culture is the highest hitherto reached by mankind, and that the process of its development has been normal. The answer to the question whether our theory is equal to the task of explaining by its laws the phenomena of other civilizations, or whether in this its attempt it meets with insurmountable difficulties, affords an additional test of the correctness of the theory itself.

§ 104. It is undeniable, that the history of European culture is more varied and richer in its contents, and brings into full light a greater number of phases of special development than that of any other culture. It represents the influence of all those agencies, without any exception, which, either singly or in some variety of combination, explain the systems of other civilizations, and, besides, includes factors, peculiar to itself.

The consanguineous society, here, as everywhere else, gave rise to those primary social spheres, the traces and memorials of which are, without exception, discoverable in every human community, whether rude or cultured. Thus we find that the most ancient civilization affecting the course of that of Europe, namely, the Egyptian, the origin of which is shrouded in the impenetrable darkness of past ages, but even the remotest memorials of which indicate already a high level, presents, in the semi-mythical tradition of Egyptian kingship at the period of its foundation, the existence of the tribal and communal organisms at the very point of their transition into the condition of a conquering society. Besides, the distribution of the several tribes and communities, the ties connecting the various groups of kinship, the peculiarity of the adoration of animals, the character of the local religious rites, the worship of ancestors, the customs of marriage, and the prevailing public and private morals observable in ancient Egypt are all only referable to consanguineous associations -necessarily antecedent in date to the oldest monuments. The standard of these associations may be determined beyond a doubt, by relationship having been regarded solely from the female side, which can be only accounted for by

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community in woman, which had prevailed at some earlier period in kinships of a still remoter era, and by subsequent endogamous rules of marriage.

The institution of caste points, again, to a period of a tribal organization, hallowed by the sanctions of remote antiquity, gradually broadening in consequence of repeated conquests, but left comparatively undisturbed by external interference, and yet striving to rigorously seclude itself from foreign elements; whilst those flourishing cities, for which the Egyptians were celebrated in the eyes of foreigners as a matter of tradition as far back as the days of Homer, bear witness to the development of the communal scciety, although that development may have been somewhat onesided, and presented but little variety.

In like manner, we find this to be the case in all the empires and dominions of Western Asia. Its various populations, the Chaldæans, the Assyrians and Babylonians, the Lydians, the Phrygians, as well as the Semitic races, the Arabs, the Jews and the Phoenicians, and, finally, the Medes and Persians, who established their rule over all the rest, present, in their career, a picture of all the stages of development, from the rudest forms of the consanguineous society to the most elaborately-ordered organisms of the patriarchal society, and, again, from the forms of the tribal and communal society to that of the conquering society amassing wealth for consumption. They thus clearly prove that this course of development arises from human wants and circumstances of a general nature, and not merely from the peculiarities of any particular race or people. The opposite view, entertained with reference to the history of some of these populations, has its origin solely in the circumstance that, on the strength of accounts either dating from a more recent period, or modified to suit ulterior currents of thought, institutions and phenomena have been accepted as ancient and primitive, which, in point of fact, had assumed their shapes after a long course of development, and were the embodiment of results brought about by a higher degree of development.

This has especially been the case with the Jewish people, where the traditions of earlier periods had quite disappeared in the presence of the patriarchal organism, and where the religion, in a manner similar to that of the Persians, was marked by the peculiarity of belonging to a higher order than we can account for by reference to the level of the social circumstances with which we find it linked. This peculiarity is explained by the fact, that the religion of the Jews undoubtedly arose partly from the transplantation of doctrines belonging to a higher level of civilization, and partly owed its appearance of superiority to the circumstance, that the legends of the tribal religion of natureworship were subsequently invested with a moral and philosophical meaning foisted into them by a later age. We do not, however, among any of the above populations, excepting perhaps Persia, find the conquering society amassing wealth for consumption in such a perfect form as we do in Egypt. The reason is, that they were less favourably situated with regard to the conditions required for the anterior development of the communal organization, or that, if they did possess them, they had been prematurely deprived of them. The only exception to this, to be found amongst Semitic communities, is Carthage, the most vigorous offshoot of the Phoenician cities, the history of which runs parallel with that of the Greek and Roman communities, and the destinies of which fall under the same criterion is the destinies of the latter.

§ 105. A tendency to similar formations may be perceived in the Iberian, Celtic, Germanic and Slav populations; yet all of them were interrupted and modified at a comparatively earlier period by external civilizations of a higher order. The Iberians before the Carthaginian and Roman conquests, the Celts in Gaul and Britain up to the time of Roman rule, and in Scotland and Ireland far into the Middle Ages, had none of them advanced beyond that primitive stage of tribal society, when it is just emerging from the patriarchal form of the consanguineous society. The military and religious institutions, and those

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of property, all still bear the mark of a primitive consanguineous community. The Celtic law in generalunable as it is to define any relation of society, of power, or of dependence, or even the relation between teacher and pupil, without reference to the model of paternal rule -furnishes, in connection with other matters, such for instance as refer to procedure and property, most interesting particulars concerning those of its ancient institutions, the germs of which still survive in higher cultures, and which, under external circumstances similar to those surrounding their original development, again send forth shoots during the first period of the formation of feudalism, though lacking as yet, so to say, any definite shape. Nor did the Slavic communities show a much greater advance during the period intervening between the fifth and the tenth centuries, that is, until the period when other populations, in a state of higher development, began to assert a paramount influence over them. Here, too, during the tribal period, still we meet with house-and village-communities, pointing to the consanguineous tie, and which, with that wonderful tenacity, characteristic of the lower orders of organic beings and of social institutions alike, flourish anew, after the lapse of centuries, under the influence of such external agencies, as constitute a drawback to any development of a higher degree, but encourage the thriving of beings and institutions of an inferior order. On the other hand, we find the tribal society already established amongst the Teutonic populations on their entering the arena of history, although traces of even more. ancient formations of relationship through the female branch, and of consanguineous institutions, are not wanting there either.

1

The consecutive sequence of the phases through which these tribal societies passed, can be followed step by step from the time of Cæsar to that of Tacitus, and then again to Jordanes, Paulus Diaconus, and the Venerable Bede, with such exact particularity, as to make the vicissitudes of the Germanic tribes patterns of instruction, as it were,

by which to study and recognize the looseness of the ties binding together the primitive societies of local contiguity.

$106. The era of the communal state, again, presents itself in its full perfection in the history of the two great classical countries. Not as if, by any means, there would, in their case, be any difficulty in penetrating to the remote traditions of much earlier stages; for, owing to the abundance of data extant, especially with regard to Greece and, though to a somewhat lesser degree, with regard to Rome also, we are able to trace almost all the stages of their social formation back to their very beginnings. The memories of an utterly unorganized condition of sexual and communal relations, surviving in the myths and traditions, the isolated and half-patriarchal mode of life outside any wider social sphere conceived as the primeval mode of life from Homer to Plato and Lucretius, the legends speaking of the condition during the Golden Age,-in which we meet with the particular features of the most primitive era, mixed up and embellished with ideas born of poetical fancy and philosophical abstraction, and which, a thousand years later, gave rise to the theory of a supposed state of nature, -the legends relating to the societies of the Amazons, where the women were supposed to rule, and to the contest waged against the latter by Heracles and Theseus, the representatives of male supremacy-the interpretations of the mythical fables of Bellerophon, Edipus and Orestesthe traditions connected with each of the many cities of Greece and the explanations afforded to the initiated as to the mysteries and religious doctrinal propositions, all these bring forcibly before us the various phases of the consanguineous society amongst the Greek populations. With these peoples it would seem that, in consequence of the great extent of intermixture and migration, as well as of the continual intercourse with foreigners, the transition from an inferior stage into that of the tribal society was an immediate one, and the family hardly ever developed into the proper patriarchal society. The conscious application and artificial employment of the institutions of the organism of