy, We seek in vain for an archaic 
 period of Egyptian art. In architecture that is easy enough to under- 
 stand, for it finds the means of accomplishing its desires commonly much 
 sooner than the plaster arts can do it. But for sculpture to divest itself 
 of all rudeness and awkwardness centuries are requisite. Greece, Italy of 
 the middle ages, prove it. But such a statue as that of Chephren, of 
 which I shall soon speak, and all the statues of the ancient empire, are 
 not at all in the style of a middle age. They have a definite style of 
 their own. Viewed as to the measure of the nation's genius, they could 
 not be done better. Egypt in this, as in so many other things, contradicts 
 the laws we assign to the Indo-Germanic and Shemitic races. She begins 
 her career, not in myth, in heroism, in barbarism. She is a China, born 
 mature, almost decrepit, having always had that air at once of infamy and 
 age which her monuments and her history reveal. The divine youth of the 
 Yavanas (lonians, Yavanasdones, the youths, Juvenes) was ever unknown 
 to her. That she started with realism, with platitude, does not amaze 
 me more than that she started with good sense, good domestic economy, 
 the right sense of worthy farmers, knowing exactly the number of their 
 geese and asses. We are not here on the soil of Homer and Phidias ; we 
 are in the land of clear and rapid conscience, but limited and stationary. 
 Solon's priest of Sais thought himself sarcastic when he said, "You Greeks 
 are babies ; there are none old among you ; you are all young in spirit : " 
 but it was the profound error of a narrow-minded conservative, proud of 
 that which marked his own inferiority. It is permitted man not to be 
 always young, but it is needful to have been young once. These intelligent 
 guardians of dead letters could not see what made the force and beauty of 
 Greece, as many a heavy spirit of our days thinks that he has exhausted 
 language against France when he has affixed to her name the epithet of 
 revolutionary.' — Henan. 
 
VIII.] ARCHITECTURE, 201 
 
 perfect realism, which refers us to more ancient' times, 
 when savages criticised the forms of nature with no aesthetic 
 sentiment, but with the interest of life and death. Hence 
 we have in these images an ethnographic precision, like 
 that of Chinese or any other cultivated but unideal art. 
 
 Let us reflect a moment. Wherein does the savage of 
 primeval times most differ from the philosophic citizen of 
 modern Boston ? Is it not in this — that life, and nature, 
 and art, and thought were to the savage man all in detail ; 
 but to the civilized are in the general ? As the savage 
 spent his time alone, spearing one fish, luring one bird, 
 trapping one animal, whittling out one arrow at a time, 
 measuring the ground with single paces, skulking from 
 tree to tree, and stopping behind each — so all natural and 
 primitive art must be detailed, precise, and characteristic 
 of single individual forms and movements. We, on the 
 contrary, we civilized people, live in crowds. Our cities 
 are aggregates of houses, even with walls and roofs in 
 common. Our furniture is made by machinery, and shovel- 
 led into our life by the million. We have lost all idea 
 of distance in miles and furlongs, like the Irish woman 
 from Boston, who refused to believe that she had arrived 
 at the West Newton station -platform., protesting that " if 
 she'd ha' known it wasn't any further than that she'd ha' 
 walked." All our thinking now is done in generals. Science 
 is merely generalization. Hence our art has become ab- 
 stract also. The feeble attempts of the Pre-Raphaelites 
 only show how utterly disagreeable to the genius of our 
 day would be a return to the individualization and charac- 
 teristic detailed particularity of the first stage of Egyptian 
 art ; when every man built his own tomb, and every image 
 in it was an exact, unflattering, conscientious portrait of 
 himself. 
 
 One more reflection before we proceed. The science of 
 the fine arts is the science of beauty, taste, an apprecia- 
 tion of the fitness of things, harmony, proportion, sym- 
 metry or rhyme, and alliteration or rhythm, — that law of 
 all laws in the Cosmos, the law of pulsation, vibration, or 
 paroxysmal repetition. Now, why do we never expect taste 
 from a savage; and why do we count taste among the prime 
 criteria of good-breeding? Ethnologists have laid down a 
 rale for themselves in estimating the relative antiquity of 
 
202 THE OEIGIN OF [LECT. 
 
 their discoveries. If the objects which they find are polished, 
 they consider them comparatively recent ; if ruder, more 
 ancient ; if very rude, primeval. But what right have 
 they to establish such a canon ? Are there not bad masons 
 a plenty, laying up tumble-down walls to-day ; and miser- 
 able sculptors cutting thousands of horrible tombstones 
 for Mount Auburn and Laurel Hill, which they expect the 
 world to call fine monuments ? What is the ground for 
 this distinction between rude and polished art ? I will 
 tell you. The savage has bad taste, because taste is that 
 faculty which deals with the true relationships of things. 
 Knowledge, therefore, cultivates Taste ; and the savage is 
 ignorant. Not the knowledge of things in detail, but of 
 things in their relationships. Nature deals in what we call 
 delicate touches, and these require sharp eyes to see — 
 loving, patient, educated eyes. This is why sorrow refines 
 the soul. Sorrow is ejection from self into tbe world's 
 wretchedness ; the hurling of the soul from its vantage 
 tower of isolation, down upon the hard pavements and 
 among the hostile crowds below. Sorrow, disaster, teaches 
 men strange bed-fellows, enlarges their comprehension of 
 the worlds in which they live, and so refines them. But 
 even this source of refinement the savage has not ; for his 
 sorrows are solitary ; his woes annihilate him like thunder- 
 bolts ; he perishes too easily ; there are no ameliorations 
 in his lot ; his taste continues hard, for he has nothing 
 about him but the raw stuff of nature, inexorably cruel to 
 him, playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse, and 
 only now and then grimly laughing at him through some 
 odd antic or queer shape of the animal or vegetable king- 
 dom. His imitations, therefore, of nature must be gross, 
 rude, and individual. He has had neither eyes to discover, 
 nor tools to imitate, those combinations of force and form 
 which constitute nature ; still less the taste to feel those 
 delicate ideals of all forms, those Ariels of the tempest of 
 this earth-life, floating high before the soul, and beautiful, 
 and musical as beautiful. These are the spirits of our 
 architecture. These were the genii of Phidias and Prax- 
 iteles, the Prosperos of that magic Isle of Art, at whose 
 command sprang up the divine porticoes of the Parthenon — 
 that Miranda of the Island ; and the three thousand statues 
 of the Olympium at Elis — that synod of all man's exquisite 
 
VIII.] ARCHITECTURE. 203 
 
 imaginations, that symposium of all forms of strength and 
 beauty realized in marble, ivory, and gold. 
 
 But even Greece was not well bred enough to compre- 
 hend the grander combinations of a later day. It needed 
 the marriage of the Classic and Teutonic races to produce 
 the Gothic cathedral. And when the time was fully come, 
 and that wondrous world of reeded piers, and skyey arches, 
 buttresses and pinnacles, towers and spires, in combination, 
 like the solar system, or the framework of the Christian 
 church, rose above the grave of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, 
 see how those three thousand deities of ancient Greece 
 rose too from their old seats in Elis, and flew to perch 
 upon its pinnacles. Painters came journeying from every 
 side of Christendom to hang their histories of angels, 
 saints, and martyrs on its piers. Musicians choired for 
 ever in its chapels, as naturally as nightingales collect 
 among the copses of the Rhine. Kings, dukes, and mer- 
 chants built between its buttresses their tombs, or decor- 
 ated shrines to their tutelary saints with offerings of every 
 precious stone and work of art, whatever they could find, 
 or buy, or steal, to save their wretched souls. Emperors 
 hung up along its vaulting naves the tattered ensigns of 
 their vanquished enemies. Pilgrims, returned from Holy 
 Land, and poor pale women, convalescing from some des- 
 perate malady, placed there their shell and scrip, or votive 
 wax light, or bouquet of artificial flowers. In times of war 
 and pestilence the multitude from the surrounding country 
 rushed to the cathedral church as their sure ark of safety. 
 God shut them in. The deluge might rage outside ; but 
 they were safe. They called it therefore going into the 
 temple Nave, from nmis, the Latin word for ship. The old [ 
 Greeks had the same name for a temple, Naos, because ' 
 naus was the Greek for ship. Architecture was to the 
 ancients, not the building of arches, but_of arks, into which 
 the suffering crowds might be led when troubles rose upon 
 the earth and men despaired of living. 
 
 Around the cathedral the whole religious hierarchy 
 organized itself. On one side stands the baptistry, by 
 which the ark is entered, spiritually. On the other stands 
 the chapter-house, where laws are made to govern the 
 church and regulate its services. A covered way in one 
 direction leads to the archbishop's palace, full of noble 
 
204 THE OEIGIN OF [LECT. 
 
 guests from every land. In the other direction stretch 
 the cloisters of recluses, automata, by which the ceremonial 
 goes on with all the rhythmical steadiness of planetary 
 motion ; or learned men, who keep alive the old traditions 
 of it ; or charitable men, busy about the hospitals and at 
 bedsides, almoners of the Church's charities, or preachers 
 to the poor and hard-worked million. Then in its vaults 
 we have more relationships — these with the past ; sarco- 
 phagi of founders, builders, restorers, rulers of the Church ; 
 the relics of the saints ; caskets of precious jewels ; boxes 
 of gold and silver plate, rich vestments, wealth bequeathed 
 for the care of its roof and walls, and all its numerous uses. 
 If we ascend its staircase we may find within its roof a 
 little village of carpenters, masons, plumbers and glaziers, 
 always occupied in keeping the vast edifice in good repair, 
 — for it is mortal, like other things in this world, and if 
 unwatched, would fall piecemeal, and crumble (like some 
 tall cliff or mountain cedar) into the dust again from which 
 it rose. Happy the ancient Memphite tombs, over whom 
 the sonsy sands were spread, like a bed of snow in winter, 
 to protect the grain for spring. 
 
 I have given you this picture of the architecture of what 
 we misname f the Middle Ages 9 (but which are, as to the 
 whole world-history of man, the modern times in which we 
 actually live), in order to show that the development of art 
 consists in these complex relationships ; that a cathedral 
 temple has grown up, like a mountain mass, by the addi- 
 tion of layer upon layer, formation upon formation, all 
 different, and yet closely related ; by successive additions 
 of great ideas, — ideas bred of civilization, of many super- 
 imposed civilizations ; ideas produced by the conflux of 
 human interests ; correlated ideas of state policy, religious 
 sentiment, and family interests. And as it required the 
 varied experiences of many ages and many races to com- 
 bine in one great monument the parts of a cathedral, so it 
 requires in the spectator a life rich in these ideas to 
 appreciate and admire such a monument. 
 
 The traveller must have travelled much, read much, 
 been greatly conversant with human things ; swept with 
 his own experience through a wide circle of adventures ; 
 grasped the meanings of many social and political pheno- 
 mena, and undergone great revolutions in his own soul, — ■ 
 
Till.] ARCHITECTURE. 205 
 
 or he will walk through the solemn aisles as a brute beast 
 grazes heedlessly among the grandest and most beautiful 
 scenes in nature. If he be a narrow bigot, he will look on 
 all the symbolic devices around him. as a vulgar raree-show, 
 and scoff at the great temple as a house of idols. If he be 
 a petty shopman, he will merely price in his own sordid 
 mind the money value of the golden censer and the marble 
 tomb. If he be a mere political economist he will murmur 
 at the vast and useless expense of walls and arches, 
 towers and pinnacles, as Judas Iscariot did of old, when 
 the woman broke her alabaster box of precious ointment 
 to pour its contents upon Jesus' feet. If he be a mere 
 statesman and a democrat, he will bluster over the despotism 
 of priests, the selfish pride of princes, and the beggarly 
 self-indulgence of the monastic orders. If he be a mere 
 painter or sculptor, uninstructed in the greatest thoughts 
 of all ages, he will occupy his narrowed taste in paltry 
 criticisms upon this or the other work of art ; carp at the 
 architrave mouldings, complain of the want of symmetry 
 between the more ancient Norman nave and the more 
 modern pointed Gothic choir, or draw detracting compari- 
 sons between the facade of this and of some other temple 
 which he fancies rather. None but a noble mind, enlarged 
 by the influx of all the past, can comprehend a great cathe- 
 dral, and the genius of its architects. 
 
 A savage cannot do this. He is stupified by the incom- 
 prehensible. The cockney Englishman, — the raw Ameri- 
 can grown suddenly rich by some infernal speculation, — 
 such men tramp through Europe like the Goths and 
 Vandals from the forests of ancient Germany. They read 
 no story in its monuments. They sail up the Nile, and 
 although its granite walls are covered with writings, these 
 are blank hieroglyphics to such eyes. It is not seeing 
 much that gives man taste or knowledge : it is seeing the 
 relationships of things. Better see a few fine specimens 
 and analyze and comprehend their relationships, than see 
 all things with an unenlightened, unreflecting eye. Napo- 
 leon said it in his famous sentence : ' Soldiers ! forty 
 centuries look down on you from the pyramids/ The 
 Anglo-Saxon calls that bombast. No ; none but a Napo- 
 leon would have thought of such an apostrophe. The past 
 reflects itself in the world's monuments. It is the com- 
 
206 THE ORIGIN OP [LECT. 
 
 monest event to hear a stupid Englishman pride himself on 
 his nonchalance for ruins. Why ? because he is ignorant 
 of history ; he sees no true relation "between a crumbling 
 ruin and his- own well-upholstered drawing-room or 
 smoking-room or billiard-room at home. And yet had not 
 those ruins been, he had never been the comfortable, care- 
 less, arrogant, impertinent Anglo-Saxon gentleman he is. 
 
 I have heard this story told of a New England clergyman ; 
 perhaps some of you may have heard it told of some one 
 else ; it may be true or false ; but it illustrates what I 
 mean to say. Prying about the island of Malta to discover 
 the scene of St Paul's shipwreck, he noticed an English 
 officer standing in a doorway, and addressed him with the 
 question : c Pray, sir, can you inform me where the Apostle 
 Paul was shipwrecked? ' e Ha ! ; was the fierce and quick 
 response. The brother meekly repeated the question : 
 ( Can you tell me where Saint Paul was shipwrecked ? ' ( No, 
 sir ! we want none of your damned conundrums here ! ' 
 The soldier had probably never heard of the event, so full 
 of interest to the clergyman; or if he had, had never 
 thought of modern Malta being the Melita of Scripture 
 history. In fact, all history is a conundrum to such men. 
 Savages have no history at all. 
 
 Everything in mind, in taste, in generosity, in liberty 
 of one's own soul, depends upon the view we get of great 
 relationships. This is why the highest prospects please us 
 least in travelling. The view from the summit of Mount 
 Washington is far inferior to the views we get from many 
 of the lower summits of the White Hills. We see an im- 
 mense panorama, but reduced to one dead level and re- 
 moved from accurate inspection. We must get some 
 standing-point, whence we can see the true construction of 
 things. Cons traction, not structure only. We must be 
 able to tie this and that together, glance up as well as 
 down, get many vistas in many directions ; see how the 
 snow feeds the glacier, and the glacier breeds the river, 
 and the river waters the vale, and the vale debouches on 
 the plain. 
 
 The finest view I know of in the United States is from 
 the summit of Penobscot Knob, from which you look down 
 upon the valley of Wyoming. You see the whole geology 
 of the region at a glance, — the Third Anthracite coal 
 
VIII.] ARCHITECTUEB. 207 
 
 basin, with its rira of conglomerate, — the long canoe of 
 the Upper Devonian mountain, inclosing it on each side 
 and at the ends — outside of which spread out the Middle 
 Devonian valleys. Far to the north stands the great wall of 
 the Alleghanies, with the edge of the First Bituminous coal 
 basin on its summit. As far to the south the Beaver- 
 Meadow mountains spread themselves against the sky, 
 bearing up the basins of the Second Anthracite Coal Field. 
 Through a bold gorge you see the broad sheet of the 
 Susquehannah river come winding superbly in among the 
 corn-covered plains of Kingston in one direction, and 
 sweeping majestically out again through a second gap to- 
 wards the west ; then for the third time striking across 
 the canoe, between grand cliffs, it passes on towards the 
 sea. Close by, in the centre of the fertile fields of the val- 
 ley, glitters the beautiful little city of Wilksbarre. Be- 
 yond it, on the Kingston side, a small grey monument 
 rises to mark the place of the old story of the Indian mas- 
 sacre, and brings to mind the verses of the poet Campbell. 
 On the same northern bank of the river, a little farther 
 down, you may perceive where men have opened up an 
 Indian graveyard in grading for a grand trunk railway to 
 connect the mines and carry off their produce to New York. 
 A hundred collieries with their tall chimneys and huge 
 breakers (those curious institutions peculiar to American 
 collieries) remind you of the genius of the present day. 
 The hum of many trains fill the air. Just at your feet 
 burrows a deep ravine, with a fine water-fall; and on a 
 plot of grass beside it is a pic-nic party of smart shop- 
 keepers and pretty girls, who claim descent from the Con- 
 necticut settlers four generations back. Passenger cars are 
 being dragged up by three incline-planes to a water-shed 
 four hundred feet below you. But, see ! A thunder gust 
 is coming up, bred in the Buffalo mountains, which bound 
 the far-off western horizon. It spreads its great black 
 wings to the right and left, laying its thundering bosom 
 on the Wyoming mountain, as it rushes on towards you. 
 You stand upon a natural plate of rock, on which you notice 
 marks, not made by man, nor by the common elements — 
 long, parallel, straight lines — diluvial scratches they are 
 called. You may observe they point across the valley, be- 
 yond the city, and the river, and the monument, precisely 
 
208 THE OEIGIN OP [LECT. 
 
 towards the gap in the Schickshinny Mountain opposite, 
 through which the river breaks at Campbell's Ledge. A 
 geologist will tell you that these scratches were made by 
 glacial ice coming from Canada. The glacier, entering by 
 that gap, must once have crossed and filled the valley, and 
 so flowed on, southward, over the mountain top on which 
 you stand. And this, of course, innumerable years before 
 the Red man had discovered how to harvest maize upon 
 those bloody flats. 
 
 - But, tell me ! were the Indian to return and seat him- 
 self upon this eminence, would he see all this ? Or, would 
 a Hebrew dealer in old clothes ? Imagine a savage hap- 
 pening here when all beneath his eye was an unbroken 
 wilderness, before a ship had crossed the Atlantic or a 
 lump of coal had been inflamed; and then imagine Sir 
 Charles Lyell, or Henry D. Rogers, or James Hall, or Sir 
 William Logan assembling there around him a knot of 
 geologists, politicians, historians, engineers, artists, and 
 poets ; Longfellow and Emerson, Bancroft and Hildreth, 
 Trautwine and Haupt, Bierstadt and Church, Charles Sum- 
 ner and Wendell Philips, Treasurer McCulloch and Chief- 
 Justice Chase, — if you would comprehend how wholly the 
 sentiment of the beautiful and sublime depends for its ali- 
 ment upon the knowledge of relationships : and then you 
 can also comprehend how the architecture of our modern 
 days, how the grand architecture of any past age which 
 had one, needed times and revolutions and the unfoldings 
 of all human passions, and the realization of all human 
 ideas, to have an existence even in possibility. 
 
 Savages have no art, no architecture, because they have 
 no eyes except for food and dagger ; because they take 
 things seriatim, each unrelated to the rest. Two senti- 
 ments inform the savage mind : death and the love of 
 parents. These produced the earliest art. Their ancient 
 gods were things which threatened death, and persons 
 who bestowed and protected life. Ancestral worship, 
 therefore, or the burial aud after- worship of the parent by 
 the child, and of the chief or petty king by his tribe or 
 subjects, constituted the first of all religions ; and tombs 
 gave origin to all architecture. 
 
 I have made this long digression for the purpose of clear- 
 ing the way to some correct theory of architecture; with 
 
VIII.] AKCHITECTUKE. 209 
 
 no intention, however, of dogmatizing against other more 
 or less accepted theories which do not seem to me so pro- 
 bable, but which, nevertheless, claim more than a passing 
 notice ; although I think that I can show that, while they 
 draw attention to some important points in the history of 
 architecture, and to a certain extent explain some stages 
 of its historical development, they offer no sufficiently 
 broad explanation for the great mystery of its original in- 
 ception in the human mind. 
 
 The first of these sub-theories, as they may be called, 
 supposes that the natural caves of the earth have furnished 
 the first and principal suggestions of architecture. Those 
 who adopt this theory point to the fact that the most 
 famous ancient shrines of India, such as those at Elephan- 
 tine and Ellora, are rock-temples, artificial excavations, or 
 ornamented caverns ; and that many of the ancient monu- 
 ments of Egypt are tomb-temples constructed by driving 
 horizontal caverns into the rock-walls of the Nile; and 
 that most of the ancient temples of Greece and Eome 
 were perfectly dark cells, square, or oblong, surrounded 
 by columns ; mere imitations in the open air of the dark 
 rock-temples of India and Egypt. The body of a Grecian 
 temple is called its cella. But it is not a certain fact that 
 the rock-temples of India are its most ancient edifices ; the 
 topes of the Jains are probably some of them much older. 
 We have lately been informed of the existence of temples 
 built in the open air near Memphis much older than all the 
 known cave-temples of Upper Egypt. In China we have 
 no evidence of any such antiquity in the case of rock- 
 temples ; and in Europe and Africa all the most ancient 
 Druid monuments are either barrows or ranges of stand- 
 ing stones set up* in the open air. If then we can discover 
 some other and better reasons for the darkness of the Greek 
 and Roman temple cella, the theory of which we speak 
 loses its principal support. Here Geology comes to our 
 aid and tells us that the earliest places of human sepulture 
 were natural caves, ceiled up to eternal darkness. After- 
 wards, when men became partially civilized, they ex- 
 cavated artificial caverns for tombs; but left them un- 
 adorned. At the next stage of human life upon the planet 
 these cave-tombs were ornamented first by painting, and 
 afterwards by sculpture more and more elaborate. At a 
 ' 14 
 
210 THE ORIGIN OF [LECT. 
 
 still later age mankind began to erect tombs in the open 
 air, especially on plains, near the great cities, far from any- 
 rock- walls or mountain- sides, and still they built them 
 dark. Thus we arrive at those great monuments, the 
 pyramids. To these, at length, they added porches and 
 porticoes, such as you see in front of the Second Pyramid. 
 And, finally, these porticoes suggested the construction of 
 temples separate from the tombs ; and thus the compli- 
 cated and elaborate system of more modern architecture 
 took its rise. 
 
 The second theory which I will mention has fewer advo- 
 cates. It supposes that the idea of grand architecture 
 arose in the human mind from beholding those great ranges 
 of natural basaltic columns which are common in volcanic 
 countries. The advocates of this theory are obliged to 
 rely almost entirely upon the classic styles of architecture 
 for its support. They point to Doric and Ionic faQades, 
 and the splendid peristyle temples of Greece and Italy. 
 But it is only necessary to call to mind that the earliest 
 temple of which we know, namely, that one lately opened up 
 by Mariette, at a distance of 30 yards south-east from the 
 great sphinx, has magnificent ranges of columns in its m- 
 terior. That it was built by the king I have named, 
 Chephren, the third king of the 4th dynasty, and therefore 
 almost at the opening of ancient Egyptian history, is 
 proved by a multitude of facsimile statuettes found in a 
 well attached to it, all of them stamped with the name of 
 that monarch in a cartouche ; in fact, the earliest specimens 
 of sculptured figures, with dates upon them, yet dis- 
 covered. It is built in the form of the letter T, and its 
 immense roof is sustained by two rows of huge, square pil- 
 lars of rose granite along the nave, supporting an archi- 
 trave of alabaster; while a third row of similar pillars 
 runs along the middle of the transept. Its immense age 
 and the unsophisticated manners of that earliest day -are 
 signalized by the severity, the methodistical simplicity of 
 the whole interior. Not an ornament, not a letter is to be 
 seen; and it confirms an incidental assertion of Strabo, 
 that in Egypt there used to be temples of a barbarous 
 style, supported by rows of columns, and wholly unorna- 
 mented. I will explain, in a future lecture, his epithet 
 1 barbarous/ 
 
VIII.] ARCHITECTURE. ' 211 
 
 The rock-temples of India also, although of far inferior 
 antiquity, are supported within by rows of columns elabor- 
 ately sculptured. Why should we suppose the early archi- 
 tects were necessitated to copy the rare instances of fine 
 basaltic escarpments, when the necessity for pillars to sup- 
 port a roof arises immediately from the enlargement of 
 the cave. The transition from columns within to columns 
 without the temple is the easiest imaginable. But we will 
 find other reasons for rejecting this theory when we come 
 to consider the idea of the column itself, which stood to 
 the ancient mind for a symbol, quite apart from the temple. 
 The column was a divine statue, — a deity. It was so in 
 all the early ages, to all the ancient peoples ; and it was 
 magnificently so employed, with finer and finer effects, as 
 mythologies were born and married to each other. The 
 standing stones of the Druids ; the Lot's Wives and 
 Weeping Niobes of the poets ; the straight processions of 
 deity-headed pillars at Carnac ; the range of eight Doric 
 columns before the Parthenon; and the circles of twin- 
 columns in churches of a later age, were all generated 
 from the myth of men and women turned to stone, termini 
 and Caryatides, gods and priests, standing gigantic and 
 solemn, in orderly silence, within or around the temple of 
 the deity. The proofs of this assertion are too voluminous 
 to lay before you at the end of a lecture ; but no true 
 generalization upon ancient art would be half complete 
 without its distinct recognition. 
 
 There is a third theory which I must allude to briefly, 
 because it has obtained many supporters in England, 
 especially since the discovery of the Lydian and Carian 
 monuments in the early part of this century. It supposes 
 that all ancient architecture originated in an enlargement 
 to public purposes of the private cottage. The theory 
 depends almost entirely on Grecian art for its illustrations, 
 and therefore is of very limited scope, neglecting most of 
 the architectural records of Asia and Africa and Western 
 Europe. It relies upon the form of the Grecian pediment, 
 and the ornamentation of its architrave. The Greek 
 builder was under the necessity of roofing his temples 
 against a northern sky. Snow fell in Greece, and the 
 pitched roof and over-hanging eves were necessaries. 
 These were supported by horizontal beams, like a fisher's 
 
212 THE ORIGIN OP [LECT. 
 
 hut ; the ends of the beams stuck out, and were split by 
 the weather; the rain-drops stood in beads below their 
 edges ; hence the Grecian triglyph ornaments ; they were 
 mere representations of the beam-ends and rain-drops in 
 stone. Just so you will see long dental shadows cast from 
 the alternate projecting tiles upon the side walls of the 
 houses in Southern France, and then these shadows imi- 
 tated in stone around the eves of the Cathedral Church of 
 Toulouse. But suppose all this true, it is only the history 
 of one part of the ornamentation of one style of architec- 
 ture, and that of a very recent age. The great Doric 
 temples at Paestum are supposed to have had no roofs, and 
 yet they had end pediments. Besides, the pediment itself 
 is a religious symbol, apart from all necessity for a roof. 
 It represented the pyramid, as the column represented the 
 obelisk. In the pediment the Greeks placed the statues 
 of their gods. It was their Olympus. But the Greek gods 
 were men of a still older time, and the Greek pediment 
 had come to be the Olympus of their gods, only because 
 the previous pyramids had been the tombs of kings. And 
 so with the architrave under it. It was not the string- 
 piece of a house, laid on the top of a wall to sustain the 
 roof; it was a separate and ancient symbol by itself; it 
 replaced in the modern Greek art the far more ancient 
 flaring cornice and cord-moulding of the Egyptian temples. 
 In fact, all these theories, based upon the local styles of 
 Greece, have lost their credit with archaeologists since the 
 discovery of the so-called ( proto-doric x style of Egypt. 
 The Greeks got all the essential ideas of their Doric archi- 
 tecture from the ancient Egyptians ; and all the variations 
 of it which are called Ionic from the ancient Babylonians 
 and Assyrians. This is now so well made out that it is a 
 generally accepted truth. 
 
 The last and fourth theory of the rise of architecture 
 which I need mention is still more local in its application 
 than the preceding, and therefore as a general theory still 
 less acceptable. It supposes that the first idea of grand 
 architecture came from the woods ; from overhanging trees 
 forming long, lofty vistas to the eye, closed at the farther 
 end with interlacing boughs and leafy tracery. Behold a 
 Gothic church ! See how its piers arise on either hand 
 like mighty trees ! See how the ribs meet over-head ! 
 
VIII.] THE ORIGIN OF ARCHITECTURE. 213 
 
 See the west window with its hundred mullions !' What 
 can be more evident than that the architect had trod the 
 forest aisles, and built them o'er again in stone ! It is a 
 pity to retire from such a phantasy. Nor need we. The 
 last of all architecture must not only include all that went 
 before it, but involve new elements of beauty. The free- 
 masons of Germany and France were princelike poets, and 
 they introduced into the grim conventional grandeurs of 
 the Egyptian art, and into the cold perfect chastity of 
 Grecian art, sweet humours and warm blood, fresh from 
 the heart of nature. They were Christians ; while their 
 Grecian ancestors were pagans ; and the old Egyptian fore- 
 runners of all were dwellers in the tombs. They broke up 
 the massive piers into reedy clustered columns, and shot 
 their branching tops into mid-air to meet in bunches of 
 foliage. They covered up the faces of the damned old 
 gods, of the box-shaped capitals, with leaves and flowers, 
 so that the tender bosoms of their children might not heave 
 with terror as they passed them by in advancing towards 
 the altar, where the Lamb of God was taking away the sins 
 of the whole world. They let into the dark old tomb-like 
 temple all the heaven of the sky, all the warmth of the sun, 
 with healing in its beams; and painted the clerestory with 
 a universal rainbow ; promising, by all the angels, saints, 
 and martyrs in those windows, that wrath should be for- 
 gotten. Then they went forth and built tall towers ; and 
 from their tops shot spires far into heaven, covered like- 
 wise with angels and with roses ; and hung therein whole 
 chimes of bells to drive away all evil, and shower down 
 in music the blessings of the upper and eternal spheres. 
 
 Thank God for these cathedrals ! And for their loving- 
 hearted, large- souled, Caucasian Christian architects. They 
 builded on the ruins of foregoing styles, out of the genius 
 of foregoing days ; but in the new dispensation of a su- 
 perior beauty and a diviner truth. 
 
214 
 
 LECTURE IX. 
 
 THE GEOWTH OP THE ALPHABET. 
 
 Men must have lived a long time upon the earth before 
 they invented an alphabet. It is a wonderful product of 
 the senses, the fancy, and the understanding co-operating. 
 Its use by any people proves that that people has been 
 civilized. If this be true now, it must have been true at 
 the beginning. Thinking men set so high a value on 
 letters that they have been disposed to deny man's genius 
 the ability to invent them, and have therefore affirmed that 
 God gave Adam letters in Paradise. But the genius of 
 man, as it grew and developed its resources, was capable 
 of all things necessary. If the creative plan, revealed in 
 other parts of the creation, was to find its consummation 
 in the development, of human life, through all its stages, 
 upward, to the highest civilization, then the germs of liter- 
 ature were planted early, and appeared in due time. The 
 only questions modern science feels called upon to ask are : 
 how ? in what forms first ? and afterwards ? 
 
 I said, in my last lecture, that the first efforts of man- 
 kind to express the aesthetic sentiments were made in the 
 direction of sculpture and architecture, under the guidance 
 of certain obscure ideas, which I did not attempt then to ex- 
 plain. This I attempt to-night, because these same obscure 
 ideas became openly and plainly embodied afterwards in 
 literature. They decided, in fact, the shapes of the first 
 letters, and the modes adopted by the earliest sculptors and 
 architects for giving a plainer meaning to their images and 
 temples. What I mean to assert is, that the art of letters 
 grew out of the arts of sculpture and architecture, and that 
 we have no trustworthy clue through the mysteries of the 
 
THE GROWTH OF THE ALPHABET. 215 
 
 origins and growths of alphabets, until we have learned to 
 comprehend the mysteries of primeval architecture. 
 
 The first architects were beyond all doubt those religious 
 teachers who civilized and intellectualized the races to 
 which they belonged. Philology teaches us this much, if 
 nothing more. The Greek word for a poet, ttoltjttjs, in- 
 volves the Greek verb iroietv, to make or build. But the 
 word poet is the same as the word bard, and the Hebrew 
 word for cutting, carving, making, creating, was Bora. 
 So the old northern name for a poet, s-kald, is repre- 
 sented by the ancient Egyptian words s-kar, to cut,* and 
 s-yjir, to make. The old Egyptian word bak, to carve, be- 
 came in time the Latin fac-io, and the German and English 
 mach-en. The high priest of Kome was called its pontifex 
 rnaximus, or chief builder of arches or bridges. f 
 
 But there are other strange combinations of these func- 
 tions of the priest and the temple-builder. The oldest 
 Druid temples we know of are circles of stones. The 
 Greeks called circles kvkXoi, dropping the r. The word 
 seems to have been originally kir-kir, or KeX-KeA ; for in all 
 languages the letters r and I are confounded and exchanged 
 one for th*e other. Now the oldest of all architectural 
 edifices throughout the Mediterranean countries, except 
 Egypt, are old walls and ruined buildings of immense 
 stones, called Cyclopean. I cannot go into the discussion 
 of the nature of the Cyclops, but I think it can be proved 
 that they were the representatives, in fable, of the wild 
 Druid priests of the circles of standing stones, like Stone- 
 henge, from which we get our word for church, or kirk. J 
 In archaic Grecian times all the poets before Homer and 
 Hesiod were grouped into one class, representing a hoar 
 antiquity. They were known as the kvkXlk (cyclic) poets, 
 the poets or bards of the circle. The earliest of them all 
 was called Arctinus, or the Arkite. Their themes were 
 exclusively Arkite ; their poetry is described by the Greeks 
 
 * Compare English 'to scar ;' Welsh mountain-sides, scars. 
 
 t vjft hs, to sing, a bard. Man squatting, wrapped up. Sarcophagus 
 \\ of an^-hepi. British Museum. Bunsen's Ideograph, 104. 
 Compare Hs-iri, Osiris, and his picture, Ideograph, 130. The judge is 
 still more strongly marked than the poet. He sits in a bath of water. J&~ 
 He is called stm, meaning judge, one who hears truth. D. 34. Ideo- ^V 
 graph, 97. In Ideograph 27, the panther skin replaces the water. ^Sfi^ 
 
 X See the whole discussion from Bozzel in Leinpriere. (B. 52. 32.) 
 
216 THE GKOWTH OF [LECT. 
 
 of a later day as rude, like that of the Welsh bards ; their 
 style was Egyptian-like in its stiffness and severe sim- 
 plicity. Their sphere of thought was bounded by the 
 magic circle of primeval mythology ; their line vanishes 
 into the dim background of Grasco- Asiatic literature ; one 
 of them, called the Ethiopian, sang of Memnon. They 
 were entirely different from the poets who sang the wars 
 of Greece : the historians, comedists, and love- song writers 
 of a later age. To the Greeks of Plato's day, their poems 
 corresponded to the Psalms of David in our sacred Scrip- 
 tures, or to the hymns of the Kig- Veda in the Hindu Scrip- 
 tures. When the Homeric scholiasts quoted them, they 
 simply said ev kvk\<$ Aeyet, ' as it is written in the circle/ 
 just as the apostles quoted the books of the Old Testament, 
 saying, ( as it is written in the prophets/ 
 
 Proclus thus describes the ancient Epic cycle. I give a 
 free translation of his words : ' The Epic cycle is deduced 
 from a mixture of heaven and earth, from which came three 
 hundred-handed sons, and three Cyclopses. It briefly dis- 
 cusses gods and other fabulous things, and contains some 
 history. It is ended by the labour of many poets at the 
 murder of Ulysses, by his unconscious son Telegon. Its 
 hymns are still studied, not for the sake of virtue, but for 
 the good order of its facts. And it preserves the names 
 and countries of its bards/ 
 
 Let me give you one of those ancient sagas, — the story 
 of Pelops. ' In Sipylus in Phrygia there once reigned a 
 wicked king Tantalus, son of Jupiter ; he had two children, 
 Pelops and Mobe. At first the gods were his friends and 
 feasted at his house ; but he committed two great sins, for 
 which he was sent to hell, where he remains, standing up 
 to his lips in water, unable to obtain a drop to quench his 
 raging thirst, while a great rock, suspended over his head, 
 threatens every moment to fall and crush him. His prime 
 offence was that of divulging to mortals the secrets of the 
 gods, which he heard at his own table. His second offence 
 was the diabolical trick which he played upon his Olympian 
 guests, in cooking his own boy Pelops and serving him up 
 as a ragout, to see if their omniscience would discover 
 what it was they ate. Mercury restored the boy to life, 
 but could not recover his shoulder, which had been already 
 eaten. So he made the boy a new shoulder of ivory. His 
 
IX.] THE ALPHABET. 217 
 
 fresh, beauty now ravished the heart of Neptune, who 
 carried him, in his own golden chariot, to the top of 
 Olympus, until the rest of the enraged deities, after a furi- 
 ous knock-down and drag-out fight in the royal dining- 
 hall, had settled his father's hash; then he was carried 
 back, to rule in his father's stead. His descendants for 
 three generations reigned in Argos ; that means the Pelo* 
 ponnesus (Pelops' ship, or Pelops' isle). And his bones 
 were afterwards taken to Troy, and became the Palladium 
 of that unhappy town. His sister Niobe had all her 
 children killed by Diana, and she herself was turned into 
 stone, and still sits weeping on a mountain in Phrygian 
 
 There is no disputing the theory, that in all the items of 
 this story (and it is only an example of the whole class of 
 Cyclopean poems) there rules a reference to some original 
 history like that which the Hebrew poets have embodied in 
 the story of Noah and Mount Ararat. Tan-tal-us repre- 
 sents the Toe, or mountain, submerged to its very lips. 
 The stone above his head is the ark about to touch the 
 mountain-top. Tantalus is in Tartarus ; is, in fact, the same 
 as Tartarus, the place of Torture, the cavern in the 
 mountain, the home of mysteries, and horrors, and woes, 
 the holle, hole, or hell of the Germanic nations. Niobe, the 
 daughter of the mountain, is again the ark, turned to stone; 
 her name, Niob, is the Egyptian word 0e/3, the ark of 
 Osiris, and the Hebrew word Theba, Noah's ark. The 
 Greek Taurus, a mountain, is the Arabic tel or tol, a 
 mountain. But the Shemitic nations wrote all their words 
 backward from right to left, and so this word tol becomes 
 lot, whose wife (her name is no where given) was also 
 turned, like Niobe, to stone. Pelops, Niobe' s brother, was 
 the Noah of the story. First, his father offered him up to 
 the gods, as the Brahma of the Hebrews offered up his 
 son Ikswaca (Isaac) . Neptune, or the rising deluge, carried 
 him up in the golden car (the ark) to the top of Olympus, 
 until his father was destroyed, that is, until the Ararat was 
 sunk to his very lips in the hell of waters. Then he was 
 restored. His descendants reigned in Argos ; they were 
 priests of Arkism. He himself became the divinity of the 
 Tor, the city of Troy. And so on, ad infinitum, et ad nau- 
 seam. 
 
 I did not intend to introduce the subject of mythology 
 
218 THE GROWTH OF [LECr. 
 
 so early in this course of lectures. It will claim our 
 attention fully hereafter. But I am forced to it, in 
 order to state clearly the true theory of architecture, and 
 the true origin of the alphabet. Architecture began with 
 imitations of Tantalus and Niobe and Pelops in stone. 
 Architecture began in attempts to build pyramids like 
 Ararat, and to place upon their summits shrines of worship 
 and houses of God symbolical of the ark. For this purpose 
 islands were especially selected because they were sur- 
 rounded by the sea. Sometimes even they were said to float, 
 as in the case of Delos (tel). The marshes of inundated 
 deltas, the level sealike expansions of the desert sands, were 
 equal favourites for building places. Where water could not 
 otherwise be obtained tanks were dug, and in their centres 
 pyramids and temples were erected. Especial use was 
 made of every natural peak of rock around which the 
 fluvial mud of some great river, like the Ganges, Euphrates, 
 Nile, or Rhone, had settled ; and on these the traveller is 
 sure to see the ruined temples and monasteries of the old 
 religions converted now into Christian churches, wherever 
 Christianity has taken possession of the ground.* 
 
 Old books on architecture are full of definitions of this 
 or that style. Until recently none but the so-called classic 
 styles were recognized as genuine architecture. All else 
 was merely barbarous. The classic styles were those of 
 Greece and Home, — Doric, and Ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan, 
 and Composite. But when Bruce and Belzoni discovered 
 Doric columns in Upper Egypt, and Layard and Lassen 
 Ionic capitals on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, 
 writers on architecture began to take larger views of the 
 subject. When Daniels published his magnificent plates 
 of the Pagodas of India, and Kingsborough and Stephens 
 made known to the world the Egyptian-like edifices of central 
 America; when other travellers had brought to notice the 
 monuments of Thibet and China, the immense statues and 
 Cyclopean walls of the Pacific islands, and the Druid 
 Tolmens of the Sahara desert, — then it became possible 
 for Fergusson to write on architectural science a text-book 
 
 * The pyramid of Cheops is said to be built on such a rock. Another, 
 a ledge of rock in situ, is seen in the floor of the Mosque of Omar. St 
 Michael's Mounts. See the St George's of the Delta of the Rhone, &c, 
 and those back of Aries. 
 
IX.] THE ALPHABET, 219 
 
 as far in advance of old Vitruvius, as Ly ell's Principles 
 and Dana's Geology are in advance of the local classifica- 
 tions of Werner, or of Baton's Manual. 
 
 Still the great primal principles of architecture, in my 
 opinion, have not been clearly stated by any writer. We 
 are bewildered by an ever-increasing multitude of pictures. 
 We must give up for a moment the study of these details, 
 and take a more distant and summary view of the great 
 edifices of the world, if we are to detect the aboriginal 
 principles of architecture. 
 
 Let us select a Chinese or Thibetan temple, a Hindoo 
 pagoda, an Egyptian propylon, and a Norwegian church, 
 and set them side by side before us. Now the question 
 arises, are there any prime or essential features common 
 to them all ? If there be, these common traits must give 
 us some clue to the universal meaning of architecture, and 
 therefore to its aboriginal ideas. 
 
 I will not delay you in the answer to this question. 
 Look at these pictures and you have the evidence before you. 
 
 Fig. 1. Thibetan, Hindu, Egyptian, and Norwegian Fig. 2. An Egyptian 
 temples. hieroglyphic. 
 
 These buildings — in their dates and situations so remote 
 from one another, in their details of ornamentation so 
 different from each other — show, nevertheless, one common 
 plan. Each of them consists, as you see, of two chief mem- 
 bers — a lower and an upper. The lower member is a 
 square pyramid ; the upper member an over-hanging box. 
 All the original or religious architectures of the world have 
 been framed upon this plan. And I leave it for yourselves to 
 judge if it be not the plan you would expect the ancient 
 priesthoods to adopt, if we be permitted to suppose that 
 the first great fact of human history was some such grand 
 catastrophe as that of Noah's flood. The lower member of 
 the plan would represent the Ararat ; the upper member 
 would represent the ark that rested on its summit. 
 
 But subdivision is the universal primary mode of growth, 
 as all oologists well know. Every germinal cell first elon- 
 
220 THE GROWTH OP [LECT. 
 
 gates and then parts in the middle to form two, which in 
 turn elongate, separate, and form four. These four form 
 eight, and so on through eternity. Thought, too, obeys 
 this law of matter. The first mythology must be, in course 
 of time, extended and bisected, like all other living things. 
 The creation is an apothecary's counter ; heresy is its 
 golden spatula. 
 
 We must investigate the rise of some great schism in 
 mythology, which produced also a great first schism in 
 architectural ideas, resulting in a two-fold historic develop- 
 ment of the original plan. 
 
 While the single pyramidal j)ile, with the single shrine 
 upon its apex, continued tcTbe, in China, in Thibet, and in 
 India, the type of the religious edifice, there arose in 
 Egypt, and spread throughout the European world, a du- 
 plicated type of temple — two mountains side by side, two 
 arks upon their tops. The earliest Egyptian monuments 
 are single ; those of the middle and later empires are 
 double. Two vast propylsea tower side by side to form 
 the portal of that immense group of courts and shrines 
 which we call the temple of Karnak at Thebes. 
 
 In modern times the Christian cathedrals were built 
 upon this plan, but with a difference. Instead of the 
 twin towers being themselves capped with two arks, a 
 single ark or nave was placed between them. Look at the 
 huge s'quare Roman towers at the west end of the Abbey 
 of Jumieges, near Rouen ; at the great west-end Norman 
 towers of William the Conqueror's abbey-church for men 
 in Caen ; at the Gothic towers of Notre Dame, in Paris ; at 
 Wren's west towers of Westminster; at all the most 
 celebrated cathedrals of western Europe, some of which 
 have been completed during our own lives. It is the plan 
 of Christendom. 
 
 What explanation now has history, or natural history, to 
 offer of this singular departure from the original type of 
 temple ? Does it mark the origin and growth of that nice 
 aesthetic function of the mind, which we call symmetry ? 
 Is it related to the rise of those obscure but natural specu- 
 lations of the old mythologists, which resulted in the spread 
 of Phallic worship, and which duplicated all the gods of 
 Egypt and Greece, and laid the foundation for the early 
 speculations of philosophers respecting the male and female 
 
IX.] THE ALPHABET. 221 
 
 elements of force in nature ? or does it stand in evidence 
 of the first attempts of the human intellect to oppose 
 dualism to unity, and satisfy the human soul with a philo- 
 sophy that shall explain the origin of evil without detract- 
 ing from the goodness of omnipotence ? At all events, I 
 think I can convince you it was no mere accident. 
 
 Perhaps, if we could discover why the Hebrew story of 
 the deluge, written in southern Syria, went to the borders 
 of the Caspian Sea, to Armenia, to select a mountain for 
 its scenery, we might solve the riddle. The Armenian 
 Ararat (see Fig. 3) is an extinct volcano, rising directly 
 
 Fig. 3. Mount Ararat in Armenia. 
 
 from the surface of an immense plain to the distinguished 
 height of 13,000 feet. The plain is itself 3000 feet above 
 the sea ; all the upper part of the mountain is therefore 
 within the limits of perpetual snow. But it is not a single 
 cone ; it is grandly duplicated ; and in the notch between 
 the cones tradition says the ribs of the old ship still sleep; 
 but woe to the mortal who attempts to reach its dreadful 
 resting-place ! 
 
 The cones are of unequal height, one being 13,300, the 
 other only 9500 feet above the bed of the Araxes, flowing 
 through the plain. ' Nothing can be more beautiful than 
 its shape/ writes Morier, ' or more awful than its height. 
 All the surrounding mountains sink into , insignificance 
 when compared to it. It is perfect in all its parts ; no 
 hard, rugged feature ; no unnatural prominences ; every- 
 thing is in harmony, and all combine to render it one of 
 the sublimest objects in nature/ And we may well add, 
 
222 THE GEOWTH OP [lECT. 
 
 one of the most terrible. It is a sleeping lion. In the 
 earthquake of 1 840, which lasted from June until Septem- 
 ber, masses of rock and ice were thrown from the upper 
 cones, 6000 feet at a single bound, covering portions of the 
 plains below with desolation.* 
 
 It seems to have been this splendid object that cap- 
 tivated the fancy of the human race as it moved westward 
 along the historic belt of emigration. Mount Masius, 
 the Damavend, Mount Meru, the Sufued Koh,f Adam's 
 peak in Ceylon,J and all those other typical diluvial sum- 
 mits of central and eastern Asia were but single peaks, 
 and satisfied the transcendental idea of a mountain. This 
 double cone of Ararat (or the two Ararats, as they are 
 called,) produced a ripple in the stream of tradition, divided 
 it, and gave birth to the second grand order of duplicated 
 architecture^ 
 
 There must have been among the early masons the same 
 diversity of natural temperament as now exists among their 
 representatives. One class would be idealists, and claim 
 that the true prototype and divine original was the moun- 
 tain idea in its absolute unity. Another party, more 
 sensuous and literal, and perhaps more artistic, would de- 
 vote themselves to the expansion of that first idea, and 
 to the imitation of the actual Ararat, producing all their 
 forms in double series. Thus even the Druid barrow came 
 to be elongated and furnished with a peak at either end ; 
 for it is scarcely disputed now that the long barrows are of 
 a later age than the round mounds. Thus, also, in Italy, 
 the pediment was split into two, and the urn was placed 
 
 * See Major Voskoboinikof's report in the Athenaeum for 1841, p. 157; 
 quoted in Kitto, sub voc. 
 
 f Or White Mountain, on the road to Peshawur and Cabul. Opposite 
 it is Noorgill, or Kooner, a towering hill. Here the Affghans set the 
 Ark. o; (Burne's Travels in Bokhara, i. p. 117.) 
 
 % The Samaritan Pentateuch gives in Gen. viii. 4, Sarandib, which is 
 the Arabic name of Ceylon. 
 
 § B-ffK 'The mountains of Ararat? It is nowhere a Bible name for a 
 mountain. Gen. viii. 4. See only elsewhere 2 Kings xix. 37 ; Is. xxxvii. 
 38 ; and Jer. li. 27. It must have been east of M esopotamia ; see Gen. 
 xi. 2, and Kitto's fine argument. In the Sibylline verses the mountains of 
 Ararat are in Phrygia ; A-napta in Phrygia was called by Greeks ki^ojtoq, 
 the Ark, because enclosed by three rivers in the shape of an ark. 
 
IX.] THE ALPHABET. 223 
 
 between its peaks, instead of on the summit of the- pedi- 
 ment. (See Fig. 4.) 
 
 Fig. 4. The Pediment, split to receive the Urn ; and the Hour-glass. 
 
 We are now prepared to speak of ' styles/ and to study 
 architecture in detail. 
 
 Every race, almost every nation, developed the Arkite | 
 plan, whether single or double, in a separate style : a style 
 of its own, or a composition of the styles of its neighbours 
 and of preceding ages. Nothing human remains un- 
 changed, except fundamental ideas. The whole effort of 
 nature is to put forth buds and branches on every side, so 
 as to realize an idea to the utmost. Nature has no sympa- 
 thy with our purist prejudices. She is no quaker. She 
 never grows cold and stupid. She is never consistent ; 
 she is always ready to go back and begin again, as water, 
 when stopped by some obstruction, finds new channels 
 that suit it quite as well. Every style has had its own 
 particular and peculiar beauties ; and every style has 
 begun in simplicity and grown composite ; or become de- 
 graded, as we choose to say. Every original symbolical 
 form has been taken up by the apprentices of the master- 
 mason who invented it, and been elaborated, and intens- 
 ified, and repeated, and varied, in all possible ways, and 
 combined with other symbols, until its personal identity 
 has become lost amid the crowd of similar forms; until its 
 nature has been perverted, and its meaning contradicted, 
 and its eminence exchanged for degradation, aud its- 
 beauty bartered for some cheap utility. 
 
 As in eastern lands the slave becomes sultan, and the 
 sons of princes have their eyes put out and become beggars 
 in the streets, so in architectural styles the fisher's skiff 
 has risen to be a cathedral, and the pyramid of Cheops 
 sunk to become the chamfered point of a graveyard obelisk. 
 
 It was in obedience to this organic law of redupli- 
 cation and variation, that the primitive symbolism of 
 
224 THE GEOWTH OF [LECT. 
 
 architecture developed itself. You remember tlie story of 
 the Apostle Paul and the silversmiths of Ephesus, whose 
 trade was to make shrines for the great goddess Diana. It 
 is understood by antiquarian scholars that these shrines 
 were small portable models of the Ephesian Temple, perhaps 
 intended for private oratories, like those plaster shrines 
 of the Virgin Mary, which good Roman Catholics buy 
 every day to place upon their dressing-tables or mantle- 
 pieces. So in the earliest times, the more celebrated 
 monuments of architectural magnificence were thus re- 
 duced for private devotion. 
 
 The same desire to duplicate the symbol provoked the 
 manufacture of ornaments in the shape of temples ; orna- 
 ments not only for the person, but for the temples them- 
 selves. A modern instance of this application of art is to 
 be seen in York minster, in the centre of which, and hung 
 midway between the vaulted ceiling and the floor, or, 
 rather, I should say, supported in that position by an 
 arch-like partition in the church, called a rood loft, is seen 
 the great organ, a model of the cathedral itself. Just so, 
 in ancient times, the idea of a truncated pyramid support- 
 ing an ark-like cornice was thinned down to the idea of a 
 square column supporting a box-shaped capital. 
 
 • We must start all architecture from the Pyramid ; as we 
 must draw from Ararat, or some other sacred mountain, the 
 source of all mythology, g J^- g [^ was the old Egyptian 
 
 or hieroglyphic name for a pyramid. All architecture was 
 in its beginnings bar-bar-ous, that is, pyramidal. The term 
 was afterwards extended in its meaning, by the Greeks, to 
 include all other objects foreign to their refined tastes and 
 their artistic religion. They called the Thracians, the 
 Phrygians, the Syrians barbarians, although in many 
 respects more advanced in civilization than themselves, not 
 because these nations committed savage acts, or erected 
 less magnificent monuments than the Greeks themselves, 
 but because these nations, in their religious architecture, 
 and in their superstitious rites, preserved a large measure 
 of that Arkite or pyramidal mythology which took its 
 name from the pyramid or BAR-BAR of old Egypt.* 
 
 * TlLpiitpig (homo) dk tan Kar 'EMaflf, yXaxraav Ka\bg KayaQoQ. Herod. 
 II. 143. Uhlmann, in his De Veterum Egyptorum lingua et litteris, 
 
TX.] THE ALPHABET. 225 
 
 The same origin is to be assigned to the obelisk, the 
 Egyptian name of which, however, was T^N. Some have 
 talked absurdly enough about its being a representation of 
 the forthputting power of nature. Others have supposed 
 it an invention of the fire-worshippers to represent a flame. 
 But the first appearance of fire-worship in Egypt dates 
 back no farther than the 17th dynasty, and soon became 
 a detested heresy; while there are obelisks of the 12th 
 dynasty. 
 
 The obelisk was merely a portable, or idealized, or ad- 
 junct pyramid. It stood isolated in front of the pyramidal 
 propylon. When the propylon was duplicated the obelisk 
 was duplicated also. All obelisks are terminated above in 
 a genuine minute pyramid. 
 
 The same origin is to be assigned to the solitary 
 column in other lands, or to the pairs of columns, like those 
 which stand before the rock-temples of India. Solomon 
 made two to stand before his sanctuary in Jerusalem, 
 calling the one Boaz and the other Jachin. And the Jews 
 were accustomed to plant two trees in every garden to re- 
 present these columns. 
 
 We reach next, in order of development, the arcade. 
 The Egyptians had already used it for their inside galleries 
 and temple-halls. The Greeks and Romans, obliged to 
 roof their sacred edifices, placed it outside, underneath the 
 gable end or pediment ; increasing the number of columns 
 from four to six and eight, and finally carrying whole 
 ranges of them around the temple cella. The pediment 
 
 p. 31, suggests that Herodotus was led to this etymology by the Egyp- 
 tian (or Coptic) expressions <ppnoo&, pulcher, fxrji, Justus esse. But I think 
 it quite possible that Herodotus rather gave the Egyptian sentiments re- 
 specting the pyramid, as the oldest, most sacred, best, and most beautiful 
 thing in the world. On .page 27 Uhlmann thinks, from the fact that the 
 
 Egyptian pyramus is in Arabic .*„&, that the py is no essential part of the 
 
 word, but only the Coptic article; while papa is the Egyptian word for 
 height, as it is in Hebrew (Kirch. Scala. M. 49). Compare Rossii Etym. 
 iEgypt. 159. Kitto's Bibl. Diet. Other etymologies have been proposed, 
 such as 7r-o8po-/3a, sepulchre of kings, but the subject is still in the dark. 
 Comparative philologists, however, will agree with me that vvp-p.id is 
 directly convertible into (3ap-(3ap, or vice versa, and that in the absence of 
 any universally accepted etymology for irvpafxiq, the Egyptian synonyme 
 given in the text above is perfectly good ground for a new theory to stand 
 upon. 
 
 15 
 
226 THE GEOWTH OE [LECT. 
 
 which they supported was but another pyramid elevated in 
 the air. The words 'pyramid and pediment are the same 
 in their alphabetic elements. It was in the tympanum 
 of the pediment that the. Greeks assembled the images 
 of their Olympic deities.* The whole roof of the Grecian 
 temple, although so different in outside form, was, in the 
 general plan, identical with the upper or ark member of 
 the structure. The Romans, not content with this, went 
 one step farther, and placed upon the peak of the pediment 
 an URN. 
 
 I must stop for a moment to enforce the argument I am 
 pursuing with a definition of this remarkable word. We 
 think that it is merely the Latin urna, which has become 
 the property of all the Eomanic languages. But, in fact, 
 the Latins received it from the East. It is nothing more 
 or less than the Hebrew name for the Ark of the Covenant, 
 arn (p$$) . But we can go still farther back. It was the 
 Egyptian name for the cartouche. 
 
 Now the cartouche is an oval enclosure containing the 
 hieroglyphic letters which make a royal name. The 
 Pharaoh in his sarcophagus or urn was symbolized by his 
 name in its cartouche or ARN. The Romans merely applied 
 the word to express a coffer of peculiar shape made to 
 preserve the ashes of the dead. The modern urn is the 
 lineal descendant of the symbolic sarcophagus of Osiris, 
 and of the ark of Noah. 
 
 Look at its peculiar shape (Fig. 4) . It consists of a com- 
 bination of the same two members, the ark upon the 
 mountain top, which I before described as constituting the 
 essential parts of every piece of architecture. This urn 
 the Romans placed upon the top of the temple pediment. 
 
 Architects have capped the temple with a dome to du- 
 plicate and make more eminent the representation of the 
 mountain, and have placed on top of this a lily, a pine apple, 
 a lantern or cupola, to represent again the ark. The Mo- 
 hammedans have chosen the more appropriate ship symbol 
 of the crescent. 
 
 The same compound symbol is seen inside the churches 
 of Christians in three forms : first, in the altar (al-tor, 
 the mountain), and upon it the communion cup ; secondly, 
 
 * Compare the cap on the head of Perseus, ornamented with figures 
 of the deities. 
 
IX.] THE ALPHABET. 227 
 
 in the baptismal font, upon its spreading sculptured base ; 
 and thirdly, in the pulpit, with its ark-like box, from which 
 the preacher prophesies, and with its quaintly- carved stem 
 below. Its very name pulpit is convertibly identical with 
 pyramid and pediment. 
 
 I leave a fruitful theme, capable of infinite and delight- 
 ful illustration ; as any one may see who enters one of the 
 modern Catholic churches, built under the supervision of 
 the Jesuit priests, where, especially about the sanctuary, 
 symbol is piled on symbol, each one the mere repetition of 
 the other, until the eye is wearied with confusion and the 
 taste disgusted with excess. 
 
 Let us go back again to earlier times, when moderation 
 and simplicity still kept the symbolic shape of ornaments 
 sharply cut and easy to be recognized. Let us take for a 
 good specimen to study, the Doric column. 
 
 The Doric Style, so called, was not invented by that 
 small tribe of Grecian people called the Dorians. As I 
 have already stated, it is found in Upper Egypt, in archi- 
 tecture of great antiquity. It would almost be just to say 
 that the Dorians were called after it. They were worship- 
 pers of the Tor; and the Doric column became in their 
 hands the purest, simplest, noblest, and most beautiful of 
 all the forms that the architectural idea has ever assumed. 
 Look at it. Poets and painters have vied with each other 
 in exhausting the vocabulary of admiring epithets, to de- 
 scribe its severe simplicity, its exquisite symmetry, its 
 graceful majesty, the charm of its lights and shadows, the 
 serenity of its unconscious strength ; the delicacy of its 
 capital, yielding to the pressure above, yet sustaining the 
 crushing weight; and the vertical contrast to the horizontal 
 architrave, of its fluted shaft, rising out of the expanded 
 marble floor of stilobate like an island-mountain from the 
 placid surface of the sea. For that is just what it was 
 meant to represent. Therefore the Doric column has no 
 base. And therefore, also, the Doric column is channeled 
 like a mountain with valleys. The Doric channels are the 
 ravines descending to the water; their shape is quite differ- 
 ent from that of the Ionic or Corinthian flutes. 
 
 Remember that we are dealing with a product of the 
 fancy ! Remember, also, that the early fancy of mankind 
 was a heated fancy, and had lost none of its fire in the time 
 
228 THE GEOWTH OF [LECT. 
 
 of Pericles. It was a religious fancy, an unscientific fancy, 
 an enthusiastic fancy, a fancy sticking at nothing by which 
 it could reach its symbolistic ends. At all events, it was 
 no modern, materialistic, cynical, critical, mechanical, 
 steam-engine building, Wall-street or State-street jobbing 
 fancy. All the history of art tells us that it was finer than 
 our judgment of it. 
 
 I have already mentioned the literal exchange of L for 
 E all over the world, and the fact that the Greeks and 
 Phoenicians said tor and zuu where Arabs said tol and 
 tel for mountain. So the Greeks named the shaft of their 
 Toric column arvXr] (s-tol), from which we get our English 
 word style, through the little column-like pencil with which 
 the scribes wrote upon tablets of wax.* Is not this a curi- 
 ous illustration of our proposition that the men of letters 
 in old times were the architects ? But I will give you now 
 a still more curious and significant coincidence. 
 
 The favourite Egyptian hieroglyphic form of the letter 
 A was a feather, plume or quill. t It stood at the begin- 
 
 Fig. 5. A ; IU; Goddess Ma ; Truth ; Crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. 
 
 ning of all words the first sound in which was A. But a 
 jackal holding a feather was the emblem of a scribe. On 
 the head of a sitting goddess the upright feather meant 
 historic truth. MA, the goddass of truth, had two feathers 
 on her head ; as the shrine had two obelisks before it on 
 which were written its history. The double letter, A A, was 
 originally, therefore, written with two feathers, which, how- 
 ever, iD time came to stand, in the later alphabet, for the 
 letter I, or rather the diphthong IU, as in the word Judsea. 
 Observe the coincidence ! The Coptic word AA means to 
 build. And the old Egyptian name for an edifice is simply 
 A, the single letter A. The scribe and the architect were 
 one. The temple-wall and the chisel which cut those im- 
 mortal hieroglyphics into its surface were one. The 
 
 * The S initial stands for san, Sacred. 
 
 f See Bunsen, p. 556 and 561, and Ideography, No. 174, 173. (Fig. 
 5, above.) 
 
IX.J 
 
 THE ALPHABET. 229 
 
 mountain, tol, became a carpenter's tool; the -column 
 dwindled to the engraver's style ; but the soul that lived 
 and spoke in all of them never changed ; it was the same 
 throughout the series. 
 
 We have been occupied with but one part of the Doric 
 column, the shaft or style ; let us now look at the other 
 member of it, the capital. There are etymologies con- 
 nected with this also. I have said more than once that 
 the words tol and toe were the same : here is another 
 proof of it. King James's version calls the capitals of 
 Solomon's two columns, chapiters. You will find no ety- 
 mology of capital in the books, except in the form of a 
 reference to the Latin caput, a head, capitalis, principal. 
 But capitalis will not explain that other equally Arkite 
 word, the name of the Roman capitol, that citadel which 
 contained its native gods, its treasures, its recorded laws, 
 and the heart's love of the great Republic. Every city of 
 any note in the ancient world had a similar citadel, the 
 home of its tutelary deities. And what was such a citadel 
 called ? An arlc — of course : AEX. And the records 
 which it secured — what were they ? — ARChives. 
 
 The capitol of a column, then, is the cap of its tol, or 
 style ; the ship upon the mountain-top. And it was pre- 
 cisely in the Doric order of architecture, the shaft of which 
 represented the mountain idea with most precision, that we 
 have a capital most simply and purely representative of the 
 ship. When I thus identify cap with ship, it is only what 
 is done every day in using words similarly allied, one of 
 which retains and the other has lost the initial s : such as 
 cup and s-coop ; the farmer calls his cap-like bee-hive a 
 s-cap ; the sailor calls the master of his ship a s-Mpper ; 
 and the little boat from shore a s-kijf. 
 
 The word cup signifies holding or containing; and in 
 such modern words as coop the form of the vessel is not at 
 all essential to the meaning. A hencoop is not at all 
 cup- shaped, but yet acts the part of a receptacle. And 
 even the Latin cap-io, I take or hold, suggests no form. 
 But at the beginning the form was essential to the mean- 
 ing. The Hebrew word for the palm of the hand, there- 
 fore, was cap (ftp), because it throws itself into the form of 
 a cup to receive anything. Many names of sacred shrines 
 like the Kaaba of Mecca, and the profane little Kaabahs 
 
230 THE GROWTH OF [LECT. 
 
 which our young ladies find so convenient, are traceable to 
 the same root which gave the ship its name. 
 
 Going back beyond the Hebrew use of the word cap, we 
 get still clearer light upon its origin ; for the arm stretched 
 upward in prayer or oblation, with the palm of the hand 
 turned upward, is one of the commonest sights upon the 
 monumental walls of Egypt. Look at it for a moment 
 (Fig. 6), and see how the Arkite imagination would seize 
 upon this living symbol, this Doric column done in flesh 
 and blood. The Hebrew word for arm was deo or tor 
 (srn).* The hand lifted in prayer was therefore a true 
 caph-tor, or capital. There is one very remarkable ideo- 
 graph on the Egyptian monuments which can be explained 
 in no other way than by reference to these facts. It is 
 Bunsen'sNo. 99 (Fig. 6), a man kneeling and hold- 
 ing up a basin, with the pronunciation n'ham, and 
 the meaning to save. What has the holding up of a 
 basin to do with salvation ? Nothing, unless there 
 be a reference to the great salvation of Arkite mythology. 
 
 Observe now how our English word arm fits into all this. 
 In drawing your attention to it, I am not digressing ; but, 
 on the contrary, leading on directly to the main subject of 
 this lecture, which I am impatient to enter upon in a more 
 systematic manner ; but all these preliminary details were 
 necessary, and will come of use. First, let me once more 
 insist upon the identity or interchangeability of the liquids 
 L and R. Secondly, you must accept Grimm's law as 
 equally true, although I cannot stop to prove it in extenso, 
 that the labial letters B, P, F, V, the vowel U, and the nasal 
 M, are also interchangeable in a certain order in all lan- 
 guages and dialects yet studied. Do you not call Maria and 
 Mary, Molly and Polly ? Do you not call Martha, Matty and 
 Patty ? Margaret becomes Maggy and Peggy, &c. Keep- 
 ing this law in mind you will see how the English word 
 ABM corresponds with the word ALP, a mountain, pre- 
 cisely as the Hebrew dor, an arm, corresponded to the 
 Phoenician tor, and the Arabic tel, a mountain. You can 
 also see why the Mont Blanc of Greece was called QiLuKpos ; 
 and why the mountain beast of Asia with the houdah on 
 
 m jm the arm, the shoulder of an animal, force, strength, &c. ^3 be- 
 longs to a different set of ideas, regarding the arm as a weapon, or a tool., 
 
IX.] 
 
 THE ALPHABET. 
 
 231 
 
 his back was called an JELeBhant ; and why the bull with 
 the crescent horns received the Syriac name of ALF. The 
 mountain was not named from the arm, the arm was 
 named from the mountain, and then only when held up in 
 adoration, with some votive offering in its hollow palm. 
 The mountain, the alp, was the beginning of all things in 
 sacred history. Hence all ancient things were named after 
 it. Olympus was the Ararat of Europe, and, curiously 
 enough, replaces Ararat on the coat of arms of the Duke de 
 
 Fig. 6. Doric column ; Caphj'n'ham; tam ; escutcheon of Nevers; Crown of 
 
 the Pharaohs. 
 
 Nevers, among the beautiful sculptures in front of the old 
 chateau in the middle of that little quaint city (Fig. 6) . The 
 most ancient and venerable river in Greece was named 
 ALFaios. The aborigines of Europe were called ELVes. The 
 Latin word for formerly or in ancient times was OL^M. The 
 Hebrew word for eternity, or unknown infinite beginning, 
 was OLM. Hence the first letter of the alphabet had to be 
 ALF a, or as the Shemites called it, ALF. And its shape also 
 had to be Alpine, like its name. The letter A is simply a 
 pyramid or mountain with a line drawn across it. In the 
 ancient bardic books of Ireland, that seat of the learning 
 of old times in the Druidic west, whenever the word moun- 
 tain occurred it was not written out in full, but in its place 
 they merely wrote a letter A; that was sufficient. 
 
 The science of philology as it now stands is largely made 
 up of the results of the investigations of learned men into 
 such subjects as these: — What is the whole number of 
 distinct sounds which can be uttered by the human organs 
 of speech ? What special number of these sounds have 
 been selected out of the whole number for use, by different 
 races and tribes of men in different countries ? What dis- 
 tinction of these sounds can we make into vowels, semi- 
 vowels, and consonants ; and of the consonants into sonants 
 and surds, aspirates and sibilants, labials, dentals, Unguals, 
 gutturals and nasals ? What relation do some of these 
 
232 THE GROWTH OF [LECT. 
 
 sounds as spoken in one language bear to others of them 
 as spoken in another language; in other words, what 
 is the real nature of those processes of transmutation, 
 permutation, inversion, and reduplication of sounds which 
 are all the time going on from generation to generation, 
 as the tribes of men meet and influence each other's speech ? 
 How can we understand the formation of dialects ? What 
 are the true derivations of words ? and what is the range 
 of those modifications which time keeps making in the 
 meanings of single words ? An immense range of investi- 
 gation into which I could not pretend to enter. 
 
 I have been keeping exclusively in view one special 
 inquiry : what was the origin of the alphabet ? Why 
 were certain figures cut upon the surface of stone walls to 
 represent certain sounds which issued from the human 
 mouth ? On what principle was this done ? Why, for in- 
 stance^ and taking the first letter as it comes, and in its 
 archaic Greek or Doric form, why was the vowel sound A 
 painted to the eye by two strokes like legs and a third 
 stroke across them ? What is there in the sound A to 
 suggest such a shape ? Is there any natural connection 
 between the two things ? If not, then is there any arti- 
 ficial connection between them ; any fanciful connection ? 
 If so, what governed the fancy of the man who invented the 
 letter A, to cause him to establish such a connection ? 
 Could it have been by any possibility an accident ? 
 
 This question, which goes down to the very roots of the 
 science, has kept many brains busily thinking in all ages ; 
 for the pure and direct tradition of how it was done has 
 been lost this long time, and it must be rediscovered in 
 very roundabout ways. Nature loves to hide the begin- 
 nings of things, and seems to kill off her early creations 
 merely for the sake of giving palaeontologists a chance to 
 develop their own intellects by the study of the fossils. 
 It was a great question in the first centuries of" the Chris- 
 tian era when the Talmuds were written, and the Indian 
 Puranas, as this pretty Oriental story may show you : — 
 
 When Jesus was a little boy, his mother Mary took him 
 by the hand and seated him at the feet of the village school 
 master, among the other children of Nazareth. When his 
 master looked upon him, he loved him, and stroked his 
 curly hair, and called him a good boy, and he should learn 
 
IX.] THE ALPHABET. 233 
 
 his a-b-c's. So lie began to show him alejph, the first letter 
 of the alphabet. ' But why is it called aleph ? ' said the 
 boy. c Ask not vain questions/ replied his master, kindly; 
 'but proceed with the next letter, beth.' 'Not so/ said 
 Jesus ; ' I must comprehend the first ; for God maketh 
 nothing in vain/ Then, taking all the letters in order, he 
 expounded unto his master the significations of all their 
 forms.* 
 
 The legend does not inform us what this divine commu- 
 nication amounted to. But there is an Armenian version 
 of it which gives us some idea of what it was. ( Behold/ 
 said Jesus, ' how this letter A is made : the three upright 
 strokes signify the three persons of the Trinity ; and the 
 stroke which underlies them signifies that these same three 
 are one/ To comprehend this part of the legend, how- 
 ever, we must notice the shape of the letter in Armenian 
 (Fig. 14, p. 240). We must remember then that this legend 
 dates not merely from Christian days, but from a time sub- 
 sequent to the Athanasian and Arian controversy. It was 
 an Athanasian accommodation of the old Arkite trinity to 
 the new controversies of the 4th century of the Christian 
 era. But it was no mere monkish or scholastic whim. 
 It had the essence of the old truth in it. Different as it 
 looks, this strange -looking Armenian A has a form which, 
 when critically studied, is essentially identical with the 
 Cadmean A, the posture of the form only being varied, as 
 I shall show directly. 
 
 I must here say, that one of the most remarkable cir- 
 cumstances connected with the tradition of the alphabet 
 is the apparent indifference which the sculptors and scribes 
 who invented the letters exhibited as to whether a letter 
 stood upright, or leaned to the right, or to the left, or lay 
 upon its side, or was turned topsy-turvy so as to stand 
 upon its head. We are not to suppose any greater nicety 
 in writing, nor any greater difficulty in reading what was 
 written five thousand years ago than now. No doubt 
 many an ancient scribe learned to write as badly as Rufus 
 Choate ; or as that superintendant of the Michigan Central 
 Railroad, whose angry letter of remonstrance and warning 
 about keeping his cows off the track was used by the 
 
 * Norton, Yol. iii. p. 270. Discussion of the Marcosian sect of 
 Gnostics (W. 54, 2). 
 
234 THE GROWTH OF [LECT. 
 
 farmer to whom it was addressed,, as a free-ticket on the 
 line for a year. 
 
 But there was a far better reason for this indifference 
 than carelessness, or that familiarity which breeds con- 
 tempt. If the earliest letters were pictorial symbols, it 
 did not much matter how they stood, provided the form 
 which conveyed the idea was kept clearly before the eye. 
 If any one out of several possible postures became a 
 specialized and permanent variation, it was because that 
 posture of the form could be also made as symbolical as 
 the form itself. Such was the case of the arm. It was only 
 when the arms were stretched upwards, with the palms 
 open, that they could typify adoration, praise, admiration, 
 holy rejoicing, and the like. You see it thus expressed in 
 the 93rdideograph of Bunsen's list (Fig. 7, p. 235) . Its sound 
 was haa ; its meaning ( to rejoice •/ and also the number 
 100,000,000. It was used like the Chinese exclamation of 
 astonishment, Hai-ah /* To apply this symbol of venera- 
 tion or astonishment to a special subject, such as time, some 
 addition had to be made to the symbol. A feather (which 
 meant history and truth and antiquity) was placed upright 
 upon the centre of its head, and then the symbol meant 
 one hundred million years, or in other words, an astonish- 
 ing length of time. 
 
 But when the arm was not used to express this a I of 
 astonishment or veneration, but merely the sound a as it 
 issues in a simple and unimportant manner from the mouth, 
 or as pronounced at the end of words, and through the 
 nose, like the on and m final of the French, or like the nasal 
 and final double *aa of the Hebrew — -then the arm was en- 
 graved in a horizontal position, at the bottom of the word. 
 We see it, for instance, thus in that bilingual inscription of 
 'the great Emperor Xerxes/ upon an alabaster vase in 
 the cabinet of antiquities in the Royal Library at Paris 
 (Fig. 8), which has played as important a part in the 
 discovery of the lost key to the ancient Assyrian or Cunei- 
 
 * The 94th, 95th, and 96th ideographs are variations. The arms and 
 neck alone, when used with the eagle (a) as a complement (Fig. 7), sig- 
 nifies the letter k, or sound ka, as in Jcam, black ; skai, to plough ; kaut, 
 to build ; Ka, a bull, goat, to receive ; mfka, copper ; tka, a spark, &c. 
 Lamb thinks that it is the Hebrew n turned upside down. See Bunsen's 
 Phonetics, p. 562, vol. i. , Egypt. 
 
 
n.] 
 
 THE ALPHABET. 
 
 235 
 
 Figure 8. 
 
 Bilingual Inscription of Xerxes, on an Alabaster Vase, 
 in the Royal Library at Paris. 
 
 K Sh, H ft "R $K ft . 
 
 Ne H 
 
 Wu Zn R K, 
 
 HAA 
 
236 THE GEOWTH OP [LECT. 
 
 form writing, as the more celebrated trilingual inscription 
 commonly known as the Rosetta stone had previously 
 played in Egyptology.* In the upper horizontal range of 
 characters, the two letters a, and the two letters S, were 
 at once seen to correspond to the two letters A, and the 
 two letters Sh, in the hieroglyphic group in the cartouche 
 below. In the art of reading a correspondence written in 
 cypher, c'est le premier pas qui coute, a right beginning is 
 all you want. Get one or two letters of the alphabet, and 
 the rest follow as obediently as a skein of thread when you 
 have found the right end. But the hieroglyphic A here is 
 represented by an eagle. The Egyptians had, in fact, 
 three hieroglyphics to express this sound — the single 
 feather, the arm, and the eagle. The feather, as I have 
 said, standing for the initial long AA of astonishment ; the 
 arm standing for the final nasal n aa ; and the eagle stand- 
 ing for a sort of gently aspirated h a, which there is no need 
 to allude to farther. 
 
 Now what I wish to fix your attention upon is the shape 
 of the Cuneiform or Assyrian letter A in this inscription. 
 Remember what I have been saying about the apparent 
 indifference of the ancient scribes to the position of the 
 letters, provided the form was what they wished it to be. 
 I do not here allude to the position of the letters in respect 
 to one another in the word ; although that, too, is a very 
 important point, to which not half enough attention has 
 been given in the science of language. For words were 
 written indifferently backwards and forwards ; the old 
 Greek inscriptions are written alternately backwards and 
 forwards, from line to line, as a field is ploughed by 
 farmers ; and they actually called that mode of writing, 
 ( boustrophedon/ that is, v oxen turned/ And you see that 
 in this cartouche the Egyptian scribe has done the same 
 thing. The fact is, if-. carving the letters preceded the! 
 writing of them with a pen, as it probably did, the necessity 
 for using a pushing or striking force coming from the right 
 hand is apparent. Nothing can be more awkward than 
 
 * See the account of its discovery by St Martin, and its complete dis- 
 cussion, in G. Pauthier's ' Essai sur Vorigme et la formation similaire des 
 ecritures figuratives chinoise et Egyptiens? Paris, 1842. Part I, p. 124, 
 et seq. ' Kshharsha Neh Wuzurk=-Kshairsha Hon Pe Na= Xerxes the 
 great Emperor.' 
 
IX.] THE ALPHABET. 237 
 
 writing the Hebrew or Arabic letters ; but nothing is easier 
 or more convenient than engraving them, commencing each 
 letter from the bottom right-hand corner. The Chinese 
 write from the top of the line downwards. On the con- 
 trary, the county land- surveyor, now-a-days, writes his field- 
 notes upwards, from the bottom of the page to the top. 
 All this has caused many dialectic variations in the words 
 of cognate languages, which have greatly puzzled philolo- 
 gists ; e. g. the Hebrew kol, a voice, is in Greek logos ; the 
 Greek gala, milk, is in Latin lac ; and if I had time to go 
 through the whole alphabet with you I would have to use 
 this law of inversion to explain many things ; as e. g. how 
 the Theb, or ark of Noah, came to be pronounced Beth, 
 the second letter of the Shemitic alphabet, and Bath ; 
 meaning both a house or temple, and a daughter, or the 
 virgin goddess of the temple. 
 
 But my object in this course of lectures has been rather 
 to state principles, to describe methods of thought, than to 
 cram the imagination with detailed facts and subordinate 
 results ; and I keep to the discussion of the letter A, not 
 for the sake of any special pre-eminence that it may have, 
 but as affording a good example of the method which 
 governed the alphabet -making mind of antiquity. 
 
 You see, then, that the position of the form of the letter 
 itself, that is, its posture, was so variable that it could be 
 laid upon its side, and turned over upon its head, ap- 
 parently without inconvenience. Mark me, I say apparently, 
 not really. Those old wise men knew what they were 
 about. Their fancy was as dogmatic as our logic, and loved 
 etiquette and punctilio as well as our natural science does. 
 If the old Assyrian scribes wrote the letter A thus fTl w ^ n 
 three upright strokes and a fourth stroke laid across on top; 
 and the Armenian scribes, many centuries afterwards, saw 
 fit to reverse their letter A thus (JJ , that is, three upright 
 strokes and a fourth laid underneath, — they certainly had 
 some dogmatic reason for doing so. And the Marcosian 
 legend of the little Jesus tells us what that was; f to 
 teach us/ said the little master, ' that the beginnings of all 
 things is one essence in three persons.'' But why would not 
 the stroke, when drawn above, do as well as when drawn be- 
 low ? The Egyptians expressed the emanations from the 
 sun, sunlight, by three waved lines descending from a circle 
 
238 THE GROWTH OF [lECT. 
 
 surrounding a dot; and the ancient Chinese expressed 
 spiritual emanations, spirit, genius, genii, by three strokes 
 beneath a fourth horizontal stroke. And although this 
 figure received- another small horizontal stroke subsequent- 
 ly, its meaning remained the same, and has been considered 
 so important, that it forms the key to an entire class of 
 Chinese words, viz. all those which relate to the spiritual 
 intelligence of mankind, the power of expressing thoughts 
 in words, the power of giving names to things. Its 
 ancient and its modern form are both given in Fig. 9 
 below. It is called chi, and means monere, significare, prce- 
 cipere, ostendere, respicere, docere, per scripturam signifi- 
 care* 
 
 But the Athanasian theology was not so easily satisfied ; 
 it had a certain technical expression to employ, viz. ' the 
 hype-statical relation of three persons in one God/ If you 
 look in Greek dictionaries for the word hypostasis, you will 
 be rather astonished to see no theological allusion whatever 
 in its meaning ; for it stood to the Greek farmer for no- 
 thing but ivine lees. It meant simply what our chemists 
 would call a precipitate. But it was made up of two words, 
 — hupo, under, and histemi, to stand; and its original 
 meaning must have been something fundamental, or at the 
 bottom. Angry theologians got to hurling this word at 
 each other's heads with this older meaning, which perhaps 
 it still retained in the learned world. The hypostatical 
 union of the three Divine persons meant their fundamental 
 union, their personalities rooted in a common underlying 
 substance or substratum. The Scribes could do no less 
 than the Pharisees. The letter which had come down to 
 them from Assyrian days, bearing its Arkite signification 
 of eternity and divinity, the beginnings of things and the 
 stuff of the world's phenomena, suited their purpose exactly, 
 provided they took the fourth stroke, which joined the 
 tops of the other three, and put it below, making it hypo- 
 statical, or fundamental. 
 
 Going back now to the Cadmean or Alpine form of the 
 letter A, will you demand that I bring it into similar re- 
 lationship with the Armenian and Assyrian forms ? The 
 demand would be just if I asserted that the Cadmean idea 
 
 * French Dictionary, p. 489. Also see the 113th Key, Kij. 
 
IX.] THE ALPHABET. 239 
 
 of the letter was precisely the same as the Assyrian or 
 Armenian idea of it. But all alphabets were not made in 
 the same age, nor by the same people,. nor under the same 
 set of influences. All I wish to hint this evening is, that, 
 taken as a whole, and in the earlier ages of literature, a 
 general Arkite mythology governed the fancy of men and 
 therefore shaped all their attempts at expressing their re- 
 ligious and historical ideas, both in architecture and in 
 writing ; and that the traces of this mythology exist under 
 all modifications of the forms of letters in all alphabets 
 even to the present time. 
 
 The origin of the curious wedge form of the Assyrian let- 
 ters has not been explained. The scribes who wrote the 
 archives of Nineveh and Babylon upon clay cylinders could 
 have made their lines or strokes as straight and smooth as 
 the Bomans, who wrote on wax, made theirs. Letters 
 made with such skill and care that they cannot be read 
 sometimes without the help of a magnifying lens (a proof, 
 by the way, that the lens was two or three thousand years 
 older than the time of Galileo), show that the writers 
 could do anything in the way of neat writing, and 
 that they must have been inspired with some special re- 
 verence for letters made with strokes in the shape of a 
 wedge, or rather arrowhead. Now Layard has figured, 
 among other things found in Assyria, an altar on which 
 reposes a gigantic arrowhead, half as large as the altar 
 itself, — as large in proportion, in fact, as a sheep or a calf 
 would be if laid upon the altar. Lying thus upon the 
 altar, it must be considered as a sacred object, offered to 
 some God. Or, if the altar be merely a pedestal, then the 
 arrowhead must be regarded as a divinity. But the arrow- 
 head is just the shape of the Cadmean letter A ; is Alpine 
 in the Arkite sense ; was used in divination ; carried the 
 great hyperborean Druid Abaris, in Greek fable, on its 
 back to Delphi; and was as appropriate an offering as the 
 fir-cone, or as the little pyramid held in the open palm of 
 the Egyptian priest. What connection may hereafter be 
 traced between this worship of the arrowhead in Mesopo- 
 tamia and the use of flint weapons by the people of Central 
 Asia, in the Stone age, I will not venture to conjecture. 
 It is enough for my present purpose that the construction 
 of the Assyrian letters out of arrowhead- shaped strokes, 
 
240 THE GROWTH OF [LECT. 
 
 gave them a peculiar sanctity or significance in an Arkite 
 sense, and converted them all into Alpine hieroglyphics. 
 
 Confining ourselves therefore still to this Alpine or 
 pyramid symbol, let me ask you how an ancient scribe 
 would be likely to make a letter out of it. Would it not 
 be in one of these four ways? 1. If he worked in a 
 Chinese spirit, scorning perspective, he would use four 
 diverging strokes to express its four sloping angles. If 
 he were a true artist he would use three diverging strokes, 
 the middle one perhaps a little on one side for the sake 
 of perspective. If he were a literal fellow he would use 
 two strokes and be satisfied with that. But if he were a 
 transcendentalist he would use but one vertical stroke to 
 represent the essential idea of isolated height. 
 
 Neglect the first form as too absurd for any body but a 
 Chinaman, and the last also as too transcendental to have 
 come into vogue until the refinements of later ages pro- 
 duced the obelisk out of the pyramid, and the obeliskal let- 
 ters^ out of the pyramidal, it remained for the common 
 Alpine letter to be made of either two or three strokes, 
 joined of course at the top. Look now at this series of 
 ancient Cadmean letters, of which No. 1 is from a Greek 
 boustrephedon inscription, the fourth is Phoenician, and 
 the rest are antique Greek. 
 
 AAAMflAfi*^ 
 
 1234 5678 9 10 
 
 You will perceive how the original form came to vary so 
 much that there is in some cases now scarcely a recog- 
 nizable trace of its original intention. Look, again, at the 
 initial Sanscrit A, No. 11, of the following forms; and 
 
 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 
 
 when you remember that all Sanscrit letters are hung 
 npon a sort of clothes-line and boxed up by vertical 
 strokes, you can see how the essential three divergent 
 
IX.] THE ALPHABET. 241 
 
 lines of the pyramid may come to form tlie cuneiform 
 letter, No. 12 ; and, finally, the Armenian letter, No. 13. 
 
 But there are still simpler pyramidal forms for the 
 letter. The Runic A has only two strokes, No. 14 ; and so 
 had some of the Roman forms of the time of the Christian 
 era, Nos. 15, 16, as well as the Moeso- Gothic, No. 18. 
 
 But there is an Irish form of great antiquity, used ex- 
 tensively in Europe, which has a peculiar significance, 
 No. 18, formed of an horizontal stroke across the summit 
 of two others. By reference to this upper stroke I think 
 we reach a complete understanding of the Arkite ideas of 
 the early alphabet -makers. But to make this clear I must 
 speak of another element of alphabetic writing, the water- 
 symbol. 
 
 /VVW 
 
 SMN 
 
 19 20 21 22 23 24 
 
 The Egyptian hieroglyph for water was three horizontal 
 waved lines, often reduced to one. In process of time 
 this became merely a straight horizontal line. Out of this 
 Egyptian hieroglyph the Greeks made their sharp hissing 
 cc (H, f), and the Assyrians their cuneiform S, No. 21. 
 The early Greeks made these lines waving like the Egyp- 
 tian, but the classic Greek alphabet converted the waved 
 into straight lines. The Greeks and R,omans used the 
 same Egyptian water-symbol for the simple sibilant s ; 
 but they stood it up straight, No. 22 ; because water 
 never hisses except when it rises in a jet or falls in a 
 cataract. When they desired an alphabetic letter to ex- 
 press the murmuring sound of water as upon the sea shore, 
 they preserved the original horizontal posture of the sym- 
 bol; and hence our MMs and Eli's. The most ancient 
 Egyptians did not recognize in their alphabet the hissing 
 sound of water : it would be difficult to say why, unless it 
 might have arisen from the scarcity of rain and mountain- 
 torrents, cascades and jets, in the valley of the Nile. It 
 is a curious fact also that they employed their water-symbol 
 for their letter N ; whereas for M they chose the figure of 
 an owl. 
 
 These two sounds of water are recognized more or less 
 
 16 
 
242 THE GEOWTH OF [LECT. 
 
 distinctly in all human languages. For instance, in our own 
 English we have two names for the great and little waters 
 of the earth : the former we call the Main, as the Hebrews 
 called it Mini* The latter we call Seas. In eastern myth- 
 ology the name of the hundred-headed sea-serpent on 
 which Vishnu sits is in Sanscrit Shi-shi. The name of the 
 Syrian Noah was Xisuihras. 
 
 The soft hissing sound of Z in Italy had the same water 
 form. The dental sibilant of the Greeks, 0, was originally 
 represented by the Egyptian zig-zag waterline surrounded 
 by a circle. It was reduced afterwards to a line, and 
 finally to a point or dot. In Arkite symbolism this letter 
 had a special function in signifying things surrounded by 
 water. Thus holy Mount Athos received its name, A©, 
 because, the A represented a mountain, and signified 
 that it was surrounded by the sea. 
 
 Let us return once more, carrying with us now this water- 
 symbol, to the discussion of the letters that were founded 
 on the mountain idea. The diluvial mountain could be re- 
 presented in three ways: either in the air, or partially sub- 
 merged, or wholly submerged ; in other words, the water- 
 symbol line could be drawn across it at the bottom, in the 
 middle, or at the top. The first would make the Greek 
 letter delta, A, the simple mountain tol or toe, — our letter 
 D. The second made the Greek letter alpha, A. The 
 third gives us the Irish and Gothic letter a, Kb. 18 above. 
 The Runic alphabet of northern Europe adds additional 
 confirmation to these facts, by giving a pyramidal form 
 to its letter t, the equivalent of the Greek d, and by calling 
 it by the same name Tyr. 
 
 Finally, to show the connection of the pyramid and 
 obelisk in alphabetic forms, as in architecture, it is only 
 needful to contrast the A and T (or D) in respect of this 
 horizontal waterline, with all the other letters. These are 
 
 26 27 28 29 30 31 
 
 the only two letters, carrying the waterline, in the old 
 cuneiform alphabet ; just as they stand apart from all the 
 others in the Cadmean alphabets of the west, in carrying 
 
IX.] THE ALPHABET. 243 
 
 it ; as may be seen in the following series. The dj, No. 27, 
 and sh, 28, are no exceptions, for they are evidently 
 subsequent modifications of the older simple d, No. 26. 
 Nor is it less a significant fact that the only other letter 
 besides a, made with three vertical strokes, is the letter th, 
 No. 31. 
 
 I could adduce still a number of other instances * of the 
 essential similarity between these two letters. But I have 
 already far transgressed the extent to which I had intended 
 to carry the illustration of the subject. As I said at the 
 outset, it is impossible to do more than to give you some 
 idea of its richness; and to suggest a method of inves- 
 tigation which will be likely to yield the best results. 
 
 Each letter of the alphabet might be taken up in its 
 turn, and its original mythological significance developed 
 by comparison with other letters in the same alphabet, and 
 other forms in other alphabets. For instance, the liquids 
 L and R were used to represent the flowing of water, 
 sliding and slipping actions, continuance, and all that class 
 of ideas. Mythological explanations come in everywhere. 
 Rhea, the goddess of the flood, from peiv, to flow, and 
 geographical names like Rhine and Rhone, are good illus- 
 trations. Invention, design, the regulated fancy of a learned 
 caste, appear at every step. The natures of the letter- 
 sounds were critically studied, and ingeniously applied, as 
 in the Greek word aet, (always) constructed out of vowels, 
 in a definite order, so as to express continued existence. 
 
 In a word, words were designedly built up, by the old 
 scribes, by placing the letter- symbols in all sorts of well- 
 devised positions and • relations to each other, until the 
 Arkite fancy was exhausted and satiated with its work 
 or play; and then fresh crops of Arkisms took root in 
 these strange compositions, and new series of fables sprang 
 from them again to delight the taste and feed the venerat- 
 ing instinct of other generations. 
 
 But before bidding adieu to this whole subject, to pass to 
 quite a different one in the next lecture, I must say a word 
 respecting the history of the growth of the more ancient 
 alphabets. 
 
 The history which Chinese scholars give of the 
 growth of their own language is precise and authentic, 
 
 * See A. 2. 16. 
 
244 THE GEOWTH OF [LECT. 
 
 although, their literature will not compare for antiquity 
 with that of Egypt. The most ancient book they have, is 
 supposed to have been written somewhat more than 1000 
 years before Christ, that is, before the time of King David. 
 It is called Y-King, or the book of transformations. In a 
 supplement to it called Hi-thseii, edited by two learned 
 Chinese of the 11th century before the Christian era,* we 
 find this account of the origin of Chinese writing : c In old 
 times Paoi or Foii-hi governed the world ; and lifting up his 
 eyes, saw figures in the sky ; and casting down his eyes, 
 saw models of them on the earth, in the forms of birds and 
 beasts, and in the proportions of the earth. From these 
 near and distant objects he began to trace out the eight 
 symbols (koua), to penetrate the meaning of the divine 
 intelligence, and to classify therein the properties of things 
 by genera/ 
 
 An ancient commentator upon this book explains that 
 the fundamental distinctions involved in this classification 
 were those of the fixed and the mobile, the resisting and the 
 yielding; which correspond very well to the western 
 mountain and water symbols. He adds that the generic 
 figures were those of lakes and mountains, wind, thunder, 
 &c. He then goes on farther to explain that Fo formed 
 his letters by six rules. By the 1st he imitated the objects 
 themselves ; by the 2nd he combined these imitations into 
 groups ; by the 3rd he inverted their meanings ; by the 
 4th he invented determinative marks to express accidents, 
 c high and low/ for instance ; by the 5th he gave his letters 
 metaphorical meanings ; by the 6th he showed by letters 
 the sounds of things. Pauthier names these six classes of 
 letters: 1. The Figurative; 2. The Qualitative; 3. The 
 Composite; 4. The Polar or Antithetic; 5. The very 
 numerous class in which an image of the object is given, 
 and with it another character to express the sound of its 
 name; 6. The Abstract or Figurative. He gives five or 
 six characters as examples of each class, from which I 
 select but one, to show the plan upon which it was con- 
 structed, and the change its shape has undergone in course 
 of time. 
 
 * Wen-wang and Tcheon-Koung ; see Panthier's Essay, page 3, et 
 seq. The commentator takes occasion to remark that before Eo's time 
 men employed knotted cords in the administration of affairs. 
 
IX.] 
 
 THE ALPHABET. 
 
 245 
 
 For example : — 
 
 1st Class, 
 Imitative. 
 
 2nd Class, 
 Qualitative. 
 
 }£ 
 
 the sun : now written 
 
 morning 
 
 3rd Class, 1 ^-n^Nvn / j \ 
 
 Composite. J ©J (sun and moon) 
 
 glit : now written 
 
 4th Class, I 
 
 Polar or !■ 
 
 Antithetic. J 
 
 5th Class, 
 
 very numerous, 
 
 Image and 
 
 Sound 
 combined. 
 
 6th Class, 
 
 Abstract, or 
 
 Figurative. 
 
 
 left 
 
 right 
 
 spirit, genius 
 from on high : 
 
 heart, 
 i. e. soul : 
 
 7 A^ 
 
 ty 
 
 In Fig. 9 above, No. 1 is the Sun, represented as on the 
 Egyptian hieroglyphics, by a disc with a dot in it; 2. 
 Morning, by a solar disc above a horizon line; 3. Light, 
 by the two figures of the sun and moon combined; 4. 
 Left and right, by two tridents with curved handles, pointed 
 different ways ; 5. Spirit, or genius sent from above, by 
 three slightly waved lines depending from a horizontal line, 
 meaning the sky ; 6. Soul or affection, by a heart. Many 
 other and finer examples might with a little care be 
 selected. The best description I have seen of the figurative 
 cunning of the inventors of the ancient Chinese characters 
 is in H. Noel Humphrey s' History of Writing. Take,, for 
 instance, the three signs following :— 
 
 n 
 
 folding doors; 
 
 [^ listening; ^ 
 
 asking a 
 question. 
 
 ear. 
 
 mouth. 
 
246 THE GEOWTH OF [lECT. 
 
 Or these : 
 
 JP singing bird ; S£ sunshine ; xjk obscurity. 
 
 bird. tree. 
 
 The passage of the figurative into the phonetic is accom- 
 plished under class V. by a union of the two ; thus, a 
 duck is not only drawn, Fig 10, but has a character added 
 to express the sound of its name Id. A willow is repre- 
 sented by a tree and the phonetic K. A root is repre- 
 sented by a tree, and a phonetic ~ken, &c. 
 
 Tig. 10. 
 
 ^ <fc iRX 
 
 Ki Ki Ken 
 
 Rude as this method is, it was the one adopted also by 
 the inventors of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. In fact, these 
 phonetic adjuncts are little else than the matres lectionis of 
 the Hebrew, in the essential genius of their purpose. 
 
 There are some remarkable fables relating to this inven- 
 tion of the great Cadmus of the East, which throws a new 
 light upon its nature. In one passage it is said that Fo 
 got the external forms of things from the heavens, but his 
 letter-figures he saw ( upon the picture which issued before him 
 from the waters.' And this mystic Arkite description of the 
 nature of the origin of letters does not by any means stand 
 alone. It is repeated by other writers, and in other forms, 
 and has no doubt some deep significance. Men whose 
 books are filled with practical wisdom, humour, and wit, 
 shrewd sarcasm and a refined fancy, do not utter what 
 seems the sheerest nonsense, the folly of babes, without a 
 cause. 
 
 Lopi, the author of the ancient 'book of itineraries/ 
 writes, that Fohi called his new invention Dragon-writing, 
 because he found it in marks upon the back of a Dragon- 
 horse which rose out of the waves. For the same reason all 
 the great mandarins or scribes in early days were denomin- 
 ated dragons. It will occur to you at once that Cadmus, 
 whom the Greeks considered the inventor of the alphabet, 
 
IX.] THE ALPHABET. 247 
 
 obtained his colonists by sowing the teeth of a dragon. 
 The hydra, the many -headed dragon of Greek fable, as its 
 name shows, represented the raging waves of the sea. The 
 Chinese word Shan, a mountain, is expressed by a charac- 
 ter which shows three teeth. The centaurs of Greece — 
 half man, half horse — were the learned men of that heroic 
 age, ' the priests of the mountain/ -^ jn^ ; and their 
 chief initiated Hercules and Achilles into all the mysteries 
 of learning which then were. 
 
 Whatever maybe the date assigned to the origin of the 
 alphabet, or what the country, the fable still wears this 
 peculiar mountain-water, or Arkite, garb. One Chinese 
 authority, Hoai-nan-tseu. (189 B.C.) asserts that Thsan-hie, 
 crown lawyer to the Emperor Hoang-ti in 2698 B.C., was the 
 inventor. Another fixes on a somewhat lower date, 2357 B.C. 
 But here again the fable shows itself in a still more perfect 
 form ; for the tortoise has always been the living and walk- 
 ing symbol of the Tor, the Druid under his tumulus ; and 
 therefore the Indian mythology piles the earth upon the 
 elephant and the elephant upon the tortoise. The great 
 sea-tortoise especially, seen with his back above the waves, 
 struck the ancient Arkite imagination with transcendant 
 admiration. So the story goes that the Emperor Yao, in the 
 year 2357 B.C., began to trace letters in imitation of the cha- 
 racters which he noticed on the bach of the divine tortoise, 
 which was brought to him by a barbarian family from the 
 far south. This tortoise was three feet wide, and a thousand 
 years old ; and on its back was written, in Kho-teau cha- 
 racters, the ivhole history of the world from its. beginning. 
 The land of the south may have been India, or Mesopo- 
 tamia, or Egypt, for all that we know to the contrary. A 
 similar, but long subsequent, arrival of learned strangers, 
 about 1110 b. c. (a date not very far from that of Solomon's 
 commerce with Ophir, by the way,) is mentioned in the 
 Li-tai-ki-sse.* 
 
 After describing the dragon-scrip of the most ancient 
 times, and the tortoise-shell alphabet of the 24th century 
 before Christ, the Chinese historians go on to tell us that 
 during the Han dynasty, i. e. from 2205 down to 1766 B.C., 
 the people got used to writing a third, but also extremely 
 
 * Pauthier, p. 10. 
 
248 THE GROWTH OF [lECT. 
 
 ancient, kind of characters, such as are seen on bells, vases, 
 and tripods preserved in the present museums and palaces 
 of the celestial kingdom. 
 
 When the Tcheoii dynasty came in, before the time of 
 Solomon, 1134 B.C., its founder introduced 'a new modifi- 
 cation of the alphabet, called the bird tracks, Niao. Soon 
 afterwards, that is, under the Wen- Wang dynasty, 1110 
 B.C., the fish-gambol characters, Nu, came into vogue, and 
 every kind of polite learning got systematized. It was at 
 this time that the sage Pao-chi invented the five rules 
 of politeness, the six kinds of music, the five methods of 
 archery, and the five styles of horsemanship ; and fixed for 
 all succeeding times the six styles of writing, as now re- 
 cognized by all Chinese scholars. 
 
 In 221 B.C. Li-sse, at the emperor's command, invented 
 the small tchouan writing ; but it was rejected except for the 
 royal signets ; and then he invented the ta or great tcheuen 
 writing, a most artificial and fantastical form of character, 
 wholly different from those that had been in use, viz. under 
 the Tcheou dynasty, 880 B.C., which scarcely differed from 
 the Kou-wen, or ancient figurative forms, in which the six 
 Kings, &c, of Khoung-tseu and the great Commentary of 
 Tso-kieov-meng were all written. 
 
 Then came the dissolution of the Empire, and the rise 
 of the great heptarchy of independent provinces, which 
 caused local modifications of the characters chiefly due to 
 differences in artistic taste. One of these provinces, the 
 easternmost, ruled over by a dynasty called Han, had 
 wisdom enough to throw overboard the whole literature of 
 the past, and attempt to open for the national mind a new 
 career. 
 
 Once, only this once, in the history of this strange na- 
 tion, there seemed a chance of the establishment of that 
 tremendous power in letters which changed the face of the 
 intellectual world in the far west ; I mean a pure phonetic 
 alphabet, such as gave Greece its empire over thought, 
 and Home its empire over society, and 'Palestine its throne 
 of grace and worship over Christendom. Even Egypt knew 
 enough to adopt a demotic or current hand. The number 
 of Chinese characters amounts to 80,000. The whole num- 
 ber of Egyptian characters in Champollion's Dictionary is 
 but 749. Those which modern science is content to use, 
 
IX.] 
 
 THE ALPHABET. 
 
 249 
 
 even including all the mathematical, chemical, and- other 
 signs, would not amount to many more than a hundred. 
 What China would be now, had the invention of the bold and 
 easy cursive hand-writing been adopted by thefian dynasty, 
 in a.d. 76 to 88, no one may say. But the purely phonetic 
 'bureau hand/ tfsao, as it was called, would probably have 
 set the soul of China free from the incubus of its strange, 
 fossilized, monosyllabic, uncompromising characters, which 
 weighs the future down for ever under the load of all the 
 past. But the experiment did not succeed. The emperor, 
 Hiao-ho-ti, in a.d. 89, while John was writing his great 
 Gospel, annulled the new invention on the ground that it 
 disturbed the public education, and ordered a return to 
 the culture of the ancient hand; on which his head gx^am- 
 marian, Hiu-chin, immediately composed a treatise in 40 
 books, which sealed the fate of China to the end of time. 
 The Chinese characters now in use have certainly not 
 varied in shape since the year 618 of the Christian era.* 
 
 But to show how they have varied since the invention 
 of letters by Eohi, I take from Pauthier the following 
 
 
 %%7 
 
 4, Vv X A A 
 
 specimens of the three ancient styles, called : 1. the 
 Komven, of the highest antiquity; 2. the Td-chouen, of 
 mean antiquity; 3. the Siao-clwuen, of low antiquity; 
 followed by, 4. the Li-chou, or bureau character; 5. the 
 Hing-chou, common or current hand; 6. the Thsao-chou, 
 cursive hand; 7. the Kiai-chou, square seal character; 
 and, 8. the Kiai-hing-chou, or current hand, all of more 
 modern age. Fig. 12 gives the original Komven characters 
 
 * Pauthier, p. 21. 
 
250 THE GROWTH OF [LECT. 
 
 for ' heaven/ c man/ and the ' savage beast sse/ followed 
 by the modifications of form to which they were subjected,, 
 corresponding to the other seven styles of writing, suc- 
 cessively coining into vogue during the four thousand 
 years which have elapsed since the reputed age of Fo. 
 
 It is only by tracing the forms of the Chinese radicals 
 back through their various transformations to their original, 
 that any comparison with the Egyptian hieroglyphs can 
 be made ; but when this is carefully done important analo- 
 gies are discoverable. The classification of ideas common 
 to both eras has been made upon a common principle, 
 which was, in fact, to be expected from the very constitu- 
 tion of the human mind. But in some instances forms 
 are also common to the two systems, establishing some 
 actual historical connection between' the two, such as is 
 hinted at by the legends cited above. 
 
 10 11 
 
 jp&kk rib Ws&fc/t 
 
 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 - ' 20 21 22 
 
 Figure 13 gives the twenty-two* characters which the 
 priests of Egypt invented for determining the class to 
 which any particular hieroglyphic belonged, when its pro- 
 nounced or written name would not of itself show. The 
 modern alphabetic writing has done away with the neces- 
 sity for such a rude device, but originally some such 
 
 * Pauthier's Essai, p. 103. "[Thiemann gives thirteen, on the authority 
 of Ideler, based on Champollion. Bunsen's list is more extensive. 
 
IX.] THE ALPHABET. 251 
 
 method was indispensable. For instance, the difference 
 between sheep and ship in English is made in writing by- 
 using in one case two vowels e, and in the other one vowel 
 i. But in the absence of vowels it would be necessary to 
 add to the word shp some sign, in the one case a rude 
 picture of a boat, and in the other case a rude sketch of an 
 animal. This is precisely the mode in which the Egyptians 
 used the following determinative signs, standing for — 1. all 
 names of gods; 2. of goddesses; 3. of men; 4. women; 5. 
 members of the body ; 6. quadrupeds ; 7. birds ; 8. rep- 
 tiles ; 9. fish; 10. trees; 11. plants; 12. metals; 13. 
 stones; 14. edifices or habitations; 15. places; 16. stars; 
 17. divisions of time; 18. fluids; 19. things noxious or 
 ecclesiastically impure or unclean, represented by a spar- 
 row; 20. scripture; and 21. actions. 
 
 Under these I have arranged a selection from the whole 
 list of over 200 Chinese radicals, such as represent the same 
 ideas, by equivalent denominative signs. These are named 
 in Chinese : 1. Ky (Radicals, 113, 119, p. 489 of the Great 
 French Dictionary); 2. My, p. 534; 3. Jin, 9, p. 8; 4. 
 In, 38, p. 138; 5. Jo, 130, p. 587; 6. Meou, 93, p. 398; 
 7. Mao, 196, p. 899; 8. Tchong, 142, p. 655; 9. Yu, 195, 
 p. 891; 10. Mo, 75, p. 288; 11. Tsao, 140, p. 615; 12. 
 Peh, 154, p. 724; 13. Chy, 112, p. 478; 14. Mien, 40, p. 
 145, and Yen, 53, p. 177; 15. Kin, 167, p. 793, Y, 163, p. 
 779, and Febu, 170, p. 818; 16. Chin, 161, p. 765; 17. 
 Jy, 72, p. 274; 18. Ho, 86, p. 380; 19. Choiiy, 85, p. 343; 
 20, 21. Til, 129, p. 586; 22. Hing, 144, p. 672. 
 
 The principal alphabets to be studied are the Punic; 
 the still but partially understood Italic or Etruscan group ; 
 the Phoenician, Samaritan, Himyaritic, Arabic, Hebrew, 
 Coptic, and Amharic; the Armenian; the three ex- 
 tremely ancient cuneiform alphabets ; the Davanagari and 
 other alphabets in India; the Thibetan; the Burmese, 
 Siamese, and Singalese of farther India; the Japanese, 
 and the Corean. They are all different at first sight from 
 one another, and some are comparatively modern. But 
 when critically studied they are all found to be allied more 
 or less distantly. Of all these the Corean is the most per- 
 fectly regular. 
 
 Our own alphabet, derived from the ancient Cadmean, 
 
252 THE GROWTH OF THE ALPHABET. 
 
 is theoretically reducible to four or five letters, represent- 
 ing that many classes of sounds : 
 
 'owels. 
 
 Labials. 
 
 Gutturals. 
 
 Dentals, &c. 
 
 A 
 
 B 
 
 c 
 
 
 D 
 
 E 
 
 F 
 
 G 
 
 
 H 
 
 I 
 
 M 
 
 K 
 
 
 L 
 
 N 
 
 
 
 P 
 
 Q 
 
 
 EST 
 
 U 
 
 VW 
 
 
 X 
 
 
 Y 
 
 
 
 
 Z 
 
 A mere glance at this scheme will show that the letters 
 of the alphabet were not placed fortuitously in their posi- 
 tion ; that the vowels came in the order of their vocal de- 
 velopment ) in a word, that the entire alphabet is a fivefold 
 orderly repetition of the first four letters, ABCD, which in 
 themselves sum up the entire range of sounds, and make 
 the key notes to all the dialectic transmutations of letters 
 to which I have already drawn attention more than once 
 before. These transmutations occur regularly only within 
 the respective columns of this scheme. For instance, B is 
 exchanged for F, M, P, or Y, but never for C, G, K, Q, or 
 X ; nor for D, H, N, H, S, T, or Z. In cases where a let- 
 ter of one column seems to be transmuted into a letter of 
 another column, as in the often-quoted instances of W illiam 
 for Gulielmus, — German welch for old English quilk, — 
 French garenne for English warren, &c.,a loss of some letter 
 must always be supposed, or the substitution of one of the 
 vowels for one of the letters. In the- three instances just 
 quoted the initial g is lost : — thus g-william for g-ulielm, 
 q- welch for q-uilk, g-warren for g-(b)arenne. 
 
 It is true that in the fourth column are collected dentals, 
 linguals, sibilants, a nasal and an aspirate, but all these 
 are proved to be transmutable by the simple method of 
 comparing a dozen or two of allied dialects. D and T are, 
 in fact, the same letter; L and R are universally inter- 
 changeable ; S and Z are identical ; N is the nasal of D, as 
 M is of B ; and H is, in fact, a sibilant in its simplest form, 
 as such words as aks and sel show. 
 
 Here I must leave this fascinating subject, hardly having 
 taken the first step across its threshold, but only thrown 
 open the door to exhibit the immensity and magnificence 
 of its interior. 
 
253 
 
 LECTURE X. 
 
 THE FOUR TYPES OE RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 
 
 . If the views be correct which I have very imperfectly 
 expressed in the previous lectures of this course, we are 
 now prepared to enter upon the last and most important 
 and most interesting subject connected with the early 
 history of man — the origin of its mythologies. 
 
 It will be necessary to keep always in view the funda- 
 mental distinction between religion and worship. Religion 
 is the soul of worship. Worship is the body, the phe- 
 nomenal form of religion. The religious life of man con- 
 sists of a combination of three of his elemental forces, — 
 Admiration, Love, and Fear — having for their object of 
 activity the invisible or superhuman world. 
 
 As there are four great types of organic animal life, 
 represented by the Articulate, Radiate, Mollusc, and Ver- 
 tebrate kingdoms, — so there are four great types of this 
 religious life, embodied in the Worship of the dead, the 
 Worship of the powers of nature, the Worship of God in 
 heaven, and the Worship of the universe. 
 
 Under these four heads all human conceptions of the 
 divine as worshipful can be collected. In one sense they 
 are four successive stages in the order of the development 
 of the human intelligence governing the exercise of the 
 instinct of worship. They are not only philosophically 
 consecutive in the order of nature, but to a certain extent 
 also historically consecutive in the order of time. They 
 have co-existed in some ages, and been combined and in- 
 termixed in some countries; just as in the case of the four 
 types of animal life. But they have virtually followed 
 each other in ruling the world ; just as, in the succession 
 
254 THE FOUR TYPES OP [LECT. 
 
 of geological ages, Radiates had their maximum develop- 
 ment first, Molluscs next, and Vertebrates last of all. 
 
 For it will not do to affirm — drawing sharp lines of 
 distinction— that in the ages of man's first appearance 
 on the planet there was no other worship than that of 
 their dead parents, or of the manes of their heroes ; that 
 everywhere there followed Fetichism, or the worship of 
 the powers of nature ; that then in later times all nations 
 attained to the higher worship of some Fate, or Jove, or 
 God of Heaven ; and that finally, in these last times, a 
 genuine Pantheism has grown universal. Far from it. 
 Complex enough have been the combinations of religious 
 ideas as far back in history as we can see. Varieties of 
 the individual, co-working with varieties of race, and with 
 the various stages and kinds of civilization, have kept, not 
 only alive, but in full vigour, the worships of the past, side 
 by side with one another, and with the higher worships of 
 the present day, developing, in fact, their four great types 
 in four parallel lines ; just as, in the growth of the whole 
 animal kingdom, we notice that Radiates and Articulates 
 lived together in the oldest sedimentary rocks, and are 
 represented still in the multiform fauna of to-day ; while 
 Molluscs and Vertebrates, from the time when these ap- 
 peared, have been mixed in with them through all the 
 higher and later sediments. 
 
 All that we can affirm, therefore, is this ; — that the 
 earliest times of mankind seemed to be stamped with the 
 forms of ancestral worship chiefly, some of which have 
 lasted to the present moment; — fetichism of all kinds — 
 stone worships, mountain worships, water worships, fire, 
 air, and sky worships, Sabasism, Mithraism, Indraism, 
 and the astrological systems of the ancients, flourished 
 chiefly in a second age, but have also lasted to our day ; 
 — then the cultivation of the Taste by idolatry, and of the 
 Sentiments by mysticism, produced at the beginnings of 
 historic times, grand, dominating, ceremonial worships of 
 a god supreme, Jove and Jehovahism, culminating in 
 Christianity ; and that, finally, the culture of the Intellect 
 has developed Pantheism. 
 
 When circumstances favour their growth, all these types 
 are developed in a single nation, in a single individual; 
 but they come to consciousness in this one order only. 
 
X.] RELIGIOUS WOESHIP. 255 
 
 Their consecutive development has been realized in all 
 the cultivated portions of the great historic section of the 
 race. Pantheism has expressed itself in the Hindu Yedas. 
 and in the Christian writings ; by Plotinus the Pagan, and 
 by Spinoza the Christian ; by Swedenborg in one charac- 
 teristic form, and by Hegel in another. On the one hand, 
 children and savages cannot be Pantheists. On the other 
 hand, philosophers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Blanco 
 White, historians like Buckel, naturalists like Yon Baer, 
 were equally impossible in the Stone period. There is a 
 time for everything under the sun. Ages may overlap. 
 One nation may outstrip another in its religious develop- 
 ment. One race may hurry forward from Fetichism to 
 Pantheism with greater intellectual vivacity than another ; 
 but he who aspires to be the historian of mythologies must 
 learn to recognize, or have the genius to construct, out of 
 the apparent confusion which has thence ensued, some 
 wide, consistent, ever-working law of growth, some com- 
 prehensive system of religious development residing in the 
 very nature of the common mind of man. 
 
 If now there be four types of religion, there are also but 
 four modes of worship. I use the word here in a more 
 precise and restricted sense. The religious sentiments of 
 man, intelligently directing themselves towards any one of 
 the four great objects of adoration, embody themselves in 
 four forms of worship. In other words, all the religions of 
 the ages have become incarnate with four members : 
 Prayer, Praise, Offering, and Sacrifice. They correspond to 
 the instincts of religious Fear, religious Love, religious 
 Policy, and religious Conscience, or the sense of justice. 
 And they have filled the world, for ages upon ages, with 
 cries, and songs, and gifts, and altar-smoke. 
 
 As worship is a body for the spirit of religion, so cere- 
 monial is the dress which these four kinds of worship 
 wear. Ceremonials are merely special shapes and combin- 
 ations of prayer, praise, offering, and sacrifice, devised by 
 the clerical imagination, localized by circumstances, and 
 sanctified by long tradition. 
 
 In common parlance we speak of ceremonials as religions ; 
 and we class men rudely by them. There could not be a 
 more unphilosophical mistake. An ethnologist might as 
 well attempt to classify the races of mankind by the 
 
 
256 THE FOUR TYPES OP [LECT. 
 
 fashions of their clothes. No two kinds of ceremonial, for 
 example, could be more unlike than that of the Romish 
 Church on the one side, and that of the Quakers, Puritans, 
 Methodists, or Moravians on the other. And yet if we ana- 
 lyze the Papist and the Protestant with equal scrupulosity 
 and skill, we shall obtain what chemists call i allotropic 
 elements ' in both. What is Protestantism but melted 
 sulphur dropped into cold water? or, if the. amour projore 
 of my audience demand another simile, red phosphorus, 
 innoxious to the manufacturers ? In the Romish commu- 
 nion you have Calvinist and Arminian, Jansenist and 
 Jesuit, Rationalist and Mystic, just the same and just as 
 eager as in the Protestant communions. There is not a 
 spiritual distinction with which intercourse and literature 
 have made us familiar, that we cannot discover (of course, 
 with intellectual modifications of expression, due to various 
 culture,) in all the religions of the modern world. 
 
 Nor is the rule confined to them. The same is true of 
 the ancient mythologies. Under a ceremonial Joseph's 
 coat of many colours, they present a grand simplicity 
 of essential symbolism. But the fourfold distinction of 
 religious type remains ; and combinations of the four modes 
 of worship in each type are there. The mythologist must 
 not allow himself to be cheated by the variety of cere- 
 monial details. The confusion of priesthoods, and mysteries, 
 and creeds, and fables, is only in appearance and in words, 
 not in reality — only in the visible organizations and local 
 establishments of the worshippers, not at all in the funda- 
 mental ideas that inspired and regulated their worships. 
 Let us look at these — 
 
 I. The worship of the dead. 
 
 I have said so much on this subject in previous lectures, 
 that nothing remains but to place it in its true relationship 
 of precedency to the other forms of religious thought and 
 conduct. 
 
 If it were necessary to add anything to the testimony 
 which the Egyptian tombs of the first six dynasties afford 
 to the extreme antiquity of ancestral worship among the 
 more civilized nations at the dawn of history, we would 
 find such additions in the mention of it in the hymns of 
 the Rig Veda, the oldest literature of southern Asia. The 
 laws of Menu speak of it as the most ancient religion of 
 
X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 257 
 
 mankind. Long after Brahmanism had substituted' for the 
 idea of immortality the doctrine of Metempsychosis, the 
 custom of the sraddha, or funereal repast, continued to 
 be kept ; rice, milk, roots, fruit, were furnished regularly 
 to the departed soul. The Greeks and Romans, and in 
 fact all branches of the Aryan race, sacrificed periodically 
 at the tomb. 
 
 So universal were these rites, that De Coulanges thinks 
 himself justified in basing upon them his theory of the 
 Family Law of the ancients. The stranger was excluded. 
 The dead accepted service and homage only from his chil- 
 dren and descendants in direct succession. ( The dead/ 
 says Lucian, ( who has left no son, receives no offerings, 
 and is exposed to a perpetual famine.'' So long as the 
 family supplied their head with what he needed in the 
 other world, so long he was its god and benefactor. The 
 living needed the dead, the dead the living, equally. This 
 mutual tie produced the solidarity of the family, the clan, 
 the tribe. 
 
 But from this service women were excluded. The 
 hearth became an altar; the son became a priest. The 
 daughter was always a servant — first to her father, then to 
 her brother, then to her husband; once married, she 
 passed into another family ; marriage was a second birth— 
 the wife was the daughter of her husband. If the dead 
 had only daughters he lost his immortality, became a 
 larva, or returned to earth in another body to obtain 
 another family. ' The extinction of a family/ says the 
 Baghavatgita, ' causes the ruin of the religion of that 
 family.'' ' No man/ says a Greek writer, f knowing that he 
 must die, can care so little for himself as to be willing to 
 leave his family without descendants, for then no one can 
 worship him.'' f If a man die without sons/ says the 
 Mosaic law, { let his brother marry his widow, and procure 
 him children.' ( By children/ says the law of Menu, ( a 
 man acquits his debt towards his ancestors, and secures his 
 own immortality.'' The Hindu, who had no son, married 
 off his daughter on the condition, that her first son should 
 be considered as his own. 
 
 This was the origin of the custom of adoption at a later 
 period. The hereditary rights of property were first estab- 
 lished entirely in the interest of this overwhelming re- 
 
 17 
 
258 THE FOUR TYPES OP [LECT. 
 
 ligious consideration ; property could protect the hearth, 
 the tomb, the funeral rites,, the immortality. f Religion 
 prescribes/ says Cicero, c that the possessions and the 
 worship of each family should be inseparable, and that the 
 care of the sacrifices should always devolve upon him to 
 whom the inheritance belongs/ The right of primogeni- 
 ture in England is maintained by precisely analogous con- 
 siderations. The Roman daughter could inherit nothing 
 from her father. The Greek laws forbade the daughter to 
 inherit anything. The common law derived from Rome 
 considers the daughter always as a minor. 
 
 The adoption of a son, also, by another man than his 
 father, removed him entirely from his own family, and 
 passed him irrecoverably over to another, as in the case of a 
 married daughter. When the demagogue Claudius curried 
 favour with the populace by causing himself to be adopted 
 by a plebeian, Cicero thundered at him the tremendous 
 rebuke, ( Why dost thou expose, by thine own fault, the 
 religion of the Claudian clan (gens) to become extinct ! 
 Athens was but a confederation of families ; a number of 
 families formed a (pparpia, a number of phratriae a tribe, and 
 the tribes combined composed the city. The religion 
 of the family retained its integrity long after the religion 
 of the city was formulated in a more splendid shape. The 
 fathers of the families became the dii Gentiles ; the city had 
 its eponym deities. 
 
 So much for the classic literature of the subject. Let us 
 turn back now to far more ancient days, beyond the dawn 
 of written history. Let us study ancestral worship in its 
 first beginnings, preceding all those notions of religious 
 sentiment and worship with which the monuments of the 
 great past have made us so familiar. 
 
 That it did actually precede all other kinds of religion 
 seems indubitably settled by the archaeological discoveries 
 of the last few years. If the picture of the head of an 
 elephant slightly engraved upon a blade of ivory, broken 
 into five pieces, discovered by Dr Falconer, in company 
 with MM. Lartet and de Verneuil, when they visited 
 together the excavations making at the station of La 
 Madeleine, Commune of Turzac, in the valley of the Yezere, 
 at the foot of the chalk cliffs of Perigord, in 1864, proves 
 that the aborigines of that part of France were acquainted 
 
X.] EELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 259 
 
 with the animal in its living state, although no elephants 
 now live in Europe ; — if the bunch of lines descending 
 beneath the throat be sufficient evidence that this elephant 
 which lived among them was no other than the long- 
 haired Mammoth, now entirely extinct, the carcases of 
 which, however, are still preserved in the eternal ice banks 
 of the Siberian coast, enveloped in the shaggy mantles 
 characteristic of the species ; * — if another engraving of 
 the head of a true elephant (that is, with almost vertical cra- 
 nium), done upon a fragment of reindeer bone, found by M. 
 de Vibraye at Langerie-Basse, a station lower down the 
 valley, proves, in like manner, that the elephant, as well as 
 the Mammoth, lived in France at that remote epoch, spe- 
 cifically differing by its narrow oblong ears set forward 
 close to the eyef from both the elephant of Africa and the 
 elephant of Asia as we know them now ; — if the picture of 
 a combat of reindeers (in which the attitude of the con- 
 queror is described as of surprising truth) upon a plate of 
 shist, with representations of a stag and doe, a horse, an 
 ox, an otter, and a beaver, upon other materials, all found 
 together by M. de Vibraye, in the diggings at Dordogne 
 and Charente,J give us all the proof we should require 
 
 * This peculiarity was verified by Mr Adams, in 1799, at the mouth of 
 the River Lina, Troyon, p. 74. Comptes rendus de PAcademie des 
 Sciences, lxi. p. 311. 
 
 f Comptes rendus l'Acad. des Sciences, lxi , 21 Aout, 1865. The eye 
 itself is represented closed by a finely-cut oblique line in its normal po- 
 sition. The tusks are represented, and the trunk, rather thin, has a 
 length about one and a half that of the head. Were these figures made 
 under the influence of a traditional knowledge of the existence of the 
 animals in a distant part of the world, chimerical characteristics would be 
 apparent, whereas a scrupulous exactness of details has been observed, 
 only to be accounted for on the supposition that the model was before 
 the artist's eyes. And, of course, all doubt is set aside by the fact of the 
 existence of the bones of these animals found in great numbers. Troyon, 
 p. 75. 
 
 % Mortillet, Materiaux, l^ re Annee, p. 109. Troyon l'homme fossile, 
 p. 73. I have myself examined a large number of these relics (in 
 cast) in the cabinet of my friend Professor Desor, and can vouch for the 
 sober truthfulness of the following description of them by Dr Broca ; — 
 'One can hardly conceive of men, deprived of the use of metal, able to 
 fabricate in bone, in ivory, in horn, an infinite variety of tools, extremely 
 delicate ; to chisel them into elegant forms, and represent by designs 
 graven on the handles of their instruments, figures of various animals ; 
 figures which are distinguished by an exactitude and artistic ability truly 
 remarkable. To find, in equal measure, the art sentiment we must 
 
260 
 
 THE FOUR TYPES OF 
 
 [lect. 
 
 Fig. 14. Handle of a Dagger, made of reindeer horn, and representing a 
 Falling Deer, found at Langerie Basse, Dordogne, France, 1883. 
 
X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 261 
 
 (apart from the evidence afforded by the bones' of the 
 animals themselves fossilized in the same localities) that 
 they were the contemporaries, the prey, and no doubt 
 the dread of the men who sketched their forms ;-— if, in a 
 word, such relics of rude skill serve well instead of books 
 to inform us under what conditions the early races of man- 
 kind protracted their material existence, why should we 
 not expect to get equally significant hints respecting their 
 intellectual and spiritual state ? 
 
 The question is answered for us by the funerary grotto of 
 Aurignac, in the south of France. 
 
 A workman making a terrace for a vineyard, in 1852, 
 dug into a talus of loose earth piled against the foot of a 
 limestone bluff, and exposed to day a large stone slab set 
 upright against a small arched opening, penetrating but a 
 short distance into the rock. Seventeen human skeletons, 
 some mammalian teeth, and eighteen little discs of sea- 
 shell, pierced as if for wearing round the neck, were super- 
 posed upon each other, in the little cave. The mayor of 
 the canton was a good Christian but a bad ethnologist ; 
 and so he gave orders to have the skeletons buried de- 
 cently, before any one had a chance to examine them 
 anatomically. Philanthropic, but rather stupid that ; con- 
 sidering that these were the immortal relics of the Adams 
 and Eves of Languedoc : and it was a chance, perhaps 
 never to turn up again, for seeing if the story of an Eden 
 could be proved or no. The adventure created no great 
 excitement, and even the new burying-place of these ante- 
 diluvian remains was afterwards forgotten. 
 
 descend innumerable centuries to the best days of Greece. They form a 
 contrast with the gross tracery of Celtic monuments so absolute that, 
 perhaps, — it has been suggested — they have been the handiwork of 
 modern refugees in the caves of the old troglodytes. But who in Europe, 
 since Quaternary times, could design on reindeer bone or horn, the figure 
 of an elephant different from all the kinds now living ? This interesting 
 race led a peaceable existence. A cranium found in the grotto of Bru- 
 niquel is distinguished by purity of form, softness of contours, slight pro- 
 jection of its apophyses, and shallowness of muscular impressions, — 
 features incompatible with the violent manners of a savage race.' In order 
 to assure the reader that there can be no exaggeration in the eulogies be- 
 stowed upon these wonderful works of art, 1 have drawn the figure of a 
 falling reindeer, which serves for the handle of a horn dagger, and he may 
 judge for himself of the artistic genius which these inhabitants of Gaul, of 
 the reindeer age, displayed. See fig. 14, 
 
262 THE FOUR TYPES OP [LECT. 
 
 In 1860 M. Lartet, unable to recover the bodies, com- 
 menced his researches of the cave itself. After the stuff 
 from the cliffs, which had concealed the mouth of the 
 cave, had been removed, there remained a terrace standing 
 about forty feet above the bed of the valley, and level with 
 the floor of the grotto. The soil of this terrace, and the 
 earthy floor of the grotto, formed one continuous deposit, 
 of variable thickness, but everywhere yielding relics of an 
 ancient age, — hearthstones, charred wood, and beds of 
 cinders, pottery, flint tools and arrow-heads, and burned 
 and fractured bones of animals. But mark this difference ! 
 All the traces of fire, all the marks of good- table fellow- 
 ship, all the proofs of industry, were outside, not inside, 
 the grotto — in the soil of the terrace, not in the floor-earth 
 of the cave. On the other hand, the human skeletons, 
 the disjointed necklaces, were found within the grotto, 
 and nothing of that sort occurred outside of it. 
 
 No stalactites were visible in this cave, nor the usual 
 stalagmite covering to the floor; no traces of the usual 
 bone-mud brought by water, and enveloping the remains, 
 as in other ossuary caverns. The earthy deposit seemed 
 a bed spread by the hands of man, on which to lay the 
 bodies found upon it. It was, to all intents and purposes, 
 a cave of Machpelah, an aboriginal mausoleum. 
 
 Outside the cave the friends of the departed had held 
 their funereal feasts ; but what were ^their delicacies ? 
 Animals no longer in existence, — the great cave-bear, the 
 mammoth, the rhinoceros, the great horned Irish elk, and 
 the cave-lion, attesting the immense antiquity of the event. 
 The aurochs — now almost extinct — and the reindeer were 
 also there. To these were added entremets of smaller crea- 
 tures which have escaped extinction and continue to haunt 
 our modern woods and fields : the common bear, the 
 badger, polecat, wild-cat, wolf and fox, the horse and ass (?), 
 the wild boar, common stag, and roe buck.* All the 
 bones which contained marrow were found broken or split 
 lengthwise with a knife. Hyenas' bones were also found; 
 and these foul creatures must have stolen in by night to 
 gnaw the relics of the feast, for the transverse marks left 
 by their teeth occurred on many of the surfaces, and their 
 dung was on the spot. , 
 
 * One bone of a hare was also found. 
 
X] . RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 263 
 
 Inside the cave were also found portions of animal 
 skeletons, so articulated that it was evident the flesh had 
 been upon them when they were deposited. Outside, the 
 remains of ruminants predominated, especially of reindeer 
 and of aurochs. Inside, those of carnivorous beasts pre- 
 dominated, especially the fox. Some species were only 
 represented by their teeth. 
 
 A few more details, and we will be prepared to draw 
 conclusions. 
 
 A hundred lamellse of flint, some flakes or chips of flint, 
 a kind of hammer, and some nuclei or matrix-blocks, gave 
 positive indications that the manufacture of tools and 
 weapons was carried on upon the spot ; and, therefore, 
 that the visit of man to the grotto was not a single and 
 incidental event. The bones and horns of the reindeer 
 had been utilized for divers instruments, such as awls or 
 bodkins, plain (unbarbed) arrow-heads, and whetstones in 
 the shape of polished blades. 
 
 The earthy deposit inside the grotto contained, with the 
 human skeletons, teeth of the cave-lion and wild boar, and 
 bones of the cave-bear, wolf, fox, horse, aurochs, reindeer, 
 and other mammifers, neither broken, gnawed, nor burned. 
 
 The picture of a bird's head was sculptured on the eye- 
 tooth of a bear. A lamella of flint, perfectly fresh and 
 unused, lay near it. The earth that had been thrown out 
 of the grotto in a heap upon the terrace, at the time 
 when the bodies were discovered, was carefully searched, 
 and furnished a beautiful specimen of worked reindeer- 
 horn, and about a hundred worked flints ; many of them, 
 however, so exceedingly minute that it seems impossible 
 to imagine them of any practical utility to those who made 
 them and placed them with the dead. These were pro- 
 bably miniature weapons, such as those small bronze 
 swords and spears, an inch or two in length, which are 
 often found in the cinerary urns of the north and south 
 of Europe. (See Appendix to pages 309, 310. 
 
 In the same heap of dirt coming from the grotto, 
 were found, naturally enough, other human bones and bones 
 of animals, none of which were either gnawed or broken ; 
 and several fragments of pottery, more or less rudely 
 made with the hand ; the only instance on record yet, 
 in which this art has shown itself to be of an antiquity 
 
264 THE FOUR TYPES OF [LECT. 
 
 commensurate with that of the extinct cave-bear. In all 
 other cases where remains of pottery have been dis- 
 covered, it has been in ossnary cave-deposits of the latest 
 Stone age, i.'e. (see page 66) contemporary with the Bos 
 primigenius (Urus), long after the total extinction of the 
 great cave-bear and large pachyderms, and the retire- 
 ment of the reindeer to the polar regions. We must 
 keep in mind, however, here that these other ossuary 
 deposits were not composed, as in this case, of dry earth, 
 shovelled by man's hand ; but muddy loams, distributed 
 by water ; and that in such aqueous deposits unhurried clay 
 potsherds could have stood but little chance of preserva- 
 tion. 
 
 What now are our conclusions ? We have here before 
 us a terrace and a cave, divided by a door of stone. On 
 the terrace traces of active life, a workshop and a table, 
 so to speak. In the cave no trace of life, dead bodies 
 only, carefully shut in from the assaults of weather and 
 wild beasts. The dead were buried then, not burned. 
 But more, — arms, ornaments, food, vessels, holding per- 
 fumes perhaps, or fruits, or cakes, were buried then (as in 
 so many parts of the world is still the custom to this day) 
 together with the dead. 
 
 Those savages believed in immortality ! WTiat was the 
 age they lived in ? The most remote of which we have, 
 as yet, any certain information of the existence of mankind, 
 — unless the reported discoveries of human fossils in the 
 tertiary rocks be true — the first of the four established 
 epochs of the great Stone age, the epoch of the cave- 
 bear, the antique elephant and first rhinoceros; for the 
 bones of this gigantic kind of bear were found not only 
 upon the terrace but inside the cave. 
 
 These funereal fires, these offerings in the tomb, this 
 workshop of the travelling equipages of their dead before 
 its door, are so many speaking traditions of an ancient, a 
 most ancient, a first and altogether aboriginal worship of 
 the manes of the dead. 
 
 The strangest part of this strange story is, that when 
 we turn to look at other funerary grottoes, for there are 
 others, caves formed by nature and used for tombs by man, 
 we see, first, that they are of a much later age, viz. the 
 fourth epoch of the age of Stone ; that characterized by the 
 
X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 265 
 
 predominance of the urus bones and domesticated animals ; 
 and secondly, we notice in them no traces of funereal 
 repasts ; at least none such have been reported or de- 
 scribed* 
 
 Was the worship of the dead abandoned, or forgotten, 
 or exchanged for some newer form of religious ceremony 
 during this interval ? That is hardly a possible suppo- 
 sition ; for, as I have shown in previous lectures, Egyptian 
 history opens under the auspices of this religious venera- 
 tion for the dead ; and the Druid dolmens, cromlechs, and 
 other structures, now considered as belonging to the lacus- 
 trine or fourth epoch of the age of Stone, are all of them 
 closely related to views and ceremonies which have the 
 same religion for a starting-point. The cave of Aurignac 
 stands as a fact so much alone in our present knowledge 
 of those distant ages that it would be extremely hazard- 
 ous to build any theory upon it involving comparative 
 questions. It is very curious, however, to observe how 
 the early sculpture also seems to have disappeared ; for on 
 the Druid monuments, and even on the bronze utensils 
 and armour of more civilized, times— those of the lacustrine 
 epoch — we find no pictures of animated nature ; only 
 circular and cross-bar patterns of a mathematical character, 
 or fanciful arabesque designs. If Troyon be correct in 
 ascribing this remarkable abstention to religious prejudices, 
 such as those which Moses afterwards established among 
 the Jews, and Mahomet among his followers, — then he 
 may be equally correct in assigning to the deluge a date 
 falling between the third and fourth epochs of the age of 
 Stone : that is, following the disappearance of the reindeer 
 and previous to the appearance of the present races of 
 domesticated animals and plants on European soil, — to a 
 deluge which was connected with slow changes of sea- 
 level, and the melting of continental glaciers ; to a deluge 
 which destroyed, not all indeed, but a large part of the 
 previous population, and allowed of a fresh importation 
 from the Orient, bringing with them an advance in arts 
 and arms, domesticated animals, the serial grains and 
 
 * Since this was written, Mr Dupont lias found a somewhat similar in- 
 stance in Belgium, a description of which will be given in the Appendix 
 to this volume. 
 
266 THE FOUR TYPES OF [LECT. 
 
 orchard trees ; and together with this new social life, a 
 more complicated set of religious ideas, among which the 
 pure and simple earlier worship of the dead would occupy 
 a subordinate and, perhaps, an insignificant position. 
 
 But it is in vain for us to attempt, in this advanced age, 
 either a defence or a precise definition of the extravagant 
 story of the deluge transmitted to. us by the Hebrew 
 scriptures. M. Troyon^s strong religious convictions 
 have prevented him from saying in so many words 
 that the deluge, which he proposes to place between 
 the third and fourth Stone age, was an almost insensible 
 variation of the sea-level, due to the retreat of the glacial 
 fields ; but he leaves that inference to be drawn by his 
 readers. Such, however, would be no Noachian deluge. 
 It would be quite another thing to ascribe the introduction 
 of new ideas simply to an amelioration of the post-glacial 
 climates and soils of Europe, permitting an influx of an 
 advancing population, among whom the primitive simplicity 
 of ancestral worship had become confused and concealed 
 by all those intellectual speculations and social customs 
 which Professor Fustel de Coulanges, of Strasbourg, has 
 traced backward in the pages of his admirable book, ( La 
 Cite Antique. 3 * 
 
 Whether this new population came from Asia originally, 
 as the comparative philologists seem to agree in believing, 
 or whether it was only reflected from the coasts of Asia 
 Minor and Syria, like a wave, originating in the west or 
 south, a view defended by Brugsch, in his discussion of 
 the seat of the Tahmu race, and others affiliated with it, 
 in the times of Ramses II., 1400 B.c.f ; or lastly, whether 
 it came direct from the great centre of Berber or Numidian 
 life, by Malta, Sicily, and Spain, as Desor and other ex- 
 plorers of the Dolmen monuments seem inclined to 
 favour, — in any case, such a population, endowed with 
 Philistine (Phoenician or Pelasgic) arts and arms, would 
 feel themselves no more embarrassed by the aborigines 
 whom they found in situ, than the Quakers, Puritans, 
 Cavaliers, and Catholics of the British colonies were by 
 
 * Paris, 1864. Reviewed in the Bib. Univ., Lausanne, xxx. No. 
 118. 
 f Geographie der Nachbarlander iEgyptens. 4to. Leipsic, 1858. 
 
X.] RELIGIOUS WOESHIP. 267 
 
 the red Indians. The one race wonld disappear slowly 
 before the other without a deluge,, or be absorbed into it. 
 
 But the subject of the apparent disappearance of these 
 mortuary rites from western Europe becomes more highly 
 complicated when we add to it the equally mysterious dis- 
 appearance of all subsequent traces of that early art, which 
 has so astonished antiquaries recently, by the admirable 
 productions which it left entombed in the caves of Peri- 
 gord. ( What/ asks Dr Broca,* ( has become of this in- 
 digenous civilization, so original, so different from all we 
 know ? Did it disappear by slow modifications ? No ; it 
 vanished suddenly, leaving no trace behind, and, everything 
 permits us to believe, by force. Following it without transi- 
 tion, we can discover nothing but the imprints of a powerful, 
 religious, warlike race, equipped with a perfected armour, 
 and knowing how to polish silex, but otherwise not dis- 
 posed to industry, and total strangers to all art sentiment. 
 Sufficient indication of a brutal and conquering invasion ! 
 The cave-dwellers of the age of Stone, who had acquired 
 the mastery of the soil, and had succeeded in extirpating 
 the last of the great mammifers of the Quaternary fauna, 
 did not know enough to defend themselves against the 
 irruption of barbarians ; and so we see a sort of pre-historic 
 Middle Ages intervene, succeeding to beautiful days of a 
 more ancient premature civilization, the origin of which is, 
 as yet, entirely unknown/ But probably these people of 
 the reindeer sculpture, so advanced in some respects, were 
 merely the somewhat softened and polished offspring of 
 the ruder savages of the epoch of the old diluvium. In 
 more than one cavern, the lower layers of the soil contain 
 rhinoceros and mammoth, while the upper hold only rein- 
 deer bones. The flints of the second epoch were worked 
 by simple percussion, precisely like those of the first epoch, 
 only that the flakes were smaller, and therefore the work 
 finer. No rubbing was employed in either. The knives 
 of both epochs are precisely alike. We may then conclude 
 from the sculptures of the reindeer cave-men of Perigord, 
 that the still more ancient cave-bear people of the grotto of 
 Aurignac had begun to make designs. One such, in fact, 
 
 * Address before the Anthropological Society, Hist, des Travaux de 
 
268 THE FOUR TYPES OF [LECT. 
 
 has been discovered by M. Garrigou, in another Pyrenean 
 cave, — a pebble, on which are cut the outlines of a bear.* 
 
 It would seem, in fact, impossible for a race, however 
 low in mental capacity, to continue for many generations 
 pecking away at flint nodules to make weapons, and at 
 marrow-bones to obtain food, without developing ideas of 
 form and the desire of producing them at will. Just so 
 the ceremonial rites of interment must have grown up 
 slowly from the most imperfect and accidental beginnings ; 
 and any ideas of a hereafter must have been educed by 
 chance from the accidents of life, through the religious 
 faculty; just as accidental likenesses in stones and bones, 
 and chance marks which were made on them by human 
 teeth and flint knives, must have provoked the artistic 
 faculty to rouse itself to attempt aesthetic shapes. 
 
 All this was consistent with the lowest grades of 
 savagery. I have said, in a former lecture, f that all 
 evidence is against the cannibalism of the Scandinavian 
 aborigines. But in other regions cannibalism may have 
 prevailed. The subject has become lately a favourite and 
 fruitful theme of discussion ; and the evidence against the 
 aborigines is growing formidable. At the recent festival at 
 Salisbury, in honour of the opening of the new Museum j 
 of archaeological relics, Dr Thurnam read a paper on the 
 round-head people of the round barrows (corresponding to 
 the hugelgraber of Germany), and the long-headed people 
 of the long barrows (reihen graber) . He asserted the priority 
 of the latter, and their evident addiction to human sacri- 
 fices. Mr Stevens stated that the human bones found in 
 the pit-dwellings lately opened at Fullerton, were all split 
 and broken like those of the animals with which they were 
 found. In the Belgian caves the same fact has been re- 
 marked. M. Garrigou (and M. Roujou also) has exhibited 
 human bones from the Pyrenean caves, on which exist 
 marks of methodical percussion, intended for opening the 
 medullary canal. Dr Clement, of St Aubin, in Canton 
 Neuchatel, has found the arm-bone of a boy, with numer- 
 ous pointed teeth-marks on its sides and ends. 
 
 War is the normal social state of all savages ; war with 
 
 * ' Which, by the length of its cervical spiny apothyses resembles more 
 the cave-bear than any other known species.' 
 t Pages 130, 131. 
 
X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 269 
 
 the beasts, war with encroaching clans. Their style of 
 war was to be crafty, treacherous, and consequently cruel. 
 The growth of religious ideas once introducing sacrifices, 
 war offers human victims, and hunger baits the temptation 
 sooner or later, which when yielded to becomes a habit ; 
 and habits are hereditary. The traces of this custom 
 are visible in the most civilized nations of antiquity. 
 In Rome and Greece locks of human hair were laid upon 
 the altar. Human effigies, built up of rushes, were on 
 certain occasions, solemnly thrown into the Tiber. Mr 
 Blyth thinks that the same explanation will suit for the 
 red powder which the Hindoos throw about upon each 
 other in their religious festivals. 
 
 But whether flowers, or food, or incense, or ornaments 
 and arms, or horses and slaves, or hecatombs of captured 
 enemies, were offered in the sacrifices of the advancing 
 ages, — all these rites, however beautiful some, however 
 horrible others, were but the many-sided aspects of one 
 aboriginal idea, the primitive religion of mankind, the 
 pure and simple worship of the dead. 
 
 I have said the pure and simple worship of the dead. 
 What, then, was the aboriginal savage's idea of immortality ? 
 A life beyond the grave ; no more, no less. How, then, 
 did it differ from the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman ideas of 
 the state of the departed ; and from that faith which the 
 Christian casts, as his anchor, into Heaven ? 
 
 All things are valued by relationships. A life this side 
 the grave cannot be the same for any two living beings ; 
 how can the life yon side be other than most manifold ? 
 And its idea, if not mere book-lore, must be likewise mani- 
 fold. The Egyptian's eternal mansion was a combination 
 of Palace hall and Parisian restaurant. The Greek of 
 Homer's day anticipated an Elysium such as Ossian sang. 
 The artists and philosophers of the Empire half believed 
 in a Hades of pensive, ennuied, gentle, garrulous, and re- 
 gretful shadows, such as Dante has described, and Bocca- 
 cio's ( Decameron' embodies in more earthly substantiality. 
 The savage knew nothing of life but its wants and woes, 
 its haggard forests, death chills, demon-like wild beasts, 
 famines, incurable diseases ; what could his faith in im- 
 mortality do for his hooped and shackled nature ? His 
 
 
270 THE FOUR TYPES OF [LECT. 
 
 worship of the dead was but the germ of a religion, a mere 
 instinct of his animal affections, — nothing more. 
 
 The heaven of the Christian is a blinding reflection 
 from the skies, of all the beauties and sublimities that the 
 eye of the poet has seen upon the earth ; of all the sweet- 
 ness of this life that the heart of parent and lover has ever 
 tasted; of all those sun-lit regions of science which the 
 latest civilizations have conquered and possessed. The 
 immortality of the ancients was the immortality of the 
 dead, with their faces always turned regretfully towards 
 the life that they had lost, because it was real life ; while 
 their immortality was but an eternal death, without an 
 object and without activity. Jesus came and stood, and 
 said, ' God is not the God of the dead, but of the living; \ 
 therefore we say of Him that f He brought a living immor- 
 tality to light/ 
 
 Yet after all, the Christian religion is but the ancient 
 worship of the dead, sublimated, glorified, intensified, 
 made more concrete in its objects and details, and con- 
 centrated upon one figure, around which all its ceremonial 
 is grouped. 
 
 II. The second type of religion is that of the worship of 
 the powers of nature. Fetichism is its lowest form; 
 astrology and fire-worship its highest forms ; but in every 
 aspect its essential nature consists in the worship of the 
 material parts of the world, under the false impression 
 that they possess powers which they do not. This ought 
 to be distinctly understood. There is a true and reason- 
 able worship of the powers of nature, which regards their 
 just sublimities, loves and respects their concurrent har- 
 monies, burns with a grateful sense of their blessed in- 
 fluences on the life of man, and shudders at the imagination 
 of disasters, which the understanding can explain, and even 
 sometimes can predict, but not prevent, nor even yet, per- 
 haps, escape from. 
 
 But a Fetich is a natural object superstition sly beloved 
 or feared, because supposed to possess unknown, peculiar, 
 or magical powers. A fetich is a thing personified by 
 ignorant people, so as to be considered able to ad — 1. volun- 
 tarily ; 2. under the influence of a kind or unkind feeling 
 towards man ; and 3. with some other kind of power than 
 its nature would suggest. 
 
X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 271 
 
 The earliest Fetiches, no doubt, were stones and sticks. 
 
 A stone, for instance, has the power to lie still where it 
 is put, but not to get up of itself; it can roll down-hill, 
 but not up-hill. Imagine our horror at seeing a rock slowly 
 and deliberately rolling itself to the top of a hill ! or an 
 Alpine aiguille nodding to us, and standing again erect ! 
 Yet that is the horror of the fetich. One of the most 
 effective scenes in the spurious continuation of Bunyan's 
 Pilgrim's Progress, is that where the wretched man is 
 hurried off by demons towards the mouth of the pit, while 
 all the trees along the road-side draw back their branches 
 from his despairing grasp, except two twigs, which merci- 
 fully advance themselves, and by which he holds on and is 
 saved. Amadis de Gaul and all the romance literature of 
 the days of chivalry abounds in this conception, by the 
 imagination, of a voluntary, kind or malignant, power, 
 resident in things. It is the characteristic of our dream 
 life ; it makes nightmare nightmare. It characterizes all 
 child life. It makes itself dominant, not only over the 
 savage population of the globe, but over the most culti- 
 vated minds, at special times, and in respect to special 
 things. I have known a well-balanced mind, set free from 
 all superstitions but one, ascribe a prophetic power of mis- 
 chief to broken glass. I have heard the most enlightened 
 and liberalized people confess to a superstitious faith in 
 those charming fetiches, the precious gems; and in- 
 numerable are the beautiful legends on record respecting 
 their magical powers. I have myself worn for four years 
 an amulet, which no money would buy ; and since I have 
 worn it, my life has been most prosperous. I will show it 
 to you — it is the nail on which John Brown hung up his 
 coat and hat all the time he was incarcerated in Charles- 
 town jail. A friend of mine, a brigade surgeon in General 
 Patterson's army, the first man who entered the cell, when 
 our troops occupied the place (in 1861), looking round the 
 room, saw nothing he could bring away for me, but this 
 one nail, which the jailor told him had been thus used, — I 
 hope it is my only fetich. 
 
 What married woman in this audience of Boston Illumi- 
 nataB would not feel heart-sick with a nameless premoni- 
 tion of impending evil, if her wedding-ring should snap 
 asunder ? That is her fetich. When the sword fell from 
 
272 THE FOUE TYPES OF [LECT. 
 
 the castle-wall, tlie senesclial never thought of ascribing it 
 to the fatigue of leather ; but to a voluntary ability in the 
 sword itself to sound an alarm of danger to the noble 
 house, of whose possessions it had been both grantor and 
 guarantee. 
 
 It is impossible to enumerate the instances of existing 
 fetich worship in the uncultivated world. The worship of 
 the horse-shoe is still almost universal ; I may explain its 
 origin hereafter. So is the observance of the divining 
 rod ; which has a similar origin. Of ten or twelve thou- 
 sand wells bored during the last eight years in the Yenango 
 county oil -region in Pennsylvania, a thousand (more or 
 less) were located by diviners with a divining rod; or 
 with a pendulum made of a deerskin bag enclosing a ball 
 of musk ; or by spiritualists falling into trances and exe- 
 cuting spasmodic evolutions when they felt the influence 
 of the spot to be selected. There is a popular lecturer 
 on geology, whose wife practises the profession of a 
 spiritual explorer, by help of this kind of fetich. The 
 other day she held a piece of antimony ore to her forehead, 
 and immediately fell into a rhapsodical description of a 
 charming lake-country, in Canada, through which the 
 vein of that ore runs. I have seen shafts sunk after silver 
 in the glades of Somerset county, Pennsylvania, under the 
 dictation of an old scamp, who would lay in his hunting 
 cap a small looking-glass, which had cabalistic characters 
 on the back of it, and was called an erdspiegel ; and then 
 hiding his own face over it, he would describe the depth 
 exactly to an inch of all the mineral wonders that he saw 
 beneath the surface. So strongly did the imagination of 
 this fetich act upon his workmen, simple old German 
 immigrants from the mother-land of superstition as they 
 were, that they affirmed with all their faith, that when at 
 work at the bottom of their shaft they could distinctly hear 
 invisible agents laughing, talking, pounding, picking be- 
 neath their feet, removing the treasure downward out of 
 reach ; for of course they never found it. 
 
 Now if all this, and a thousand times more of it, be 
 possible in our day, in this fresh land of honest, open work, 
 compelling nature to say all and no more than what she 
 knows — to do all and no more than what she has the 
 power to do; leaving no hole or corner of the globe an 
 
X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 273 
 
 unexplored retreat of the mysterious ; with libraries full of 
 demonstrations of the exact ability of every created agency 
 to harm or heal us ; with public schools to save our sons 
 and daughters from the ineradicable first infection of this 
 superstition of the fetich, how overwhelming a deluge of 
 it must have submerged the early souls of men; those 
 hapless savages, who trembled at every leaf-fall, and fled 
 with averted faces from every natural object a little out of 
 the ordinary shape.* What more inevitable than that 
 such shapes as isolated pillars of rock, stones curiously 
 perched on peaks and movable by the hand's touch, and 
 ambrose stones, cheese-rings, boulders in river currents, 
 labyrinthine caves and horrid clefts between high crags, 
 made grandly vocal with the voice of cataracts, and with 
 the awful roar of beasts ; what more inevitable than that 
 these objects of nature should come to be feared and 
 worshipped ? f 
 
 This was sure to be the case, when they imitated even 
 in the least degree the forms of man or beast. Such a 
 pillar of red saliferous sandstone, capped by a fragment of 
 a layer of white limestone, as the traveller may see stand- 
 ing half way up the mountain side/and overlooking the west 
 shore of the Dead Sea, was sure to have some horrible 
 Lot's-wife legend attached to it. Two months ago as I 
 passed along the southern shore of the Gulf of St Law- 
 rence, rounding the point of Gaspe, I saw a rock called the 
 Old Man, and was told that some few years ago another 
 stood beside it, called the Old Woman, but the surf had 
 carried that away. The ocean is a great artificer of such 
 rude effigies, making and breaking them wherever there 
 are suitable rocks on any coast. And the ancient savages 
 were fishermen, and lived upon the coast, and sailed 
 among these cliffs ; and many a father's dead body was 
 found near some remarkable rock, which grew to be the 
 special object of his children's reverence ; and many a 
 legend of dead warriors got mingled up with new-formed 
 
 * See good instances mentioned by Livingstone. 
 
 f See m ' Harper ' of November the account of the Indian worship of 
 Mount Popocatapetl, 'the smoking mountain.' See the picture and 
 description of Mount Barkal, in Upper Egypt, by Lepsius, Reise. See 
 also the views of the cleft mountain behind Delphi, in Greece, and the 
 cleft rock in front of the temple of Philce. 
 
 18 
 
274 THE FOUR TYPES OP [LECT. 
 
 prodigies of the erosive powers of the sea; transitions 
 from ancestral worship to fetich worship, and mixtures of 
 the two. In this way we can explain the frequency of 
 legends of animated stones, and human beings turned to 
 stones, and in fact all the phenomena of early idolatry, 
 together with that other class of legends wherein trees are 
 substituted for rocks, maidens changed into laurel and 
 myrtle and cypress, spirits confined in oaks, and the whole 
 range of similar superstitions. But I shall show you 
 hereafter that even for these superstitions there was a solid 
 historical basis, apart from all disposition in the human 
 imagination to personify and deify or diabolize the benefi- 
 cent and noxious qualities of natural things. We must 
 ne^er forget that Druid priests lived under oaks, and their 
 spirits were supposed to haunt them afterwards. The 
 hunter who fell from the rock was supposed to become 
 identified with the rock. Superstition acts upon material 
 objects to convert them into fetiches just as heat acts upon 
 a bar of iron to make of it a magnet. It was not the height 
 of the rocky summit that evoked the savage's devotion, 
 but the remembrance of some salvation there ; it was his 
 Ararat. It was not the tickled fancy which grew reverent 
 before the natural rocking-stone. It was its unaccountable 
 and imposing resemblance to the boat which had been to 
 his race both mother and father in one — obtaining for him 
 food in life, saving him in storms from death, and furnish- 
 ing him with a burial-place — that made him reverent. 
 
 But the intellectual ground of fetich worship is now, and 
 always has been, ignorance of natural history. The fetich 
 is the first physical object which strikes the bewildered eye 
 as wanting its own explanation. In this sense the range 
 of the fetich is immense. It is not confined to sticks and 
 stones. It ascends to the platform of classic art. The 
 Greek priests made their statues live and move and speak 
 and weep, as Romish priests do now. Memnon's statue 
 with its sunrise music was a splendid fetich. 
 
 We can ascend still higher. I have mentioned the wor- 
 ship of gems, endowed with superhuman intelligence. 
 But there is a far more refined fetichism than that. The 
 whole system of the Cabala is built upon it. In ancient 
 times extraordinary powers were assigned to words and 
 numbers. They were treated as entities, powerful entities. 
 
X.] EELIGIOUS WOESHIP. 275 
 
 You know how full the stories of the Thousand Nights are 
 of this. The name of Solomon was the most powerful of 
 all fetiches. He who could speak it rightly could bind 
 and loose spirits, fly like a bird, and, in fact, command all 
 the powers of nature. The King of the Genii was confined 
 thousands of years in a casket merely because Solomon's 
 seal was upon it. The story has been repeated in many 
 forms. Asmodeus was thus shut up in a modern magi- 
 cian's phial. No satisfactory explanation of this class of 
 superstitions has ever been published, to my knowledge. 
 It must have some basis in real life. Primal error, which 
 is a nothing, cannot bear fruit. The Pythagorean system 
 of Philosophy turned on the magic powers of numbers. 
 There is a great disposition in the human mind to dwell on 
 coincidences. We are fascinated by the magic square, for 
 instance, which adds up the same in all directions. I was 
 once introduced to a learned Rabbinical scholar living in 
 Berlin. His room was so full of tobacco smoke when I 
 entered it that I could hardly discern his form at the far end. 
 But I soon found that his head was so much fuller of tal- 
 mudic and cabalistic lore that it was impossible to see any 
 truth through that fog. He assured me that there was such 
 power in a name, that the moment of the christening of a 
 child was the most solemn and sublime of all the moments 
 in his history. For as he was named so he became. The 
 name had the power of destiny, and involved in its own 
 letters all the events of that child's existence. 
 
 Now how could such a curious system of fetichism 
 arise ? I have given you the explanation, in part, in my 
 lecture on the alphabet. The letters of a name are sym- 
 bolic ; their conjunction was cabalistic. But fully to com- 
 prehend the importance of a word to the old nations, one 
 must imagine for himself the rise of the secret priesthoods, 
 the sacred mysteries, the freemasonries with their signs and 
 pass words.* Solomon was the representative Cell Man, 
 or Cabalist, head of all the orders of freemasons, clerical 
 and lay, so to speak, that have ever existed, f His name 
 
 * *m DaBaK, Hebrew, a word, is the same as "at DeBiR, the taber- 
 nacle of Jehovah. 
 
 t Solomon, Shalmanezer, Carloraan, Charlemagne, such names are may- 
 poles upon which have been hung all the garlands of mythology, for the 
 nations to dance around. Solomon calls himself (if he wrote the book) 
 
276 THE FOUR TYPES OF [LECT. 
 
 was, in fact, the embodied idea of the Mystery; it stood 
 for the whole body of occult lore. But it therefore stood 
 for the whole political power of the initiated classes. Its 
 rise by any man was a guarantee of his good standing in 
 the society, of responsibility as a messenger, of authority 
 as an agent. All the spirits of the throne and the pulpit, 
 the work-bench and the writing-table, were obedient to it. 
 Hence, legends like that of Prospero and Ariel; Faust 
 and Mephistopheles ; Friar Bacon and Father Bungay; 
 legends so devised as to conceal the real spirits, the real 
 magicians, and the real words-of-command ; but legends 
 which, doing this work for their inventors, did also another 
 for themselves, infused into the common people of every 
 race a fresh and more subtle spirit of mystic fetichism, so 
 penetrating and intangible in its character, that the wisest, 
 most learned, and most holy men of modern times have 
 not escaped its influence. For, 
 
 One step more, and we reach the highest grade of 
 fetichism ; rising insensibly from all before described. 
 What is an orthodox creed, but a mystic word-fetich ? 
 Look at the wafer elevated by the Romish priest in the 
 sacrifice of the mass, as a piece of God-man — thousands 
 prostrate before it, not daring even to look at it, so awful 
 is their dread of its power to bless them and to curse 
 them, to annihilate them instantly ! Yet that is merely a 
 thing-fetich. Look now at that dogma, elevated by the 
 Protestant preacher before the logical understanding of 
 his audience, whose souls He prostrate in the dust before 
 it, not daring to use their reason on it, or to look it for a 
 moment in the face, believing, as they must, that to doubt 
 it is to be damned ! That is a word-fetich. 
 
 What is the school of Gaussen and Hengstenberg 
 among theologians, but a sect of Christianity retiring 
 from the noble reverence and practice of the Spirit of 
 Christ and his apostles, and from the sublime conceptions 
 of the Hebrew poets, and dropping backward and down- 
 ward on to the ground of literal fetichism ; worshipping 
 
 in the beginning of Ecclesiastes, the Cabalist, or quelt (ribp,) which our 
 translators have rendered preacher, without knowing that to preach = to 
 bark, i. e. to speak oracularly (Arkitely) ; as, to pray — to bray ; and as, 
 to gabble, or talk gibberish = to gobble, i, e. to speak cabalistically, or in 
 a manner unintelligible to the uninitiated or common people. 
 
X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 277 
 
 the letter which, Christ says it, must kill ; and converting 
 the literature of all the Hebrew ages from David and Solo- 
 mon to James and John into a gilt-edged quarto bound in 
 calf; putting a more fatal stop to the progress of the Chris- 
 tian Church towards its millennial purity than ever did the 
 golden calf which arrested the progress of Israel into their 
 promised land ! There are multitudes of Christians living 
 now who entertain so strongly the old Jewish reverence 
 for the word Jehovah, that they bring themselves to pro- 
 nounce it only with a strenuous effort of the reason and the 
 will combined. It is not simply from reverence for the in- 
 finite God whose special name it is supposed to be — but 
 reverence for the word ; because it was for ages one of the 
 great world-fetiches, and called 'the unpronounceable/ 
 Laymen had no right to take it on their lips. It was a 
 privilege of clergy. It was fetich — or tabu — for the out- 
 side masses. Why ? Because it lay at the heart of the 
 special religious system of the Hebrews : because it was 
 the supposed formula of Unitarian doctrine as opposed to 
 all idolatry; because it was translated 'the living God/ 
 and itself shared a sort of weird life ; because it was the 
 word-temple in which dwelt the shekinah of all transcend- 
 ental science ; veiled, but ready to break forth in fire and 
 light ; veiled like Isis, but before which the initiated priests 
 might worship, trembling and alone. It was, therefore, to 
 the ancient Jew, and still is to the devout but superstitious 
 Christian, an awful silent logos. 
 
 In a still more, distant east, we have another instance of 
 an unpronounceable word, a fetich formula, the key to the 
 mysteries of another system of religious worship : I refer, 
 of course, to the sacred syllable ATJM of the Brahmans. It 
 is said to be of no known specific meaning, but to involve 
 in some way the idea of the Trinity. Now we know what 
 the Hindu trinity is : Brahma, Yishnu, Siva ; the maker, 
 preserver, destroyer. But why these three are so related 
 to each other and to human history, or how they can be 
 distinguished by the letters A TJ M (or any other mode of 
 spelling Oil), has not been clearly stated ; nOr can I venture 
 to demand your long attention this evening to what I 
 would consider the true demonstration of the curious 
 problem. I should make it on Arkite grounds ; by which 
 I mean, that the word itself, as pronounced, has always 
 
 
278 THE F0UE TYPES OP [LECT. 
 
 been the symbol of Arkite mystery, secrecy, and initiation ; 
 being the representative of the roar or murmur of the 
 great deep. Mim is the Hebrew name for the waters of 
 the sea.* Ainim is the Hebrew name for multitudes of 
 peoples, the roar of which goes up as the voice of many 
 waters. I have shown you that the shape of the letter M 
 was obtained from the water-waved surface of the sea. 
 You are all probably sufficiently acquainted with the 
 pictures of the Hindu pantheon to recognize in Vishnu 
 the Fish- Noah, or god of the waters, sleeping upon a coiled 
 serpent, the symbol of water, and representing the pre- 
 serving genius of the ark. Brahma as the father-creator 
 represents the genius of the mountain. And Siva, the 
 destroyer, his name being identical with the Typhon of 
 the west, represents the devouring deluge. Then, al- 
 though the three letters A U M are of western form, and 
 the analogous Sanscrit letters have been so changed as to 
 conceal their old meanings, the identity of the A with Brah- 
 ma, U with Vishnu, and M with Siva, follows as a matter 
 of course ; and there is no longer any wonder that this 
 Om is too dreadful a fetich to be pronounced, and too 
 sacred to be taught by any Brahman to a man of any 
 other caste. And yet, in spite of the prohibition, it has 
 escaped. It leaked out, into many languages, in the earliest 
 times. It formed part of many of the most sacred western 
 words ; such as, Omphalos, the navel, a name for the 
 Delphic oracle; Triomjohe, the cry or watchword of the 
 priests of Bacchus; umber and imber, darkness and storm; 
 amber, f the precious electron found floating on the waves. 
 The Irish Druids called by this name, Omh,J the living 
 God, and defined its meaning ( He who is/ There is very 
 little doubt that it is the Ob, or spirit of divination, men- 
 tioned in the Hebrew scriptures, and the Obi, or necro- 
 mantic power, of the blacks of Western Africa. It is not 
 
 * Egyptian ham-ham, to roar (Bunsen, vol. i. p. 462); Coptic 
 7iem,-hem, to roar ; hm, to fish, p. 463 ; mhi, to draw water, p. 469 ; mah, 
 water (Bunsen cites Leemans, viii. xiv. xvi. for this, on p. 468). 
 
 f Am, Egyptian, gem or pearl. Bunsen, p. 455 (Coptic ana-mei), and 
 anm (p. 456). — See the word discussed in the Appendix. 
 
 X Cf. Amn, Egyptian name of Jupiter, Coptic amoun ; and also the Egyp- 
 tian verb, to conceal ; Coptic amoni. Compare with this the Amen of the 
 Hebrew, and the Egyptian ma (Coptic me, mei), truth, true. Cf. also 
 amut (Coptic amen-t), Hades ; and am-t (cf. ouom), devourer. 
 
X.] KELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 279 
 
 impossible that it occurs in such modern words as humbug; 
 for the second syllable of that word is undoubtedly (like 
 bugger, and bugaboo) the Scythian bog, once meaning 
 god (Bacchus), and now devil. It probably occurs in our 
 word Umpire , or judge in equity, but refers in this case 
 not to the man, but to the bar, or court, whose laws he 
 but administered. 
 
 The unpronounceable divine name among the Hebrews is 
 perhaps the best introduction we could have to the history 
 of the third type of religious worship, which I have now 
 to describe. 
 
 III. The worship of the gods in heaven. 
 
 You may remember that our first type of religion in- 
 volved the worship which the early inhabitants of the 
 earth paid, and many of its present inhabitants still pay, to 
 their dead parents and ancestors. The second type of 
 religion, the last described, coeval in its origin and co- 
 extensive in its duration with the first, was fetichism, the 
 worship of the powers of nature, as expressed unintel- 
 ligibly or magically in the objects of sense — mountains and 
 seas, rocks and trees, sounds in the air, works of art, and 
 words and creeds constructed by the priests. 
 
 Now the third type of religion is the worship of the 
 invisible God as a creator, preserver, benefactor, and judge. 
 
 It has been the central question of all critical theology, 
 how this religious conception was generated in the soul 
 of man. Was it aboriginal ? Or has it been developed 
 gradually by civilization ? Was it revealed at first ? Or did 
 it reside as an innate co-essential germ of intelligence in the 
 human intellect as such ? Was it the common property of 
 the earliest people and afterwards lost amid the sins and 
 miseries of migrating races, enslaved races, isolated races, 
 perishing races ? Or was it committed as a sacred and 
 peculiar privilege to one chosen people, for safe keeping 
 until the fulness of times had come, and the Son of God 
 was revealed, and the new dispensation was inaugurated, 
 and the apostles were sent forth to fill the earth with the light 
 and warmth of that 'life eternal, which is the knowledge 
 of the true God, and of Jesus Christ whom he hath sent.'' 
 
 Of these theories, the last is held to be the true one by 
 orthodox Christians. But it is opposed in many points to 
 the results of that criticism of the religious history of man- 
 
280 THE FOUR TYPES OF [LECT. 
 
 kind which the modern sciences have forced the honest 
 seekers after truth to undertake. Of course I will not 
 have time this evening to pursue the discussion far. But 
 I must at least point out the place where men of science 
 stand to view the rise of the divine idea in man, — that 
 glorious sunrise of the soul — the only sunrise in the 
 history of mankind. 
 
 The idea of an invisible God finds its only analogy in 
 
 j the knowledge which the domestic relations give to chil- 
 dren of their parents. It is reasonable, therefore, that it 
 
 | sprang, as a natural development, out of the worship of 
 dead ancestors. If the idea of God be that of a being 
 invisible, creative, provident, protective, and judicial, it 
 differs in no respect from a combination of the two ideas 
 of a living father, and a father who has entered his eternal 
 mansion. Do you object, however, that the idea of God is 
 far grander ? I grant it : but that is a matter of degrees. 
 The definition of the young minister, which took by storm 
 the suffrages of the Assembly of the Westminster Divines : 
 — ' God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his 
 being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and 
 truth/ was the glorious consummation of all the religions 
 feeling and reasoning of all ages, — the flower of human 
 thought, ripened in the choicest soil of the last deposits of 
 the waters of civilization. Wisdom, power, justness, 
 goodness, truth ! What are these but human attributes, 
 on which the whole superstructure of ancestral worship 
 has been built ? But the three epithets, Infinite, Eternal, 
 and Unchangeable, are transcendental ideas, evolved by 
 science ; abstractions, only possible to well-formed, well- 
 bred brains; enlargements of the savage notion of a 
 father's character by civilized thinkers, whose material 
 horizon has been widened by travel ; whose astronomy has 
 changed its starry firmament into realms of interstellar 
 space ; whose lives of leisure have allowed free scope for 
 poetry as well as practice ; and made love, not fear, the 
 law of thought. Love is, like heat, the great expander. 
 God is a product of philanthropy.* The shivering, 
 
 * Benevolence is an unknown instinct in the lower animals until they 
 are domesticated with mankind ; for their love of offspring is not only 
 selfish, but provisional, and in all its exhibitions savage and cruel. Bene- 
 volence is foreign also to the animal part of man's economy; the 
 
X.] EELIGIOUS WOESHIP. 281 
 
 hungry, timorous savage of the earliest days had not 
 enough of love about his house to make a small- sized god 
 of. Infinite ! Eternal ! Unchangeable ! Men could begin 
 to comprehend such epithets — to invent them rudely, I 
 should rather say — when they began to build pyramids and 
 ' eternal mansions 3 for their departed great : but not 
 before. 
 
 We find, therefore, no trace of our idea of Deity in the 
 earliest history of mankind. The Hebrew writers report 
 indeed such traces ; but their reports are not evidence 
 because not contemporary. They only go to show what 
 was the idea of God among the Jews after the times of 
 David, subsequent to whom all their Scriptures seem to 
 have been written. Or, if the earlier books should be 
 considered as compilations from fragments of an older 
 time — an opinion now placed almost above discussion — 
 such fragments prove, not that our idea of God existed at 
 the beginning of history, but,' on the contrary, that it did 
 not so exist. You will find an admirable resumti of the 
 evidence of the truth of this statement in Chapter V. of a 
 book by William Rathbone Greg, entitled Creed of 
 Christendom. You need, however, merely refresh your 
 biblical memories, and recall a few texts, to see at once 
 that the common notion of a special revelation to the 
 Jews, as a peculiar people, of the fact of the existence of 
 One God, has no foundation whatever. 
 
 Milman and others speak of the pure monotheism of the 
 Jews as a singular phenomenon, confined to the narrow 
 strip of land called Palestine, where { the worship of one 
 Almighty Creator of the universe subsisted as its only 
 sanctuary, and where, in every stage of society, under the 
 pastoral tent of Abraham, and in the sumptuous temple of 
 Solomon, the same creed maintained its inviolable sim- 
 
 stomach laughs at it ; but the savage is little else than a reasoning 
 stomach ; he immolates his parents, and exposes his children, when they 
 cease to benefit his own life, or gratify his own desires. Benevolence did 
 not enter — could not enter into the early idea of a God. The Hebrew 
 Jehovah is a selfish personage. The Christian God is Love itself. It is 
 not made out whether good is from god, or god from good ; or whether 
 indeed there is any direct connection between these words. In the 
 Appendix will be found a table of words, in 52 languages, standing 
 for the ideas of God, Spirit, Angel, and Devil, which the reader may find 
 useful. 
 
282 THE F0UK TYPES OF [LECT. 
 
 plicity.'* No ! Their own writings show that they were 
 incessantly and unconquerably idolatrous. No punish- 
 . ments could cure them. The High Priest of Jehovah 
 is described as worshipping the Egyptian Apis, while 
 Jehovah was thundering his law to this high priest's 
 brother, on the top of the mountain, before their eyes. 
 And when that law came down in his hands, it contained 
 no notice of the doctrine of an only true God. Its first 
 commandment merely forbade the people, to whom it was 
 sent, from worshipping any other than their own God. 
 
 The fact is evident, that Jehovah was the family God of 
 the Abrahamidas ; and therefore became subsequently the 
 national God of the Hebrews. I do not mean by this, a 
 family god in the sense of the ancestral worship ; but a 
 god, considered by the Hebrew progenitors of David and 
 Solomon, whoever they were, as the lar or hatfjuov of their 
 house. It looks as if it were an adopted deity, adopted 
 by the Hebrews (if they were Hyksos) from the Egyptian 
 FIJK PXJ NTJK, the ( unknown God/ the male Isis, whose 
 veil could not be raised ; the god who refused to tell his 
 worshippers his name ; a name, in fact, in process of in- 
 vention^ The story reads that this God called Abram out 
 of Ur of the Chaldees ; of course the call came from the 
 God at his own home — in Palestine; he was a western 
 deity. The story says that Abram/ s parents worshipped 
 other gods (although in Gen. xxxi. 53, we read, ' the God 
 of Abraham, the God of Nachor, the God of their fathers 
 judge betwixt us' !), and that his children's cousins at the 
 old eastern homestead continued to do so afterwards. The 
 Jehovah was evidently a western deity. His "other Hebrew 
 name, Adonai, shows this still more plainly ; for it is the 
 Adonis of the Syrian worship, and was introduced into 
 the pantheon of Egypt by Amenoph IV., a Pharaoh of the 
 18th dynasty, who took this God's name instead of Am- 
 nion's in his own, calling himself no longer Amen-oph, but 
 Khou-en-Aten, or the splendour of the solar disc. Aten, 
 1 the radiant disc,' was then the Syrian Baal- Adonis, intro- 
 duced into Egypt by the Hyksos of the previous (17th) 
 dynasty, under the name of Sutech. How it happened that 
 a native Pharaoh, a lineal descendant of Amosis, the ex- 
 
 * Hist. Jews, i. 4. f See Appendix to p. 300. 
 
X.] EELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 283 
 
 peller of the Hyksos (through Amenopli I., Thouttnes I. 
 and III., Amenopli II., Thoutmes IV., and Amenopli 
 III.), should forsake Ammon, persecute the old Egyptian 
 ceremonial, and become a fanatical propagandist of a 
 special form of Hyksos- Shemite faith, can only be ex- 
 plained by reference to the fact that his mother was a 
 foreigner. Her pictures at Tel-Amarna have rose-coloured 
 (i. e. northern- coloured) flesh. His own most extraor- 
 dinary profile hints at a strange and tragic family origin ; 
 while similarly strange-faced priests, standing around his 
 figure, at the altar, on the monuments, intimate that his 
 reign was a temporary revolution in favour of the only 
 half-expelled and half-suppressed Hyksos population of the 
 Delta — a momentary triumph of that worship, every trace of 
 which the next Pharaoh (Horus) did his best to obliterate ; 
 but which still survived, in secret, under his successor, 
 Seti I., the founder of the 19th dynasty, and then 
 was re-established as the worship of Seth, by the great 
 Ramses II. and his unfortunate son Menephtha, the so- 
 called Pharaoh of the Exodus. 
 
 Thus a direct connection is established between the 
 Mosaic worship of Jehovah-Adonai, the Hyksos worship 
 of Seth-Aten, and the later Israelitish worship of Baal- 
 Adonis ; and any noble character discoverable in the first 
 must be related to what natural refinements the already 
 long-existing civilizations of those countries had already 
 been enabled to produce. In later times we are express- 
 ly told that the Jews of the twelve tribes worshipped 
 Jehovah and Baal together. 
 
 But not to hurry on too fast, let us remount from the 
 19th to the 12th dynasty, and return from Moses to 
 Abraham; for men's ideas are wonderfully changed in 
 fifteen hundred years, or even in five hundred, to take the 
 Hebrew chronology for our guide. 
 
 The legends of Abranr's God Jehovah exhibit him to us 
 in the most anthropomorphic garb, — the least spiritual and 
 Christian possible. He sits with Abraham at the door of 
 his tent. He eats with him ; getting into an angry alter- 
 cation with Sarah, the patriarch's old wife. He discusses 
 with him the case of Sodom and Gomorrah; informing 
 him that he was on his way thither to see if the reports he 
 had heard of their wickedness were correct. 
 
284 THE POUR TYPES OP [LECT. 
 
 The legends of Isaac and Jacob are equally explicit and 
 compromising to the god they praise. They describe 
 Jacob's family as idolaters, and Jacob himself as only 
 gathering their idols together and hiding them nnder an 
 oak (Gen. xxxv. 2 — 4) when he approached the domain of 
 his western family deity. They tell a story of the cun- 
 ning fellow regularly bargaining with Jehovah to take 
 him for his God on certain conditions, and promising a 
 tithe of his possessions if Jehovah would fulfil his part of 
 the contract (Gen. xxviii. 20). To whom the tithes were 
 to be paid, or for what end, is not stated ; but this mention 
 of an arrangement of tithes betrays the late date of the 
 history in which the story occurs. 
 
 It was not until the Abrahamidse came in contact with the 
 civilization of Egypt that we begin to see any tendency of 
 their Jehovah worship to rise to a higher intellectual level. 
 Moses — a character representing the New Egyptian phase 
 of Hebrew (or Hyksos ?) life — takes one great step in ad- 
 vance of his forerunners. But even Moses makes no claim 
 of sole existence for his nation's deity ; but only insists 
 that he is superior to all other gods ; the Jehovah Elohim, 
 Lord of lords, and God of gods. 
 
 In Exodus xv. 11, he is made to say, f Who is like thee, 
 O Jehovah, among the gods?' He is always represented 
 as speaking to Pharaoh of Jehovah not as Supreme Ruler 
 of heaven and earth, but as the God of the Hebrews ; and 
 to the Hebrews, 'I am Jehovah thy God, who brought 
 thee out of the house of bondage ; thou shalt have no other 
 gods beside (or before) me.' What is true of the legends 
 of Moses is equally true of those of his successor. In the 
 24th chapter, Joshua is made to urge upon the people 
 fidelity to Jehovah, not at all on the ground of an ex- 
 alted Monotheism, but because it would be the blackest 
 ingratitude in them not to prefer the God who had heaped 
 such favours upon them to all other deities. The sub- 
 sequent records of the nation, as far as they can be con- 
 sidered historical, become a monstrous paradox in psycho- 
 logical research, if we suppose that there existed at that 
 time in the Hebrew mind any idea of one true God such as 
 we possess. 
 
 In fine, these records are full of charges against them of 
 infidelity to Jehovah, but do not contain one single charge 
 
X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 285 
 
 against them of Atheism on that account. No wonder ! 
 Do these records ever describe Jehovah in language such 
 as a modern civilized thinker would dare to use ? On the 
 contrary, they tell us that Jehovah said to Moses : Let 
 them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them 
 (Exod. xxv. 8, 21, 22). Put the cover on the ark, and 
 there will I talk to thee. And Jehovah spake with 
 Moses face to face as a man with his friend (Exod. xxxiii. 
 9, 11). And Jehovah said, I will put thee in a cleft of 
 the rock, and will cover thee with my hand, while I pass 
 by, and thou shalt see my back parts (Exod. xxxiii. 21 — 
 24). Moses is described as piquing the amour propre of 
 the Hebrews, by telling them how it was reported among 
 the surrounding nations that Jehovah was their God and 
 was seen by them face to face (Numb. xiv. 14). He is de- 
 scribed as pleading with Jehovah when very angry, and 
 nobly offering himself as a victim to his wrath, and thus 
 gaining a respite and commutation of their punishment ; 
 which, however, involved an entire change of the whole 
 programme of the Exodus, a change of base for their 
 military operations, and the postponement of their invasion 
 of Palestine for the mystic number of 40 years. 
 
 Surely all this is merely a slight modification of those far 
 more ancient and semi-savage ideas of deity, which ap- 
 pear in the legends of the creation and of the flood, where 
 Jehovah is said to make woman out of a rib of man; 
 to take Noah and f shut him into the ark ; ' ' to smell a 
 sweet savour/ when Noah, liberated, made his first sacrifice ; 
 to invent the rainbow ; and to promise no more ( to curse 
 the ground for man's sake/ 
 
 But time went on. The wars of settlement, the civil 
 feuds of rival judges, came to an end. The poet warrior 
 and the regal philosopher sat in turn upon the throne of 
 Zion. Peace bore its proper fruit ; commerce enlarged the 
 native genius of the Jew. Priesthoods devised grand 
 ceremonials. The discussion of false mysteries sharpened 
 the souFs perception of the true, as alchemy in our day 
 led on to chemistry. Luxury bred vice, and the miseries 
 of despotism generated a reactionary patriotism. The 
 school of the sacrificers found itself confronted by the 
 school of the sacrificed. Prophets arose to denounce 
 the priest, and die for it. But as they died, the heavens 
 
286 THE FOUR TYPES OP [LECT. 
 
 opened, and they caught those visions of the one true 
 God which were to become the living, realities of after 
 ages. Calamities crushed in upon the little remnant of 
 that kingdom which David founded, and Solomon illumin- 
 ated with his taste and wisdom, idolater and sensualist as 
 he was. The poor ' favoured people - ' were meal between 
 the millstones of Egypt and Babylon, ground to the finest 
 flour. Their anthropomorphic deity vanished like a power- 
 less, mocking spectre before the irresistible wind raised 
 by migrating nations. But in its place arose the sun in a 
 sky which, if not clear, was hot and bright. The abstract 
 idea of God as a unit, an Infinite one, on whose strong 
 arm Nature the mother, and Man her baby child, could 
 always lean with confidence and ever- springing hope — of 
 God the sole creator, sole sustainer, sole judge and exe- 
 cutioner of justice — penetrated that broken mass of 
 Hebrew people, as the alkaline waters of the drainage of 
 the rain penetrate disturbed and fractured regions of the 
 earth's crust, permeating the entire substance, metamor- 
 phosing, crystallizing, and charging it with veins of the 
 precious metals. 
 
 It is impossible not to see that the God of the priests 
 and the God of the prophets of Israel — and the same is 
 true in our day— were two very different deities ; the 
 embodiment of two very different classes of ideas. ' Let 
 any one, (says Greg) ' compare the partial, unstable, re- : 
 vengeful, and deceitful God of Exodus and Numbers, with 
 the sublime and unique Deity of Job and the nobler 
 Psalms ; or even the God of Ezekiel and Daniel with the i 
 God of Isaiah ; and he can scarcely fail to admit that the 
 conception of the one living and true God was a plant of ■ 
 slow and gradual growth in the Hebrew mind, and was 
 due — not to Moses, the patriarchs, or the priests, but to 
 the superiority of individual minds at various periods of 
 their history/ This plant of Aryan growth was first 
 planted in the mountains of Judea, when Solomon, estab- 
 lishing his kingdom ' from the great River Euphrates 
 to the Western Sea/ brought his people into contact with 
 the pure Zoroastrian monotheism of the Persian plateau ; 
 and it came to flower when, several centuries afterwards, 
 c the chosen people ' were banished from their native hills 
 to hang their harps upon the willows of Babylon; or 
 
X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 287 
 
 rather, we may say, were sent to school, tribe after- tribe, 
 back to the lands where their original ancestors first drew 
 the breath of life. 
 
 It was Solomon who first learned how to say, ' Behold, the 
 heaven of heavens cannot contain thee, how much less this 
 house which I have built ? ' * ' The eyes of Jehovah are 
 everywhere, beholding the evil and the good/ f 
 
 It was no priest or Levite of the temple service, but 
 David the young shepherd poet, or more likely yet, some 
 later prophet, whose verses, equally dear to the hearts of 
 all humanity, came to be sung under that all overshadow- 
 ing name, who chanted — ' Whither shall I go from thy 
 spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence ? 3 ' Thou 
 coverest thyself with light as with a garment; thou art 
 clothed with honour and majesty.'' ' Jehovah ! who shall 
 abide in thy tent ? who shall dwell on thy sacred tumulus ? 
 He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, 
 and speaketh the truth heartily. For the word of Je- 
 hovah is right, and all his works are done in truth/ 
 ' He loveth righteousness and judgment. Lying lips are 
 his abomination. But true dealers are his delight/ ' The 
 counsel of Jehovah standeth for ever/ ' Thou desirest 
 not sacrifice, else would I give it. Thou delightest not in 
 burnt- offering/ ' The world is mine and the fulness 
 thereof. Will I eat the flesh of bulls, and drink the blood 
 of goats ? If I were hungry would I tell thee ? Offer unto 
 Grod thanksgiving/ % 
 
 It was no Hebrew priest or Levite, but some Idumean 
 sheikh of the eastern desert, who lived, it would seem from 
 the best philological criticism, long after the days of Solo- 
 mon, who said all those fine things in the Book of Job, 
 like, l Lo, he goeth by me, but I perceive him not/ ( How 
 should a man be just with God ? he cannot answer him for 
 one of a thousand. For he is not man, as I am, that we should 
 come together in judgment. Shall a man be more pure 
 than his Maker ? ' || 
 
 The fine words which are put into the mouth of the first 
 
 * 1 Kings viii. Cf. Svvaoai St aii icavrod duovtiv 'Avkgi Krjdofi'ev^. Iliad, 
 16. 514. 
 
 f Prov. XV. Cf. Qtoi tcl Ttavra loaciv. Odys. 4. 379. 
 
 J Psalms xxxiii., 1., li., civ., cxxxix. ; Prov. xv, 
 
 || Job ix., xi. 
 
288 THE FOUR TYPES OF [LECT. 
 
 of the prophets, the reputed teacher of David, r The 
 strength of Israel will not lie, nor repent, for he is not a 
 man to repent/ * give us still the narrow idea of a national 
 god, and not of the universal and only God of the later 
 prophets, such as was known to the author of the Book 
 of Ecclesiastes, who threw the same idea into a much 
 larger mould : ' I know that whatsoever God doeth shall 
 be for ever; nothing can be put to it nor nothing taken 
 from it/ f 
 
 It was in the midst of the desolations of Israel by the 
 hordes of Mesopotamia that the greatest of the prophets 
 expressed the Zoroastrian faith in those sublime words, 
 ' To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto 
 me ? saith Jehovah.'' J 
 
 And it was in the last convulsions of national extinction 
 that the Prophet Micah proposed and answered the 
 same awful question in the still sublimer words : 
 ' Wherewith shall I come before Jehovah, and bow myself 
 before the Highest God ? With burnt-offerings, calves of 
 a- year old ? Will he be pleased with thousands of rams, 
 or ten thousands of rivers of oil ? Shall I give my firstborn 
 for my transgression ; the fruit of my body for the sin of 
 my soul ? He hath showed thee, . man, what is good. 
 And what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, 
 to love mercy, and to walk humbly before thy God ! ' || 
 
 Thy God ! The cycle is complete. The God of Abraham 
 had become the God of the ten tribes ; the God of Israel had 
 grown to be the God of all ; and now this God of mankind 
 is about to come incarnate to the individual soul, to claim 
 his last and highest throne of all. 
 
 It was the propagation of these splendid conceptions of 
 deity, subsequent to the Babylonian captivity, and after 
 they had come under the Zoroastrian influence of Persia, 
 which cured the Jews of infidelity to Jehovah, made them 
 self-sacrificing Unitarians to the end of time, and pre- 
 pared the way for the founding of the Christian Church. 
 And we are probably to explain the rapid spread of Chris- 
 tianity at the outset, by the wide diffusion of Jewish ideas, 
 previous to the birth of Christ, among the sober-minded 
 Gentiles of Western Asia and the Boman empire. But 
 
 * 1 Sam. xv, f Eccl. iii. % Isaiah i. || Micah vi. 
 
X.] EELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 289 
 
 there resulted thence a strange mixture of monotheism 
 with polytheism before the Christian Era, corresponding 
 to the mixture of Christianity with every form of local 
 heathenism which happened afterwards. 
 
 Professor Sophocles has lately published an ancient 
 epitaph, dug up recently by a seeker for treasures of another 
 sort, near the little town of Zerbhokhia in Magnesia. I 
 will give you his translation of it.* 
 
 ( No other corpse, whether of a man or of a woman, is 
 permitted to be deposited in this vault. And if any one 
 shall recklessly dare to open it, he will anger the most 
 great, the King, the Almighty Maker of all things ; and 
 all the gods, and goddesses, and demigods, and the lady 
 queen herself. For the depositing of any other corpse with 
 these is forbidden once for all/ 
 
 We could not have a better description than this 
 epitaph affords us of that mixed or primitive theism which 
 pervades the older Hebrew or Mosaic Scriptures, and 
 which gave place to a grander and purer monotheism 
 among the prophets of a later age. 
 
 The date of the beginning of this change then, would be 
 about 1000 years before Christ. "We find in the Hindu 
 Scriptures of that date evidences of a similar growth of 
 the religious mind. ( In the oldest portions of the hymns 
 [of the Rig Veda, the most ancient of the Sanscrit books] 
 we discover,' says Mr Muir, the latest and best English 
 writer on this subject, 'few traces of any such abstract 
 conceptions of the Deity. They disclose a much more 
 primitive stage of religious belief. They are the produc- 
 tions of simple men, who, under the influence of the most 
 impressive phenomena of nature, saw everywhere the 
 presence and agency of divine powers, who imagined that 
 each of the great provinces of the universe was directed 
 and animated by its own separate deity, and who had not 
 yet risen to a clear idea of one Supreme Creator and 
 governor of all things.' f 
 
 The hymns of the Eig Yeda are hymns to Agni the god 
 of Fire, Surya the god of the Sun, Indra the god of Storms, 
 addressed each under a variety of names, and strangely 
 mixed up together, and sometimes actually identified with 
 
 * Journ. R. Asiat. Soc, New Series, i. 2, p. 339. 
 
 t Proe. Amer. Acad. p. 77, 1801 
 
 19 
 
290 THE FOUE TYPES OF [LECT. 
 
 one another. But, as Muir and others have shown, there 
 are strains in these ancient hymns which seem to come from 
 some inner sanctuary, revealing a conception of divinity 
 more spiritual and universal than the general tenour of the 
 hymns. The grades of this spiritualism involved in the 
 general materialism of the Vedic hymns are various. The 
 reader can, as it were, watch the expansion of the poetic 
 idea. Varuna is described as dwelling in a palace of a 
 thousand columns, and a thousand doors,* before he is 
 described as dwelling in all worlds, as sovereign ruler, 
 possessed of illimitable resources, meting out, creating, 
 and upholding the heavens and the earth. f The different 
 earliest deities had their different admirers and special 
 devotees. Bach deity was praised in strains as exalted as 
 the capacity of the worshipper, and as the growth of the 
 religious ideas of his age. Hence, as the notions of space 
 and time became enlarged, and the powers of abstract 
 thought were cultivated, the pantheon swelled to colossal 
 proportions ; and each separate deity belonging to it be- 
 came to his own worshippers the infinite and eternal God 
 of gods ; while yet retaining his own distinctive name and 
 some relics of his original, local, and specific character. 
 
 The resemblance between the poetic imagery of the 
 Hebrew and Hindu Scriptures of that ancient date is 
 strikingly in harmony with the ethnological derivation of 
 the Abrahamidse from the land of Brahma. The Hebrew 
 poet sings : ( The eyes of Jehovah are in every place be- 
 holding the evil and the good,' The Yedic poet sings ; 
 ' Varuna, the mighty ruler of the worlds, sees as if close at 
 hand/ The Hebrew : ( Whither can I flee from thy pre- 
 sance ? If I ascend into heaven, thou art there ! If I 
 make my bed in the grave, thou art there ! If I take the 
 wings of the morning, and fly into the uttermost parts of 
 the sea, even there will thy right hand uphold me/ — is 
 echoed by the Sanscrit : ' The earth belongs to Yaruna 
 the King, and the mighty sky whose ends are far away ; 
 the seas are his loins, though he lives in the smallest pool ; 
 let one flee beyond the furthest skies, he should not escape 
 Yaruna the King, whose messengers descend from heaven 
 
 * Rig Veda, ii. 41. 5 ; v. 62. 6 ; vii. 88. 5. 
 
 t Ibid. iv. 42. 3, 4 ; vi. 70. 1; vii. 86. 1 ; 87. 5, 6; viii. 41. 4, 5. 10; 
 42.1. 
 
X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 291 
 
 and thousand-eyed traverse the earth/ There is in the 
 Hebrew poems a sad, sweet, noble simplicity and intense 
 spiritual personality, which is not so perceptible in their 
 Indian contemporaries. There is also in them an absence 
 of gross mistakes and exaggerations, which place them 
 on an eminence unapproachable by the admirers of their 
 Sanscrit rivals ; yet the common propriety which both 
 these holy literatures have in all the essential elements of 
 the divine idea is unmistakable. 
 
 This is especially true of the later hymns of the Rig 
 Veda, and of the hymns of the Atharva Veda, supposed to 
 have been not much, if any, less ancient. It is in these 
 that we begin to find those grand titles : Visva Karman, 
 ' the universal architect/ and Prajapati, ' lord of crea- 
 tures ; ' but we notice that they are applied still to special 
 deities : Indra, Savitr, Rudra, Soma, Vishnu, or Varuna. 
 In the 1 21st hymn of the Rig Veda, for example, the deity 
 is celebrated (under the name Hiranyagarbha) as { arisen 
 in the beginning ; only lord of all ; upholder of heavens 
 and earth ; giver of life and breath ; god of all gods, and 
 the animating principle of their existence.* 
 
 I need not follow this subject further. I confess I do 
 not at all agree with the common explanations of the Hindu 
 mythology, as published by Muir, Max Miiller, and other 
 Sanscrit scholars. Their theories seem to me to have no 
 system. I think it is because they have no basis. They 
 have not yet struck the key-note. In this course of lectures 
 I have been gradually preparing your minds for a view of 
 the subject, which I think may explain most of the diffi- 
 culties which Sanscrit mythologists confess that they en- 
 counter. ' This is my tenth lecture. I have still one more 
 to deliver. I have reserved the theme to which I have 
 given most attention to the last. I do not wish to scare you 
 with a deluge of unintelligible words. I think I can repay 
 your patience with a solid addition to your knowledge. I 
 think I can show you an order reigning over the apparent 
 chaos of ideas respecting the gods in olden times. I think 
 I can put into your hands the right key to the door, — the 
 safe clue for the labyrinth. The ancient poets were not 
 mad-men ; the old philosophers were not all fools. They 
 
 * Sanscrit Texts, iv. 13 H. Muir, p. 344. 
 
292 THE FOUR TYPES OP [.LECT. 
 
 could distinguish sense from nonsense as well as we, — ■ 
 though not as vjell as we. Classical scholars have been 
 tormented by the inconsistent and contradictory family- 
 relations of the Greek and Roman gods, father, brother, 
 and son, being mixed up together. Sanscrit scholars are 
 equally at a loss to comprehend why Bramanas-pati should 
 be called in one hymn of the Rig Veda ' the father of the 
 gods/ * and in another, l the son of Tvashtr, lord of all/ f 
 Now, I think that it is only in the theory of the develop- 
 ment of the later monotheisms and polytheisms out of the 
 older ancestral worships and fetich- worship of primeval 
 times, that we can find our explanation of these and similar 
 mythological absurdities. To the ancient bard, initiated in 
 the Arkite mysteries, they were no absurdities. What was 
 fetich to the vulgar crowd outside, was history and poetry to 
 the priest within. And so it may become to us. But we must 
 comprehend the symbols. Of these I will speak at large 
 when next we meet, and you will permit me to devote an 
 entire evening to them ; for they cover the whole ground 
 of human life, and interpenetrate every department of na- 
 tural history. 
 
 For this evening I have but one more word to add. I 
 have spoken of three types of religious ideas : 1. Ancestral 
 worship ; 2. Fetich worship ; 3. Polytheism and Mono- 
 theism. 
 
 IY. The highest type of the religious idea is Pantheism. 
 It is the philosophic idea of God. It is the idea which 
 science takes of the divine. Science, you know, is the know- 
 ledge of the logical understanding; not the instinctive 
 sight of the pure reason — not the deep faith of the loving 
 imagination. Science is essentially irreligious, that is, 
 unworshipping. Science looks down upon things — not up 
 to them. Science analyzes, dissects, discusses, all things; 
 God among the rest : or tries to do so ; it is its vocation, 
 its nature, its duty. Do not blame it. Do not feel a 
 horror at it, as the Italians shuddered at good old Vasari, 
 with his medical fez, loose gown, and scalpel. Yasari 
 with his scalpel looked like a vampire hanging over that 
 dead body. But there was no demoniac fury in the old 
 man's eyes ; no — there was a holy zeal burning in them, to 
 
 * Muir, p, 344. R. V. ii, 26. 3. t B» V. ii. 23. 17. 
 
X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 293 
 
 discover the laws of the anatomy of the dead for the good 
 of the living. Science is no vampire of the night, flap- 
 ping its wings over our sleeping religion, soothing its 
 slumbers, and sucking its blood. God forbid the thought. 
 Every part of man must do its duty ; and science is the 
 work of man's logical understanding. Now, the investiga- 
 tion of God by man's understanding has always resulted in 
 some theory of Pantheism. 
 
 Whether philosophers took Fetichism as their stand- 
 point, or whether they took Ancestor-worship as their 
 starting-point, they arrived at Pantheism. The worship 
 of the father on earth developes itself into the worship of 
 the father in heaven. Then the attributes of the personal 
 god become generalized, refined, distributed, dissipated, 
 and identified with the universe. When ancient sages 
 came to believe in the absolute goodness, justice, love, and 
 wisdom of deity, or providence, they fell into that peace 
 which needed nothing, feared nothing, and therefore wor- 
 shipped nothing. Nothing to blame, nothing to praise; 
 the perfect whole became one great divinity. It was so in 
 Magadha and Benares; it is so in Concord and Boston. 
 
 On the other hand, the worship of the fetich developed 
 itself into the elemental worship of the ancients, and into 
 the thunder- and war-providence worship of orthodox 
 Christianity. If the progress of science has explained 
 away the miracles, where is the miracle -mak er ? Dis- 
 tributed throughout his universe. All nature becomes a 
 miracle. ' In him we live and move and have our being/ 
 
 But universal Pantheism is impossible. All the common 
 instincts of man oppose his progress in that direction. 
 Man also is a trinity : he is heart, imagination, under- 
 standing, in one. His God must therefore always be per- 
 sonal and anthropomorphic as well as infinite : personal — 
 to be beloved; anthropomorphic — to be imagined; and 
 infinite — to be confided in. The Incarnation of Jesus was 
 a reaction of the liuman heart against the cold spaciousness 
 of Pantheism. The Assumption of Jesus was a reaction of 
 the imagination against the dark vagueness of Pantheism. 
 So long as man feels himself a child, he will climb up upon 
 the knees of the Father who is in heaven ; or nestle to the 
 bosom of Abraham. So long as woman feels herself op- 
 pressed and afflicted, she will idolize a well-defined divinity. 
 
294 THE POUR TYPES OF EELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 
 
 Joy and sorrow make common cause against the approach 
 of Pantheism. Youth and women — three quarters of the 
 human race — are idolaters by natural necessity. Let then 
 the progress of science — the deductions of the logical un- 
 derstanding — clear away from men's eyes the errors of the 
 past, and lead them into that liberty of spirit which is due 
 to Christianity, c the liberty wherewith Christ made his 
 people free/ — it will be none the less a fact, that ( the things 
 of the Spirit are spiritually discerned. - ' There are things 
 that science cannot grasp, some things that lie beyond the 
 scope of logic ; and it will be as true in every age, as it 
 was when the blessed Master took a little child and set him 
 in the midst of them, that — ( many things are hidden from 
 the wise and prudent which are revealed unto babes/ 
 
295 
 
 LECTURE XI. 
 
 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 
 
 We have discussed the development of the Religious 
 Idea under its four types : Atavism, or the worship of 
 parents; Fetichism, or the worship of magical powers in 
 the objects of nature ; Theism and Polytheism, or the wor- 
 ship of heavenly powers ; and Pantheism, or the philosophi- 
 cal deification of the Cosmos or Perfect Universe. 
 
 We ought, perhaps, now to take up the discussion of the 
 generic and specific forms of ceremonial worship under 
 which these four types of the Religious Idea have developed 
 themselves in the history of the various races of mankind ; 
 and show how the tropical black races, and the hyperborean 
 stunted races, seem never to have had the ability to lift 
 their spiritual life out of the bogs and swamps of Fetichism 
 upon the firm land of Theism, but have been a prey in all 
 ages to the cruelties of demon worship and the low trick- 
 ery of Shamans or sorcerers; how the central white races 
 alone have had, first, powers of imagination to devise sym- 
 bols to represent abstract thoughts, and then powers of 
 understanding to construct intellectual systems to free 
 their souls from the terrors of nature, and at last to sub- 
 ject the powers of the physical elements to scientific con- 
 trol. 
 
 But you are probably familiar enough with that train of 
 thought to make its recapitulation unnecessary; and I 
 willingly pass to a subject not so well understood, not at 
 all elaborated in the books, in fact, hardly recognized by 
 our new tribes of thinkers ; yet lying, I believe, at the 
 bottom of all true knowledge of ancient history. 
 
/ 
 
 296 ON AEKITB SYMBOLISM. [lECT. 
 
 Let me claim, then, your attention this evening to what 
 I must call, for want of a better name, the Arlrite Symbol- 
 ism of the Ancients. 
 
 Mycologists, like geologists, philologists, and other 
 classes of savans, constitute a large and learned body in 
 our day. Mythology has become one of the sciences. It 
 has its schools also, and its schoolmaster ei, to use a German 
 word greatly needed in English, although the new chan- 
 cellor of the University of Edinburgh was not precisely the 
 man to introduce it. Its professors have their theories, 
 differing widely, we must confess; but they work for a 
 common end, and that a noble one : the elucidation of the 
 religious intellectual history of mankind. They are always 
 busy deciphering the ancient inscriptions, restoring in idea 
 the ancient monuments, harmonizing all the ancient fables, 
 and analyzing all the records of old forms and modes of 
 thought and feeling which have happily escaped destruction 
 in the lapse of time. Every month some learnedly-elabor- 
 ated memoir makes its appearance in the annals of one or 
 other of the learned societies of Europe, especially in those 
 of Dresden, Yienna, and Berlin. At last our own country 
 has begun to take a part in this fascinating recreation. 
 Germany is to have no longer a monopoly of the philosophy 
 of religious history. The resume of known facts relating 
 to all religions which Lydia Maria Child has given to us, 
 would do honour to a European scholar. The coming of 
 Kreutzer to New York, and SeufTarth to St Louis, furnished 
 our thinkers with the same sort of stimulus as that which 
 the coming of Max Muller to Oxford afforded the fellows 
 of England. I do not mean to liken these three men to 
 one another, or to draw comparisons between them and a 
 host of other workers in this field of science — to Rawlinson, 
 and Muir and Eenan and De Eougemont and Bunsen 
 and Aufrecht and Panofka. On the contrary, the fact 
 that these men are all different — represent different views, 
 views in many respects irreconcilable, in many respects 
 visionary, illogical, contracted, preposterous, self-destruc- 
 tive, unworthy of true science, although, in many ways, 
 throwing a flood of light upon the history of the past, — 
 only shows that this science of Mythology is still in the 
 process of self- organization. Let us work and wait. It 
 will all come out clear and beautiful in its time. But as 
 
XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 297 
 
 yet there is no reliable text-book, no infallible professor, of 
 the science of Mythology. 
 
 This science may be said to be in its third stage of 
 growth. It began with the classical scholars of the Re- 
 formation, Reuchlin, Erasmus, and the rest of the splendid 
 list of the early prophets of the revival of literature, end- 
 ing with Jacob Bryant and the so-called etymological 
 mythologists of a hundred years ago. These men laid the 
 foundation by collating from the Roman, Greek, and 
 Hebrew writers all that remained about the gods and 
 priestcrafts of antiquity. You find their labours recorded 
 in the great dictionaries of JBayle, and Calmet, and Lem- 
 priere, and Gesenius, and Anthon, and Smith. And a pre- 
 cious mixture of fact and fable, sense and nonsense, it is. 
 Mixed up, as it came at last to be, with the undigested 
 learning of the Welsh and Irish mythologists, it settled 
 into a mere fermenting muck-heap of absurdities, deserved- 
 ly disgusting to the reasoning world ; and so it was covered 
 over with contempt, and hid away. But some day it will 
 be opened up again, and will prove a mine of wealth under 
 a better system of cultivation. 
 
 The next stage of the science opened with Young's and 
 Champ olli on' s discoveries of the lost key to the reading of 
 the Egyptian hieroglyphs; followed by the successful in- 
 vestigations of Burnouf and Abel-Remusat and Pauthier 
 and Lassen and Rawlinson and Wilson and Wilford, into 
 the deciphering of the Assyrian, Indian, and Chinese litera- 
 tures. This immensely enlarged the scope of the inquiry, 
 explained the origin and meaning of many a Hebrew, 
 Greek, and Roman mystery, and gave the first aspect of 
 unity to the new science. 
 
 The third stage of progress was inaugurated by the 
 Brothers Grimm, followed by a procession of scholars, 
 taking up the subject of the folkslore of Germany, Scandi- 
 navia, Slavonia; working out the traditions of antiquity 
 which still exist among the common people of Christendom, 
 heathen worships which are practised in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury in the bosom of the Christian Church, and bringing 
 them into harmony or contrast with existing heathenisms 
 in other regions of the globe, as these have been studied 
 and described by hundreds of Catholic and Protestant 
 missionaries at their respective stations. 
 
298 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 This will give some idea — vague but vast enough — of the 
 amount of work in this science already done. But it will 
 also suggest the state of affairs among its professors, and 
 why discordant views are held by its highest authorities; I 
 mean discordant systems — hostile theories of the origins and 
 meanings of the different mythologies and ceremonials of 
 history. Just at the present moment there seems to be a 
 more concurrent sentiment among them ; but it is a decep- 
 tive appearance. There is a lull in the storm of speculation, 
 that is all. Everybody has turned to collecting facts. The 
 same thing happened in geology a few years ago. The old 
 controversies ceased ; speculation, or theorizing on a large 
 scale, was abandoned for the moment ; geologists employed 
 their time in observation, and refused controversy. But 
 this could not last long, and did not last long. Hypothesis 
 is king of science. The soul, like an artist, walks back- 
 ward as far as possible from the canvas to see how the 
 general effect of the picture is coming out, and then re- 
 tarns to supply deficiencies in the details, or correct the 
 errors of the plan. 
 
 We may be sure that all that has ever been thought 
 out carefully by the old mythologists will be taken up 
 and re-incorporated with the generalizations of new men. 
 Jacob Bryant had his day and is forgotten : — people say 
 it. No ! Jacob Bryant is yet to have his day. Some man 
 of larger culture will yet do for this English mystagogue, 
 what Eawlinson has done for Herodotus ; what Birch and 
 Hincks and Marie tte are doing for Manetho. It is in the 
 Arkism of Bryant and Harcourt that we are to find the so- 
 lution of most of those still unexplained anomalies which 
 prevent the mythological studies of our day from taking 
 equal rank with those of the other and more so-called 
 physical sciences. 
 
 ' I comprehend well/ writes one of our greatest mytho- 
 logists, 'the principle of the Arian religion, a religion 
 entirely of poetry, a profound naturalism, touching, full of 
 a high morality ; I think I comprehend well the principle 
 of the religion of the Shemitic nomades, such as the Book 
 of Job presents us with, such as the Mussulman of Arab 
 race still practises in our day; I even comprehend, to a 
 certain point, those bizarre worships of Babylon and 
 Syria, worships not Shemitic, and still less Arian, answer- 
 
XI.] ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. 299 
 
 ing to sensations of an order apart from these ; but the 
 primary idea of the Egyptian religion escapes me/* 
 
 If such a confession can be made by Eenan what must 
 be the condition of that department of modern science of 
 which he is one of the acknowledged leaders ? ISTot to 
 comprehend the primary idea of the Egyptian religion is 
 not to comprehend anything of the genius,, anything of the 
 ceremonial, anything of the architecture, anything of the 
 intellectual literature of primeval antiquity. Egyptian 
 history goes back farther than all others. The Egyptian 
 ideas of religion open to us the doors of all spiritual in- 
 quiry. 
 
 Our first business then is to obtain, in any way open to 
 us, by an examination of its monuments, some clue to the 
 central principle of the most ancient of the religious 
 systems of Egypt, some notion of that ' primary idea ? to 
 which M. Renan alludes. For it is very evident that new 
 and different notions were intruded as dynasty after dy- 
 nasty arose, until system was piled upon and interfused 
 with system to the prejudice, though not to the entire sup- 
 pression or extinction, of the earliest ideas. The monu- 
 ments of the Middle Empire (11—17 dynasties) and of the 
 Classic Empire (18 — 21 dynasties) are covered with a 
 literature from which our Egyptologists have constructed 
 the so-called Egyptian Pantheon, with the Libyan Ammon 
 for its Jupiter, and a long train of gods and goddesses, 
 resembling those of Greece and Rome. At the commence- 
 ment of the Middle Empire Osiris and his sister Isis first 
 appear. Our first question- then must be : Were these 
 two deities the earliest gods of the Egyptians, and were 
 they recognized and worshipped previously to their ap- 
 pearance upon the monuments of the eleventh dynasty ? 
 To obtain any right to answer this difficult question we 
 must go back to the much earlier times of the ancient em- 
 pire and see what images of a supernatural, mythological, 
 or ideal kind existed then, and what probable meaning 
 they can be made to bear. 
 
 In a former lecture I have noticed the extraordinary 
 fact that the most ancient monuments of Egypt show no 
 evident traces of religion; and I may add in passing, 
 
 * Kenan, Revue des Deux Mondes, June, 1865, p. 682. 
 
300 ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 Desor's assertion, that, up to the last discoveries in the 
 lake- dwellings of Switzerland, ' neither an idol nor any- 
 thing from which any custom of worship may be inferred 
 has as yet been found, unless certain objects of baked 
 earth called moonsichles may be by some regarded as re- 
 ligious emblems. - ' (See Appendix to p. 310.) 
 
 But there is one Egyptian figure of great antiquity and 
 interest, that of the dog Anubis, the watch-dog of the 
 tomb; the only image that can even lay a claim to the 
 name of a divinity. The cognomen of ' a god ' is no doubt 
 in this instance a misnomer; we are doubtless dealing 
 with a symbol. But we must bear in mind the name, 
 Anubis, or — as it is written on the monuments of the old 
 empire, with the figure, not of a dog, but of a jackal, with 
 cocked ears, and tail erect ANUP,* — for we shall have oc- 
 casion to refer to it hereafter. I will only say in passing, 
 now, that if the jackal was in any sense or degree an ob- 
 ject of religious reverence to the earliest Egyptians, it 
 must have been as a fetich, out of fear, as the wolf and fox 
 became objects of superstitious terror to other races of 
 mankind, because it feasted on the bodies of the dead.f 
 The dog alone could have inspired any such cordial respect 
 as would justify the Egyptian artists in making Anubis 
 the guardian of the tomb. It must however be borne in 
 mind that his name in old Egyptian was not ANTJB but 
 SAB, the same word which was employed to express craft 
 and cunning, and also a magician. 
 
 In spite however of this sacred silence of the earliest 
 monuments the ancient Egyptians must have had some re- 
 ligious ideas besides the mere anticipation of an eternal 
 
 * Bunsen's Egypt, vol. i. p. 492, p. 515 ; Ideographs, Nos. 259 to 264; 
 also plate vi.27- See p. 321, below, and Appendix to p. 300. 
 
 f The wolf and fox in other countries take the place of the jackal in 
 the superstitions of the people, as prowlers in the night, evil spirits of 
 darkness. De Rougemont (Peuple Primitif, Geneva, 1855, i. p. 339) 
 shows how the wolf was an emblem of night. Apollo XvKoyivrjg, ' son of 
 the she-wolf, 5 Latona, Night, is himself called the ' Wolf-slayer.' The 
 Scandinavians say that two wolves perpetually pursue the sun and moon, 
 and when they catch them there happens an eclipse. The wolf, Fenris, 
 now chained (like the Satan of the Apocalypse), will one day break loose 
 and swallow Odin and his universe. Fenris, is chaos or darkness, and his 
 father Loki, is the evil deity. The Japanese consider the fox (WOLF = 
 VJTLPes = Fa\w7T££) an incarnation of the Genius of Evil. The dog, on 
 the other hand, is the priest of light. 
 
XI.] ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. 301 
 
 pliant om-life within the tomb. We know,, for instance, 
 that the great Sphinx was in existence at the very opening 
 of Egyptian history, and was an object of such veneration 
 that the builder of the great pyramid, Cheops, the second 
 king of the 4th dynasty, records his restoration of it with 
 masonry ; * and I have already spoken of the temple which 
 M. Mariette found close beside it, as well as of the little 
 figures in a well within its walls bearing the name of 
 Chephren, the builder of the second pyramid. Now the 
 great Sphinx stands all alone. f It was once an isolated 
 outcrop of rock, rising from the inundated valley of the 
 Nile. Some monarch, of a dynasty still older than the 
 fourth, must have cut this island-rock (177 feet long by 
 65 feet high) into the form of a crouching lion, with a 
 human head, coifed in that strange cap, with broad flap- 
 ping ears, and long breast -lappets, which became the 
 standard of taste in Egypt for 5000 years. 
 
 If we could get at the truth it would probably turn out, 
 that the great Sphinx of Egypt was not a deity originally, 
 but a symbol. The lotus bunches on the facades of the 
 old tombs might possibly have been an accidental pictorial 
 ornament. The broad flaring cornice of the temple might 
 possibly have been an unconscious effort of the taste to 
 beautify the awkward crest-line of a wall against the sky. 
 But a rock-carved lion with a human head must have 
 meant something; must have had an intellectual mean- 
 ing ; in mythological language, must have been a religious 
 symbol. J 
 
 But if the Sphinx had a designed and intelligible mytho- 
 logical meaning, then we may go back to the lily-mould- 
 ings and to the flaring cornice, and conclude that they also 
 were probably religious symbols. To what system of 
 symbolism then could they have belonged ? What could 
 have been the religious ideas of a day when there were no 
 idols to worship, no ceremonial but the simplest burial 
 service, no priesthood but that of the father of the family ? 
 Especially must we ask, what system of religious symbolism 
 
 * Renan says of this inscription found by Mariette, and now at Boulak, 
 that it fs so bizarre as to raise some doubts, p. 676 of his Revue. 
 
 f Picture of it in frontispiece of Bunsen's Egypt. See Appendix. 
 
 X Bunsen, Ideograph (p. 513), 277, sphinx, victory; a/cr, sphinx; nb 
 lord. D. &c. [See his Nos, 273 to 276.] See Appendix. 
 
302 ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 will include such heterogeneous elements as a sphinx,, a 
 group of lilies, and a cornice ? 
 
 If we only knew from what direction the oldest inhabit- 
 ants entered the valley of the Nile, — whether from India, 
 or from Syria, or from Abyssinia and Central Africa, — we 
 should have perhaps a more convenient starting-point for 
 our investigation. But as the origin of the earliest Egyp- 
 tian people is still an undetermined point, we must take 
 the widest glance around the ancient world to see if we 
 can find, in countries possibly connected with Egypt at 
 the dawn of history, any mythological objects similar to 
 these* 
 
 Pococke has tried to prove that Egypt was first settled 
 from India. Let us then look in India for the lily, the 
 cornice, and the sphinx, or for some objects that resemble 
 them. The Egyptian lily is no longer seen upon the 
 waters of the Nile ; but it grows all over India, and is the 
 sacred flower of Vishnu and of Brahma. The sphinx is no 
 uncommon sight upon the temples of India. The Egyptian 
 cornice is not seen in India because its stiff and regular 
 shape was only suited to the cold and mathematical pylon 
 which it covered ; but its analogue exists, as I have shown 
 in a former lecture, in the uppermost bulging story of the 
 Hindu pagoda and the Tibetan temple. To these I may 
 also add another instance, the Urasus, or hooded- serpent, 
 the sign of royalty which you are so familiar with, as seen 
 upon the forehead of all the Egyptian kings, and which 
 seems to be the cobra of India. f 
 
 There was then undoubtedly an early connection of re- 
 ligious ideas between these two regions, separated only by 
 a moderate length of sea-coast. But there are also such 
 diversities observable between the shapes above alluded to 
 that we are led to suspect, and almost to believe, that two 
 indigenous populations of entirely different stirpal origin, 
 possessed indeed a common symbolism, but developed it 
 in two quite independent lines. 
 
 Our question is : What was there in common to the re- 
 ligious symbolism of India and Egypt, — including of course 
 in the field of our inquiry the intermediate and dependent 
 regions of Persia, Babylonia, and Syria, as well ? Ignoring 
 
 * See Appendix to page 302. t See Appendix to p. 340. 
 
XI.] 02T AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 303 
 
 for tlie moment all the elaborated mythologies of later 
 times, what simple system of worship can we discern per- 
 vading the earliest monumental relics of that central his- 
 toric zone ? 
 
 I know of but one answer to this question. It is the 
 answer of the Hebrew Scriptures, of the Talmuds, of the 
 Cabbalists, of the Freemasons, of Jacob Bryant, Harcourt, 
 Davis, and Faber :— The system of Arkite symbolism ; the 
 religious representation of the ark of Noah, the water 
 on which it floated, the mountain on which it rested, and 
 the man whom it preserved. Whatever may have been the 
 nature of the event, wherever its scene may have been 
 laid, at whatever date it may have happened — all matters 
 which seem beyond the reach of our discovery, — surely> 
 this Diluvium, — distorted records of which abide among 
 all nations, in the New World * as well as in the Old — 
 this Diluvium, so scoffed at by sceptics, denied by geology, 
 and contemptuously ignored by all the present schools of 
 philologists and archaeologists, — this Deluge of Noah could 
 alone have furnished to the most Ancient Egypt its sym- 
 bolic lily, its temple cornice, and its Sphinx ; as it after- 
 wards furnished to the Middle Empire a numerous and 
 complicated pantheon. 
 
 It may be asserted, I mean to say, that all mythologies f 
 issued from the ark. History itself begins with the word. Ev 
 apyj] — c in the beginning ■ — ( God created the heavens and 
 the earth/ says the translation of the Seventy. ARChaios 
 is the classical Greek word for ancient. Archaeologists 
 get the very name of their science from the ark which it 
 has grown the fashion among them to sink.f 
 
 The Greeks called ARGos their most ancient city ; and 
 the mythological prototype of all sea-going ships was the 
 AXtGo, They considered the gods of ARCadia the most 
 ancient, as they were certainly the most primitively simple 
 deities of the classic world. They called their most ancient 
 and sacred religious ceremonies ORGs (opyia) ; from which 
 the Christians got their opprobrious term Orgies for all 
 sorts of heathen ceremonies, especially when they were 
 
 * See especially Pacific It. R. Surveys, vol. iii. 3rd part ; Wipple, p. 40. 
 
 f Architecture received its name from the same source, as I have already 
 explained. The Latins said TStRiQcere, as we still say ER<?C/, when we 
 wish to speak of building on a grand scale. (See Appendix to p. 303.) 
 
304 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 practised in the dark and secrecy. A curious relic of the 
 ancient root is preserved in one of the African negro 
 languages, the Bari, where we have the word GROT, mean- 
 ing to be ashamed. The Roman word for any mystery was 
 ARCanum— for any religious teaching QUACulum — that is, 
 an Arkite thing, knowledge shut up and sealed from jlublic 
 view.* 
 
 The ancient Phrygian name for their first man or king 
 was Arki&ev&is, which still survives in the Armenian word 
 Ark&j, and its equivalent the Latin m/ius, or rex, a king ; f 
 in modern days it carries the same meaning even into the 
 most distant regions of the earth ; for throughout the whole 
 Pacific Ocean the word ARIK-^ means a chief, and in New 
 Zealand, a priest , or representative of God. % 
 
 Understand me, we are not now busying ourselves with 
 the true etymology of the word ark. I am simply showing 
 you that it was a word used in ancient times to represent 
 the beginning of things, antiquity, religion, and religious 
 mysteries ; and that, preparatory to its application to the 
 most ancient and venerable object of religious art in Egypt, 
 the Great Sphinx. For although the common name of a 
 sphinx in the Egyptian language was neb, or 'lord/ the 
 proper and personal name of the Great Sphinx in the most 
 ancient times seems to have been ARK, the ark. All other 
 sphinxes afterwards sculptured to represent guards of the 
 temples, and placed in two rows between which the pro- 
 cessions of priests passed to the shrine, were copies of the 
 Great Sphinx, and shared its names and honours. 
 
 As reasonable people what are we to think of these coin- 
 cidences ? Are we not shut up without escape to the con- 
 clusion that the primeval symbolism of the historic, literary, 
 or mythological races of mankind, took form in the endeavour 
 to perpetuate the memory of some diluvial catastrophe ? and 
 that its elements were of the simplest kind, — pictures and 
 models of the ark, of the mountain, of the water ; — a trinity 
 of objects, representing the starting-point of history, and 
 
 * The old Egyptian word ARK signifies upon the monuments (says 
 Bunsen) conclusion, shutting up. And in Coptic or later vulgar Egyptian, 
 to guard. Compare Latin Arceo, I shut up, or prohibit. 
 
 t The prochaldean word for c a king' is SkIP, says Talbot, Jour. R. 
 Asi. Soc., p. 446, vol. xx. 
 
 X See Lee and Hale. 
 
XI.] ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. 305 
 
 itself the starting-point of all mythology, — the first type of 
 all those solemn ceremonials on which the poet and the 
 priest, those intellectual aristocrats of early ages, organized 
 society, and laid a basis for that culture out of which has 
 sprung, like the lilies from the inundations of the Ganges 
 and the Nile, all arts, philosophies, and worships that have 
 awed and charmed and elevated man. 
 
 You will feel as I do, how impossible it is, if this idea be 
 true, to enter largely into the details of its elucidation. I 
 must confine myself to special points. How does the 
 Arkite theory afford us any explanation of the Sphinx, — that 
 wonderful object of the old Egyptian's reverence, crouch- 
 ing in front of the great pyramid, alone in its silent majesty, 
 before the other pyramids were built, the oldest god of 
 Egypt, — before the Egyptians knew there was a God ? I 
 have already said it was no god ; it was a symbol only. In 
 after-ages indeed it became a god, and was called, so the 
 Greek informs us, Armachis. Its personal hieroglyphic 
 name which the Greeks thus perverted, was horem-hou* 
 ( the Great Hou ; 3 and some have brought this name Hou 
 into etymological identity with the awful name of the 
 Hebrew Deity, Ihoua, or Jehovah. At all events the cele- 
 brated sacred city of Egypt, Diospolis, the city of gods, is 
 called by the Arabs to this day by the same name, Hou. 
 
 Let us compare the sphinxes of Egypt with those of 
 other and more eastern lands ; and then connect with these 
 the chimeras, griffins, hydras, centaurs, tritons, hippo- 
 camps, hyppogriffs, and dragons of the classical and still 
 more modern times. In all cases we will find that the 
 attempt was made to combine the three essential elements 
 of the Arkite symbolism in one object. The head of a 
 woman with the body of a lion ; or, the head of a man with 
 the body of a bull; or, the head of a goat with the body 
 of a lion and the tail of a serpent ; or, the head and body 
 of a man with the body of a horse, and the fins and tail of 
 a fish. In all cases the first element represented the ark 
 upon the mountain, or the Noah in place of the ark ; the 
 second element the mountain itself; and the third element 
 the diluvial flood. The water was symbolized either by 
 the lion's mane and tail ; or, by the serpent as a tail ; or, 
 
 Renan, Revue, p. 676. But Fowler thinks that hu is thu, the same 
 God (Jour. G., 4, 17). 
 
 20 
 
306 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [lECT. 
 
 in the case of the Ninevite sculptures, by a covering of 
 scales on the body of the bull ; or, by the feathers of eagles' 
 wings, as in the Hebrew cherubim, a type intermediate 
 between the' sphinx of Mesopotamia and the sphinx of 
 Egypt. In Persia the single image was subdivided; and 
 the separated elements formed a group of statuary. Mi- 
 thras stabbing the bull which had a lion's mane ; or, lions 
 with diluvial manes flying upon the shoulders of the moun- 
 tain bull. In such cases the ark was represented by the 
 crescent horns of the bull. In the Egyptian type of 
 sphinx the head-dress, flowing down over the back and 
 breast like the mane of a lion, represented the water ; and 
 the female head represented Isis, the genius of the ark, the 
 Venus floating on the sea, the Maia, virgin mother of 
 Vishnu. 
 
 A hundred pages might be filled with illustrations of 
 that ingenuity of fancy, with which this symbolism was 
 brought to perfection by its inventors ; and varied by the 
 multifarious priesthoods, full of schisms and heresies, which 
 followed each other like successive forests on that virgin 
 soil. These few first elements of mythology have been 
 played upon by all mythologists ; as the seven musical 
 notes of the diatonic scale have furnished to musicians the 
 stuff of all their compositions ; from the rudest Gregorian 
 chant up to the bewildering fugues of Bach, and the 
 splendid combinations of melody and harmony in the Don 
 Giovanni and the Fidelio. The history of music has been 
 in fact the counterpart of the history of symbolism ; and 
 been interwoven with it from the earliest times. 
 
 The score with its three cleffs* (which represent the 
 triple water-line of the Egyptian monuments) embodies 
 the idea of the Arkite trinity. The roar of the Bass around 
 the Treble, with the melody in Alto, is the roar of the sea 
 around the Tor-Baal ; and it was produced in ancient days 
 by the repetition of single words by the immense crowd 
 around the temple. I have heard the monotonous re- 
 sponses of the Ora pro nobis ! pulsating thus by the hour 
 through the solemn gloom of the great Cathedral at 
 Nantes, with a falling and then rising and then falling 
 inflexion, like the periodical dash of the surge of the sea 
 
 * Compare the sistrum with its 3 rods (sometimes 4). 
 
XI.] ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. 307 
 
 upon the "beach. If you will but recall the older Italian 
 mass music, you will notice how it sustains itself nearly 
 level for* long distances, but with a perpetually upward 
 and downward motion, confined within the limits of three 
 or four notes, as if the waving surface of water had been 
 actually before the composer's eyes.* 
 
 It is surprising how porous the stratification of human 
 history has been, letting down, through all the generations, 
 the percolating streams of tradition ; each age passing on- 
 ward to its successor what it received of its predecessor, 
 with additions of its own. Thus are we born heirs to the 
 wealth of all the past. 
 
 In Wales the traveller sees around him the accumulated 
 work of many centuries, stone bridges, stone roads, stone 
 houses, stone barns; stone walls of immense height and 
 infinite in number, cover all the country ; and within-doors 
 the furniture and utensils are heirlooms from forgotten an- 
 cestors. So it is with the world's symbolism. The waters 
 of tradition have been always gathering up the salt and oil 
 from every stratum of history, to fill with them those re- 
 servoirs which we call Church and State and Family. 
 
 From State life, Church life, and Family life, you may 
 select a thousand specimens of the traditions of the most 
 remote past. I need nothing more than the commonest 
 English forms of speech, the nursery words which you are 
 teaching to your babies as they grow, in order to elucidate 
 the meaning of those primeval symbols of religious faith 
 which still stand, petrified, august, unhonoured, and mis- 
 understood, as if they had at last fallen asleep from very 
 weariness of all that they have passed through and seen 
 done beneath them on the borders of the Nile. 
 
 The sphinx I have already explained, and the cornice 
 moulding also, in a former lecture. The lily emblem is 
 the floating cradle of Vishnu. f Flowers are the most 
 beautiful mysteries of the earth-life. Was the eye of 
 man ever indifferent to the shooting bud, the unfolding 
 calyx, the flying pollen, and the swelling seed ? We may 
 well ask when the wheat and the apple, the poppy and the 
 walnut (Ju-glans, the nut of Jove J ), were tamed and cul- 
 tivated — reclaimed from their poor and savage meagreness 
 
 * See Appendix A to p. 307. f Idem, B. J Desor. 
 
308 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 to be the comfort of the civilized man and the delight of 
 the men of luxury and taste. Agriculture and horticulture 
 are worships of the powers of nature, cultus maximS matris. 
 How closely must the earlier thinkers of mankind have 
 watched all these phenomena of seed-time and harvest ! 
 How the primeval fancy must have revelled in this wealth 
 of symbolism ! It was the founder of free-masonry that 
 ' knew all the trees, from the cedar of Lebanon to the 
 hyssop that groweth on the wall/ It was in the convent 
 garden that flowers grew doubly beautiful, and choice 
 flavours began to exhale from every fruit. It was to the 
 dreaming priest that the pomegranate looked a colony of 
 living individuals, like his own fraternity ; that the fir-cone 
 seemed an Athos full of mimic anchorites ; that the nymphcea 
 was an ark of safety floating over the abyss, a tliebah with 
 its family of Noachides ; that the nut (in German nuss) was 
 a z;auj or little ship, in which the infant deity lay hidden until 
 his time was come. No wonder, then, that in Egypt — the 
 country of floods, of inundations par excellence — the water- 
 lily should become a prime and perpetual symbol of the 
 mysteries both of death and resurrection, and take pre- 
 cedency of all those vegetable symbolisms which multi- 
 plied themselves in course of time according to the pro- 
 gress of intelligence and the appearance of successive new 
 mythologies. 
 
 Fig. 15. .ANY, repeated on the Ark of Osiris 
 
 I must pass on to mention other instances of the embodi- 
 ment of the Arkite sphinx-trinity symbol in other and 
 different forms. And the first and most important one of 
 all, you see it here repeated three times (see Fig. 15) on a 
 group of hieroglyphs on the side of the ark of Osiris : at 
 the beginning, in the centre, and at the end of the group. 
 You recognize it as the sign of divinity which all the 
 Egyptian gods carry in the hand, and which is also fre- 
 quently seen in the hands of the images of priests (Fig. 16,k.) 
 
XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 309 
 
 Its form is that of a ring surmounting a crux ansata, or head- 
 less cross j its name, under the old empire, was anx ; * and 
 its meaning, life. But why did it mean life ? or rather 
 why did it mean immortal life, divine life, life beyond 
 death, the life of the gods, i. e. of the deified ancestors ? 
 No answer to this question is given in the books. 
 
 Now if we apply the Arkite key to it we obtain an imme- 
 diate intelligible answer to this question : the ring is the 
 mundane egg or ship ; the cross line is the surface of the 
 waters; and the stem represents the mountain. If the 
 cross pieces of the symbol were always simply made up of 
 straight lines there still might be some lurking doubt about 
 the meaning of the stem. But the Egyptian priests were care- 
 ful to furnish a commentary on it by making this stem in 
 many cases in the form of a pyramid or triangle ; and a 
 
 Fig. 16. 
 
 35 b. Kou, Thou. Anchor 12. mahr slick ^tm k. 
 
 tradition of this form is still preserved in the triangular 
 shape of the arms of the Maltese cross. You may see the 
 symbol in its perfect condition repeated, with the lily and 
 the scarabaeus, on this amulet or seal, found in one of the 
 graves of the ancient cemetery of Tharras — the Thebes of 
 the island of Sardinia (Fig. 17). It has been discovered 
 
 * Bunsen, Eg. Voc, p. 456, No. 62. Bunsen has not the anx in his 
 phonetic alphabet. In his determinatives he has No. 144 (Fig. 16), 
 mirror, ma-hr ; In-lir, mirror. No. 128, s'ha (Fig. 16), to encase; sna, 
 to turn away, knee. No. 127 (Fig. 16), seal, ytm^ to shut; snnu, to en- 
 close. No. 12 (Fig. 16), names of gods (living gods) ; ' same holding 
 symbol of life.' (No. 11, same (without symbol of life), names of men.) 
 In his Ideographs he has 408, 338, 288, 246, gazelle with it hanging from 
 his neck, {Ska, ska, to collect, a crowd ;) 239, 200, 199, 198, goddesses 
 holding it ; 174, 173, 164, 162, 154, 146, 141, 137, 135, 131, 116, 72, God 
 holding ; 35 (Fig. 16) is the ' House Good ' on the tombs, the tamboura 
 in the opened quadrangle. We are reminded of the shape of our anchor 
 (Fig. 16), as if it had an etymology of aneh-Hor, the anx °f Horus. I am 
 also reminded of that beautiful symbol which stands over the gateway 
 leading up to the Carthusian monastery, the Grande Chartreuse, a globe 
 with a cross over it and the fine motto : — Stat crux dum volvitur orbis. 
 (Fig. 16. b.) 
 
310 
 
 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 
 
 [lect. 
 
 Fig. 17. Amulet 
 found at Tharras 
 in Sardinia. 
 
 among the amulets of the Bronze age,* in the palafittes or 
 lake dwellings of Switzerland. 
 Figure 18 is from the last 
 edition of Professor Besoms 
 Pfahlbauten des Neuenburger 
 Sees, p. 72, and is extremely 
 interesting and important for 
 our subject, because the water- 
 symbol is here not the hori- 
 zontal line of a Crux ansata, 
 but a zig-zag ornamentation 
 across the face of the moun- Fi 18 y Gr 
 tain pyramid; while the sculp- Bronze amulet 
 
 turing of the edges of the found in lake 
 , & , 1 -S Neufchatel. 
 
 truncated pyramid very ex- 
 actly reproduces the side mouldings of the later Egyptian 
 propylaea. But we do not. really need this visible elucida- 
 tion of the symbolic form of the anx* The obelisk is as 
 much, and within eleven dynasties as ancient, a hieroglyph 
 of the Ararat as is the pyramid. 
 
 But the position of the symbol is of some importance to 
 the explanation, and it is therefore very interesting to 
 remark that in all cases the ' sign of life ' is kept carefully 
 in one invariable position ; that is, ring uppermost ; or, in 
 other words, all standing figures hold it by the ring down- 
 wards, but all sitting figures by the stem up wards, f Of 
 course its whole meaning would be lost by turning it stem 
 up and ring down. J Being a symbol of the deluge, it repre- 
 sented life destroyed and re-secured ; it represented the 
 passage of man through the grand catastrophe ; it repre- 
 sented death and burial and resurrection ; it represented 
 the renewal of life upon the planet to the race of men ; it 
 represented the conversion of the Noachidse from common 
 men into immortal gods. Do you now feel the force of its 
 
 * See Appendix to pages 309, 310. 
 
 t I remember but one exception to this rule, viz. when gods or priests 
 present the sign of life (either alone, or combined with the tarn and the tet) 
 to the lips of the king, or of a defunct person. This occurs repeatedly on 
 the walls of the model temple in the Champs de Mars, Exposition of 1867. 
 See Appendix B to page 308. 
 
 J "And yet the Chinese Kou (fig. 16) = ancient, Pauthier's Pamphlet, 
 p. 58 ; and Thou (fig. 16), earth, terra (p. 59), seems to upset it. "Yet it 
 is the tamboura of Egypt (fig. 16, No. 35), meaning music and goodness. 
 

 XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 311 
 
 triple appearance on the face of this sacred ark, carried by 
 priests, and surmounted by the symbolic vase, from which 
 issues the ram's head of the first man, Ammon, the god of 
 gods in the Egyptian Pantheon ? * 
 
 Before passing to other illustrations, I must beg you to 
 let your attention be arrested by a coincidence in this same 
 figure. The combination of the ship and water symbols in 
 the ring and cross bar of the an\, as represented three 
 times on the side of the ark, is repeated in the globe and 
 outspread waving ram's horns above it. It is a common 
 combination on the monuments. It explains also the 
 mysterious winged globe which so commonly occupies a 
 central position on the cornice of Egyptian buildings, 
 especially upon the lintel of the door [toe] . It explains 
 also the less ancient and more elaborate similar object 
 visible on so many Mesopotamian and Persian monuments, 
 the flying Mithras sitting in a ring, and upon a carpet, 
 while his robes, spread out beneath it in a triangular or 
 pyramidal form, represent the Ararat. In process of time 
 the upward tendencies of human thought towards abstract 
 conceptions and philosophical speculation converted the 
 Arkite ring into a globe, which in its turn became the 
 mundane egg enveloped by a serpent, which still later took, 
 in one direction, the Bacchic form of the pine-apple on the 
 summit of the Thyrsus [toe] bound round with fillets of 
 white wool (to represent the water), — and in the other 
 direction the Christian form of St John's communion cup, 
 from which the serpent drinks. As Spencer sings of 
 Faith :— 
 
 ' She was arrayed all in lylie white, 
 And in her right hand bore a cup of gold 
 With wine and water filled up to the height, 
 In which a serpent did himself enfold, 
 That horror made to all that did behold, 
 But she no whit did change her constant mood/ &c. 
 
 But we must not follow the symbol through its innu- 
 merable transformations to so low a date, or we shall lose 
 ourselves in a forest of details. Let us return to the study 
 
 * The figure 15 has been very badly drawn, from memory, the author 
 having no access to the original at the time of going to press. It ex- 
 presses therefore only the general idea. The Ram's head ought to have 
 been drawn issuing from a jar or vase. 
 
312 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 of it in its original and simplest shape. Or rather let us 
 confine ourselves now to its cross only, and neglect the 
 ring. The Christian symbol of faith, the cross, was only 
 an adaptation to the events of the death of Christ, of the 
 ancient and almost universally recognized symbol of death 
 and immortality, ( the sacred TAU7 It was recognized from 
 almost the earliest dawn of the history of the classic world 
 as a sign of life redeemed.* Its adoption by brutal and 
 
 * M. G. de Mortillet has published in 1866 an 8vo volume of 183 
 pages, 117 figures in the text, entitled Le Signe de la Croix avant le 
 Christianisme. 
 
 He was led to the study of this subject by the common opinion that 
 the builders of the Celtic monuments had no religious notions because no 
 idols have ever been discovered in the dolmens. He has collected in this 
 book the proofs of the universal or common occurrence, on these monu- 
 ments of the bronze epoch, and of the first epoch of iron, of three prin- 
 cipal symbols, recognizable under a multitude of variations : the circle ; 
 the pyramid ; and the cross. - 
 
 The circle, representing eternity, is still placed, under the name of 
 nimbus, around the heads of Christian saints. The triangle, representing 
 the Trinity, is almost always placed by Catholic painters upon the head of 
 God. The cross represents redemption. 
 
 On the Celtic monuments, he says, the circle is usually simple, with a 
 dot in its centre ; but sometimes there exist concentric circles, up to 
 seven. 
 
 The triangle is usually composed of a series of parallel straight lines 
 cut obliquely by two other bounding lines. Sometimes the parallel lines 
 are horizontal or vertical. Sometimes the pyramid is built up of chevrons 
 containing one another, or, in other words, a series of isosceles triangles, 
 inside of one another, all cut off by a base line. Sometimes two asso- 
 ciated triangles compose a six-pointed star. [See p. 34, above.] 
 
 The cross is still more varied, made either with points, dots, or little 
 holes, or with straight lines. Sometimes the ends of the cross pieces are 
 turned aside at a right angle. Sometimes a dot or a circle is in the centre 
 of the cross ; or circles are at its ends ; or between its arms ; or a circle 
 envelopes the cross ; or is cut by its arms. Sometimes the cross is 
 formed by four groups of semicircles, &c, &c. 
 
 This combination of circle and cross used at places of sepulture is of a 
 religious importance, and has invited M. Mortillet's special study. He 
 finds its use far anterior to Christianity. The worship of the cross, ex- 
 tensively spread through Gaul before the Roman conquest, existed in 
 Emilia during the age of bronze. Its most complete exhibition is in the 
 sepultures of Golaseeca. It seems to have been a worship of such a 
 peculiar nature as to exclude the worship of idols, and that with such 
 severity as to forbid even the representation of living objects. In pro- 
 portion as these representations make their appearance, the cross becomes 
 more rare, and finally disappears. (Materiaux pour l'histoire, &c, Sept., 
 1866. Page 503.) 
 
 The discoveries in the catacombs of Rome put quite a different aspect 
 
XI.] ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. 313 
 
 superstitious nations like the Bomans, as a punishment , can 
 only be accounted for on mythological grounds, and by 
 reference to the malign influence of a degenerate and cruel 
 priestcraft. All tortures were symbolically contrived in 
 those dark ages. Is it not, alas, in our own days that the 
 Tabor of the divine transfiguration has been parodied by 
 the Tyburn of criminal expiation ? Is not the Tabernacle 
 with its Holy of Holies still insulted in the Christian world 
 by Taverns* of drunkenness and vice ? Is not even the 
 splendid apostrophe of EzekieFs vision made to stand in 
 the pillory as an illustration of the meeting of the extremes 
 of the sublime and the ridiculous, when the mother, in the 
 nursery, sings to the baby in her lap the patty-cake song, 
 bidding the baker-man to * Pick it, and cross it, and mark 
 it with T ? ' — c And Jehovah spake to the man clad in linen, 
 saying : Go through the midst of the city, even Jerusalem, 
 and stamp T upon the foreheads of the men who sigh and 
 cry for all the evil that is doing in their midst/ The 
 expression in the original Hebrew is v'hithuitha tav } 
 (ifi pVpty ; literally, cause TaV to be taved upon them. So 
 completely had the sacred letter become a mark of holi- 
 ness, that a verb had been constructed out of it ; to tav a 
 thing, meant to stamp it with a tav ]-). And we have 
 retained the very word in our own modern language, only 
 improving upon it and intensifying it by the prefix s, 
 signifying holy. Our word s-TAMp is with this addition its 
 exact equivalent; and the German s-tem-pel is a still 
 further enlarged and enforced form. 
 
 When fathers eat of sour grapes, the children's teeth are 
 always set on edge. Words never die. A symbolism, 
 once established, can no more perish than an element in 
 
 upon this symbol of the cross. A friend has informed me that he saw in 
 the catacomb of St Sebastian at least a dozen figures of the cross, and in 
 every instance it was in the shape of the letter T ; but one arm of the 
 cross bar (at the right hand of the sufferer, the left of the spectator) was 
 always longer than the other, and had always a square tablet of the 
 accusation affixed to it at its end. 
 
 * When K replaces T, as in all that series of words which may be most 
 strictly called Cabalistic, then the derivatives change their initials also. 
 When toe, becomes cab, and tatjb, becomes caer, then the English 
 Tavern becomes the Prench Cabaret. Bar-bar-ity, tor-ture, and m-carcer- 
 ation (from Latin career, a prison), are related to each other in precisely 
 this sense. 
 
314 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 nature. Times change. Ages follow each other in solemn 
 procession, like files of kings and priests along an avenue of 
 sphinxes, each contributing its fatal riddle to the ceremony. 
 Worships are donned and doffed, like priestly vestments, 
 by the great religious spirit of mankind. Temples arise 
 and draw in treasures like a man, and then lie down again, 
 and die, stripped like dead bodies for the dust. All those 
 things which seem to be real, prove themselves to be per- 
 ishable and ephemeral like clouds. But words ! those airy 
 nothings ! those birds of paradise, glancing across the air 
 and sunshine of the soul ! those clouds of ever-changing 
 shapes, but ever of one substance; self-producing and 
 self-healing, when the winds arise to dash them into frag- 
 ments ! Words never perish. They are the true waters of 
 life : the world has never done with them. They rise for 
 ever from the seas of soul, float, and appear around the 
 mountain-tops of history, descend in branching languages, 
 and yield man drink and plenty and intellectual commerce, 
 and never-ending luxury. A word can never die. It may 
 be changed ; changed in the twinkling of an eye ; caught 
 up from its original gross meaning into a heaven of poetry, 
 to sit with symbols in a realm of glorious imagination; 
 but it must live for ever. Words breed like creatures. 
 Bach begets its like — with a difference; but the family 
 resemblance lasts. The oldest word man ever spoke is 
 spoken, with its old meaning, somewhere upon earth to- 
 day. 
 
 Words, once invented by the poet, become D'HITj 
 taboes — mountain-tops on which humanity erects its 
 temples. In these shrines the deities of thought reside. 
 The Hebrew language knew no difference between a word 
 (dabar) and the tabernacle of the Lord of Hosts (debir). 
 The Romans could not well distinguish between a denom- 
 ination (nomen) and a deity (numen) . For a self-preserving, 
 propagating force lies in each word ; as a specific genius 
 conceals itself and works in every kind of animal and plant, 
 throughout a thousand generations, against all the oppos- 
 ing principles of nature, endowing it with a sort of gener- 
 ous and special immortality. 
 
 To prove what I have said, I shall devote the principal 
 portion of the rest of this lecture to the tracing of such a 
 word from its earliest appearance in Egyptian history down 
 
XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 315 
 
 to our own times. I might, perhaps, have selected some 
 other one equally persistent and significant to better pur- 
 pose. I shall have, perhaps, difficulty in keeping it clear 
 of its symbolical entanglements with others. But although 
 I must sometimes allude to such side connections, I shall 
 try to draw one thread only from the skein, tangled as it 
 is, even at the risk of sometimes breaking it short off, and 
 with the certainty of losing a thousand indications of the 
 old mythology quite as interesting and as important to 
 the subject. 
 
 The example I select then is the old Egyptian word TB, 
 meaning a vase or pot* and pronounced in modern 
 Egyptian or Coptic taibi. That its central idea was that 
 of hollowness, or a receptacle, is seen by reference to the 
 old Egyptian tf, Coptic thbai, a cavern ; f tpt, Coptic taibi, 
 a boat ; J and tba, Coptic tebe, a box, chest, coffer, sarcopha- 
 gus or cqffbi.§ This last form of the word is made by two 
 signs upon the monuments, — an unknown object and the 
 human leg; the unknown object being evidently a ship - 
 water-mountain monogram, occurring in exactly this shape 
 as one of the forms of the Cadmean letter A (Figure 8, 
 p. 235). The old Egyptian word for prostration in prayer, 
 was this word tb repeated, thus : tb-tb. A prayer itself 
 they called tb-ti ; which was also their name for sandals 
 or shoes ; that is, the little ships in which we place our feet 
 when we make a journey, or go a voyage. They called by 
 nearly the same name, tb-t, the hippopotamus, or river 
 beast, sacred to their Arkite goddess Isis. 
 
 Now if you will refer to any copy of the First Book of 
 Moses, G-enesis, printed in Hebrew, you will see that the 
 word rendered in our English version ark (of course 
 it is Noah's Ark, and not the Ark of the Covenant) is this 
 same Egyptian word for a box, coffer, or sarcophagus, TBE 
 (nun) ; and Gesenius says of it in his dictionary that its 
 etymology is quite unknown. Gesenius was the greatest 
 of modern Hebrew lexicographers. But here is just where 
 the old lexicography has always been at fault. No lexi- 
 cographer has ever yet succeeded in getting one word out 
 
 * Bunsen's Egypt, Eng. Edit., Vocabulary, No. 516, page 482. 
 f No. 547. % No. 549. 
 
 § No. 517, 569 ; and its determinative is the lid of a box, No. 136, 
 page 550. 
 
316 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [lECT. 
 
 of another in an infinite backward series. You must, 
 sooner or later, come to some beginning, — some first word 
 in the series.. That word must either be an instinctive utter- 
 ance of the physical organs, or else it must be an artificial 
 word, a manufactured word, a word invented by the fancy. 
 Now this word TBE is from its very nature one of this last 
 sort. Its true etymology therefore cannot be discovered, un- 
 less one will first provide oneself with some sure clue through 
 the fantastic mysteries of the old alphabet -makers. We 
 may not hit precisely upon all the details of the explanation ; 
 we may make minor errors in portraying this or that 
 feature ; — but we cannot be far wrong in an analysis based 
 upon principles involving nothing but a knowledge of 
 human nature and the monuments of authentic history. 
 
 As one of the two letters of the old Egyptian word was 
 evidently constructed upon the Arkite plan, and represents 
 an hour-glass crossed by the water-line ; so it is quite pos- 
 sible that the three letters of the Hebrew word were chosen 
 with the same three Arkite elements in view, T to represent 
 the mountain, B (Beth, a house) to represent the ark, and 
 E (the soft aspirate, equivalent to the sibilant) to represent 
 the water.* The Greeks have preserved for us the actual 
 final S, in the name they gave in common to the three most 
 
 * The discussion of such an etymology is of course one of the most 
 difficult of all tasks, because, from the very nature of the case, the evidence 
 cannot be direct, but merely inferential, or circumstantial as the lawyers 
 say. That there was an original connection of the closest kind between 
 the words tor, kar, nab,, tab, and one or two other prime Arkite radicals, 
 is demonstrable. It is also certain that tor and kar are in a multitude of 
 cases contractions from ta-bor and ka-bar. It is therefore possible that 
 tab is also a contraction from tarb ; and the story of Moses marrying 
 Tharbe when he entered Meroe, and many other similar indications, point 
 that way. Sometimes these monosyllables look like primary bardic roots, 
 and sometimes like compounds. Even bar itself, which has the most 
 radical aspect of them all, may itself be a compound of b and ar ; for hor 
 is the Shemite word for mountain. But, on the other hand, when the 
 labial disappears entirely from a word it often leaves behind it to mark its 
 place an aspirate lenis or a vowel, or even a sibilant. To complicate the 
 difficulties there come in the various articles, P in Egyptian, H in Hebrew. 
 T in Greek, and It in the Uomanic and Teutonic languages._ bar may 
 possibly be explained by P-TOR, Egyptian, the mountain, which gave the 
 Greeks their personal name Peter (irtrpog), convertible into Selas, its 
 Hebrew form. The subject affords a series of extremely difficult prob- 
 lems when taken in detail, while as a whole it carries an open demonstra- 
 tion in its face. — See Appendix to page 316, for Beth-ark. 
 
XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 317 
 
 celebrated sacred cities of classical antiquity : the Thebes of 
 Bceotia, the Thebes of Phrygia, and the hundred-templed * 
 Thebes of Egypt, as old Homer loves to call it in his Iliad. 
 The monumental name, however, was not Thebes, but 
 TABA. 
 
 The Egyptian Thebes was the centrepoint of Arkite 
 mythology, from the times of the eleventh dynasty, when 
 Arkism had become a state religion in Egypt, and had its 
 priesthoods, mysterious ceremonials, and architects. It 
 was more than a thousand years after the building of the 
 Memphite pyramids that Thebes became the capital shrine f 
 of that resplendent symbolism. Within its walls were 
 clustered those lofty corridors and gateways which illus- 
 trated the glory of the Middle Kingdom of Egyptian history, 
 and strike the traveller to-day with the same awe which 
 the ancients felt for them. It is a city, every stone of 
 which tells some diluvial story. Every temple in it had the 
 Arkite cornice over it, with the cord moulding for a water- 
 line, Every one of its columns was a rock standing out 
 from a marsh of water-lilies. Every capital was an ark 
 from which the imprisoned Noah looked forth upon his 
 worshippers, visibly or invisibly. 
 
 And if we turn to the Boeotian Thebes, at the siege of 
 which all the mythical heroes of Greece and all the gods of 
 Olympus assisted, as at the siege of Troy, — younger and 
 far less fortunate and splendid than her Egyptian proto- 
 type, — yet there is scarcely an allusion to her in the old 
 Greek poets which does not carry a meaning essentially 
 and formally diluvial. The story of the dried- up lake ; the 
 story of the siege itself; the part her heroes took in the 
 wars of Troy, that poetical TOE or TABOR, defended by 
 HEC-TOR, "the Lord of the Tor/ — all show how well the 
 older Nilotic symbolism flourished when, transplanted to the 
 shores of the JEgean Sea and crowned with Delphian laurel, 
 it was made beautiful and youthful with the food and airs 
 of Greece. 
 
 And this is all the more surprising when we remember 
 
 * Hundred-gated. But the gates were no doubt the vast propylsea or 
 gateways to the temples. 
 
 t The Isle of Meroe also represented the Ark of Osiris, which was 
 named by the Greeks Baris ((3apiQ) } from which we get our word Bark, a 
 ship, &c. 
 
318 * ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 how opposite the airy liberty of the Athenian gentleman 
 was to the stiff formalism of the Memphite or Theban 
 ecclesiastic. Among the heavy Boeotians the ancient 
 doctrines might breed for ever unchanged. But even 
 within sight of Mars Hill the old Pelasgic population tilled 
 the fields and kept the ancient Berber traditions unchanged. 
 
 But what is calculated most of all to impress us is the 
 fact of the universality of this Arkism in the ancient world. 
 At one moment we are inclined to call it Pelasgic, at the 
 next Phoenician, Phrygian, or Thracian. Now, it seems to 
 have its principal seat in Egypt proper. Then, a crowd of 
 geographical names on the monuments seem to refer it to the 
 desert of Sahara, or to the negro continent of the head- waters 
 of the Nile. Now, one remembers that the Athenians and 
 other Greeks were Heraclidas, that is, immigrants from the 
 valley of the Indus, and that modern Hindustan, like 
 ancient India, is full of Arkite names and monuments and 
 ceremonies. The northern Scythia is also unmistakably 
 an Arkite region ; and so is Western or Celtic Europe. We 
 can turn in no direction without seeing this round sky of 
 aboriginal mythology touch and rest upon the earth. China, 
 Japan, Corea, and the Australian Archipelago, the scattered 
 islands of the Pacific and the southern continent of 
 America, are full of every kind and degree of Arkite name 
 and thing of history or reverence. 
 
 Its great antiquity alone will account for this its univers- 
 ality ; and only by going back as I have done to the be- 
 ginnings of recorded history, and by selecting objects from 
 well-known localities to compare with one another, can we 
 get any notion of the genuine meaning of this Ark or 
 Thebes whose name has been stamped in a thousand styles 
 upon the many-sided life of the world. 
 
 Keeping still close to Egypt then, but with our eyes 
 open to resemblances in other countries, let me give you 
 three or four instances of the propagation of the Theban 
 idea among the Hebrews. 
 
 I have already given you one — the mark of the sacred 
 TAV. 
 
 Another of the same sort occurs in the Hebrew word for 
 goodness, holiness, or orthodox purity, TOB. This word, 
 so incessantly employed in the Hebrew scriptures, — as it 
 is the word which the traveller oftenest hears in Egypt, still, 
 
XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 319 
 
 tail! well! — meant something far different from the later 
 and larger abstract Greek conception of holiness, freed from 
 dependence upon priestcraft and ceremonial oaths of ini- 
 tiation and thunders of excommunication. The hiKaiocrvvr} 
 of the writers of the New Testament, the hiKaios and 81*77 
 of Plato and Aristotle, like the Latin dico, I say (allied to 
 hziKvvixi, our English word to teach) was worthy of the 
 artistic simplicity of the Grecian intellect, and of its pro- 
 phecy of modern science. It was not at Thebes, it was 
 not at Jerusalem, nor at Oxford and Cambridge, that such 
 a change of name for relationship of the creature to the 
 Creator could have taken place. Only to Job in the plains 
 of Moab, to Jesus at Nazareth of Galilee, to Peter on the 
 tanner's roof at Joppa, or to Colenso among the Natalese 
 of Southern Africa, could the inspiration come that ' every 
 man that doeth right must be accepted of God/ Yet even 
 the Greeks who had learned hiKanqv, righteousness, still re- 
 tained a tradition of the old sacerdotal Arkite word, in the 
 list of their sub-olympian deities, as <d"EMis, goddess of 
 justice. The earliest church establishment at the dawn of 
 history, equally with the latest sect of modern bigots, 
 claimed the prerogative of the Royal exchequer to refuse 
 the right of circulation to the holiness of the soul before it 
 had received the stamp of the temple. And the legal lan- 
 guage of the nineteenth century contains more than one 
 relic of these ancient Arkite days when church and state 
 were one, the king a priest, and the priest a king, when 
 Bards and Barons exercised co-ordinate sacerdotal and 
 judicial powers on the Barrow, or prophesied from the cell 
 beneath it. The English judge is still a Baron. The 
 criminal is brought to the Bar. Ship crimes are called 
 par excellence Barratry. If the accused have done no 
 wrong he is declared Pure. If he be guilty he can still 
 be Par-doned. Then there ai*e other words derived from 
 the TOE or tabor. Our lawyers say that a Tort has been 
 committed, and the accused must be Tried. This word 
 once had a more dreadful meaning than now, for it was 
 equivalent to being Tor-tur-ed, and Tor-mented. When 
 we complain of being tired, we are not aware how fearful 
 was the meaning of that word also once. Dar/mess also 
 took its name from the cell beneath the tor. But to re- 
 turn to our theme :• — 
 
320 ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [lECT. 
 
 A third illustration of the use of the word TAB in 
 Hebrew is the exact opposite of the last one. For, as I 
 have already somewhere in the course of these lectures 
 remarked, all spiritual expressions are disposed to polarize 
 themselves, — to have a north and a south pole, morally, 
 so to speak, — to take on two contrary meanings. Barak, 
 in Hebrew, meant to bless and to curse. Sacer, in Latin, 
 meant devoted to the gods as pure, and devoted to the 
 devils as vile. This is precisely the case with the word 
 TABU as used over the whole Pacific Ocean : it represents 
 anything set aside ecclesiastically.* It occurs repeatedly 
 in the Hebrew Scriptures as TTIOBE (rrnyin) m connec- 
 tion with the Exodus from Egypt : as in 1 Gen. xliii. 32 : 
 { For to eat bread with the Hebrews was tabu to the 
 Egyptians/ Gen. xlvi. 34 : ' Every shepherd was a tabu of 
 the Egyptians/ Ex. viii. 25, 26 : ■ For they would have 
 to sacrifice the tabu of the Egyptians/ i. e. the bull, or 
 some other animal which the Egyptians worshipped. And 
 when we turn to the Coptic language for an explanation of 
 the Hebrew word, we find the Coptic word meaning to 
 sanctify was TOUBE. How this Egyptian Thebism got to 
 be so wide- spread as to cover all the islands of the Great 
 Pacific Ocean we may well ask. But who has been yet able 
 to trace the historical connection between the neckpillow of 
 Egypt and its facsimile now used by the shock-headed 
 negroes of the Feejee Islands ? Or who has yet explained 
 the presence of the Australian boomerang upon the monu- 
 ments of Egypt ? The coincidence, however, of the 
 boomerang, the neckpillow, and the tabu system of Egypt, 
 in the remote East, and at the present day, may open our 
 eyes to the permanence of human thoughts and uses, and 
 lead us to search for the most ancient relics of the past in 
 the most retired nooks of the present world. 
 
 A fourth illustration of the use of the radical TAB in its 
 Arkite or Theban meaning, in the Hebrew language, is 
 afforded by such a proper name as David, when we regard 
 the final d as an attributive affix. The greatest man of 
 ancient times — if influence over the religious feelings of all 
 succeeding ages can be accepted as a true criterion of 
 greatness in any man — the man after God's own heart, as 
 
 * T. 14. 26. T. 34. 53. 
 
XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 321 
 
 priestcraft calls him, — the pivot of all ecclesiasticism, — 
 the true intellectual founder of that Hebrew Arkism which 
 his son Solomon raised to the summit of political glory, — 
 what other name could this man have had bestowed upon 
 him but that of DAYiD, the Theban, the man of the Ark, 
 par excellence, the man belonging to the Tab ? For, while 
 the Hebrew writers speak of the ark of Moses, David and 
 Solomon, by the later name Am, the Arabian writers 
 always call it by the name which the Jews reserved for the 
 ark of Noah, TABwT, and at the same time they call the 
 king by the same name BAB^D.* 
 
 A fifth illustration, of much interest, is found in the He- 
 brew name of the jackal, TaB, 2T) } the canis aureus of Lin- 
 neus, ' whose monotonous wail may be heard every night 
 over the whole extent of the Desert of Sahara, whether by 
 the camp-fire, or under the protection of the oasis/ f The 
 Arabs call it Dheel*. The importance of the word lies in 
 the fact that it is the A'HUP of the monuments, (see page 
 300,) the first god Anubis of Egypt ; a word quite equiva- 
 lent to the A'DaM of the early Hebrew mythology, the 
 father of mankind. It is peculiarly important to notice 
 the prefix character of the A, which is extremely common 
 in Arkism, and explains a multitude of otherwise inscru- 
 table mysteries in the names of persons and things, always 
 indicating that such names are taken from the mountain 
 symbol. (See Appendix to page 300.) 
 
 I cannot stop longer to collect illustrations of the trans- 
 plantation of the word TAB upon Greek and Roman soil, 
 or to follow it in all its wanderings to other lands, and its 
 adoption (with fall Arkite meaning) into other lauguages. 
 I will only draw your attention to it in the Latin form of 
 "EAYis, a ship, Greek, Naus, which has given to modern 
 architecture its term, the Nave of a church. 
 
 * H. 8. 1, b. I. The Arabic legend gives also Taint for Saul, and 
 Djalut for Goliath. 
 
 t Tristram's Great Sahara. London, 1860. There are several other 
 kinds of jackals in the north of Africa. The Vulpes vulgaris (L.), Vulpes 
 Niloticus (Cuv.), the common Egyptian fox, very common in the south. 
 Vulpes famelicus (L.)> a pretty little fox confined to Southern Algeria, and 
 the Fennicus Brucei (Desm.), the lovely little cunning, affectionate, squir- 
 rel-like fennie, half the size of a cat, with large ears and a bushy tail, 
 caught by the boys throughout the rolling sand deserts. Besides these 
 there are the Lepus Mediterraneus and Lepus JEgypthis (Geof.). 
 
 21 
 
322 ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 A truce then to these antiquities ! But where, you 
 will ask me, where is this oldest of Arkite words, this 
 Thebes or TAB, to be found on earth to-day ? I answer — 
 everywhere. Every woman has the word upon her lips as 
 a household thing; at least on washing day; it is our 
 homely English tub. Sailors call every slow old ship a 
 tub. And can we see no meaning in the legend that the 
 founder of the cynics dogmatized in a tub, when we remem- 
 ber that his name, Diogenes, meant goddess born ? Dio- 
 genes philosophized in his tub in obedience to the same 
 Arkite prejudice which forced the fanatical Simeon Stylites 
 to prophesy for forty years on the summit of a Corinthian 
 column, drawing up his daily food with a rope from the 
 awe-struck crowds below. 
 
 The Theb that gave the Greeks their name for a goddess* 
 DIVa, — whether the gift came by the way of Arya or direct 
 from Egypt matters not, — has given us our name for that 
 most wonderful, most mystic, and most beautiful of all 
 things, the drop of DEW. 
 
 One of the most beautiful forms in which the old word 
 Thebeh appears in our modern vernacular is the name of 
 the bird which every poet, every lover, knows so well, the 
 favourite Christian symbol too of that divine providence, 
 that celestial Sophia, that benevolent wisdom, which broods 
 upon the stormy waters of human life, preserving, en- 
 lightening, and immortalizing mankind. The DOVe was a 
 favourite Arkite symbol long before the baptism of our 
 Lord. How beautifully it plays its part in the story of the 
 Deluge. Scholars have not failed to draw attention to the 
 identity of its Hebrew name Jon with that of Jonah, who 
 typified the Noah in the legend of the whale, and with 
 that of John, the beloved apostle, which leaned at supper- 
 time on Jesus' breast, and with that of John the Baptist, 
 before whose eyes his feathered namesake hovered down 
 from heaven to rest on Jesus' head.f 
 
 In the eyes of the ancients all birds in general, and as 
 such, were accounted symbols of the ark. Aristophanes 
 founded his half- satirical, half-mystical drama upon this 
 sentiment. The whole system of auspices hence derived 
 
 * And for a wealthy man DlVes. 
 f The Toni of India will be noticed farther on. See p. 326. 
 
XI.] ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. 323 
 
 its force.* A multitude of bizarre and picturesque legends, 
 in all ages and among all nations, have been in vogue, 
 founded upon a traditionary reverence for this primeval 
 relationship of bird to lard. Sinbad's HOC was merely an 
 Arabian inversion of the ARK. You may recall the horror 
 of the genius of the lamp when, by the advice of the 
 wicked magician, poor Aladdin ordered him to procure a 
 roc's egg to be hung up under his palace dome ; why ! 
 the roc's egg was the King of the Genii ! We read in 
 the Mohammedan books of a great bird called DAM, — a 
 word, the equivalent of TAB.f The great flying dragon 
 of the Chinese is called TAP. J 
 
 The ancients believed that there was a language of 
 birds which Solomon and his free-masons alone under- 
 stood; meaning, of course, a secret language of bards or 
 priests ; and the eastern story has it, that the Hoopoo was 
 excommunicated because he betrayed the knowledge of 
 this bird-language to men,§ 
 
 But why was the dove picked out of all the families of 
 birds to be the special type and bear the very name of the 
 Theb, through all ages, to the present dfty ? Why among 
 all the birds were just the turtle-doves the only birds that 
 could be offered in sacrifice before the Hebrew ark ? Why 
 did the Greeks call it irepis-Ttp-a ? || Why do the Germans 
 call it Turtel-taube, and the English turtle-dove ? What 
 have the turtles to do with the doves ? Nothing but a 
 genuine Arkism could bring these two creatures together, 
 representing as they do two totally different kingdoms of 
 the animal world : the one inhabiting the air, the other 
 the sea ; the one the swiftest, the other the slowest of all 
 animals. But the fancy is a fire which fuses together the 
 most opposite elements. The Indian mythology begins 
 with the mysterious postulate that the earth is sustained 
 upon an elephant (the living ALP) ; and the elephant is 
 
 * See Appendix to p. 322. 
 
 f Its connection with Janus and Diana is more doubtful ; although 
 these deities are male and female representatives of the ark (the moon), 
 and of the man of the ark (Noah), with his face set two ways, backward 
 to the world before the flood and forward to the new dispensation. They 
 bear a relation to each other like that of Is-iri (Osiris) and Is-is. She is 
 the virgin mother of God, and he the God of re-established peace. T. 17. 
 44. See also the verse about the Devil and his Dam, T. 16. 12. 
 
 % T. 14. 21. § See Appendix to p. 323. || J. 6. 2. 
 
324 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 standing on a turtle's back (the summit of the TOR pro- 
 jecting from the water) ; but the turtle stands on nothing, 
 the beginning is reached, history can go no farther back 
 than Ararat, the aboriginal TOR. 
 
 But this digression gives us no direct information on 
 the subject of the dove. Let us apply then for an explan- 
 ation to the language of ancient Rome, the Ramah of the 
 west, one of the chief seats of ancient, as it is the capital of 
 modern, Arkism ; for many questions of this nature can be 
 answered there. The Eomans called the dove TUR-TUR, 
 the bird of the Tor, par excellence. Now we can see why 
 the Greeks called it Peeis-tee, that is, the /3apts of the Tor, 
 the ship of the rock. Turtel-tauhe, then, in modern Ger- 
 man means simply the mountain-bird. The Roman re- 
 duplication TUR-TUR, tur-tle, expressed a noun of multi- 
 tude. The plural is commonly made in this way by 
 savages, and was probably always so made in the most 
 ancient languages. It is the same influence which induces 
 English women to say incessantly 'Very very,' when 
 American women content themselves with simply c Very/ 
 The dove not onlj- by its habits of building its nest in the 
 rocks, then, but also by its gregarious habits, building in 
 colonies, and flying in swarms, represented those religious 
 communities of priests, whose lamaseries and monasteries 
 have played so important a role in architectural history ; 
 and those thousands of solitary anchorites whose cells 
 honey-combed the rocky sides of every desert valley and of 
 every sea-girt mountain. They represented also those 
 more solemn communities of the departed dead, whose 
 f eternal mansions ' pitted the rock-walls of the valley of 
 the Nile, and made cavernous the limestone escarpments 
 of Palestine. 
 
 The recent investigations of M. Rossi in the catacombs 
 of Rome, rivalling in interest those of M. Mariette upon 
 the site of ancient Memphis, have brought to light the fact 
 that they were not quarries merely, adopted afterwards by 
 the persecuted sect of Christians as places of refuge, chapels 
 of worship and burial-places for the martyrs ; but that they 
 were authorized and regulated cemeteries, separately owned 
 by chartered companies, protected by the Roman govern- 
 ment, and used not only by the Christians, but by the 
 Latin population previous to the time of Christ. They 
 
XI.] ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. 325 
 
 grew in course of time to so vast a size that their galleries 
 communicated across the boundary lines ; and the direction 
 of their growth was determined by the desire felt by the 
 Christians to be buried as near as possible to any martyr 
 of peculiar sanctity or fame. These catacombs were all 
 arranged on one plan however ; and this is the interesting 
 point which I wish just now to keep in view. They were 
 excavated in parallel corridors, in the sides or walls of 
 which the bodies of the dead were laid in oblong chambers, 
 arranged in separate columbaria, or Dove-cotes. These 
 were no new invention. In ages long preceding the 
 Roman Empire, this was a common mode of building a 
 necropolis, and it had its influence in fixing a religious 
 meaning to the name and habits of the birds of which I 
 am now speaking. 
 
 But there are other mythological connections to be 
 noticed. In Egypt and in ancient Greece there was an 
 order of priests, habitually called black doves ; and the 
 title does not seem to be one given in derision, like that of 
 crows given to the priests by the modern inhabitants of 
 Italy. * The same cause gave the Delphic priestesses the 
 name of bees, melissce. The multitudes of doves through- 
 out the coasts of Syria strike travellers with wonder; 
 stock-doves (Columba cenas), and ring-doves (0. palumbus), 
 and common pigeons (C. domestica), Barbary Carriers, 
 Turkish Crisps, and Persian Shakers, fill the air; while 
 their numbers and gyrations are watched by modern sooth- 
 sayers as anxiously and wisely as in any ancient day. But 
 they are even more abundant still in the mountain-chains 
 of the Indus, the Coh-i- Suleiman, which in fact is called 
 in the Sanscrit ARGa-varta, land of the dove. You see that 
 •in the sacred tongue of the East, the dove is called the ark. 
 
 It was not so much because of these gregarious traits 
 of character in a wild state, as on account of the domestic 
 habits of the dove, its usefulness to the family, and its 
 sociableness with man, that it became remarkable in 
 
 * It may, however, have had some connection with pictures of priests 
 letting loose carrier pigeons seen upon the monuments. This was one 
 of their favourite tricks, and one of the most mysterious and efficient 
 means at their command to keep up religious communication over all the 
 ancient world, and preserve an influence over the politics of all the an- 
 cient states. — See Appendix to page 325. 
 
326 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [lECT. 
 
 ancient eyes. But it was given to Venus, not because 
 of its loving disposition, for it is as ill-natured as all other 
 birds, but because Venus was herself the representative 
 goddess of the ark, and claimed ^the dove on account of 
 the olive branch. Cama the god of love, the hindu Cupid, 
 is seen in Coleman's Hindu Mythology, plate 21, riding on 
 a dove with his bow and arrow ready to shoot. In the 
 phallism of India the female member bears the Hebrew 
 name of the dove Yoni. 
 
 But if the dove was peculiarly sacred in an Arkite sense, 
 it had not much pre-eminence before other almost equally 
 venerated birds, such as the hawk of Horus, the eagle of 
 Jove, and the owl of Pallas. I repeat it, all birds, without 
 an exception, had an Arkite sacredness in the eyes of the 
 ancients. And why ? Not only because they floated on 
 the air as ships upon the water, but because they construct- 
 ed nests. And every nest is a wonder of nature, an inspira- 
 tion from God, a miracle of unpretending skill, a lesson 
 to man of patience, taste, and foresight ; a symbol of the 
 marriage-bed, the ante-type and archi-type of home. But 
 more than this is it, or rather was it, to the ancients. 
 Poised on a tree-branch, rocking in the wind, freighted 
 with its helpless, timorous, clamorous, new-born, open- 
 mouthed, and large-eyed little family, it was a symbol of 
 New Generation, and of the beginning of things ; of the ark 
 perched (bae-K6c/) upon Mt Ararat, holding its family of 
 Noachides. 
 
 The nest, therefore, was called by the Greeks the little 
 ship veoo-G-ia ;* as the oak tree was called by them the mount- 
 ain, hpvs, toeus ; and as the bard-baron who taught and 
 judged and sacrificed beneath its living tumulus of green 
 leaves was called the Druid, the man of the toe-teee, i. e. 
 the oak, which more than all other trees resembles a 
 rounded mountain, and in the hollow trunk of which the 
 Druid found both cell and shrine. 
 
 The nest of every bird, therefore, was a sacred symbol 
 I of the ark to the ancients ; and those were the most re- 
 
 * Nfoffffeuw, to build a nest. Pathey gives in his vocabulary four or five 
 separate and very different Coptic words for nest. I have already men- 
 tioned the fact that both the Greek and Latin vavg (nafis), navis, and the 
 English and German ship, schiffe, are dialectic conversions of the same 
 radical letters which make the Egyptian and Hebrew TBE and TAEBE. 
 
XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 327 
 
 vered winch were built most prominently in sight about 
 the dwellings of the people. The poetic veneration for 
 the stork, for instance, that universal substitute for the 
 dragon on the lacquered ware and temple walls of the 
 Japanese — that household god of the inhabitants of the 
 delta of the Rhine, recalls the affectionate reverence which 
 the dwellers in the valley of the Nile felt for the same 
 bird five thousand years ago. Its flight, its body stilted 
 (s-tol), like a shepherd of the landes of Gascony, upon a 
 triangle made of its two diverging legs, — but especially 
 its trick of building its little ship upon the gabel {gibel, 
 Arabic for mountain) of the house, or on the chimney-top, 
 that tower above the hearth, that temple of the household 
 lares* — all combined to make it an object of curiosity, 
 affection, and Arkite significance. Hence its name of 
 STOXL&, the bird of the mystic TOR. Hence it was 
 adopted by the Egyptian mystagogues to represent in 
 their hieroglyphic alphabet the local deluge of the Nile 
 valley. You may see it, drawn as in fig. 19, sitting on 
 a black pyramid, on the monuments.f Bunsen gives it as 
 No. 291 in his ( Vocabulary of Ideographs/ He calls it, 
 indeed, l a Nycticorax alighted on a heap of corn/ but he 
 gives as its hieroglyphic meaning ' to inundate, inunda- 
 tion, to swell, harvest. 3 % 
 
 Fig. 19. 
 
 *tw 
 
 AB-HOU S-^ BA BA R)( R)( BAK 
 
 The step from this first application to the deluge, and 
 
 * There is a whole train of Arkisms connected with the names for the 
 chimney-stack in various languages ; and not the least curious of them is 
 the application of the term (chemine) to the preposterous high heels of 
 the ladies of the middle ages, which in Yenice attained the fabulous 
 altitude of a foot-and-half, so that the dame of fashion had to promenade 
 between two gentlemen or two servants, leaning her arms, bent at the 
 elbow, on their shoulders ; and severe, but of course inoperative, sump- 
 tuary laws were made against the fashion by the Council of Ten. All 
 these allied facts are explained by a single and direct reference to the 
 word Ca-bar, in its various dialectic forms, as gibel, gabel, gable, cobald, 
 cobold, cobalt, cabalistic, &c, meaning ' related to the sacred bar.' 
 
 f See Appendix. % With the sound AB-HU, or BAH. 
 
328 ON AEKITB SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 the new humanity, or to the inundation of the Mle with 
 the new harvest, to that of a genius of life, was easy to 
 make. Therefore the Egyptian mystagogues used the 
 standing stork-like figure, with legs outstretched, and a 
 tuft of hair falling from its breast (like the long beard 
 given to the figures of the male gods), as seen in fig. 19, to 
 express the human soul* 
 
 But as I have already said, the stork was not alone in 
 this beautiful idealism. All birds, by their swift and 
 varied flight, suggested the idea of thought. The priests 
 therefore portrayed the soul also by means of another 
 hieroglyph, a bird with black wings and a human head 
 and face, as in fig. 19. f But did the scribe wish to write 
 pure spirit, he drew a Numidian crane, fig. 19, and pro- 
 nounced it in his reading, AE,K,J or a phoenix with human 
 hands uplifted above a star, as in fig. 19, pronouncing 
 the same word ARK. But when he wished to designate a 
 divine spirit, a divinity, a god, he selected a bird of high 
 flight and piercing vision, the kingly soaring and swoop- 
 ing haivk, writing it before the name of the deity, which he 
 gives in phonetic letters (fig. 19). And the name of this 
 hawk-god symbol was BAK, from which we may probably 
 derive the Bacchus of the Greeks, and the Tartar bog, 
 meaning god. 
 
 But to return to our Theban nest (which I am loth to 
 leave without an illustration or two more), and keeping in 
 mind its Arkite meaning of a little ship, I will draw your 
 attention first to the 325th ideograph of Bunsen's list 
 (fig. 19), S'x ' ^ nest of birds/ which bore the unexpected 
 meaning water-places and to fill; still in reference to the 
 inundation and the deluge. Now look at this woodcut 
 figure 20. It is a drawing of two antique candelabra, 
 which stand beside one of the open doorways in the great 
 corridor of the Vatican Museum. You see that they con- 
 sist of the trunks of two trees — oak trees, apparently, 
 from their gnarled and knotted bark — with enough of the 
 first circle of their branches left uncut to hold three nests, 
 
 * Pronounced BA. See Appendix to page 327. 
 
 t Pronounced EA. Ideograph No. 322. Champollion's Dictionary, 
 54. The Hebrew word for the face of man and for the presence of God 
 was PE, ;-f£) 
 
 % U x . Idiograph 292. 
 
XI.] 
 
 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 
 
 129 
 
 Fig. 20. Antique Candelabra in the Vatican Museum. 
 
 one on the one tree, and two on the two forked branches 
 of the other. In the first nest lie — not three unfledged 
 birds, as in the Egyptian hieroglyphic — but three lovely 
 baby children ; and in each of the other two are packed 
 five similar little cherubs, making ten in all. Here is a 
 two-fold presentation of the self- same myth, done in the 
 finest style of the most advanced taste of the classic age 
 of art. On the one side you have the symbolic reproduc- 
 tion of the ark and its three principal deities, the three 
 Cabiri, the Dii Major es. In the other you have the Dii 
 Minores, the Daktuloi, or finger-gods of Thrace, the ten 
 digits of the human hand, the ten creators, also called 
 Cabiri, or gods of the old Cabala, but representatives of 
 the family of the NoachidE©.* 
 
 * As I have shown in speaking of the arm and hand oh page 234 above. 
 The word, daktuloi, looks as if it were compounded of deka, ten, and tel, 
 mountain. For the word Thumb is closely connected with Tom, tumulus, 
 as is plainly shown by all the nursery stories of Tom Thumb, &c, and 
 numerous talmudic stories, such as that of Abram preserved in a cave 
 from the cruelty of Nimrod, sucking his thumbs, from one of which he 
 
330 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [lECT. 
 
 It is needless to remind you what various changes in 
 the form of the myth two or three thousand years of 
 priestcraft must have created. The Hebrew story of the 
 flood makes use of the number eight. But the number of 
 persons in the ark varies in other myths. Sometimes 
 they included Noah with his three sons, making the num- 
 ber four. Sometimes his wife, Anna, and their three wives 
 are added, making the number eight. The Egyptian 
 system of the middle empire duplicated all its deities. 
 Its object was to represent the female principle always by 
 the side of the male. Thus gradually there arose a com- 
 bination of the ship symbol, which was always female, 
 with the mountain symbol system, which was properly a 
 male. This introduced, in course of time, a bewildering 
 confusion between the ship and mountain symbols, which 
 would require a volume to illustrate instead of a single 
 lecture. Even the Greeks were no strangers to this acci- 
 dent. The pure ship symbols, Yenus and Diana, were 
 the only really unmarried deities they had ; I mean the 
 aboriginal Yenus, riding in her shell upon the waters ; 
 and the Diana riding as a crescent through the sky — 
 
 ' That orbed maiden, 
 With white fire laden, 
 Whom mortals call the moon.' 
 
 The number of the children, therefore, in the nests of 
 our candelabra was not an essential point. These can- 
 got milk and from the other honey, until he grew up. One of the most 
 beautiful and perfect Arkite traditions remaining in England, is the 
 touching story of Peeping Tom of Coventry [Kabar-tor] and the good 
 Countess, who was compelled to ride naked, covered only with her great 
 vail of streaming, waving, golden hair, upon a horse through the streets, 
 while all the inhabitants were forbidden to appear. Tom only peeped. 
 The top of the Ararat was the only residue of all the earth that watched 
 the Gene-vra {yvvq (3api), the lady bark, upon her lonely ride to save the 
 perishing humanity. The same sort of connection between the Tom or 
 Tor and the Bar is seen in the story of Martha (flapig) capturing the 
 dragon of Tar-ascon ; and in the universal spread of the household fame 
 of the dear lady Queen Bertha, whose home was equally in Provence, in 
 Switzerland, where she has the reputation of having buiit all the Towers, 
 and in Germany, where she is made the same as Eve : — 
 1 When Adam ploughed and Bertha span 
 Where was then the gentleman ? ' 
 In English it runs : — 
 
 ' When Adam delved and Eve span,' &c. 
 
XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 331 
 
 delabra remain among the most curious and precious relics, 
 not only of the art of the classic world, but of that fertile 
 fancy which laid hold of every object in the wide circlet 
 of the world to make some record on it of the aboriginal 
 worship of mankind. 
 
 Have I wearied you with these details ? It is only by 
 heaping up data, one by one, that modern science builds 
 its pyramids. It is only by the widest synthesis that we 
 obtain our largest truths. It is only by showing you the 
 same mythological fossils buried in the histories and lan- 
 guages of distant lands that I can prove to you the se- 
 quence in time, and the outspread in space of this grand 
 mythological stratification of the spiritual world. I wish 
 to show you that there must have been a profound and 
 universal substratum of the mystical, the Cabalistic, sup- 
 porting all the outer and more material life of the early 
 ages of mankind, saturated with this Arkism, — this idea of 
 the salvation of the human race from a deluge of waters, 
 by means of a floating sanctuary, stranded at length upon 
 some Ararat, from the sides of which the repossession of 
 the devastated earth, and the rehabilitation or rejuvenation 
 of humanity commenced again. 
 
 And therefore it is that we have the names of the old 
 Gods in our business and baby talk. Our boys play with 
 the holy emblems of the ancient faiths. Did you ever no- 
 tice that annual series of boys' games, which moves on 
 with the seasons, almost unseen beneath our eyes, pre- 
 occupied as they are with Christian and modern affairs ? 
 It is a veritable dervish-dance of mythological antiquities. 
 It is a procession of symbols handed down from the most 
 Arkite times ; not by monuments, not in books, not by 
 pandects and scholia ; but by a free-masonry and tradition 
 which only children understand. Its rules, its etiquette, 
 its arrangements of times, and places, and shapes, its 
 catchwords and penalties, have all been floating together 
 down the ages on the ceaseless flood of child-play, foaming 
 and sparkling and murmuring in the sunshine of parental 
 and divine affection, over the whole surface of the earth. 
 Notice these games, and you will see that they are all 
 Druidic. I will not now stop to explain them; indeed, 
 they need no elaborated explanation. But I ask you to re- 
 gard that one of them which commences the series, the 
 
332 ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 TOP.. It is spun before us, on every pavement, in the 
 spring. It is the most perfect emblem of the primeval 
 Theb, whose name it bears. Its cord, like that which 
 underlies the Egyptian temple cornice, and occurs so fre- 
 quently in the Gothic mouldings, is the water symbol. 
 Once it was lashed by priests, in sacred fury, round the 
 temple floor, with a whip of many cords, to represent the 
 multitudinous waves, roaring around the ark. Not ten 
 years ago, in the heart of Arabia, the traveller Palgrave 
 was clandestinely smoking his cigar outside of the walls of 
 Riadh, the capital city of the Wahabees, when he was ap- 
 proached by a boy, who was amusing himself with just 
 such a top as Palgrave had many a time played with in Eng- 
 land, when he was himself a child. The boy spun the top 
 in his left hand. Then he took it upon his right-hand 
 forefinger, and keeping it spinning there, held it up above 
 his head, his arm at full length, and repeated the formula, 
 e not by my strength, nor cleverness, but by the strength 
 of God, and by the cleverness of God/* Palgrave relates 
 the anecdote to illustrate the foolish and excessive fatalism 
 of these fanatical mussulmen. But it teaches a far deeper 
 and older lesson. 
 
 And the rest of the series of these children's games, the 
 hoop, the kite, the marbles, hop-skip, base ball, cricket, 
 shinney (hocky as it is called in England), all of them are 
 of a hoar and Druidical antiquity. You see the shinney on 
 the coins of the Phoenician colonists. The kite, like the 
 bird of the same name, receives that name from the same 
 Arkite radical which gives name to the cat, the whale 
 (/0770s), the cod, and to the ships of the Mediterranean Sea. 
 Cricket is the game of the Druid kirk, and its character- 
 istic is a wooden gate, or wicket, made in imitation of one 
 of those tremendous trilithons which compose the circle of 
 Stonehenge ; and the game is a mimic war between two 
 parties, one of which represents the priesthood, whose 
 whole business is to protect the sacred lintel, which the 
 other party strive to cast down and destroy. The game of 
 marbles represents a similar attack from outside foes upon 
 the safety of the initiated in the Church, in the form of 
 marbles in the ring ; for kirk or church is the same as 
 kvkXos, or circle, in the Druid mythology of the past. The 
 * Proc. Roy. Geog. Soe. 1846, Eeb. 22, p. 74. 
 
XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. • 333 
 
 order of tlie Knights of the Temple were the last in Chris- 
 tendom to keep alive the mystery of building circular 
 churches. The very name TOE. alley, which the boys give 
 to the great marble in the centre of the ring, is enough to 
 show the Arkite tradition in the game. But above all, the 
 game of hop-skip speaks for itself. No one can watch 
 two boys draw with chalk on a pavement an oblong space 
 terminating in an apse at one end, and divide it by cross 
 lines, and draw a cross at the farther end, without seeing 
 at once that the figure is the ground-plan of a French ca- 
 thedral church. See how the little vagabonds then num- 
 ber the included spaces with cyphers from 1 to 12, begin- 
 ning at the square (west) end, and terminating in the 
 round or choir end. Then see one of them take an oyster 
 shell — a neophyte — and with great difficulty, hopping on 
 one foot, and with all sorts of mystic motions and compli- 
 cated rules of conduct, according to a well-established 
 order of tradition, which his opponent jealously observes, 
 being on the watch to trip him up at the least infraction of 
 the rules, — and see him shove the oyster shell from division 
 to division on towards the cross and altar-place, where 
 the catechumen becomes a communicant, and the communi- 
 cant a priest — and tell me there is nothing ancient, no- 
 thing Archaic, nothing of the Eleusinian or still older Old 
 Egyptian mysteries in that ! * 
 
 I might carry you far into the forest of such mystical 
 correlations of our own with former days, by following the 
 clue which has thus far led us, the Theban name of Noah's 
 ark. There are other clues of equal worth, but I have held 
 to this, to show you how one such leads us on from one 
 chamber of imagery to another, until we feel at home in the 
 whole house of the faith of the early fathers of mankind. 
 This clue we have been following is not yet half unrolled. 
 The same old word — this Thebes — comes up in almost 
 every trade and walk of life. 
 
 * Many of these games bear in other languages equally significant 
 Arkite names. For example, the game of nine-pins, a perfectly Druidic 
 game, is called in French quilles. But Q,-UTL is the equivalent of Ca- 
 BIL, and the meaning is simply, when carried back through all its ety- 
 mologies, Cabalistic. Quille is the French equivalent for the ke'el of a 
 ship. I say nothing here about the game of chess because it requires a 
 study by itself. Its best form is the Chinese, wherein the opposing forces 
 fight across a river that runs between them on the board. 
 
334 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 The old maid still pets her Tabby-cat, the mystic animal 
 of all witch-stories ; the beast symbol, seen sitting on the 
 sacred sistram of the Egyptian musical performers. 
 
 The engineer, the bridge-builder, the chemist, has each 
 his tube. It is the ancient Tuba, out of which the trombone 
 of Pompeii came. The Mohammedan legend of Enoch says 
 that the tallest and most beautiful of all the trees, standing 
 in the centre of Paradise, was named Tuba ; and that Allah 
 commanded it to bend its top over the outer walls, that 
 Enoch might take hold thereon ; and so he was lifted over 
 into Paradise.* And there is a curious story in the 
 eastern books about King David and a tube : After the 
 rebellion of Absalom, King David would no longer trust 
 his own judgment. So he arranged an apparatus some- 
 thing like that which good old Dr Hare of Philadelphia 
 arranged before he died, to prove the reality of his com- 
 munion with the spirit world. The king hung up a bell in 
 the inside of a tube ; he would then place the accuser and 
 accused one on each side of it. They would touch the 
 tube by turns; and the ringing of the bell would designate 
 the guilty. But it chanced one day that a thief was 
 brought to judgment who had stolen a pearl ; and the bell 
 gave no sign; and the king accused the bell of bribery; 
 but he afterwards discovered that the cunning thief had 
 hidden the pearl in his walking staff, and handed his staff 
 to the accuser to hold, when he touched the tube. The in- 
 sulted instrument of justice resented the king's suspicion 
 of its virtue, and caused itself to be translated into heaven. 
 
 These foolish Oriental stories are full of meaning. The 
 Arabian Night's Entertainments are as much a mine of 
 mythological wealth as the Hebrew Scriptures themselves. 
 The proper names they use are significant of the oldest 
 ideas of our race. But many of our own proper names, 
 such as Charles and Thomas, James and John, Peter 
 and Paul, date from the very invention of the alphabet. 
 The first appearance of James and John is in an Egyptian 
 history, as the Jannes and Jambres who withstood Moses, 
 working miracles as wonderful, though not as powerful, as 
 his. I have referred to the connection of the name of John 
 
 * Wild's Legends (N. 5. 7. e.). The story of the Queen of Sheba, s. 
 18, 19, p. 8, shows how the Qfjfi was typified long before the worship of 
 Mary began. 
 
XI.] ON AEKITB SYMBOLISM. 335 
 
 with the Dove or ark. The name of James was as closely 
 and extensively connected with the Ambrose stones of the 
 Druids, and the Ambrosia, or baptismal water of the Greek 
 mythology.* The sinking Peter of the lake of Gennesareth 
 and the Peter on whom the church was to be built, was 
 emblematic of the submerged, restored, and re-established 
 mountain. f In adopting these ancient personal names 
 we propagate unconsciously the oldest known ideas of 
 civilized mankind, mixing, however, with them, and in 
 most respects overlaying and concealing them with the 
 more intellectual, but not less symbolistic, ideas of all the 
 ages that have intervened between the earliest and our 
 own. 
 
 All modern life is therefore impregnated with this 
 ancient element. It is like gold in quartz, found every- 
 where, on every hill-top, in every river-bar. One need but 
 have it said, it is here — to look — and find it. It moves on 
 the waters ; it springs from the ground in the names of 
 plants ; it floats over our heads in the names of birds. The 
 table, around which the family sodality institutes itself 
 and comes to consciousness, is an antique Arkism, although 
 it is the chief characteristic of modern civilization, for it is 
 the altar of love (al toe), the tabor of home life. The 
 S-tool,\ on which the mother sets her feet — the carpet on 
 which the children play, the rug at our fireplace on which 
 the cat is purring, are Arkite in their English names. The 
 carpet especially figures in all Oriental tales with a mysti- 
 cal meaning. We still use its classical name when we say 
 tapestry ; or, that a subject of discussion is on the tapis. 
 The cross-legged Turk upon his carpet, on his stone-floor, 
 is the Boodh, the Noah, the Yishnu in his Theb, upon the 
 waters. § 
 
 Why does the Coptic woman of Egypt, at the present 
 day, call the yeast with which she makes her bread myste- 
 riously swell up, and grow full of cells, by the sacred name 
 
 * H. 8. 1. r. 
 
 f I have said above already, that P was the Egyptian masculine article. 
 But the mythological symbolism must hold good, whether the etymology 
 offered in the text be accepted or not. 
 
 % Stol is the universal Sclavonic word for table ; showing not only the 
 contraction of tabor into tor, but that the s is a prefix or denominative 
 sign, and not a radical element of the word. 
 
 § TcnniQ, tapis, teppich (K. 13. 19.) 
 
336 ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 of T/^AB ? * She knows no more about it than a priest in 
 Germany does when he says taufen, to baptize, or we our- 
 selves when we say in English dip, and deep, and dive,f in 
 reference to water, or tip and top in reference to a moun- 
 tain. A schoolmaster's etymology is a stupid affair, a 
 handboard at the entrance of a cul-de-sac, or blind alley. 
 An aboriginal Bardic word is a divine thing, casting a broad 
 bar of light across the past, as the setting moon illuminates 
 Lake Leman to the eyes of the pensionnaires of La Tour de 
 Peilz when the Bize is blowing from the plains of Germany. 
 
 I have made no attempt this evening to prove the ety- 
 mologies with which I have plied your perhaps long since 
 fatigued attention. That would have been an intolerable 
 stupidity. In fact it could be done only by placing before the 
 eye a multitude of tables, lists of words in many languages 
 — not thrown together, pell-mell, in a heap, as is too often 
 the case with those great works of German linguists which 
 make the world stare and students despair, but arranged 
 with all the care and skill that a man of physical science 
 knows must be expended on a cabinet of modern history. 
 
 But I have wished and tried to give you some idea of, 
 or rather a g'enuine feeling for, the reality of the great in- 
 visible and antique world of Types, as it exists about us 
 also now — now in this ' Age of type ' as it has been called. 
 Our printers play with things that they call types, and little 
 do they think that every one of them was once fetich, a 
 symbol of the gods, shem-baal (^MCDttf), o-rj/^a ttjs flapibos, 
 the name of the Ark of Osiris. 
 
 I have tried to show you also how this world of types 
 possesses a life of its own, capable of indefinite expansion 
 and self-reproduction. We must always distinguish — and 
 hitherto it has not been sufficiently done — between the 
 worship of man's spirit and that of man's imagination ; 
 between the adoration of a God of love or vengeance, and 
 the curious fetichistic respect for some suggestive figure, 
 sound, or motion in nature. It astonishes the missionary 
 to see a pagan alternately supplicate and revile an idol. 
 It has puzzled the writers of the history of philosophy to 
 explain the origin of Yezideeism or devil-worship. But, 
 let us start fairly with some great event, impressing the 
 resident human population of the globe with awe, and we 
 * T. 28. 43. f T. 18. 42. 
 
XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 337 
 
 can comprehend how the following generations occupied 
 their uncultivated imaginations in separating the elements 
 of its story, and in showing their veneration, gratitude, or 
 terror, by inventing from all the vast materials of nature 
 around them a symbolism, which became religious, without 
 ever becoming simplified, without ever becoming stable. 
 We can comprehend how the ark of Noah would be wor- 
 shipped equally well under the form of the dove and of the 
 hawk ; under the form of a rocking- stone and of a Doric 
 capital ; under the form of a mandarin's button or a Venus' 
 shell ; under the form of a Parthenon upon an Acropolis, 
 and of a sepulchral chamber below the base of the pyramid 
 of Cheops. If we divest ourselves of our habitual ideas of 
 religion, got from the teachings of Christ, by which we 
 are born into the belief that worship and adoration are the 
 same thing, and are due to God alone, and without respect 
 of places, we can then put ourselves in the position 
 occupied by the aboriginal inhabitants of Switzerland, 
 living on their pile-built platforms, dreading nothing 
 so much as an inundation, and being without the dis- 
 tinct imagination of a providential and protecting deity. 
 Blind emotions, blind yearnings, blind fancies were theirs, 
 groping after definite thoughts, struggling helplessly for 
 liberation from the blackness of darkness. As at once 
 naturalists and physiologists, we can dissect those fossil 
 people ; and see in the casts of soul, which the mytholo- 
 gies of not much later days afford for our inspection, 
 incipient organisms, initial types, opening that series of 
 the intellectual and spiritual fauna of historic deposits, 
 which is the grand analogue to the geological column of 
 genera and species in the rocks. It is as certain, in my 
 opinion, that respect for the simplest forms of Arkite 
 symbolism, an unsesthetic, unmetaphysical, unmathemati- 
 cal, confused, dreamy, inconsistent veneration for what- 
 ever suggested to the eye the ideas of the ship, the 
 mountain, and the flood, — constituted the principal part of 
 the early religion of the race, — as it is certain that trilobites 
 and brachiopods monopolized the Silurian world. This 
 granted, the conversion of species becomes an easier 
 problem to solve in this domain of thought and feeling, 
 than in that animal world. 
 
 Arkism, like all other exhibitions of life in the universe, 
 
 22 
 
338 . ON AEKITB SYMBOLISM. [lECT. 
 
 carried in its own centre its own force of development. 
 It looked ; it began to reason ; it invented ; it began to 
 build. It readied towards the sun, and became Mithrism ; 
 towards the stars, and became Sabaism ; towards commerce, 
 and became architecture ; towards beauty, and became the 
 splendid idolatry of Greece. It had its branch of politics 
 in Celtic Druidism and the ritual of the great { high place/ 
 old Eome. It had its branch of mysticism in the gnostic 
 world of Asia. It has- its branch of humanity in the Monts 
 de Piete of modern Europe. 
 
 In a word, everything at the opening of the intellectual 
 history of man was cabalistic; and most things remain 
 cabalistic, in a mythologic sense, to the present day. 
 Nine-tenths of the people of the earth are still living in 
 the practice of cabalistic formulas ; and nine-tenths of the 
 religion of the remaining tenth is actually and demon- 
 strably cabala. The Free-mason reverences the gavel 
 without knowing, until he reaches his highest initiations,' 
 if he does then, that it represents the gibel or mountain 
 form, and is therefore cabalistic. The Chancellor of 
 England sits gravely on the awkward woolsack, without 
 knowing that wool is the cabalistic symbol of water, and 
 that he is Lord High Baron, because, like the bards and 
 barons of Druid times, his place is at the summit of the 
 bar or holy mountain. We all of us talk of monkeys 
 gibbering, and idiots muttering gibberish, and turkeys 
 gobbling, and school-girls gabbling, without a suspicion 
 that these words date from the times when the language of 
 the initiated was a mysterious, unintelligible cabala to the 
 common people. The Frenchman calls his horse a cheval 
 and the German calls his a gaul, without reference to the 
 fact that the motion of the animal was recognized to be 
 that of a ship on the waves, by those who first subjected 
 it to the saddle, and at the same time cabalistically in- 
 vented the fish-tail ed hippocamp to carry Neptune. And 
 the same scorn of the tonsure is expressed to-day which 
 prompted the boys to cry to Elisha, ' Go up, thou bald 
 pate ! ' with the same ignorance that the circlet of hairj 
 around the naked skull is the symbol of the Arkite water: 
 around the naked mountain-top ; and therefore the French! 
 word for hair is cheveux, capilli, i. e] the cabalistic sign of 
 initiation into the priesthood. 
 
XI.] ON AUKITE SYMBOLISM. 339 
 
 I cannot dismiss the subject without again reminding 
 you that I have confined myself to only one train of analo- 
 gies, that led off by the word TAB, TBE, or Thebes. I 
 might have made the same use of any of the variant forms 
 of Theb ; for instance, TOM ; * and shown you how it was 
 represented by our tomb, and dome, and all that class of 
 words; and their derivatives, the tabor and temple and 
 devil symbols. Or I might have taken for my guide the 
 word AE¥, which the Egyptians used to designate the 
 oval or cartouche in which they placed a royal name, from 
 which the Hebrews got their designation for the ark of the 
 covenant, and the Latins their word urna with its depend- 
 encies, as I have mentioned in my lecture upon archi- 
 tecture, f 
 
 Or I might have chosen the word BAR (or BAL) to be 
 the clue through our Arkite labyrinth (with its compounds 
 and contractions, kabar, caer, car, tabar, tower, tor, bark, 
 bar't, cabark, kirk, &c, &<c.) as the fullest and richest of 
 all, in traditional meaning. 
 
 I might have shown you how these symbols were com- 
 pounded to suit the needs which arose with schisms and 
 heresies of all kinds, as the times rolled on, and under 
 what strange disguises some of them have entered into the 
 languages which men now speak. 
 
 For instance, the heresy of Phallism, converting all the 
 older Arkite symbols into illustrations of its own philo- 
 sophical conceptions of the mystery of generation, gave to 
 the various parts and members of the human body those 
 names which constitute the special vocabulary of obscenity 
 at the present day. It is only by reference to other Arkite 
 symbols of the mountain-top — as standing above the waters 
 constituting itself the new starting-point for life upon the 
 planet — that we can solve that unsolved mystery of 
 mysticism, circumcision, for which the Hebrew scriptures 
 offers no explanation, and the practice of which has been 
 pursued for ages far outside the limits of the Levitical in- 
 fluence. But when the true key is given it is seen at once 
 to be a precisely identical phenomenon with the tonsure of 
 initiation, the tiara of the papacy, the ducal crown, the 
 
 * T. 6. 3. DomKirche, T. 17. 35. 
 
 f Bunsen, vol. i. p. 44. — Aaron, Mosss's brother. — "^l the tree of 
 which idols were made, Isa. xliv. 14. 
 
340 ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 university cap, and a thousand curious female head-dresses 
 scattered about the world. 
 
 Another curious region into which the study of this 
 subject may be pushed, with the certainty of good results, 
 is that of necromancy, rhabdomancy, geomancy, palmistry, 
 as they still exist and drive nourishing trades among the 
 ignorant and superstitious. It is easy to see that the 
 Ophism or serpent-worship of the ancients was merely a 
 one-sided Arkism, deifying the water symbols in an exag- 
 gerated degree.* It is equally easy to show that the 
 Yezidee, or devil-worship, was but a modification of 
 Ophism, and was represented in Arkism by the worship of 
 the Crocodile, and other amphibious or marine monsters, 
 by the legends of Tannim, and the Typhon, and by the 
 whole ceremonial of Sivaism, and was perpetuated in the 
 bat-winged devil of Etruria, Japan, and the modern 
 Miltonian orthodoxy. The half-philosophical discussion 
 of the evils flesh is heir to has produced Ahrimanism, 
 Manicheism, and Dualism in general, in all ages; but the 
 special symbolic of demon- worship or diabolism has, 
 nevertheless, always been essentially and plainly Arkite ; 
 as may be seen in the tales of the Genii, the Talmud, and 
 the Apocalypse of St John, as well as in the formulae of 
 the necromancers. f 
 
 One of the most interesting, if it be not in fact the most 
 important field of investigation for the theory which I have 
 developed in this lecture, is that remarkable system of re- 
 ligious faith and practice which occupies so large a part of 
 
 * See Dean Stanley's graphic description of the serpents in the tombs 
 of the Vale of Kings, back of Thebes. The further you penetrate swarm 
 jackal gods, monstrous genii, good and bad, the Goddess of Justice with 
 her feather, barges carrying mummies over the lake, and more than all, 
 everlasting convolutions of serpents, in every possible form and attitude, 
 human-legged, human-handed, crowned, entwining mummies, enwreathing 
 or embraced by processions extending down whole galleries, so that meet- 
 ing the head of the serpent at the top of the staircase you have to descend 
 to its very end before you reach his tail. (Sinai and Palestine, page 44. 
 See also Jour., Feb. 5, 1867.) One of the most curious instances of this 
 serpent-worship in Egypt is a picture of a serpent stretched at full length 
 upon a boat, reaching nearly from the stem to the stern, and holding in 
 its mouth, by the ring, the sign of life. It occupies the place due to 
 Osiris. — See Appendix to p. 340. 
 
 f On the mystical compounds of Bar, in the Proc. Amer. Philosoph. 
 Soc, July 14, 1865. 
 
xi.] on aekite symbolism:. 341 
 
 the continent of Asia, and is believed to be professed by 
 a large majority of the whole human race, I mean the 
 Buddhism of China and Thibet. This system when ex- 
 amined is seen to be Arkite in the highest degree. It is 
 no wild vagary of an excited fancy that allies two such ap- 
 parently irrelevant trains of thought as those suggested 
 by the hierarchy of the Grand Lama in his capital at 
 Llassa, and the Apocalyptic 'Lamb in the midst of the 
 throne " before whom the four-and-twenty elders and the 
 hosts of the New Jerusalem fell down and worshipped. 
 The very name of the most ancient capital of Arkism is 
 still retained as the name of the central province of its 
 latest and completest representation — TJiIEeT. We have 
 little need to go back to its ancient records, we may study 
 it here in all its details, developed to the highest pitch. 
 And from this as a vital centre we may trace its radiating 
 traditions and its proselyting ceremonials to the farthest 
 limits of the East, throughout Mongolia, China, and Japan, 
 amongst the Polynesian islands, to California, Mexico, 
 and Peru. Everything grows clear, — the pagoda and its 
 dragon — the Marai and its tabu — the shamanism of the 
 northern zone — the teocallis of the New World. 
 
 The Druidism of Europe, however, is only the western 
 representation of the Lamaism of the East, which con- 
 tinues to exist and develope its infinitely prolific germs 
 of variation and transmutation in the Greek and Roman 
 Churches of Christendom and in some of their Protestant 
 offshoots. It is evident that the Legends of the Saints 
 are to be rescued from contempt, and explained, only by 
 reference to the spirit of Arkism, which has thoroughly 
 and energetically inspired the Church of Christ ; inventing 
 perpetually new dresses for the old symbols, and recom- 
 mending them thereby to new classes of society, or to 
 new sections of the heathen world. A perfect harmony 
 can thus be established between the stories of the cloister 
 and the sagas and folkslore of the hearth; between the 
 mythical St Christopher and the equally mythical William 
 Tell* 
 
 * A Jesuit priest in the middle of the seventeenth century, published a 
 pamphlet in Berne showing that no such person as Tell ever existed. He 
 was driven from Switzerland for this offence. But the most laborious re- 
 searches in the convent libraries of Switzerland have failed to afford the 
 
342 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 And this brings us to an astounding prospect — if our 
 eyes be open. What is this new religion which is sweep- 
 ing over Catholic Christendom like a storm of sand, ob- 
 literating the old landmarks and sinking out of sight the 
 temples built to Christ ? This worship of the Virgin 
 Mary — what does it mean ? Half-educated preachers will 
 give a commonplace and vulgar explanation of it. But 
 they are schoolmasters, not savants. There must be some 
 deep-seated cause for such a phenomenon — it must have 
 its philosophical statement. Why does this new worship 
 flourish in France and Spain and not in Bavaria, Austria, 
 and Hungary ? — in the homes of the druidic Celts, but not 
 in the habitat of the Sclavonic and Germanic races ? 
 
 I answer : because this adoration of the Virgin Mary is 
 no new mystery, but the revival of an always existing and 
 most ancient system of religious ideas. The Virgin Mary, 
 Queen of Heaven, Mother of God, Mater dolorosa, of the 
 Bull of Pope Pius the Ninth, is identical with the Mary 
 mother of Jesus in nothing but in name. In all other re- 
 spects she is the Venus- Astarte-Isis of the old mythologies. 
 Nay, in name also, — for she is the /3apt or sacred ark of 
 Osiris itself. A thousand circumstaritial coincidences go 
 to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the ark was 
 regarded as a virgin mother of the Noah, the first and 
 greatest of the gods. In all nations, in all religions, the 
 myth of the man-child born of a virgin keeps alive this 
 tradition of the ark, and fresh humanity. She is wor- 
 shipped on the first of May, when the leaves grow' green 
 and the rose-buds swell and the birds'-nests fill with,-egg's! 
 In Eome she is the old Bgeria. In Spain they seat a young 
 girl dressed in white upon a throne and seek about her for 
 Maia, the ancient heathen tutelary deity of sailors. Upon 
 the Ehone the young girl still retains the name of Maia. 
 In England the Queen of May and the dance about the 
 pole are inseparable traditions. In Languedoc they sing 
 strange verses which will well repay grave study. On every 
 
 slightest evidence of the existence of Tell's family or person ; the list of 
 Austrian governors preserved at Vienna does not include the name of 
 Gesler ; the Scandinavians have a precisely similar legend; the history of 
 Switzerland shows that its independence was the work of the nobles and 
 not of the peasantry ; and the whole story of the apple, coupled with the 
 name of Tell, has a purely Arkite look. 
 
XI.] ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. 343 
 
 hill-top looking out upon the sea c Our lady of good suc- 
 cour ' has a shrine of pilgrimage for sailors safely come to 
 port, or for wives when tempests howl across the sea. No 
 one can stand upon the rocky summit of the Marie de la 
 Garde overlooking the ancient Phoc8ean seaport of Mar- 
 seilles, and watch the pilgrims toiliug up those steps worn 
 in the rock by millions upon millions of praying feet, with- 
 out a complete conviction taking possession of his soul 
 that this has been a shrine of prayer to some more ancient 
 Mary than her who suckled the infant Jesus only eighteen 
 hundred years ago. Nor will the traveller find this con- 
 viction lessen when he perceives that the most famous 
 images of the Virgin Mary, like those in the Crypt at 
 Chartres and the monastery at Einsiedlen, are black, and 
 very old — and that the local tradition assigns to them a 
 heathen or Druidic origin. We need not be shocked at 
 the coincidence of Jesus' mother bearing this aboriginal 
 Arkite name, for it had become by that time widely spread 
 as a proper name for women, not only among the Hebrews 
 but elsewhere. But when we meet with it in what seems 
 otherwise like fable, for instance, in the Maia Virgin 
 mother of the Hindu Crishna, and in Miriam the motherly 
 sister of Moses, we have a right to add it to our list of 
 ancillary Arkisms. 
 
 Still, all this opens up a grave subject for discussion, 
 and one which I desire to state in such a way as may least 
 offend weak consciences. The question is, how far this 
 Arkite superstition can be traced backwards in Christianity 
 towards its starting-point ? To what extent the pristine 
 Arkism of the more ancient world, appearing and reappear- 
 ing through preceding ages, Proteus-like, in many forms 
 of worship and systems of philosophy, appeared once more 
 in Christianity ? 
 
 Many an ardent disciple of Jesus Christ has come to feel 
 that there is something in the Gospels that he cannot com- 
 prehend, — a certain element of the traditional mixed in 
 with the great history of that Redemption. And that this 
 slumbering sentiment can be awaked in many hearts is 
 proved by the immense reception of such books as the 
 Ecce Homo, the Vie de Jesus, and the Characterbild Jesu, 
 within the last four years. Nor can the utmost pressure 
 of that pillow of Orthodoxy stifle this innocent Desdemona. 
 
344 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [ LECT - 
 
 We must know. We must invent some sieve to winnow 
 out the chaff — if chaff there be — from the all-precious wheat 
 of our dear faith, from which that bread is made of which 
 if a man eat he shall never die. These literalists that 
 thunder from our pulpits are stupid or crazy Grahamites, 
 pretending that the husks are needful for our weak di- 
 gestion. 
 
 Will such a theory as this which I have tried to formu- 
 late before you this evening — will this old Arkite system 
 of ideas serve us for a sieve ? I am afraid to specify 
 such items of the gospel history as the walking of Jesus 
 on the water, the sinking of Peter when he tried to do the 
 same, the appearance of Noah's dove at John's baptism of 
 Jesus, the curious triplicity of Peter, James, and John, and 
 the re-appearance of Jannes and Jambres in the names of 
 John and James ; the selection of Peter as the one on whom 
 the Church was to be built, &c, &c; because they seem 
 such integral parts of the history. But when we come to 
 the lesser writings of the years subsequent to the Master's 
 disappearance, I have no hesitation in calling such a story 
 as that of Peter's vision, recounted in the Acts, an Arkite 
 myth. Why should a sheet, filled with as various a multi- 
 tude of living things as that which the ark of Noah is said 
 to have contained, be let down out of heaven precisely upon 
 this apostle's head, and on no other, unless it were because 
 by name he typified the Ararat ? • Nor can I view in any 
 other light such an allusion as that which Jude makes to 
 the contention between Michael and the Devil for the body 
 of Moses which was buried by Jehovah on the top of 
 Pisgah. Still less hesitation can I feel in handling with 
 the freest criticism such an evident mythical rhapsody as 
 the Apocalypse, ascribed by the fathers to St John, — mag- 
 nificent and touching as it is, — full of sublime reinforce- 
 ments for the spirits of the persecuted saints, and of the 
 heartiest warnings and persuasions for us all to-day. 
 
 But how can the discoveries of truth hurt such a book ? 
 Nothing has so completely damaged its authority even with 
 the orthodox doctors of the Protestant Communions, as 
 the apparent impossibility of clearing up its meaning, or 
 of detecting the source of that element of the enthusiastic 
 and bizarre, which overshadows all its beauties and sublim- 
 ities to so many earnest Christian minds. Looked at, how- 
 
XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 345 
 
 ever, from the stand-point I have taken, this book assumes 
 a reasonable shape ; its fancifulnesses regulate themselves ; 
 there is meaning in its symbols ; they were comprehended 
 in the early centuries of the Christian era. If we have 
 lost these mystical traditions, we may recover them ; I 
 have tried to show you how. Look at that marvellous 
 picture with which the Apocalyptic writer opens the 
 twelfth chapter of his immortal drama : — ' And there ap- 
 peared a great wonder in heaven ; a woman clothed with 
 the sun, and the moon under her feet [as in the Virgin of 
 Murillo in the Louvre], and a crown of twelve stars upon 
 her head; and she being with child cried, travailing in 
 birth, and pained to be delivered. And there appeared 
 another wonder in heaven ; and behold a great red dragon 
 . . . stood before the woman ... to devour her child as 
 soon as it was born. And she brought forth a man child 
 . . . and her child was caught up unto God and to his 
 throne ; and the woman fled (with wings) into the wilder- 
 ness. . . . and Michael and his angels fought against the 
 dragon . . . and the serpent cast oat of his mouth a flood 
 of water after the woman that he might cause her to be 
 carried away of the flood ; and the earth helped the woman 
 and opened its mouth and swallowed up the flood . . ' 
 Let what interpretation you please be given to the body of 
 this complicated metaphor — let the woman be the Christian 
 Church, and the dragon the Roman government, and the 
 flood its persecuting violence, and the helping earth society 
 at large, with all its remedial influences and spiritual 
 necessities — I have nothing to urge against it. But I 
 maintain that the principal details of the dress in which 
 the metaphor flashed splendidly before the inspired writer, 
 and appeals for sympathy and admiration to ourselves, is a 
 dress borrowed from the universal Arkite sentiment of the 
 pre-Christian and pre- Judaic mythology, a sentiment which 
 still found ample opportunities for gratifying all its cher- 
 ished traditionary ideas in every kind of organization whether 
 of the heathen priesthoods or the Christian heresies. 
 
 Therefore it lives to-day. And precisely' by the secret 
 masonic order of the Jesuits devoted to the Papacy is it 
 reinaugurated and rehabilitated in this revival of the wor- 
 ship of the Queen of Heaven, the Mary of the Moon. 
 How far the wide-spread organization of Free-masonry 
 
346 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 conceals for its higher initiations, knights templars and 
 what not, the traditions of the ancient creed, I do not 
 know ; for I am not a mason. But this I am quite sure 
 of, that Free-masonry must offer to its initiated another field 
 for investigating living Arkism. Its gavel and trowel are 
 sacred symbols of the mountain; and its other insignia, 
 the square and the compasses, are equally easy to read in 
 the light of architectural mysticism. Its primeval grand- 
 master, Solomon, the Man of the Cell, called himself the 
 QELT (nbtip) or Cabalist.* Many branches of Free- 
 Masonry have been produced in the course of ages, known 
 by different names, and various in spirit, language, and 
 rites, according to the temper of the times, the blood of 
 the members, and the progress of ideas. But so far as 
 their interior history has ever been revealed, the revelation 
 has exposed the elements of Arkism as the stuff of which 
 originally their essence was composed. No phenomenon 
 connected with the existence of man has excited more 
 curiosity and speculation than the universal spread of not 
 only the spirit, but the language of Free-masonry around 
 the world. It can only be explained by reference to the 
 simplicity of its formularies, and their preservation from 
 the remotest antiquity, as modern representatives of pri- 
 meval Arkism. 
 
 And now if Arkism can do something like this service 
 for religion, what can it do for science ? If it does nothing 
 but sweep away the rubbish of geographical and historical 
 names which encumber the study of the habitats and 
 migrations of races it will have done much. If it does but 
 wipe off from the solid body of human zoological research 
 that cracked and dingy varnish of traditional philology, it 
 will give us a chance to see a picture which ethnology can 
 then describe. If it only teaches us one truth — that the 
 names of nations are not names of country or of race, but 
 names of worship — it will at all events prepare our way to 
 take up the whole subject of race afresh, unfettered by 
 prejudice, with no old Hebrew t Greek, and Latin scales 
 upon our eyes. 
 
 * QEL, sTlp, ticicXrjaia, kirk, church s as well as the verbs which cor- 
 respond to them, and from which they are commonly supposed to be 
 derived, viz. snp, tcaXeo), select, collect, &c, find their explanation in 
 
 the Arkite-Cabala. 
 
XI.] ON ARXITE SYMBOLISM. 347 
 
 This Arkism will do, I think. It will explain how the 
 priesthoods of the BAB,, the TAB, the TOE, the GEL, 
 bestowed these names not only on the symbols and idols 
 that they worshipped, but on all things and persons attach- 
 ed to those worships, on the priesthoods themselves, and 
 on the nations who adopted them. Thus were these sacred 
 epithets transferred from thing to thing, from man to man, 
 from place to place, from age to age, until one universal 
 Arkite nomenclature penetrated everywhere, preceding 
 and underlying others that came afterwards. There 
 could, therefore, be Tar- tars worshipping the Tor in 
 Siberia, and Berbers worshipping the Bar in the Sahara ; 
 Chaldees or Mithraic Celts in Armenia and Galatia, and 
 Culdees or Christian Celts in Scotland; Iberians in the 
 Caucasus as well as in Spain; Germani in Europe, Cara- 
 manians in Asia, Garamantes in Africa, all of them of dif- 
 ferent stocks, but worshipping in common the Cser of 
 Mannus ; Persia, and Prussia, and Paris, and the innu- 
 merable Bars and Berris in France and Italy, Britain and 
 Burgundy, and a thousand other derivatives of the original 
 worship of the Bar.* I take these names at haphazard, 
 not to assert anything respecting the true etymology of 
 any single one of them taken by itself, but simply to show 
 the kind of thought, the run of the argument, suggested 
 to us by the question : What can Arkism do for science ? 
 I feel sure, however, that the greater part of all geographi- 
 cal names carry traditions of religious foundations, emigra- 
 tions, feuds, heresies, and fresh developments of mystic 
 and philosophic thought. I am quite certain that such 
 much-disputed names as Celt and Scyth are essentially 
 religious and not political denominations : and the bearing 
 of all this on the science of ethnology I need not stop at 
 this late hour to expatiate upon.f 
 
 * The ship which one sees on the coat lappets of the government 
 officials in Paris was the ancient sign or totem of the place in Druid days. 
 The Isle de la Cite sacred to the worship of Notre Dame, was the shrine of 
 Isis, the baris or sacred bark of Osiris. The Celtic god was Hesus. 
 
 f Others are coming or have come to the same conclusion. I see in 
 an extract from the Ausland, one of the best periodicals of Germany, an 
 account of Dr Ludwig's paper on the aboriginal history of Mexico, trans- 
 lated by Dr Andree of Bremen, in which the learned author ' seeks to 
 establish new and interesting views of the migrations and names of the 
 Tulteks, Chichimeks, and Aztecs, which names he considers rather as 
 
348 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM.' [lECT. 
 
 A few more words and I have done.* ' So wide a general- 
 ization of facts from all departments of history in the 
 past, and human life in the present, centred upon so small 
 a group of facts as that which has been described above, 
 under the name of the Arkite symbol of the mountain, 
 ship, and water, will necessarily incur the charge of one- 
 sidedness. The theory will be said to attempt too much, 
 to run itself into the ground, to break down with its own 
 weight. It will find arrayed against itself other theories 
 of primeval history, laboriously invented by the best think- 
 ers of the last hundred years, each claiming to explain the 
 rise and development of human thought and culture, as 
 well as most of the anomalous and eccentric, fantastic and 
 absurd, misapplications of men's views of the super- 
 natural and of nature. Of no part of science is it a 
 truer saying than of this, that no theory can be true that 
 does not accept, ally, and illustrate, all that is true in all 
 other theories ; embodying their generalizations within its 
 own, and differing from them only in the superior expan- 
 siveness of its field of vision. Modern geology is neither 
 Huttonism nor Wernerism, but an eclectic combination of 
 both. Sociology, as now best taught, recognizes the just- 
 ness of every form of government in its natural place. 
 The science of physics is a compound precipitate from the 
 relation of the most prosy parts of materialistic natural 
 history, and the finest transcendental or metaphysical 
 notions respecting essence, and the mysterious forces of 
 the entire universe. Even theology is being stimulated 
 from its sleep of ages by stimulants administered by un- 
 believing savans. Isolation is no longer possible for the 
 investigator ; and his theories must be in good society, or 
 be tabooed. 
 
 Archseology has been based exclusively on Astrology 
 by some of its best writers. Undoubtedly there is a 
 department of astronomical archaeology; and the genius 
 
 political denominations (like nobility, people, priests), than as designa- 
 tions of distinct nationalities. . . . The Aztecs Mr L. considers as a 
 caste of priests,' &c. Confined as snch an opinion is to a verysmall 
 locality, it makes a sensible addition to a broader statement which is 
 intended to cover the entire world. 
 
 * The following paragraphs are reproduced from the notice before 
 quoted, in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, July, 
 1865. 
 
XI.] ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. 349 
 
 and learning displayed in such a masterpiece as Dupuis' 
 great work were far from being thrown away. On the 
 contrary,, it is as much a cabinet of new-discovered facts 
 and truths, as Boucher des Perthes' Celtic Remains, or 
 Tyndall's Lectures on Heat. But it does not follow from 
 all the wonderful coincidences between mythologies and 
 the phenomena of the sky, that the aboriginal mythology 
 was astronomical. Man's eyes were early dazzled by the 
 light of the sun, and his heart melted by the beauty of the 
 moon ; but an earlier worship may have existed for his 
 soul, and centuries of intellectual development may have 
 been needed before the order of the stars could take so 
 strong a hold upon his imagination, as to subjugate his 
 reverence, and systematize his hopes and fears into the 
 Mithraic and Sabasan forms. Some wider synthesis must 
 include Dupuis. The very nomenclature of sun and planet 
 worship requires an older worship for its explanation ; so 
 does its architecture; so does its symbolism. The ring, 
 the bird's tail, the carpet of Mithras, in conjunction, find 
 no account of themselves in astronomy. Fire-vforship was 
 evidently adopted and carried in arms by an older moun- 
 tain-worship. If the great triliths of Stonehenge have 
 their tops cut down to the plane of the ecliptic, the central 
 sacrificial stone, sloped for the draining off of human 
 blood, is a structure suggestive of quite a different system 
 — that of the Arkite loggan and ambrose stones of the 
 whole Druid world. Supposing Turner's views respecting 
 the great pyramid to have been made mathematically cer- 
 tain by the memoir of the Astronomer-Royal of Scotland, 
 Turner himself insists that the great pyramid differs from 
 all other pyramids, in Egypt and elsewhere, in this very 
 fact, that it alone is astronomical ; the rest must give some 
 other account of themselves. Arkism embraces and ex- 
 plains astronomical archaeology, but the latter cannot 
 explain the former. 
 
 Then there is the Phallic system of Kanne, and all 
 the learned writers of that school. A theory of antiquity 
 not to be despised — a grand summary of indubitable facts 
 — it has a philosophical basis to stand upon. It has im- 
 mense resources in philology. It is written with the freest 
 and coarsest hand on the monuments of east and west. It 
 explains, and is explained by, the experiences of monastic 
 
350 ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 life. It appeals for justification, in fact, to the strongest 
 of all the energies of nature, both physical and spiritual, 
 when it affirms that the first astonishment man felt was at 
 himself when he began to cohabit with woman ; and the 
 second, at the birth of his first child ; that thus all worship 
 sprang from love, and all its symbols from the organs of 
 reproduction ; replaced afterwards by such objects of nature 
 as mountains, caverns, and seas, for grandeur's sake. If, 
 however, the nomenclature, the architecture, and the 
 ritual of Phallism can be shown to have had an anterior 
 existence, unmodified by the gross sentiments of animal 
 love, and to be explainable on a hypothesis, .not personal 
 to the individual man, but common to mankind, then the 
 Phallic theory, like the astronomical, must take a secondary 
 rank, and be accepted only for what it is worth within its 
 just limits ; while its formal origin and outer development 
 will be referable to that older and more general Arkism, 
 whose language it had adopted, whose symbols it had 
 modified, whose truths it had degraded, whose pure and 
 simple worship it had debased and defiled, but still con- 
 tinued to illustrate. 
 
 The Ophite theory is considered, by the authors of 
 such books as the" Serpent Symbol," all sufficient to account 
 for the prehistoric religious history of man. This seems to 
 be a most presumptuous supposition. The theory has to 
 do with no grand event in history, which might be sup- 
 posed to have made an indelible impression upon the life 
 of mankind ; nor with any general idea of the sublime or 
 terrible, germain to worship ; nor to any master sentiment 
 of the human heart, — for fear is not so strong as love, nor 
 so instructive as curiosity, nor so inventive as taste. The 
 theory involves a mere classification of one kind of archae- 
 ological facts, requiring the simplest treatment, and barren 
 of all results but one, namely, a certain addition to the 
 mass of evidence, otherwise collected, that some myste- 
 rious Arkite intercourse has had existence between all the 
 known races of the world. Beyond this, Ophism has no 
 story to tell ; and instead of elucidating antiquity, adds to 
 its confused obscurity. But Ophism is one of the great 
 facts of history, notwithstanding; and enters not only 
 largely but naturally into the composition of the Arkite 
 theory, which fully unfolds it, suggesting for its existence 
 
XI.] ON AEEITE SYMBOLISM. 351 
 
 a new and satisfactory cause, and explaining all its forms 
 and variations perfectly. 
 
 Then there is the great archaeological problem of Devil- 
 worship, for so many portions of mankind, the terrors 
 of shamanism, the darker or fearful side of fetichism, 
 all so nearly allied to serpent-worship, and all so nearly 
 explainable by reference merely to the limitations of 
 human will and human happiness, but none of them quite 
 so. What shall be done with the unexplained residuum ? 
 Archaeology claims it; but which archaeological theory 
 shall take charge of it ? Certainly none of these theories 
 of departments, departmental theories, — we need the new 
 name, — already alluded to. No. To learn the language 
 of Fear-worship, we must go back to the very beginning ; 
 to some age of weakness, calamity, and fright ; to some 
 irruption of wild beasts, or conflagration, or deluge ; to 
 some event so overwhelming that it could impress no less 
 than all mankind, for a time no less than all the ages, the 
 memory of which would be a simple figure of destruction 
 and salvation combined, the symbol of which would be the 
 intertwined names of God and the Devil. In the moun- 
 tain and the ship, which rescued mankind from destruction 
 in that event, we have the explanation of the origin of all 
 Phallism and Egg- worship. In the waters which came so 
 near destroying him, we have the explanation of the origin 
 of all Ophism and Devil-worship. Both were made ornate 
 in the tasteful idolatry of Greece, scientific on the clear- 
 eyed mountain-land of Persia, and spiritual among the 
 justice-loving seers of Palestine. Before Arkism, of 
 course, was universal fetichism, like a great chaos, without 
 law, or any method of self-expression ; and after Arkism 
 came all forms of thought and feeling possible for man to 
 invent, but all budding from this Yggdrasil, and bearing 
 flowers and fruit after the pattern of its undying life. 
 
 It is not, therefore, in violation of the great canon of 
 modern science, but in obedience to it, that the Arkite 
 theory sets up its claims to universality. 
 
 What the great event was which so -impressed the 
 worshipful mind of the human race, or whether the chronic 
 relationships of mankind in the earlier stages of their ex- 
 istence to mountains, or firm land in general, to boats, 
 rafts, or stationary crannoges, and to all waters in general, 
 
352 ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 
 
 may not compensate for the doubt which physical science 
 cannot help throwing over the story of a Noachian deluge, 
 — it will be hard to demonstrate. Geological investigation 
 has as yet discovered no traces of a real event, such as is 
 described in Mosaic and other records of the barbarous 
 ages of the world. That science, however, has long taught 
 the alternate submergence and emergen ce of dry land; 
 and all its latest teachings are of the extreme antiquity of 
 human life upon the earth, and of man's contemporaneous 
 existence with other now extinct animals, during a glacial' 
 epoch, involving probably great floods, and opening into 
 the comparatively modern age at the beginning of which 
 men lived upon the waters, instead of on the land. The 
 Arkite theory has nothing to say on these matters. It 
 starts from a given point, the already established worship 
 of the mountain, ship, and flood, without explaining how 
 this worship was begotten ; only denying that it was de- 
 veloped intellectually out of Fetichism, Ophism, Mithraism, 
 Phallism, or any other known mythology ; and affirming, 
 on the contrary, that it explains and embraces them/ 
 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 Appendix to page 12. 
 
 CLASSIFICATION OE THE SCIENCES. 
 
 I. General Sciences : — 
 
 1. Philosophy. 2. Bibliography. 
 II. Mathematical Sciences : — 
 
 1. Mathematics. 2. Astronomy. 3. Meteorology. 4. Geodesy. 
 5. Geography. 6. Physics, leading to the 
 
 III. Inorganic Sciences : — 
 
 1. Chemistry. 2. Mineralogy. 3. Metallurgy. 4. Geology. 
 5. Palaeontology, leading to the 
 
 IV. Organic Sciences : — 
 
 1. Biology. 2. Botany. 3. Zoology. 4. Medicine, leading 
 to the group of the 
 Y. Historical Sciences: — 
 
 1. Chronology. 2. Mythology. 3. Archaeology. 4. Ethnology. 
 5. History, leading to the 
 
 VI. Social Sciences : — 
 
 1. Sociology or Statistics. 2. Manufacture, o. Commerce. 
 4. Defence. 5. Equity, leading to the 
 
 VII. Intellectual Sciences : — 
 
 1. Language. 2. Belles Lettres. 3. Eine Arts. 4. Meta- 
 physics. 5. Education. 6. Philanthropy. 7. Worship. 
 VIII. Personal Science : — 
 1. Biography. 
 
 Appendix to page 34. 
 
 Star. It is remarkable, however, that the star so persistently -worship- 
 ped by men kneeling in little dishes, on the columns of the XIX. Dynasty 
 temple at Abydos, is always five-pointed, and made by the meeting, not 
 of five triangles at their bases, but of five plain bars or spokes ; and that 
 
 23 
 
354 APPENDIX. 
 
 the top one is always upright, while the two lower ones form two straddling 
 legs. The remaining two are in their places so as to divide the circle into 
 five equal segments. But there are instances on the monuments where 
 these last two arms form a continuous bar across the apex of the two legs ; 
 and then the symbol approximates the form of the sign of life. See Ap- 
 pendix to page 236, below. 
 
 Appendix to the last paragraph on page 120. 
 
 The latest important discovery bearing upon the theoretical relation- 
 ship of man to the quadrumana has been made by M. Edouard Dupont, 
 to whom the Belgian Government has confided the task of continuing the 
 researches of Dr Schmerling in the cave and soil deposits of the Meuse. 
 M. Dupont had examined (up to August of 1866) twenty-four caverns 
 situated on the banks of the Lesse, an affluent of the Meuse, in the 
 neighbourhood of Dinant. 
 
 The quaternary deposits of this region are thus classified : — 
 
 1. Siliceous (90 per cent, silex) greyish-yellow brick-clay; 'loess/ 
 
 2. Yellow clay with angular pieces of local rocks ; ' block clay ; ' at the 
 base of which are found remains of reindeer. 
 
 3. Sand, with subdivisions of gravel, containing human remains (the 
 oldest found as yet), and supporting a stratum of sandy clay, with cal- 
 careous concretions ; ' lehm.' 
 
 4. Rolled stones, with intercalated lens-shaped layers of sand. Then 
 follows floor of rock, of various geological antiquity, which has furnished 
 the angular pieces of the block clay. 
 
 Of these four quaternary deposits, No. 3 has repaid the researches of 
 M. Dupont with a very remarkable human jaw, which he exhibited at the 
 International Palseontological Congress at Neufchatel in August of 1866, 
 and was described by him as having been found in a cavern called the 
 Trou de la Naulette, in the left bank of the Lesse, 80 feet above the 
 river bed, — in the back part of the cave, under a covering of ten alternate 
 layers of stalagmite and clay, — in a layer of sand, and in company with a 
 cubitus of an individual of small stature, a fragment of bone pierced by 
 the hand of man, and numerous bones of animals : marmot, mammoth, 
 rhinoceros, reindeer, chamois, &c. 
 
 The alternate layers of sand and clay and stalagmite, which form the 
 floor of the cave, belong to formation No. 3. The block clay formation 
 No. 2, which, outside the cave, upon a natural terrace in front of its 
 mouth, is 10 feet thick, thins so rapidly inwards, that not a trace of it is 
 to be found four paces from the mouth. This block clay yields here bones 
 of the horse, reindeer, &c. 
 
 The Naulette jaw has a very remarkable shape. All the teeth, the 
 vertical branches, and the hind part of the right horizontal branch, as far 
 as to the second pre-molar, are wanting, the residue is in excellent pre- 
 servation, even to the walls of the alveoles. Looked at in front, this jaw 
 does not possess those little well-pronounced details, which commonly 
 mark the insertions of the muscles. The whole is smooth and rounded. 
 The chin region itself is vertical, or rather retires upward, without, how- 
 ever, making it certain that the chin was prominent. Moreover, the 
 
APPENDIX. 355 
 
 horizontal branches, as well as the chin, have an exceptional thickness, 
 that is, relatively to the feeble elevation of these branches, so that it seems 
 as if there were a kind of balance between the thickness and the height 
 of the bone. 
 
 Looked at from behind, it offers such a proclivity from behind forwards 
 of the parts about the symphysis, that one is obliged to remark a prog- 
 nathism entirely animal. The apophyses are not indicated, the lateral 
 fossae are well pronounced, and the rim of the chin is reduced to its 
 minimum. 
 
 Seen from above, this jaw confirms, by the disposition of the sockets, 
 the impression produced by its prognathism ; the sockets of the eye-teeth, 
 although very close to the sockets of the incisors and the molars, remind 
 us of the disposition of the teeth in the jaw of the monkey. In effect, 
 the socket of the eye-tooth is very vast, and bulges on the external face. 
 But what seems still more strange is, that the three sockets of the great 
 molars absolutely present the typical order of the monkey jaw, the third 
 socket being greater than the second, and the second than the first. The 
 socket of the wisdom-tooth shows the print of five roots; finally, the 
 socket of the second pre-molar has an oblique direction. 
 
 It is impossible to mistake (as Professor Vogt remarked after the read- 
 ing of the memoir) the singular importance attaching to this relic of the 
 human frame. Judging by the connection of the teeth, the jaw is 
 entirely human ; there does not exist the least interruption of continuity, 
 not the smallest space between the eye-teeth and the molars and 
 incisors. But, on the other hand, the fact that the molars augment in 
 size backward instead of forward is a most curious feature. In the 
 human jaw the first molar' is the largest, and the wisdom-tooth the 
 smallest and often entirely wanting. The absence of the apophyses 
 (geni) is also very strange. As for the chin itself, it is intermediate in 
 type between that of the man and that of the monkey, being vertical ; 
 whereas that of man advances, while that of the monkey retreats, or is 
 completely effaced. 
 
 Besides this remarkable jaw from the third quaternary deposit of the 
 age of the mammoth, Monsieur Dupont presented at the same time a 
 second human jaw, very different from the first, possessing none of its 
 peculiarities, and of a much later age, although still of high antiquity, for 
 it was imbedded in the deposit No. 2, that of the reindeer age. It was 
 found in one of the grottoes of Furfoos, called the Trou du Frontal, the 
 galleries of which have served for a graveyard, and contained when 
 examined a quantity of human bones, related to 13 skeletons, disseminated 
 irregularly through the stalagmite and coarse mud. Near these bones 
 were found twenty flint knives, many fossil shells, pierced for suspension 
 as an ornament, and a hand-made urn of very rude pottery. A great slab 
 of dolomite was found buried in the clay near the mouth of the grotto, 
 and no doubt once served as a door. The block clay just inside the open 
 mouth of the grotto, and in front of this door, contained fractured bones 
 of reindeer, brown bear, chamois, beaver, horse, &c, mixed with thousands 
 of flint chips. Broken for their marrow, these bones all bore the trace of 
 fire. Among these animals thus used for food, were foxes, horses, and 
 water-rats in abundance. The human bones inside the cave exhibited no 
 mark of fire or of fracture. 
 
356 APPENDIX. 
 
 This cave of the age of the reindeer is a case, therefore, of the same 
 kind with that of the grotto of Aurignac, which is however immensely 
 older, belonging as it does to the age of the great cave bear. 
 
 Monsieur Dupont has found the succeeding age of polished stones also 
 represented in one only of these caves (Pont a Lesse). No reindeer 
 remains are seen here. The men of the later epoch fed upon the wild 
 boar, the goat, the stag, and the water-rat ; but not upon the horse. The 
 presence of some human bones belonging to a youth, mixed in with those 
 of animals used for food, would lead to the suspicion of cannibalism, were 
 it not that these human bones were neither broken intentionally nor 
 marked with fire. 
 
 In one other cave, however (Trou des Nutons de Gendron). and in a 
 layer of earth above formation No. 2 above, he found the bones belonging 
 to 17 skeletons, all of them broken, but so arranged that the fragments 
 of head, then those of the trunk and arms, then those of the legs, were 
 met with successively in a space of seven feet. He then found a second, 
 a third, and then a fourth range of three incomplete skeletons. The first 
 range contained only two. After the fourth a little skeleton was placed 
 transversely. Then the longitudinal arrangement was resumed with two 
 skeletons, the heads towards the mouth of the cave. Then came another 
 little transverse skeleton. Finally, two more longitudinal skeletons. At 
 the entrance was found a little flint flake and three pieces of coarse 
 pottery. 
 
 Appendix to page 136. 
 
 The distinguished secretary of the Royal Geographical Society con- 
 siders it an historical fact that the great movements of the Tartar race in 
 the 12th century, under Togrul Beg Genghis Khan and other chiefs, 
 keeping Asia in disturbance for several generations, among other results 
 had the effect of pressing upon the Siberian aborigines belonging to the 
 Circumpolar race, forcing them to migrate beyond Behring Straits as far 
 as the western coast of Greenland, at that time occupied by 300 farms and 
 villages of northmen, who had settled there under Eric the Red, at the 
 end of the 10th century, all of whom these invading Esquimaux destroyed. 
 He depends for his theory, that these Norsemen were not pirates but 
 settlers in Greenland, upon the proof afforded by Runic inscriptions, and 
 the existence of stone-dwellings and churches in ruins, furnished with 
 large bells, and almost magnificent enough to be styled cathedrals. An 
 east and west belt across Siberia and North America of ruined stone- 
 dwellings, in which are found bones of animals cut with flint instruments, 
 &c, he thinks were the successive halting-places of the great Siberian mi- 
 gration, Mr Markham says that the appearance of the hostile strangers in 
 Greenland took place suddenly in the middle of the 14th century, with- 
 out boats ; and therefore it must have come from the north by land and not 
 across from Labrador, where Esquimaux are known to have been settled 
 in the 10th century. The ruined Yourts still found on Cape Chelagskoi, 
 in northern Siberia, mark the commencement of the long march, which 
 must have been accomplished by following some unknown polar lands, 
 such as those high mountain-lands reported to Admiral Wrangell north 
 
APPENDIX. 357 
 
 of Cape Chelagskoi, and seen by Admiral Kellett N. and N.W. of Behring 
 Straits. (Proc. R. G. Soc. ix. p. 88.) Mr Lubbock, president of the 
 Ethnological Society and a higher authority in such matters, opposes Mr 
 Markham's views, with a theory more in accordance with all the known 
 facts. He considers the Lapland or Siberian race as the aboriginal race 
 of Europe, driven northward by the Celts and Teutons ; as the American- 
 Siberians or Esquimaux seem to have been driven northward by the more 
 powerful Red Indian. He does not credit the assertion that' Greenland 
 was empty at the coming of the Norsemen ; nor that miserable Skrcelling 
 immigrants could drive off Icelanders ; nor did he think, with Kane, that 
 the Arctic highlanders were a race in process of extinction (p. 102). Mr 
 Crawfurd doubts the whole history of the Norse settlements of the 9th 
 century, and ascribes the Runic inscriptions to the occasional visits of 
 pirates, but he could not explain the bells ; he considered Greenland 
 always inhabited by Esquimaux, and that these were not of Asiatic origin 
 (pp. 102, 103). _ 
 
 Mr Owen beljeves that the study of the Esquimaux will give us our 
 best ideas of the life of the aboriginal inhabitants — the cave-dwellers— of 
 Europe (p. 100). 
 
 The Esquimaux at the mouth of Mackenzie river and round fort Ander- 
 son or Anderson river, sleep naked between deer-skins, and prefer cooked 
 food, although they occasionally eat raw meat and frequently raw fish. 
 Before leaving the river (Nov. 30) for their winter homes on the coast 
 east of the Anderson inlet, many of them make large caches of deer-meat 
 secured in the ice upon the river, against their return in April ; the ani- 
 mals beginning to go north in May. When the ice goes off the men hunt 
 reindeer on the slopes and summits of the river-bank and float the car- 
 case (buoyed by an arrow) down to the fort. Later they spear the rein- 
 deer as they cross the river; one expert canoe-man will spear 50 at a 
 time. These Esquimaux are peaceable and fast improving; they buy 
 guns and ammunition, are excessively fond of tobacco, and use kettles, 
 steel-traps, wolverines, knives, files, blankets, the flint and steel now in- 
 stead of the fire-producer. They also work well in parties with the Hud- 
 son Bay Indians farther south. Their game consists of five kinds of fox, 
 two bears, a few beavers, very few lynx, musks, martens, musquash, 
 wolves, swan, and a few musk oxen, which last are pretty numerous S.E. 
 of them. (Mc Farlane, to the R. Geog. Soc, March, 1865, p. 130.) 
 
 The Esquimaux of the Labrador coast in 1864 (discovered by Cabot in 
 1497) consisted only of 200 individuals chiefly living near Esquimaux Bay, 
 or Hamilton Inlet. There are 1600 British colonists. In the interior there 
 are ' mountaineers,' a branch of the Creek Indians ( ? ), scattered tribes. 
 At the August fair, on Esquimaux Bay, you may see the birch canoe and 
 seal-skin boat side by side. The Esquimaux are more cleanly than the 
 British settler, live in nice houses, with well-stocked English cottage- 
 looking dressers, and little ornaments ; they wear the English dress, and 
 are invariably Protestants. In 1864, 60 Hudson Bay Bed Indians 
 crossed the Straits of Belleisle and anxiously asked if Micmacs were there, 
 saying that they were bad Indians, and that their own hunting-grounds 
 were exhausted, and 300 of their tribe would like to settle in Newfound- 
 land. Their fear of Micmacs was hereditary, because their Bed ancestry 
 had been exterminated by the inferior Micmacs when the English settlers 
 
358 APPENDIX. 
 
 gave the latter guns. Micmacs and mountaineers are invariably Catholics. 
 (Cap. Hamilton, Proc. R, G. Soc, March, 1865, p. 133.) 
 
 Mr O'Callaghan (in the Proc, Geo. and Pol. Soc, W. R. of Yorkshire, 
 1863-4, p. 312) says that the ancient Britons, previous to or during the 
 Stone period, buried their fat and butter in wooden vessels in bogs. ' The 
 peat-moss seems to have been used as a cellar or larder before the dis^ 
 covery of the curative property of salt, or even of its existence in this 
 country ; for the Greek historians tell us that salt was one of the imported 
 articles used in barter for the native metals*' ' Butter, cheese, and tallow 
 are frequently found sunk deep in Irish bogs, sometimes in large masses, 
 converted into a sort of stearine, although generally every particle of the 
 wooden vessel which contained the substance has utterly disappeared.' 
 Wilson, quoting Train for a ball of fat or bannock of tallow, weighing 
 127 lbs.., found in a peat-moss, says that it indicated the spot where some 
 large animal had perished (Prehistoric Annals of Scot., p. 31), This is 
 absurd enough. 
 
 Appendix to page 171. 
 
 JBarzil, Hebrew name for iron. Selas, a stone, is probably the second 
 syllable. The first syllable occurs in the name of the mythological 
 inventor of metallurgy, Tubalcain. The Tu of this name is a prefix, as 
 we see from its Roman form, Vulcan. The Cain is equally a separate 
 syllable from the Bal (Bar) as we see from its separate existence in other 
 proper names, as Cain, the son of Adam, Cainan the grandson of Noah, 
 &c. It is undoubtedly the Hebrew word CEN, cohen, a priest. Cain 
 offered the first bloody sacrifice of fire upon an altar, according to the 
 Hebrew tradition. Vulcan means, then, priest of the Bal (Bar) ; and 
 Tubalcain, priest of the Tabal (Tabor) ; the Greeks reversed the order of 
 the syllables and said Centaur. Every epithet connected with this 
 important manufacture reveals some Arkism. The hammer is a cabar or 
 cabalistic thing, sacred to the mountain, tor, the god Thor. It was 
 carried by all the deities of Etruria. The anvil is an om-bar, the very 
 form of which reproduces the ship-mountain symbol. The Greek name 
 for iron, sideron, means 'that which belongs to the sacred tor' (s-tor-n). 
 Ferrum, in Latin, is the reverse of Om-bar ; or is simply bar, with a 
 neuter noun-sign like the final ma of Greek substantives. 
 
 One of the most curious circumstances connected with the discoveries 
 of the bronze age, is a fact made plain by the researches of Dr F. Wibel. 
 (Die Cultur der Bronzezeit, Kiel, 1865, p. 24, quoted in Die Pfahlbauten 
 des Neuenbergen Sees von E. Desor. Erankfurt am Main, 1866, page 
 75.) The art of tempering bronze seems to have been known to the pre- 
 historic smiths. Bronze to be malleable (cold) must not contain more 
 than 5 per cent, tin ; but hot, it is malleable with 15 per cent. Bronze, 
 to be malleable with a still higher per centage of tin, must be suddenly 
 cooled, according to the process of d'Arcet. It then receives a mallea- 
 bility which is not proper to it, and cannot be given to it by slow 
 tempering. Now, as they have found in the lake dwellings some articles 
 of bronze, containing ten per cent, of tin and more, and yet hammered 
 
 
append rx. 359 
 
 into shape, it follows that the tempering of bronze must be almost as old 
 as bronze itself. It is surprising, then, that the people of the Iron age 
 were not in this way led to the discovery of steel, which, however, just 
 the reverse of bronze, is hardened by plunging, and softened by slow 
 cooling. 
 
 M. Mariette informs me that the arms of the 11th Dynasty, mentioned 
 in his Apercu, were not of metal. The swords are made of hard, dark, 
 Nubian wood ; the arrow-heads and spear-points, of fish-bones. No copper 
 or bronze armour of so early a date has been discovered. Gold ornaments 
 however have been. Iron must have been known to the early Egyptians ; 
 for their mythology contained a fable, that Osiris was slain by Typhon 
 with an instrument of iron, and that the rust of iron was the blood of the 
 murdered god. M. Mariette thinks that this superstition formed the 
 obstacle to the employment of that metal by the old Egyptians ; but it 
 seems to me that there must have been something hostile to the use of iron 
 anteceding the superstition and suggesting the myth. Traces of primeval 
 men are beginning to be found in and about Egypt. Caves in the Penin- 
 sula of Sinai have yielded flint (or stone) arrow-heads, but have not yet 
 been searched for bones. Other similar relics of the Stone age are spoken 
 of between the first and second cataracts, in connection with recent species 
 of fossils in the post-tertiary clay banks ; as, for example, at the Armenian 
 convent opposite the island of Philae. 
 
 Appendix to Lecture VIII. 
 
 In Ireland, Minemon, 700 B.C., was the first Irish king who decorated 
 the necks of his nobles with gold torques, and permitted them to wear 
 armlets and bracelets also. But a century earlier (784 B.C.) Tigernach, 
 the 26th king of Ireland, first worked its gold mines and caused one 
 Theodore of "Weeklow to make golden clothes-pins for the neck instead 
 of the bone and wooden skewers which his subjects wore. Pins, brooches, 
 collars of gold are amongst the most ancient articles of gold and silver, 
 and from their number we must judge that gold was most abundant in 
 Britain in ancient times. Stream gold and nuggets always attract the 
 savage eye, and are at once convertible to ornamental use. Some of the 
 Irish plates and bars of gold seem to have been beaten out with a stone 
 hammer, and are so rude that they must date back to the earliest an- 
 tiquity. (O'Callaghan, Proc. Soc, York, 1863-4, p. 317.) 
 
 There is an iron age, but no age of gold. All ages have been ages of 
 gold. But in the beginning the savages had advantages in finding it, 
 which their feeling for art was not advanced enough to allow of their 
 turning to a proper use. The iron age is, after all, the age of gold. But 
 each nation has a history which places the use of gold before the perfect 
 use of iron. It is true that iron is destructible, and gold lasts for ever. 
 But this fact is one which bears on the antecedent use of iron, for it makes 
 gold lie in abundance upon the surface of the ground, while it covers iron 
 up in rust and dirt beneath the soil. The earliest money therefore must 
 have been of gold, and money took the earliest stamp of the fine arts. 
 Then golden plates were spread on royal breasts, and grew to be whole 
 panoplies. This was before the Trojan war. 
 
360 • APPENDIX. 
 
 There stands an ancient barrow in the corner of a field at Mould in 
 Flintshire, called the ' Hill of the Fairies/ and it is much dreaded by the 
 peasantry, especially by night. ^ One chilly evening in the autumn of 1833 
 an old woman of that neighbourhood was forced by circumstances to pass 
 this awful mound, and what was her horror to behold a spectral figure 
 slowly pacing to and fro upon its top, clothed in a golden coat, which 
 shone upon her like the setting sun. She told the tale, of course, and 
 great was the commotion all along that country-side. The owner of the 
 land determined to remove the terrible barrow altogether. At first the 
 excavations only turned up rude urns of unbaked pottery, containing 
 burnt bones. But at the bottom, what was the astonishment and delight- 
 ful horror of the ghost-believers to come upon a human skeleton wrapped 
 round the chest with a corslet of the purest gold, embossed with an orna- 
 mentation of superior design and workmanship ! The precious relic was 
 at once broken up and sold, but the pieces were afterwards recovered 
 from the purchasers, and the corslet may now again be seen, nearly com- 
 plete, in the British Museum. (O'Callaghan, p. 318.) 
 
 The gold ring-money of the Druids is probably the most ancient use to 
 which that metal was placed. But the term money here seems to be 
 inappropriate. These rings are supposed, for many good reasons, to have 
 been sacred utensils, used for swearing troth and fealty on, and used in 
 courts of justice as the Bible is now. 
 
 Yet the ring was probably used in commerce by the Phoenicians, and 
 is said to be the shape of money now in Africa. Mr Evans has shown 
 that the concave coins, called ' dish money/ and other types, were in use 
 in Britain and the Channel Islands long before the Roman occupation. 
 
 The weapons and tools of the Assyrians and Egyptians were of gold 
 or copper, if we may judge by the yellow colour used in painting them. 
 Bronze weapons found in sepulchres show how that alloy was in use 
 among them. Berzelius believed that Cornwall must have been the sole 
 depot of tin known to the ancient civilized nations in the west. Coins of 
 the Ptolemies and other Egyptian relics have been dug up in Cornwall ; 
 for instance, two bronze bulls, in a deep cut, in the town of Penryn, in 
 1850, intended for Apis, and in 1853 a bifrontal bust of Isis, in a ditch in 
 Exeter. One or two places still bear Phoenician names. In Ireland the 
 Phoenicians have left a multitude of gold and bronze relics. 
 
 But the most interesting relics of the early use of gold are those which 
 have been recently discovered in the tombs of the cemetery of Halstadt 
 near Salzburg in the Austrian Tyrol, the site 'of perhaps the most import- 
 ant salt-mines in Europe, taking into consideration the remote age at 
 which they began to be wrought, and the intimate relations which were 
 maintained with them by the people of the Italian peninsula. When 
 these graves were made, it was an age of stone for the north and west of 
 Europe. Iron had not yet come into use. The inhabitants of the tombs 
 were probably neither the inside miners nor the outside villagers, but 
 wealthy owners of a better class, perhaps foreigners from Italy, govern- 
 ment officials, or visitors, their wives and their daughters. Many of the 
 articles found are female ornaments ; and among these are noticeable a 
 number of those curiously embossed and ornamented circular plates, some- 
 times mistaken for small bucklers, but now known to archaeologists by 
 the name of ' disques de chasteteV Weapons of men however were also 
 
APPENDIX. 361 
 
 found, some of them of great price and beauty. One long sword had a 
 handle of ivory. A dagger and sheath of solid gold is particularly remark- 
 able. My friend Mr Desor tells me that he has found facsimiles of some 
 of the more curious specimens on which are visible what seems to be an 
 astronomical emblem, as well as rows of horses and dancing figures in 
 pairs, and idols with spread-out legs and arms, in the Etruscan museums. 
 Eor further information respecting the age of gold, see De Rougeinont 
 Sur VAge de Bronze. Paris and Geneva, 1867. 
 
 Appendix to page 187. 
 
 The numerous prints of the human hand in red paint upon the ancient 
 edifices of Central America have given rise to much discussion as to its 
 possible meaning. I am informed by my friend Dr Goldberg that many 
 of the battle-flags of Asiatic tribes overthrown in battle by the Russian 
 troops, and preserved in the capital of the Empire, show the same sign, 
 the impression of a human hand in red colour. The first of these trophies 
 excited great surprise ; the Russian soldiery, to enhance their own re- 
 putation for valour, declared that these impressions were made by the 
 standard-bearers, when they grasped their colours with their dying hands, 
 and dyed them with their blood. But the great number of such trophies 
 soon set aside this romantic tradition, and proved that the custom was 
 widespread among the Asiatic nations. In the East it is usual to conse- 
 crate a dwelling-house or other structure of a permanent character, by 
 killing a sheep, and dipping the naked hand in its blood, and stamping 
 the wall. It is reported of Mahmoud that on the capture of Constanti- 
 nople, riding on horseback into the church of St Sophia, he stopped 
 before the door, dipped his right hand in blood, and stamped its impres- 
 sion upon the door-post as high as he could reach. One cannot help 
 recalling to mind the Hebrew custom of sprinkling the door-post at the 
 Passover with blood ; and the rubente dextera manu of Horace. The 
 hand in a ring, placed at the summit of the standards of the Roman 
 legions, may, therefore, have an Eastern origin. And we must not forget 
 that the ring was an amulet to swear by and to take an oath upon in the 
 European world. The escutcheon of a monastery near Mecklenburg 
 bears a monk holding a ring in his hand. Can this " red right hand " 
 have anything to do with the uplifted faulcion of the Pharaohs on the walls 
 of their monuments, smiting prostrate kings or flying hosts ? The flesh 
 of the Egyptian is always painted red in these representations. The sign 
 of life involves the hand in its sacredness. The hand occurs as the sacred 
 letter t in the hieroglyphic vocabulary. 
 
 Appendix to page 236. 
 
 Cuneiform A. The reader would be greatly astonished, I feel sure, to 
 see this letter (with strokes and top bar, however, plain and not wedge- 
 shaped) hanging by a little ring, from the left elbow of a figure kneeling 
 in a dish, and holding up both hands in adoration to a star. It actually 
 occurs thus on the various faces of the 4 foursquare columns of the lately 
 
362 APPENDIX. 
 
 excavated temple near the Ramesseum at Abydos. I observed, however, 
 that from the elbow of one of the kneeling figures, wearing a hood and 
 hawk-bill mask, depended, not the cuneiform A, but the five-pointed star 
 which the others worshipped. Underneath the dish in which this one knelt 
 I read the syphon S and the Anx ; while under the others were a chicken 
 and a plain equilateral upright Christian cross, and under these again a 
 horizontal line. This cuneiform A was therefore a talisman like the star, 
 the an^, &c. See Appendix to pages 309, 310, below. 
 
 Appendix to page 278. 
 
 AUM. Maurice speaks of plain sculptures of the Trinity at 
 Elephantine. In the Baghavat Geeta (page 80) Yishnu says : — ' I am 
 the Holy One worthy to be known. I am the mystic figure OM. I am 
 the Rig, Yagush, and Sarnan Yedas.' Dr Wilkins shows these letters to 
 mean the creator, preserver, and destroyer. (Maurice's Ind. Antiq. iv. 
 pp. 744, 745.) Moore in his Pantheon, p. 413, says that aum, aom, or 
 awm, mean creator, preserver, destroyer, in that order. Sonnerat 
 describes the Hindu Trinity in his Yoyages, i. p. 749. Eorster says that 
 this Trinity is composed of Sri-mun-narrain, — the beautiful female 
 Maha-letchimy ; — and a serpent (Sketches of Hindu Mythology, p. 12), 
 in which we see mountain (or Noah), the ark, and the water. Maurice 
 calls Narayen the supreme God. He says that Latchmi is the Imma of 
 the Hebrew fabulists. (Ind. Antiq. iv. p. 750.) Coleman in his 
 discussion of the Yedas (Asiat. Researches, v.) says that OM signifies 
 God of Gods, and that all Brahmans are obliged to pronounce it internally 
 (not audibly, at the beginning or ending of every lecture of the Yedas), as 
 the Jews have taught us to use the word Amen. The Guyatri (called by 
 Jones the Mother of the Vedas), the holiest text of Sanscrit sacred 
 literature, is expressed by the sacred triliteral AUM. (See Coleman's 
 Hindu Mythology, chapter x., and his second plate for a picture of the 
 idol TRImurti, or Trinity.) Higgins, in his Celtic Druids, chapter ii., 
 section 224, says that the OM or OM/* of the Irish Druids meant ' he 
 who is. 5 
 
 OMFE, o^r), is the name given in Greek fable to the black dove who 
 founded the Delphic oracle. By a black dove was meant, of course, some 
 member of an order of priests or priestesses dressed in black, commis- 
 sioned from some older shrine of divination to a new one at this spot in 
 Greece. But we must not forget that the Holy Ghost of the Christians 
 took this form of a dove ; while that of the older Hebrews was always 
 called a voice (col), or a breathing or rushing wind (ruh). (See Gen. ii. 
 7 ; Ps. xxxiii. 6, &c.) The Alexandrine father of the Christian Church, 
 Origen, taught (of course, by virtue of the Egyptian influences by which 
 he was surrounded) that the Holy Ghost was female. His expression 
 is: — 7raidt<TKr] de' Kvpiag tov aywv Ttvi.v\iaroQ rj $vxn> 'the soul is handmaid 
 to her mistress the Holy Ghost.' Higgins (in his Apocalypse, vol. I., 
 book iii., chap. 2, devoted to this word OM) gives the etymology of 
 H(pr) as divine voice; responsum a deo datum consulenti. The om represents 
 divinity, and the fe or pe represents voice or face (Greek verb <pr)ni, to 
 
APPENDIX. 363 
 
 speak ; 0aw, I see; Hebrew HD and ^, face, mouth). Suidas calls on<p, 
 Beta icXrjdujv, sacred voice, holy sound. Jacob Bryant is very learned in his 
 treatment of the o/x in Greek names, and names of places, where he shows 
 that the Greeks themselves were ignorant of the meaning of ofjKpi. O^iq 
 is the second name which Plutarch gives to Osiris ; and Champollion sees 
 in it the oun-nefer, " the beneficent," of the monuments. 
 
 OMFALOS. The Phallic worship greatly confused the simple old 
 Arkism. At first sight of*<pa-\oQ means any place of an oracle. Euripides, 
 in Medea, calls Delphi, ofupaXoi ttjq yrjg, the navels of the earth (as 
 Basnage in his Hist. Jud. III. xiv. p. 194, says the Jews called Jerusalem 
 the world's navel), not only because they conceived of it as central and 
 principal, but because from certain symbolic conceptions connected with the 
 womb. Om-phalos may be nothing else than the divine phallus ; for we 
 are informed that, in fact, a gigantic phallus, erected in front of the 
 Delphic temple, was anointed every day with holy oil. But other etymo- 
 logies might be found. Por example, <pa\og means benignant, and the 
 oracle might be called ' divine grace. 5 But there is something behind all 
 these words. In one of the pictures in Moore's Pantheon, Brahma is 
 seen rising out of the navel of his mother Maia, with the umbilical cord 
 uncut wound round him. The navel represented the ark, and the cord 
 the water. There was a crescent-shaped boat carried about in the 
 Delphic processions, and it had two names : Omphalos, the navel ; and 
 Argo, the ark. That seems to tell the story plainly enough. The true 
 etymology of omphalos, or as in Latin, um-bilicus, is om-baris, the divine 
 ship of Osiris, the Holy Ark. The human belly received its name from 
 its bulging, mountainous form. Hence the Phtah Sokari or dwarf god of 
 Egypt, with the scarab on his head and two crocodiles under his feet, is 
 represented with an immense belly. — The woman's belly represented the 
 .tumulus with the priest within concealed. 
 
 Whether Ammon, Am-un, received his name from this mystic syllable, 
 or from the syllable man, mannus, menu, menes, &c, it is certain the 
 great god Bacchus had epithets which contained it : for example, om-estes 
 (translated by the Greeks the devourer~), and om-a-dius, the om god ; by 
 which last he was known in Ohio and Tenedos. (Appendix to p. 316.) 
 
 Om is the prefix to all the names of the seven heavens in India. It is 
 the symbol of the lord of all, says an Purana, therefore it shall never pass 
 away, although all the rites, sacrifices, and purifications of the Vedas 
 shall pass away. (What a curious inversion this of Jesus' saying 
 respecting his words !) When Brahma, as Chrisna, says to Arjun : — ' I 
 am the creator of all ; all proceed from me ; I am beginning, middle, and 
 end ; I am time ; I am all-grasping death ; I am the resurrection ; I am 
 the mystic syllable OM ; I am generation and dissolution ; I am the fire 
 and the victim also : ' and Arjun replies : — c Oh, all in all, infinite in 
 power and glory, father of all, there is none like thee ! ' it is impossible 
 to mistake the general sense of OM in composition, nor to remark the 
 immediate juxtaposition of OM and the ideas of generation and destruc- 
 tion. Its use in the Phallic mythology was inevitable. Hence the 
 Roman nurses used the letter M, but pronounced by them (as Pliny tells 
 us in Book 28, c. iv.) mu, as a charm against witchcraft and the evil eye, 
 especially against fascination by the god Fascinus, whose image was a 
 penis or phallus, and was worn about the necks of the women and 
 
 
364 APPENDIX. 
 
 children, like the Agnus Dei of the Christians. The truth was, an 
 image of the mountain or the ship was a charm against danger from 
 water, so a water symbol, like this M, was a protection against the 
 phallic mountain', the male organ of generation. 
 
 AM, Db$, was the old Hebrew word for mother. It is used in 
 connection with Eve, in Genesis ii. 24. But it would occur in Arkite 
 mythology as the name for the ark when considered as a virgin mother. 
 The al-ma of the Phoenicians, al-me of the Hebrews, meaning Virgin, 
 became the Alma, mater of the Latins, a word unknown to the Greeks, but 
 meaning the mother. — Respecting the name JJm-gummel, on the highland 
 east of Heliopolis, Wilkinson says that the prefix. TJM is remarkable for 
 its antiquity, and stands before the names of several mountain-ranges in 
 the Goshen desert. " It is an ancient African word," he adds, " implying 
 greatness or excellence, as in Ama-zulu among the CafFres, and in Berber 
 names in North Africa; but it is not related to the Arabic um. or om, 
 mother." 
 
 OM is solar fire, says Sir "William Jones. Time (TTfiTl) was the 
 female solar orb in Syria. ATJN and AH (]*)W, "}M) is the way the 
 name of the Egyptian city of the sun is spelt in Hebrew Scriptures. (A 
 word translated ' strength ' in other passages.) In these instances we 
 see how the sun- worshipping mythology, like the phallic mythology, 
 adapted the Arkite words to its own use. What connection this Syrian 
 sun-god had with H«M (SH), the son of Noah, to whom Egypt was 
 given (according to the LXX), we do not know. 
 
 OM-EAE. represents the most common compound of OM ; but it 
 infers an element of obscurity ; since by an organic law of language, 
 illustrated by Haldeman and others, M followed by certain other letters 
 either takes a B after it, or converts the following letter into B. Thus, a 
 proper name like Omri must come in course of time to be pronounced 
 Ombri. Notwithstanding this source of error, we are safe in dividing 
 most words of this form into om and bar, in which case we have the two 
 most sacred of all ancient Arkite words. Sometimes the bar will have 
 reference to the mountain, and sometimes to the ship. 
 
 Ombria, for example, is the name which Pliny gives to an aerolite, 
 calling it a precious, or sacred stone, which has descended from heaven 
 (N. Hist., 37, x.) Nothing could equal such a fetich in the eyes of an 
 Arkite; unless it might be the next example. It is possible that the 
 Hebrew word for stone, AVN (]^S) has some connection with it also, 
 for it is constructed like the aum of the Hindoos, and gave name to the 
 place where Jeroboam set up the worship of the calves for Israel. 
 
 Amber, the precious gem found floating on the sea, and found cut intc 
 the shape of an animal in one of the lake-dwelling deposits of Switzer- 
 land, is another instance. Pliny says that in ancient Egypt it was called 
 sacal (the Latin sacer, holy). Its Hebrew name in Exodus xxx. 34, 
 where it forms an ingredient of frankincense, is the same, Sheceleth 
 (although the LXX translates this word, marine onyx, blatta byzantina, 
 an odorous Eastern shell). The Scythians also called it sacrium. Some 
 have thought that Sicily, or Siculia, got its name from furnishing this 
 gem. But it is easy to see that the Arkism was as good for the three- 
 cornered Etna-bearing island as for the amber. The Greek name for it, 
 Electron, seems to be quite another thing, and etymologists have talked 
 
APPENDIX. 365 
 
 of elek-tor, radiant star, and elek, the Arabic name for tree-gum, and 
 schachal. the Aramean verb to sweat and weep. But as the Greek logos 
 is the Hebrew col, a voice, and would be scol if the terminal s were also 
 included in the inversion, so the Shemitic sacal could become the Greek 
 elek, losing the s ; or rather the Greek elektr, converting the s into t or r. 
 Homer's elecktron, an alloy of gold and silver, merely resembled amber in 
 colour. The Phoenician rosaries were of alternate gold and amber beads. 
 The mysterious origin of amber gave it great price in Arkism ; the poets 
 sang how the sister Heliades mourned their brother Phaethon, were 
 changed to poplars, and dropped their amber tears into the Eridanus or 
 Po, which Nilsson makes the German river Eider, between which and the 
 Elbe the amber coast Raunonia (read Rauronia, as Geneva Genabrum was 
 called in the middle ages Gehenna), from Rav, Rafr, Rbv, the Scandina- 
 vian and Prison names of amber. As the palace of Menelaus was 
 adorned with gold and amber, so in a palace near St Petersburg there is 
 an entire room walled or wainscotted with pieces. 
 
 Umbri. This will stand for an example of the extensive use made of 
 Arkite radical words for designating societies and populations as religious 
 communities. The Umbrians were a powerful people before the rise of 
 the Etruscan power. Niebuhr says that the Greeks recognized in the 
 name ombria an allusion to a very high antiquity. Pliny says that its 
 inhabitants were supposed to be the oldest in Italy, and were called by the 
 Greeks ombri, because they were the only survivors of a general deluge. 
 (Nat. Hist. B. 3, chap, xiv.) There were Heraclidan traditions of one 
 Italos or Itoulos, the father of Italy, whose name signified a bull. If 
 this was not a conceit engendered by the Latin word for calf, vitulus, then 
 we must see in it a direct Arkite reference to the Arabic tel (mountain), 
 and Greek tauros (bull). Italos was I-tobul-us, like Aris-tobul-us, &c. 
 In the bull we have the mountain radical in Vm-bri-R. The word occurs 
 in Humber, Cumberland, &c. 
 
 TJM means around, circular, and connects the radical with the Druid 
 mythology, or the sacredness of the circle. The Latin circ-um, around, 
 contains the .word church and the sacred syllable om. This also is a 
 branch of astronomical or solar mythology ; the ancient circular dances 
 and processions are still in full force in the Catholic Church. The Latin 
 word for going around or being ambient is am-bire. There are other 
 words (like am-biges) which retain the same meaning. The German urn 
 zu placed ' before verbs is another instance. Jamieson, in his Hermes 
 Scythicus, page 6, shows the circular force of this radical in the northern 
 countries of Europe, 
 
 Appendix to pages 300 and 321. 
 
 A'NUP. Anubis. The jackal-headed staff occurs in the prenomen 
 cartouches (fig. 21) of B.aNXJSXt, the fifth king of the 5th dynasty, and of 
 HaTJSK, the first king of the 6th dynasty, in the newly discovered tablet 
 of Abydos ; and is read in both of them as the letter U. It occurs again 
 in the prenomen cartouche of RaUSS, a king of the 11th dynasty. It is 
 the first letter in the names of Osortasen I., II., III., of the 12th dynasty. 
 But when we come down to the times of the 19th dynasty, and find it in 
 
366 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 the prenomen cartouche of the great Rameses, it seems to have its original 
 symbolic meaning of guardian, — ' the sun, guardian of truth.' In the pre- 
 nomen of Seti II. we must evidently read, not literally RaUToTJMAMN, 
 but symbolically. ' Sun, guardian of worlds, beloved of Amnion. 5 
 
 The first letter of the name of the Pharaoh of the 19th dynasty, who 
 came between Ramses I. and Ramses II. (Sesostris), who began to build 
 the Ramessium of Abydos, and whose oval (the 8th in fig. 21) closes the 
 great tablet of Abydos and is repeated in a multitude of places on the 
 walls of the corridors,— is called by Sharpe OIMeNePhTaH, or ' Osirei 
 approved of Phtah.' But as he was a great king-builder his ovals are in 
 great confusion, and sometimes read (as in the 7th of fig. 21, from Wilk- 
 inson) PhTaH-MeN-S-PhTaH, ' approved of Phtah, son of Phtah/ 
 Here Phtah has usurped the place of Osiris. But in some of his ovals the 
 image of the dog-headed deity Anubis occupies that position, and in many 
 of them Anubis has been chiselled out and Osiris substituted ; perhaps 
 from some change of politics or religion. There is some trouble also about 
 his name Oserei having been once Sethi, and a tradition that his body was 
 refused burial. Whether all this has anything to do with identifying the 
 old god Anubis and the old devil Seth, — or with the substitution in Ge- 
 nesis of Seth for Cain and Abel, I do not know. But Sharpe affirms that 
 the squatting jackal with his tail erected (see his figure p. 71, vol. I. Hist, 
 Egypt), looking very much like the Hebrew N, aleph, was the letter A or 
 O which was chiselled out to make place for Osiris, everywhere from 
 Ethiopia to San, upon the sea-coast. Wilkinson suggests that this king 
 was not admitted into the Theban lists because he was a Memphite (which 
 may have had something to do with his change of religion), or because he 
 was only ' king consort ' of the Queen Taosiri. But that there was no 
 conflict in the mythologies of Osiris and Anubis is seen from the fact that 
 the jackal staff vowel, TJ or 0, occurs in this queen's oval, as the first let- 
 ter of the word Osiris ; as it does in the name of Osirtasen. 
 
 On the monuments the jackal is frequently seen couchant on the top of 
 a miniature temple or facade of a tomb. 
 
 OIMNOTH 
 
 The name Sab, or Seb, occurs mythologically in a very curious sepul- 
 chral document of the 11th dynasty, discovered by M. Mariette at Abydos, 
 and published in the Appendix to his Catalogue of the Musasum at Boulaq. 
 On this cenotaph of an official named Roma, the god Osiris is addressed 
 thus : ' Hail to thee, Osiris ! first son of the God SEB, eldest of the five 
 divine children of the goddess Nout, eldest grandson of Ra, father of fa- 
 thers, placed near Ra, king of ages, lord of eternity . . . Ureeuses around 
 his head . . . No one knows his name. Innumerable are his names in the 
 
 
APPENDIX. 367 
 
 cities and provinces. The sun rises by his will ... He makes prosperity . 
 Osiris of Abgdos, lord of Tattou, king of Amenti . . . Saluted by Beset in 
 his double form ... I come to thee, Osiris ! master of Toser . . . Accord 
 me to be luminous in heaven, powerful on earth, and justified like the lords 
 of the graveyard . . . ' &c. 
 
 It is very remarkable that the dog Cerberus, sitting on its haunches on 
 an altar before Osiris, in the celebrated soul-weighing judgment scene in 
 the Theban tombs, is a bitch, and its figure instantly recalls to the spec- 
 tator the she-wolf of Rome, 
 
 Appendix A to page 301. 
 
 The Sphinx. The platform of Magnesian Limestone rocks, upon which 
 the pyramids of Gizeh stand, is an irregular promontory of the great table 
 land, the eastern edge of which forms the western barrier of the valley of 
 the Nile. At this promontory the edge of the table land begins to make 
 its trend towards the north-west and west, or, in other words, begins to 
 make the south-west barrier of the Delta. Before the deposit of the Delta 
 this promontory and the opposite promontory, on the end of which stands 
 the citadel of Cairo, together, formed the gate at the mouth of the Nile. 
 It is hardly proper to say, as in the text, that the sphinx stands c all 
 alone' as 'an isolated outcrop of rock rising from the inundated valley 
 of the Nile.' It is a mere protuberance, at the very edge of the platform ; 
 and it is so small, while the platform stretches away as far as the eye can 
 reach, and it is so overhung by the enormous masses of the larger pyra- 
 mids, and is so near and subordinate to the three small ruined pyramids, 
 which screen the base of the Cheops, that it remains an insignificant ob- 
 ject in the landscape, until it is closely approached. This could not have 
 been quite so much the case before the accumulating of sand had been 
 permitted to bury it nearly up to the level of its back ; but nevertheless 
 its mass of rock was never more than one of the many accidents in the 
 rock outcrop wall which here rises from the plain. The most remarkable 
 feature about it is the visible dip of the strata eastward, causing^an ap- 
 pearance of insecurity in the position of the sphinx, as if it might at any 
 moment begin to slip and slide forward, and not stop until it was buried 
 in the mud of the plain. This dip is brought into bold relief by the deep 
 and regular weathering of the rock mass out of which it was cut. Any 
 good photograph of it will show how the weathering has gone on ; but the 
 traveller will be interested in observing that the same eroding process has 
 gone on in the case of all the rock-surfaces near by ; as may be seen upon 
 the outcrop a few hundred yards to the north of it, in which are the open 
 grottoes where visitors sometimes spend the night ; and in the outcrops 
 along the road ascending to the north face of the Cheops ; and even on 
 the surfaces of the great blocks in the base of the pyramid itself. The 
 climate of Egypt has formerly been much more destructive to building- 
 stone than it is now ; but even now it weathers into new-cut surfaces with 
 ease and rapidity. The sand which half buries the sphinx is the blown 
 debris of all these weathered rock-surfaces. In a few more thousand years 
 the head and breast of the sphinx will be mouldered down by the action of 
 the air into an indistinguishable roundish ' cheese-ring.' It has been a 
 
368 APPENDIX. 
 
 good fortune for us of the 19th century that the sand has been carelessly 
 allowed to accumulate about these monuments, and so preserve them for 
 our curiosity. — The dip of which I have spoken, continuing to rise gradu- 
 ally westward, obliged the Pharaohs to cut out areas to contain their great 
 pyramids, and at the same time gave the Memphite nobles a chance to ex- 
 cavate horizontal tombs in the wall of the area behind the pyramids, that 
 is, facing their western sides, — In spite of all that has been said, however, 
 it remains true that when the platform of rock, its front wall over a hun- 
 dred feet high, its larger and smaller pyramids, and its tombs, were kept 
 in good order by the government of ancient Memphis, as its Pere-la- Chaise, 
 the sphinx must have presented a rare and splendid show to the proces- 
 sions of priests and mourners as they ascended, by a slanting highway, the 
 cliffs directly in front and underneath it. In fact, its position could not 
 have been more happily chosen had it been entirely of artificial manu- 
 facture. 
 
 I have spoken on page 306 of the meaning of the sphinx figure as a 
 
 female. The Egyptian sphinxes are often androgenous, being furnished 
 with beards, and it is possible that the great sphinx was provided with 
 this sign of virility, although no trace of it now remains. But the usual 
 interpretation, of combined intelligence, strength, and speed, does not in 
 any case hold good, for the sphinx possesses no wings. And even when 
 wings are given to chimerical emblems they do not necessarily imply 
 speed, because the wing was used like the hair, like wool, like scales, and 
 like the twisted cord, to symbolize water. 
 
 There is a strange, but very common, mythological Egyptian sphinx, 
 related to the tombs, the goddess Thoueris of the Greek writers, in Egyp- 
 tian t~KB-oer, ' the great (female) AP,' or simple t-oer, ' the great one ' 
 (feminine article). She has a hippopotamus' body and griffon's or lion's 
 claws, and sometimes a lion's head. Plutarch calls her the concubine of 
 Typhon, as Isis was the wife of Osiris, his brother. Her name suggests 
 a new etymology for TABOH, namely, f the great, or vast.' This god- 
 dess carries the mystical knot ; see Catalogue of Boulaq Musaeum, p. 94 
 & 95. But the most important connection of this goddess is through her 
 proper name, AP, as a hippopotamus, with APis, the sacred bull, whose 
 name, Mariette asserts (Catalogue, page 92), is frequently cited on monu- 
 ments of the age of the pyramids, and whose worship (Manetho is quoted 
 for the assertion) was inaugurated by Cechoiis, a king of the second dy- 
 nasty ! If this be true the precedency of Anubis is Drought into serious 
 question. 
 
 Appendix B to page 301. 
 
 The Egyptian Cornice. Since seeing the remains of the Egyptian piles 
 myself, I am much less impressed by the overhanging massiveness of the 
 cornice, when compared with the vast heights and breadths of the walls. 
 It seems to me also very possible, that the idea of the cornice was either 
 generated, or at least reinforced, by the magnificent lights and shadows 
 of the natural cornices of the cliffs which border the valley, and over at 
 intervals the water of the Nile. The strata being almost universally ho- 
 rizontal (with only an insensible rise towards the south), and consisting 
 

 APPENDIX. 369 
 
 of alternate courses of soft marls and harder limestone, there ensue series 
 of overhanging cliffs and long, straight, even ledges of rock, at various 
 heights, from fifty to five hundred feet, above the river, calculated to im- 
 press the imagination powerfully. 
 
 Appendix to page 302. 
 
 Origin of the Egyptian population. The slave trade is forbidden by law, 
 and slavery is nominally abolished in Egypt. Yet in actual fact a very 
 large number of blacks are held in slavery in the valley of the Nile ; and 
 the British vice-consul, Mr Reed, disguised as a Mogrebbin Arab trader, 
 visited thirty or forty slave marts, in Cairo, and other places in the Delta, 
 and found three thousand slaves for sale in them, in the summer of 1867. 
 In all ages of the world the negroes of the interior have inundated Egypt. 
 All the sailors at the First Cataract, and all the guards and watchmen of 
 the houses and stores of Alexandria, are intensely black Berberines, who 
 are accounted the most courageous and the most reliable servants in 
 Egypt. Many of the slaves of gentlemen at Benisuef, Assiout, and other 
 large towns upon the Nile, are so peculiarly black, that even the ' white 
 of the eye ' is black ; and the skin, not being glossy, presents none of 
 those reflections which play upon the face of the negroes in the United 
 States. The tablets of the Pharaohs recount repeated conquests of negro 
 nations, ending with their deportation en masse and settlement in Egypt. 
 The whole population of Egypt, with the exception of a few thousand 
 Erank strangers, and a few thousand Turkish and Armenian families, whose 
 colour is kept pretty white by marriage with Circassian slave women, is 
 either quite black or of various deep mulatto shades. It may therefore 
 be safely said, that, in the main, Egypt has been settled from the South, 
 — from the negro lands of Central Africa ; and I believe that this black- 
 skin origin will prove to correspond with a primeval mythology indigenous 
 also to Africa. 
 
 Two exceptions to this rule must however be noticed. Eirst, the Arab 
 tribes of the desert on the west, and of the desert between the river valley 
 and the Red Sea, although themselves black, and oftentimes as black as 
 Darfour negroes, are evidently a separate race. But the monumental his- 
 tory of Egypt shows that they were always nomades, always enemies, and 
 never much adulterated the popular blood of the valley of the Nile. The 
 traveller sees in many places the remains of the vast wall which the Pha- 
 raohs built at the edge of the desert, from the Delta all the way up to the 
 first cataract, to restrain the incursions of these untamable and hostile 
 barbarians ; a wall five hundred miles long, and oftentimes approaching 
 within half a mile of the eastern bank of the river. These were the shep- 
 herds whom the Egyptians always and naturally held in the greatest 
 abomination, and whom the existing government still holds in such respect, 
 that it levies no taxes on them, and dares not refuse them the right of 
 carrying arms, while all the fellahin of the valley are disarmed. The affi- 
 liation of these Arabs with the tribes of the Arabian peninsula, and with 
 the tribes of Syria, is of course well known, and may help to explain the 
 history of the conquest of Egypt by the Hyksos. 
 
 24 
 
370 APPENDIX. 
 
 The second exception relates to a peculiar race which inhabits the sea- 
 coast of the eastern division of the Delta, and allowed to be the descend- 
 ants of a Shemitic population, identifiable perhaps with the Hyksos them- 
 selves, whose capital was San, near the coast. In the ruins of San there 
 have been discovered sufficient evidences of the fact that the expulsion of 
 the Hyksos was a very imperfect operation ; that, in fact, a large part of 
 the Hyksos people never left the Delta, at the time when the Hyksos 
 government was destroyed and its leading men were exiled. All this 
 amounts to saying, merely, that the country of the Delta between Cairo 
 and the Suez Canal and the sea-shore has always belonged ethnologically 
 to Asia and not to Africa, and has never lost or greatly changed its Asiatic 
 population. The presence of Hebrews in this part of the Delta, or in the 
 ' table land ' (Goshen) back of it, in extremely ancient times, becomes a 
 fact of comparatively slight importance ; while the great role which the 
 Jews played in the history of the Delta, for five hundred years before the 
 time of Christ, receives an easy explanation. 
 
 The traveller from America however is greatly astonished to see, as he 
 ascends the Nile, men of a perfect copper colour, standing in pairs and 
 groups upon the bank, at intervals, quite naked, working shedoofs or dip- 
 pers, to lift the water of the river over the bank into small canals, which 
 run inland to irrigate the fields. These men are tall and strong, but rather 
 slim, very graceful and dignified, but lively and cheerful, and when wet 
 by the dripping buckets, their skin shines in the sunlight like the side of 
 a polished copper kettle ; both colour and lustre quite metallic. But when 
 the skin is dry a white film or plum bloom spreads over it, which may be 
 due to sweat, but is noticeable on them when quite at rest. In this cop- 
 per skin we have the exact representative of the m£-coloured flesh of the 
 Egyptian on the monuments. There is no mistaking it. What the origin 
 of this race is, or whether it be a separate race, I do not know ; nor how, 
 if it be a separate blood, it has kept itself distinct from other Egyptian 
 blood. But it is in relation to the red Egyptian that the question of the 
 origin of the Pharaonic regime becomes of ethnological importance. 
 
 Appendix to page 303. 
 
 Ev apxy, in the ark, ' in the beginning.' The Hebrew hereshith, in the 
 beginning, from rosh, the head, contains apparently the same root : rosh = 
 orsh ■= apx- It is very curious to see how the Latins retained the use of 
 two letters, which the Greeks converted into one. The Copts wrote CH 
 like the Latins, out of which the Greeks made %. The Copts were fol- 
 lowed by the Latins in writing separately TH, out ot which the Greeks 
 made 6, by crossing the Coptic h with a line, instead of writing the t (a 
 cross upon its side) in front of it. The Coptic CH is, when pronounced, 
 not kh but sh. 
 
 Appendix A to page 307. 
 
 Music. This perpetual waving and wailing, ascending and falling ca- 
 dence in music, is especially noticeable in the native music of Egypt in the 
 present day. 
 
APPENDIX. 371 
 
 Appendix B to page 307. 
 
 Lotus. I have said little or nothing in the text about the symbolism 
 of the papyrus tuft and bud, which shared, with the lily flower and bud, 
 the veneration of the Egyptians, because they are in the Arkite sense 
 mere substitutes for one another, and are mistaken for one another by all 
 travellers. The papyrus may reasonably be considered a later symbol, 
 adopted for the purpose (among others) of distinguishing Lower Egypt, 
 of which it was the peculiar emblem, from Upper Egypt, whose emblem 
 was the lotus. Of course its use in literature gave to the papyrus tuft 
 and plant a peculiar sacredness. One of the most beautiful objects in 
 Egypt is the pair of square monoliths with square heads in front of the 
 shrine at Karnak, on the tall smooth sides of one of which you see, in high 
 relief, merely three stalks of papyrus, and on the other three stalks of 
 lotus. 
 
 Appendix A to page 308. 
 
 Fir-cone. When split through the apex and centre the fir-cone shows a 
 section which reveals the seeds in their cells. This section was adopted 
 by the priestly architects as the theme of the most beautiful of all running 
 ornaments, the Greek honeysuckle moulding. Single sections were erected 
 upon the summit and at the outer angles of the pediment of the Corinthian 
 temple ; situations where the Latins used the urn. 
 
 Appendix B to page 308. 
 
 AncJi and tarn. These two symbols, the sign of life, or crux ansata, and 
 the hoopoo-headed fork-footed staff or tarn sceptre, occur incessantly and 
 universally upon the walls of the monuments of the middle and lower 
 empires. They form running mouldings, along the surbases of the walls, 
 following around the angles, and binding the parts of the building together 
 with lace-like fringes. They form bands at intervals from the base to the 
 capital of the columns in the porticos of the temples at Denderah and at 
 Edfou. They cover, in regular horizontal stripes, the whole inside wall 
 of the triumphal gateway which stands by itself in front of the ruins of 
 Karnak, the superbest gateway in the world, in the presence of which the 
 far larger Arc de l'Etoile at Paris would seem cold and tasteless, and the 
 little arches of Titus and Severus the erections of prosaic boys. 
 
 In the hieroglyphic records tbe natural alliance and the usual appear- 
 ance of the av% is with the isosceles pyramid, the two together meaning 
 ' giver, or gift, of immortality.' But in ornamental architecture, and in 
 the symbolism of royalty, the av% and tarn go together. The tarn is held 
 upright by standing and sitting gods and kings, and expresses simply and 
 always governing jjower, or the right to rule. Added to the av% it means 
 immortal sovereignty. The combination is accomplished in many ways. 
 On the running mouldings the anch stands between two tarns, the hoopoo- 
 heads of which are on a line with and looking at the handle of the cross ; 
 and all three stand on the flat base of a segment of a circle. This group 
 
372 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 is then repeated as often as is needful to go round the column or along 
 the wall. But the sign of life is frequently seen issuing from the hoopoo- 
 head of the tam sceptre, and often in connection with the nilometer or tat. 
 Sometimes the hand which grasps both the tam sceptre, the flail, and the 
 crook, holds also the handle of the sign of life : this is the case on all the 
 walls of the palace of Rameses II. at Abydos. 
 
 In the text I speak of the ring of the avx, or crux ansata ; but after 
 copying it a hundred times and in many styles of art, I was unable to find 
 a single instance where the handle of the cross could properly be called a 
 ring ; it was always a loop. An apparent exception to this rule only makes 
 the rule more manifest. The protecting vulture over the head of certain 
 Pharaohs always holds in both claws, or more properly stands with both 
 talons on the upper curve of a ring, to the bottom of which is attached a 
 crosspiece, or water-line ; but in no case does this become a cross. This 
 distinction is consistently maintained between the round ring with the 
 crosspiece in the bird's talons (called a seal, xtm), and the pear-shaped 
 loop to the cross in the priest's or god's hand. The loss of the upright of 
 the cross in the first case is not strange ; since that represents the moun- 
 tain, which the bird (or ship), when floating on the water-line, has left far 
 
 Fig. 22. 
 
 Figures on the west wall of second grand gallery of columns in the 
 Eamesseum at Abydos. 
 
APPENDIX. 373 
 
 beneath it. But the invariability of the pear-shape of the loop of the crux 
 ansata I cannot explain. For granting that it was made actually of leather 
 and strapped down to the crosspiece (as an examination of the larger re- 
 presentations of it will show was the fact), it is wonderful that it was 
 never made of bronze or copper or gold, or other rigid substance, which 
 would keep the circular form. 
 
 I have alluded in a note on page 310 to the figures of gods or priests 
 approaching the face of a Pharaoh, as an artist would measure the features 
 of a statue with a pair of dividers formed of a combination of two tarns 
 enclosing an anch. This action is repeated on many of the monuments of 
 Egypt, and represents, in some cases at least, as in the celebrated annun- 
 ciation scene at Karnak, the introduction of life into the person. In that 
 scene two goddesses are introducing into the mouth of the queen mother 
 their anchs, to give life to her conception of the young Pharaoh. On one 
 of the walls of the Ramesseum at Abydos I noticed a beautiful combina- 
 tion of the nilometer (tet), the sistrum, the sign of life {anch), and two 
 sceptres (tam), presented to the lips of the Pharaoh ; Pig. 22 a. And over 
 his head the vulture holding the ring and crosspiece (chtm), to which was 
 attached an anch and two tarns : Pig. 22 b. In the first case the loop of 
 the anch, receiving the head of the tet, with its four normal cross lines, is 
 also crossed by three supplementary bars, which convert it into a sistrum. 
 
 Appendix to pages 309 and 310. 
 
 Pyramid amulets of the Bronze age. In Macmillan's Magazine for Sep., 
 1867, there is an interesting article, describing the discoveries of flint in- 
 struments in the upper and lower gravel beds of the Ponte Molle quarries, 
 outside the walls of Ptome, by Sign. Ceselli, beginning in 1846. The au- 
 thor goes on to say, that among the numerous arrowheads and what not 
 in the splendid cabinet of M. Ceselli, are two or three of a very peculiar 
 shape, and very small. They are between an isosceles and equilateral 
 triangle in shape, and about three-quarters of an inch long. At the back 
 the natural fracture of the flint remains, and this is a characteristic of the 
 earliest worked flints. But the front has three bevels carefully and skill- 
 fully done, following the three sides of the triangle. The top is purposely 
 not brought to a point, and has a peculiar indentation on one side, by 
 means of which the article could be suspended from a thread around the 
 neck. It was an amulet. A few days after his discovery of these he 
 detected another in a basket full of fresh specimens, just brought in from 
 the ploughed fields of Montecelli, 20 miles from Rome, to the Abate Carlo 
 Rusconi, for his cabinet. Again, he found this form of amulet among the 
 'Etruscan' gems in the shop of the great jeweller of Rome, Castellani, 
 who considered them far older than the Etruscan era, and called them 
 Pelasgic, for want of a better name. These were found at Prteneste, and 
 were made of rich red amber, wrought and polished with superior skill, 
 bevelled three ways in front, and left plain behind, and furnished at the 
 top with a regularly perforated bead or buglehead, by which they could all 
 be strung together. There were about two dozen. 
 
 The ancients have left abundant proofs that the flints of the Stone age 
 
 
374 APPENDIX. 
 
 were regarded as heavenly productions, thunder-stones, Ceraunia^ and 
 Betuli, and were worn as amulets. Eossil teeth also were so worn, and 
 called tongue-stones, glossopetree. In Castellani's collection were some of 
 pre-Etruscan age,, in their natural condition, but mounted in holders of 
 exquisite workmanship, in gold, and others imitated in agate, bloodstone, 
 &c. Pliny recounts that they fell from the sky in the wane of the moon. 
 But the ancients knew also of their occurrence in the bone earth of caves ; 
 for in Sign. Rossi's pamphlet, quoted by the author of the article in Mac- 
 millan's Magazine, Claudian is quoted saying : 
 
 Pyrseneis que sub antris 
 
 Ignia flumineae legere ceraunia nymphse. 
 Water-nymphs have collected fiery thunderbolts in the caves of the Pyrenees. 
 
 It is not strange, then, that the arrowhead thus worshipped, and thus 
 worn as an amulet, should have been adopted as the sacred type of the 
 Assyrian alphabetic character. 
 
 The use of amulets dates from the origin of the human race. The cases 
 of the Boulaq Museum are full of them. They were not only in the form 
 of scarabei and little gods. I noticed. scores of little nilometers ; scores 
 of little neck-pillows ! and on the wall of the Serapeum at Saqqarah I saw 
 and copied a human figure, holding a neck-pillow in his left hand, as if it 
 were the sign of life — which I feel sure it was ; for the lune-shaped upper 
 piece to receive the head, the upright stem, and the flat horizontal base- 
 board, together exactly make up the triple symbol. (See top of page 300, 
 and bottom of page 263.) 
 
 But the most extraordinary of all the kinds of amulets in the Boulaq 
 Museum were those in the shape of a Roman letter A, I should say an 
 English block-letter A, cut out clean and smooth from a plate of bronze 
 or other metal, and sometimes drilled at the apex to receive a thread. 
 This fact fully bears out all I have said on pages 236 to 239 of Lecture 
 IX. on the alphabet. Eor in this Boulaq collection this sort of amulet is 
 illustrated by a numerous suite of specimens, showing a gradual transition 
 from the plain triangle through the triangle notched at the base, or en- 
 graved so as to bring out the mason's square, up to the plain square (some- 
 times with a bugle soldered to its edge) and the square with its cross- 
 piece, and finally to the isosceles with a cross-piece, in the exact form of 
 an A. 
 
 M. Mariette (in his catalogue, page 133, Yitrine M) says that the angle, 
 or square, was a symbol of mystery and adoration, the triangle of 
 equilibrium, and were hung about the necks of the mummies to mark that 
 eternal rest which awaits the just. No doubt. But the question is how 
 did they acquire that meaning ? and why do they assume the shape of the 
 letter A ? 
 
 The Book of the Dead directs also that little columns of feldspar, and 
 seals of lapis lazuli, discs of red paste ' placed on the character mountain? 
 as well as nilometers and signs of life, should be suspended at the neck 
 of the defunct. Fibula and amethyst cornelian, hematite, and green feld- 
 spar hearts are also found with mummies. Sometimes a scarabeus is en- 
 graved on the heart ; and sometimes the bird bemiou (the phoenix). See 
 Appendix to page 236, above. 
 
 See also the curious offering of onions, tied into the form of the lacus- 
 
APPENDIX. 375 
 
 trine amulet (figured in the text, page 310), which. Wilkinson 'figures on 
 page 324 of the first volume of his Ancient Egyptians. 
 
 Appendix to page 316. 
 
 B, beth, a house. I have referred in the text to the inversion of beth = 
 theb, bringing this letter into its proper Arkite relationship. Its Hebrew 
 squa re form 3 seems to me directly derivable from the hieroglyphic letter 
 fj, read h by Egyptologists. Its sound was a gentle aspirate equivalent 
 to the Greek r\, because its Coptic name was (in Greek letters) HI, but 
 the meaning of this name i)i in Coptic is house ; and while the Hebrews 
 gave this meaning as a name to their letter beth, they used the form for 
 their phonetic b, because b is the initial letter of beth, their name for a 
 house. But there are other connections. Isis was characterized by her 
 ship or ark. Yet the monumental name of Isis is composed of three sym- 
 bols, read MNH, or in full, Coptic, Men-n-ei, that is, mistress of the house. 
 This meant, no doubt, goddess of the temple. But it must have meant 
 more than that ; for every deity was equally master or mistress of its own 
 temple. It points to an original identity between house and ship, beth 
 and theb. 
 
 It is something more than a curious coincidence that this name of Isis 
 is* almost exactly that of the half-historical, half-mythical Menu, Mena, 
 Menes, first king of the first dynasty, and founder of the oldest empire. 
 The tablet of Abydos commences with his name (fig. 23), an oval contain- 
 ing three letters, the top one and middle one being identical with the first 
 and second in the name of Isis. The third is & feather, A ; not the hawk 
 A, nor the arm A, but the ostrich feather, symbol of government and 
 victory : while the third letter in the name of Isis is the house H. Now 
 everybody reads these three letters M<?NA, or M^UE, or MeNTJ. The 
 Greeks read it fitvrj, which makes it perfectly identical with the name of 
 Isis. But why should we not read it also symbolically as we do the name 
 of Isis, Men-n-a, Master of the plume ? When we remember, however, 
 that the letter A was used to signify building (see text, page 228) and a 
 house, the identity of the names of Menes and Isis is demonstrated. What 
 this astonishing coincidence means I leave my readers, with the key in 
 their possession, to guess. But it illustrates exactly the idea I have ex- 
 pressed in the text. If the ancient symbolizers of Isis could find three 
 signs that signified her character, they did not care what the juxtaposition 
 of those three signs or letters would produce in the shape of a word ; 
 whatever that word should be they would adopt it as one of her names. 
 
 Take another instance. The name of the god Phtah has never been 
 satisfactorily explained by mere comparative philology. The Pharaohs 
 used it as part of their names, beloved of Phtah, 'PhTaH-'M.ai. The 
 dwarfish, big-bellied images of the god in the Museum of Boulaq all have 
 a scarabeus on the ,head, and two crocodiles under foot. The scarab 
 meant the world, as all acknowledge ; the crocodiles meant the waters ; 
 the big belly, bandy legs, dwarfish figure of the god were characteristic 
 symbols of the mountain witli its mines and horrors. To express these 
 three ideas in hieroglyphs was easy enough. A circle for the world-ship, 
 a semicircle for the mountain, and a waved line for the water — and the 
 
376 APPENDIX. 
 
 triple symbol was spelled. But the circle was already devoted to the solar 
 orb, so they took the square, meaning house, enclosure of any kind. For 
 the waved line they took the twisted cord, which symbolized water. But 
 the square was the letter P aspirated, the semicircle T, and the three- 
 looped twist of cord H. When these were put together in the Arkite order, 
 ship, mountain, water, they gave the priests a new name for their divinity 
 — PkTaH.. Afterwards, when an M had to be added, meaning beloved, 
 
 Figure 23. 
 
 HUH EMM Kmy| H M ft 
 
 Menes. Isis. Amun. Phtah. Phtah-mai. 
 
 it became more convenient to stand the twisted cord upright alongside of 
 the Ph. and T, as in fig. 23. This dwarf, by the way, is the Phtah pa- 
 teques of Herodotus [father of waters ?], whose image stood on the prow 
 of Phoenician ships, a sort of Castor, or Pollux ; in whose names, without 
 discussing them further, w T e read at least i^he tor and the bar ; and whose 
 issue from Leda's swan-egg would make Castor's name unmistakably Ark- 
 ite, even if it were not the name the ancients gave to the beaver, on ac- 
 count of its wonderful habit of building half-submerged Ararats for itself 
 to live in. 
 
 If the A in Menes' name, fig. 23, be not a feather, but, as some main- 
 tain, the Coptic Ake, a reed, or its plume, then w r e have another illustra- 
 tion of this word- building ; for the M symbol will float on the water-line 
 N, and under it will be the obeliskal submerged reed or Alpine letter A. 
 
 And if the M symbol represents an ark with its crew, then the group 
 AMN (the usual form of the name of the Theban Jupiter) will be another 
 instance of the same kind ; the Alpine symbol A being placed for com- 
 pactness on one side of the ship and water symbols. ' 
 
 Brugsh, in his book on the Calendar, p. 17, shows that 'Amun' was 
 written sometimes with the figure of a lizard (with only two fore feet, and 
 as if crawling sideways on a wall), — and also sometimes with a cartouche 
 (on its side) containing a single water-line ; in other words, an N in an 
 Arn. Is this a hint to be used in our oft-baffled attacks upon the etymo- 
 logy of the name of that Hebrew Ammon, Noah ? It is, at all events, of 
 great moment that the Jupiter AMN and the Egyptian Adam MNA 
 should not only be written with the same sounds but w T ith the same letters, 
 and that the only difference should consist in placing the feather with its 
 feather edge looking right or looking left. 
 
 Appendix A to page 322. 
 
 Auspices. Why are the intestines of birds called giblets ? Because they 
 have anything to do with a fork, in German gabel ? That would be absurd 
 enough. Or because the heart, cceur, cor, is the principal entrail ? That 
 is nearer the truth ; but reverses the true explanation. The cceur is in- 
 deed the mystical cabar, or shrine of life ; but the liver also mystically 
 received the same name, jecur, ia-eor. All the entrails were cabala, and 
 
APPENDIX. 377 
 
 objects of divination. The priest prophesied over the shape and number 
 and posture of the folds of the bowels of the victim on the altar. They 
 were his cabalistic machinery, his giblets. 
 
 Appendix to page 323. 
 
 Hoopoo. This legend has a high interest in view of the fact that the 
 tarn sceptre of the Pharaohs has for a handle the head of a hoopoo ; per- 
 haps adopted on account of its erectile top-knot feathers. 
 
 Appendix to page 325. 
 
 Birds. The pigeons of the valley of the Nile astonish by their numbers. 
 In the Thebaid the situation of the villages is designated to the traveller 
 on the river by a compact castellated mass of square towers, built of mud 
 and reeds, crowned with battlements of goulahs, or large earthen pots, 
 and pierced in stories with ranges of holes for the entrance and exit of the 
 birds. These towers are curious caricatures of the propylea of the tem- 
 ples. The people however make very little use of the flesh of these birds 
 for food, and permit the traveller to shoot among the flocks at his pleasure, 
 wherever his boat may be detained by a head- wind against the bank, or in 
 his journeys inland. But each pigeon-tower becomes valuable to its owner 
 as a storehouse of guano, which is used about the roots of the sugar canes. 
 Nothing in Egypt is more amazing than the infinity of birds of all kinds. 
 
 Some of the Egyptian myths about birds are very surprising. The 
 Phoenix story is familiar to everybody. But it seems that the vulture — 
 which plays so large a part on the monuments, and may be seen in flocks, 
 in a striking attitude on the sandbanks of the river, with its wings spread, 
 breast to the wind and back to the sun, while magpies hover and skip 
 among the group, picking at the parasites of the vultures — is accounted 
 in mythology the emblem of maternity. Every vulture was considered a 
 female, and her virginity therefore implied. The vulture-headed goddess 
 of the South, Souvan (the Greek Lucina), is represented on the monuments 
 as ' the mother ' par excellence. She sometimes hovers as a victory over 
 the field of battle. The 'grand mother, who bears the Sun, Neith/ the 
 Athene or Minerva of the Greeks, is also always a virgin mother. Her 
 son is said on the monuments to be 'conceived, not engendered/ This 
 goddess is the vavg, or ship, and her vulture is the BAR-TOR. 
 
 Appendix to page 327. 
 
 Stork. In the King's Tomb, No. 17 (Belzoni's), in chamber No. 3, on 
 the right hand of the gallery, after passing in at the first doorway, I saw 
 a fine painting of the African stork with two long backward- bending head- 
 feathers, sitting upon the sharp apex of a tripod, the three feet of which 
 rested on a sort of flanged board, the flanges preventing the two outer 
 leg-bars from spreading. 
 
 The priests used the walking posture of the legs in a great variety of 
 applications. In this same tomb one may see snakes with two and others 
 with four legs in this position. In one of the sepulchral chambers at Beni 
 
378 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 Hassan I noticed an extraordinary object like the horn of an anvil walking 
 (as a letter) upon two human legs, the hinder part seemed erased, and 
 looked like one side of a dish with a loop hanging down ; but there was 
 nothing symmetrical about the figure except the legs, and it had a weird 
 expression of life and motion in its front part, which was quite sharp. 
 
 Appendix to page 340. 
 
 Serpent worship. In the Ramesseum at Abydos there is a beautiful 
 figure of a serpent coiled round a tapering conical vessel set upon a low 
 tripod, underneath a table of one (central) leg supporting a row of feathers, 
 as an offering. 
 
 In the tomb of Seti at Thebes (Belzoni's) an immensely long serpent is 
 carried along the wall, by many priests, between every two ot whom the 
 snake is kinked into a fold, producing the classical fret moulding, in one 
 instance square and in another round. 
 
 In the ' tomb of Memnon ' is a procession of twelve snakes, each on two 
 legs ending below in a fork stuck into a short board or stand. Each snake 
 is convoluted in such a way that the same fret moulding is produced by 
 the whole series. 
 
 At Dendera I saw the v snake of the alphabet used as the cross-piece 
 of the sign of- life. 
 
 The cobra of India is the cabalistic serpent above all others. 
 
 Appendix to Lecture XL 
 
 MABIETTE'S RESUME OP MONUMENTAL AUTHORITIES, 1867. 
 
 r 
 
 i. 
 
 ii. 
 
 in. 
 
 b 
 
 . a 
 
 "o 
 
 E 
 
 <! 
 
 IV. 
 
 "1 
 
 Pyramid of steps, Saccara (4th king, 1st dynasty). 
 Tomb of Tot-hotep, Saccara. Three statues of 
 family of functionary Sepa (Louvre). Tomb and 
 statue of Amten (Berlin) contemporary, of penulti- 
 mate king of 3rd dynasty. Diggings at Abydos 
 now going on. Tablet of Saccara gives 2 kings of 
 1st, 6 of 2nd, 8 of 3rd dynasty. 
 
 Pyramids of Giseh, 4th dynasty. Pyramid at Abou- 
 sir, 5th dynasty. Magnificent tombs at the Pyra- 
 mids and at Saccara. Temple of alabaster and 
 granite discovered by Mariette at the foot of the 
 great Sphinx, the only architectural monument yet 
 discovered of the ancient empire. Statue of Chep- 
 hren, founder of 2nd Pyramid (Exposition at Paris). 
 Inscription of Khoufou, founder of 1st Pyramid, 
 4th dynasty, the great key to the Egyptian civiliz- 
 ation. Large style, found at the Pyramid Giseh to 
 the mistress of Snefrou II. and Khoufou, and maid 
 of honour to Schafra. Wooden statue, private por- 
 trait (Exposition at Paris). Eine sarcophagi of 
 granite, 4th dynasty. Fifty monolith steles, sta- 
 tues, &c, in Boulaq Museum. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 379 
 
 s 
 
 YI. Monuments at Elephantine, El-Kab, Kasr-es-Sayed, 
 
 Abydos, Cheyk-sa'id, Zaouyet-el-Maitin, Memphis, 
 San Wadi-Maghara. Great inscription on tomb 
 of Ouna, Abydos, under Kings Teti, Pepi, Meri-en- 
 ka, refutes the assertion that Apappus reigned 
 100 years (Boulaq). Inscription to a functionary 
 of Abydos, who served under the same three kings. 
 and also Nefer-ke-Ra. 
 No monuments. 
 
 Steles, vases, fruits, bread, clothes, furniture, arms, 
 utensils, of rude style, in Boulaq Museum. The 
 winged Isis, protecting Osiris, appears. Hiero- 
 glyphics are awkward. All got at Lrah-abouT- 
 neggah, Thebes. 
 
 Amenemha and Osortasen family. Trans, at Ouady 
 Majarah, Kumnah, Semnah. Obelisks of Mata- 
 rieh, Payoum (Begyg). Grand hypogees of Beni- 
 hassan. Grottoes of Syout. Colossi found at San 
 and Abydos. Brilliant epoch of art. Formerly 
 called the 18th dynasty, then 17th. 
 
 Sebekhotep and Nofrehotep families. Hall of An- 
 cestors. Papyrus of Turin. Steles in various 
 museums. Colossi of San. Walls of tombs at 
 Syout, Assouan, Hamamat. 
 
 Hyksos invasion. No monuments. 
 
 Hyksds dynasty established at San, side by side 
 with a native dynasty at Thebes. Revival of art 
 at Thebes. Reappearance of feathered cartouches 
 in the tombs of Drah-abou'1-neggah (Thebes), 
 vases, arms, &c, as before ; gilded winged figures. 
 Old names -reappear. Theban kings on the tpmbs 
 of Qournah, table at Marseilles, &c, &c. Hyksos 
 kings, names of two found. First, Sa'ites ; last, 
 Apophis (Apapi), Pour grand granite Sphinxes 
 at San (Boulaq Museum) with a lion's mane, dedi- 
 cated to the new Shemite god Set. Granite group 
 of two figures (Boulaq Museum). Head of Hyksos 
 king at Payoum (Boulaq Museum). Papyrus of the 
 London Museum. Inscription on wall of tomb at 
 El-kab, of functionary Ahmes, under King Raske- 
 nen. Large granite stele at San, unreadable as yet. 
 'XYIII. Amosis, Amenophis, Thoutmes, &c. Present confu- 
 
 sion of records. Inscriptions at El-kab to Ahmes. 
 Base of statue (Louvre). Stele to Neboua. In- 
 scription to Hor-em-heb at Abd-el-Quourneh. Mon- 
 uments at Gebel Barkal, temple and sphinxes of 
 Amenophis I. Temples of Thoutmes III. at So- 
 leb, Semneh, Amada in Nubia. Beautiful temple 
 of Amenophis III. destroyed, on isle of Elephan- 
 
 XII. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 XIY. 
 
 XY. 
 
 XYI. 
 
 XYII. 
 
 
38.0 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 a 
 
 O 
 
 tine. Granite gate of Hatasou at Onibos. Bas- 
 reliefs at Gebel Silsileh. Splendid constructions at 
 Thebes. Temple of Deir-el Bahari. Colossi' of 
 Amenophis III. Grand tombs of Abd-el-Quour- 
 neh. Tombs of Kings in the valley of the west. 
 Great works at Karnak. Temple of Luxor, Ame- 
 nophis III., finished under the 26th dynasty. Other 
 remains at El-kab, Tel-el-amarna, Gebel Touneh, 
 Memphis, Saqqara, Pyramids, Heliopolis, Serbut- 
 el-Kadim, Wady Magara. Beautiful statues now 
 in Turin. Colossal bust of Thoutmes III., and 
 a recent stele of granite, in Boulaq Museum, with 
 the great poem of the Pentaour. Belies found on 
 the mummy of Queen Aah-hotep, mother of King 
 Amosis, now exhibiting at Paris, and described in 
 Mariette's Apercu, pp. 92 — 95. 
 
 XIX. Sesostris (Barneses II.) Seti, Menephthah, &c. Seven 
 
 kings. Pormer monuments completed by these 
 kings. Tombs of Bab-el-Molouk. The most splen- 
 did tomb of Egypt is that of Seti I. The rock- 
 temple of Ipsamboul (Barneses II.). Temples at 
 Derr, Beit (Dually in Nubia (Barneses II.). Desert 
 monument of Seti I., back of Edfou. Several 
 little temples of Barneses II. at Karnak. The Ba- 
 messeum. Seti's temple to Barneses I., at Quourneh. 
 Tablet temple of Barneses II. at Abydos. Grand 
 temple of Seti I. and Barneses II., now excavating. 
 Probably lost temples at Memphis. Pine colossi 
 at Myt-Bahyneh. Temple at San, rebuilt by Ba- 
 rneses II., Menepthah and Seti II. Eleven obelisks, 
 many monolith columns of granite, colossal steles 
 lately found. 
 
 XX. Barneses family. All its kings bear this name. 
 
 Tombs of Bab-el-moulak. Civil wars. Pavilion 
 and temple of Medinet Abou. Temple of Chons at 
 Karnak, bearing false cartouches of 21st dynasty. 
 Eine stele in Bib/ Boy. Paris from this temple, re- 
 lating the story of the voyage of the god to Meso- 
 potamia. 
 
 XXI. High-priests at Thebes. Temple between Karnak 
 
 and Luxor. The legitimate dynasty ruling at San. 
 
 XXII. Nine kings of Tel Basta. Statue of the god Nile 
 
 (British Museum). Inscriptions on the outside of 
 the walls of 'Karnak. Inscriptions in tomb of Apis, 
 at Saqqara (Louvre). No great edifice. 
 XXITT. Three kings of San. Coushite inscription on stele 
 
 found at Gebel Barkal. Many collateral dynasties ; 
 civil wars. Steles of tomb of Apis. 
 
 XXIV. Bocchoris. One king; name at last discovered in 
 
 tomb of Apis. 
 
 XXV. Cushite or Ethiopian dynasty. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 381 
 
 XXVI. Psammiticus. The Greeks appear in Egypt. Steles 
 
 of tomb of Apis at Saqqara. Official epitaphs of 
 the sacred bulls. Beautiful tombs of Assassif 
 (Thebes). Hock inscriptions at Asouan, Hammat, 
 Thebes, Abydos, Saqqara. The whole force of this 
 dynasty concentrated itself at Sais. Here was the 
 lost temple of Apries, described by Herodotus ; lost 
 portico of Amosis superior to all others ; lost co- 
 lossus of 70 feet high ; lost monolith in chapel of 
 Amosis brought from the quarries of Elephantine. 
 
 XXVII. Persians. Cambyses on the steles of Apis. Darius 
 
 at Hamamat ; lost temple to Ammon at Khargeh. 
 Artaxerxes on two fine vases in the Bib. Roy., 
 Paris, and Treasury of St Marc at Venice. 
 Civil wars. Grand temple at Philse commenced by 
 
 XXVIII. Nectanebo II. Additions to Temples at Med-Abou, 
 and Karnak by Nectanebo I. Tomb of Apis at 
 
 [ Memphis completed by Nectanebo I. Fine propy- 
 
 AA . r Ion in front of the tombs, Nectanebo I. Statues 
 
 of Acoris and Nephrenites. Grand sarcophagi at 
 
 XXX. Berlin, Paris, and Boulaq. No trace yet of the 
 J rapid subsequent decline of Egyptian art. 
 
 XXXI. Persians again. 
 
 XXXII. Macedonians. Alexander I. on the granite gateway 
 
 at Elephantine. Eine granite chamber at Karnak, 
 in front of the sanctuary in the chamber of Thout- 
 mes III., by Philip Arideus. Bas-reliefs of Alex- 
 ander II. on walls of temples of Karnak and Luxor. 
 
 XXXIII. Ptolemies. Great builders. Temples in Nubia, at 
 
 Dakkeh, Kalabsheh, Debond, Dandour, especially 
 Philse ; in Egypt at Ombos, Esneh, Erment, in 
 detestable style, but of great magnificence. Orna- 
 mented Alexandria. At Thebes, Deir-el-Medyneh ; 
 little temple on the Birket-abou ; grand portal 
 north of Karnak ; portal between Luxor and tem- 
 ple of Chons ; little edifice by the side of temple 
 of Chons. Denderah — great unread inscriptions, 
 Edfou. Names also at El-kab, Motaneh (Esneh). 
 Akhmin, Behbit, near Mahakeh-el-Kebir, &c, &c. 
 The most beautiful part of the tomb of Apis at 
 Saqqara, and its gigantic sarcophagi. Rosetta 
 stone (British Museum). 
 
 XXXIV. Romans. 5400 after Menes. Pompey's pillar at 
 
 Alexandria. Adrian's Villa at Antinoe (Cheykh- 
 abadeh). Adrian's tomb to Antinous, the obelisk 
 Barberini at Rome was one of the obelisks and 
 sphinxes before its gate. The emperors built at 
 Kalabscheh, Dandour, Dakkeh, Philse, Edfou, Es- 
 neh, Erment, Denderah. 
 
 25 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Words for God, Spirit, Angel, Devil, in the various langu 
 
 A. I. 
 
 B. I. 
 
 II. 
 III. 
 
 VII. 
 
 vii : 
 
 IV. 9. 
 
 V. 10. 
 
 VI. 11. 
 
 VII. 12. 
 
 VIII. 13, 
 
 C. I. 14. 
 
 II. 15. 
 
 16. 
 
 III. 17. 
 
 IV. 18. 
 19. 
 
 V. 20. 
 21. 
 22. 
 23. 
 24. 
 25. 
 26. 
 27. 
 28. 
 VI. 29. 
 
 40. 
 41. 
 42. 
 43. 
 44. 
 45. 
 46. 
 47. 
 48. 
 49. 
 50. 
 51. 
 52. 
 
 Vasconice 
 
 Finnice 
 
 Esthonice 
 
 Lapponice 
 
 Sueco-Lappo 
 
 Syrjaene 
 
 Permice 
 
 Votjachice 
 
 Ceremissice 
 
 Morduanice 
 
 Hungarice 
 
 Vogulice 
 
 Ostiachice 
 
 Hibernice 
 
 Cambrice 
 
 Armorice 
 
 Epirotice 
 
 Graece 
 
 Neo-Graece 
 
 Latine 
 
 Italice 
 
 Hispanice 
 
 Lusitanice 
 
 Gallice 
 
 Provineialiter 
 
 Catalaunice 
 
 Rhaetice 
 
 Valaebiee 
 
 Gothice 
 
 30. Teutoniee 
 
 Germaniee 
 
 Saxoniee 
 
 Neo-Sax. 
 
 Hollandice 
 
 Anglo-Sax. 
 
 Anglice 
 
 Frisice 
 
 Neo-Frisice > 
 
 Islandice "I 
 
 Suecice )■ b 
 
 Danice J 
 
 Slavonice 
 
 Russice 
 
 Illy rice 
 
 Slovenice 
 
 Bulgarice 
 
 Polonice 
 
 Bohemice 
 
 Sorabice 
 
 Borussice 
 
 Lithuanice 
 
 Lettice 
 
 *Jainco, Jinco, *Jaungoico 
 
 Ju mala 
 
 Jummal 
 
 Ibmel 
 
 Jubmel, Ibmel 
 
 Jen 
 
 (Jen) 
 
 (In mar) 
 
 Joma 
 
 Paz 
 
 Isten 
 
 (Tarom) 
 
 (Tor6m) 
 
 Dia 
 
 Duw, 
 
 Doue 
 
 TlepvTt 
 
 Gfos 
 
 Oeos 
 
 Deus 
 
 Dio, Iddio 
 
 Dios 
 
 Deos 
 
 Dieu 
 
 Diou, Dieou 
 
 Deu 
 
 Deus 
 
 Dumnezeu 
 
 Gub 
 
 Got, Kot 
 
 Gott 
 
 God, Got 
 
 God 
 
 God 
 
 God 
 
 God 
 
 God 
 
 Goad 
 
 Gud 
 
 Gud 
 
 Gud 
 
 Bog 
 
 Bog 
 
 Bog 
 
 Bog 
 
 Bog 
 
 Buh 
 
 Boh 
 
 Deiws 
 
 Diewas 
 
 Deews 
 
 'Espiritu, *Megope 
 Henki 
 "YVaim 
 Vuaigqa 
 "Wuoigenes 
 Duh 
 (*Zyn) 
 
 *(Zyn') *(Lul') 
 'Siiles 
 'Oime 
 
 Szellem, Lelek 
 *(Atta) 
 
 *(E P yt/), *(Ebyl') 
 Spiorad 
 Yspryd 
 Spered 
 2?rip"r 
 Hvev/na 
 Tlveu/ma 
 Spiritus 
 Spirito 
 Espiritu 
 Espirito 
 Esprit 
 
 Esprit, Esperit 
 Esperit 
 Spirt 
 Duh 
 Ahma 
 f A Atum, A Adum, Ahatui 
 ( Ahadum, Geist, Keii ! 
 Geist 
 Gest 
 Geest 
 Geest 
 Gast 
 
 Spirit, Ghost 
 lest, Gast, Gest 
 Gaest 
 Audi 
 Ande 
 Aand 
 Duh 
 Duh 
 Duh 
 Duh 
 Duh 
 Duch 
 Duch 
 Duch 
 
 Noseilis, Nuseilis 
 Dwafe 
 Gars 
 
.ECTUKE X. 
 
 )f Europe, as reported by Prince Lucien Buonaparte. 
 
 mgueru 
 
 Keli 
 
 jel 
 
 igel 
 
 igel 
 
 lgel 
 
 *Deabru, Demonio 
 
 Perkelet, Piru 
 
 Kurrat, Judas, Tigge, Kohn, Kohnrat, Pahharat 
 
 Baergalakka 
 
 Parkel, Paha innemi 
 
 Diavol, Bes 
 
 
 Kel'temas, Diavol, 'Saltan, 'Soi'tan 
 
 l 
 
 Diavol, 'Saltan 
 
 /al 
 
 Ordog 
 
 ngiol, Aingeal 
 
 Diabhal, Deamhan 
 
 ngel 
 
 Diafol, Diawl, Diafl, Cythraul 
 
 sd, El 
 
 Diaoul, Aeraouant 
 
 yyik' 
 
 TlaovSs, AyiaX', ~2arava, Acll/ulove 
 
 yygXos 
 
 Atd/3o\"os 
 
 yyeXos 
 
 Aia/3o\os, Aaifxwv, Aai/uioviov 
 
 Qgelus 
 
 Diabolus 
 
 agelo, Angiolo 
 
 Diavolo, Demonio 
 
 ngel 
 
 Diablo, Demonio 
 
 ajo 
 
 Diabo, Demonio 
 
 age 
 
 Diable, Demon 
 
 agi, Ange 
 
 ,, Demoni, Demonn 
 
 ngel 
 
 ,, . fi 
 
 angel 
 
 Giavel, Dimuni 
 
 a'ger, Angel 
 
 Diavol, Drak 
 
 jgilus, Aggelus 
 
 Diabaulus, Unhutya, -o, Skobsl 
 
 lgil, Engil 
 
 Diubil, Diufal, Tiefel, Tievei 
 
 igel 
 
 Tenfel 
 
 igil, Engel 
 
 Diufeal, &c, XJnhold 
 
 igel 
 
 Diivel 
 
 igel 
 
 Duivel 
 
 igel, iEngel, Angel 
 
 Deofol, Seneca, Sceocca, Scocca 
 
 igel 
 
 Devil 
 
 Uigel, Angl. 
 
 Diovl, Divel 
 
 gel 
 
 Dyvel, Deal 
 
 igil], Eingill 
 
 Djdfull 
 
 igel 
 
 Djefvul 
 
 igel 
 
 Djaavel 
 
 ggel 
 
 Diavol, Bes, 'Cert 
 
 agel 
 
 Djavol, Be's, Cert 
 
 igjeo 
 
 Djavao, Vrag, Hudoba 
 
 igel, Angele 
 
 Vrag, Hudie, Hudir, Zlodi, Zlodey, 'Cert 
 
 agel 
 
 Diavol, Bes 
 
 dot 
 
 Diabet, Czart, Bies, Bis 
 
 id'el, Angel 
 
 'Dabel, 'Cert, 'Das 
 
 tid'zel 
 
 Djabot, 'Cert 
 
 igels 
 
 Pickuls 
 
 igilas 
 
 Welnas, Szetonas, "VVelinas, Czartas, Befas 
 
 .gelis 
 
 Wels, Welns 
 
ERRATA. 
 
 Page 
 
 line 
 
 
 29 
 
 27 
 
 read obscene for obscure 
 
 62 
 
 20 
 
 „ Jurassic „ Durassic 
 
 95 
 
 9 
 
 „ Melanesians „ Milanesians 
 
 142 
 
 last 
 
 jj leti jj set 
 
 155 
 
 26 
 
 „ Nubia „ Numidia 
 

 '<*•♦• 
 
 MAR 1959 J) 
 
 tipuntJ lv* 
 
m 
 
 mi 
 dm 
 
 BBBtmwgfll 
 
 Hill 
 
 Hi 
 
 mm 
 
 HI 
 
 ■ii 
 
 ■I