PART II.. I.—Ethnography As Applied to Architectural Art.

I.—ETHNOGRAPHY AS APPLIED TO ARCHITECTURAL ART.

Ethnology, though one of the youngest, is perhaps neither the least beautiful nor the least attractive of that fair sisterhood of sciences whose birth has rewarded the patient industry and inflexible love of truth which characterises the philosophy of the present day. It takes up the history of the world at the point where it is left by its elder sister Geology, and, following the same line of argument, strives to reduce to the same scientific mode of expression the apparent chaos of facts which have hitherto been looked upon as inexplicable by the general observer.

It is only within the limits of the present century that Geology was rescued from the dreams of cataclysms and convulsions which formed the staple of the science in the last century; and that step by step, by slow degrees, rocks have been classified and phenomena explained. All that picturesque wildness with which the materials seemed at first sight to be distributed over the world’s surface has been reduced to order, and they now lie arranged as clearly, and as certainly in the mind of a geologist, as if they had been squared by the tool of a mason and placed in order by the hand of a mechanic. So it is with Ethnology. Race has succeeded race;—all have been disturbed, some obliterated—many contorted—and sometimes the older, apparently, superimposed upon the newer. All at first sight is chaos and confusion, and it seems almost hopeless to attempt to unravel the mysteries of the long-forgotten past. It is true nevertheless, in Ethnology, as in the sister science, that no change on the world’s surface has taken place without leaving its mark. A race may be obliterated, or only crop up at the edge of some great basin of population; but it has left its traces either as fossil remains in the shape of buildings or works, or as impressions on language or on the arts of those who supplanted the perishing race. When these are read,—when all the phenomena are gathered together and classified, we find the same perfection of Order, the same beautiful simplicity of law pervading the same complex variety of results, which characterise all the phenomena of nature, and the knowledge of which is the highest reward of intellectual exertion.

Language has hitherto been the great implement of analysis which has been employed to elucidate the affiliation of races; and the present state of the science may be said to be almost entirely due to the acumen and industry of learned linguists. Physiology has lent her aid; but the objects offered for her examination are so few, especially in remote ages, and the individual differences are so small, as compared with the general resemblance, that, in the present state of that science, its aid has not been of the importance which it may fairly be expected hereafter to assume. In both sciences History plays an important part: in Geology, by furnishing analogies without which it would be hardly possible to interpret the facts; in Ethnology, by pointing out the direction in which inquiries should be made, and by guiding and controlling the conclusions which may have been arrived at. With the assistance of these sciences, Ethnologists have accomplished a great deal, and may do more; but Ethnology, based merely on Language and Physiology, is like Geology based only on Mineralogy and Chemistry. Without Palæontology, that science would never have assumed the importance or reached the perfection to which it has now attained; and Ethnology will never take the place which it is really entitled to, till its results are checked, and its conclusions elucidated, by the science of Archæology.

Without the aid and vivifying influence derived from the study of fossil remains, Geology would lose half its value and more than half its interest. It may be interesting to the man of science to know what rock is superimposed upon another, and how and in what relative periods these changes occurred; but it is far more interesting to watch the dawn of life on this globe, and to trace its development into the present teeming stage of existence. So it will be when, with the aid of Archæology, Ethnologists are able to identify the various strata in which mankind have been distributed; to fix identities of race from similarities of Art; and to read the history of the past from the unconscious testimony of material remains. When properly studied and understood, there is no language so clear, or whose testimony is so undoubted, as that of those petrified thoughts and feelings which men have left engraved on the walls of their temples, or buried with them in the chambers of their tombs. Unconsciously expressed, but imperishably written, they are there to this hour. Any one who likes may read, and no one who can translate them can for one moment doubt but that they are the best, and frequently the only, records that remain of bygone races.

It is not difficult to explain why ethnographers have not hitherto considered Archæology of that importance to their researches to which it is undoubtedly entitled. We live in an age when all Art is a chaos of copying and confusion; we are daily masquerading in the costume of every nation of the earth, ancient and modern, and are unable to realise that these dresses in which we deck ourselves were once realities. Because Architecture, since the Reformation in the sixteenth century, has in Europe been a mere hortus siccus of dried specimens of the art of all countries and of all ages, we cannot feel that, before that time, Art was earnest and progressive; and that men then did what they felt to be best and most appropriate, by the same processes by which Nature works. We do not therefore perceive that, though in an infinitely lower grade, we may reason of the works of man before a given date, with the same certainty with which we can reason of those of Nature. When this great fact is once recognised—and it is indisputable—Archæology and Palæontology take their places side by side, as the guiding and vivifying elements in the sister sciences of Ethnology and Geology; and give to each of these a value they could never otherwise attain.

As may well be expected, however, when Archæology is employed to aid in these researches, results are frequently arrived at, which at first sight are discrepant from those to which the study of language alone has hitherto led scientific men. But this is no proof either of the truth or falsehood of the conclusions arrived at, or of the value or worthlessness of the processes employed. Both are essential to the question of knowledge, and it is by a skilful balancing of both classes of evidence that truth is ultimately arrived at.

It would be out of place to attempt in an introduction like the present anything approaching to a complete investigation of this subject. Nor is it necessary. The various ethnographic relations of one style to another will be pointed out as they arise in the course of the narrative, and their influence traced to such an extent as may be necessary to render them intelligible. But for the same reasons which made it expedient to try, in the preceding pages, to define the meaning of the term architecture and to point out its position and limits, it is believed that it will add to the clearness of what follows if the typical characteristics of the principal races of mankind with whom the narrative deals, are first defined as clearly, though as succinctly as possible.

As the object of introducing the subject here is not to write an essay on Ethnology, but to render the history of Architecture interesting and intelligible, it may be expedient to avoid all speculation as to the origin of mankind, or the mode in which the various races diverged from one another and became so markedly distinct. Stretch the history of Architecture as we will, we cannot get beyond the epoch of the Pyramid builders (3500 B.C.), and when these were erected the various races of mankind had acquired those distinctive characteristics which mark them now. Not long afterwards, when the tombs at Beni Hassan were painted (2500 B.C.), these distinctions were so marked and so well understood, that these pictures might serve for the illustration of a book on Ethnography at the present day. Nor will it be necessary in this preliminary sketch to attempt more than to point out the typical features of the four great building races of mankind. The Turanian, the Semitic, the Celtic, and the Aryan. Even with regard to these, all that will be necessary will be to point out the typical characteristics without even attempting to define too accurately their boundaries, and leaving the minuter gradations to be developed in the sequel.

The one great fact which it is essential to insist on here is, that if we do not take into account its connexion with Ethnography, the History of Architecture is a mere dry, hard recapitulation of uninteresting facts and terms; but when its relation to the world’s history is understood,—when we read in their buildings the feelings and aspirations of the people who erected them, and above all through their arts we can trace their relationship to, and their descent from one another, the study becomes one of the most interesting, as well as one of the most useful which can be presented to an inquiring mind.

II.—TURANIAN.

The result of recent researches has enabled the ethnographer to divide and arrange prehistoric man into three great groups or periods, which in Europe at least seem to have succeeded to one another; though at what time has not yet been determined even approximately; nor is it known how long any of the three subsisted before it was superseded by the next, nor how far the one overlapped the other, or indeed, whether, as was almost certainly the case, at some time all three may not have subsisted together.

The first is called the Stone age, from the rude race who then peopled Europe having no knowledge of the use of metals. All the cutting parts of their implements were formed of flint or other hard stones, probably fitted with wooden or bone handles, and used as tools of these materials.

These were succeeded by a people having a knowledge of the use of copper and tin, with the possession of gold, and perhaps silver. Their principal weapons and tools were formed of a compound of the two first-named metals; and their age has consequently been called the age of Bronze.

Both these were superseded, perhaps in historic times, by a people having a knowledge of the properties and use of Iron. Hence their epoch came to be distinguished by the name of that metal.

There seems no doubt but that the people of the Stone age were generally, if not exclusively, of that great family which we now know as the Turanian.

The race who introduced bronze seem to have been the ancestors of the Celtic races who afterwards peopled so large a portion of Europe.

The Aryans were those who introduced the use of iron, and with it dominated over and expelled the older races.

If any prehistoric traces of the Semitic races are to be found, they must be looked for in Western Asia or in Africa; they certainly had no settlements in Europe.

Further researches may perhaps at some future time enable us to fix approximative dates to these various migrations. At present we know that men using flint implements lived in the valleys of the Garonne and Dordogne when the climate of the south of France was as cold as that of Lapland, or perhaps Greenland; when the reindeer was their principal domestic animal, and the larger animals of the country belonged to species many of which had ceased to inhabit those regions before the dawn of history. On the other hand, we may assert with certainty that the climate of Egypt has not varied since the age of the Pyramid builders; and there is nothing in the history of either Greece or Italy that would lead us to believe that any remarkable alteration in the climate of these countries has taken place in historic times.

These questions, however, hardly come within the scope of the present work. The men of the Stone age have left nothing which can be styled architecture, unless we include in that term the rude tumuli of earth with which they covered the remains of their dead. It is also extremely uncertain if we can identify any building of stone as belonging certainly to the age of Bronze. All the rude cromlechs, dolmens, menhirs, &c., which usher in the early dawn of civilisation in Europe, belong, it is true to the earlier races, but seem to have been erected by them at a time when the Aryan races had taught them the use of iron, and they had learnt to appreciate the value of stone as a monumental record. This, however, was at a period long subsequent to the use of iron in Egypt and the East, and long after architecture had attained maturity; and its history became easily and distinctly legible in the Valley of the Nile.

The great feature in the history of the Turanian races is that they were the first to people the whole world beyond the limits of the original cradle of mankind. Like the primitive unstratified rocks of geologists, they form the substructure of the whole world, frequently rising into the highest and most prominent peaks, sometimes overflowing whole districts and occupying a vast portion of the world’s surface;— everywhere underlying all the others, and affording their disintegrated materials to form the more recent strata that now overlie and frequently obliterate them,—in appearance at least.

In the old world the typical Turanians were the Egyptians; in the modern the Chinese and Japanese; and to these we are perhaps justified in adding the Mexicans. If this last adscription stands good, we have at three nearly equidistant points (120 degrees apart) on the earth’s surface, and under the tropic of Cancer, the three great culminating points of this form of civilisation. The outlying strata in Asia are the Tamuls, who now occupy the whole of the south of India, and all the races now existing in the countries between India and China. The Turanians existed in the Valley of the Euphrates before the Semitic or Aryan races came there. The Tunguses in the north are Turanians, and so are the Mongols, the Turks, and all those tribes generally described as Tartars.

In Europe the oldest people of this family we are acquainted with are the Pelasgi and Etruscans, but the race also crops up in the Magyars, the Finns, the Lapps, and in odd broken fragments here and there, but everywhere overpowered by the more civilised Aryans, who succeeded and have driven them into the remotest corners of the continent.

In Africa they have been almost as completely overpowered by the Semitic race, and in America are now being everywhere as entirely overwhelmed as they were in Europe by the Aryan races, and in all probability must eventually disappear altogether.

Even if the linguist should hesitate to affirm that all their languages can be traced to a common root, or present sufficient affinities for a classification, the general features of the races enumerated above are so alike the one to the other, that, for all real ethnographic purposes, they may certainly be considered as belonging to one great group. Whether nearly obliterated, as they are in most parts of Europe, or whether they still retain their nationality, as in the eastern parts of Asia, they always appear as the earliest of races, and everywhere present peculiarities of feeling and civilisation easily recognised, and which distinguish them from all the other races of mankind.

If they do not all speak cognate languages, or if we cannot now trace their linguistic affinities, we must not too readily assume that therefore they are distinct the one from the other. It must be more philosophical to believe, what probably is the case, that the one instrument of analysis we have hitherto used is not sufficient for the purpose, and we ought consequently to welcome every other process which will throw further light on the subject.

RELIGION OF THE TURANIANS.

It is perhaps not too much to assert that no Turanian race ever rose to the idea of a God external to the world. All their gods were men who had lived with them on the face of the earth. In the old world they were kings,—men who had acquired fame from the extent of their power, or greatness from their wisdom. The Buddhist reform taught the Turanian races that virtue, not power, was true greatness, and that the humblest as well as the highest might attain beatitude through the practice of piety.

All the Turanians have a distinct idea of rewards and punishments after death, and generally also of a preparatory purgatory by transmigration through the bodies of animals, clean or unclean according to the actions of the defunct spirit, but always ending in another world. With some races transmigration becomes nearly all in all; in others it is nearly evanescent, and Heaven and Hell take its place; but the two are essentially doctrines of this race.

From the fact of their gods having been only ordinary mortals, and all men being able to aspire to the godhead, their form of worship was essentially anthropic and ancestral; their temples were palaces, where the gods sat on thrones and received petitions and dispensed justice as in life, and where men paid that homage to the image of the dead which they would have paid to the living king. They were in fact the idolators, par excellence. Their tombs were even more sacred than their temples, and their reverence was more frequently directed to the remains of their ancestors than to the images of their gods. Hence arose that reverence for relics which formed so marked a feature in their ritual in all ages, and which still prevails among many races almost in the direct ratio in which Turanian blood can be traced in their veins.

Unable to rise above humanity in their conceptions of the deity, they worshipped all material things. Trees with them in all times were objects of veneration, and of especial worship in particular localities. The mysterious serpent was with them a god, and the bull in most Turanian countries a being to be worshipped. The sun, the moon, the stars, all filled niches in their Pantheon; in fact, whatever they saw they believed in, whatever they could not comprehend they worshipped. They cared not to inquire beyond the evidence of their senses, and were incapable of abstracting their conceptions. To the Turanians also is due that peculiar reverence for localities made celebrated by great historical events, or rendered sacred by being the scene of great religious events, and hence to them must be ascribed the origin of pilgrimages, and all their concomitant adjuncts and ceremonies.

It is to this race also that we owe the existence of human sacrifices. Always fatalists, always and everywhere indifferent of life, and never fearing death, these sacrifices never were to them so terrible as they appear to more highly-organised races. Thus a child, a relative, or a friend, was the most precious, and consequently the most acceptable offering a man could bring to appease the wrath or propitiate the favour of a god who had been human, and who was supposed to have retained all the feelings of humanity for ever afterwards.

It is easy to trace their Tree and Serpent worship in every corner of the old world from Anuradhapura in Ceylon, to Upsala in Sweden. Their tombs and tumuli exist everywhere. Their ancestral worship is the foundation at the present day of half the popular creeds of the world, and the planets have hardly ceased to be worshipped at the present hour. Most of the more salient peculiarities of this faith were softened down by the great Buddhist reform in the sixth century B.C., and that refinement of their rude primitive belief has been adopted by most of the Turanian people of the modern world, and is now almost exclusively the appanage of people having Turanian blood in their veins. Even, however, through the gloss of their Buddhist refinements we can still discern most of the old forms of faith, and even its most devoted votaries are yet hardly more than half converted.

GOVERNMENT.

The only form of government ever adopted by any people of Turanian race was that of absolute despotism,—with a tribe, a chief,—in a kingdom, a despot. In highly civilised communities, like those of Egypt and China, their despotism was tempered by bureaucratic forms, but the chief was always as absolute as a Timour or an Attila, though not always strong enough to use his power as terribly as they did. Their laws were real or traditional edicts of their kings, seldom written, and never administered according to any fixed form of procedure.

As a consequence or a cause of this, the Turanian race are absolutely casteless; no hereditary nobility, no caste of priests ever existed among them; between the ruler and the people there could be nothing, and every one might aspire equally to all the honours of the State, or to the highest dignity of the priesthood. “La carrière ouverte aux talens,” is essentially the motto of these races or of those allied to them, and whether it was the slave of a Pharaoh, or the pipe-bearer of a Turkish sultan, every office except the throne is and always was open to the ambitious. No republic, no limited monarchy, ever arose among them. Despotism pure and simple is all they ever knew, or are even now capable of appreciating.

MORALS.

Woman among the Turanian races was never regarded otherwise than as the helpmate of the poor and the plaything of the rich; born to work for the lower classes and to administer to the gratification of the higher. No equality of rights or position was ever dreamt of, and the consequence was polyandry where people were poor and women scarce, and polygamy where wealth and luxury prevailed; and with these it need hardly be added, a loss of half those feelings which ennoble man or make life valuable.

Neither loving nor beloved in the bosom of his own family,—too much of a fatalist to care for the future,—neither enjoying life nor fearing death,—the Turanian is generally free from those vices which contaminate more active minds; he remains sober, temperate, truthful, and kindly in all the relations of life. If, however, he has few vices, he has fewer virtues, and both are far more passive than active in their nature,—in fact, approach more nearly to the instincts of the lower animals than to the intellectual responsibilities of the highest class of minds.

LITERATURE.

No Turanian race ever distinguished itself in literature, properly so called. They all possessed annals, because they loved to record the names, the dates, and the descent of their ancestors; but these never rose to the dignity of history even in its simplest form. Prose they could hardly write, because none of the greater groups ever appreciated the value of an alphabet. Hieroglyphics, signs, symbols, anything sufficed for their simple intellectual wants, and they preferred trusting to memory to remember what a sign stood for, rather than exercise their intellect to compound or analyse a complex alphabetical arrangement. Their system of poetry helped them, to some extent, over the difficulty; and, with a knowledge of the metre, a few suggestive signs enabled the reader to remember at least a lyric composition. But without a complex grammar to express and an alphabet to record their conceptions it is hopeless to expect that either Epic or Dramatic Poetry could flourish, still less that a prose narrative of any extent could be remembered; and philosophy, beyond the use of proverbs, was out of the question.

In their most advanced stages they have, like the Chinese, invented syllabaria of hideous complexity, and have even borrowed alphabets from their more advanced neighbours. By some it is supposed that they have even invented them; but though they have thus got over the mechanical difficulties of the case, their intellectual condition remains the same, and they have never advanced beyond the merest rudiments of a literature, and have never mastered even the elements of any scientific philosophy.

ARTS.

If so singularly deficient in the phonetic modes of literary expression, the Turanian races made up for it to a great extent in the excellence they attained in most of the branches of æsthetic art. As architects they were unsurpassed, and in Egypt alone have left monuments which are still the world’s wonder. The Tamul race in Southern, the Moguls in Northern India, in Burmah, in China, and in Mexico, wherever these races are found, they have raised monuments of dimensions unsurpassed; and, considering the low state of civilisation in which they often existed, displaying a degree of taste and skill as remarkable as it is unexpected.

In consequence of the circumstance above mentioned of their gods having been kings, and after death still only considered as watching over and influencing the destiny of mankind, their temples were only exaggerated palaces, containing halls, and chambers, and thrones, and all the appurtenances required by the living, but on a scale befitting the celestial character now acquired. So much is this the case in Egypt that we hardly know by which name to designate them, and the same remark applies to all.

Even more sacred, however, than their temples were their tombs. Wherever a Turanian race exists or existed, there their tombs remain; and from the Pyramids of Egypt to the mausoleum of Hyder Ali, the last Tartar king in India, they form the most remarkable series of monuments the world possesses, and all were built by people of Turanian race. No Semite and no Aryan ever built a tomb that could last a century or was worthy to remain so long.

The Buddhist reform altered the funereal tumulus into a relic shrine, modifying this, as it did most of the Turanian forms of utterance, from a literal to a somewhat more spiritual form of expression, but leaving the meaning the same,—the Tope being still essentially a Tomb.

Combined with that wonderful appreciation of form which characterises all the architectural works of the Turanians, they possessed an extraordinary passion for coloured decoration and an instinctive knowledge of the harmony of colours. They used throughout the primitive colours in all their elemental crudeness; and though always brilliant, are never vulgar, and are guiltless of any mistake in harmony. From the first dawn of painting in Egypt to the last signboard in Constantinople or Canton, it is always the same,—the same brilliancy and harmony produced by the simplest means.

In sculpture they were not so fortunate. Having no explanatory literature to which to refer, it was necessary that their statues should tell their whole tale themselves; and sculpture does not lend itself to this so readily as painting. With them it is not sufficient that a god should be colossal, he must be symbolical; he must have more arms and legs or more heads than common men; he must have wings and attributes of power, or must combine the strength of a lion or a bull with the intellect of humanity. The statue must, in short, tell the whole story itself; and where this is attempted the result can only be pleasing to the narrow faith of the unreflecting devotee. So far from being able to express more than humanity, sculpture must attempt even less if it would be successful; but this of course rendered it useless for the purposes to which the Turanians wished to apply it.

The same remarks apply to painting, properly so called. This never can attain its highest development except when it is the exponent of phonetic utterances. In Greece the painter strove only to give form and substance to the more purely intellectual creation of the poet, and could consequently dispense with all but the highest elements of his art. In Egypt the picture was all in all; it had no text to refer to, and must tell the whole tale with all its adjuncts, in simple intelligible prose, or be illegible, and the consequence is that the story is told with a clearness that charms us even now. It is however, only a story; and, like everything else Turanian, however great or wonderful, its greatness and its wonder are of a lower class and less intellectual than the utterances of the other great divisions of the human family.

We have scarcely the means of knowing whether any Turanian race ever successfully cultivated music to any extent. It is more than probable that all their families can and always could appreciate the harmony of musical intervals, and might be charmed with simple cadences; but it is nearly certain that a people who did not possess phonetic poetry could never rise to that higher class of music which is now carried to such a pitch of perfection, that harmonic combinations almost supply the place of phonetic expression and influence the feelings and passions to almost the same extent.

There is also this further peculiarity about their arts, that they seem always more instinctive than intellectual, and consequently are incapable of that progress which distinguishes most of the works of man. At the first dawn of art in Egypt, in the age of the Pyramid builders, all the arts were as perfect and as complete as they were when the country fell under the domination of the Romans. The earliest works in China are as perfect—in some respects more so—as those of to-day; and in Mexico, so soon as a race of red savages peopled a country so densely as to require art and to appreciate magnificence, the arts sprung up among them with as much perfection, we may fairly assume, as they would have attained had they been practised for thousands of years under the same circumstances and uninfluenced by foreigners. It is even more startling to find that the arts of the savages who inhabited the south of France, on the skirts of the glacial period, are identical with those of the Esquimaux of the present day, and even at that early time attained a degree of perfection which is startling, and could hardly be surpassed by any people in the same condition of life at the present day.

SCIENCES.

There is no reason to suppose that any people occupying so low a position in the intellectual scale could ever cultivate anything approaching to abstract science, and there is no proof of it existing. Living, however, as they did, on the verge of the tropics, in the most beautiful climates of the world, and where the sky is generally serene and unclouded, it was impossible but that they should become to some extent astronomers.

It is not known that any of them ever formed any theory to account for the phenomena they observed, but they seem to have watched the paths of the planets, to have recorded eclipses, and generally to have noted times and events with such correctness as enabled them to predict their return with very considerable precision; but here their science stopped, and it is not known that they ever attempted any other of the multifarious branches of modern knowledge.

We have only very imperfect means of knowing what their agriculture was; but it seems always to have been careful when once they passed from the shepherd state, though whether scientific or not it is not easy to say. On the point of artificial irrigation the Turanians have always been singularly expert. Wherever you follow their traces, the existence of a tunnel is almost as certain an indication of their pre-existence as that of a tomb. It is amusing, as it is instructive, to see at this hour an Arab Pacha breaking down in his attempts to restore the irrigation works of the old Pharaohs, or an English Engineer officer blundering in his endeavours to copy the works instinctively performed by a Mogul, or a Spaniard trying to drain the lakes of Mexico. Building and irrigation were the special instincts of this old people, and the practical intellect of the higher races seems hardly yet to have come up to the point where these arts were left by the early Turanian races, while the perfection they attained in them is the more singular from the contrast it affords to what they did, or rather, did not do, in other branches of art or science.

III.—SEMITIC RACES.

From the extraordinary influence the Semitic races have had in the religious development of mankind, we are apt to consider them as politically more important than they really ever were. At no period of their history do they seem to have numbered more than twenty or thirty millions of souls. The principal locality in which they developed themselves was the small tract of country between the Tigris, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea; but they also existed as a separate race in Abyssinia, and extended their colonies along the northern coast of Africa. Their intellectual development has been in all ages so superior to that of the Turanian races, that they have subdued them mentally wherever they came in contact with them; and notwithstanding their limited geographical extension, they have influenced the intellect of the Aryan tribes to a greater extent than almost any of their own congeners.

If anything were required to justify the ethnographer in treating the various families of mankind as distinct and separate varieties, it would be the study of the history of the Semitic race. What they were in the time of Abraham, that they are at the present day. A large section of them sojourned in Egypt, among people of a different race, and they came out as unmixed as oil would do that is floated on water. For the last two thousand years they have dwelt dispersed among the Gentiles, without a nationality, almost without a common language, yet they remain the same in feature, the same in intellectual development and feeling, they exhibit the same undying repugnance to all except those of their own blood, which characterised the Arab and the Jew when we first recognise their names in history. So unchangeable are they in this respect, that it seems in vain to try to calculate how long this people must have lived by themselves, separated from other races, that they should have thus acquired that distinctive fixity of character nothing can alter or obliterate, and which is perhaps even more wonderful intellectually than are the woolly hair and physical characteristics of the negro, though not so obvious to the superficial observer.

RELIGION.

From the circumstance of our possessing a complete series of the religious literature of the Semitic race, extending over the two thousand years which elapsed between Moses and Mahomet, we are enabled to speak on this point with more precision than we can regarding the doctrines of almost any other people.

The great and distinguishing tenet of this race when pure is and always seems to have been the unity of God, and his not being born of man. Unlike the gods of the Turanians, their Deity never was man, never reigned or lived on earth, but was the Creator and Preserver of the universe, living before all time, and extending beyond all space; though it must be confessed they have not always expressed this idea with the purity and distinctness which might be desired.

It is uncertain how far they adhered to this purity of belief in Assyria, where they were more mixed up with other races than they have ever been before or since. In Syria, where they were superimposed upon and mixed with a people of Turanian origin, they occasionally worshipped stones and groves, serpents, and even bulls; but they inevitably oscillated back to the true faith and retained it to the last. In Arabia, after they became dominant, they cast off their Turanian idolatries, and rallied as one man to the watchword of their race, “There is no God but God,” expressed with a clearness that nothing can obscure, and clung to it with a tenacity that nothing could shake or change. Since then they have never represented God as man, and hardly ever looked upon Him as actuated by the feelings of humanity.

The channel of communication between God and man has always been, with all the Semitic races, by means of prophecy. Prophets are sent, or are inspired, by God, to communicate His will to man, to propound His laws, and sometimes to foretell events; but in all instances without losing their character as men, or becoming more than messengers for the special service for which they are sent.

With the Jews, but with them only, does there seem to have been a priest caste set aside for the special service of God; not selected from all the people, as would have been the case with the casteless Turanians, but deriving their sanctity from descent, as would have been the case with the Aryans; still they differed from the Aryan institution inasmuch as the Levites always retained the characteristics of a tribe, and never approached the form of an aristocracy. They may therefore be considered ethnographically as an intermediate institution, partaking of the characteristics of the other two races.

The one point in which the Semitic form of religion seems to come in contact with the Turanian is that of sacrifice—human, in early times perhaps, even till the time of Abraham, but afterwards only of oxen and sheep and goats in hecatombs; and this apparently not among the Arabs, but only with the Jews and the less pure Phœnicians.

From their having no human gods they avoided all the palatial temples or ceremonial forms of idolatrous worship. Strictly speaking, they have no temples. There was one holy place in the old world, the Hill of Zion at Jerusalem, and one in the new dispensation, the Kaaba at Mecca. Solomon, it is true, adorned the first to an extent but little consonant with the true feeling of his race, but the Kaaba remains in its primitive insignificance; and neither of these temples, either then or now, derive their sanctity from the buildings. They are the spots where God’s prophets stood and communicated His will to man. It is true that in after ages a Roman Tetrarch and a Turkish Sultan surrounded these two Semitic cells with courts and cloisters, which made them wonders of magnificence in the cities where they existed; but this does not affect the conclusion that no Semitic race ever erected a durable building, or even thought of possessing more than one temple at a time, or cared to emulate the splendour of the temple-palaces of the Turanians.

GOVERNMENT.

Although no Semitic race was ever quite republican, which is a purely Aryan characteristic, they never sank under such an unmitigated despotism as is generally found among the Turanians. When in small nuclei, their form of government is what is generally called patriarchal, the chief being neither necessarily hereditary, nor necessarily elective, but attaining his headship partly by the influence due to age and wisdom, or to virtue, partly to the merits of his connexions, and sometimes of his ancestors; but never wholly to the latter without some reference at least to the former.

In larger aggregations the difficulty of selection made the chiefship more generally hereditary; but even then the power of the King was always controlled by the authority of the written law, and never sank into the pure despotism of the Turanians. With the Jews, too, the sacred caste of the Levites always had considerable influence in checking any excesses of kingly power; but more was due in this respect to their peculiar institution of prophets, who, protected by the sacredness of their office, at all times dared to act the part of tribunes of the people, and to rebuke with authority any attempt on the part of the King to step beyond the limits of the constitution.

MORALS.

One of the most striking characteristics in the morals of the Semitic races is the improvement in the position of woman, and the attempt to elevate her in the scale of existence. If not absolutely monogamic, there is among the Jews, and among the Arabic races where they are pure, a strong tendency in this direction; and but for the example of those nations among whom they were placed, they might have gone further in this direction, and the dignity of mankind have been proportionately improved.

Their worst faults arise from their segregation from the rest of mankind. With them war against all but those of their own race is an obligation and a pleasure, and it is carried on with a relentless cruelty which knows no pity. To smite root and branch, to murder men, women, and children, is a duty which admits of no hesitation, and has stained the character of the Semites in all ages. Against this must be placed the fact that they are patriotic beyond all other races, and steadfast in their faith as no other people have ever been; and among themselves they have been tempered to kindness and charity by the sufferings they have had to bear because of their uncompromising hatred and repugnance to all their fellow-men.

This isolation has had the further effect of making them singularly apathetic to all that most interests the other nations of the earth. What their God has revealed to them through His prophets suffices for them. “God is great,” is a sufficient explanation with them for all the wonders of science. “God wills it,” solves all the complex problems of the moral government of the world. If not such absolute fatalists as the Turanians, they equally shrink from the responsibility of thinking for themselves, or of applying their independent reason to the great problems of human knowledge. They may escape by this from many aberrations that trouble more active minds, but their virtues at best can be but negative, and their vices unredeemed by the higher aspirations that sometimes half ennoble even crime.

LITERATURE.

In this again we have an immense advance above all the Turanian races. No Semitic people ever used a hieroglyph or mere symbol, or were content to trust to memory only. Everywhere and at all times—so far as we know— they used an alphabet of more or less complicated form. Whether they invented this mode of notation or not is still unknown, but its use by them is certain; and the consequence is that they possess, if not the oldest, at least one of the very oldest literatures of the world. History with them is no longer a mere record of names and titles, but a chronicle of events, and with the moral generally elicited. The story and the rhapsody take their places side by side, the preaching and the parable are used to convey their lessons to the world. If they had not the Epos and the Drama, they had lyric poetry of a beauty and a pathos which has hardly ever been surpassed.

It was this possession of an alphabet, conjoined with the sublimity of their monotheistic creed, that gave these races the only superiority to which they have attained. It is this which has enabled them to keep themselves pure and undefiled in all the catastrophes to which they have been exposed, and that still enables their literature and their creed to exert an influence over almost all the nations of the earth, even in times when the people themselves have been held in most supreme contempt.

ARTS.

It may have been partly in consequence of their love of phonetic literature, and partly in order to keep themselves distinct from those great builders the Turanians, that the Semitic races never erected a building worthy of the name; neither at Jerusalem, nor at Tyre or Sidon, nor at Carthage, is there any vestige of Semitic Architectural Art. Not that these have perished, but because they never existed. When Solomon proposed to build a temple at Jerusalem, though plain externally, and hardly so large as an ordinary parish church, he was forced to have recourse to some Turanian people to do it for him, and by a display of gold and silver and brass ornaments to make up for the architectural forms he knew not how to apply.

In Assyria we have palaces of dynasties more or less purely Semitic, splendid enough, but of wood and sunburnt bricks, and only preserved to our knowledge from the accident of their having been so clumsily built as to bury themselves and their wainscot slabs in their own ruins. Though half the people were probably of Turanian origin, their temples seem to have been external and unimportant till Sennacherib and others learnt the art of using stone from the Egyptians, as the Syrians did afterwards from the Romans. During the domination of the last-named people, we have the temples of Palmyra and Baalbec, of Jerusalem and Petra: everywhere an art of the utmost splendour, but with no trace of Semitic feeling or Semitic taste in any part, or in any detail.

The Jewish worship being neither ancestral, nor the bodies of their dead being held in special reverence, they had no tombs worthy of the name. They buried the bodies of their patriarchs and kings with care, and knew where they were laid; but not until after the return from the Babylonish captivity did they either worship there, or mark the spot with any architectural forms, though after that epoch we find abundant traces of a tendency towards that especial form of Turanian idolatry. But even then the adornment of their tombs with architectural magnificence cannot be traced back to an earlier period than the time of the Romans; and all that we find marked with splendour of this class was the work of that people, and stamped with their peculiar forms of Art.

Painting and sculpture were absolutely forbidden to the Jews because they were Turanian arts, and because their practice might lead the people to idolatry, so that these nowhere existed: though we cannot understand a people with any mixture of Turanian blood who had not an eye for colour, and a feeling for beauty of form, in detail at least. Music alone was therefore the one æsthetic art of the Semitic races, and, wedded to the lyric verse, seems to have influenced their feelings and excited their passions to an extent unknown to other nations; but to posterity it cannot supply the place of the more permanent arts, whose absence is so much felt in attempting to realise the feelings or aspirations of a people like this.

As regards the useful arts, the Semites were always more pastoral than agricultural, and have not left in the countries they inhabited any traces of such hydraulic works as the earlier races executed; but in commerce they excelled all nations. The Jews—from their inland situation, cut off from all access to the sea—could not do much in foreign trade; but they always kept up their intercourse with Assyria. The Phœnicians traded backwards and forwards with every part of the Mediterranean, and first opened out a knowledge of the Atlantic; and the Arabs first commenced, and for long afterwards alone carried on, the trade with India. From the earliest dawn of history to the present hour, commerce has been the art which the Semitic nations have cultivated with the greatest assiduity, and in which they consequently have attained the greatest, and an unsurpassed success.

In Asia and in Africa at the present day, all the native trade is carried on by Arabs; and it need hardly be remarked that the monetary transactions of the rest of the world are practically managed by the descendants of those who, one thousand years before Christ, traded from Eziongeber to Ophir.

SCIENCES.

Although, as before mentioned, Astronomy was cultivated with considerable success both in Egypt and Chaldæa, among the more contemplative Turanians, nothing can be more unsatisfactory than the references to celestial events, either in the Bible or the Koran, both betraying an entire ignorance of even the elements of astronomical science; and we have no proof that the Phœnicians were at all wiser than their neighbours in this respect.

The Semitic races seem always to have been of too poetical a temperament to excel in mathematics or the mechanical sciences. If there is one branch of scientific knowledge which they may be suspected of having cultivated with success, it is the group of natural sciences. A love of nature seems always to have prevailed with them, and they may have known “the trees, from the cedar which is in Lebanon to the hyssop that springeth out of the wall, and the names of all the beasts, and the fowls, and the creeping things, and the fishes;” but beyond this we know of nothing that can be dignified by the name of science among the Semitic races. They more than made up however for their deficient knowledge of the exact sciences by the depth of their insight into the springs of human action, and the sagacity of their proverbial philosophy; and, more than even this, by that wonderful system of Theology before which all the Aryan races of the world and many of the Turanian bow at the present hour, and acknowledge it the basis of their faith and the source of all their religious aspirations.

IV.—CELTIC.

It is extremely difficult to write anything very precise or very satisfactory regarding the Celtic races, for the simple reason that, within the limits of our historic knowledge, they never lived sufficiently long apart from other races to develop a distinct form of nationality, or to create either a literature or a polity by which they could be certainly recognised. In this respect they form the most marked contrast with the Semitic races. Instead of wrapping themselves up within the bounds of the most narrow exclusiveness, the Celt everywhere mixed freely with the people among whom he settled, and adopted their manners and customs with a carelessness that is startling; while at the same time he retained the principal characteristics of his race through every change of circumstance and clime.

Almost the only thing that can be predicated of them with certainty is, that they were either the last wave of the Turanians, or, if another nomenclature is preferred, the first wave of the Aryans, who, migrating westward from their parent seat in Asia, displaced the original and more purely Turanian tribes who occupied Europe before the dawn of history. But, in doing this, they seem to have mixed themselves so completely with the races they were supplanting, that it is extremely difficult to say now where one begins or where the other ends.

We find their remains in Asia Minor, whence Ethnologists fancy that they can trace a southern migration along the northern coast of Africa, across the Straits of Gibraltar, into Spain, and thence to Ireland. A more certain and more important migration, however, crossed the Bosphorus, and following the valley of the Danube, threw one branch into Italy, where they penetrated as far south as Rome; while the main body settled in and occupied Gaul and Belgium, whence they peopled Britain, and may have met the southern colonists in the Celtic Island of the west. From this they are now migrating, still following the course of the sun, to carry to the New World the same brilliant thoughtlessness which has so thoroughly leavened all those parts of the Old in which they have settled, and which so sorely puzzles the purer but more matter-of-fact Aryan tribes with which they have come in contact.

RELIGION.

It may appear like a hard saying, but it seems nevertheless to be true, to assert that no purely Celtic race ever rose to a perfect conception of the unity of the Godhead. It may be that they only borrowed this from the Turanians who preceded them; but whether imitative or innate, their Theology admits of Kings and Queens of Heaven who were mortals on earth. They possess hosts of saints and angels, and a whole hierarchy of heavenly powers of various degrees, to whom the Celt turns with as confiding hope and as earnest prayer as ever Turanian did to the gods of his Pantheon. If he does not reverence the bodies of the departed as the Egyptian or Chinese, he at least adopts the Buddhist veneration for relics, and attaches far more importance to funereal rites than was ever done by any tribe of Aryans.

The Celt is as completely the slave of a casteless priesthood as ever Turanian Buddhist was, and loves to separate it from the rest of mankind, as representing on earth the hierarchy in heaven, to which, according to the Celtic creed, all may hope to succeed by practice of their peculiar virtues.

To this may be added, that his temples are as splendid, his ceremonials as gorgeous, and the formula as unmeaning as any that ever graced the banks of the Nile, or astonished the wanderer in the valleys of Thibet or on the shores of the Eastern Ocean.

GOVERNMENT.

It is still more difficult to speak of the Celtic form of government, as no kingdom of this people ever existed by itself for any length of time; and none, indeed, it may be suspected, could long hold together. It may, however, be safely asserted, that no republican forms are possible with a Celtic people, and no municipal institutions ever flourished among them. The only form, therefore, we know of as peculiarly theirs, is despotism; not necessarily personal, but rendered systematic by centralised bureaucratic organisations, and tempered by laws in those States which have reached any degree of stability or civilisation.

Nothing but a strong centralised despotism can long co-exist with a people too impatient to submit to the sacrifices and self-denial inherent in all attempts at self-government, and too excitable to be controlled, except by the will of the strongest, though it may also be the least scrupulous among them.

When in small bodies they are always governed by a chief, generally hereditary, but always absolute; who is looked up to with awe, and obeyed with a reverence that is unintelligible to the more independent races of mankind.

With such institutions, of course a real aristocracy is impossible; and the restraints of caste must always have been felt to be intolerable. “La carrière ouverte aux talens” is their boast; though not to the same extent as with the Turanians; and the selfish gratification of individual ambition is consequently always preferred with them to the more sober benefit of the general advancement of the community.

MORALS.

If the Celts never were either polygamic or polyandric, they certainly always retained very lax ideas with regard to the marriage-vow, and never looked on woman’s mission as anything higher than to minister to their sensual gratification. With them the woman that fulfils this quality best always commands their admiration most. Beauty can do no wrong—but without beauty woman can hardly rise above the level of the common herd.

The ruling passion in the mind of the Celt is war. Not like the exclusive, intolerant Semite, a war of extermination or of proselytism, but war from pure “gaieté de cœur” and love of glory. No Celt fears to die if his death can gain fame or add to the stock of his country’s glory; nor in a private fight does he fear death or feel the pain of a broken head, if he has had a chance of shooting through the heart or cracking the skull of his best friend at the same time. The Celt’s love of excitement leads him frequently into excesses, and to a disregard of truth and the virtues belonging to daily life, which are what really dignify mankind; but his love of glory and of his country often go far to redeem these deficiencies, and spread a halo over even his worst faults, which renders it frequently difficult to blame what we feel in soberness we ought to condemn.

LITERATURE.

If love and war are the parents of song, the bard and the troubadour ought to have left us a legacy of verse that would have filled the libraries of Europe; and so they probably would had not the original Celt been too illiterate to care to record the expressions of his feelings. As it is, nine-tenths of the lyric literature of Europe is of Celtic origin. The Epos and the Drama may belong to the Aryan; but in the art of wedding music to immortal verse, and pouring forth a passionate utterance in a few but beautiful words, the Celtic is only equalled by the Semitic race.

Their remaining literature is of such modern growth, and was so specially copied from what had preceded it, or so influenced by the contemporary effusions of other people, that it is impossible accurately to discriminate what is due to race and what to circumstances. All that can safely be said is, that Celtic literature is always more epigrammatic, more brilliant, and more daring than that of the sober Aryan; but its coruscations neither light to so great a depth, nor last so long as less dazzling productions might do. They may be the most brilliant, but they certainly do not belong to the highest class of literary effort; nor is their effect on the destiny of man likely to be so permanent.

ARTS.

The true glory of the Celt in Europe is his artistic eminence. It is perhaps not too much to assert that without his intervention we should not have possessed in modern times a church worthy of admiration, or a picture or a statue we could look at without shame.

In their arts, too,—either from their higher status, or from their admixture with Aryans,—we escape the instinctive fixity which makes the arts of the pure Turanian as unprogressive as the works of birds or of beavers. Restless intellectual progress characterises everything they perform; and had their arts not been nipped in the bud by circumstances over which they had no control, we might have seen something that would have shamed even Greece and wholly eclipsed the arts of Rome.

They have not, it is true, that instinctive knowledge of colour which distinguishes the Turanian, nor have they been able to give to music that intellectual culture which has been elaborated by the Aryans: but in the middle path between the two they excel both. They are far better musicians than the former, and far better colourists than the last-named races; but in modern Europe Architecture is practically their own. Where their influence was strongest, there Architecture was most perfect; as they decayed, or as the Aryan influence prevailed, the art first languished, and then died.

Their quasi-Turanian theology required Temples almost as grand as those of the Copts or Tamuls; and, like them, they sought to honour those who had been mortals by splendour which mortals are assumed to be pleased with; and the pomp of their worship always surpassed that with which they honoured their Kings. Even more remarkable than this is the fact that they could and did build Tombs such as a Turanian might have envied, not for their size but for their art, and even now can adorn their cemeteries with monuments which are not ridiculous.

When a people are so mixed up with other races as the Celts are in Europe,—frequently so fused as to be undistinguishable,—it is almost impossible to speak with precision with regard either to their arts or influence. It must in consequence be safer to assert that where no Celtic blood existed there no real art is found; though it is perhaps equally true to assert that not only Architecture, but Painting and Sculpture, have been patronised, and have flourished in the exact ratio in which Celtic blood is found prevailing in any people in Europe; and has died out as Aryan influence prevails, in spite of their methodical efforts to indoctrinate themselves with what must be the spontaneous impulse of genius, if it is to be of any value.

SCIENCES.

Of their sciences we know nothing till they were so steeped in the civilisation of older races that originality was hopeless. Still, in the stages through which the intellect of Europe has yet passed, they have played their part with brilliancy. But now that knowledge is assuming a higher and more prosaic phase, it is doubtful whether the deductive brilliancy of the Celtic mind can avail anything against the inductive sobriety of the Aryan. So long as metaphysics were science, and science was theory, the peculiar form of the Celtic mind was singularly well adapted to see through sophistry and to guess the direction in which truth might lie. But now that we have only to question Nature, to classify her answers, and patiently to record results, its mission seems to have passed away. Truth in all its majesty, and Nature in all her greatness, must now take the place of speculation, with its cleverness, and man’s ideas of what might or should be, must be supplanted by the knowledge of God’s works as they exist and the contemplation of the eternal grandeur of the universe which we see around us.

Though these are the highest, they are at the same time the most sober functions of the human mind; and while conferring the greatest and most lasting benefit, not only on the individual who practises them, but also on the human race, they are neither calculated to gratify personal vanity, nor to reward individual ambition.

Such pursuits are not, therefore, of a nature to attract or interest the Celtic races, but must be left to those who are content to sink their personality in seeking the advantage of the common weal.

V.—ARYAN.

According to their own chronology, it seems to have been about the year 3101 B.C. that the Aryans crossed the Indus and settled themselves in the country between that river and the Jumna, since known among themselves as Arya Varta, or the Country of the Just, for all succeeding ages.

More than a thousand years afterwards we find them, in the age of the Ramayana, occupying all the country north of the Vindya range, and attempting the conquest of the southern country,—then, as now, occupied by Turanians,—and penetrating as far as Ceylon.

Eight hundred years later we see them in the Mahabharata, having lost much of their purity of blood, and adopting many of the customs and much of the faith of the people they were settled amongst; and three centuries before Christ we find they had so far degenerated as to accept, almost without a struggle, the religion of Buddha; which, though no doubt a reform, and an important one, on the Anthropic doctrines of the pure Turanians, was still essentially a faith of a Turanian people; congenial to them, and to them only.

Ten centuries after Christ, when the Moslems came in contact with India, the Aryan was a myth. The religion of the earlier people was everywhere supreme, and with only a nominal thread of Aryanism running through the whole, just sufficient to bear testimony to the prior existence of a purer faith, but not sufficient to leaven the mass to any appreciable extent.

The fate of the western Aryans differed essentially from that of those who wandered eastward. Theoretically we ought to assume, from their less complex language and less pure faith, that they were an earlier offshoot; but it may be that in the forests of Europe they lost for a while the civilised forms which the happier climate of Arya Varta enabled the others to retain; or it may be that the contact with the more nearly equal Celtic races had mixed the language and the faith of the western races, before they had the opportunity or the leisure to record the knowledge they brought with them.

Be this as it may, they first appear prominently in the western world in Greece, where, by a fortunate union with the Pelasgi, a people apparently of Turanian race, they produced a civilisation not purely Aryan, and somewhat evanescent in its character, but more brilliant, while it lasted, than anything the world had seen before, and in certain respects more beautiful than anything that has illumined it since their time.

They next sprang forth in Rome, mixed with the Turanian Etruscans and the powerful Celtic tribes of Italy; and lastly in Northern Europe, where they are now working out their destiny, but to what issue the future only can declare.

The essential difference between the eastern and western migration is this—that in India the Aryans have sunk gradually into the arms of a Turanian people till they have lost their identity, and with it all that ennobled them when they went there, or could enable them now to influence the world again.

In Europe they found the country cleared of Turanians by the earlier Celts; and mingling their blood with these more nearly allied races, they have raised themselves to a position half way between the two. Where they found the country unoccupied they have remained so pure that, as their number multiplies, they may perhaps regain something of the position they had temporarily abandoned, and something of that science which, it may be fancied, mankind only knew in their primeval seats.

RELIGION.

What then was the creed of the primitive Aryans? So far as we can now see, it was the belief in one great ineffable God,—so great that no human intellect could measure His greatness,—so wonderful that no human language could express His qualities,—pervading everything that was made,—ruling all created things,—a spirit, around, beyond the universe, and within every individual particle of it. A creed so ethereal could not long remain the faith of the multitude, and we early find fire,—the most ethereal of the elements,—looked to as an emblem of the Deity. The heavens too received a name, and became an entity:—so did our mother earth. To these succeeded the sun, the stars, the elements,—but never among the pure Aryans as gods, or as influencing the destiny of man, but as manifestations of His power, and reverenced because they were visible manifestations of a Being too abstract for an ordinary mind to grasp. Below this the Aryans never seem to have sunk.

With a faith so elevated of course no temple could be wanted; no human ceremonial could be supposed capable of doing honour to a Deity so conceived; nor any sacrifice acceptable to Him to whom all things belonged. With the Aryans worship was a purely domestic institution; prayer the solitary act of each individual man, standing alone in the presence of an omniscient Deity. All that was required was that man should acknowledge the greatness of God, and his own comparative insignificance; should express his absolute trust and faith in the beneficence and justice of his God, and a hope that he might be enabled to live so pure, and so free from sin, as to deserve such happiness as this world can afford, and be enabled to do as much good to others as it is vouchsafed to man to perform.

A few insignificant formulæ served to mark the modes in which these subjects should recur. The recitation of a time-honoured hymn refreshed the attention of the worshipper, and the reading of a few sacred texts recalled the duties it was expected he should perform. With these simple ceremonies the worship of the Aryans seems to have begun and ended.

Even in later times, when their blood has become less pure, and their feelings were influenced by association with those among whom they resided, the religion of the Aryans always retained its intellectual character. No dogma was ever admitted that would not bear the test of reason, and no article of faith was ever assented to which seemed to militate against the supremacy of intellect over all feelings and passions. In all their wanderings they were always prepared to admit the immeasurable greatness of the one incorporeal Deity, and the impossibility of the human intellect approaching or forming any adequate conception of His majesty.

When they abandoned the domestic form of worship, they adopted the congregational, and then not so much with the idea that it was pleasing to God, as in order to remind each other of their duties, to regulate and govern the spiritual wants of the community, and to inculcate piety towards God and charity towards each other.

It need hardly be added that superstition is impossible with minds so constituted, and that science must always be the surest and the best ally of a religion so pure and exalted, which is based on a knowledge of God’s works, a consequent appreciation of their greatness, and an ardent aspiration towards that power and goodness which the finite intellect of man can never hope to reach.

GOVERNMENT.

The most marked characteristic of the Aryans is their innate passion for self-government. If not absolutely republican, the tendency of all their institutions, at all times, has been towards that form, and in almost the exact ratio to the purity of the blood do they adopt this form of autocracy. If kingly power was ever introduced among them, it was always in the form of a limited monarchy; never the uncontrolled despotism of the other races; and every conceivable check was devised to prevent encroachments of the crown, even if such were possible among a people so organised as the Aryans always have been.

With them every town was a municipality, every village a little republic, and every trade a separate self-governing guild. Many of these institutions have died out, or else fallen into neglect, in those communities where equal rights and absolute laws have rendered each individual a king in his own person, and every family a republic in itself.

The village system which the Aryans introduced into India is still the most remarkable of its institutions. These little republican organisms have survived the revolutions of fifty centuries. Neither the devastations of war nor the indolence of peace seems to have affected them. Under Brahmin, Buddhist, or Moslem, they remain the same unchanged and unchangeable institutions, and neither despotism nor anarchy has been able to alter them. They alone have saved India from sinking into a state of savage imbecility, under the various hordes of conquerors who have at times overrun her; and they, with the Vedas and the laws afterwards embodied by Menu, alone remain as records of the old Aryan possessors of the Indian peninsula.

Municipalities, which are merely an enlargement of the Indian village system, exist wherever the Romans were settled, or where the Aryan races exist in Europe; and though guilds are fast losing their significance, it was the Teutonic guilds that alone checked and ultimately supplanted the feudal despotisms of the Celts.

Caste is another institution of these races, which has always more or less influenced all their actions. Where their blood has become so impure as it is in India, caste has degenerated into an abuse; but where it is a living institution, it is perhaps as conducive to the proper regulation of society as any with which we are acquainted. The one thing over which no man can have any control is the accident of his birth; but it is an immense gain to him that he should be satisfied with the station in which he finds himself, and content to do his duty in the sphere in which he was born. Caste, properly understood, never interferes with the accumulation of wealth or power within the limits of the class, and only recognises the inevitable accident of birth: while the fear of losing caste is one of the most salutary checks which has been devised to restrain men from acts unworthy of their social position. It is an enormous gain to society that each man should know his station and be prepared to perform the duties belonging to it, without the restless craving of a selfish ambition that would sacrifice everything for the sake of the personal aggrandisement of the individual. It is far better to acknowledge that there is no sphere in life in which man may not become as like unto the gods as in any other sphere; and it is everywhere better to respect the public good rather than to seek to gratify personal ambition.

The populations of modern Europe have become so mixed that neither caste nor any other Aryan institution now exists in its pristine purity; but in the ratio in which a people is Aryan do they possess an aristocracy and municipal institutions; and, what is almost of more importance, in that ratio are the people prepared to respect the gradations of caste in society, and to sacrifice their individual ambition to the less brilliant task of doing all the good that is possible in the spheres in which they have been placed.

It is true, and so has been found, that an uncontrolled despotism is a sharper, a quicker, and a better tool for warlike purposes, or where national vanity is to be gratified by conquest or the display of power; but the complicated, and it may be clumsy, institutions of the Aryans, are far more lasting and more conducive to individual self-respect, and far more likely to add to the sum of human happiness, and tend more clearly to the real greatness and moral elevation of mankind, than any human institution we are yet acquainted with.

So far as our experience now goes, the division of human society into classes or castes is not only the most natural concomitant of the division of labour, but is also the most beneficent of the institutions of man; while the organisation of a nation into self-governing municipalities is not only singularly conducive to individual well-being, but renders it practically indestructible by conquest, and even imperishable through lapse of time. These two are the most essentially characteristic institutions of the Aryans.

MORALS.

In morals the Aryans were always monogamic, and with them alone does woman always assume a perfect equality of position: mistress of her own actions till marriage; when married, in theory at least, the equal sharer in the property and in the duties of the household. Were it possible to carry out these doctrines absolutely in practice, they would probably be more conducive to human happiness than any of those enumerated above; but even a tendency towards them is an enormous gain.

Their institutions for self-government, enumerated above, have probably done more to elevate the Aryan race than can well be appreciated. When every man takes, or may take, his share in governing the commonwealth— when every man must govern himself, and respect the independence of his neighbour—men cease to be tools, and become independent reasoning beings. They are taught self-respect, and with this comes love of truth— of those qualities which command the respect of their fellow-men; and they are likewise taught that control of their passions which renders them averse to war; while the more sober occupations of life prevent the necessity of their seeking, in the wildness of excitement, that relief from monotony which so frequently drives other races into those excesses the world has had so often to deplore. The existence of caste, even in its most modified form, prevents individual ambition from having that unlimited career which among other races has so often sacrificed the public weal to the ambition of an individual.

LITERATURE.

The Aryan races employed an alphabet at so early a period of their history that we cannot now tell when or how it was introduced among them; and it was, even when we first become acquainted with it, a far more perfect alphabet than that of the Semitic races, though apparently formed on its basis. Nothing in it was dependent on memory. It possessed vowels, and all that was necessary to enunciate sounds with perfect and absolute precision. In consequence of this, and of the perfect structure of their language, they were enabled to indulge in philosophical speculation, to write treatises on grammar and logic, and generally to assume a literary position which other races never attained to.

History with them was not a mere record of dates or collection of genealogical tables, but an essay on the polity of mankind, to which the narrative afforded the illustration; while their poetry had always a tendency to assume more a didactic than a lyric form. It is among the Aryans that the Epos first rose to eminence and the Drama was elevated above a mere spectacle; but even in these the highest merit sought to be attained was that they should represent vividly events which might have taken place, even if they never did happen among men; while the Celts and the Semites delight in wild imaginings which never could have existed except in the brain of the poet. When the blood of the Aryan has been mixed with that of other races, they have produced a literature eminently imaginative and poetic; but in proportion to their purity has been their tendency towards a more prosaic style of composition. The aim of the race has always been the attainment of practical common sense, and the possession of this quality is their pride and boast, and justly so; but it is unfortunately antagonistic to the existence of an imaginative literature, and we must look to them more for eminence in works on history and philosophy than in those which require imagination or creative power.

ART.

These remarks apply with more than double force to the Fine Arts than to verbal literature. In the first place a people possessing such a power of phonetic utterance never could look on a picture or statue as more than a mere subsidiary illustration of the written text. A painting may represent vividly one view of what took place at one moment of time, but a written narrative can deal with all the circumstances and link it to its antecedents and effects. A statue of a man cannot tell one-tenth of what a short biography will make plain: and an ideal statue or ideal painting may be a pretty Celtic plaything, but it is not what Aryans hanker after.

With Architecture the case is even worse. Convenience is the first thing which the practical common sense of the Aryan seeks, and then to gain what he desires by the readiest and the easiest means. This done, why should he do more? If, induced by a desire to emulate others, he has to make his building ornamental, he is willing to copy what experience has proved to be successful in former works, willing to spend his money and to submit to some inconvenience; but in his heart he thinks it useless, and he neither will waste his time in thinking on the subject, nor apply those energies of his mind to its elaboration, without which nothing great or good was ever done in Art.

In addition to this, the immaterial nature of their faith has always deprived the Aryan races of the principal incentive to architectural magnificence. The Turanian and Celtic races always have the most implicit faith in ceremonial worship and in the necessity of architectural splendour as its indispensable accompaniment. On the other hand, the more practical Aryan can never be brought to understand that prayer is either more sincere or is more acceptable in one form of house than in any other. He does not feel that virtue can be increased or vice exterminated by the number of bricks or stones that may be heaped on one another, or the form in which they may be placed; nor will his conception of the Deity admit of supposing that He can be propitiated by palaces or halls erected in honour of Him, or that a building in the Middle Pointed Gothic is more acceptable than one in the Classic or any other style.

This want of faith may be reasonable, but it is fatal to poetry in Art, and, it is feared, will prevent the Aryans from attaining more excellence in Architectural Art at the present time than they have done in former ages.

It is also true that the people are singularly deficient in their appreciation of colours. Not that actual colour-blindness is more common with them than with other races, but the harmony of tints is unknown to them. Some may learn, but none feel it; it is a matter of memory and an exercise of intellect, but no more. So, too, with form. Other—even savage—races cannot go wrong in this respect. If the Aryan is successful in art, it is generally in consequence of education, not from feeling; and, like all that is not innate in man, it yields only a secondary gratification, and fails to impress his brother man, or to be a real work of Art.

From these causes the ancient Aryans never erected a single building in India when they were pure, nor in that part of India which they colonised even after their blood became mixed; and we do not now know what their style was or is, though the whole of that part of the peninsula occupied by the Turanians, or to which their influence ever extended, is, and always was, covered by buildings, vast in extent and wonderful from their elaboration. This, probably, also is the true cause of the decline of Architecture and other arts in Europe and in the rest of the modern world. Wherever the Aryans appear Art flies before them, and where their influence extends utilitarian practical common sense is assumed to be all that man should aim at. It may be so, but it is sad to think that beauty cannot be combined with sense.

Music alone, as being the most phonetic of the fine arts, has received among the Aryans a degree of culture denied to the others; but even here the tendency has been rather to develop scientific excellence than to appeal to the responsive chords of the human heart. Notwithstanding this, its power is more felt and greater excellence is attained in this science than in any other. It also has escaped the slovenly process of copying, with which the unartistic mind of the Aryans has been content to fancy it was creating Art in other branches.

If, however, these races have been so deficient in the fine arts, they have been as excellent in all the useful ones. Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, ship-building, and road-making, all that tends to accumulate wealth or to advance material prosperity, has been developed to an extent as great as it is unprecedented, and promises to produce results which as yet can only be dimly guessed at. A great, and, so far as we can see, an inevitable revolution, is pervading the whole world through the devotion of the Aryan races to these arts. We have no reason for supposing it will be otherwise than beneficial, however much we may feel inclined to regret that the beautiful could not be allowed to share a little of that worship so lavishly bestowed on the useful.

SCIENCES.

It follows, as a matter of course, that, with minds so constituted, the Aryans should have cultivated science with earnestness and success. The only beauty they, in fact, appreciated was the beauty of scientific truth; the only harmony they ever really felt was that of the laws of nature; and the only art they ever cared to cultivate was that which grouped these truths and their harmonies into forms which enabled them to be easily grasped and appreciated. Mathematics always had especial charms to the Aryan mind; and, more even than this, astronomy was always captivating. So, also, were the mechanical, and so, too, the natural sciences. It is to the Aryans that Induction owes its birth, and they probably alone have the patience and the sobriety to work it to its legitimate conclusions.

The true mission of the Aryan races appears to be to pervade the world with the useful and industrial arts, and so tend to reproduce that unity which has long been lost, to raise man, not by magnifying his individual cleverness, but by accumulating a knowledge of the works of God, so tending to make him a greater and wiser, and at the same time a humbler and a more religious servant of his Creator.

CONCLUSION.

When Auguste Comte proposed that classification which made the fortune of his philosophy,—when he said that all mankind passed through the theological state in childhood, the metaphysical in youth, and the philosophical or positive in manhood,—and ventured to extend this discovery to nations, he had a glimpse, as others have had before him, of the beauty of the great harmony which pervades all created things. But he had not philosophy enough to see that the one great law is so vast and so remote, that no human intellect can grasp it, and that it is only the little fragments of that great scheme which are found everywhere which man is permitted to understand.

Had he known as much of ethnographical as he did of mathematical science, he would have perceived that there is no warrant for this daring generalisation; but that nations, in the states which he calls the theological, the metaphysical, and the philosophical, exist now and coexisted through all the ages of the world to which our historical knowledge extends.

What the Egyptians were when they first appeared on the scene they were when they perished under the Greek and Roman sway;—what the Chinese always were they now are;—the Jews and Arabs are unchanged to this day;— the Celts are as daringly speculative and as blindly superstitious now as we always found them;—and the Aryans of the Vedas or of Tacitus were very much the same sober, reasoning, unimaginative, and unartistic people as they are at this hour. Progress among men, as among the animals, seems to be achieved not so much by advances made within the limits of the group, as by the supercession of the less finely organised beings by those of a higher class;—and this, so far as our knowledge extends, is accomplished neither by successive creations, nor by the gradual development of one species out of another, but by the successive prominent appearances of previously developed, though partially dormant creations.

Ethnographers have already worked out this problem to a great extent, and arrived at a very considerable degree of certainty, through the researches of patient linguistic investigators. But language is in itself too impalpable ever to give the science that tangible, local reality which is necessary to its success; and it is here that Archæology comes so opportunely to its aid. What men dug or built remains where it was first placed, and probably retains the first impressions it received: and so fixes the era and standing of those who called it into existence; so that even those who cannot appreciate the evidence derived from grammar or from words, may generally see at a glance what the facts of the case really are.

It is even more important that such a science as Ethnology should have two or more methods of investigation at its command. Certainty can hardly ever be attained by only one process, unless checked and elucidated by others, and nothing can therefore be more fortunate than the possession of so important a sister science as that of Archæology to aid in the search after scientific truth.

If Ethnology may thus be so largely indebted to Archæology, the converse is also true; and she may pay back the debt with interest. As Archæology and Architecture have hitherto been studied, they, but more especially the latter, have been little more than a dry record of facts and measurements, interesting to the antiquary, to the professional architect, or to the tourist, who finds it necessary to get up a certain amount of knowledge on the subject; but the utmost that has hitherto been sought to be attained is a certain knowledge of the forms of the art, while the study of it, as that of one of the most important and most instructive of the sciences connected with the history of man, has been as a rule neglected.

Without this the study of Architecture is a mere record of bricks and stones, and of the modes in which they were heaped together for man’s use. Considered in the light of an historical record, it acquires not only the dignity of a science, but especial interest as being one of those sciences which are most closely connected with man’s interests and feelings, and the one which more distinctly expresses and more clearly records what man did and felt in previous ages, than any other study we are acquainted with.

From this point of view, not only every tomb and every temple, but even the rude monoliths and mounds of savages, acquire a dignity and interest to which they have otherwise no title; and man’s works become not only man’s most imperishable record, but one of the best means we possess of studying his history, or of understanding his nature or his aspirations.

Rightly understood, Archæology is as useful as any other branch of science or of art, in enabling us to catch such glimpses as are vouchsafed to man of the great laws that govern all things; and the knowledge that this class of man’s works is guided and governed by those very laws, and not by the chance efforts of unmeaning minds, elevates the study of it to as high a position as that of any other branch of human knowledge.

HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE.