Читать книгу The Dawn of History: An Introduction to Pre-Historic Study - C. F. Keary - Страница 5

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The advance of pre-historic study has been during the last ten years exceptionally rapid; and, considering upon how many subsidiary interests it touches, questions of politics, of social life, of religion almost, the science of pre-historic archæology might claim to stand in rivalry with geology as the favourite child of this century; as much a favourite of its declining years as geology was of its prime. But as yet, it will be confessed, we have little popular literature upon the subject, and that for want of it the general reader is left a good deal in arrear of the course of discovery. His ideas of nationalities and kindredship among peoples is, it may be guessed, still hazy. We still hear the Russians described as Tartars: and the notion that we English are descendants of the lost Israelitish tribes finds innumerable supporters. I am told that a society has been formed in London for collecting proofs of this more than Ovidian metamorphosis. The reason of this public indifference is very plain. Pre-historic science has not yet passed out of that early stage when workers are too busy in the various branches of the subject to spare much time for a comparison of the results of their labours; when, one may say, fresh contributions are pouring in too fast to be placed upon their proper shelves in the storehouse of our knowledge. In such a state of things the reader who is not a specialist is under peculiar disadvantages for a discovery of what has been done. He stands bewildered, like the sleeping partner in a firm, to whom no one—though he is after all the true beneficiary—explains the work which is passing before his eyes.

It will not be thought a misplaced object to attempt some such explanation, and that is the object of the following chapters. And as at some great triumph of mechanism and science—a manufactory, an observatory, an ironclad,—a junior clerk or a young engineer is told off to accompany the intelligent visitor and explain the workings of the machinery; or as, if the simile serve better, in those cities which are sought for their treasures of art and antiquity, the lower class of the population become self-constituted into guides to beauties which they certainly neither helped to create nor keep alive; so this book offers itself to the interested student as a guide over some parts of the ground covered by pre-historic inquiry, without advancing pretensions to stand beside the works of specialists in that field. The peculiar objects kept in view have been, to put the reader in possession of (1) the general results up to this time attained, the chief additions which pre-historic science has made to the sum of our knowledge, even if this knowledge can be given only in rough outline; (2) the method or mechanism of the science, the way in which it pieces together its acquisitions, and argues upon the facts it has ascertained; and (3) to put this information in a form which might be attractive and suitable to the general reader.

The various labours of a crowd of specialists are needed to give completeness to our knowledge of primitive man, and it is scarcely necessary to say that there are a hundred questions which in such a short book as this have been left untouched. The intention has been to present those features which can best be combined to form a continuous panorama, and also to avoid, as far as possible, the subjects most under controversy. No apology surely is needed for the conjoint character of the work: as in every chapter the conclusions of many different and sometimes contradictory writers had to be examined and compared, and as these chapters, few as they are, spread over various special fields of inquiry.

It is to be hoped that some readers to whom pre-historic study is a new thing may be sufficiently interested in it to desire to continue their researches. For the assistance of such, lists are given, at the end, of the chief authorities consulted on the subject of each chapter, with some notes upon questions of peculiar interest.

The vast extent of the field, the treasures of knowledge which have been already gathered, and the harvest which is still in the ear, impress the student more and more the deeper he advances into the study. Surely, if from some higher sphere, beings of a purely spiritual nature—nourished, that is, not by material meats and drinks, but by ideas—look down upon the lot of man, they must be before everything amazed at the complaints of poverty which rise up from every side. When every stone on which we tread can yield a history, to follow up which is almost the work of a lifetime; when every word we use is a thread leading back the mind through centuries of man’s life on earth; it must be confessed that, for riches of any but a material sort, for a wealth of ideas, the mind’s nourishment, there ought to be no lack.