JAPAN
The progress of civilisation is always gradual. A nation does not pass, in one stride, from burial in rude tumuli to sepulture in highly specialised forms of stone vaults, nor yet from a bronze age to an iron. It is therefore evident that the evolution of dolmen from barrow did not take place within Japan. The dolmen-constructor must have completely emerged from the bronze age and abandoned the fashion of barrow-burial before he reached Japan. Otherwise search would certainly disclose some transitional form between the barrow and the dolmen, and some iron implements would occur in the barrows, or bronze weapons in the dolmens. If, then, the barrow-builder and the dolmen-constructor were racially identical, it would seem to follow that the latter succeeded the former by a long interval in the order of immigration, and brought with him a greatly improved type of civilisation evolved in the country of his origin.
The reader will be naturally disposed to anticipate that the geographical distribution of the dolmens and the barrows furnishes some aid in solving this problem. But though the exceptional number found on the coasts opposite to Korea tends to support the theory that the stream of Mongoloid immigration came chiefly from the Korean peninsula viâ the island of Tsushima, there is not any local differentiation of one kind of sepulture from the other, and, for the rest, the grouping of the dolmens supplies no information
42
