So far for the character of the alterations upon the first edition. The new matter introduced, whenever it has not been of the nature of a correction of the old, has been aimed in the direction of making more clear the _processes_ through which the human mind has gone in the acquisition of each fresh capacity--more clear the extent to which each successive phase of pre-historic life has been built upon the preceding phase--more clear the process by which mankind seems to have gone through the stages of language-formation, and so forth. This has been the direction in which the editor has sought to improve upon the earlier edition: rather than in loading his pages by a greater accumulation of facts, to make the relationship of the various facts to one another plainer and more easy to remember; in one word, to appeal to the reason much more than to the memory. This is by no means the principle on which a great majority of _introductions_ and _manuals_ seem to have been written, but upon a principle almost the reverse of this. Finally, it has never been lost sight of, that the present volume is meant to leave the reader, so to say, at the door of history. It is not designed to be an _anthropology_, or a history of the growth of faculty among mankind at large, but only a _pre-historic study_, an account of the ascertainable doings and thoughts on the part of the people who have gone to make up the historic races of the world. Even the stone-age civilization is treated, not as a phase of culture in the abstract, but as an element of the growth in culture of the historic nations of our planet. C. F. KEARY. 200, CROMWELL ROAD, S.W. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.