Throughout much of Europe and Asia there were already in existence different civilizations in different stages of development; such were the Egyptian, the Chaldean, and farther west the great Minoan civilization, which in its Bronze Age was to ray out an influence from Crete all over the Aegean world. It may be that there was something static[2] in the very nature of these pre-Aryan cultures, or it may be that they were ageing and passing in the natural course of events; what is certain is that there was something dynamic, some organic, out-pushing quality in the waters of this Aryan spring. For these waters spread. They have been spreading over the world ever since that time, now quickly, now slowly, down into India and Persia, north to the Baltic, west over all Europe and the New World, until in the persons of the three Aryan explorers, Peary, Amundsen, and Scott, their waves have licked the poles. It appears to have been the tendency of the Aryan settler, whether he came as a conquering invader or as a peaceful immigrant, to obliterate more than he absorbed of the aboriginal culture on which he imposed himself. In this the Celts and Teutons who ages ago overran most of Europe appear to have resembled the English-speaking settlers who long afterwards almost annihilated the North American Indian with his gods and traditions. It is true that we English owe to this latter pre-Aryan race the ability to express just that shade of contempt which is conveyed by the word _skunk_, also the charming blend of whimsicality and reprobation crystallized in _mugwump_. But such survivals really only emphasize the extent to which, as the Aryan waters spread, the pre-Aryan past has been covered over. The past does indeed live in the language we speak and in those with which we are familiar, but it is the past of the Aryans. If we dig down far enough into the English language, we reach an old civilization flourishing somewhere round the banks of the Dnieper; of what was going on in these islands at that time we hear scarcely the faintest reverberation. There is little doubt that the ancient inhabitants of Western Europe as a whole differed from their Aryan successors in two important customs. They buried their dead, whereas the Aryans invariably used cremation; and they were organized in systems of matriarchies. Aryan culture is patriarchal to its very foundations. We may patronize our less fortunate neighbours, but we do not “matronize” them. Yet faint memories of such strange ways seem to have lingered on among the Aryans in the widespread legend of a race of Amazons who once dwelt in the lost continent of Atlantis, the western land, and in the rumour of mighty female warriors in pre-Celtic[3] Gaul, while the name of the River Marne (Matrona) is thought to be another relic of the existence in pre-Aryan Europe of a race of men who deified their trees and streams, and hoped, when they died, to be gathered to their mothers.