promise, it has still strange tales to tell us in the future.


THE RACES OF MAN

Turn now from this tracing of our means of knowledge, to speak of the
facts they tell us. When our humankind first become clearly visible they
are already divided into races, which for convenience we speak of as
white, yellow, and black. Of these the whites had apparently advanced
farthest on the road to civilization; and the white race itself had
become divided into at least three varieties, so clearly marked as to
have persisted through all the modern centuries of communication and
intermarriage. Science is not even able to say positively that these
varieties or families had a common origin. She inclines to think so; but
when all these later ages have failed to obliterate the marks of
difference, what far longer period of separation must have been required
to establish them!

These three clearly outlined families of the whites are the Hamites, of
whom the Egyptians are the best-known type; the Semites, as represented
by ancient Babylonians and modern Jews and Arabs; and the great Aryan or
Indo-European family, once called the Japhites, and including Hindus,
Persians, Greeks, Latins, the modern Celtic and Germanic races, and even
the Slavs or Russians.

The Egyptians, when we first see them, are already well advanced toward
civilization.[2] To say that they were the first people to emerge from
barbarism is going much further than we dare. Their records are the most
ancient that have come clearly down to us; but there may easily have
been other social organisms, other races, to whom the chances of time