its origin in a parent stock is rather a theoretical possibility than a state of things of which even the most dim and distant view is to be obtained." Thirty years, however, have, as I have said, now passed since Dr. Tylor gave expression to this splendid, though cautiously worded, anticipation—thirty years unparalleled, perhaps, in the revolutionary character of their results in every department of scientific research. And what I hive now to say comes practically to this—that, taking due account of these last thirty years of research, what was to Dr. Tylor but a "theoretical possibility" in 1865, is now, in 1891, a theoretical probability, which may, by 1895, be an accepted reality.
Now, it will no doubt be readily admitted that our theory of the Origins of Mythology must depend on a more general implicit or explicit theory of the Origins of Civilisation. I must here, however, confine myself to the special question of the Origins of Mythology. And hence I will only state the three sets of facts on which my general theory of the Origins of Civilisation is founded, and which, as leading to a new theory of those more general Origins, lead also, as I submit, to a new theory of those more special Origins with which we are here more immediately concerned.
The first set of facts are those which tend at least altogether to overthrow current notions—or I should rather say current commonplaces, which our actions constantly belie—about the Equality of Human Races. Once a Race is definitively formed by the thorough amalgamation of the various ethnical elements of which it is composed, it becomes, through Heredity, analogous to a Species, and is marked henceforth not only by the most extraordinarily persistent physical features, but by no less extraordinarily persistent moral characteristics and intellectual capacities. Not less, therefore, in intellectual capacities and moral characteristics than in physical features have Whites, from the earliest historical ages, been distinguished from Blacks; and, among the White Races, Aryans from Semites. Nay more. Though there is nothing we hear of more frequently in the School of Messrs. Spencer and Tylor than " Primitive Man", yet the fact is that, in the very earliest ages to which anthropological evidence goes back, we find at least two species of "Primitive Man". These are distinguished by Hamy and De Quatrefages as belonging
