archaeology, much of which lies in the years since 1870, and nearly all
of it since 1815, the first thing which strikes us now is the frequency
and delicacy of its response to contemporary thoughts and aspirations. A
few of the greatest men have recognized this at the time. I quote from
Karl Ernst von Baer, the founder of comparative embryology, and in great
matters the master of men as different as Huxley, Spencer, and Francis
Balfour. He died in 1876, when political anthropology was still young;
but in his great book on Man he 'appeals to the experience of all
countries and ages, that if a people has power, and attempts wrongdoing
against another, it also does not omit to conceive the other as very
worthless and incompetent, and to repeat this conviction often and
emphatically' (_Der Mensch_, ii. 235). It is easy for us to dot the _i_
and cross the _t_ here; less easy perhaps to realize that what troubled
von Baer was the persistence of British and American ethnologists in the
polygenist heresy, which he traced (and rightly) to their reluctance to
treat their 'black brother' as if he were their relative at all.
Judgement in that ethnological controversy went by default, with the
victory of the North in the American Civil War; and in 1871 the lion lay
down with the lamb, even in London; inveterate foes in the Ethnological
Society and the Anthropological merging their fate in one
Anthropological Institute. In 1915 the reluctance of the 'tall fair
people who come from the north'--I borrow a phrase from Professor
Ridgeway--to fraternize with mere brunettes, beyond Rhine and Danube,
comes in its turn before the same tribunal as polygenism in 1862.

Our subject, 'Unity in Prehistoric Times', embraces three main topics:
(1) the unity of human effort and reason everywhere in Man's struggle
with Nature and with his Fellow-man; (2) the special conditions which
favoured or hindered unity of prehistoric culture in what has been
called elsewhere the 'north-west quadrant' of the Old-World land-mass
west of Ararat and the Median hills and north of Sahara, the cradle and
nursery of the modern 'western world'; and (3) the convergent lines of
advancement within that region, which can be traced through the
centuries before Roman policy let Greek culture penetrate almost as deep
into peninsular Europe as Alexander's conquests had opened to it the
inlands of the Near East.

When we speak of unity in human affairs, and particularly just n