only in what is prehistoric. And this disaster has befallen a large
proportion of the learned who grope in the darkness of unrecorded epochs
for the roots of their favourite race or races. The wars, the
enslavements, the primitive marriage customs, the colossal migrations
and massacres upon which their theories repose, are no part of history
or even of legend. And rather than trust with entire simplicity to these
it would be infinitely wiser to trust to legend of the loosest and most
local sort. In any case, it is as well to record even so simple a
conclusion as that what is prehistoric is unhistorical.

But there is another way in which common sense can be brought to the
criticism of some prodigious racial theories. To employ the same
figure, suppose the scientific historians explain the historic centuries
in terms of a prehistoric division between short-sighted and
long-sighted men. They could cite their instances and illustrations.
They would certainly explain the curiosity of language I mentioned
first, as showing that the short-sighted were the conquered race, and
their name therefore a term of contempt. They could give us very graphic
pictures of the rude tribal war. They could show how the long-sighted
people were always cut to pieces in hand-to-hand struggles with axe and
knife; until, with the invention of bows and arrows, the advantage
veered to the long-sighted, and their enemies were shot down in droves.
I could easily write a ruthless romance about it, and still more easily
a ruthless anthropological theory. According to that thesis which refers
all moral to material changes, they could explain the tradition that old
people grow conservative in politics by the well-known fact that old
people grow more long-sighted. But I think there might be one thing
about this theory which would stump us, and might even, if it be
possible, stump them. Suppose it were pointed out that through all the
three thousand years of recorded history, abounding in literature of
every conceivable kind, there was not so much as a mention of the
oculist question for which all had been dared and done. Suppose not one
of the living or dead languages of mankind had so much as a word for
"long-sighted" or "short-sighted." Suppose, in short, the question that
had torn the whole world in two was never even asked at all, until some
spectacle-maker suggested it somewhere about 1750. In that case I think
we should find it hard to believe that t