RESEARCHES
INTO THE
EARLY HISTORY, OF MANKIND
AND THE
DEVELOPMENT OF CIVILIZATION. <...> IN studying the phenomena of knowledge and art, religion and
mythology, law and custom, and the rest of the complex whole
which We call Civilization, it is not enough to have in View the
more advanced races, and to know their history so far as direct
records have preserved it for us. <...> To take а. trivial instance, the statement is true enough as it stands, that the women of modern
Europe mutilate their ears to hang jewels in them, but the
reason of their doing so is not to he fully found in the circumstances among which we are living now. <...> It is indeed hardly too much to say that Civilization, being
a process of long and complex growth, can only be thoroughly
understood when studied through its entire range ; that the
past is continually needed to explain the present, and the whole
to explain the part. Ð feeling of this may account in some
measure for the eager curiosity which is felt for descriptions of
the life and habits of strange and ancient races, in Cook’s Voyages, Catlin’s ‘North American Indians,’ Prescott’s ‘Mexico’
and ‘Peru,’ even i.u the meagre details which antiquaries have
succeeded in recovering of the lives of the Lake-dwellers of
Switzerland and the Reindeer Tribes of Central France. <...> Though, however, the Early History of Man is felt to be
an attractive subject, and great masses of the materials needed
for Working it out have long been forthcoming, they have as
yet been turned to but little account. <...> The opinion that the
use of facts is to illustrate theories, the confusion between
History and Mythology, which is only now being partly cleared
up, an undue conï¬dence in the statements of‘ ancient writers, whose means of information about times and places remote
from themselves were often much narrower than those which
are, ages later, at our own command, have been among the
hindrances to the growth of sound knowledge in this direction. <...> The time for writing a systematic treatise on the subject does
not seem yet to have come; certainly nothing of the kind is
attempted in the present series of essays, whose contents, somewhat miscellaneous as they are <...>