1. The three classes of indications on which we rely for a knowledge of the advance of mankind previous to the period when authentic history comes to our aid—the researches of geologists among the accidental traces of man’s early activities, the ruins of ancient cities, and the study of the growth of language—unite in testifying to an extremely rude, feeble and childish condition of the earliest representatives of the race, and to a progressive improvement in knowledge and capacity, precisely like what occurs in the case of every individual of our kind. A fourth more general observation also confirms this view. This is the obscurity that covers the early ages. Aside from the Bible narrative, a cloud rests on the early history of every people. A long period passes before they begin to reflect, to look around and back toward their origin, and still another of groping thought and study before they are led to record their reflections and experiences. The necessities and habit of social intercourse give rise to language and gradually mature it; a long period would necessarily pass before the natural aversion to other than desultory labor, the increase of population and the habit of obedience to an authority requiring continued painful toil, would render the massive monuments of some of the earlier peoples possible, and before their attempts at architecture could mature and originate the elaborate ruins which time has not been able to destroy during so many centuries. 2. One of the most striking traits of pre-historic times is the simplicity and awkwardness that characterize childhood. The Chinese language has been remarked upon as showing the extremely infantile cast of mind among the people who formed and retained it to our times. Each word is a sentence, standing by itself originally; the tone and gesture give it much of its signification. It would seem as if its authors had never grown to the idea of an elaborated sentence. There is an average of eight words, spelled and pronounced exactly alike, for every sound used. There are, it is said, 212 characters pronounced _che_; 138 pronounced _foo_; and 1165 which all read _e_, and each letter is a word, a phrase and a sentence, and may be an adjective, a noun, or a verb, or all three together. The difficulty of expressing shades of meaning, or all that may be in the thought, where so much must be acquired before expression is possible, has kept the Chinese mind, in many respects, in a state of childhood, though they have preserved a stability of character and institutions nowhere else observed. The primitive mind and habits are maintained as if crystalized. The principle of decay, so universal elsewhere, would seem, by some singular process, banished from a vast nation, as it is in the human body in Egyptian mummies. The same feature is observable in a smaller degree among the Hindoos, and seems to have characterized the ancient Egyptians.