age, in the partial or complete discoveries of genius, and in the great and stupendous achievements of modern experimental science.  It would require a long treatise to fill so wide a field, which we must restrict to the limits of a few pages.  Since our readers are now generally acquainted with the course pursued by human thought, and with the progress of peoples, but few landmarks or formulas are necessary to enable them to clear away obscurity and estimate facts at their just value, so as to understand what civilization and science have to do with the evolution of myth, and of science itself.

A great corollary also ensues from studies undertaken with the aid of sociology, that is, the genesis, form, and gradual evolution of human societies.  These vary in character, in attitude, in power, form and duration, with the different characters of races, and thus fulfil in various ways the cycle of myth and science of which they are capable.  It would indeed be difficult to attain to a clear and adequate conception of the universal evolution of myth and science, but for the existence of a privileged race distinguished for its psychical and organic power, which from its beginning until now, although subject to many partial eclipses, has on the whole maintained its position in the world so as to present to us the long historical drama of its evolutions.  Other races, peoples, or tribes have disappeared in the struggle for existence, or have remained essentially incapable of further progress even in a relatively inferior degree, so as to afford no aid in following the successive development of myth and science; while the Aryan family, a race to which I believe that the Semitic originally belonged,[6] furnishes the unbroken sequence of events and the stages of such complex evolution.  Nor certainly is there any signs of the disappearance of this race, since every day its intellectual and territorial achievements, added to the instruments of a powerful material civilization, invigorate its strength and presage its indefinite duration in forms we are not able to foresee, unless indeed fatal astral or telluric catastrophes should hinder its progress or bring it to an end.

If we compare this race with itself at different epochs, and in the many different peoples into which it was severed, and if at the same time we confront it with the types of other peoples at various stages, from the rudest to the most civilized, it becomes possible to form a clear conception of the genesis and successive evolution of myth and science of which the human race is capable, and in this way we may understand the general law which governs such evolutions.  This study also teaches us that humanity, whether we agree with monogenists or poligenists, is physically and psychically in all respects the same in its essential elements; in all peoples without distinction, as ethnography teaches us, the origin and genesis of myth, the implicit exercise of reason and its development, are, at all events up to a given point, absolutely identical.  All start from the same manifestations and mythical creations, and these are afterwards developed according to the logical or scientific canons of thought, which are applied to their classification.  Both among fetish-worshippers and polytheists there was a tendency towards monotheism, although sometimes it could only be discerned in a vague and confused manner.