But, even if it were true that savagery preceded civilization in Europe, such could not have been the case everywhere; for it is certain that civilization and culture of a comparatively high order were imported into Europe before the close of the Old Stone Age. The Hungarian Lake-dwellings show that culture of a high type existed in the New Stone Age. These two ages are regarded as prehistoric in Europe, though in America the Stone Age belongs to history. It is also possible that in Europe much of the Stone Age was coëval with the history of civilized nations, and that it may be coincident with, instead of prior to, the Bronze Age, which seems to have begun in Egypt, and which belongs unquestionably to history. And here we may be permitted to remark that history gives the lie to the evolutionary conceit that civilized man has arisen from a primitive state of barbarism. History begins almost contemporaneously in many different centers, such as Egypt, Babylonia, Chaldea, China, and Crete, about 5,000 or 6,000 years ago, and, as far back as history goes, we find the record of high civilizations existing side by side with a coëval barbarism. Barbarism is historically a state of degeneration and stagnation, and history knows of no instance of a people sunk in barbarism elevating itself by its own efforts to higher stages of civilization. Always civilization has been imposed upon barbarians from without. Savages, so far as history knows them, have never become civilized, save through the intervention of some contemporary civilized nation. History is one long refutation of the Darwinian theory of constant and inevitable progress. The progress of civilization is not subsequent, but prior, or parallel, to the retrogression of barbarism.