in time some of these grew into the custom of interclan mating, thereby learning for the first time in the human world the great lesson of experience, that in union there is strength; in this way some clans grew into tribes, while others were either absorbed or extinguished under the hard law of natural selection— and the vestiges and proof of this stage survive today among the leaf-wearing and rat-eating savages of southeastern Asia, savages whose gods are beasts and whose worship is debasing fear. In this stage the law of organization was maternal descent-for at the outset and long after, the mystery of paternity remained unsolved. With the growth of tribes along the fecund lowlands, some were forced into the adjacent uplands, and eventually into the higher mountains; the relief from tribal pressure brought partial surcease of strife, yet demanded harder peaceful labor, sharper shrewdness in the chase, greater activity of body and mind; so that those who would purchase peace bought at the cost of vigorous exercise, yet were in due time rewarded by the superior faculty born of stressful organic function. Incidentally those who pushed highest on the Titanic stairway leading to the Roof of the World breathed the more deeply and of a purer air; the hepatic activity required to throw off the miasmatic poisons of the coast diminished, and the respiratory activity required by longer journeying and steeper climbing increased in larger measure—and thereby the excess of pigment in skin and inner tissues was eliminated, and the face of the human forbear bleached to brown, to yellow, and at last to the tinted whiteness of standards which grew as the color changed. This was but one of the ways of human beautification, whereby prognathic jaws were retracted, arms shortened, legs straightened, and the hirsute covering cast off and concentrated to the feminine crown and masculine halo

but this most entrancing of all the lines. of human progress, measuring as it does the rise of young affection and the growth of human feeling, must be passed over.* Meantime strength grew with exercise and self-confidence with strength, until the hill tribesmen and the denizens of deserts made conquest of their animal contemporaries, slaying the fierce and taming the gentle, and so far made conquest of trees and rocks as to utilize them for tools and utensils; and as self-confidence grew, fear and worship were withdrawn from visible beasts, from tangible trees and rocks. and rivers, and were concentrated on the remoter mysteries of sun and stormthough these were long personified as superpotent animals. Meantime, too, the problem of paternity was solved, and the law was so reconstructed as to cluster about paternal relationship. This stage in the development of the Asian people is represented today by some of the hill tribes of India, some of the remoter folk of Thibet, some of the groups about Lake Baikal; it is represented also by the world's best-known records of patriarchy in olden times.

The meaningful feature of the growth from savage clan to patriarchal tribe thus outlined is its spontaneity, its necessity; for, with the given conditions of organic structure and budding intelligence, the way from savagery to barbarism is certain and sure as the growth of the plant from its seed, as the development of the insect from egg to larva, as the flow of a river formed by highland tributaries on its way to the sea. Herein lies the lesson of the special usefulness of the great culture-phases in the classification of mankind; they may be lik

*The subject may be pursued in “The Trend of Human Progress," American Anthropolo gist, n. s., vol. 1, 1899, pp. 415-418, and in

The Seri Indians," Seventeenth Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, part 1, 1898, especially pp. 154-163, 279–287.

ened to the insect stages of ovum, larva, pupa, imago; they may succeed more swiftly or linger longer in coming, but under natural conditions they must follow their established order of growth, unless interrupted by the extinction of the stock. Nor is it to be supposed that the stages are hypothetic or uncertain; for their definition rests on the sum of observed facts not only of Asian peoples but of those of all the world.

THE RISE OF NATIONS

Now the hill tribes of Asia at first developed faster than those of the shorelands, and sent branches or isolated colonies in all directions; one of the earliest,, and in all respects the most noteworthy, of the human streams trickled westward through the passes of the Caucasus and over the sands of Suez, to grow gradually into the world's greatest peoples; another branch apparently crept around the western flanks of the Pamir, and then filtered eastward to form the tribes of the Middle Kingdom, to displace the earlier comers by more easterly routes, and to grow at last into the world's most populous empire; still other rivulets flowed northward even unto the shores of the Arctic; while some of the strongest streams of blood and culture ebbed again toward the Indian lowlands, sweeping the most sluggish indigenes westward to the Dark Continent (where they doubtless foregathered with local groups) and eastward into Malacca and the great archipelago stretching thence to Australia. Yet not all of the indigenes were displaced; enough still remain to form that stratified series of peoples and cultures described by Professor Morse Stephens and defined by the world's most striking examples of race-sense-for, in spite of the economic factors, the castes of India find their roots in racial antipathies.

The story of the growth of intertribal

commerce, of the Alexandrian invasion, and of the pushing of Asian influence into Europe has already been told by one of us; the story of the welding of Mongolian tribes into a nation and empire, and of the westerly crusade aimed for Christianity but content to stop at Buddhism, has been told by another; † the story of slow confederation among the tribes of India, and of more rapid national assimilation under the influence of alien empire, has also been told; ‡ while the story of the absorption of those northern tribes occupying the world's greatest woodland and tundra by one of the foremost world-powers is still fresh in mind.§ So these events and episodes of Asian development, important though they be, may be passed

over.

HUMAN ANTIQUITY IN ASIA

The developmental outline of human Asia would be incomplete without some intimation as to the relative antiquity of mankind on the great continent and elsewhere. Fortunately the geologic estimate is made definite for Asia, and for other lands as well, by the finding of the fossil prototype, Pithecanthropus, in late Pliocene deposits; and so far as definite knowledge goes this forms the geologic and archeologic datum-point for the world. The archeologic record is consistent with that of geology, in so far as the time-measures of the two sciences are commensurate; the partly traditional history of China runs more than fifty centuries into the past, yet begins

* Dr. Talcott Williams on Western Asia; printed in this volume as The Link Relations of Southwestern Asia."

† Hon. John Barrett on Eastern Asia; printed in this volume under the title "China: Her History and Development."

Prof. H. Morse Stephens on Southern Asia; soon to be printed.

§ Prof. Edwin A. Grosvenor on Northern Asia; also soon to be printed.

with accounts of conquest over earlier peoples and with great eras* which must have begun far earlier still; the sacred books of India summarize several millenniums of history from the days when "the noble races had to struggle with the low-caste tribes, people of black complexion and flat nose, and even with the Anasikas, demons, and monkeys," up to modern centuries-and even at this beginning there were long eras, like the Kali-yug, implying traditional preservation of observations for millenniums already past; and throughout southwestern Asia and Egypt ruin is superposed on ruin, and the later ruins are so identified by records of fifty centuries and more of history as to indicate an occupation of certainly 80 to 100, and probably 150 to 200, centuries from the beginning to the present. The historical record of human Asia is long, very long; the archeologic record runs a long way farther into the past through a succession of relics and ruins beyond

* Chinese chronologers reckon their history by dynasties running back to the era of Yao, beginning B. C. 2397. Still more impressive are their natural time units; for not only were the Chinese astronomers familiar with the lunisolar period (or eclipse cycle) of 7,421 lunations or 600 years, known as the Chaldean naros, long before the cycle was recognized in the west, but they conjoined this with an arbitrary period of 60 days to form the Chinese Great Year of 57,105 lunations, or 4,617 years (Bibliographie générale de l'Astronomie, par J. C. Houzeau et A. Lancaster, tome premier, première partie, 1887 [Introduction], p. 95; cf. "Comparative Chronology,' American Anthropologist, vol. v, 1892, pp. 327-330).

compare in Europe or Africa, immeasurably beyond the earliest human traces of the western world.

So, it is just to consider Asia the cradle of humanity; within her ample borders the earliest races sprang, over her shorelands and uplands the earlier culture-stages were developed, and from her plains and mountains all other lands were at least partly peopled. More than this; Asia witnessed within her own borders the natural growth of nations from crude confederacy at the beginning of barbarism to brilliant empire. and still more; Asia illumined the world with its brightest examples of ennobling faith, from the crude shamanism and Shintoism that did good service in their time, through higher and higher stages to the Golden Rule of Confucius in the Far East, to the Light of Asia in the great midland, and at last to the Light of the World in far western Palestine.

THE WORLD'S DEBT TO ASIA

Yea,

On the whole, when the Continent of continents is fairly viewed in her length and fullness of history as in her breadth and wealth of land, Asia must be held at once the cradle of humanity, the birthplace of nations, the nursery of the world's religions; and all right-thinking men must hope that the debt of the western world to the queenly continent will be paid in full measure, and in peace and good-will to the men of ancient lineage, whether their skins be brown or yellow.

W

HATEVER test, therefore, we adopt, whether we regard the differences of precipitation, weather, or plants, whether we trace the distribution of species or the wanderings of the human race-only a degree less unconsciously flowing in the channels made by the invisible walls of temperature, rain, elevation, and their joint product in the vegetable and animal world-we reach at last in man the same distribution of life more highly organized in urban conditions on the east and west, with a narrow linked region connecting them, between vast northern and southern spaces. In these the rigor or the vigor of climate and the perpetual conflict of continental areas develop single, dominant, destructive, or exclusive types, as the ocean spaces the shark, once absent from seas like the Mediterranean. The effect of this on warfare in northern Asia is perhaps best illustrated by the differing arrow release to which that observant and ingenious ethnologist, Prof. E. S. Morse, long since drew attention. As we pass from the simple primary thumb and forefinger release of the savage to the three-finger release of the Mediterranean races and on to the thumb ring of the Mongolian arrow release, we are passing through a successive development in missile weapons, of which the last represents the strongest and shortest bow and the weightier missile the highest development which this weapon has reached on horseback. Joined to the habit of concerted action and the capacity for wide rule which the plains races always develop, whether they be the Arab of the Southern plains,

the Turk or Tatar of the Northern plains, or even the Teuton of that brief analogue of the Riverine plains of Asia, which lies just north of the mountain masses of Europe, there exists, both in warfare and in predatory organization, an overmastering advantage in the races to the north and the races to the south.

If we ask why these riders have not ridden down the world about and broken this link between the development of the East and the West, it is because the bridge is protected by the dike created. by the elevations extending from the center uplifts of Asia and Europe, as Professor Suess has shown perhaps more clearly than any other physiographer. When the mountain ranges are reduced as they are in his diagrammatic map to elementary conditions, it is at once apparent that a continuous chain runs from the Pamir Dagh to the end. There the curving Carpathian line loses itself in the Noric Alps at the point where the Danube breaks through and the Celtic huts of Vindobona have been replaced by the roofs and towers of Vienna. the south this linked region is differently separated. The Pusht-i-Kuh and its continuing ranges, which for five millennia have separated Semitic and Iranic realms, lie to the north of the Euphrates River Valley, and nearly join the Armenian Taurus, which closes off Asia Minor. As a result, while the Arabian Patesi broke into this linked region in the fourth millennium before Christ, the Turkish Bey had not made his appearance south of the northern more defined dike until the close of the first millennium of our area, unless in

To

deed the Hittites were the early precursors of the Turks. These successive invasions of this region found there the earliest development of civilization. This, in its turn, was probably due to the early existence of the same trade which has through all modern history been the foundation of commercial prosperity and maritime empire.

It is not improbable that when all is known it will be found that the reason why the Nile and Euphrates early figure with settled institutions is because in these river valleys the slight advantage given by the opportunity to offer protection and gain tribute from the trade between the East and the West along this connecting region enabled ruler and city. to secure their primitive advance over other river valleys not less well situated in climate and product, but lacking the fertilizing fruits of this stream of trade. The sacred caravan which now leaves Cairo and passes along the Sinaitic Peninsula meets the Haj from Damascus in the north and defiles southward along the earliest of these trade trails, which goes through Mecca and ends in Yemen at Aden. The reason why the ancient sanctuary of the Caaba stands at Mecca is because the city is threaded on this route. The development of Islam itself accompanied a period when the closing of the Red Sea route and the interruption of trafic across Persia forced traders through Arabia and led to the attempt of Justinian to secure new trade connections with China north of the Black Sea by way of the chain of Nestorian mission stations.

When from any cause the sea routes are interrupted the land of Arabia flourishes and Arabian expansion comes. But the more ordinary trade routes are those which pass by the Red Sea or by the Persian Gulf by diverging caravan routes northwardly to Trebizond; next due east to Antioch; and third, more ancient, by Babylon, Tadmor, Damascus, to the Phoenician cities.

Along one or the other of these routes, like beads on a string for three millennia before Christ, slipped the seats of rule over this tract from the days of LuggalZaggizi, always following more or less closely the shift of trade, always maintaining relations due to their independent commercial share in the Mediterranean trade, first with Sidon and then with Tyre.

The relation of these routes to the Mediterranean becomes instantly apparent in the admirable study of the physiographic conditions of this historic sea, which I owe to Dr. Daniel C. Gilman. These routes both finally reached the Mediterranean at different points along that great fissure first suggested by Professor Suess, and more lately discussed by Mr. Gregory in his lucid, illuminating, and instructive work. What might be called the germinal point of our civilization is the place at which this great rift, the largest on the earth's surface, meets the great fold, also the largest of its character, which constitutes the backbone of the Eurasian mass. The link region owes most of its relations to the circumstance that it falls in the angle between the junction of these two great physiographic phenomena. The north-and-south uplift attending this rift, which began far south of Lake Tanganyika and ends in Lebanon (the fish of their streams retaining traces of their earlier connection) creates the eastern end of the Mediterranean, just as the Mediterranean, as a whole, is a depression on the southern side of the great Alpine fold. Along this great rift were developed, first Judaism, then Christianity, and last Mohammedism, three world religions, of which the last two today alone survive among all earth's faiths with the capacity for conversion still existent. To the north of the end of this rift lies Asia Minor, itself physiographically a part of the great Asian plain, opening toward it like a funnel between the