Outlines of Universal History, Designed as a Text-book and for Private Reading. George Park Fisher
a later sub-division. In the first and most ancient section, the weapons and utensils, mostly of flint, were very rude in their manufacture. This was the Paleolithic Age, where there are no signs of habitations constructed by the hand, or of domesticated plants and animals. Men lived in caves, and their vestments were the skins of beasts. Yet, among their implements are found fragments of bone, horn, ivory, and stone, on which are carved in outline, often with much skill, representations of the reindeer, the bear, the ox, and of other animals. In the Neolithic period, there was a decided advance. Implements are better made and polished. There were domestic animals and cultivated plants. The lake-dwellings in Switzerland were well contrived for shelter and defense. Every hut had its hearth. It is probable that most of them were furnished with a loom for weaving. Fragments of pottery are found, and flax was grown and made into cord, nettings, etc. Stalls were constructed near the huts for the ox, the goat, the horse, sheep, and pigs. The lake-dwellers cultivated wheat and barley. The Bronze Age, when implements were made of copper or of a mixture of copper and tin, exhibits proof of decided improvement in various directions; and the Age of Iron, a still more marked advance. In the Swiss remains referred to are distinct traces of a transition from the Stone Age to the Age of Bronze, and then to the Age of Iron. The kitchen-middens, or shell-mounds, of Denmark belong exclusively to the Neolithic period. Where the transition was made from the Stone Age to the Age of Bronze, it apparently occurred in some cases by degrees, and peacefully; but sometimes by the incoming of an invading people more advanced. It should be observed that the lines of division between these periods are not sharply drawn: implements of stone continued to be used after the Bronze and even the Iron periods had been introduced. Nor were these several ages in one region contemporaneous with like conditions in every other. Moreover, it is not possible to find in all countries once civilized proofs of a passage through these successive eras. In Egypt, the evidences of a Stone Age are scanty. The most ancient human remains show that man in his physical characteristics was on a level with man at present.
Dr. Daniel Wilson, speaking of the age of the Flint-folk, says: "It is of no slight importance to perceive that the interval which has wrought such revolutions in the earth" [involving great geological changes and mutations of climate] "as are recorded in the mammaliferous drift, shows man the same reasoning, tentative, and inventive mechanician, as clearly distinguished then from the highest orders of contemporary life of the Elephantine or Cave periods, as he is now from the most intelligent of the brute creation. … The oldest art-traces of the paleotechnic men of central France not only surpass those of many savage races, but they indicate an intellectual aptitude in no degree inferior to the average Frenchman of the nineteenth century." (Prehistoric Man, pp. 33, 34.)
Literature.—Wilson, Prehistoric Man, etc. (2 vols., 1876); Joly, Man before the Metals (1883); Keary, The Dawn of History. The writings of E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (2 vols.), Anthropology, Early History of Mankind; his Art. Anthropology, Encycl. Britt.; Lubbock's Prehistoric Times, and his Origin of Civilization; Argyll, The Unity of Nature (1884); J. Geikie, Prehistoric Europe (1881); Lyell, The Antiquity of Man; W. E. Hearn, The Aryan Household; L. H. Morgan, Ancient Society.
THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.—Science does not furnish us with the means of fixing the date of the first human inhabitants of the earth. But its various departments of investigation concur in pronouncing the interval between the creation of man and the present to be far longer than the traditional opinion has assumed. For the growth of language and its manifold ramifications; for the development of the different races of mankind, physically considered; for the geological changes since the beginning of the Stone Age in the regions where its relics are uncovered; for the rise of the most ancient civilization in Egypt as well as in Babylon and China—it is thought that periods of very long duration are indispensable.
As to the date of the Neolithic man, or of the last section of the Stone Age, Professor J. Geikie writes: "Any term of years I might suggest would be a mere guess; but I have written to little purpose, however, if the phenomena described in the preceding chapters have failed to leave the impression upon the reader, that the advent of Neolithic man in Europe must date back far beyond fifty or seventy centuries." (Prehistoric Europe, p. 558.)
The chronology gathered from Genesis has been supposed to place the date of man's creation at a point far less remote. Usher's calculation, attached to the authorized English Version of the Bible, sets this date at 4004 B.C. The discussion of these questions of Scriptural chronology belongs to theology and biblical criticism. It may be observed here, however, that of the three forms in which Genesis is handed down to us—the Hebrew text, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Septuagint, or ancient Greek translation—no two agree in the numbers on which the estimate is founded. Hence Hales and Jackson, following the larger numbers in the genealogies of the Septuagint, place the date of the creation at a point about fourteen hundred years prior to that fixed upon by Usher.
ANCIENT AND MODERN HISTORY.
The periods of history are not divided from one another by merely chronological limits, according to intervals of time of a definite duration. Such a classification may be of use to the memory, but it is arbitrary in its character. The landmarks of history are properly placed at the turning-points where new eras take their start, whether the intervals between them are longer or shorter.
Of these natural divisions, the most general and the most marked is that between ancient and modern history. Ancient history not only precedes modern in time: it is distinguished from the latter as relating to a by-gone state of things. Modern history, on the contrary, deals with an order of things now existing. Between the two there is this line of demarkation.
History (with the exception of China and India, which require distinct consideration, as standing apart) begins with Egypt, and flows down in a continuous stream, until, in the fourth century A.D., the Roman Empire, into which the ancient civilized peoples were incorporated, was broken up. Then the new nations, especially the tribes of the Germanic race, took power into their hands; Christianity was established among them; out of the chaos of elements there emerged the European nations, with their offshoots—the peoples at present on the stage of action. Ancient history had its center in the Mediterranean. It embraced the peoples who dwelt on the shores of that sea, in the three continents, and the nations that were brought into relations with them. The Roman Empire, the final outcome of ancient history, was "the monarchy of the Mediterranean." With the breaking-up of the Empire, new races, new centers of power, a universal religion in the room of national religions, and a new type of culture and civilization, were introduced. Invaluable legacies were handed over from the past, surviving the wreck of ancient civilization. There is, however, a unity in history: the transition from the ancient to the modern era was gradual.
MEDIAEVAL AND LATER MODERN HISTORY.
Since the fall of the Roman Empire, there has occurred no revolution to be compared with the circumstances and results of that event. An old world passed away, and a new world began to be. Yet the student, as he travels hitherward, arrives at another epoch of extraordinary change—a period of ferment, when modern society in Europe takes on a form widely different from the character that had belonged to it previously. The long interval between ancient history and modern (in this more restricted sense of thes term) is styled the Middle Ages. Its termination may be found in the fifteenth century, and a convenient date to mark the boundary-line is the capture of Constantinople by the Turks (1453).
History thus divides itself into three parts:—
Part I. Ancient History, to the migrations of the Germanic Tribes (375 A.D).
Part II. Mediæval History, from A.D. 375 to the Fall of Constantinople (1453).
PART III. Modern History, from 1453 until the present.
Works on General History.—Ranke, Universal History; Ploetz, Epitome of Ancient, Mediæval, and Modern History (Boston, 1884); Weber, Weitgeschichte (2 vols.); Assmann, Handbuch d. allgemeinen Geschichte (5 vols., 1853–1862); by the same, Abriss d. allgem. Gesch. (in 3 parts); Oncken,