Romanes Lecture at Oxford.--L.F.A.

Throughout their early stages the movements of civilization--for,
properly speaking, there was no one movement--were very slow, were
local in space, and were partial in the sense that each developed
along but few lines. Of the numberless years that covered these early
stages we have no record. They were the years that saw such
extraordinary discoveries and inventions as fire, and the wheel, and
the bow, and the domestication of animals. So local were these
inventions that at the present day there yet linger savage tribes,
still fixed in the half-bestial life of an infinitely remote past, who
know none of them except fire--and the discovery and use of fire may
have marked, not the beginning of civilization, but the beginning of
the savagery which separated man from brute.

Even after civilization and culture had achieved a relatively high
position, they were still purely local, and from this fact subject to
violent shocks. Modern research has shown the existence in prehistoric
or, at least, protohistoric times of many peoples who, in given
localities, achieved a high and peculiar culture, a culture that was
later so completely destroyed that it is difficult to say what, if
any, traces it left on the subsequent cultures out of which we have
developed our own; while it is also difficult to say exactly how much
any one of these cultures influenced any other. In many cases, as
where invaders with weapons of bronze or iron conquered the neolithic
peoples, the higher civilization completely destroyed the lower
civilization, or barbarism, with which it came in contact. In other
cases, while superiority in culture gave its possessors at the
beginning a marked military and governmental superiority over the
neighboring peoples, yet sooner or later there accompanied it a
certain softness or enervating quality which left the cultured folk at
the mercy of the stark and greedy neighboring tribes, in whose savage
souls cupidity gradually overcame terror and awe. Then the people that
had been struggling upward would be engulfed, and the levelling waves
of barbarism wash over them. But we are not yet in position to speak
definitely on these matters. It is only the researches of recent years
that have enabled us so much as to guess at the course of events in
prehistoric Greece; while as yet we can hardly even hazard a guess as
to how, for instance, the Hallstadt culture rose and fell, or as to
the hi