treating his subject from the comparative point of view, draw his conclusions as to the bearing of his results on the general question of Eurasian problems—the latter seemed preferable. For, with the whole chain of observation and thought fresh in the mind, it would seem to be the province of the individual investigator to state his inferences, even if only as working hypotheses.
I confess to having written a chapter on the Aryan problem in the light of an extended study of the whole field and of our own results. But this I have suppressed because it seemed a premature as well as a hazardous venture for one not already an authority on the subject; and the word Aryan is mentioned only incidentally. The various parts, however, of the volume contain abundant material for both use and controversy in this connection. In drawing my own conclusions I have tried to keep before the reader a current statement of the objective facts from which such inferences were drawn.
The reader may be surprised that no traces of writing are noted among the finds from Anau, especially since it is assumed that the people who carried the proto-cuneiform script into Chaldea came from an eastward- lying region within the area of isolation. It must be frankly confessed that such traces were not looked for. But even had these earlier peoples of Anau I and II possessed the art of writing, it would probably have been used only on wood, bark, or skins; for the straight and curved lines of the earliest proto-cuneiform script of Chaldea are proof that in its pre-Chaldean stage it must have been used on materials different from the clay tablets on which it was possible to develop the later cuneiform. And all traces of organic substances have disappeared, except only charcoal and niter-saturated bones. And while we might perhaps expect the strata of Anau III, which show evidence of Chaldean relations, to contain inscribed clay tablets, these might easily be confused with the containing earth mass and thus escape eyes that were not looking for inscriptions.
And now what relation do the results bear to the dream that gave rise to the expeditions? On the physical side, Messrs. Davis, Huntington, and R. W. Pumpelly have traced in High Asia the records of several great glacial expansions during the glacial period. The climatic conditions, which during that period so greatly expanded these glaciers and buried Russia under thousands of feet of ice, presumably produced also the inland sea whose shore lines are still visible.
The evolution of civilization has been traced backward to a time when, before its datings in Babylon and Egypt, man at Anau already lived in cities, cultivated wheat and barley, began the domestication and breeding of the useful animals which are our inheritance, and possessed the funda-
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