them Branch of the sity of California Los Angeles TS 1&T3 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below Form L-9-15m-8,'26 EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST BY JOHN FISKE Wfllst du ins Unendliche schreitcn Gch nur im Endlichen nach alien Seiten GOETHE BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY <$bt Ritoetfibe p# Cambnbge 83925 COPYRIGHT 1883 BY JOHN F1SKE COPYRIGHT 1902 BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN fc CO. COPYRIGHT I9II BY ABBY M. FISKE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED To REV. JOHN LANGDON DUDLEY. DEAR AND HONOURED FRIEND: Quarter of a century has passed since I used to listen with delight to your preaching and come to you for sympathy and counsel in my studies. In these later days, while we meet too seldom, my memory of that wise and cordial sympathy grows ever brighter and sweeter; and to-day, in writing upon my title-page the words of the great German seer, my thoughts naturally revert to you. For I know of no one who under- stands more thoroughly or feels more keenly how it is that if we would 1 fain learn something of the Infinite, we must not sit idly repeating the formulas of other men and other days, but must gird up our loins anew, and diligently explore on every side that finite realm through which still shines the glory of an ever-present God for those that have eyes to see and ears to hear. Pray accept this little book from one who is Ever gratefully yours, JOHN FISKE. CAMBRIDGE, October 23, 1883. CONTENTS I. EUROPE BEFORE THE ARRIVAL OF MAN . I II. THE ARRIVAL OF MAN IN EUROPE . 33 III. OUR ARYAN FOREFATHERS ... 68 IV. WHAT WE LEARN FROM OLD ARYAN WORDS 97 V. WAS THERE A PRIMEVAL MOTHER TONGUE? 131 VI. SOCIOLOGY AND HERO-WORSHIP . . 158 VII. HEROES OF INDUSTRY . . . . 184 VIII. THE CAUSES OF PERSECUTION . . 191 IX. THE ORIGINS OF PROTESTANTISM . . aai X. THE TRUE LESSON OF PROTESTANTISM . 444 XI. EVOLUTION AND RELIGION . . .268 XII. THE MEANING OF INFANCY ... 279 XIII. A UNIVERSE OF MIND-STUFF . . .19* XIV. IN MEMORIAM : CHARLES DARWIN . 308 INDEX ........ 339 EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST I EUROPE BEFORE THE ARRIVAL OF MAN IN looking over any modern historical nar- rative such, for example, as Knight's "History of England" one cannot fail to be struck by the disproportion between the amounts of space devoted respectively to ancient and to modern events. Of the eight bulky volumes of Knight, the first covers a period of 1432 years, from Caesar's invasion of Britain to the death of Edward III. ; the second, bringing us down to the death of Henry VIII., covers 170 years; the third takes us 95 years further, to the beginning of the Great Rebellion ; while five volumes are required to do justice to the two centuries intervening between the overthrow of Straffbrd and the repeal of the corn laws. This is due partly to the greater complexity of modern life, and partly to the increasing abun- dance of our sources of information. It is true, EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST we have to go back a long way before we en- counter an absolute scarcity of information ; there was a great deal more literature in the Middle Ages than is commonly supposed, and it is possible to describe many long past events with great minuteness and accuracy. Mr. Free- man devotes the greater part of a volume of 768 pages to the political and military history of England during the single year 1066. But the history during the spring of 1 8 1 5, if treated with equal thoroughness, would fill a good many volumes as big as this ; and this is owing largely to our increased wealth of materials. When we go back far enough and encounter a positive dearth of material, we can devote but a few pages to the history of a century, as in the case of the earliest Teutonic invasions of Britain ; or, as in the case of the long ages before Caesar's invasion, we can barely say that such and such races of men inhabited the island, and we can give little or no account of what they did. This is one reason why we find it so hard to form and preserve an accurate mental picture of the dura- tion of past time. It requires a deliberate effort of the mind to realize, for example, that the in- terval between the proclamation of Constantine the Great by the Roman legions at York and the invasion of William the Conqueror was exactly equal to the interval between the latter event and the accession of George IV., or the 2 EUROPE BEFORE ARRIVAL OF MAN adoption of the Missouri Compromise. We may know that it is so, but in order to make it seem so, most people will have to stop and think. The case is somewhat similar when we try to realize the relative duration of the successive geological epochs in the history of the earth's crust. We are naturally inclined to overrate the relative duration of the later epochs. Familiar as we are with the established classification of periods as Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary, we fall naturally into a habit of regarding these three great groups of epochs as substantially equal in value, so that the beginning of the Tertiary period is apt to seem one third of the way back toward the first beginnings of fossil- bearing strata. Probably in our every-day think- ing the Tertiary period occupies more than a third of the space that is occupied by the whole recorded life history of the earth, mainly for the reason that it is so much more completely filled for us with familiar and well-ascertained facts. This may be partly because organic life has really been more complex and multiform since the beginning of the Tertiary period than it was in earlier ages ; but it is also, no doubt, because our sources of information are far more abundant. On the whole, the geologic record of the Tertiary period is much more completely preserved than that of the two earlier periods ; 3 EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST we see more clearly into the details of life at that time, and consequently have a more vivid picture of it before us ; and this more vivid picture, as is natural, usurps an undue place in our minds. The force of these remarks will be obvious when it is stated that in point of fact the begin- ning of the Tertiary period carries us back barely one twentieth -part of the way toward the first beginnings of fossil-bearing strata. In the table that follows, I have tried to give something like a just idea of the relative lengths of geological epochs, in accordance with the views now gener- ally adopted by geologists. Let us first suppose the entire lapse of time since the oldest Lauren- tian strata began to be deposited, down to the present day, to be divided into ten equal periods, or aeons, such as I have marked off" on the table with dotted lines. Then the Laurentian epoch fills three of these great aeons, to begin with. Here we find (with the exception of the Cana- dian eozoon, the organic nature of which has been disputed) only indirect traces of life, such as limestone, which probably came from shells. But, remembering how soft and perishable are all the lowest organisms, and remembering how considerably these oldest rocks have been af- fected by volcanic heat, we need not be sur- prised at finding the records of life in them very scanty and obscure. Next, the Cambrian 4 EUROPE BEFORE ARRIVAL OF MAN TERTIARY. Recent Pleistocene. Pliocene. Miocene. Eocene. Mammals dominant. ij Cretaceous. Jurassic. Reptiles dominant. .... 1 Triassic. Earliest Birds. 9- Permian. Earliest mammals and reptiles. Earliest batrachians. 8. ><' Carboniferous. 7- M Devonian. Earliest insects. Earliest fishes. 6. i n Sanskrit as hansa, in Bohemian as bus, the name of the celebrated martyr. But conversely, where we say heart the Greek said KapS and the old Roman cord, and where the German says haupt the Roman said caput. That is, a Teutonic answers to a Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, or Slavonic h> but a Teutonic h answers to a k in the latter languages. Now this group of facts is not precisely analogous to the cockney's transposition of his aspirates, but it is 103 EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST certainly very similar, and it is equally myste- rious. Why this curious alteration of sounds should have occurred so systematically, and on so great a scale, no one has ever succeeded in ex- plaining. It is none the less to the purpose, how- ever, that it has occurred. Although an empirical rule, Grimm's law is nevertheless a well-estab- lished rule, and in the study of Aryan etymology it has to be taken into account at every step. It is easy to see what a revolution the establishment of this law has worked in our methods of com- paring words. Formerly the etymologist looked, though in a vague, indiscriminate way, for mere resemblances ; and this was natural enough. But now a too strict resemblance sometimes becomes a suspicious circumstance. The Greek word for " whole " is 0X0?, and what could be more plausi- ble than to suppose it identical with the English word ? But here Grimm's law makes us suspi- cious. We ought not to expect a Greek to pro- nounce " whole " like an Englishman, any more than we ought to expect to hear a cockney say "horse." What the cockney says is "orse," and what the Greek would naturally say is not oXos, but /coXos ; and in point of fact it has been otherwise proved that our suspicion is here well grounded, the resemblance between the Eng- lish and Greek words is purely accidental. Mere resemblance is thus a very treacherous guide in etymology. In French we have louer, " to hire," 104 OLD ARYAN WORDS and louer, "to praise." Some philological dreamer tried to show that these words might be connected, because you praise your lodgings or horses when you wish to induce some one to hire them ! In fact, the one word has been clipped down from Latin locare, " to hire," and the other from Latin laudare, "to praise." In striking contrast to this, let us observe how two English words, pen and feather, are closely con- nected in origin, in spite of their entire dissimi- larity. There was an Old Aryan verb paf, " to fly," which still appears in the Greek 7rero/w,cu. There were also such suffixes as tra and na, de- noting the instrument with which an act is ac- complished. Pat-tra thus meant " a wing," and a Hindu might perhaps thus understand it ; but in Gothic we find fath-thra, and in English feather, just as Grimm's law has taught us to expect. Pat-na had the same meaning, and passed into old Latin zspes-na, which later Latin clipped down to penna, a wing or feather, and finally the quill-feather with which you write. In these days we have applied the word to little implements of gold or steel which have nothing to do with flying, unless the soaring of Peg- asus be supposed to keep up the association of ideas. This example of pen and feather is a very trite one, but I have cited it because it further illustrates a very important point, toward which 105 EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST the argument has been for some time tending. Looking at these two words, with reference to the whole extant Aryan vocabulary, we find that their very forms disclose their past history. We see that the word feather > which has under- gone the change of pronunciation indicated in Grimm's law, in common with Teutonic words in general, is a genuine Teutonic word, and appears in the English language to-day because it has always belonged to English speech. But the word /> Eng. wick. The Old Norse language shows a curious deviation from this general agreement in meaning ; for whereas the word generally describes an abode on the land, to the sea-rov- ing Norseman a wick was a creek or sheltered bay serving as a station for ships, and hence their famous name of Vikings or " men of the fjord." So, while the ending wick or wich is very common in old English names of inland towns, it occurs frequently also on the British "5 EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST coasts in the Norse sense, as in Sandwich and Berwick, favourite stations for pirates. But with this characteristic divergence, the generally uni- form significance of the word, in languages so widely scattered, points clearly to the existence of village communities among the prehistoric Aryans. The various forms of the English word town are equally instructive, though not quite so numerous. The Old English form tun has its counterpart in Old German zun, " an in- closed or fortified place," with which the mod- ern German zaun, " a hedge," is connected. Now, in accordance with Grimm's law, we find Armenian dun, " a house," Kymric din, " a for- tress," Irish dun, a " fortress " or " camp " or " walled town." This Keltic form appears in many geographical names, such as Thun, in Switzerland ; Lug-dun-um on the Rhone, now Lyons ; Lug-dun-um in Holland, now Leyden ; Dun-keld, the " fort of the Kelts ; " Dumbarton, the " fort of the Britons ; " Dundee, London, Clarendon, etc. In the remote Himalayas the same word reoccurs in the names of hill for- tresses, such as Kjarda Dhun, Dehra Dhun, etc. ; and again it is a fair inference that where a word turns up in so many parts of the Aryan domain with the very same determinations of meaning, it must have belonged to the primitive vocabu- lary of the race. So that our forefathers would appear to have been acquainted not only with 116 OLD ARYAN WORDS houses and villages, but also with some kind of walled towns. The name of the rampart with which such fortified inclosures were surrounded was also contained in the Old Aryan vocabulary. From the old root val or var, to " protect " or " sur- round," we have Skr. varana, Old Germ, wari, Pol. warownia y Lat. vallum, Lith. wolas, Irish fat, Kymric gwal y Eng. wall. The partition wall of a house, on the other hand, is more properly described by a root which in Sanskrit seems to be applied to wicker-work, but which in the European tongues appears, with hardly any variation either in sound or sense, as Lat. murusy Lith. muras y Old Germ. mura y modern Germ, mauer, Irish, Kymric, Old Eng., and Pol. mur. The name for " roof " is similarly ubiquitous : in Skr. we have sthag y " to cover," in Lith. stogas y " a roof," in Gr. o-reyo?, a "roof" or " house," and crrcyeu, " to cover ; " but the word appears about as often in Greek as reyo?, with the initial letter dropped ; and so in Irish we find teg, " a house," in Lat. tego and tectum, in Old Eng. thecan y in Eng. deck and thatch. In door there has been even less variation than this : Skr. has dvar y and also dur in the Vedas ; Zend dvara, Pers. dar y Gr. Bvpa y O. H. G. tura y Goth. daur y Old Eng. duru y Irish and Welsh dor; the Lithuanian has lost the singular, but retains the plural durrys for folding-doors. The 117 EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST word meant originally " that which obstructs or keeps out." Another old name for the door, which appears in Skr. as arara, has been pre- served in Europe only in the Irish or air y a " porch " or " vestibule," and Welsh oriel. This latter is one of the very few Keltic words to be found in English, where it has become the name of a kind of bay-window. Among the Aryan words for " window " there is no such identity, though there is a most curious similarity in the metaphors by which they have been constructed. In Sanskrit the window is grhaksha, or " the eye of the house," and a big round window is called gavaksha, a compound of gau y " cow," and aksha y " eye," which is about equivalent to our expression " bull's-eye." The Slavonic languages have okno y from okoy " an eye," while Gothic has augadauro and O. H. G. augatora, or "eye-door." The meaning of our English word is not so immedi- ately apparent, but in one of our nearest rela- tives, the Danish, it occurs as vindue, and in Old Norse this was vindauga^ that is, " an eye or hole for the wind to blow through." These coincidences are interesting as showing how easily and naturally the same association of ideas may occur to different people, for these words have been independently formed. Whether we are entitled to infer from this that the Aryan mother tongue had no word for window, and 118 OLD ARYAN WORDS that therefore the people who spoke it lighted and aired their houses only through the door- way, it is not easy to decide. It is very unsafe to rest a conclusion upon negative evidence. The old Aryans certainly might have had a name for window which among various tribes came to be supplanted by various other expres- sions. Accordingly we can only say that, while we are perfectly sure that they had doors, it is quite uncertain, so far as philology goes, whether they had windows or not. And in general, while the occurrence of the same indigenous name for any object, throughout the different classes of Indo-European speech, is sufficient proof that the primitive Aryans knew and named the ob- ject, on the other hand, the non-existence of such a common name raises only a negative presumption, which we have seldom any further means for testing. The ancient Aryan gained a livelihood chiefly from rearing cattle and tilling the ground. The names of our principal domestic animals are found in all parts of the Indo-European terri- tory. The various Teutonic terms, cow, ku y chuo y reappear with the proper change of guttural in Lettish gows, Pers. g&w, Armen. gov, Zend gao zndgava, Skr.gaus,gava, zndgu. A peculiar twist, by which a labial was pronounced, instead of an original guttural, may be observed quite frequently in the Graeco-Roman and Keltic lan- 119 EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST guages, and here we have Gr. ovs, Lat. bos> Irish bo, and Welsh bu. The meaning of the word has been variously explained, but, as we have beside it the Skr. gu, Gr. yocteo and )8oaw, Lat. boaoy to " bellow," it is most likely an im- itative sound, like our moo and mooley. In the dialect of the Vedas a bull is called vaksha^ in later Skr. and Zend uksha ; in Gothic this ap- pears as auhsa, and in Old Eng. as oxa y whence our ox. Sthira^ again, is a Skr. name for bull, meaning the " powerful " animal. In Zend tfaora means a strong beast of burden ; in Eng- lish we have kept the full word sfeer, but the initial s has generally been dropped, so that we have Dan. tyr, Gr. and Lat. taurus y Russ. turu, Irish tor. The word bull itself is descriptive of the strength of the animal, and appears in Skr. baling Irish bulan, Lith. bullus, and in many other languages. There are a great many other Aryan names for these animals, but without spending time on them we may note that several of the words just cited have been borrowed by non-Aryan languages, such as those of the Finno-Tataric class, and even the Japanese and Chinese ; from which it would seem probable either that the primitive Aryans were the first to domesticate cattle, or at least that they were very preeminent as a pastoral race, and furnished to their neighbours great numbers of these most useful animals. The prominence of the cow 1 20 OLD ARYAN WORDS in early Aryan thought is shown both by the multitude of synonyms for the creature, and by the frequency of similes, metaphors, and myths in the Vedic hymns in which the cow plays a part. In those days, moreover, which were before the days' of " soft " or " hard " money wealth was reckoned in cows, and cows were the circulating medium, with sheep and pigs for small change. Every one knows that Lat. pe- cunia is derived from pecus, " a herd ; " the same is true of pecu!ittm y "a man's private pro- perty," from which we have obtained peculiarity, or " that which especially pertains to an indi- vidual." Pecus, Lith. pekus, Skr. and Zend pa^u, " the animal that is tied or penned up," reappears with the regular change in Goth.faihu y Old Eng.feoh, modern Germ. Vieh ; in modern English the word has become / to " draw " or " carry," with the name of this kind of carriage. Thus arose the word veredus, " the drawer of the rheda" the post-horse, or courier's horse ; and so veredarius was a post-classic Latin word for " courier ; " but the name veredus was not long in becoming generalized, for in Martial we find it used for a light, fleet hunting horse. At the same time there came into general use the curi- ously hybrid word paraveredus, made by pre- fixing the Greek preposition ira/aa, meaning " beyond," to veredus, to denote an extra post- horse for extraordinary occasions. This mon- grel word paraveredus, thus oddly made up out of Greek, Latin, and Keltic elements, seems to have been a favourite name for the horse in the Middle Ages. In Ducange's great dictionary of mediaeval Latin we find parvaredus, parafredus, and palafredus, along with many other forms. From palafredus came the French palefroi and the English palfrey ; while the simple contraction and abbreviation of the older paraveredus re- sulted in the form pferd adopted by the modern German. 123 EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST As the Teutonic languages have thus adopted new words to designate the horse, so the modern Romanic languages have generally forgotten equus and substituted for it the name which appears in French as cheval and in Italian as cabalky and from which we have obtained such words as cavalry, chevalier, and chivalry. An- cient Greek and Latin both had this word ca- ballusy which, as kobyla, is the common name for a horse in the Slavonic languages, and ap- pears also in Irish as capall and in Welsh as ceffyl. We do not find any such name in San- skrit, but in the Kawi of the island of Java, which is a non- Aryan Malay language, as full of Sanskrit words as English is of Latin words, we find the horse called capala y and side by side with this we have in Sanskrit the adjective qapalay "swift." The Sanskrit quite generally corrupted Old Aryan ^-sounds in this way, as we corrupt Latin sounds in English when we say serebrum and Sisero instead of kerebrum and Kikero ; and I have no doubt that in this word for " swift " we have the explanation of caballus. Curiously enough, the modern Greek has also dropped the classical name for the fleet-footed beast, and substituted aXoyov, which means " unreasoning," and in former times was applied to brutes in general. It is quite remarkable that there should have been such vicissitudes in the career of the words which describe so 124 OLD ARYAN WORDS familiar an animal, and we need no better illus- tration to convince us of the danger, above pointed out, of relying too confidently upon negative evidence in such inquiries as we are here making. Looking at the contemporary names only, we find the English and French say- ing horse and cheval y " the swift runner," while High German and Greek szypferd, " the extra drawer of a post-carriage," and aXoyov, "the brute," names quite distinct both in sound and in meaning. If all the other forms had been lost and replaced by new words, as might easily be the case where there are so many syn- onyms for the same object, we might perhaps have inferred that there was no common Aryan name for the horse, and that hence the animal was not known until after the separation of Aryan tribes had begun ; but this would have been very plainly a mistake. Besides the horse and cow, the primitive Ar- yans had domesticated sheep, goats, and pigs, as well as dogs. With regard to the cat, the case is less clear. That wild species of the cat family were known seems probable, and the word puss has some claim to an Old Aryan pedigree, for we find pushak in modern Persian, -puiz'e in Lithuanian, pusag and puss in Irish, whence we have adopted the word ; but whether the primi- tive form of these names was applied to a wild or to a domesticated cat is uncertain. With this 125 EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST exception, the Indo-European names are all different. In Latin we have felis, in Greek cuAovpos ; but we know otherwise that the Greeks and Romans had no domestic cats, but kept a kind of weasel to destroy their rats and mice. In our own and most other modern Euro- pean languages the principal name of the animal is borrowed from Latin ; but the Latin catus is itself an imported word from a non-Aryan source. It is the Syriac kato, Arabic kitt, indi- cating that the cat was introduced into Europe from the Levant, at a comparatively recent period. But whether the Old Aryans had domestic cats or not, they certainly needed them, for the word mouse occurs, with hardly any variation, in nearly all the Indo-European languages. In Latin, Greek, Old Norse, Old German, and Old English it is mtis ; in Russian we have myshi, in Bohemian mysh, in Persian mush, in Sanskrit musha y the "pilfering creature," the " little thief." Flies are also to be numbered among the household pests of Aryana Vaejo ; the old name was makshi, the " buzzing creature," and is pre- served in Zend and the modern Indian lan- guages. In Europe we have Lith. musse, Bohem. musska, Lat. musca, O. H. G. muccha, Swed. and Old Eng. mygge, Eng. midge, of which the di- minutive midget, or " little fly," has been applied 126 OLD ARYAN WORDS as a caressing epithet to children. The meaning of the more common Teutonic name " fly " is too obvious to require mention. The ordinary Aryan name for " bee " Skr. bha, O. H. G. pia, Old Eng. beo t Eng. bee refers to the bright colour of the insect, but the Lat. apis is the " thrifty creature " and the Greek /neXicrcra is the " maker of honey." The Old Aryans not only kept bees for their honey, but out of the honey they made an intoxicating drink called madhU) from which we have the Zend madhu and Greek p0v, "wine," Russ. medii, Irish meadh. Old Eng. medu> Eng. mead. Wine and must are Old Aryan words, and the same is probably true of ale ; but in this latter in- stance we cannot safely infer that what we call ale was brewed, for the meaning of the word has varied considerably. Lith. alus, Old Norse 07, Old Eng. eala y mean " beer," but the Skr. all means a spirituous liquor, and the Irish ol is applied to any kind of drink. As for the word beer itself, it is doubtful if it can be traced out- side of the Teutonic languages ; for although it occurs in Irish, Welsh, and modern Persian, it does not conform to Grimm's law, and has thus most likely been borrowed from English or some other Teutonic source. Whether our Aryan forefathers brewed ale or not, they certainly cultivated barley and prob- ably wheat, and ground them into meal in mills. 127 EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST They were familiar with the plow, the yoke, and the spade. Their harvests were reaped with a sickle, and the grain was duly threshed and win- nowed, and carried to mill in wagons fitted with wheels and axle-trees. The blacksmith's work with hammer and anvil, forge and bellows, was also carried on. Sewing and spinning were fem- inine occupations, and garments were woven out of sheep's wool. The art of tanning was also practised, and leather shoes were worn. The entire career of the Aryans has been that of a warlike people. In the primitive times of which we are treating, their principal weapons were the lance, the bow and arrow, the sword and dagger and mace, with helmet and buckler for defence. That the early Aryans were acquainted with the sea seems unquestionable, for the name oc- curs, with very little change in sound and hardly any in meaning, in nearly all the Indo-European languages. The Lat. mare y whence our adjec- tive marine, appears in Skr. mira, Russ. moru, Lith. mares, Irish muir, Welsh mor, Goth, marei, O. H. G. man, Old Norse mar, Old Eng. mere. In English meer is an archaic word, still used in poetry in the sense of " lake," and it appears in many well-known names of English lakes, as Grasmere and Windermere. The original sense of the word has something poetic in it, for it means the barren, desolate waste, just as we find it commonly described in Homer. The 128 OLD ARYAN WORDS Teutonic languages, however, have generally adopted another name. In Skr. sava means simply " water," but the more specific sense appears in Goth, saivs, O. H. G. seo, Old Eng. s