successive races and their doings.  What with their savage wars, the barbaric habits of the historic Goths, Huns, Franks, and other warrior nations, and the interested literary Vandalism of the shaveling priests who for centuries sat upon its intellectual life like a nightmare, an antiquity could not exist for Europe.  And, having no Past to record themselves, the European critics, historians and archeologists have not scrupled to deny one to others—­whenever the concession excited a sacrifice of biblical prestige.

No “traces of old civilizations” we are told!  And what about the Pelasgi—­the direct forefathers of the Hellenes, according to Herodotus?  What about the Etruscans—­the race mysterious and wonderful, if any, for the historian, and whose origin is the most insoluble of problems?  That which is known of them only shows that could something more be known, a whole series of prehistoric civilizations might be discovered.  A people described as are the Pelasgi—­a highly intellectual, receptive, active people, chiefly occupied with agriculture, warlike when necessary, though preferring peace; a people who built canals as no one else, subterranean water-works, dams, walls, and Cyclopean buildings of the most astounding strength; who are even suspected of having been the inventors of the so-called Cadmean or Phoenician writing characters from which all European alphabets are derived—­who were they?  Could they be shown by any possible means as the descendants of the biblical Peleg (Gen. x. 25) their high civilization would have been thereby demonstrated, though their antiquity would still have to be dwarfed to 2247 “B.C..”  And who were the Etruscans?

Shall the Easterns like the Westerns be made to believe that between the high civilizations of the pre-Roman (and we say—­prehistoric) Tursenoi of the Greeks, with their twelve great cities known to history; their Cyclopean buildings, their plastic and pictorial arts, and the time when they were a nomadic tribe “first descended into Italy from their northern latitudes”—­only a few centuries elapsed?  Shall it be still urged that the Phoenicians with their Tyre 2750 “B.C.” (a chronology, accepted by Western history), their commerce, fleet, learning, arts, and civilization, were only a few centuries before the building of Tyre but “a small tribe of Semitic fishermen”?  Or, that the Trojan war could not have been earlier than 1184 B.C., and thus Magna Graecia must be fixed somewhere between the eighth and the ninth Century “B.C.,” and by no means thousands of years before, as was claimed by Plato and Aristotle, Homer and the Cyclic Poems, derived from, and based upon, other records millenniums older?  If the Christian historian, hampered by his chronology, and the freethinker by lack of necessary data, feel bound to stigmatize every non-Christian or non-Western chronology as “obviously fanciful,” “purely mythical,” and “not worthy of a moment’s consideration,” how shall one, wholly dependent upon Western guides