John Clark Ridpath

If the beginnings of history are to be found in wide-apart regions of the earth at a date as remote as twenty centuries before the common era, how great must be the. distance of that childhood of the race and that early youth when the …

There was in the thought of antiquity a conception of evolution and a conception of creation. The two were blended. Man was made out of clay; but a supernatural being was the maker.

Many are the forms and applications of tradition....Almost every tribe and incipient people urged some extravagant claim to a prior possession of the country or place which they occupied....Though we are convinced that the world was …

It is as difficult to reach a common original for all existing linguistic forms as it is to find a common ancestry for the cave dwellers of Western Europe, the native Australians, the blubber-eating Esquimaux, and the flint-chipping …

The attempt to derive Hebrew and German from a single original is, to say the least, beset with as many difficulties as confronts the ethnologist in his effort to trace an Anglo-American to the same stock with an aboriginal Australian.

With what a sense of impotency must the primitive man have come to the seashore! Even after the age of boats and ships, how did he cling to the shores and inlets of the seemingly infinite deep!

Some of the West India islands were uninhabited at the close of the fifteenth century. The same circumstance has been noted in Polynesia. But as a general fact the world has all been inhabited, even from antiquity. More than this: the …

The rudimentary breasts of the male...seem to point to a condition still more primitive in the development of our race — to a time when even the sexes had not been differentiated the one from the other!

We may safely assume that the processes of the natural world which we observe around us are the same processes which have been giving form and feature to the surface of our planet through eons of past time.

We may not admit that the universe is an absurdity. We may not any longer suppose that our own small earth with its burden of interests, to us so overwhelming, is of any superior consequence in the universal scheme beyond what the size, …

He who studies the prehistoric career of mankind...is as the observer who, sitting by the window of the flying car, may see the moving spectra of distant landscapes appearing and disappearing among the shadows of the other side.

True history is the generalized result of all things that have been thought and done by men.

Above all other branches of knowledge, history sits and broods, with wings outspread as though the universe of things were pregnant and must bring forth under the shadow and power of thought.

It might be said, even at this late day, that the whole intellectual structure of the world rests on the concrete of tradition.

The story was from one point of view as variable as the fancies of the race were vague and their creative powers capricious. But from another point of view there were common features in the traditions which now gained currency, and these …

The origin of man was the keynote of the oldtime story. The primitive peoples...were ever busy with the theory of the genesis of the race....All agreed that some explanation must be given of the time, the place, and the circumstances of …

The various peoples differed greatly, some being comparatively taciturn, little disposed to communicate with their fellows, and others having a natural enthusiasm and gift in the commerce of speech. Some of the most intellectual and …

Primitive man was rife with conjectures and dim memories of his former state....Doubtless the former experiences of the half-conscious race were transmitted to him with his blood.

The historian in the ideal history is as little seen as Shakespeare is seen in the tragedy of Hamlet....The camera is not seen in the sun picture; neither are the easel, the brush, the hand, and the eye of the artist seen on his canvas.

As in the case of the individual, there comes to pass a time in the progress of kindred and tribe and race when consciousness appears. When this happens in the individual, he at once begins...to consider himself, to remember....In like …

Ethnology proceeds confidently by comparison, by hypothesis, by analogy, along the lines of growth and expansion until it reaches the grand discoveries and noble impulses which constitute the ripe fruit of the most recent epochs.

The line of division is made on the principle that the remains of what man has done shall fall to archaeology, and the remains of what man was to anthropology.

At many points palaeontological research touches the existence and conditions of man in the geological and archaeological ages. It considers him, indeed, as the culmination of the animal races whose antiquity is in the rocks and whose …

Geology takes up the investigation of planet life where astronomy leaves off. The latter deals with worlds in their relation to each other, and incidentally with world constitution. The former investigates the history of our own earth in …