“ A philosophy of the history of the human race, worthy of its name, must begin with the heavens and descend to the earth, must be charged with the conviction that all existence is one—a single conception sustained from beginning to end upon one identical law. ”— Friedrich Ratzel. T HIS Outline of History is an attempt to tell, truly and clearly, in one continuous narrative, the whole story of life and mankind so far as it is known to-day. It is written plainly for the general reader, but its ai

T HE earth on which we live is a spinning globe. Vast though it seems to us, it is a mere speck of matter in the greater vastness of space. Space is, for the most part, emptiness. At great intervals there are in this emptiness flaring centres of heat and light, the “fixed stars.” They are all moving about in space, notwithstanding that they are called fixed stars, but for a long time men did not realize their motion. They are so vast and at such tremendous distances that their motion is not perc

§ 1. The First Living Things. § 2. How Old Is the World? W E do not know how life began upon the earth. [4] Biologists, that is to say, students of life, have made guesses about these beginnings, but we will not discuss them here. Let us only note that they all agree that life began where the tides of those swift days spread and receded over the steaming beaches of mud and sand. The atmosphere was much denser then, usually great cloud masses obscured the sun, frequent storms darkened the heavens

N OW here it will be well to put plainly certain general facts about this new thing, life , that was creeping in the shallow waters and intertidal muds of the early Palæozoic period, and which is perhaps confined to our planet alone in all the immensity of space. Life differs from all things whatever that are without life in certain general aspects. There are the most wonderful differences among living things to-day, but all living things past and present agree in possessing a certain power of g

§ 1. Life and Water. § 2. The Earliest Animals. W HEREVER the shore line ran there was life, and that life went on in and by and with water as its home, its medium, and its fundamental necessity. The first jelly-like beginnings of life must have perished whenever they got out of the water, as jelly-fish dry up and perish on our beaches to-day. Drying up was the fatal thing for life in those days, against which at first it had no protection. But in a world of rain-pools and shallow seas and tides

§ 1. Why Life Must Change Continually. § 2. The Sun a Steadfast Star. § 3. Changes from Within the Earth. § 4. Life May Control Change. T HE Record of the Rocks is like a great book that has been carelessly misused. All its pages are torn, worn, and defaced, and many are altogether missing. The outline of the story that we sketch here has been pieced together slowly and painfully in an investigation that is still incomplete and still in progress. The Carboniferous Rocks, the “coal-measures,” giv

§ 1. The Age of Lowland Life. § 2. Flying Dragons. § 3. The First Birds. § 4. An Age of Hardship and Death. § 5. The First Appearance of Fur and Feathers. W E know that for hundreds of thousands of years the wetness and warmth, the shallow lagoon conditions that made possible the vast accumulations of vegetable matter which, compressed and mummified, [14] are now coal, prevailed over most of the world. There were some cold intervals, it is true; but they did not last long enough to destroy the g

§ 1. A New Age of Light. § 2. Tradition Comes into the World. § 3. An Age of Brain Growth. § 4. The World Grows Hard Again. § 5. Chronology of the Ice Age. T HE third great division of the geological record, the Cainozoic, opens with a world already physically very like the world we live in to-day. Probably the day was at first still perceptibly shorter, but the scenery had become very modern in its character. Climate was, of course, undergoing, age by age, its incessant and irregular variations

§ 1. Man Descended from a Walking Ape. § 2. First Traces of Man-like Creatures. § 3. The Heidelberg Sub-man. § 4. The Piltdown Sub-man. § 5. The Riddle of the Piltdown Remains. T HE origin of man is still very obscure. It is commonly asserted that he is “descended” from some man-like ape such as the chimpanzee, the orang-utang, or the gorilla, but that of course is as reasonable as saying that I am “descended” from some Hottentot or Esquimaux as young or younger than myself. Others, alive to thi

§ 1. The Spreading of the Aryan-Speakers. § 2. Primitive Aryan Life. § 3. Early Aryan Daily Life. W E have spoken of the Aryan language as probably arising in the region of the Danube and South Russia and spreading from that region of origin. We say “probably,” because it is by no means certainly proved that that was the centre; there have been vast discussions upon this point and wide divergences of opinion. We give the prevalent view. As it spread widely, Aryan began to differentiate into a nu

§ 1. The Place of the Israelites in History. § 2. Saul, David, and Solomon. § 3. The Jews a People of Mixed Origin. § 4. The Importance of the Hebrew Prophets. W E are now in a position to place in their proper relationship to this general outline of human history the Israelites, and the most remarkable collection of ancient documents in the world, that collection which is known to all Christian peoples as the Old Testament. We find in these documents the most interesting and valuable lights upo

At this distance of time we are unable to guess at the motives for this omission. Attila continued to speak of her as his affianced bride, and to use the relationship as a pretext for aggressions. In the subsequent negotiations a certain Priscus accompanied an embassy to the camp of the Hunnish monarch, and the fragments that still survive of the narrative he wrote give us a glimpse of the camp and way of living of the great conqueror. The embassy was itself a curiously constituted body. Its hea

§ 1. Judea at the Christian Era. § 2. The Teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. § 3. The New Universal Religions. § 4. The Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. § 5. Doctrines added to the Teachings of Jesus. § 6. The Struggles and Persecutions of Christianity. § 7. Constantine the Great. § 8. The Establishment of Official Christianity. § 9. The Map of Europe, A.D. 500. § 10. The Salvation of Learning by Christianity. B EFORE we can understand the qualities of Christianity, which must now play a large par

§ 1. Arabia before Muhammad. § 2. Life of Muhammad to the Hegira. § 3. Muhammad becomes a Fighting Prophet. § 4. The Teachings of Islam. § 5. The Caliphs Abu Bekr and Omar. § 6. The Great Days of the Omayyads. § 7. The Decay of Islam under the Abbasids. § 8. The Intellectual Life of Arab Islam. W E have already described how in A.D. 628 the courts of Heraclius, of Kavadh, and of Tai-tsung were visited by Arab envoys sent from a certain Muhammad, “The Prophet of God,” at the small trading town of

§ 1. The Western World at its Lowest Ebb. § 2. The Feudal System. § 3. The Frankish Kingdom of the Merovingians. § 4. The Christianization of the Western Barbarians. § 5. Charlemagne becomes Emperor of the West. § 6. The Personality of Charlemagne. § 7. The French and the Germans become Distinct. § 8. The Normans, the Saracens, the Hungarians, and the Seljuk Turks. § 9. How Constantinople Appealed to Rome. § 10. The Crusades. § 11. The Crusades a Test of Christianity. § 12. The Emperor Frederick

§ 1. Asia at the end of the Twelfth Century. § 2. The Rise and Victories of the Mongols. § 3. The Travels of Marco Polo. § 4. The Ottoman Turks and Constantinople. § 5. Why the Mongols were not Christianized. § 5 A . Kublai Khan founds the Yuan Dynasty. § 5 B . The Mongols Revert to Tribalism. § 5 C . The Kipchak Empire and the Tsar of Muscovy. § 5 D . Timurlane. § 5 E . The Mongol Empire of India. § 5 F . The Mongols and the Gipsies. W E have to tell now of the last and greatest of all the raid

§ 1. Princes and Foreign Policy. § 2. The English Republic. § 3. The Dutch Republic. § 4. The Break-up and Disorder of Germany. § 5. The Splendours of Grand Monarchy in Europe. § 6. The Growth of the Idea of Great Powers. § 7. The Crowned Republic of Poland and Its Fate. § 8. The First Scramble for Empire Overseas. § 9. Britain Dominates India. § 10. Russia’s Ride to the Pacific. §11. What Gibbon Thought of the World in 1780. § 12. The Social Truce Draws to an End. I N the preceding chapter we h

§1. The Possible Unification of Men’s Wills in Political Matters. §2. How a Federal World Government may come about. §3. Some Fundamental Characteristics of a Modern World State. §4. What this World might be were it under one Law and Justice. §5. The Stages Beyond. W E have brought this Outline of History up to our own times, but we have brought it to no conclusion. It breaks off at a dramatic phase of expectation. The story of life which began inestimable millions of years ago, the adventure of

T O conclude this Outline , we give here a Table of Leading Events from the year 800 B.C. to 1920 A.D. With it we give five time diagrams covering the period from 1000 B.C. onward, which present the trend of events in a graphic form. It is well that the reader should keep in mind an idea of the true proportions of historical to geological time. The scale of these five diagrams is such that by it the time diagram on page 196 , vol. i, would be about 8½ times as long, that is to say about 4 feet;