ditions. The earliest
inhabitants, to whom part of the folklore belonged, and the later
peoples, to whom part belonged, have both arrived at their ultimate
point of settlement in the country where we discover their folklore
after being in touch with many points of the world's surface. They are
both world-people as well as national people--they belonged to
anthropology before they came under the dominion of history. This
important fact is often or nearly always neglected. We are apt to
treat of Greek and Roman and Briton, of Cretan, Scandinavian, and
Russian, as bounded by the few thousands of years of life which have
fixed them with their territorial names, and to ignore all that lies
behind this historic period. There is, as a matter of fact, an immense
period behind it, reckoned according to geological time in millions of
years, and this period, longer in duration, more strenuous in its
influences upon character and mind, containing more representatives in
peoples, societies, and races than the later period, has affected the
later period to a far greater extent than is generally conceded or
understood. We cannot understand the later period without knowing
something of the earlier period.

There is more than this; for the dominating political races occupying
European countries to-day were, in most cases, preceded by a
non-political people. Thus, if we turn to Britain for illustration, we
find evidence of a people physically allied with a race which cannot
be identified with Celt or Teuton,[284] philologically allied with a
people which spoke a non-Aryan language,[285] archaeologically allied
with the prehistoric stone-circle and monolith builders,[286] and we
find custom, belief, and myth in Britain retaining traces of a culture
which is not Celtic and not Teutonic, and which contains survivals of
the primitive system of totemism.[287] These four independent classes
of evidence have to be combined if we would ascertain the true
position they occupy in the history of Britain, and it is perfectly
clear that, apart from general considerations, a direct appeal to
anthropology is necessary to help out the deficiencies of both history
and folklore. The questions involved in totemism alone compel us to
this course. It is questionable whether there is any existing savage
or barbaric people who are non-totemic in the sense of either not
possessing the rudimentary beginnings of totemism, or not having once
possessed a full syst