Physics and Politics or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of ''natural selection'' and ''inheritance'' to political society

For this purpose, I do not need to deal with the dim ages that ethnology just reveals to us--with the Stone Age, the flint implements, and the refuse heaps. The time to which I would go back is only that just before the dawn of history--coeval with the dawn, perhaps, it would be right to say--for the first historians saw such a state of society, though they saw other and more advanced states too: a period of which we have distinct descriptions from eye-witnesses, and of which the traces and consequences abound in the oldest law. 'The effect,' says Sir Henry Maine, the greatest of our living jurists--the only one, perhaps, whose writings are in keeping with our best philosophy--'of the evidence derived from comparative jurisprudence is