[97] The Duke of Argyll ("Primeval Man," p. 30) says--"Knowledge, for example, or ignorance of the use of metals are, as we shall see, characteristics on which great stress is laid" (by the advocates of the "savage theory"). "Now, as regards this point, as Whately truly says, the narrative of Genesis distinctly states that this kind of knowledge did not belong to mankind at first.... It is assumed in the savage theory that the presence or absence of this knowledge stands in close and natural connection with the presence or absence of other and higher kinds of knowledge, of which an acquaintance with metals is but a symbol and a type. Within certain limits this is true." [98] Presuming total ignorance of writing--its invention at _any_ period seems to me much more marvellous than the discovery of printing after the invention of writing. For the rest we have seen that writing was known at an early period to the Chaldæans and Egyptians, and probably to the Chinese and Japanese, and to the Medians (ch. xii.) Plutarch tells us that a law of Theseus, written on a column of stone, remained even to the time of Demosthenes. Schlegel says[99]-- "I have laid it down as an invariable maxim to follow historical tradition, and to hold fast by that clue, even when many things in the testimony and declarations of tradition appear strange and almost inexplicable; or, at least, enigmatical; for so soon as, in the investigations of ancient history, we let slip that thread of Ariadne, we can find no outlet from the labyrinth of fanciful theories and the chaos of clashing opinion." [99] Phil. Hist. I propose to give a few instances of tradition, casually selected, which appear to me to be in illustration of this dictum of Schlegel's. Take, in illustration, the question whether mankind commenced with the state of monogamy. Not that there is any obscurity on this point in the Book of Genesis. It is indeed sometimes loosely said that we find instances of polygamy in patriarchal times; but, as our Lord said, it was not so in the beginning; and the Book of Genesis exhibits mankind as commencing with a single pair, and subsequently as re-propagated through a group of families, all represented to us at their commencement as monogamous. But if this highest testimony is discarded, and men gravely discuss whether or not they commenced with a state of promiscuity, the argument from tradition will go for as much as the argument from the analogy of circumstances and conditions as inferred from the existing state of savages, since this state, from our point of view, must have been the result of degeneracy.[100]