THE MILESTONES OF HUMAN PROGRESS.[1]

[Footnote 1: A lecture delivered by Prof. Daniel G. Brinton at
the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia.]


The subject pertains directly to the advancement of the race. Indeed,
it is to the measure of this advancement I shall ask your attention.
There is no doubt about the advancement. There are some people who
believed and believe that man began in a state of high development and
has since then degenerated into his present condition. The belief in
some period of Arcadian simplicity and human perfection is still to be
found in some remote nooks and crannies of the learned world; but
those minds who have been trained in archæological studies and in
ethnographic observations know well that when we go back to the most
ancient deposits, in which we find any sign of man at all on the
globe, we find also the proofs that man then lived in the rudest
possible condition of savagery. He has, little by little, through long
centuries and millenniums of painful struggle, survived in made his
weapons and his most effective tools for the time being would be a
good criterion to go by, because these weapons and tools enabled him
to conquer not only the wild beasts around him and his fellow man
also, but nature as well. These materials are three in number. They
particularly apply to European archæology, but, in a general way, to
the archæology of all continents. The one is stone, which gave man
material for the best cutting edge which he could make for very many
millenniums of his existence. After that, for a comparatively short
period, he availed himself of bronze--of the mixture of copper and tin
called bronze--an admixture giving a considerable degree of hardness
and therefore allowing polish and edge making. The bronze age was not