ly
acquiesce in its use, and pass it by without comment, trusting that
the author understood himself when he adopted it, were it not that by
incidental references, and especially by his allusions to the legendary
literature of the Jews, Mr. Gladstone shows that he means more by the
title than it can fairly be made to express. An author who seeks to
determine prehistoric events by references to Kadmos, and Danaos, and
Abraham, is at once liable to the suspicion of holding very inadequate
views as to the character of the epoch which may properly be termed the
"youth of the world." Often in reading Mr. Gladstone we are reminded
of Renan's strange suggestion that an exploration of the Hindu Kush
territory, whence probably came the primitive Aryans, might throw some
new light on the origin of language. Nothing could well be more futile.
The primitive Aryan language has already been partly reconstructed for
us; its grammatical forms and syntactic devices are becoming familiar to
scholars; one great philologist has even composed a tale in it; yet
in studying this long-buried dialect we are not much nearer the first
beginnings of human speech than in studying the Greek of Homer, the
Sanskrit of the Vedas, or the Umbrian of the Igovine Inscriptions. The
Aryan mother-tongue had passed into the last of the three stages of
linguistic growth long before the break-up of the tribal communities
in Aryana-vaedjo, and at that early date presented a less primitive
structure than is to be seen in the Chinese or the Mongolian of our own
times. So the state of society depicted in the Homeric poems, and well
illustrated by Mr. Gladstone, is many degrees less primitive than that
which is revealed to us by the archaeological researches either of
Pictet and Windischmann, or of Tylor, Lubbock, and M'Lennan. We shall
gather evidences of this as we proceed. Meanwhile let us remember that
at least eleven thousand years before the Homeric age men lived in
communities, and manufactured pottery on the banks of the Nile; and let
us not leave wholly out of sight that more distant period, perhaps a
million years ago, when sparse tribes of savage men, contemporaneous
with the mammoths of Siberia and the cave-tigers of Britain, struggled
against the intense cold of the glacial winters.

Nevertheless, though the Homeric age appears to be a late one when
considered with reference to the whole career of the human race, there
is a point of view from which it ma