Nor are our means of penetrating the past even thus exhausted.  A third chain yet more subtle and more marvellous has been found to link us to an ancestry immeasurably remote.  This unbroken chain consists of the words from our own mouths.  We speak as our fathers spoke; and they did but follow the generations before.  Occasional pronunciations have altered, new words have been added, and old ones forgotten; but some basal sounds of names, some root-thoughts of the heart, have proved as immutable as the superficial elegancies are changeful.  “Father” and “mother” mean what they have meant for uncounted ages.

Comparative philology, the science which compares one language with another to note the points of similarity between them, has discovered that many of these root-sounds are alike in almost all the varied tongues of Europe.  The resemblance is too common to be the result of coincidence, too deep-seated to be accounted for by mere communication between the nations.  We have gotten far beyond the possibility of such explanations; and science says now with positive confidence that there must have been a time when all these nations were but one, that their languages are all but variations of the tongue their distant ancestors once held in common.

Study has progressed beyond this point, can tell us far more intricate and fainter facts.  It argues that one by one the various tribes left their common home and became completely separated; and that each root-sound still used by all the nations represents an idea, an object, they already possessed before their dispersal.  Thus we can vaguely reconstruct that ancient, aboriginal civilization.  We can even guess which tribes first broke away, and where again these wanderers subdivided, and at what stage of progress.  Surely a fascinating science this!  And in its infancy!  If its later development shall justify present 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.