uess
which tribes first broke away, and where again these wanderers
subdivided, and at what stage of progress. Surely a fascinating science
this! And in its infancy! If its later development shall justify present
promise, it has still strange tales to tell us in the future.

THE RACES OF MAN

Turn now from this tracing of our means of knowledge, to speak of the
facts they tell us. When our humankind first become clearly visible they
are already divided into races, which for convenience we speak of as
white, yellow, and black. Of these the whites had apparently advanced
farthest on the road to civilization; and the white race itself had
become divided into at least three varieties, so clearly marked as to
have persisted through all the modern centuries of communication and
intermarriage. Science is not even able to say positively that these
varieties or families had a common origin. She inclines to think so; but
when all these later ages have failed to obliterate the marks of
difference, what far longer period of separation must have been required
to establish them!

These three clearly outlined families of the whites are the Hamites, of
whom the Egyptians are the best-known type; the Semites, as represented
by ancient Babylonians and modern Jews and Arabs; and the great Aryan or
Indo-European family, once called the Japhites, and including Hindus,
Persians, Greeks, Latins, the modern Celtic and Germanic races, and even
the Slavs or Russians.

The Egyptians, when we first see them, are already well advanced toward
civilization.[2] To say that they were the first people to emerge from
barbarism is going much further than we dare. Their records are the most
ancient that have come clearly down to us; but there may easily have
been other social organisms, other races, to whom the chances of time
and nature have been less gentle. Cataclysms may have engulfed more than
one Atlantis; and few climates are so fitted for the preservation of
man's buildings as is the rainless valley of the Nile.

[Footnote 2: See the _Dawn of Civilization_, page 1.]

Moreover, the Egyptians may not have been the earliest inhabitants even
of their own rich valley. We find hints that they were wanderers,
invaders, coming from the East, and that with the land they appropriated
also the ideas, the inventions, of an earlier negroid race. But whatever
they took they added to, they improved on. The idea of futurity, of
man's existence beyond the