We have thus seen that, wherever we seem to lay hold of primeval savages who are supposed to represent to us the unchanged image of the primeval man, the evidence of their having been autochthonous in the places where we now find them is very weak, the proofs that they have never changed are altogether wanting; while geographical, physical, and linguistic considerations make it probable, though no more, that they originally came from more favored countries, that they were driven in the struggle for life into inhospitable climates, and that in accommodating themselves to the requirements of their new homes they gradually descended from a higher level of civilisation, indicated by their language and religion, to that low level in which we find them now. Some of them have sunk so low that, like individual members of the noblest families in Europe, they can no longer be reclaimed. Others, however, though shaken by sudden contact with the benefits and the dangers of a higher civilisation, may regain their former health and vigor, and, from having been retrogressive savages, become once more progressive in the great struggle for existence. But if in the cases just mentioned we feel inclined to recognise the influence of degradation, and if we class such races as the Fuegians, the Eskimos, the Bushmen and Hottentots, the Papuans and brown Polynesians, as retrogressive savages, the question arises where we can hope to find specimens of the progressive savage, or rather of the natural man, who might teach us something of what man may have been before civilisation completely changed him into an artificial being, forgetful of the essential purposes of life, and who feels at home no longer in fields and forests, on rivers or mountains, but only in that enchanted castle of custom and fashion which he has erected for himself out of the unmeaning fragments of former ages? My answer is that after we have collected the primitive tools and weapons which lie buried beneath the abodes of civilised man, our best chance of learning some of the secrets of primitive civilisation is to study the sacred hymns and the ancient legends of India, the traditions embodied in the Homeric poems, and whatever has been preserved to us of the most ancient literature of the progressive races of the world, the Italic, Celtic, Slavonic, and Teutonic races. This of course applies to the Aryan race only. The Semitic races are represented to us in their progress from a nomadic to a more or less civilised life in the Old Testament, in the earliest ballads of the Arabs, and in passages scattered in the inscriptions of Assyrians, Babylonians, and Phœnicians. China too in its ancient literature allows us an insight into the age of a nascent society, while Egypt discloses to us the most ancient of all civilisations, which can boast of a literature at a time when the very idea of writing was as yet unknown to all other nations.