The last seventy or eighty years have seen a vast increase in our materials, with a corresponding widening of the conception of what a History of the World should be. Accordingly, the time for trying to produce one upon a new plan and enlarged scale seems to have arrived; not, indeed, that the years to come will not continue to add to the historian’s resources, but that those resources have recently become so much ampler than they have ever been before that the moment may be deemed auspicious for a new departure. The nineteenth century was marked by three changes of the utmost consequence for the writing of history. [Illustration: THE WORLD AS KNOWN TO ITS FIRST HISTORIAN The world as known to Herodotus is shown by the white part of this map, indicating the limited range of ancient geographical knowledge. ] [Sidenote: New Material and New Methods] That century, in the first place, has enormously widened our knowledge of the times hitherto called prehistoric. The discovery of methods for deciphering the inscriptions found in Egypt and Western Asia, the excavations in Assyria and Egypt, in Continental Greece and in Crete, and to a lesser extent in North Africa also, in the course of which many inscriptions have been collected and fragments of ancient art examined, have given us a mass of knowledge regarding the nations who dwelt in these countries larger and more exact than was possessed by the writers of classical antiquity who lived comparatively near to those remote times. We possess materials for the study not only of the political history but of the ethnology, the languages, and the culture of the nations which were first civilised incomparably better than were those at the disposal of the contemporaries of Vico or Gibbon or Herder. Similar results have followed as regards the Far East, from the opening up of Sanskrit literature and of the records of China and Japan. To a lesser degree, the same thing has happened as regards the semi-civilised peoples of tropical America both north and south of the Isthmus of Panama. And while long periods of time have thus been brought within the range of history, we have also learnt much more about the times that may still be called prehistoric. The investigations carried on in mounds and caves and tombs and lake-dwellings, the collection of early stone and bronze implements, and of human skulls and bones found along with those of other animals, have thrown a great deal of new light upon primitive man, his way of life, and his migrations from one region to another. As history proper has been carried back many centuries beyond its former limit, so has our knowledge of prehistoric times been extended centuries above the furthest point to which history can now reach back. And this applies not only to the countries previously little explored, but to such well-known districts as Western Europe and the Atlantic coast of America.