sical evolution that its adherents oppose and
belittle to the utmost every bit of evidence of any antiquity even for
the physical frame of man. We have, to say nothing of the rest of the
world, Egyptian civilization now pushed back 10,000 years, and (together
with others as we slowly uncover them) as far removed as ever from
barbarism, if not indeed growing greater as we go back; but we are not
allowed anything but apelike, half arboreal savages 50,000 years ago.
And yet every observed _fact_ shows us savage or worn-out races
everywhere throughout the world deteriorating and dying out, and nowhere
any savages progressing or, unaided by outside influence, developing
what we know as civilization. We see everywhere the rise and fall of
nations, races and civilizations, and their utter blotting out; and we
refuse to accept that process as a universal law through which the
destiny of the human race is working itself out. In fact, we do not seem
to believe that the human race has any destiny; it may have beginning
and an end, but no destiny.

And so although this modern scientific school began as a reaction
against the narrowness of theological limitations, both of time and
greatness, so hampered and hypnotized has our thought been by both, that
man is of nearly as little universal account with one as with the
other, and we find a seemingly ineradicable repugnance to admit that any
people had "developed" writing before the least possible time ago we can
fix it, usually this side of the year 1 of the Christian era. And thus
we have M. Terrien de Lacouperie's "450 _embryo_ scripts and
writings"--which another fifty years may show to be nearly as many
fragments of one or a few great stocks of ancient hieroglyphs. Of course
it is impossible to derive the American races or civilizations from the
Chinese, Phoenicians, Hittites, or any of the cultures of the other
hemisphere, if we limit the latter to what we know of their history
within the past two or three thousand odd years, and American
civilization to the past fifteen hundred years. The matter is somewhat
greater than that--just as man is somewhat greater than a fool of
natural caprice.

There is one point from which this question of American origins, at
least of American place in human society and civilization, can be
studied in its broader lines, even with what materials we have. It is
that of language in general. All these other matters we have touched
upon are necessary