In determining whether the races of mankind are to be classed as

varieties of one species, it is important to decide whether every two

races can unite to produce fertile offspring. It is settled by

experience that the most numerous and well-known crossed races, such as

the Mulattos, descended from Europeans and Negroes--the Mestizos, from

Europeans and American indigenes--the Zambos, from these American

indigenes and Negroes, &c., are permanently fertile. They practically

constitute sub-races, with a general blending of the characters of the

two parents, and only differing from fully-established races in more or

less tendency to revert to one or other of the original types. It has

been argued, on the other hand, that not all such mixed breeds are

permanent, and especially that the cross between Europeans and

Australian indigenes is almost sterile; but this assertion, when

examined with the care demanded by its bearing on the general question

of hybridity, has distinctly broken down. On the whole, the general

evidence favours the opinion that any two races may combine to produce a

new sub-race, which again may combine with any other variety. Thus, if

the existence of a small number of distinct races of mankind be taken as

a starting-point, it is obvious that their crossing would produce an

indefinite number of secondary varieties, such as the population of the

world actually presents. The working out in detail of the problem, how

far the differences among complex nations, such as those of Europe, may

have been brought about by hybridity, is still, however, a task of

almost hopeless intricacy. Among the boldest attempts to account for

distinctly-marked populations as resulting from the intermixture of two

races, are Huxley's view that the Hottentots are hybrid between the

Bushmen and the Negroes, and his more important suggestion, that the

Melanochroic peoples of southern Europe are of mixed Xanthochroic and

Australioid stock.

The problem of ascertaining how the small number of races, distinct

enough to be called primary, can have assumed their different types, has

been for years the most disputed field of anthropology, the

battle-ground of the rival schools of monogenists and polygenists. The

one has claimed all mankind to be descended from one original stock, and

generally from a single pair; the other has contended for the several

primary races being separate species of independent origin. The great

problem of the monogenist theory is to explain by what course of

variation the so different races of man have arisen from a single stock.

In ancient times little difficulty was felt in this, authorities such as

Aristotle and Vitruvius seeing in climate and circumstance the natural

cause of racial differences, the Ethiopian having been blackened by the

tropical sun, &c. Later and closer observations, however, have shown

such influences to be, at any rate, far slighter in amount and slower in

operation than was once supposed. A. de Quatrefages brings forward

(_Unite de l'espece humaine_) his strongest arguments for the

variability of races under change of climate, &c. (_action du milieu_),

instancing the asserted alteration in complexion, constitution and

character of Negroes in America, and Englishmen in America and

Australia. But although the reality of some such modification is not

disputed, especially as to stature and constitution, its amount is not

enough to upset the counter-proposition of the remarkable permanence of

type displayed by races, ages after they have been transported to

climates extremely different from that of their former home. Moreover,

physically different peoples, such as the Bushmen and Negroes in Africa,

show no signs of approximation under the influence of the same climate;

while, on the other hand, the coast tribes of Tierra del Fuego and

forest tribes of tropical Brazil continue to resemble one another, in

spite of extreme differences of climate and food. Darwin is moderate in

his estimation of the changes produced on races of man by climate and

mode of life within the range of history (_Descent of Man_, part i. ch.

4 and 7). The slightness and slowness of variation in human races having

become known, a great difficulty of the monogenist theory was seen to

lie in the apparent shortness of the Biblical chronology. Inasmuch as

several well-marked races of mankind, such as the Egyptian, Phoenician,

Ethiopian, &c., were much the same three or four thousand years ago as

now, their variation from a single stock in the course of any like

period could hardly be accounted for without a miracle. This difficulty

the polygenist theory escaped, and in consequence it gained ground.

Modern views have however tended to restore, though under a new aspect,

the doctrine of a single human stock. The fact that man has existed

during a vast period of time makes it more easy to assume the

continuance of very slow natural variation as having differentiated even

the white man and the Negro among the descendants of a common

progenitor. On the other hand it does not follow necessarily from a

theory of evolution of species that mankind must have descended from a

single stock, for the hypothesis of development admits of the argument,

that several simian species may have culminated in several races of man.

The general tendency of the development theory, however, is against

constituting separate species where the differences are moderate enough

to be accounted for as due to variation from a single type. Darwin's

summing-up of the evidence as to unity of type throughout the races of

mankind is as distinctly a monogenist argument as those of Blumenbach,

Prichard or Quatrefages--

"Although the existing races of man differ in many respects, as in

colour, hair, shape of skull, proportions of the body, &c., yet, if

their whole organization be taken into consideration, they are found

to resemble each other closely in a multitude of points. Many of these

points are of so unimportant, or of so singular a nature, that it is

extremely improbable that they should have been independently acquired

by aboriginally distinct species or races. The same remark holds good

with equal or greater force with respect to the numerous points of

mental similarity between the most distinct races of man.... Now, when

naturalists observe a close agreement in numerous small details of

habits, tastes and dispositions between two or more domestic races, or

between nearly allied natural forms, they use this fact as an argument

that all are descended from a common progenitor who was thus endowed;

and, consequently, that all should be classed under the same species.

The same argument may be applied with much force to the races of

man."--(Darwin, _Descent of Man_, part i. ch. 7.)

The main difficulty of the monogenist school has ever been to explain

how races which have remained comparatively fixed in type during the

long period of history, such as the white man and the Negro, should, in

even a far longer period, have passed by variation from a common

original. To meet this A.R. Wallace suggests that the remotely ancient

representatives of the human species, being as yet animals too low in

mind to have developed those arts of maintenance and social ordinances

by which man holds his own against influences from climate and

circumstance, were in their then wild state much more plastic than now

to external nature; so that "natural selection" and other causes met

with but feeble resistance in forming the permanent varieties or races

of man, whose complexion and structure still remained fixed in their

descendants (see Wallace, _Contributions to the Theory of Natural

Selection_, p. 319). On the whole, it may be asserted that the doctrine

of the unity of mankind stands on a firmer basis than in previous ages.

It would be premature to judge how far the problem of the origin of

races may be capable of exact solution; but the experience gained since

1871 countenances Darwin's prophecy that before long the dispute between

the monogenists and the polygenists would die a silent and unobserved

death.

IV. _Antiquity of Man._--Until the 10th century man's first appearance

on earth was treated on a historical basis as matter of record. It is

true that the schemes drawn up by chronologists differed widely, as was

natural, considering the variety and inconsistency of their documentary

data. On the whole, the scheme of Archbishop Usher, who computed that

the earth and man were created in 4004 B.C., was the most popular (see

CHRONOLOGY). It is no longer necessary, however, to discuss these

chronologies. Geology has made it manifest that our earth must have been

the seat of vegetable and animal life for an immense period of time;

while the first appearance of man, though comparatively recent, is

positively so remote, that an estimate between twenty and a hundred

thousand years may fairly be taken as a minimum. This geological claim

for a vast antiquity of the human race is supported by the similar

claims of prehistoric archaeology and the science of culture, the

evidence of all three departments of inquiry being intimately connected,

and in perfect harmony.

Human bones and objects of human manufacture have been found in such

geological relation to the remains of fossil species of elephant,

rhinoceros, hyena, bear, &c., as to lead to the distinct inference that

man already existed at a remote period in localities where these

mammalia are now and have long been extinct. The not quite conclusive

researches of Tournal and Christol in limestone caverns of the south of

France date back to 1828. About the same time P.C. Schmerling of Liege

was exploring the ossiferous caverns of the valley of the Meuse, and

satisfied himself that the men whose bones he found beneath the

stalagmite floors, together with bones cut and flints shaped by human

workmanship, had inhabited this Belgian district at the same time with

the cave-bear and several other extinct animals whose bones were

imbedded with them (_Recherches sur les ossements fossiles decouverts

dans les cavernes de la province de Liege_ (Liege, 1833-1834)). This

evidence, however, met with little acceptance among scientific men. Nor,

at first, was more credit given to the discovery by M. Boucher de

Perthes, about 1841, of rude flint hatchets in a sand-bed containing

remains of mammoth and rhinoceros at Menchecourt near Abbeville, which

first find was followed by others in the same district (see Boucher de

Perthes, _De l'Industrie primitive, ou les arts a leur origine_ (1846);

_Antiquites celtiques et antediluviennes_ (Paris, 1847), &c.). Between

1850 and 1860 French and English geologists were induced to examine into

the facts, and found irresistible the evidence that man existed and used

rude implements of chipped flint during the Quaternary or Drift period.

Further investigations were then made, and overlooked results of older

ones reviewed. In describing Kent's Cavern (q.v.) near Torquay, R.A.C.

Godwin-Austen had maintained, as early as 1840 (_Proc. Geo. Soc.

London_, vol. iii. p. 286), that the human bones and worked flints had

been deposited indiscriminately together with the remains of fossil

elephant, rhinoceros, &c. Certain caves and rock-shelters in the

province of Dordogne, in central France, were examined by a French and

an English archaeologist, Edouard Lartet and Henry Christy, the remains

discovered showing the former prevalence of the reindeer in this region,

at that time inhabited by savages, whose bone and stone implements

indicate a habit of life similar to that of the Eskimos. Moreover, the

co-existence of man with a fauna now extinct or confined to other

districts was brought to yet clearer demonstration by the discovery in

these caves of certain drawings and carvings of the animals done by the

ancient inhabitants themselves, such as a group of reindeer on a piece

of reindeer horn, and a sketch of a mammoth, showing the elephant's long

hair, on a piece of a mammoth's tusk from La Madeleine (Lartet and

Christy, _Reliquiae Aquitanicae_, ed. by T.R. Jones (London, 1865),

&c.).

This and other evidence (which is considered in more detail in the

article ARCHAEOLOGY) is now generally accepted by geologists as carrying

back the existence of man into the period of the post-glacial drift, in

what is now called the Quaternary period, an antiquity at least of tens

of thousands of years. Again, certain inferences have been tentatively

made from the depth of mud, earth, peat, &c., which has accumulated

above relics of human art imbedded in ancient times. Among these is the

argument from the numerous borings made in the alluvium of the Nile

valley to a depth of 60 ft., where down to the lowest level fragments of

burnt brick and pottery were always found, showing that people advanced

enough in the arts to bake brick and pottery have inhabited the valley

during the long period required for the Nile inundations to deposit 60

ft. of mud, at a rate probably not averaging more than a few inches in a

century. Another argument is that of Professor von Morlot, based on a

railway section through a conical accumulation of gravel and alluvium,

which the torrent of the Tiniere has gradually built up where it enters

the Lake of Geneva near Villeneuve. Here three layers of vegetable soil

appear, proved by the objects imbedded in them to have been the

successive surface soils in two prehistoric periods and in the Roman

period, but now lying 4, 10 and 19 ft. underground. On this it is

computed that if 4 ft. of soil were formed in the 1500 years since the

Roman period, we must go 5000 years farther back for the date of the

earliest human inhabitants. Calculations of this kind, loose as they

are, deserve attention.

The interval between the Quaternary or Drift period and the period of

historical antiquity is to some extent bridged over by relics of various

intermediate civilizations, e.g. the Lake-dwellings (q.v.) of

Switzerland, mostly of the lower grades, and in some cases reaching back

to remote dates. And further evidence of man's antiquity is afforded by

the kitchen-middens or shell-heaps (q.v.), especially those in Denmark.

Danish peat-mosses again show the existence of man at a time when the

Scotch fir was abundant; at a later period the firs were succeeded by

oaks, which have again been almost superseded by beeches, a succession

of changes which indicate a considerable lapse of time.

Lastly, chronicles and documentary records, taken in connexion with

archaeological relics of the historical period, carry back into distant

ages the starting-point of actual history, behind which lies the

evidently vast period only known by inferences from the relations of

languages and the stages of development of civilization. The most recent

work of Egyptologists proves a systematic civilization to have existed

in the valley of the Nile at least 6000 to 7000 years ago (see

CHRONOLOGY).

It was formerly held that the early state of society was one of

comparatively high culture, and thus there was no hesitation in

assigning the origin of man to a time but little beyond the range of

historical records and monuments. But the researches of anthropologists

in recent years have proved that the civilization of man has been

gradually developed from an original stone-age culture, such as

characterizes modern savage life. To the 6000 years to which ancient

civilization dates back must be added a vast period during which the

knowledge, arts and institutions of such a civilization as that of

ancient Egypt attained the high level evidenced by the earliest records.

The evidence of comparative philology supports the necessity for an

enormous time allowance. Thus, Hebrew and Arabic are closely related

languages, neither of them the original of the other, but both sprung

from some parent language more ancient than either. When, therefore, the

Hebrew records have carried back to the most ancient admissible date the

existence of the Hebrew language, this date must have been long preceded

by that of the extinct parent language of the whole Semitic family;

while this again was no doubt the descendant of languages slowly shaping

themselves through ages into this peculiar type. Yet more striking is

the evidence of the Indo-European (formerly called Aryan) family of

languages. The Hindus, Medes, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Celts

and Slavs make their appearance at more or less remote dates as nations

separate in language as in history. Nevertheless, it is now acknowledged

that at some far remoter time, before these nations were divided from

the parent stock, and distributed over Asia and Europe, a single

barbaric people stood as physical and political representative of the

nascent Aryan race, speaking a now extinct Aryan language, from which,

by a series of modifications not to be estimated as possible within many

thousands of years, there arose languages which have been mutually

unintelligible since the dawn of history, and between which it was only

possible for an age of advanced philology to trace the fundamental

relationship.

From the combination of these considerations, it will be seen that the

farthest date to which documentary or other records extend is now

generally regarded by anthropologists as but the earliest distinctly

visible point of the historic period, beyond which stretches back a vast

indefinite series of prehistoric ages.

V. _Language._--In examining how the science of language bears on the

general problems of anthropology, it is not necessary to discuss at

length the critical questions which arise, the principal of which are

considered elsewhere (see LANGUAGE). Philology is especially appealed to

by anthropologists as contributing to the following lines of argument. A

primary mental similarity of all branches of the human race is evidenced

by their common faculty of speech, while at the same time secondary

diversities of race-character and history are marked by difference of

grammatical structure and of vocabularies. The existence of groups or

families of allied languages, each group being evidently descended from

a single language, affords one of the principal aids in classifying

nations and races. The adoption by one language of words originally

belonging to another, proving as it does the fact of intercourse between

two races, and even to some extent indicating the results of such

intercourse, affords a valuable clue through obscure regions of the

history of civilization.

Communication by gesture-signs, between persons unable to converse in

vocal language, is an effective system of expression common to all

mankind. Thus, the signs used to ask a deaf and dumb child about his

meals and lessons, or to communicate with a savage met in the desert

about game or enemies, belong to codes of gesture-signals identical in

principle, and to a great extent independent both of nationality and

education; there is even a natural syntax, or order of succession, in

such gesture-signs. To these gestures let there be added the use of the

interjectional cries, such as _oh! ugh! hey!_ and imitative sounds to

represent the cat's _mew_, the _click_ of a trigger, the _clap_ or

_thud_ of a blow, &c. The total result of this combination of gesture

and significant sound will be a general system of expression, imperfect

but serviceable, and naturally intelligible to all mankind without

distinction of race. Nor is such a system of communication only

theoretically conceivable; it is, and always has been, in practical

operation between people ignorant of one another's language, and as such

is largely used in the intercourse of savage tribes. It is true that to

some extent these means of utterance are common to the lower animals,

the power of expressing emotion by cries and tones extending far down in

the scale of animal life, while rudimentary gesture-signs are made by

various mammals and birds. Still, the lower animals make no approach to

the human system of natural utterance by gesture-signs and

emotional-imitative sounds, while the practical identity of this human

system among races physically so unlike as the Englishman and the native

of the Australian bush indicates extreme closeness of mental similarity

throughout the human species.

When, however, the Englishman and the Australian speak each in his

native tongue, only such words as belong to the interjectional and

imitative classes will be naturally intelligible, and as it were

instinctive to both. Thus the savage, uttering the sound _waow!_ as an

explanation of surprise and warning, might be answered by the white man

with the not less evidently significant _sh!_ of silence, and the two

speakers would be on common ground when the native indicated by the name

_bwirri_ his cudgel, flung _whirring_ through the air at a flock of

birds, or when the native described as a _jakkal-yakkal_ the bird called

by the foreigner a _cockatoo_. With these, and other very limited

classes of natural words, however, resemblance in vocabulary practically

ceases. The Australian and English languages each consist mainly of a

series of words having no apparent connexion with the ideas they

signify, and differing utterly; of course, accidental coincidences and

borrowed words must be excluded from such comparisons. It would be easy

to enumerate other languages of the world, such as Basque, Turkish,

Hebrew, Malay, Mexican, all devoid of traceable resemblance to

Australian and English, and to one another. There is, moreover, extreme

difference in the grammatical structure both of words and sentences in

various languages. The question then arises, how far the employment of

different vocabularies, and that to a great extent on different

grammatical principles, is compatible with similarity of the speakers'

minds, or how far does diversity of speech indicate diversity of mental

nature? The obvious answer is, that the power of using words as signs to

express thoughts with which their sound does not directly connect them,

in fact as arbitrary symbols, is the highest grade of the special human

faculty in language, the presence of which binds together all races of

mankind in substantial mental unity. The measure of this unity is, that

any child of any race can be brought up to speak the language of any

other race.

Under the present standard of evidence in comparing languages and

tracing allied groups to a common origin, the crude speculations as to a

single primeval language of mankind, which formerly occupied so much

attention, are acknowledged to be worthless. Increased knowledge and

accuracy of method have as yet only left the way open to the most widely

divergent suppositions. For all that known dialects prove to the

contrary, on the one hand, there may have been one primitive language,

from which the descendant languages have varied so widely, that neither

their words nor their formation now indicate their unity in long past

ages, while, on the other hand, the primitive tongues of mankind may

have been numerous, and the extreme unlikeness of such languages as

Basque, Chinese, Peruvian, Hottentot and Sanskrit may arise from

absolute independence of origin.

The language spoken by any tribe or nation is not of itself absolute

evidence as to its race-affinities. This is clearly shown in extreme

cases. Thus the Jews in Europe have almost lost the use of Hebrew, but

speak as their vernacular the language of their adopted nation, whatever

it may be; even the Jewish-German dialect, though consisting so largely

of Hebrew words, is philologically German, as any sentence shows: "_Ich

hab noch hoiom lo geachelt_," "I have not yet eaten to-day." The mixture

of the Israelites in Europe by marriage with other nations is probably

much greater than is acknowledged by them; yet, on the whole, the race

has been preserved with extraordinary strictness, as its physical

characteristics sufficiently show. Language thus here fails

conspicuously as a test of race and even of national history. Not much

less conclusive is the case of the predominantly Negro populations of

the West India Islands, who, nevertheless, speak as their native tongues

dialects of English or French, in which the number of intermingled

native African words is very scanty: "_Dem hitti netti na ini watra

bikasi dem de fisiman_," "They cast a net into the water, because they

were fishermen." (Surinam Negro-Eng.) "_Bef pas ca jamain lasse poter

cones li_," "Le boeuf n'est jamais las de porter ses cornes." (Haitian

Negro-Fr.) If it be objected that the linguistic conditions of these two

races are more artificial than has been usual in the history of the

world, less extreme cases may be seen in countries where the ordinary

results of conquest-colonization have taken place. The Mestizos, who

form so large a fraction of the population of modern Mexico, numbering

several millions, afford a convenient test in this respect, inasmuch as

their intermediate complexion separates them from both their ancestral

races, the Spaniard, and the chocolate-brown indigenous Aztec or other

Mexican. The mother-tongue of this mixed race is Spanish, with an

infusion of Mexican words; and a large proportion cannot speak any

native dialect. In most or all nations of mankind, crossing or

intermarriage of races has thus taken place between the conquering

invader and the conquered native, so that the language spoken by the

nation may represent the results of conquest as much or more than of

ancestry. The supersession of the Celtic Cornish by English, and of the

Slavonic Old-Prussian by German, are but examples of a process which has

for untold ages been supplanting native dialects, whose very names have

mostly disappeared. On the other hand, the language of the warlike

invader or peaceful immigrant may yield, in a few generations, to the

tongue of the mass of the population, as the Northman's was replaced by

French, and modern German gives way to English in the United States.

Judging, then, by the extirpation and adoption of languages within the

range of history, it is obvious that to classify mankind into, races,

Aryan, Semitic, Turanian, Polynesian, Kaffir, &c., on the mere evidence

of language, is intrinsically unsound.

VI. _Development of Civilization._--The conditions of man at the lowest

and highest known levels of culture are separated by a vast interval;

but this interval is so nearly filled by known intermediate stages, that

the line of continuity between the lowest savagery and the highest

civilization is unbroken at any critical point.

An examination of the details of savage life shows not only that there

is an immeasurable difference between the rudest man and the highest

lower animal, but also that the least cultured savages have themselves

advanced far beyond the lowest intellectual and moral state at which

human tribes can be conceived as capable of existing, when placed under

favourable circumstances of warm climate, abundant food, and security

from too severe destructive influences. The Australian black-fellow or

the forest Indian of Brazil, who may be taken as examples of the lowest

modern savage, had, before contact with whites, attained to rudimentary

stages in many of the characteristic functions of civilized life. His

language, expressing thoughts by conventional articulate sounds, is the

same in essential principle as the most cultivated philosophic dialect,

only less exact and copious. His weapons, tools and other appliances

such as the hammer, hatchet, spear, knife, awl, thread, net, canoe, &c.,

are the evident rudimentary analogues of what still remains in use among

Europeans. His structures, such as the hut, fence, stockade, earthwork,

&c., may be poor and clumsy, but they are of the same nature as our own.

In the simple arts of broiling and roasting meat, the use of hides and

furs for covering, the plaiting of mats and baskets, the devices of

hunting, trapping and fishing, the pleasure taken in personal ornament,

the touches of artistic decoration on objects of daily use, the savage

differs in degree but not in kind from the civilized man. The domestic

and social affections, the kindly care of the young and the old, some

acknowledgment of marital and parental obligation, the duty of mutual

defence in the tribe, the authority of the elders, and general respect

to traditional custom as the regulator of life and duty, are more or

less well marked in every savage tribe which is not disorganized and

falling to pieces. Lastly, there is usually to be discerned amongst such

lower races a belief in unseen powers pervading the universe, this

belief shaping itself into an animistic or spiritualistic theology,

mostly resulting in some kind of worship. If, again, high savage or low

barbaric types be selected, as among the North American Indians,

Polynesians, and Kaffirs of South Africa, the same elements of culture

appear, but at a more advanced stage, namely, a more full and accurate

language, more knowledge of the laws of nature, more serviceable

implements, more perfect industrial processes, more definite and fixed

social order and frame of government, more systematic and philosophic

schemes of religion and a more elaborate and ceremonial worship. At

intervals new arts and ideas appear, such as agriculture and pasturage,

the manufacture of pottery, the use of metal implements and the device

of record and communication by picture writing. Along such stages of

improvement and invention the bridge is fairly made between savage and

barbaric culture; and this once attained to, the remainder of the series

of stages of civilization lies within the range of common knowledge.

The teaching of history, during the three to four thousand years of

which contemporary chronicles have been preserved, is that civilization

is gradually developed in the course of ages by enlargement and

increased precision of knowledge, invention and improvement of arts, and

the progression of social and political habits and institutions towards

general well-being. That processes of development similar to these were

in prehistoric times effective to raise culture from the savage to the

barbaric level, two considerations especially tend to prove. First,

there are numerous points in the culture even of rude races which are

not explicable otherwise than on the theory of development. Thus, though

difficult or superfluous arts may easily be lost, it is hard to imagine

the abandonment of contrivances of practical daily utility, where little

skill is required and materials are easily accessible. Had the

Australians or New Zealanders, for instance, ever possessed the potter's

art, they could hardly have forgotten it. The inference that these

tribes represent the stage of culture before the invention of pottery is

confirmed by the absence of buried fragments of pottery in the districts

they inhabit. The same races who were found making thread by the

laborious process of twisting with the hand, would hardly have disused,

if they had ever possessed, so simple a labour-saving device as the

spindle, which consists merely of a small stick weighted at one end; the

spindle may, accordingly, be regarded as an instrument invented

somewhere between the lowest and highest savage levels (Tylor, _Early

Hist. of Mankind_, p. 193). Again, many devices of civilization bear

unmistakable marks of derivation from a lower source; thus the ancient

Egyptian and Assyrian harps, which differ from ours in having no front

pillar, appear certainly to owe this remarkable defect to having grown

up through intermediate forms from the simple strung bow, the still used

type of the most primitive stringed instrument. In this way the history

of numeral words furnishes actual proof of that independent intellectual

progress among savage tribes which some writers have rashly denied. Such

words as _hand, hands, foot, man_, &c., are used as numerals signifying

5, 10, 15, 20, &c., among many savage and barbaric peoples; thus

Polynesian _lima_, i.e. "hand," means 5; Zulu _tatisitupa_, i.e. "taking

the thumb," means 6; Greenlandish _arfersanek-pingasut_, i.e. "on the

other foot three," means 18; Tamanac _tevin itoto_, i.e. "one man,"

means 20, &c., &c. The existence of such expressions demonstrates that

the people who use them had originally no spoken names for these

numbers, but once merely counted them by gesture on their fingers and

toes in low savage fashion, till they obtained higher numerals by the

inventive process of describing in words these counting-gestures.

Second, the process of "survival in culture" has caused the preservation

in each stage of society of phenomena, belonging to an earlier period,

but kept up by force of custom into the later, thus supplying evidence

of the modern condition being derived from the ancient. Thus the mitre

over an English bishop's coat-of-arms is a survival which indicates him

as the successor of bishops who actually wore mitres, while armorial

bearings themselves, and the whole craft of heraldry, are survivals

bearing record of a state of warfare and social order whence our present

state was by vast modification evolved. Evidence of this class, proving

the derivation of modern civilization, not only from ancient barbarism,

but beyond this, from primeval savagery, is immensely plentiful,

especially in rites and ceremonies, where the survival of ancient habits

is peculiarly favoured. Thus the modern Hindu, though using civilized

means for lighting his household fires, retains the savage "fire-drill"

for obtaining fire by friction of wood when what he considers pure or

sacred fire has to be produced for sacrificial purposes; while in Europe

into modern times the same primitive process has been kept up in

producing the sacred and magical "need-fire," which was lighted to

deliver cattle from a murrain. Again, the funeral offerings of food,

clothing, weapons, &c., to the dead are absolutely intelligible and

purposeful among savage races, who believe that the souls of the

departed are ethereal beings capable of consuming food, and of receiving

and using the souls or phantoms of any objects sacrificed for their use.

The primitive philosophy to which these conceptions belong has to a

great degree been discredited by modern science; yet the clear survivals

of such ancient and savage rites may still be seen in Europe, where the

Bretons leave the remains of the All Souls' supper on the table for the

ghosts of the dead kinsfolk to partake of, and Russian peasants set out

cakes for the ancestral manes on the ledge which supports the holy

pictures, and make dough ladders to assist the ghosts of the dead to

ascend out of their graves and start on their journey for the future

world; while other provision for the same spiritual journey is made when

the coin is still put in the hand of the corpse at an Irish wake. In

like manner magic still exists in the civilized world as a survival from

the savage and barbaric times to which it originally belongs, and in

which is found the natural source and proper home of utterly savage

practices still carried on by ignorant peasants in Great Britain, such

as taking omens from the cries of animals, or bewitching an enemy by

sticking full of pins and hanging up to shrivel in the smoke an image or

other object, that similar destruction may fall on the hated person

represented by the symbol (Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, ch. i., iii.,

iv., xi., xii.; _Early Hist. of Man_, ch. vi.).

The comparative science of civilization thus not only generalizes the

data of history, but supplements its information by laying down the

lines of development along which the lowest prehistoric culture has

gradually risen to the highest modern level. Among the most clearly

marked of these lines is that which follows the succession of the Stone,

Bronze, and Iron Ages (see ARCHAEOLOGY). The Stone Age represents the

early condition of mankind in general, and has remained in savage

districts up to modern times, while the introduction of metals need not

at once supersede the use of the old stone hatchets and arrows, which

have often long continued in dwindling survival by the side of the new

bronze and even iron ones. The Bronze Age had its most important place

among ancient nations of Asia and Europe, and among them was only

succeeded after many centuries by the Iron Age; while in other

districts, such as Polynesia and Central and South Africa, and America

(except Mexico and Peru), the native tribes were moved directly from the

Stone to the Iron Age without passing through the Bronze Age at all.

Although the three divisions of savage, barbaric, and civilized man do

not correspond at all perfectly with the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages,

this classification of civilization has proved of extraordinary value in

arranging in their proper order of culture the nations of the Old World.

Another great line of progress has been followed by tribes passing from

the primitive state of the wild hunter, fisher and fruit-gatherer to

that of the settled tiller of the soil, for to this change of habit may

be plainly in great part traced the expansion of industrial arts and the

creation of higher social and political institutions. These, again, have

followed their proper lines along the course of time. Among such is the

immense legal development by which the primitive law of personal

vengeance passed gradually away, leaving but a few surviving relics in

the modern civilized world, and being replaced by the higher doctrine

that crime is an offence against society, to be repressed for the public

good. Another vast social change has been that from the patriarchal

condition, in which the unit is the family under the despotic rule of

its head, to the systems in which individuals make up a society whose

government is centralized in a chief or king. In the growth of

systematic civilization, the art of writing has had an influence so

intense, that of all tests to distinguish the barbaric from the

civilized state, none is so generally effective as this, whether they

have but the failing link with the past which mere memory furnishes, or

can have recourse to written records of past history and written

constitutions of present order. Lastly, still following the main lines

of human culture, the primitive germs of religious institutions have to

be traced in the childish faith and rude rites of savage life, and

thence followed in their expansion into the vast systems administered by

patriarchs and priests, henceforth taking under their charge the

precepts of morality, and enforcing them under divine sanction, while

also exercising in political life an authority beside or above the civil

law.

The state of culture reached by Quaternary man is evidenced by the stone

implements in the drift-gravels, and other relics of human art in the

cave deposits. His drawings on bone or tusk found in the caves show no

mean artistic power, as appears by the three specimens copied in the

Plate. That representing two deer (fig. 6) was found so early as 1852 in

the breccia of a limestone cave on the Charente, and its importance

recognized in a remarkable letter by Prosper Merimee, as at once

historically ancient and geologically modern (_Congres d'anthropologie

et d'archeologie prehistoriques_, Copenhagen (1869), p. 128). The other

two are the famous mammoth from the cave of La Madeleine, on which the

woolly mane and huge tusks of _Elephas primigenius_ are boldly drawn

(fig. 7); and the group of man and horses (fig. 8). There has been found

one other contemporary portrait of man, where a hunter is shown stalking

an aurochs.

That the men of the Quaternary period knew the savage art of producing

fire by friction, and roasted the flesh on which they mainly subsisted,

is proved by the fragments of charcoal found in the cave deposits, where

also occur bone awls and needles, which indicate the wearing of skin

clothing, like that of the modern Australians and Fuegians. Their bone

lance-heads and dart-points were comparable to those of northern and

southern savages. Particular attention has to be given to the stone

implements used by these earliest known of mankind. The division of

tribes in the stone implement stage into two classes, the Palaeolithic

or Old Stone Age, and the Neolithic or New Stone Age, according to their

proficiency in this most important art furnishes in some respects the

best means of determining their rank in general culture.

In order to put this argument clearly before the reader, a few selected

implements are figured in the Plate. The group in fig. 9 contains tools

and weapons of the Neolithic period such as are dug up on European soil;

they are evident relics of ancient populations who used them till

replaced by metal. The stone hatchets are symmetrically shaped and edged

by grinding, while the cutting flakes, scrapers, spear and arrow heads

are of high finish. Direct knowledge of the tribes who made them is

scanty, but implements so similar in make and design having been in use

in North and South America until modern times, it may be assumed for

purposes of classification that the Neolithic peoples of the New World

were at a similar barbarous level in industrial arts, social

organization, moral and religious ideas. Such comparison, though needing

caution and reserve, at once proved of great value to anthropology.

When, however, there came to light from the drift-gravels and limestone

caves of Europe the Palaeolithic implements, of which some types are

shown in the group (fig. 10), the difficult problem presented itself,

what degree of general culture these rude implements belonged to. On

mere inspection, their rudeness, their unsuitability for being hafted,

and the absence of shaping and edging by the grindstone, mark their

inferiority to the Neolithic implements. Their immensely greater

antiquity was proved by their geological position and their association

with a long extinct fauna, and they were not, like the Neoliths,

recognizable as corresponding closely to the implements used by modern

tribes. There was at first a tendency to consider the Palaeoliths as the

work of men ruder than savages, if, indeed, their makers were to be

accounted human at all. Since then, however, the problem has passed into

a more manageable state. Stone implements, more or less approaching the

European Palaeolithic type, were found in Africa from Egypt southwards,

where in such parts as Somaliland and Cape Colony they lie about on the

ground, as though they had been the rough tools and weapons of the rude

inhabitants of the land at no very distant period. The group in fig. 11

in the Plate shows the usual Somaliland types. These facts tended to

remove the mystery from Palaeolithic man, though too little is known of

the ruder ancient tribes of Africa to furnish a definition of the state

of culture which might have co-existed with the use of Palaeolithic

implements. Information to this purpose, however, can now be furnished

from a more outlying region. This is Tasmania, where as in the adjacent

continent of Australia, the survival of marsupial animals indicates long

isolation from the rest of the world. Here, till far on into the 19th

century, the Englishmen could watch the natives striking off flakes of

stone, trimming them to convenient shape for grasping them in the hand,

and edging them by taking off successive chips on one face only. The

group in fig. 12 shows ordinary Tasmanian forms, two of them being finer

tools for scraping and grooving. (For further details reference may be

made to H. Ling Roth, _The Tasmanians_, (2nd ed., 1899); R. Brough

Smyth, _Aborigines of Victoria_ (1878), vol. ii.; _Papers and

Proceedings of Royal Society of Tasmania_; and papers by the present

writer in _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_.) The Tasmanians,

when they came in contact with the European explorers and settlers, were

not the broken outcasts they afterwards became. They were a savage

people, perhaps the lowest in culture of any known, but leading a

normal, self-supporting, and not unhappy life, which had probably

changed little during untold ages. The accounts, imperfect as they are,

which have been preserved of their arts, beliefs and habits, thus

present a picture of the arts, beliefs and habits of tribes whose place

in the Stone Age was a grade lower than that of Palaeolithic man of the

Quaternary period.

[Illustration: PLATE

FIG. 1. FIG. 2. FIG. 3 FIG. 4. FIG. 5. FIG. 6. FIG. 7. FIG. 8. FIG. 9.

FIG 10. FIG. 11. FIG. 12.]

The Tasmanian stone implements, figured in the Plate, show their own use

when it is noticed that the rude chipping forms a good hand-grip above,

and an effective edge for chopping, sawing, and cutting below. But the

absence of the long-shaped implements, so characteristic of the

Neolithic and Palaeolithic series, and serviceable as picks, hatchets,

and chisels, shows remarkable limitation in the mind of these savages,

who made a broad, hand-grasped knife their tool of all work to cut, saw,

and chop with. Their weapons were the wooden club or waddy notched to

the grasp, and spears of sticks, often crooked but well balanced, with

points sharpened by tool or fire, and sometimes jagged. No spear thrower

or bow and arrow was known. The Tasmanian savages were crafty warriors

and kangaroo-hunters, and the women climbed the highest trees by

notching, in quest of opossums. Shell-fish and crabs were taken, and

seals knocked on the head with clubs, but neither fish-hook nor

fishing-net was known, and indeed swimming fish were taboo as food. Meat

and vegetable food, such as fern-root, was broiled over the fire, but

boiling in a vessel was unknown. The fire was produced by the ordinary

savage fire-drill. Ignorant of agriculture, with no dwellings but rough

huts or breakwinds of sticks and bark, without dogs or other domestic

animals, these savages, until the coming of civilized man, roamed after

food within their tribal bounds. Logs and clumsy floats of bark and

grass enabled them to cross water under favourable circumstances. They

had clothing of skins rudely stitched together with bark thread, and

they were decorated with simple necklaces of kangaroo teeth, shells and

berries. Among their simple arts, plaiting and basket-work was one in

which they approached the civilized level. The pictorial art of the

Tasmanians was poor and childish, quite below that of the Palaeolithic

men of Europe. The Tasmanians spoke a fairly copious agglutinating

language, well marked as to parts of speech, syntax and inflexion.

Numeration was at a low level, based on counting fingers on one hand

only, so that the word for man (_puggana_) stood also for the number 5.

The religion of the Tasmanians, when cleared from ideas apparently

learnt from the whites, was a simple form of animism based on the shadow

(_warrawa_) being the soul or spirit. The strongest belief of the

natives was in the power of the ghosts of the dead, so that they carried

the bones of relatives to secure themselves from harm, and they fancied

the forest swarming with malignant demons. They placed weapons near the

grave for the dead friend's soul to use, and drove out disease from the

sick by exorcising the ghost which was supposed to have caused it. Of

greater special spirits of Nature we find something vaguely mentioned.

The earliest recorders of the native social life set down such features

as their previous experience of rude civilized life had made them judges

of. They notice the self-denying affection of the mothers, and the hard

treatment of the wives by the husbands, polygamy and the shifting

marriage unions. But when we meet with a casual remark as to the

tendency of the Tasmanians to take wives from other tribes than their

own, it seems likely that they had some custom of exogamy which the

foreigners did not understand. Meagre as is the information preserved of

the arts, thoughts, and customs of these survivors from the lower Stone

Age, it is of value as furnishing even a temporary and tentative means

of working out the development of culture on a basis not of conjecture

but of fact.

_Conclusion._--To-day anthropology is grappling with the heavy task of

systematizing the vast stores of knowledge to which the key was found by

Boucher de Perthes, by Lartet, Christy and their successors. There have

been recently no discoveries to rival in novelty those which followed

the exploration of the bone-caves and drift-gravels, and which effected

an instant revolution in all accepted theories of man's antiquity,

substituting for a chronology of centuries a vague computation of

hundreds of thousands of years. The existence of man in remote

geological time cannot now be questioned, but, despite much effort made

in likely localities, no bones, with the exception of those of the

much-discussed _Pithecanthropus_, have been found which can be regarded

as definitely bridging the gulf between man and the lower creation. It

seems as if anthropology had in this direction reached the limits of its

discoveries. Far different are the prospects in other directions where

the work of co-ordinating the material and facts collected promises to

throw much light on the history of civilization. Anthropological

researches undertaken all over the globe have shown the necessity of

abandoning the old theory that a similarity of customs and

superstitions, of arts and crafts, justifies the assumption of a remote

relationship, if not an identity of origin, between races. It is now

certain that there has ever been an inherent tendency in man, allowing

for difference of climate and material surroundings, to develop culture

by the same stages and in the same way. American man, for example, need

not necessarily owe the minutest portion of his mental, religious,

social or industrial development to remote contact with Asia or Europe,

though he were proved to possess identical usages. An example in point

is that of pyramid-building. No ethnical relationship can ever have

existed between the Aztecs and the Egyptians; yet each race developed

the idea of the pyramid tomb through that psychological similarity which

is as much a characteristic of the species man as is his physique.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--J.C. Prichard, _Natural History of Man_ (London, 1843);

T.H. Huxley, _Man's Place in Nature_ (London, 1863); and "Geographical

Distribution of Chief Modifications of Mankind," in _Journal

Ethnological Society_ for 1870; E.B. Tylor, _Early History of Man_

(London, 1865), _Primitive Culture_ (London, 1871), and _Anthropology_

(London, 1881); A. de Quatrefages, _Histoire generale des races

humaines_ (Paris, 1889), _Human Species_ (Eng. trans., 1879); Lord

Avebury, _Prehistoric Times_ (1865, 6th ed. 1900) and _Origin of

Civilization_ (1870, 6th ed. 1902), Theo. Waitz, _Anthropologie der

Naturvolker_ (1859-1871), E.H. Haeckel, _Anthropogenie_ (Leipzig,

1874-1891), Eng. trans., 1879; O. Peschel, _Volkerkunde_ (Leipzig,

1874-1897); P. Topinard, _L'Anthropologie_ (Paris, 1876); _Elements

d'anthropologie generale_ (Paris, 1885); D.G. Brinton, _Races and

Peoples_ (1890); A.H. Keane, _Ethnology_ (1896), and _Man: Past and

Present_ (1899); G. Sergi, _The Mediterranean Race_ (Eng. ed., 1889);

F. Ratzel, _History of Mankind_ (Eng. trans., 1897); G. de Mortillet,

_Le Prehistorique_ (Paris, 1882); A.C. Haddon, _Study of Man_ (1897);

J. Deniker, _The Races of Man_ (London, 1900); W.Z. Ripley, _The Races

of Europe_ (1900, with long bibliography); _The Journal of the

Anthropological Institute of Great Britain_; _Revue d'anthropologie_

(Paris); _Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie_ (Berlin). See also

bibliographies under separate ethnological headings (AUSTRALIA,

AFRICA, ARABS, AMERICA, &c.). (E. B. T.)

ANTHROPOMETRY (Gr. [Greek: anthropos], man, and [Greek: metron],

measure), the name given by the French savant, Alphonse Bertillon (b.

1853), to a system of identification (q.v.) depending on the unchanging

character of certain measurements of parts of the human frame. He found

by patient inquiry that several physical features and the dimensions of

certain bones or bony structures in the body remain practically constant

during adult life. He concluded from this that when these measurements

were made and recorded systematically every single individual would be

found to be perfectly distinguishable from others. The system was soon

adapted to police methods, as the immense value of being able to fix a

person's identity was fully realized, both in preventing false

personation and in bringing home to any one charged with an offence his

responsibility for previous wrongdoing. "Bertillonage," as it was

called, became widely popular, and after its introduction into France in

1883, where it was soon credited with highly gratifying results, was

applied to the administration of justice in most civilized countries.

England followed tardily, and it was not until 1894 that an

investigation of the methods used and results obtained was made by a

special committee sent to Paris for the purpose. It reported favourably,

especially on the use of the measurements for primary classification,

but recommended also the adoption in part of a system of "finger prints"

as suggested by Francis Galton, and already practised in Bengal.

M. Bertillon selected the following five measurements as the basis of

his system: (1) head length; (2) head breadth; (3) length of middle

finger; (4) of left foot, and (5) of cubit or forearm from the elbow to

the extremity of the middle finger. Each principal heading was further

subdivided into three classes of "small," "medium" and "large," and as

an increased guarantee height, length of little finger, and the colour

of the eye were also recorded. From this great mass of details, soon

represented in Paris by the collection of some 100,000 cards, it was

possible, proceeding by exhaustion, to sift and sort down the cards till

a small bundle of half a dozen produced the combined facts of the

measurements of the individual last sought. The whole of the information

is easily contained in one cabinet of very ordinary dimensions, and most

ingeniously contrived so as to make the most of the space and facilitate

the search. The whole of the record is independent of names, and the

final identification is by means of the photograph which lies with the

individual's card of measurements.

Anthropometry, however, gradually fell into disfavour, and it has been

generally supplanted by the superior system of finger prints (q.v.).

Bertillonage exhibited certain defects which were first brought to light

in Bengal. The objections raised were (1) the costliness of the

instruments employed and their liability to get out of order; (2) the

need for specially instructed measurers, men of superior education; (3)

the errors that frequently crept in when carrying out the processes and

were all but irremediable. Measures inaccurately taken, or wrongly read

off, could seldom, if ever, be corrected, and these persistent errors

defeated all chance of successful search. The process was slow, as it

was necessary to repeat it three times so as to arrive at a mean result.

In Bengal measurements were already abandoned by 1897, when the finger

print system was adopted throughout British India. Three years later

England followed suit; and as the result of a fresh inquiry ordered by

the Home Office, finger prints were alone relied upon for

identification.

AUTHORITIES.--Lombroso, _Antropometria di 400 delinquenti_ (1872);

Roberts, _Manual of Anthropometry_ (1878); Ferri, _Studi comparati di

antropometria_ (2 vols., 1881-1882); Lombroso, _Rughe anomale speciali

ai criminali_ (1890); Bertillon, _Instructions signaletiques pour

l'identification anthropometrique_ (1893); Livi, _Anthropometria_

(Milan, 1900); Furst, _Indextabellen zum anthropometrischen Gebrauch_

(Jena, 1902); _Report of Home Office Committee on the Best Means of

Identifying Habitual Criminals_ (1893-1894). (A. G.)

ANTHROPOMORPHISM (Gr. [Greek: anthropos], man, [Greek: morphae], form),

the attribution (a) of a human body, or (b) of human qualities

generally, to God or the gods. The word anthropomorphism is a modern

coinage (possibly from 18th century French). The _New English

Dictionary_ is misled by the 1866 reprint of Paul Bayne on Ephesians

when it quotes "anthropomorphist" as 17th century English. Seventeenth

century editions print "anthropomorphits," i.e. anthropomorphites, in

sense (a). The older abstract term is "anthropopathy," literally

"attributing human feelings," in sense (b).

Early religion, among its many objects of worship, includes beasts (see

ANIMAL-WORSHIP), considered, in the more refined theology of the later

Greeks and Romans, as metamorphoses of the great gods. Similarly we find

"therianthropic" forms--half animal, half human--in Egypt or

Assyria-Babylonia. In contrast with these, it is considered one of the

glories of the Olympian mythology of Greece that it believed in happy

manlike beings (though exempt from death, and using special rarefied

foods, &c.), and celebrated them in statues of the most exquisite art.

Israel shows us animal images, doubtless of a ruder sort, when Yahweh is

worshipped in the northern kingdom under the image of a steer. (Some

scholars think the title "mighty one of Jacob," Psalm cxxxii., 2, 5, _et

al_., [Hebrew: abir] as if from [Hebrew: avir] is really "steer"

[Hebrew: abir] "of Jacob.") But the higher religion of Israel inclined

to morality more than to art, and forbade image worship altogether. This

prepared the way for the conception of God as an immaterial Spirit. True

mythical anthropomorphisms occur in early parts of the Old Testament

(e.g. Genesis iii. 8, cf. vi. 2), though in the majority of Old

Testament passages such expressions are merely verbal (e.g. Isaiah lix.

1). In the Christian Church (and again in early Mahommedanism) simple

minds believed in the corporeal nature of God. Gibbon and other writers

quote from John Cassian the tale of the poor monk, who, being convinced

of his error, burst into tears, exclaiming, "You have taken away my God!

I have none now whom I can worship!" According to a fragment of Origen

(on Genesis i. 26), Melito of Sardis shared this belief. Many have

thought Melito's work, [Greek: peri ensomatou theou], must have been a

treatise on the Incarnation; but it is hard to think that Origen could

blunder so. Epiphanius tells of Audaeus of Mesopotamia and his

followers, Puritan sectaries in the 4th century, who were orthodox

except for this belief and for Quartodecimanism (see EASTER).

Tertullian, who is sometimes called an anthropomorphist, stood for the

Stoical doctrine, that all reality, even the divine, is in a sense

material.

The reaction against anthropomorphism begins in Greek philosophy with

the satirical spirit of Xenophanes (540 B.C.), who puts the case as

broadly as any. The "greatest God" resembles man "neither in form nor in

mind." In Judaism--unless we should refer to the prophets' polemic

against images--a reaction is due to the introduction of the codified

law. God seemed to grow more remote. The old sacred name Yahweh is never

pronounced; even "God" is avoided for allusive titles like "heaven" or

"place." Still, amid all this, the God of Judaism remains a personal,

almost a limited, being. In Philo we see Jewish scruples uniting with

others drawn from Greek philosophy. For, though the quarrel with popular

anthropomorphism was patched up, and the gods of the Pantheon were

described by Stoics and Epicureans as manlike in form, philosophy

nevertheless tended to highly abstract conceptions of supreme, or real,

deity. Philo followed out the line of this tradition in teaching that

God cannot be named. How much exactly he meant is disputed. The same

inheritance of Greek philosophy appears in the Christian fathers,

especially Origen. He names and condemns the "anthropomorphites," who

ascribe a human body to God (on Romans i., _sub fin_.; Rufinus' Latin

version). In Arabian philosophy the reaction sought to deny that God had

any attributes. And, under the influence of Mahommedan Aristotelianism,

the same paralysing speculation found entrance among the learned Jews of

Spain (see MAIMONIDES).

Till modern times the philosophical reaction was not carried out with

full vigour. Spinoza (_Ethics_, i. 15 and 17), representing here as

elsewhere both a Jewish inheritance and a philosophical, but advancing

further, sweeps away all community between God and man. So later J.G.

Fichte and Matthew Arnold ("a magnified and non-natural

man"),--strangely, in view of their strong belief in an objective moral

order. For the use of the _word_ "anthropomorphic," or kindred forms, in

this new spirit of condemnation for all conceptions of God as

manlike--sense (b) noted above--see J.J. Rousseau in _Emile_ iv. (cited

by Littre),--_Nous sommes pour la plupart de vrais anthropomorphites_.

Rousseau is here speaking of the language of Christian theology,--a

divine Spirit: divine Persons. At the present day this usage is

universal. What it means on the lips of pantheists is plain. But when

theists charge one another with "anthropomorphism," in order to rebuke

what they deem unduly manlike conceptions of God, they stand on slippery

ground. All theism implies the assertion of kinship between man,

especially in his moral being, and God. As a brilliant theologian, B.

Duhm, has said, physiomorphism is the enemy of Christian faith, not

anthropomorphism.

The latest extension of the word, proposed in the interests of

philosophy or psychology, uses it of the principle according to which

man is said to interpret all things (not God merely) through himself.

Common-sense intuitionalism would deny that man does this, attributing

to him immediate knowledge of reality. And idealism in all its forms

would say that man, interpreting through his reason, does rightly, and

reaches truth. Even here then the use of the word is not colourless. It

implies blame. It is the symptom of a philosophy which confines

knowledge within narrow limits, and which, when held by Christians (e.g.

Peter Browne, or H.L. Mansel), believes only in an "analogical"

knowledge of God. (R. Ma.)

ANTI, or CAMPA, a tribe of South American Indians of Arawakan stock,

inhabiting the forests of the upper Ucayali basin, east of Cuzco, on the

eastern side of the Andes, south Peru. The Antis, who gave their name to

the eastern province of Antisuyu, have always been notorious for

ferocity and cannibalism. They are of fine physique and generally

good-looking. Their dress is a robe with holes for the head and arms.

Their long hair hangs down over the shoulders, and round their necks a

toucan beak or a bunch of feathers is worn as an ornament.

ANTIBES, a seaport town in the French department of the Alpes-Maritimes

(formerly in that of the Var, but transferred after the Alpes-Maritimes

department was formed in 1860 out of the county of Nice). Pop. (1906) of

the town, 5730; of the commune, 11,753. It is 12-1/2 m. by rail S.W. of

Nice, and is situated on the E. side of the Garoupe peninsula. It was

formerly fortified, but all the ramparts (save the Fort Carre, built by

Vauban) have now been demolished, and a new town is rising on their

site. There is a tolerable harbour, with a considerable fishing

industry. The principal exports are dried fruits, salt fish and oil.

Much perfume distilling is done here, as the surrounding country

produces an abundance of flowers. Antibes is the ancient Antipolis. It

is said to have been founded before the Christian era (perhaps about 340

B.C.) by colonists from Marseilles, and is mentioned by Strabo. It was

the seat of a bishopric from the 5th century to 1244, when the see was

transferred to Grasse. (W. A. B. C.)

ANTICHRIST ([Greek: antichristos]). The earliest mention of the name

Antichrist, which was probably first coined in Christian eschatological

literature, is in the Epistles of St John (I. ii. 18, 22, iv. 3; II. 7),

and it has since come into universal use. The conception, paraphrased in

this word, of a mighty ruler who will appear at the end of time, and

whose essence will be enmity to God (Dan. xi. 36; cf. 2 Thess. ii. 4;

[Greek: o antikeimenos]), is older, and traceable to Jewish eschatology.

Its origin is to be sought in the first place in the prophecy of Daniel,

written at the beginning of the Maccabean period. The historical figure

who served as a model for the "Antichrist" was Antiochus IV. Epiphanes,

the persecutor of the Jews, and he has impressed indelible traits upon

the conception. Since then ever-recurring characteristics of this figure

(cf. especially Dan xi. 40, &c.) are, that he would appear as a mighty

ruler at the head of gigantic armies, that he would destroy three rulers

(the three horns, Dan. vii. 8, 24), persecute the saints (vii. 25), rule

for three and a half years (vii. 25, &c.), and subject the temple of God

to a horrible devastation ([Greek: bdelugma tes eremoseos]). When the

end of the world foretold by Daniel did not take place, but the book of

Daniel retained its validity as a sacred scripture which foretold future

things, the personality of the tyrant who was God's enemy disengaged

itself from that of Antiochus IV., and became merely a figure of

prophecy, which was applied now to one and now to another historical

phenomenon. Thus for the author of the _Psalms of Solomon_ (c. 60 B.C.),

Pompey, who destroyed the independent rule of the Maccabees and stormed

Jerusalem, was the Adversary of God (cf. ii. 26, &c.); so too the tyrant

whom the _Ascension of Moses_ (c. A.D. 30) expects at the end of all

things, possesses, besides the traits of Antiochus IV., those of Herod

the Great. A further influence on the development of the eschatological

imagination of the Jews was exercised by such a figure as that of the

emperor Caligula (A.D. 37-41), who is known to have given the order,

never carried out, to erect his statue in the temple of Jerusalem. In

the little Jewish Apocalypse, the existence of which is assumed by many

scholars, which in Mark xiii. and Matt. xxiv. is combined with the words

of Christ to form the great eschatological discourse, the prophecy of

the "abomination of desolation" (Mark xiii. 14 et seq.) may have

originated in this episode of Jewish history. Later Jewish and Christian

writers of Apocalypses saw in Nero the tyrant of the end of time. The

author of the Syriac _Apocalypse of Baruch_ (or his source), cap. 36-40,

speaks in quite general terms of the last ruler of the end of time. In 4

Ezra v. 6 also is found the allusion: _regnabit quem non sperant_.

The roots of this eschatological fancy are to be sought perhaps still

deeper in a purely mythological and speculative expectation of a battle

at the end of days between God and the devil, which has no reference

whatever to historical occurrences. This idea has its original source in

the apocalypses of Iran, for these are based upon the conflict between

Ahura-Mazda (Auramazda, Ormazd) and Angro-Mainyush (Ahriman) and its

consummation at the end of the world. This Iranian dualism is proved to

have penetrated into the late Jewish eschatology from the beginning of

the 1st century before Christ, and did so probably still earlier. Thus

the opposition between God and the devil already plays a part in the

Jewish groundwork of the _Testaments of the Patriarchs_, which was

perhaps composed at the end of the period of the Maccabees. In this the

name of the devil appears, besides the usual form ([Greek: satanas,

diabolos]), especially as Belial (Beliar, probably, from Ps. xviii. 4,

where the rivers of Belial are spoken of, originally a god of the

underworld), a name which also plays a part in the Antichrist tradition.

In the _Ascension of Moses_ we already hear, at the beginning of the

description of the latter time (x. 1): "And then will God's rule be made

manifest over all his creatures, then will the devil have an end" (cf.

Matt. xii. 28; Luke xi. 20; John xii. 31, xiv. 30, xvi. 11).[1] This

conception of the strife of God with the devil was further interwoven,

before its introduction into the Antichrist myth, with another idea of

different origin, namely, the myth derived from the Babylonian religion,

of the battle of the supreme God (Marduk) with the dragon of chaos

(Tiamat), originally a myth of the origin of things which, later

perhaps, was changed into an eschatological one, again under Iranian

influence.[2] Thus it comes that the devil, the opponent of God, appears

in the end often also in the form of a terrible dragon-monster; this

appears most clearly in Rev. xii. Now it is possible that the whole

conception of Antichrist has its final roots in this already complicated

myth, that the form of the mighty adversary of God is but the equivalent

in human form of the devil or of the dragon of chaos. In any case,

however, this myth has exercised a formative influence on the conception

of Antichrist. For only thus can we explain how his figure acquires

numerous superhuman and ghostly traits, which cannot be explained by any

particular historical phenomenon on which it may have been based. Thus

the figure of Antiochus IV. has already become superhuman, when in Dan.

viii. 10, it is said that the little horn "waxed great, even to the host

of heaven; and cast down some of the host and of the stars to the

ground." Similarly Pompey, in the second psalm of Solomon, is obviously

represented as the dragon of chaos, and his figure exalted into myth.

Without this assumption of a continual infusion of mythological

conceptions, we cannot understand the figure of Antichrist. Finally, it

must be mentioned that Antichrist receives, at least in the later

sources, the name originally proper to the devil himself.[3]

From the Jews, Christianity took over the idea. It is present quite

unaltered in certain passages, specifically traceable to Judaism, e.g.

(Rev. xi.). "The Beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit" and,

surrounded by a mighty host of nations, slays the "two witnesses" in

Jerusalem, is the entirely superhuman Jewish conception of Antichrist.

Even if the beast (ch. xiii.), which rises from the sea at the summons

of the devil, be interpreted as the Roman empire, and, specially, as any

particular Roman ruler, yet the original form of the malevolent tyrant

of the latter time is completely preserved.

A fundamental change of the whole idea from the specifically Christian

point of view, then, is signified by the conclusion of ch. ii. of the

Second Epistle to the Thessalonians.[4] There can, of course, be no

doubt as to the identity of the "man of sin, the son of perdition" here

described with the dominating figure of Jewish eschatology (cf. ii. 3

&c., [Greek: o anthropos tes anomias], i.e. Beliar (?), [Greek: o

antikeimenos]--the allusion that follows to Dan xi. 36). But Antichrist

here appears as a tempter, who works by signs and wonders (ii. 9) and

seeks to obtain divine honours; it is further signified that this "man

of sin" will obtain credence, more especially among the Jews, because

they have not accepted the truth. The conception, moreover, has become

almost more superhuman than ever (cf. ii. 4, "showing himself that he is

God"). The destruction of the Adversary is drawn from Isaiah xi. 4,

where it is said of the Messiah: "with the breath of his lips shall he

slay the wicked."[5] The idea that Antichrist was to establish himself

in the temple of Jerusalem (ii. 4) is very enigmatical, and has not yet

been explained. The "abomination of desolation" has naturally had its

influence upon it; possibly also the experience of the time of Caligula

(see above). Remarkable also is the allusion to a power which still

retards the revelation of Antichrist (2 Thess. ii. 6 &c., [Greek: to

katechon; o katechon]), an allusion which, in the tradition of the

Fathers of the church, came to be universally, and probably correctly,

referred to the Roman empire. In this then consists the significant turn

given by St Paul in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians to the whole

conception, namely, in the substitution for the tyrant of the latter

time who should persecute the Jewish people, of a pseudo-Messianic

figure, who, establishing himself in the temple of God, should find

credence and a following precisely among the Jews. And while the

originally Jewish idea led straight to the conception, set forth in

Revelation, of the Roman empire or its ruler as Antichrist, here, on the

contrary, it is probably the Roman empire that is the power which still

retards the reign of Antichrist. With this, the expectation of such an

event at last separates itself from any connexion with historical fact,

and becomes purely ideal. In this process of transformation of the idea,

which has become of importance for the history of the world, is revealed

probably the genius of Paul, or at any rate, that of the young

Christianity which was breaking its ties with Judaism and establishing

itself in the world of the Roman empire.

This version of the figure of Antichrist, who may now really for the

first time be described by this name, appears to have been at once

widely accepted in Christendom. The idea that the Jews would believe in

Antichrist, as punishment for not having believed in the true Christ,

seems to be expressed by the author of the fourth gospel (v. 43). The

conception of Antichrist as a perverter of men, leads naturally to his

connexion with false doctrine (1 John ii. 18, 22; iv. 3; 2 John 7). The

_Teaching of the Apostles_ (xvi. 4) describes his form in the same way

as 2 Thessalonians ([Greek: kai tote phainaesetai o kosmoplanos os uios

theoy kai poiei saemeia kai terata]). In the late Christian Sibylline

fragment (iii. 63 &c.) also, "Beliar" appears above all as a worker of

wonders, this figure having possibly been influenced by that of Simon

Magus. Finally the author of the Apocalypse of St John also has made use

of the new conception of Antichrist as a wonder-worker and seducer, and

has set his figure beside that of the "first" Beast which was for him

the actual embodiment of Antichrist (xiii. II &c.). Since this second

Beast could not appear along with the first as a power demanding worship

and directly playing the part of Antichrist, he made out of him the

false prophet (xvi. 13, xix. 20, xx. 10) who seduces the inhabitants of

the earth to worship the first Beast, and probably interpreted this

figure as applying to the Roman provincial priesthood.[6]

But this version of the idea of Antichrist, hostile to the Jews and

better expressing the relation of Christianity to the Roman empire, was

prevented from obtaining an absolute ascendancy in Christian tradition

by the rise of the belief in the ultimate return of Nero, and by the

absorption of this outcome of pagan superstition into the

Jewish-Christian apocalyptic conceptions. It is known that soon after

the death of Nero rumours were current that he was not dead. This report

soon took the more concrete form that he had fled to the Parthians and

would return thence to take vengeance on Rome. This expectation led to

the appearance of several pretenders who posed as Nero; and as late as

A.D. 100 many still held the belief that Nero yet lived.[7] This idea of

Nero's return was in the first instance taken up by the Jewish

apocalyptic writers. While the Jewish author of the fourth Sibylline

book (c. A.D. 80) still only refers simply to the heathen belief, the

author of the (Jewish?) original of the 17th chapter of the Apocalypse

of St John expects the return of Nero with the Parthians to take

vengeance on Rome, because she had shed the blood of the Saints

(destruction of Jerusalem!). In the fifth Sibylline book, which, with

the exception of verses 1-51, was mainly composed by a Jewish writer at

the close of the first century, the return of Nero plays a great part.

Three times the author recurs to this theme, 137-154; 214-227; 361-385.

He sees in the coming again of Nero, whose figure he endows with

supernatural and daemonic characteristics, a judgment of God, in whose

hand the revivified Nero becomes a rod of chastisement. Later, the

figure of Nero _redivivus_ became, more especially in Christian thought,

entirely confused with that of Antichrist. The less it became possible,

as time went on, to believe that Nero yet lived and would return as a

living ruler, the greater was the tendency for his figure to develop

into one wholly infernal and daemonic. The relation to the Parthians is

also gradually lost sight of; and from being the adversary of Rome, Nero

becomes the adversary of God and of Christ. This is the version of the

expectation of Nero's second coming preserved in the form given to the

prophecy, under Domitian, by the collaborator in the Apocalypse of John

(xiii., xvii.). Nero is here the beast that returns from the bottomless

pit, "that was, and is not, and yet is"; the head "as it were wounded to

death" that lives again; the gruesome similitude of the Lamb that was

slain, and his adversary in the final struggle. The number of the Beast,

666, points certainly to Nero ([Hebrew: keisar neron] = 666, or [Hebrew:

keisar nero] = 616). In the little apocalypse of the _Ascensio Jesaiae_

(iii. 13b-iv. 18), which dates perhaps from the second, perhaps only

from the first, decade of the third century,[8] it is said that Beliar,

the king of this world, would descend from the firmament in the human

form of Nero. In the same way, in _Sibyll._ v. 28-34, Nero and

Antichrist are absolutely identical (mostly obscure reminiscences,

_Sib._ viii. 68 &c., 140 &c., 151 &c.). Then the Nero-legend gradually

fades away. But Victorinus of Pettau, who wrote during the persecution

under Diocletian, still knows the relation of the Apocalypse to the

legend of Nero; and Commodian, whose _Carmen Apologeticum_ was perhaps

not written until the beginning of the 4th century, knows two

Antichrist-figures, of which he still identifies the first with Nero

_redivivus_.

In proportion as the figure of Nero again ceased to dominate the

imagination of the faithful, the wholly unhistorical, unpolitical and

anti-Jewish conception of Antichrist, which based itself more especially

on 2 Thess. ii., gained the upper hand, having usually become associated

with the description of the universal conflagration of the world which

had also originated in the Iranian eschatology. On the strength of

exegetical combinations, and with the assistance of various traditions,

it was developed even in its details, which it thenceforth maintained

practically unchanged. In this form it is in great part present in the

eschatological portions of the _Adv. Haereses_ of Irenaeus, and in the

_de Antichristo_ and commentary on Daniel of Hippolytus. In times of

political excitement, during the following centuries, men appealed again

and again to the prophecy of Antichrist. Then the foreground scenery of

the prophecies was shifted; special prophecies, having reference to

contemporary events, are pushed to the front, but in the background

remains standing, with scarcely a change, the prophecy of Antichrist

that is bound up with no particular time. Thus at the beginning of the

_Testamentum Domini_, edited by Rahmani, there is an apocalypse,

possibly of the time of Decius, though it has been worked over (Harnack,

_Chronol. der altchrist. Litt._ ii. 514 &c.) In the third century, the

period of Aurelianus and Gallienus, with its wild warfare of Romans and

Persians, and of Roman pretenders one with another, seems especially to

have aroused the spirit of prophecy. To this period belongs the Jewish

apocalypse of Elijah (ed. Buttenwieser), of which the Antichrist is

possibly Odaenathus of Palmyra, while _Sibyll._ xiii., a Christian

writing of this period, glorifies this very prince. It is possible that

at this time also the Sibylline fragment (iii. 63 &c.) and the Christian

recension of the two first Sibylline books were written.[9] To this time

possibly belongs also a recension of the Coptic apocalypse of Elijah,

edited by Steindorff (_Texte und Untersuchungen_, N. F. ii. 3). To the

4th century belongs, according to Kamper (_Die deutsche Kaiseridee_,

1896, p. 18) and Sackur (_Texte und Forschungen_, 1898, p. 114 &c.), the

first nucleus of the "Tiburtine" Sibyl, very celebrated in the middle

ages, with its prophecy of the return of Constans, and its dream, which

later on exercised so much influence, that after ruling over the whole

world he would go to Jerusalem and lay down his crown upon Golgotha. To

the 4th century also perhaps belongs a series of apocalyptic pieces and

homilies which have been handed down under the name of Ephraem. At the

beginning of the Mahommedan period, then, we meet with the most

influential and the most curious of these prophetic books, the

_Pseudo-Methodius_,[10] which prophesied of the emperor who would awake

from his sleep and conquer Islam. From the _Pseudo-Methodius_ are

derived innumerable Byzantine prophecies (cf. especially Vassiliev,

_Anecdota Graeco-Byzantina_) which follow the fortunes of the Byzantine

emperors and their governments. A prophecy in verse, adorned with

pictures, which is ascribed to Leo VI. the Philosopher (Migne, _Patr.

Gracca_, cvii. p. 1121 &c.), tells of the downfall of the house of the

Comneni and sings of the emperor of the future who would one day awake

from death and go forth from the cave in which he had lain. Thus the

prophecy of the sleeping emperor of the future is very closely connected

with the Antichrist tradition. There is extant a Daniel prophecy which,

in the time of the Latin empire, foretells the restoration of the Greek

rule.[11] In the East, too, Antichrist prophecies were extraordinarily

flourishing during the period of the rise of Islam and of the Crusades.

To these belong the apocalypses in Arabic, Ethiopian and perhaps also in

Syrian, preserved in the so-called _Liber Clementis discipuli S. Petri_

(_Petri apostoli apocalypsis per Clementem_), the late Syrian apocalypse

of Ezra (Bousset, _Antichrist_, 45 &c.), the Coptic (14th) vision of

Daniel (in the appendix to Woide's edition of the _Codex Alexandrinus_;

Oxford, 1799), the Ethiopian _Wisdom of the Sibyl_, which is closely

related to the Tiburtine Sibyl (see Basset, _Apocryphes ethiopiennes_,

x.); in the last mentioned of these sources long series of Islamic

rulers are foretold before the final time of Antichrist. Jewish

apocalypse also awakes to fresh developments in the Mahommedan period,

and shows a close relationship with the Christian Antichrist literature.

One of the most interesting apocalypses is the Jewish _History of

Daniel_, handed down in Persian.[12]

This whole type of prophecy reached the West above all through the

_Pseudo-Methodius_, which was soon translated into Latin. Especially

influential, too, in this respect was the letter which the monk Adso in

954 wrote to Queen Gerberga, _De ortu et tempere Antichristi_. The old

Tiburtine Sibylla went through edition after edition, in each case being

altered so as to apply to the government of the monarch who happened to

be ruling at the time. Then in the West the period arrived in which

eschatology, and above all the expectation of the coming of Antichrist,

exercised a great influence on the world's history. This period, as is

well known, was inaugurated, at the end of the 12th century, by the

apocalyptic writings of the abbot Joachim of Floris. Soon the word

Antichrist re-echoed from all sides in the embittered controversies of

the West. The pope bestowed this title upon the emperor, the emperor

upon the pope, the Guelphs on the Ghibellines and the Ghibellines on the

Guelphs. In the contests between the rival powers and courts of the

period, the prophecy of Antichrist played a political part. It gave

motives to art, to lyrical, epic and dramatic poetry.[13] Among the

visionary Franciscans, enthusiastic adherents of Joachim's prophecies,

arose above all the conviction that the pope was Antichrist, or at least

his precursor. From the Franciscans, influenced by Abbot Joachim, the

lines of connexion are clearly traceable with Milic of Kremsier

(_Libellus de Antichristo_) and Matthias of Janow. For Wycliffe and his

adherent John Purvey (probably the author of the _Commentarius in

Apocalypsin ante centum annos editus_, edited in 1528 by Luther), as on

the other hand for Hus, the conviction that the papacy is essentially

Antichrist is absolute. Finally, if Luther advanced in his contest with

the papacy with greater and greater energy, he did so because he was

borne on by the conviction that the pope in Rome was Antichrist. And if

in the _Augustana_. the expression of this conviction was suppressed for

political reasons, in the Articles of Schmalkalden, drawn up by him,

Luther propounded it in the most uncompromising fashion. This sentence

was for him an _articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae_. To write the

history of the idea of Antichrist in the last centuries of the middle

ages, would be almost to write that of the middle ages themselves.

AUTHORITIES.--See, for the progress of the idea in Jewish and New

Testament times, the modern commentaries on Revelation and the 2nd

Epistle to the Thessalonians; Bousset, _Antichrist_ (1895), and the

article "Antichrist" in the _Encyclop. Biblica_; R.H. Charles,

_Ascension of Isaiah_, Introduction, li.-lxxiii. For the history of

the legend of Nero, see J. Geffcken, _Nachrichten der Gottinger

Gesellschaft der Wisscnschaft_ (1899), p. 446 &c.; Th. Zahn,

_Zeitschrift fur kirchliche Wissenschaft und kirchliches Leben_

(1886), p. 337 &c.; Bousset, _Kritisch-exegetisches Kommentar zur

Offenbarung Johannis_, cap. 17, and the article "Sibyllen" in

Herzog-Hauck, _Realencyklopadie fur Theologie und Kirche_ (3rd ed.),

xviii. 265 &c.; Nordmeyer, _Der Tod Neros in der Legende_, a

_Festschrift_ of the Gymnasium of Moos. For the later history of the

legend, see Bousset, _Antichrist_, where will be found a more detailed

discussion of nearly all the sources named; Bousset, "Beitrage zur

Geschichte der Eschatologie," in _Zeitschrift fur Kirchengeschichte_,

xx. 2, and especially xx. 3, on the later Byzantine prophecies;

Vassiliev, _Anecdota Graeco-Byzantina_, i. (Moscow, 1893), which gives

the texts of a series of Byzantine prophecies; E. Sackur,

_Sibyllinische Texte und Forschungen_ (1898), containing (i)

_Pseudo-Methodius_, Latin text, (2) _Epistola Adsonis_, (3) the

_Tiburtine Sibylla_; V. Istrin, _The Apocalypse of Methodius of Patara

and the Apocryphal Visions of Daniel in Byzantine and Slavo-Russian

Literature_, Russian (Moscow, 1897); J. Kampers, _Die deutsche

Kaiseridee in Prophetie und Sage_ (Munich, 1896), and "Alexander der

Grosse und die Idee des Weltimperiums," in H. Grauert's _Studien und

Darstellungen aus dem Gebiet der Geschichte_, vol. i. 2-3 (Freiburg,

1901); E. Wadstein, _Die eschatologische Ideengruppe, Antichrist,

Weltsabbat, Weltende und Welgericht_ (Leipzig, 1896), which contains

excellent material for the history of the idea in the West during the

middle ages; W. Meyer, "Ludus de Antichristo," in _Sitzberichl der

Munchener Akad._ (Phil. hist. Klasse 1882, H. i.); Kropatschek, _Das

Schriftprincip der lutherischen Kirche_, i. 247 &c. (Leipzig, 1904);

H. Preuss, _Die Vorstellungen vom Antichrist im spateren Mittelalter,

bei Luther u. i. d. Konfessionellen Polemik_ (Leipzig, 1906).

(W. Bo.)