Problems such as these were bound to present themselves sooner or later to so reasonable a people as the Greeks. There is no doubt that they were already so familiar, in the fourth century, as to be almost obsolete _as problems_. Otherwise we should find more importance attached to them in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. The question before us now is rather, how early did they present themselves; what methods were applied to deal with them; and how far had Greek thought gone towards a solution, when Socrates stepped down from his Cloud-basket, and substituted psychology as the proper study of Mankind? To those who are familiar with the early phases of Greek physical inquiry, it is needless to repeat in detail how closely this movement was bound up, in its origin, with that great exploratory movement which littered the shores of the Mediterranean, from Tarsus to Tartessus, and from the Tanais to the Nile, with Greek factories and settlements, and brought all climates, lands, and varieties of men within the scope of one encyclopaedic vision; how the compilers of ‘Circuits of the World’ had surveyed all shores of ‘their own Sea’; how the specialists had treated ‘Air, Water, and Places’ (if I may antedate the later catch-title) in accordance with the principles of their respective sciences; and how, on the other limit of knowledge, Milesian chronologers and astronomers--the latter with no small glimpses into the storehouse of Babylonian observation--had begun to make just such maps of all time human and geological as Milesian cartographers were making of ‘all the sea and all the rivers’. Can we doubt that, in a movement of national inquiry, of this intensity and scope, the question was raised of the origin, the distribution, and the modes of subsistence of Man? Direct evidence of the existence of an Ionian anthropology has evaded us for the most part. Yet, earlier still, we have the proof that something of the kind was stirring. Hesiod presents us already with a standard scheme of archaeology in which Ages of Gold, Silver, and Bronze succeed each other, classified by their respective artefacts, and succeeded, first by an Age of Heroes--an anomaly, partly of Homeric authority, partly genuine tradition of the Sea Raids and the Minoan _débâcle_--and then by an Age of Iron. More than this, the observation that primitive Man was a forest-dweller, who grew no corn, and subsisted on acorns and beech mast, presumes observation, and inference besides, which were perhaps obvious enough among men of the Balkan fringe, ancient and modern; but at the same time betrays a reasonable interest, and an eye for essentials, which are far beyond the average of archaic or barbarian speculation as to human origins.