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BY EDWARD B. TYLOR, AUTHOR OK "llKaEABCHEH INTO THE EARLY HIHTORV OF MANKIND," ilc. " Ce n'ost pas dans les possibilitds. c'estdans I'honime n.Sme qu'il faut ^tudior I'boraine • U no sagit paH annagmorce qu'il miroit pfl on dft fairo, mais do regardor ce qu'il fait." qu'i — De Brossks, IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. 1. LONDON : JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 187L (JUlMn oj Travflation and Reproduction rmn-ol.) / ^0/x / LONDON : BRADDURV, EVA.Nfe, AND CO., I'UINTERS, WII1TEFK1AE8. PREFACE. i # I The present volumes, uniform with the previous volume of "Researches into the Early History of Mankind " (1st Ed. 1865; 2nd Ed. 1870), carry on the investigation of Culture into other branches of thought and belief, art and custom. During the past six years, I have taken occasion to bring tentativel}' before the puolic some of the principal points of new evidence and argumenc here advanced. The doc- trine of survival in culture;, the bearing of directly- expressive language and the invention of numerals on the problem of early civilization, the place of myth in the primitive history of the human mind, the develop- ment of the animistic philosophy of religion, and the origin of rites and ceremonies, hnvo been discussed in various papeis and lectures,* before being treated at L.'.rge and with a fuller array of facts in this work. The authorities for the facts stated in the text are * Fortnightly Review : ' Origin of Language,' April 15, 1866 ; ' Boligion of Savages,' August 15, 1866. Lectures at Royal Institution: 'Traces of the Early Mental Condition of Mar,' March 15, 1867 ; ' Survival of Savage Thruglit in Modern Civilization,' April 23, 1869. Lecture at University College, London : • Spiritualistic Philosophy of the Lower Races of Mankind,' May 8, 1869. Paper read at British Association, Nottingham, 1866 : ' Phenomena of Civilization Traceable to a Rudimental Origin among Savage Tribes,' Paper read at Ethno- logical Society of London, April 26, 1870 : ' Philosophy of Religion among the Lower Race^ of Mankind,' etc. etc. J! VI I'UKl'ACU. fully spo(ifi(!(l ill the foot-iiotos, which must also sci've m^ my <,^('iu'ral {Kikuowlt'tlgmunt of obligution.s to writers on etIiiiogrii[)hy and kindred sciiaices, ii.s well as to historians, travellers, and missionaries. 1 will only mention apart two treatises of which I have made especial use : the ' Menscli in del* Oeschichte,' by Professor Bastian of Berlin, and the * Antliroi)ologic der Naturviilker,' by the late Professor Widtz of Marbarg. In discussing problems so complex as those of the development of civilization, it is not enough to put for- ward theories accompanied by a finv illustrative examples. The statement of the facts must form the staple of the argiunent, and the limit of needful dc^tail is only reached when each group so displays its general law, that fresh cases come to range themselves in their proper inches as new instances of an already established rule. Should it seem to any readers that my attempt to reach this limit sometimes leads to the heaping up of too cumbrous detail, I would point out that the theoretical novelty as well as the practical importance of many of the issues raised, make it most unadvisable to stint them of theii' full evidence. In the course of ten years chiefly spent in these researches, it has been my constant task to select the most instructive ethnological facts from the vast mass on record, and by lopping away unnecessary matter to reduce the data on each problem to what is indis- pensable for reasonable proof. E. B. T. March, 1871. Iso sei've ua ) writers on ) liistorians, htion apart il use : the in of Jicrlin, l>y tlic late lose of the to 2)ut for- 3 examples. a pie of the ily readied , that fresli r niches as I Shoukl it this limit ■ous detail, y as well lies raised, theii' full spent in to select the vast iry matter is indis- i B. T. CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUMP: y leaps (la nature n'agit jamais par saut)," as well as in his " great principle, commonly little employed, that nothing happens without its sufficient reason." Nor, again, in studying the structure and habits of plants and animals, or in investigating the lower functions even of man, are these leading ideas unacknowledged. But when we come to talk of the higher processes of human feeling and action, of thought and language, knowledge and art, a change appears in the prevalent tone of opinion. The world at large is scarcely prepared to accept the general study of human life as a branch of natural science, and to carry out, in a large sense, the poet's injunction, to "Account for moral as for natural things." To many educated minds there seems something presumptuous and repulsive in the view that the history of mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature, that our thoughts, wills, and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern the motion of waves, the combination of acids and bases, and the growth of plants and animals. The main reasons of this state of the popular judgment are not far to seek. There are many who would willingly accept a science of history if placed before them with substantial defi- niteness of principle and evidence, but who not unreasonably reject the systems offered to them, as falling too far short of a scientific standard. Through resistance such as this, real know- ledge always, sooner or later, makes its way, while the habit of opposition to novelty does such excellent service against the invasions of speculative dogmatism, that we may sometimes even wish it were stronger than it is. But other obstacles to the investigation of laws of human nature arise from consider- ations of metaphysics and theology. The popular notion of free human will involves not only freedom to act in accordance with Ml THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE. 3 motive, but also a power of breaking loose from continuity and acting without cause, — a combination which may be roughly illustrated by the simile of a balance sometimes acting in the usual way, but also possessed of the faculty of turning by itself Avithout or against its weights. This view of an anomalous action of the will, which it need hardly bo said is incompatible Avith scientific argument, subsists as an opinion, patent or latent in men's minds, and strongly affecting their theoretic views of history, though it is not, as a rule, brought prominently forward in systematic reasoning. Indeed the definition of human will, as strictly according with motive, is the only possible scientific basis in such enquiries. Happily, it is not needful to add here yet another to the list of dissertations on supernatural inter- vention and natural causation, on liberty, predestination, and accountability. We may hasten to escape from the regions of transcendental philosophy and theology, to start on a more hopeful journey over more practicable gi-ound. None will deny that, as each man knoAvs by the evidence of his OAvn conscious- ness, definite and natural cause does, to a great extent, deter- mine human action. Then, keeping aside from considerations of extra-natural interference and causeless spontaneity, let us take this admitted existence of natural cause and effect as our standing-ground, and travel on it so far as it will bear us. It is on this same basis that physical science pursues, Avith ever- increasing success, its quest of laAvs of nature. Xor need this restriction hamper the scientific study of human life, in which the real difficulties are the practical ones of enormous com- plexity of evidence, and imperfection of methods of obser- vation. NoAV it appears that this view of human Avill and conduct, as subject to definite laAV, is indeed recognized and acted upon by the very people Avho oppose it Avhen stated in the abstract as a general principle, and who then complain that it annihilates man's frc^-Avill, destroys his sense of personal responsibility, and degrades him to a soulless machine. He who will say these things Avill nevertheless pass much of his own life in studying the motives which lead to human action, seeking to attain his Avishes through them, framing in his mind theories of personal 1.1 1 1' 4 THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE. character, reckoning wliat arc likely to be the effects of now combinations, and giving to his reasoning the crowning ciiaracter of true scientific inquiry, by taking it for granted that in so far as his calculation turns out wrong, either his evidence must have been false or incomplete, or his judgment upon it unsound. Such a one will sum up the experience of years spent in com- plex relations with society, by declaring his persuasion that there is a reason for everything in life, and that where events look unaccountable, the rule is to wait and watch in hope that the key to the problem may some day be found. This man's observa- tion may have been as narrow as his inferences are crude and prejudiced, but nevertheless he has been an inductive philosopher " more than forty years without knowing it." He has practically acknowledged definite laws of human thought and action, and has simply thrown out of account in his own studies of life the whole fabric of motiveless will and uncaused spontaneity. It is assumed here that they should be just so thrown out of accoimt in wider studies, and that the true philosophy of history lies in extending and improving the methods of the plain people who form their judgments upon facts, and check them upon new facts. Whether the doctrine be wholly or but partly true, it accepts the very condition under which we search for new know- ledge in the lessons of experience, and in a word the whole course of our rational life is based upon it. " One event is always the son of another, and we must never forget the parentage," was a remark made by a Bechuana chief to Casalis the African missionar}'. Thus at all times historians, so far as tliey have aimed at being more than mere chroniclers, have done their best to show not merely succession, but con- nexion, among the events upon their record. Moreover, they have striven to elicit general principles of human action, and by these to explain particular events, stating expressly or taking tacitly for granted the existence of a philosophy of history. Should any one deny the possibility of thus establishing historical laws, the answer is ready with which Boswell in such a case turned on Johnson : " Then, sir, you would reduce all history to no better than an almanack." That nevertheless the labours of so many eminent thinkers should ha . e as yet brought history only THE .SCIENCE OF CULTURE. to the threshold of science, need cause no wonder in those who Consider the bewildering complexity of the problems which come before the general historian. The evidence from which he is to draw his conclusions is at once so multifarious and so doubtful, that a full and distinct view of its bearing on a par- ticular question is hardly to be attained, and thus the tempta- tion liecomes all but irresistible to garble it in support of some rough and ready theory of the course of events. The philosophy of history at large, explaining the past and predicting the future phenomena of man's life in the world by reference to general laws, is in fact a subject with which, in the present state of knowledge, even genius aided by wide research seems but hardly able to cope. Yet there are departments of it which, though difficult enough, seem comparatively accessible. If the field of inquiry be narrowed from History as a whole to that branch of it which is here called Culture, the history, not of tribes or nations, but of the condition of knowledge, religion, art, custom, and the like among them, the task of investigation proves to lie within far more moderate compass. We suffer still from the same kind of difficulties which beset the wider argument, but they are much diminished. The evidence is no longer so wildly heterogeneous, but may be more simply classified and compared, while the power of getting rid of extraneous matter, and treat- ing each issue on its own proper set of facts, makes close reason- ing on the whole more available than in general history. This may appear from a brief preliminary examination of t' ^' problem, liow the phenomena of Culture may be classified and arranged, stage by stage, in a probable order of evolution. Surveyed in a broad view, the character and habit of mankind at once display that similarity and consistency of phenomena which led the Italian proverb-maker to declare that " all the world is one country," " tutto il mondo e paese." To general likeness in human nature on the one hand, and to general likeness in the circumstances of life on the other, this similarity and consistency may no doubt be traced, and they may be studied with especial fitness in comparing races near the same grade of civilization. Little respect need be had in such comparisons for date in history or for place on the map ; the THE SCIFNCE OF CULTURE. yi\ ■Hi II! I!l:! ancient Swiss lako-dwclicr n"»ay l)C set beside the mediaeval Aztec, and the Ojibwa c: North America beside the Zulu of South Africa, As Dr. Johnson contemptuously said when he had read about Patagonians and South Sea Islanders in Hawkesworth's Voyager, " one set of savages is like another." How true a generalization chis really k, any Ethnological Museum may show. Examine for Instance the edged and pointed instruments in sucli a cJlection ; the inventory includes hatchet, adze, chisel, knife, saw, scraper, awl, needle, spear and arrow-head, and of these most or all belong Avith only differences of detail to races the most various. So it is with savage occupations; the wood-chopping, fishing with net and line, shooting iiid spearing game, fire-making, cooking, twisting cord and plaiting baskets, repeat themselves with wonderful uni- formity in the museum shelves which illustrate the life of the lower races from Kamchatka to Tierra del Fuego, and from Dahome to Hawaii. Even when it comes to comparing barbaroub hordes with civilized nations, the consideration thrusts itself upon our minds, how far item after item of the life of the lower races passes into analogous proceedings of the higher, in forms not too far changed to be recognized, and sometimes hardly changed at all. Look at the modern European peasant using his hatchet and his hoe, see his food boilin»f or roastin": over the log-fire, observe the exact place which beer holds in his calcula tion of happiness, hear his tale of the ghost in the nearest haunted house, and of the farmer's niece who was bewitched with knots in her inside till she fell into fits and died. If we choose out in this way things which have altered little in a long course of centuries, we may draw a picture where there shall bo scarce a hand's breadth difference between an English plough- man and a negro of Central Africa. These pages will be so crowded with evidence of such con'espondence among mankind, that there is no need to dwell upon its details here, but it may be used at once to override a problem which would compli "latc the argument, namely, the question of race. For the present purpose it appears both possible and desirable to eliminate considerations of hereditary varieties or races of man, and to treat mankind as homogeneous in nature, though placed in Tin: sriKNCE of cui.tuuk. different grados of civilization. The details of the enquiry will, I think, prove that stages of culturp may be compared without taking into account how far tribes who use the same implement, follow the same custom, or believe the same myth, may differ in their bodily configuration and the colour of their skin and hair. A first step in the study of civilization is to dissect it into details, and to classify these in their proper groups. Thus, in examining weapons, they are to bo classed under spear, club, sling, bow and arrow, and so forth ; among textile arts are to be ranged matting, netting, and several grades of making and weaving threads ; myths are divided under such headings as myths of sunrise and sunset, eclipse-myths, earthquake-myths, local myths which account for the names of places by some fanciful tale, eponymic myths which account for the parentage of a tribe by turning its name into the name of an imaginary ancestor ; under rites and ceremonies occur such practices as the various kinds of sacrifice t j the ghosts of the dead and to other spiritual beings, the turning to the east in worship, the purifica- tion of ceremonial or moral unclcanness by means of water or fire. Such are a few miscellaneous examples from a list of hundreds, and the ethnograplicr's business is to classify such details with a view to making out their distribution in geography and history, and the relations Avhich exist among them. What this task is like, may be almost perfectly illustrated by comparing these details of culture with the species of plants and animals as studied by the naturalist. To the ethnographer, the bow and arrow is a species, the habit of flattening children's skulls is a species, the pract'oo of reckoning numbers by tens is a species. The geographical distribution of these things, and their trans- mission from region to region, have to be studied as the naturalist studies the geography of his botanical and zoological species. Just as certain plants and animals are peculiar to certain districts, so it is with such instruments as the Australian boomerang, the Polynesian stick-and-groove for fire-making, the tiny bow and arrow used as a lancet or phleme by tribes about the Isthmus of Panama, and in like manner with many an art, myth, or custom, found isolated in a particular field. Just as 1 T, ■! ii:! ii 8 THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE. tlio catalogue of all the species of plants and animals of a district represents its Flora and Fauna, so the list of aii the items of tlie general life of a j)eople represent that whole which we call its culture. And just as distant regions so often produce vegetables and animals which arc analogous, though by no means identical, so it is with the details of the civilization of their inhabitants. How good a working analogy there really is between the diffusion of plants and a.amals and the diffusion of civilization, comes well into view when we notice how far the same causes have produced both at once. In district after district, the same causes which have introduced the cultivated plants and domesticated animals of civilization, have brought in with them a corresponding art and knowledge. The course of events which carried horses and wheat to America carried with them the use of the gun and the iron hatchet, while in return the old world received not only maize, potatoes, and turkeys, but the habit of sni ing and the sailor's hammock. It is a matter worthy of cuusideration, that the accounts of similar phenomena of culture, recurring in different parts of the world, actually supply incidental proof of tlieir own authen- ticity. Some years since, a question which brings out this point was put to me by a great historian — " How can a state- ment as to customs, myths, beliefs, &c., of a savage tribe be treated as evidence where it depends on the testimony of some traveller or missio; ary, who may be a superficial observer, more or less ignorant of che native language, a careless retailer of unsifted talk, a man prejudiced, or even wilfully deceitful ? " This question is, indeed, one which every ethnographer ought to keep clearly and constantly before his mind. Of course he is bound to use his best judgment as to the trustworthiness of all authors he quotes, and if possible to obtain several accounts to certify each point in each locality. Bu(. it is over and above these measures of precaution, that the test of recurrence comes in. If two independent visitors to different countries, say a mediaeval Mohammedan in Tartary and a modern Englishman in Dahome, or a Jesuit missionary in Brazil and a Wesleyan in the Fiji Islands, agree in describing some analogous art or rite or myth among the people they have visited, it becomes difficult THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE. iiiimals of a st of ail the whole which ns so often s, though by ivilization of icre really is ! diffusion of how far the listrict after e cultivated ivc brought Tiie course rica carried let, while in )tatoes, and imniock. accounts of it parts of wn autheu- s out this 1 a state- e tribe be ly of some rver, more retailer of eceitful ? " ler ought course he thiness of 1 accounts and above nee comes ies, say a iglishman vsleyan in or impossible to set down such correspondence to accident or wilful fraud, A story by a bushranger in Australia may, per- haps, be objected to as a mistake or an invention, but did a Methodist minister in Guinea conspire with him to cheat tho public by telling the same story there ? The possibility of inten- tional or unintentional mystification is often barred by such a state of things as that a similar statement is made in two remote lands, by two witnesses, of whom A lived a century before B, and B appears never to have heard of A. How distant are the countries, how wide apart the dates, how t ; nt lar^o, and soinctiinos wo Imvo to stmly movcinciits of iiutioiial lilb as a wliole, whoro tlu; ijidividtials co-opiTatiuj; in tliciu aiu utterly beyond our oltsia'vation. IJut seeing that collective Hoeial action is the mere resultant vi' many individual notions, it is elear that these two nmthods of enciuiry, if riglitly followed, nuist be absolutely consistent. In studyinj,' botl; the recurrence of special habits or ideas in several districts, and their prevalence within each district, thero come before us ever-reiterateil ])roofs of regular causation pro- t shape the early stages of human life. Those men whose eyes are always turned to look back on the wisdom of the ancients, those who by a common confusion of thought ascribe to men of old the wisdom of old men, those who hold fast to some once- lionoured scheme of life which new schemes are superseding before their eyes, are apt to carry back their thought of present degeneration into far-gone ages, till they reach a period of primaeval glory. The Tarsi looks back to the happy rule of King Yima, when men and cattle were immortal, when water and trees never dried up and food was inexhaustible, when there was no cold nor heat, no envy nor old age,^ The Bud- dhist looks back to the age of glorious soaring beings who had no sin, no sex, no want of food, till the unhappy hour when, tasting a delicious scum that formed upon the surface of the earth, they fell into evil, and in time became degraded to eat rice, to bear children, to build houses, to divide property, and to establish caste. In after ages, record preserves details of the continuing course of degeneration. It was King Chetiya who told the first lie, and the citizens who heard of it, not knowing what a lie was, asked if it were white, black, or blue. Men's lives grew shorter and shorter, and it was King Maha S^igara ' Goguet, vol. iii. p. 270. ' Lucret. v. 923, etc. ; sec Hor. Sat. i. 3. 3 ' Avesta,' trans. Spiegel & Bleeck, vol. ii. p. 60. THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTUllE. 37 who, after a brief reign of 252,000 years, made the dismnl discoveiy of the first grey hair.^ Admitting the imperfection of the historical record as regards the lowest stages of culture, we must bear in mind that it tells both ways. Niebuhr, attacking the progressionists of the 18th century, remarks that they have overlooked the fact " that no single example can be brought forward of an actually savage people having independently become civilized."^ Whately appropriated this remark, which indeed forms the kernel of his well-known Lecture on the Origin of Civilization : " Facts are stabborn things," he says, "and that no authenticated instance can be produced of savages that ever did emerge, unaided, from that state is no theory, but a statement, hitherto never disproved, of a matter of fact." He uses this as an argument in support of his general conclusion, that man could not have risen independently from a savage to a civilized state, and that savages are degenerate descendants of civilized men.^ But he omits to ask the counter-question, whether we find one recorded instance of a civilized people fall- ing independently into a savage state ? Any such record, direct and well vouched, would be cf high interest to ethnologists, though, of course, it would not contradict the development- theory, for proving loss is not disproving previous gain, But where is such a record to be found '? The defect of historical evidence as to the transition between savagery and higher culture is a two-sided fact, only half taken into Archbishop Whately's one-sided argument. Fortunately the defect is by no means fatal. Though history may not account directly for the existence and explain the position of savages, it at least gives evidence which bears closely on the matter. Moreover, we ai'e in various ways enabled to study the lower course of culture on evidence which cannot have been tampered with to support a theory. Old traditional lore, however untrustworthy as direct record of events, contains most faithful incidental * Hardy, ' Manual of Budhism, ' pp. 64, 123. ' Niebuhr, •Romischo Geschichte,' part i. p. 88 : "Nur das haben sie ivbcr- seheiij dasz kein einziges Beyspiel von eineiu wirklich wilden Volk aufzuweisen ist, welches froy zur Cultur ubergegangen ware." » Whately, ' Essay on Origin of Civilization.' 38 THK DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE. descriptions of manners and customs ; archaeology displays old structures and buried relics of the remote past ; philology brings out the undesigned history in language, which genera- tion after generation have handed down without a thought of its having such significance ; the ethnological survey of the races of the world tells much ; the ethnographical comparison of their condition tells more. Arrest and decline in civilization are to be recognized as among the more frequent and powerful operations of national life. That knowledge, arts, r^d institutions should decay in certain districts, that peoples once progressive should lag behind and be passed by advancing neighbours, that some- times even societies of men should recede into rudeness and misery — all these are phenomena with which modern history is familiar. In judging of the relation of the lower to the higher stages of civilization, it is essential to gain some idea how far it may have been affected by such degeneration. What kind of evidence can direct observation and history give as to t\c degradation of men from a civilized condition toward that of savagery ? In our great citios, the so-called " dangerous classes" are sunk in hideous misery and depravity. If we have to strike a balance between the Papuans of New Caledonia and the communities of European beggars and thieves, we may sadly acknowledge that we have in our midst something worse than savagery. But it is not savagery; it is broken-down civilization. Negatively, the inmates of a Whitechapel casual ward and of a Hottentot kraal agree in their want of the knowledge and virtue of the higher culture. But positively, their mental and moral characteristics are utterly different. Thus, the savage life is essentially devoted to gaining subsistence from nature, which is just what the proletarian life is not. Their relations to civilized life — the one of independence, the other of de- pendence — are absolutely opposite. To my mind the popular phrases about " city savages " and " street Arabs " seem like comparing a ruined house to a builder's yard. It is more to the purpose to notice how war and misrule, famine and pesti- lence, have again and again devastated countries, reduced their population to miserable remnants, and lowered their level of THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE. 39 civilization, and how the isolated life of wild country districts seems sometimes tending toward a state of savagery. So far as wo know, however, none of these causes have ever really reproduced a savage community. For an ancient account of degeneration under adverse circumstances, Ovid's mention of the unhappy colony of Tomi on the Black Sea is a case in point, though perhaps not to be taken too literally. Among its mixed Greek and barbaric population, harassed and carried off into slavery by the Sirmatian horsemen, much as the Persians of to-day are by the Turkomans, the poet describes the neglect of the gardener's craft, the decay of textile arts, the barbaric clothing of hides. " Nee tamon htoc loca sunt ullo pretiosa motallo : Hostia ab agricola vix sinit ilia fodi. Purpura scepe tuos fulgens prostexit amictus. Sed nou Sannatico tingitur ilia maii. Vellera diu-a ferunt pecudes, et Palladis uti Arte Tomitanae non didicere nurus. Femina pro lana Cerialia munera frangit, Suppositoque gravem vertioa portat aquam. Non hie pampineis amicitur vitibus ulmus, Nulla premunt ramos pondere porna suo. Tristia deformes pariunt absinthia ctimpi, Terraque de fructu quam sit amara, docet." ' Cases of exceptionally low civilization in Europe may perhaps be sometimes accounted for by degeneration of this kind. But they seem more often the relics of ancient unchanged bar- barism. The evidence from wild parts of Ireland two or three centuries ago is interesting from this point of view. Acts of Parliament were passed against the inveterate habits of fasten- ing ploughs to the horses' tails, and of burning oats from the J xaw to save the trouble of threshing. In the 18th century Ireland could still be thus described in satire : — '* The Western isle renowned for bogs, For ^-orieo and for great wolf-dogs, Ff r drawing hobbies by the tails, And. threshing corn with fiery flails." * vi * Ovid. Ex Ponto, iii. 8 ; see Grote, * History of Greece,' toI. xU. p 641, ' W. C. Taylor, *Nat. Hist, of Society,' voL i p. 202. 40 THE DEVKLOPMKNT OF CULTURE. Fyncs Moryson's (Inscription of tho wild or " mcero " Irish, about 1(){)(), is uuiJizing. Tho very lords of them, ho says, dwelt in poor clay houses, or cabins of boughs covered with turf. In many parts men as well as women had in very winter time but a linen rag about the loins and a woollen mantle on their bodies, so that it would turn a man's .stomach to see an old woman in the morning before breakfast. He notices their habit of burn- ing oats from the straw, and making cakes thereof They had no ta\)les, but set thoir meat on a bundle of gi'ass. They feasted on fallen horses, and seethed pieces of beef and pork with tho unwashed entrails of beasts in a hollow tree, lapped in a raw cow's hide, and bo set over the fire, and they drank milk warmed with a stone first ciust into the fire.^ Another district remarkable for a barbaric simplicity of life is the Hebrides. In 18G8 Mr. Walter Morrison there bought from an old woman at Stornoway the service of earthenware slie was actually using, of which lie gave me a crock. These earthen vessels, unglazed and made by hand without tho potter's wheel, might pass in a museum as inditferent specimens of savage manufacture. Such a modem state of the potter's art in the Hebrides fits well with George Buchanan's statement in the 16th century that the islanders used to boil meat in the beast's own paunch or hide.* Early in the 18th century Martin mentions as prevalent there the ancient way of dressing corn by burning it dexterously from the ear, Avhich he notices to be a very quick process, thence called "graddan" (Gaelic, ^>'a(? = quick).' Thus we see that the habit of burning out the grain, for which the " meere Irish " were reproached, was really the keeping up of an old Keltic art, not without its practical use. So the appearance in modern Keltic districts of other widespread arts of the lower culture— hide- boiling, like that of the Scythians in Herodotus, and stone- boiling, like that of the Assinaboins of North America — seems Fyno3 Moryson, ' Itinerary ;' London, 1617, part iii. p. 162, etc. ; Evans in ' Archseologia,' voL xli. See description of hide-boiling, etc., among the wild Irish about 1550, in Andrew Boorde, 'Introduction of Knowledge,' ed. by F. J. Furnivall, Early English Text Soc. 1870, ' Buchanan, ' Eerum Scoticarum Historia ; ' Edinburgh, 1528, p. 7. See ' Early History of Mankind,' 2nd ed. p. 272. 2 Martin, •Description of Western Islands,' in Piukerton, vol. iii. p. 639. Tllli DKVKLOPMiiNT OF CULTUUK. 41 uru " Irish, n, ho says, d witli turf, ,er tiiuo but huir bodies, I woman in it of burn- Thcy hud l)cy feasted •k witli tho id in a raw ilk warmed remarkable II 18G8 Mr. Stornoway f which ho d made by nuscum as I a modern ith Georr^e J islanders * Early there the from the nee called the habit sli " were ic art, not rn Keltic re— hide- id stoue- a — seems Evans in ■ng the wild 3d. by F. J, 7. See . 63». e 4 I to fit not so well with degradation from a high as with survival from a low civilization. Tho Irish and tho Hebrideans hud been for ages under the influence of comparatively high civilization, which nevertheless may have left unaltered much of tho older and ruder habit of the people. ' Instances of civilized men taking to a wihl life in outlying districts of the world, and ceasing to obtain or want tho ap- pliances of civilization, give more distinct evidence of degrada- tion. In connexion with this state of things takes place the nearest known approach to an independent degeneration from a civilized to a savage state. This happens in mixed races, whose standard of civilization may be more or less below that of the higher race. The mutineers of the Bounty, with their Poly- nesian wives, founded a rude but not savage community on Pitcairn's Island.^ The mixed Portuguese and native races of the East Indies and Africa lead a life below the European standard, but not a savage life.° Tho Oauchos of the South American Pampas, a mixed European and Indian race of equestrian herdsmen, are described as sitting about on ox- skulls, making broth in horns with hot cinders heaped round, living on meat without vegetables, and altogether leading a foul, brutal, comfortless, degenerate, but not savage life.^ One step beyond this brings us to the cases of individual civilized men being absorbed in savage tribes and adopting the savage life, on which they exercise little influence for improvement ; the children of these men may come distinctly under the category of savages. These cases of mixed breeds, however, do not show a low culture actually produced as the result of degenera- tion from a high one. Their theory is that, given a higher and a lower civilization existing among two races, a mixed race between the two may take to the lower or an intermediate condition. Degeneration probably operates even more actively in the * * Mutiny of the Bounty,' etc. * Wallace, 'Malay Archipelago,' vol. i. pp. 42, 471 ; vol. ii. pp. 11, 43, 48 ; Latham, ' T :r. Eth.,' vol. ii. pp.492-5 ; D. & C. Livingstone, ' Exp. to Zambesi,' p. 45, ' Southey, 'History of Braail,' vol. iii. p. 422. •'Hi 42 THE DEVELOrMENT OF CULTURE. m i ; i lower than in the higher culture. Barbarous nations and savage hordes, with their less knowledge and scantier appliances, would seem peculiarly exposed to degrading influences. In Africa, for instance, there seems to have been in modern centuries a falling off in culture, probably due in a considerable degree to foreign influence. Mr. J. L. Wilson, contrasting the 16th and I7tli century accounts of powerful negro kingdoms in West Africa with the present small communities, with little or no tradition of their forefathers' more extended political organiza- tion, looks especially to the slave-trade as the deteriorating cause.^ In South-east Africa, also, a comparatively high barbaric culture, wliich we especially associate with the old descriptions of the kingdom of Monomotapa, seems to have fallen away, and the remarkable ruins of buildings of hewn stone fitted without mortar indicate a former civilization above that of the present native population.*^ In North America, Father Charlevoix remarks of the Iroquois of the last century, that in old times they used to build their cabins better than other nations, and better than they do themselves now ; they carved rude figures in relief on them ; but since in various expeditions almost all their villages have been burnt, they have not taken the trouble to restore them in their old condition.^ The degradation of the Cheyenne Indians is matter of history. Persecuted by their enemies the Sioux, and dislodged at last even from their fortified village, the heart of the tribe was broken. Their numbers were thinned, they no longer dared to establish themselves in a permanent abode, they gave up the cultivation of the soil, and became a tribe of wandering hunters, with horses for their only valuable possession, which every year they bartered for a supply of corn, beans, pumpkins, and European merchandise, and then returned into the heart of the prairies.* When in the Rocky Mountains, Lord Milton and Dr. Cheadle came upon an outly- ing fragment of the Shushwap race, without horses or dogs, » J. L. Wilson, ' W. Afr.,' p. 189. ' Waitz, 'Anthropologic,' vol. ii. p. 359, see 91 ; Du Chaillu, ' Asliango-land,' p. 116. ' Charlevoix, 'Nouvellc France,' vol. vi. p. 51. * Irving, 'Astoria,' vol. ii. ch. v. THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE. 43 sheltering themselves under rude temporaiy slants of bark or matting, falling year by year into lower misery, and rapidly dying out ; this is another example of the degeneration which no doubt has lowered or destroyed many a savage people.^ There are tribes who are the very outcasts of salvage life. There is reason to look upon the miserable Digger Indians of North America and the Bushmen of South Africa as the persecuted i emnants of tribes who have seen happier days.*^ The traditions of the lower races of their ancestors' better life may sometimes be real recollections of a not far distant past. The Algonquin Indians look back to old days as to a golden age when life was better than now, when they had better laws and leaders, and manners less rude.^ And indeed, knowing what we do of their history, we may admit that they have cause to remember in misery happiness gone by. Well, too, might the rude Kamchadal declare that the wo "Id is growing worse and worse, that men are becoming fewer and viler, and food scarcer, for the hunter, and the bear, and the reindeer are hurrying away from here to the happier life in the regions belov:.'* It would be a valu ^ble contribution to the study of civilization to have the action of decline and fall investigated on a wider and more exact basis of evidence than has yet been attempted. The cases here stated are probably but part of a long series which might be brought forward to prove degeneration in culture to have been,byno means indeed the primary cause of the existence of barbarism and savagery in the world, but a secondary action largely and deeply affecting the general development of civilization. It may per- haps give no unfair idea to compare degeneration of culture, bcth in its kind of operation and in its immense extent, to denudation in the geological history of the earth. In judging of the relations between savage and civilized life, some!;hing may be learnt by glancing over the divisions of the human race. For this end the classification by families of 'Ml' m ' Milton and Cheadle, ' North West Passage by Lac^,' p. 241 ; "Waitz, vol. iii. pp. 74-6. ' ' Early History of Manklid,' p. 187. ' Schoolcraft, 'Algic Res.,' vil. i. p. 50. * Steller, ' Kamtschatka,' p. 272. i I ;l 44 TH DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE. languages may be conveniently used, if checked by the evidence of bodily characteristics. No doubt speech by itself is an insufficient guide in tracing national descent, as witness the extreme cases of Jews in England, and three-parts negi-o races in the West Indies, nevertheless speaking English as their mothei'-tongue. Still, under ordinary circumstances, connexion of speech does indicate more or less connexion of ancestral race. As a guide in tracing the history of civilization, language gives still better evidence, for common language to a great extent involves common culture. The race dominant enough to main- tain or impose its language, usually more or less maintains or imposes its civilization also. Thus the common descent of the languages of Hindus, Greeks, and Teutons is no doubt due in gi'eat measure to common ancestry, but is still more closely bound up with a common social and intellectual history, with what Professor Max Miiller well calls their " spiritual relationship." The wonderful perm?.ncnce of language often enables us to detect among remotely ancient and distant tribes the traces of connected civilization. How, on such grounds, do savage and civilized tribes appear to stand related within the various groups of mankind connected historically by the possession of kindred languages ? The Semitic family, which represents one of the oldest known civilizations of the world, includes Arabs, Jews, PhcET'icians, Syrians, etc., and may have an older as well as a newer con- nexion in North Africa. This family takes in t, me rude tribes, but none which would be classed as savages. The Aryan family has existed in Asia and Europe certainly for several thousand years, and there are well-known and well-marked traces of its early barbaric condition, which has perhaps survived with least change among secluded tribes in the valleys of the Hindu Kush and Himalaya. There seems, again, no known case of any full Aryan tribe having become savage. The Gypsies and other outcasts are, no doubt, partly Aryan in blood, but their degraded condition is not savagery. In India there are tribes Aryan by language, but whose physique is rather of indigenous type, and whose ancestry is mainly from indigenous stocks with more or less mixture of the dominant Hindu. Some tribes \\\ THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE. 45 ish as their coming under tliis category, as among the Bhils and Kulis of the Bombay Presidency, speak dialects which are Hindi in vocabulary at least, whether or not in grammatical stiiicture, and yet the people themselves are lower in culture than some Hinduized nations who have retained their original Dravidian speech, the Tamils for instance. But these all appear to stand at higher stages of civilization than such wild forest tribes of the peninsula as can be reckoned even nearly savages, who are non- Aryan both in blood and speech.^ In Ceylon, however, we seem to have the remarkable phenomenon of a distinctly savage race speaking an Aryan dialect. This is the wild part of the race of Veddas or " hunters," of whom a remnant still inhabit the forest land. These people are dark-skinned and flat-nosed, slight of frame, and very small of skull, and five feet is a full average man's height. They are a shy, harmless, simple people, living principally by hunting ; they lime birds, take fish by poisoning the water, and are skilful in getting wild honey ; they have bows with iron-pointed arrows, which, with their hunting dogs, are their most valuable possessions. They dwell in caves or bark huts, and their very word for a house is Singhalese for a hollow tree (rukula) ; a patch of bark was formerly their dress, but now a bit of linen hangs to their waist-cords ; their planting of patches of ground is said to be recent. They count on their fingers, and produce fire with the simplest kind of fire-drill twirled by hand. They are most truthful and honest. Their monogamy and conjugal fidelity contrast strongly with the opposite habits of the more civilized Singhalese. A remarkable Vedda marriage custom sanctioned a man's taking his younger (not elder) sister as his wife ; sister-marriage existing among the Singhalese, but being confined to the royal family. Mis- taken statements have been made as to the Veddas having no religion, no personal names, no language. Their religion, in fact, corresponds with the animism of the ruder tribes of India ; some of their names are remarkable as being Hindu, but not in use among the modern Singhalese ; their language is described as a kind of Singhalese patois, peculiar in dialect and utterance. ' Sec G. Campbell, ' Ethnology of India,' in Journ. As. Soc. Bengal, 1866, part ii. ay \. 'i 46 THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE. til': ■ \ % ill ll 1 '1 i 1 i 1 i i i; ( ' i ii 1- 1' v,n hi. \ ( Ill j i! \i There is no doubt attaching to the usual opinion that the Veddas are in the main descended from the " yakkos " or demons ; i. e., from the indigenous tribes of the island. Legend and language concur to make probable an admixture of Aryan blood accom- panying the adoption of Aryan speech, but the evidence of bodily characteristics shows the Vedda race to be principally of indigenous prae- Aryan type.^ The Tatar fa. ily of Northern Asia and Europe (Turanian, if the word be wn^d in a restricted sense), displays evidence of quite a different kind. This wide-lying group of tribes and nations has members nearly or quite touching the savage level in anciont and even modern times, such as Ostyaks, Tunguz, Samoyeds, Lapps, while more c less high ranges of culture are represented by Mongols, Turks, and Hungarians. Here, how- ever, it is unquestionable that the rude tribes represent the earlier condition of the Tatar race at large, from which its more mixed and civilized peoples, mostly by adopting the foreign culture of Buddhist, Moslem, and Christian nations, and partly by internal development, are well known to have risen. The ethnology of South-Eastern Asia is somewhat obscure ; but if we may classify under one heading the native races of Siam, Birma, etc., the wilder tribes'may be considered as representmg earlier conditions, for the higher culture of this region is ob- viously foreign, especially of Buddhist origin. The Malay race is also remarkable for the range of civilization represented by tribes classed as belonging to it. If the wild tribes of the Malayan peninsula and Borneo be compared with the semi- civilized nations of Java and Sumatra, it appears that part of the race survives to represent an early savage state, while part is found in possession of a civilization which the first glance shows to have been mostly borrowed from Hindu and Moslem sources. Some forest tribes of the peninsula, seem to be repre- sentatives of the Malay rice at a very low level of culture, how far original and how far degraded it is not easy to say. Among them the very rude Orang Sabimba, who have no agriculture J J. Bailey, 'Veddahs,' in Tr. Eth. Soc, vol. ii. p. 278 ; see vol. iii. p. 70. Compare Eobevt Knox, 'Historical Relation of Ceylon.' London, 1681, part iii. chap. i. ; Sir J. E. Tcnnent, ' Ceylon,' etc. THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE. 47 and no l>oats, give a remarkable account of themselves, that they are descendants of shipwrecked Malays from the Bugis country, but were so harassed by pirates that they gave up civilization and cultivation, and vowed not to eat fowls, which betrayed them by their crowing. So they plant nothing, but eat wild fruit and vegetables, and all animals but the fowl. This, if at all founded on fact, is an interesting case of degenera- tion. But savages usually invent myths to account for peculiar h-^its, as where, in the same district, the Biduanda Kallang account for their not cultivating the ground by the story that their ancestors vowed not to make plantations. Another rude people of the Malay peninsula are the Jakuns, a simple, kindly race, among whom some trace their pedigree to a pair of white monkeys, while others declare that they are descendants of white men ; and indeed there is some ground for supposing these latter to be really of mixed race, for they use a few Portuguese words, and a report exists of some refugees having settled up the country.^ The Polynesians, Papuans, and Australians represent gTades of savagery spread each over its own vast area in a com- paratively homogeneous way. Lastly, the relations of savagery to higher conditions are remarkable, but obscure, on the American continents. There are several great linguistic families whose members were discovered in a savage state throughout : such are the Esquimaux, Algonquin, and Guarani groups. On the other hand there were three apparently unconnected districts of semi- civilization reaching a high barbaric level, viz., in Mexico and Central America, Bogota, and Peru. Between these higher and lower conditions were races at the level of the Natchez of Louisiana and the Apalaches of Florida. Linguistic connexion is not unknown between the more advanced peoples and the lower races around them.- But definite evidence showing the ^ Journ. Ind. Archip,, vol. i. pp. 295-9 ; vol. ii, p 237. ^ For the connexion between the Azicc language and the Sonoran family ex- tending N.W. toward the sources of the Missouri, see Buschmann, * Spuren der Aztekischen Sprache im NOrdlichen Mexico,' etc., in Abh. der Akad. der Wissensch. ^854; Berlin, 1859; also Tr, Eth. Soc, vol. ii. p. 130. For the connexion between the Natchez and Maya languages, see Daniel G. Brinton, in 'American Historical Magazine,' 1867, vol. i. p. 16 ; and 'Myths of the New World,' p. 28. 48 I ii ii i:' iSI: 1! I;M il 'ii n THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE. higher culture to have arisen from the lower, or the lower to have fallen from the higher, is scarcely forthcoming. Both ope- rations may in degree have happened. It is apparent, from such general inspection of this ethnological problem, that it would repay a far closer study than it has as yet received. As the evidence stands at present, it appears that when in any race some branches much excel the rest in culture, this more often happens by elevation than by subsidence. But this elevation is much more apt to be produced by foreign than by native action. Civilization is a plant much oftener propagated than developed. As regards the lower races, this accords with the results of European intercourse with savage tribes during the last three or four centuries ; so far as these tribes have sur- vived the process, they have assimilated more or less of Euro- pean culture and risen towards the European level, as in Poly- nesia, South Africa, South America. Another important point becomes manifest from this ethnological survey. The fact that, during so many thousand years of known existence, neither the Aryan nor the Semitic stock appears to have thrown off any direct savage offshoot recognizable by the age-enduring test of language, tells, with some force, against the probability of de- gradation to the savage level ever happening from high-level civilization. With regard to the opinions of older writers on early civiliza- tion, whether progressionists or degenerationists, it must be borne in mind that the evidence at their disposal fell far short of even the miserably imperfect data now accessible. Criticizing an 18th century ethnologist is like criticizing an 18th century geologist. The older writer may have been far abler than his modern critic, but he had not the same materials. Especially he wanted the guidance of Prehistoric Archaeology, a depart- ment of research only established on a scientific footing within the last few years. It is essential to gain a clear view of the bearing of this newer knowledge on the old problem. Chronology, though regarding as more or less fictitious'the immense dynastic schemes of the Egyptians, Hindus, and Chinese, passing as they do into mere ciphering-book sums with years for units, nevertheless admits that existing monuments carry back THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE. 4D the traces of comparatively high civilization to a distance of above five thousand years. By piecing together Eastern and Western documentary evidence, it seems that the great religious divisions of the Aryan race, to which modern Brah- manism, Zarathustrism, and Buddhism are due, belong to a period of remotely ancient history. Even if we are not quite sure, with Professor Max Miiller, in the preface to his translation of the " Rig Veda," that this collection of Aryan hymns " will take and maintain for ever its position as the most ancient of books in the library of mankind," and if we do not fully admit the stringency of his reckonings of its date in centuries B. C, yet we must grant that he shows cause to refer its composition to a very ancient period, where it then proves that a com- paratively high barbaric culture already existed. The linguistic argument for the remotely ancient common origin of the Indo- European nations, in a degree as to their bodily descent, and in a greater degree as to their civilization, tends toward the same result. So it is again with Egypt. Baron Bunsen's calculations of Egyptian dynasties in thousands of years are indeed both disputable and disputed, but they are based on facts which at any rate authorize the reception of a long chronology. To go no further than the identification of two or three Egyptian names mentioned in Biblical and Classical history, we gain a strong impression of remote antiquity. Such are the names of Shishank ; of the Psammiticlios line, whose obelisks are to be seen in Rome ; of Tirhakah, King of Ethiopia, whose nurse's coffin is in the Florence Museum ; of the city of Rameses, plainly connected with that great Raraesside line which Egypt- ologists call the 19th Dynasty. Here, before classic culture had arisen, the culture of Egypt culminated, and behind this time lies the somewhat less advanced age of the Pyramid kings, and behind this again the indefinite lapse of ages which such a civiUzation required for its production. Again, though no part of the Old Testament can satisfactorily prove for itself an antiquity of composition approaching that of the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions, yet all critics must admit that the older of the historical books give on the one hand con- temporary documents showing considerable culture in the .if; ■,ffij VOL. I. 50 THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE. :i ! Hi I Semitic world at a date which in comparison with classic history is ancient, while on the other hand they afford evidence by way of chronicle, caiTying back ages farther the record of a somewhat advanced barbaric civilization. Now if the develop- ment-theoiy is to account for phenomena such as these, its chronological demand must be no small one, and the more so when it is admitted that in the lower ranges of culture progress would be extremely slow in comparison with that which experience shows among nations already far advanced. On these conditions of the first appearance of the middle civilization being thrown back to distant antiquity, and of .slow development being required to perform its heavy task in ages still more remDte, Prehistoric Archssology cheerfully takes up the problem. And, indeed, far from being dismayed by the vastness of the period required on the narrowest computation, the prehistoric archaeologist shows even too much disposition to revel in calcu- lations of thousands of years, as a financier does in reckonings of thousands of pounds, in a liberal and maybe somewhat reck- less way. Prehistoric Archreology is fully alive to facts which may bear on degeneration in culture. Such are the colossal human figures of hewn stone in Easter Island, which may possibly have been shaped by the ancestors of the existing islanders, whose present resources, however, are quite unequal to the execution of such gigantic works.^ A much more important case is that of the former inhabitants of the Mississippi Valley. In districts where the native tribes known in modern times do not rank high even as savages, there formerly dwelt a race whom ethnologists call the Mound-Builders, from the amazing extent of their mounds and enclosures, of which there is a single gi'oup occupying an area of four square miles. To have constructed such works the Mound-Builders must have been a numerous population, mainly subsisting by agriculture, and indeed vestiges of their ancient tillage are still to be found. The civilization of these people has been, however, sometimes overrated. Their earthworks did not require, as has been thought, standards of 1 J. H. Lampr y, in Trans, of Prehistoric Congress, Norwich, 1868, p. 60 ; J. Lintou Pa^jner, in Joum. Eth. Soc, vol. i., 1869. THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE. 51 raeas'jrement and means of determining angles, for a cord and a bundle of stakes would be a sufficient set of instruments to lay out any of them. Their use of native copper, hammered into shape foi- cutting instruments, is similar to that of some of the savage tribes farther north. On the whole, judging by their earthworks, fields, pottery, stone implements, and other remains, they seem to have belonged to those high savage or barbaric tribes of the Southern States, of whom the Creeks and Cherokees, as described by Bartram, may be taken as typical.^ If any of the wild roving hunting tribes now found living near the huge earthworks of the Mound-Builders are the descendants of this somewhat advanced race, then a very considerable de- gradation has taken place. The questio^i is an open one. The explanation of the traces of tillage may perhaps in this case be like that of remains of old cultivation-terraces in Borneo, the work of Chinese colonists whose descendants have mostly been merged in the mass of the population and follow the native habits.^ On the other hand, the evidence of locality may be misleading as to race, A traveller in Greenland, coming on the ruined stone buildings at Kakortok, would not argue justly that the Esquimaux are degenerate descendants of ancestors capable of such architecture, for in fact these are the remains of a church and baptistery built by the ancient Scandinavian settlers.'^ On the whole it is remarkable how little of colourable evidence of degeneration has been disclosed by archaeology. Its negative evidence tells strongly the otlier way. As an instance may be quoted Sir John Lubbock's argument against the idea that tribes now ignorant of metallurgy and pottery formerly pos- sessed but have since lost these arts, " We may also assert, on a general proposition, that no weapons or instruments of metal have ever been found in any country inhabited by savages wholly ignorant of metallurgy, A still stronger case is afforded by pottery. Pottery is not easily destroyed ; when known at ^ Sqwierand Davis, ' Mon, of Mississippi Valley,' etc., in Smithsonian Contr., vol. i. 1848. See Lubbock, ' Preliistoric Times,' chap. vii. ; "Waitz, 'Anthro- pologic,' vol. iii, p. 72. Bartram, ' Creek and Cherokee Ind.,' in Tr. Amer. Ethnol. Soc, vol. iii. part i. ' St, John, ' Life in Forests of Far East, ' vol. ii, p, 327. ' Kafn, 'Americas Arctiske Landes Gamie Geographic,' pi. vii., viii, E 2 1:1 52 THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE. I ii M M all it is always abundant, and it possesses two qualities, namely, those of being easy to break, and yet difficult to destroy, which render it very valuable in an archaeological point of view. Moreover, it is in most cases associated with burials. It is, therefore, a very significant fact, that no fragment of pottery has ever been found in Australia, New Zealand, or the Poly- nesian Islands." ^ How different a state of things the popular degene' ation-theory would lead us to expect is pointedly siig- gesto'l by Sir Charles Lyell's sarcastic sentences in his 'Anti- quity of Man.' Had the original stock of mankind, he argues, been really endowed with superior intellectual powers and inspired knowledge, while possessing the same improvable nature as their posterity, how extreme a point of advancement would they have reached. "Instead of the rudest pottery or Hint tools, so iiTCgular in form as to cause the unpractised eye to doubt whether they afford unmistakable evidence of design, we should now be finding sculptured forms surpassing in beauty the master-pieces of Phidias or Praxiteles ; lines of buried rail- ways or electric telegi'aphs, from Avhich the best engineers of our day might gain invaluable hints ; astronomical instruments and microscopes of more advanced construction than any known in Europe, and other indications of perfection in the arts and sciences, such as the nineteenth century has not yet witnessed. Still farther would the triumphs of inventive genius be found to have been carried, when the later deposits, now assigned to the ages of bronze and iron, were formed. Vainly should we be straining our imaginations to guess the possible uses and mean- ing of such relics — machines, perhaps, for navigating the air or exploring the depths of the ocean, or for calculating arithmetical problems beyond the wants or even the conception of living mathematicians." ^ The master-key to the investigation of man's primasval con- dition is held by Prehistoric Archaeology. This key is the evidence of the Stone Age, proving that men of remotely ancient ages were in the savage state. Ever since the long- delayed recognition of M. Bjucher de Perthes' discoveries (1841 ' Lubbock, in 'Eeport of British Association, Dundee, 18G7,' p. 121. - Lyell, 'Antiquity of Man,' chap. xix. THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTUKE. 53 and onward) of the flint implements in tlie Drift gravels of tlu; Sommo Valley, evidence has been accumulating over a wide European area to show that the ruder Stone Age, represented by implements of the Pala3olithic or Drift type, prevailed among savage tribes of the Quaternary period, the contempo- raries of the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, in ages for which Geology asserts an antiquity far more remote than History can avail to substantiate for the human race. Mr. John Frere had already written in 1797 respecting such flint instruments discovered at Hoxne in Suffolk. " The situation in which these weapons were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed, even beyond that of the present world." ^ The vast lapse of time through which the history of London has represented the history of human civilization, is to my mind one of the most suggestive facts disclosed by archaeology. The antiquary, excavating but a few yards deep, may descend from the debris representing our modern life, to relics of the art and science of the Middle Ages, to signs of Norman, Saxon, Romano-British times, to traces of the higher Stone Age. And on his way from Temple Bar to the Great Northern Station he passes near the spot (" opposite to black Mary's, near Grayes inn lane ") where a drift implement of black flint was found with the skeleton of an elephant by Mr. Conyers, about a century and a half ago, the relics side by side of the London mammoth and the London savage." In the gravel-beds of Europe, the laterite of India, and other more superficial localities, [where relics of the Palaeolithic Age arc found, what principally testifies to man's condition is the extreme rudeness of his stone implements, and the absence of even edge-grinding. The natural inference that this indicates a low savage state is confirmed in the caves of Central France. There a race of men, who have left indeed really artistic por- traits of themselves and the reindeer and mammoths they lived among, seem, as may be judged from the remains of their weapons, implements, etc., to have led a life somewhat of ...1°-* M m '•III 1 Frere, in * Archceologia,' 1800. 2 J. Evans, in ' Arclxa;ologia,' 1861; Lubbock, ' Prebistoric Times,' 2nd cd., p. 335. H TIIK DKVKLOPMENT OF CUI.TURK. I'll l!^' m m Ks(iuimaux typo, but lower by the want of domesticated uuiinals. The districts where impleinouts of the riulo primitive Drift type are found are limitc ' Early History of Mankind,' pp. 192, 243, etc., etc. m 58 THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE. tion does not seem beyond their intellectual condition, and especially if it may be produced by imitating nature or follow- ing nature's direct suggestion, there is fair reason to suppose the very origin of the art to 1. tve been reached. Professor Nilsson, looking at the remarkable similarity of the hunting and fishing instruments of the lower races of mankind, considers them to have been contrived instinctively by a sort of natural necessity. As an example he takes the bow and an-ow.^ The instance seems an unfortunate one, in the face of the fact that the supposed bow-and-an-ow-making instinct fails among the natives of Australia, to whom it would have been very use- ful, while even among the Papuan natives of the New Hebrides there is reason to think it not original, for the bow is called there fana, 'pena, nfanga, &c., namas apparently taken from the MsLlay panah, and indicating a Malay origin for the instru- ment. It seems to me that Dr. Klemm, in his dissertation on Im- plements and Weapons, and Colonel Lane Fox, in his lectures on Primitive Warfare, take a more instructive line in tracing the early development of arts, not to a blind instinct, but to a selec- tion, imitation, and gradual adaptation and improvement of objects and operations which Nature, the instructor of primaeval man, sets before him. Thus Klemm traces the stages by which ])rogress appears to have been made from the rough stick to the iinished spear or club, from the natural sharp-edged or rounded stone to the artistically fashioned celt, spear-head, or hammer.^ Fox traces connexion through the various types of weapons, pointing out how a form once arrived at is repeated in various sizes, like the spear-head and arrow-point ; how in rude con- ditions of the arts the same instrument serves different pur- poses, as where the Fuegians used their arrow-heads also for knives, and Kafirs carve with their assagais, till separate forms are adopted for special purposes ; and how in the history of the striking, cutting, and piercing instruments used by mankind, a continuity may be traced, which indicates a gradual progressive development from the rudest beginnings to the most advanced improvements of modern skill. To show how far the early * Nilsson, 'Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia,' p. 104. ' Klemm, 'Allg. Culturwissenscliaft,' part ii., "Werkzcuge und Wafifen. THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE. 59 development of warlike arts may have been due to man's imitative faculty, he points out the analogies in methods of warfare among animals and; men, classifying as defensive appliances hides, solid plates, jointed plates, scales ; as offensive weapons, the piercing, striking, serrated, poisoned kinds, &c. ; and under the head of stratagems, flight, concealment, leaders, outposts, war-cries, and so forth.^ The manufacture of stone implements is now almost perfectly understood by archaeologists. The processes used by modern savages have been observed and imitated. Mr. John Evans, for instance, by blows with a pebble, pressure with a piece of stag's horn, sawing with a flint-flake, boring with a stick and sand, and grinding on a stone surface, succeeds in reproducing all but the finest kinds of stone implements.^ On thorough knowledge we are now able to refer in great measure the remarkable similarities of the stone scrapers, flake-knives, hatchets, spear- and arrow- heads, &c., as found in distant times and regions, to the similarity of natural models, of materials, and of requirements which belong to savage life. The history of the Stone Age is clearly seen to be one of development. Beginning with the natural sharp stone, the transition to the rudest artificially shaped stone implement is imperceptibly gradual, and onward from this rude stage much independent progress in different directions is to be traced, and the manufacture at last arrives at admirable artistic perfection, by the time that the introduction of metal is super- seding it. So with other implements and fabrics, of which the stages are known through their whole course of development from the merest nature to the fullest art. The club is traced from the rudest natural bludgeon up to the weapon of finished shape and carving. Pebbles held in the hand to hammer with, and cutting-instruments of stone shaped or left smooth at one end to be held in the hand, may be seen in museums, hinting that the important art of fixing instruments in handles was the result of invention, not of instinct. The stone hatchet, used as ' Lane Fox, * Lectures on Primitive Warfare,' Journ. United Service Inst., ISO 7— 9. - Evans in 'Trans, of Congress of Prehistoric Arc1ia2ology ' {Norwicli, 1868), p. 191 ; Ran in ' Smithsonian Reports," 1868 ; Sir E. Pelcher in Tr. Eth. Soc. vol. i. p. 129. i m '-■k: iji i. lii hill ill I!: 60 THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE. a weapon, passes into the battle-axe. The spear, a pointed stick or pole, has its point hardened in the fire, and a further im- provement is to fix on a sharp point of horn, bone, or chipped stone. Stones are flung by hand, and then by the sling, a con- trivance widely but not universally known among savage tribes. From first to last in the history of war the spear or lance is grasped as a thrusting weapon. Its use as a missile no doubt })egan as early, but it has hardlj^ survived so far in civilization. Thus used, it is most often thrown by the unaided arm, but a sling for the purpose is known to various savage tribes. The short cord with an eye used in the New Hebrides, and called a " becket " by Captain Cook, and a whip-like instrument noticed in New Zealand, are used for spear-throwing. But the more usual in&trument is a wooden handle, a foot or two long. This spear-thrower is known across the high northern districts of North America, ..mong some tribes of South America, and among the Australians. These latter, it has been asserted, could not have invented it in their present state of barbariom. But the remarkable feature of the matter is that the spet . -thrower belongs especially to savagery, and not to civilization. Among the higher nations the nearest approach to it seems to have been the classic amentum, apparently a thong atuached to the middle of the javelin to throw it with. The highest people known to have used the spear-thrower proper are the Aztecs. Its existence among them is vouched for by representations in the Mexican mythological pictures, by its name "atlatl," and by a beautifully artistic specimen of the thing itself in the Christy Museum. ; but we do not hear of it as in practical use at the Conquest, when it had apparently fallen into survival. In fact the history of thu instrument seems in absolute opposition to the degradation-theory, representing as it does an invention belong- ing to savage culture, and scarcely able to survive beyond. Nearly the same may be said of the blow-tube, which as a serious weapon scarcely ranges above rude tribes of the East Indies and South America, though kept up in sport at higher levels. The Australian boomerang has been claimed as derived fr some hypothetical high culture, whereas the transition- stages through which it is connected with the club are to be THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE. 61 obscn'od in its own country, while no civilized race possesses the weapon. The use of an elastic switch to fillip small missiles with, and the remarkable elastic darts of the Pelew Islands, bent and made to fly by their own spring, indicate inventions which may have led to that of the bow, while the arrow is a miniature form of the javelin. The practice of poisoning arrows, after the manner of stings and serpents' fangs, is no civilized device, but a characteristic of lower life, which is generally discarded even at tlie barbaric stage. The art of narcotizing fish, remembered but ''.'^t approved by high civilization, belongs to many savage tribes, who might easily discover it in any forest pool where a suitable plant had fallen in. The art of setting fences to catch fish at the ebb of the tide, so common among the lower races, is a simple device for assisting nature quite likely to occur to the savage, in whom sharp hunger is no mean ally of dull wit. Thus it is with other arts. Fire-making, cooking, pottery, the textile arts, are to be traced along lines of gi*adual improve- ment.^ Music begins with the rattle and the drum, which in one way or another hold their places from end to end of civili- zation, while pipes and stringed instruments represent an ad- vanced musical art which is still developing. So with architec- ture and agriculture. Complex, elaborate, and highly-reasoned as are the upper stages of these arts, it is to be remembered that their lower stages begin with mere direct imitation of nature, copying the shelters which nature provides, and the propagation of plants which nature jDcrforms. Without enu- merating to the same purpose the remaining industries of savage life, it may be said generally that their facts resist rather than require a theory of degradation from higher culture. They agree with, and often necessitate, the same view of development which we know by experience to account for the origin and progress of the arts among ourselves. In the various branches of the problem which will hencefor- ward occupy our attention, that of determining the relation of the mental condition of savages to that of civilized men, it is an excellent guide and safeguard to keep before cur minds the * See details iu 'Early History of Mankind,' chap. vii. — ix. I {>,iverbs — Riddles — Significance and sun'ival in Customs: sneezing-formula, rite of foundation-sacrifice, prejudice against saving a drowning man. When a custom, an art, or an opinion is fairly started in the world, disturbing influences may long affect it so slightly that it may keep its course from generation to generation, as i stream once settled in its bed will flow on for ages. This is mere permanence of culture ; and the special wonder about it is that the change and revolution of human affairs should have left so many of its feeblest rivulets to run so long. On the Tatar steppes, six hundred years ago, it was an offence to tread on the threshold or touch the ropes in entering a tent, and so it appears to be still,^ Eighteen centuries ago Ovid mentions the vulgar Roman objection to marriages in May, which he not unreasonably explains by the occurrence in that month of the funeral rites of the Lemuralia : — " Nee viduoo taidis eadem, nee virginis apta Tempera. Qua; nupsit, non diuturna fuit. Hac quoque de causa, si te proverbia tangunt, Mense malas Maio nubere \olgus ait." - The saying that marriages in May are unlucky survives to this day in England, a striking example how an idea, the meaning ' Will, de Rubruquis in Pinkerton, vol. vii. pp. 46, C7, 132 ; Michie, 'Siberian Overland Route,' p. 96. » Ovid, ' Fast.' t. 487. :l ■.j:f'il 64 SURVIVAL IN CULTUUE. li i i! J? (i'i of which has perished for ages, may continue to exist simply hecausc it has existed. Now there are thousands of cases of this kind which have become, so to speak, landmarks in the course of culture. When in the process of time there has come general change in the condition of a people, it is usual, notwithstanding, to find much that manifestly had not its origin in the new state of things, but has simply lasted on into it. On the strength of these survivals, it becomes possible to declare that the civilization of the people they are observed among must have been derived from an earlier state, in which the proper home and meaning of these things are to bo found ; and thus collections of such facts are to be worked as mines of historic knowledge. In dealing with such materials, experienr;e of what actually happens is the main guide, and direct history has to teach us, first and foremost, how old habits hold their ground in the midst of a new culture which certainly would never have brought them in, but on the contrary presses hard to thrust them out. What this direct information is like, a single example may show. The Dayaks of Borneo were not accustomed to chop wood, as we do, by notching out V-shaped cuts. Accordingly, when the white man intruded among them with this among other novelties, they marked their disgust at the innovation by levying a fine on any of their own people who should be caught chopping in the European fashion ; yet so well aware were the native woodcutters that the white man's plan was an improve- ment on their own, that they would use it surreptitiously when they could trust one another not to tell.^ The account is twenty years old, and very likely the foreign chop may have ceased to be an offence against Dayak conservatism, but its prohibition was a striking instance of survival by ancestral authority in the very teeth of common sense. Such a pro- ceeding as this would be usually, and not improperly, described as a superstition ; and, indeed, this name would be given to a large proportion of survivals generally. The very word " su- perstition," in what is perhaps its original sense of a "standing over " from old times, itself expresses the notion of survival ' 'Journ, lud. Archip.' (ed. by J. E. Logan), vol. ii. p. liv. '■^"u,,..„ SURVIVAL IN CULTUHE. 65 But the term superstition now implies a reproach, and though this reproach may be often cast deservedly on fragments of a dead lower culture embedded in a living \\\ . er one, yet in many cases it would be harsh, and even .; itrue. For the ethnographer's purpose, at any rate, it is desirable to intro- duce such a term as " survival," simply to denote the his- torical fact which the word "superstition" is now spoiled for expressing. Moreover, there have to be included as partial survivals the mass of cases where enough of the old habit is kept up for its origin to be recognizable, though in taking a new form it has been so adapted to new circumstances as still to hold its place on itt -w^^ merits. Thus it would be seld a reasonable to call the children's games of modern EUiupe superstitions, though many of them are survivals, and indeed remarkable ones. If the games of children and of grown-up people be examined with an eye to ethnological lessor to be gained from them, one of the first things that strikes us is how many of tliem are only sportive imitations of the serious business of life. As children in modern civilized times play at dining and driving horses and going to church, so a main amusement of savage children is to imitate the occupations which they Avill carry on in earnest a few years later, and thus their games are in fact their lessons. The Es- quimaux children's sports are shooting with a tiny bow and an'ow at a mark, and building little snow-huts, which they light up with scraps of lamp- wick begged from their mothers.^ Miniature boomerangs and spears are among the toys of Aus- tralian children ; and even as the fathers keep up the extremely primitive custom of getting themselves wives by carrying them off by violence from other tribes, so playing at such " bride-lift- ing" has been noticed as one of the regular games of the little native boys and girls.^ Now it is quite a usual thing in the world for a game to outlive the serious practice of which it is an imi- tation. The bow and arrow is a conspicuous instance. Ancient cind wide-spread in savage culture, we trace this instrument ^ Klemin, 'Cultur-Geschichte,' vol. ii. p. 209. 2 OHfield in ' Tr. Eth. Soc' vol. iii. p. 266 r Astrolabe,' vol. i. p. 411. VOL. I. Duinont d'Urville, *Voy. dft m i"J^j1 66 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. I 1 ' lilii p;! through barbaric and classic life and onward to a high media3val level. But now, when we look on at an archery meeting, or go by country lanes at the season when toy bows and arrows are " in " among the children, we see, reduced to a mere sportive survival, the ancient weapon which among a few savage tribes still keeps its deadly place in the hunt and the battle. The cross-bow, a comparatively late and local improvement on the long-bow, has disappeaied yet more utterly from practical use ; but as a toy it is in full European service, and likely to remain so. For antiquity and wide diffusion in the world, through savage up to classic and mediaeval times, the sling ranks with the bow and arrow. But in the middle ages it fell out of use as a practical weapon, and it was all in vain that the loth century poet commended the art of slinging among the exercises of a good soldier :— " Use eek the cast of stono, with slynge or hondo : It falloth ofte, yf other shot there none is, Men harneysod in steel may not withstonde. The multitude and mighty cast of eto^ys ; And stonys in effecte, are every where, And slynges are not noyous for to beare." ' Perhaps as serious a use of the shng as can now be pointed out within the limits of civilization is among the herdsmen of Spanish America, who sling so cleverly that the saying is they can hit a beast on either horn and turn him which way they will. But the use of the rude old weapon is especially kept up by boys at play, who are here again the representatives of remotely ancient culture. As games thus keep up the record of primitive warlike arts, so they reproduce, in what are at once sports and little children's lessons, early stages in the history of childlike tribes of man- kind. English children delighting in the imitations of cries of animals and so forth, and New Zealanders playing their favourite game of imitating in chorus the saw hissing, the adze chipping, the musket roaring, and the other instruments, making' their proper noises, are alike showing at its source the ' Strutt, ' Sports and Pastimes,' book. ii. chap. ii. -*L^. SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. 67 imitative clement so important in the formation of language.^ When we look into the early development of the art of count- ing, and see the evidence of tribe after tribe having obtained numerals through the primitive stage of counting on their fingers, we find a certain ethnographic interest in the gauges which teach this earliest numeration. The New Zealand game of " ti " is described as played by counting on the fingers, a number being called by one player, and he having instantly to touch the proper finger ; while in the Samoan game one player holds out so many fingers, and his opponent must do the same instantly or lose a point." These may be native Polynesian games, or they may be our own children's games borrov.'ed. In the English imrsery the child learns to say how many fingers the nurse shows, and the appointed formula of the game is '' Biich, Buck, how many horns do I hold up?" The game of one holding up fingers and the others holding up fingers to match is mentioned in Strutt. We may see small schoolboys in the lanes playing the guessing-game, where one gets on another's back and holds up fingers, the other must guess how many. It is interesting to notice the wide distribution and long permanence of these trifles in liistory when we read the following passage from Petronius Arbiter, written in the time of Nero : — " Trimalchio, not to seem moved by the loss, kissed the boy and bade him get up on his back. Without Compare Davis, 'Chinese,' vol. i. p. 317; Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians, vol. i. p. 188 ; Facciolati, Lexicon, s. v. 'niiciire'; etc. "^ Jamieson, * Diet, of Scottish Lang.' s. v. 3 'Early History of Mankind,' p. 244, etc.; Grimm, 'Deutsche Myth.', p. 573. * Grimm, ibid., p. 1200. BUHVIVAL IN CULTUUE. 69 tlio flame us (|uickly us may be, for the one in whose liantls the Kpill gocH out has to pay a forfeit, and it is then proclaimed that " petit bonlioinnie est mort." Crinim mentions a simihir game in Clermany, played with a burning stick, and H alii well gives the nursery rhyme which is said with it when it is played in England : — " Jack's iilivo and in very good health, If ho dicH in your hand you muHt look to yourself." Now, as all readers of Church liistory know, it used to be a favourite engine of controversy for the adherents of an esta- blished faith to accuse heretical sects of celebrating hideous orgies as the mystej'ies of their religion. The Pagans told these .stories of the Jews, the Jews told them of the Christians, and Christians themselves reached a bad eminence in the art of slandering religious opponents whose moral life often seems in fact to have been exceptionally pure. The Manicha'ans were an especial mark for such aspersions, which were passed on to a sect considered as their successors — the Paulicians, whose name reappears in the middle ages, in connexion with the Cathari. To these latter, apparently from an expression in one of their religious formulas, was given the name of Boni Homines, which became a recognized term for the Albigenses, It is clear that the early Paulicians excited the anger of the orthodox by object- ing to sacred images, and calling those who venerated them idola- ters ; and about A.D. 700, John of Osun, Patriarch of Armenia, wrote a diatribe against the sect, lU'ging accusations of the regular anti-Manicha3an type, but with a peculiar feature wliich brings his statement into the present singular connexion. He declares that they blasphemously call the orthodox " image- worshippers " ; that they themselves worship the sun; that, moreover, they mix wheaten flour with the blood of infants and therewith celebrate their communion, and " when they have slain by the worst of deaths a boy, the first-born of his mother, thrown from hand to hand among them by turns, they venerate him in whose hand the chih expires, as having at- tained to the first dignity of the sect To explain the corre- spondence of these atrocious details with the nursery sport. m 'm > HI ^l1 I i4 70 SURVIVAL IN CtLTUKE. i^i iiii il it is perhaps the most likely supposition, not that the game of " Petit Bonhomme " keeps up a recollection of a legend of the Boni Homines, but that the game was known to the children of the eightti century much as it is now, and that the Armenian Patriarch simply accused the Paulicians of playing at it with live babes.^ It may be possible to trace another interesting group of sports as survivals fiom a branch of savage philosophy, once of high rank though now fallen into merited decay. Games of chanc3 correspond so closely with arts of divination belong- ing already to savage culture, that there is force in applying to several such games the rule that the serious practice comes first, and in time may dAvindle to the sportive survival. To a modern educated man, drawing lots or tossing up a coin is an appeal to chance, that is, to ignorance ; it is committing the decision of a question to a mechanical jDrocess, itself in no way unnatural or even extraordinary, but merely so difficult to follow that no one can say beforehand wdiat will come of it. But we also know that this scientific doctrine of chance is not that of early civilization, which has little in common with tl-o mathematician's theoi-y of probabilities, but much in common with such sacred divination as the choice of Matthias by lot as a twelfth apostle, or, in a later age, the Moravian Brethren's rite of choosing wives for their young men by casting lots with 1 Halliwell, 'Popular Ilhymcs,' p. 112; Giiiiim, ' D. M.' p. 812. Bastian, 'Mcii,s(,'li,' vol. iii. p. 106. Johanuib riiilosoplii Oznieusis Opera (Auclier), Venice, 1834, p. 78 — 89. "Infantium sanguiiii similam coinmiscentes illegiti- iiiam conimunioiicm tk'glutiunt ; quo pacto porcorum suos fotiis inimaniter vescentium exsupcraiit educitatem. (Juique illorum eadavera super tecti culinen celantes, ac siirsum oculis in cocliuu dofixis respicieutes, jurant alieno verbo ac sensu : AUissimus novit. Soleni vero dcprecari volentes, ajiint : Solicule, Lucicule; atque aereos, vagosque da;mones rlaiii iuvocant, juxta Muuicliiuorum Simoiiisque incantatoris errores. Similiter ct priniuin paricntis fcemiiiic pueruin de maiiu in manum inter cos inviceni projectum, (pium pessima mortc occidcrint, ilium, in cujusmanu exspiraverit puer, ad primani sootne dignitatem provectum veiicrantur ; atque per utriusquc nomen audent insane jurare; Juro, dicunt, per unigcnitian fiJiam : et iteruni : Tcstcm habco tibi (jloriavii ejus, in cujtis manum unigcnims fiUus spiritum suiim tnulidit .... Contra lies [the orthodox] aiulacter cvomero ])ra3suniunt impietatis suaj bilem, atquo insaiiientes, ex niali spiritus hlasphemiii, Scidpiicolas vocant." SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. 71 prayer. It Avas to no blind cliance that the Maoris looked when they divined by throwing up lots to find m thief among a suspected company ;^ or the Guinea negroes when they went to the fetish-priest, who shuffled his bundle of little strips of leather and gave his sacred omen." The crowd with uplifted hands pray to the gods, when the heroes cast lots in the cap of Atrcides Agamemnon, to know who shall go forth to do battle with Hektor and help the well-greaved Greeks.^ With prayer to the gods, and looking up to heaven, the German priest or father, as Tacitus relates, drew three lots from among the marked fruit- tree twigs scattered on a pure white garment, and interpreted the answer from their signs.* As in ancient Italy oracles gave responses by graven lots,^ so the modern Hindus decide dis- putes by casting lots in front of a temple, appealing to the gods with cries of " Let justice be shown ! Show the innocent, ! "'^ The uncivilized man thinks that lots or dice are adjusted in their fall with reference to the meaning he may choose to attach to it, and especially he is apt to suppose spiritual beings standing over the diviner or the gambler, shuffling the lots or turning up the dice to make them give their answers. This view held its place firmly in the middle ages, and later in history we still find games of chance looked on as results of supernatural operation. The general change from mediaeval to modern notions in this respect is well shown in a remarkable work published in 1G19, which seems to have done much toward bringing the change about. Thomas Gataker, a Puritan minister, in his treatise 'Of the Nature and Use of Lots,' states, in order to combat them, the following among the current ob- jections made against games of chance : — " Lots may not be used but with great reverence, because the disposition of them commctli immediately from God "...." the nature of a Lot, ( ^ I t> '»] ^ Polack, vol. i. p. 270. - ijOGiuaii, ' Guineso Kust,' letter x. ; Eiig. Trans, in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 399, 2 Homer. Iliad, vii. 171. * Tacit. Oormania. 10. * Smith's 'Die. of Gr. and Rom. Ant.,' arts, 'oraculum,' 'sortes.' 6 Roberts, ' Oriental Illusti-ations,' j). 163. 72 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. which is affirmed to bee a worke of Gods speciall and imme- diate providence, a sacred oracle, a divine judgement or sen- tence : the light use of it therefore to be an abuse of Gods name ; and so a sinne against the third Commandement." Gataker, in opposition to this, argues that " to expect the issue and event of it, as by ordinurie meanes from God, is common to all actions : to expect it by an immediate and xtraordinarie worke is no more lawfull here than elsewhere, yea is indeed mere superstition."^ It took time, however, for this opinion to become prevalent in the educated world. After a lapse of forty years, Jeremy Taylor could still bring out a remnant of the older notion, in the course of a generally reasonable argument in favour of games of chance when played for refreshment and not for money. " I have heard," he says, " from them that have skill in such things, there are such strange chances, such pro- moting of a hand by fancy and little arts of geomancy, such constant winning on one side, such unreasonable losses on the other, and these strange contingencies produce such horrible effects, that it is not improbable that God hath permitted the conduct of such games of chance to the devil, who will order them so where he can do most mischief ; but, without the in- strumentality of money, he could do nothing at all.'"" With what vitality the notion of supernatural interference in games of chance even now survives in Europe, is well shown by the still flourishing arts of gamblers' magic. The folk-lore of our own day continues to teach that a Good Friday's egg is to be carried for luck in gaming, and that a turn of one's chair will turn one's fortune ; the Tyrolese knows the charm for getting from the devil the gift of winning at cards and ■^' there is still a great sale on the continent for books which show how to discover, from dreams, good numbers for the lottery ; and the Lusatian peasant will even hide his lottery-tickets under the altar-cloth that they may receive the blessing with the sacra- ^ ment, and so stand a better chance of winning.^ Arts of divinat'on and games of chance are so similar in ^ Gataker, p. 141, 91 ; see Lecky, 'History of liationalism,' vol. i. p. 307. ^ Jeremy Taylor, Ductor Dubitaptiun., in 'Works,' vol. xiv. p. 337. 3 See Wiittke, 'Deutsche Volksaberglaube,' p. 95, 115, 178. * ,, SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. 73 principle, that the very same instrument passes from one use to the other. This appears in the accounts, very suggestive from this point of view, of the Polynesian art of divination by spin- ning the "niu" or cocoa-nut. In the Tongan Islandr, in Mariner's time, the principal purpose for which this was solemnly per- formed was to inquire if a sick person would recover ; prayer was made aloud to the patron god of the family to direct the nut; which Vt^as then spun, and its direction at rest indicated the intention of the god. On other occasions, when the cocoa-nut was merely spun for amusement, no prayer was made, and no credit given to the result. Here tl e serious and the sportive use of this rudimentary teetotum are found together. In the Samoan Islands, however, at a later date, the Rev. G. Turner finds the practice passed into a different stage. A party sit in a circle, the cocoa-nut is spun in the middle, and the oracular answer is according to the person towards vvhom the monkey- face of the fruit is turned when it stops ; but whereas formerly the Samoans used this as an art of divination to discover thieves, now they only keep it up as a way of casting lots, and as a game of forfeits.^ It is in favour of the view of serious divination being the earlier use, to notice that the New Zealanders, though they have no cocoa-nuts, keep up a ti -^e of the time when their ancestors in the tropical islands had them and divined with them ; for it is the well-known Polynesian word " niu," i. e. cocoa-nut, which is still retained in use among the Maoris for other kinds of divination, especially that performed with sticks. Mr. Taylor, who points out this curiously neat piece of ethnolo- gical evidence, records another case to the present purpose. A method of divination was to clap the hands together while a proper charm was repeated ; if the fingers went clear in, it was favourable, but a check was an ill omen ; on the question of a party crossing the country in war-time, the locking of all the fingers, or the stoppage of some or all, were naturally inter- preted to mean clear passage, meeting a travelling party, or being stopped altogether. This quaint little symbolic art of divina- tion seems now only to survive as a game ; it is called " puni- ' i.ariner, 'Tonga Islands,' vol. ii. p. 239 ; Turner, 'Polynesia,' p. 214; ■\Villianis, 'Fiji,' vol, i. ji. 228. Compare Cranz, 'Crunlaml,' p. 2:31. C •; k •) *'? 74 sur\jlV.'.l in CVI-TURE. "1 puni.'^ A similar ccimexiori betv, een divination and gambling is shown by more familiar instruments. The hnckleboncs or astragali were used in divination in aurient Rome, being con- verted into rude dice by numberin_f^ the ibi r sides, and even when the Roman gambler used the tali for gambling, he would invoke a god or his mistress before he made his throw." Such implements are now mostly used for play, but, nevertheless, theii use for divination was by no means confined to the ancient world, for hucklebones are mentioned in the 17tli century among the fortune-telling instruments which young girls divined for husbands with;'' and Negro sorcerers still throw dice as a means of detecting thieves. "^ Lots serve the two purposes equally well. The Chinese gamble by lots for cash and sweetmeats, whilst they also seriously take omens by solemn appeals to the lots kept ready for the purpose in the temples, and professional diviners sit in the market-places, thus re open the future to their cus- tomers.'' Playing-cards are still iii European use for divination. That early sort known as " tra-ots" v-diich the French dealer's license to sell " cartes et tarots " still keeps in mind, is said to be preferred by fortune -tell '.n to the common kind ; for the tarot-pack, with its more numerous and complex figures, lends itself to a greater variety of omens. In these cases, direct history fails to tell us whether the use of the instrument for om. , ;"• play came first. In this respect, the history of the Greoi^ Kottabos'' is instructive. This art of divination con- sisted in flinging wine out of a cup into a metal basin some dis- tance off without spilling any, the thrower saying or thinking his mistress's name, and judging from the clear or dull splash of the wine on the metal what his fortune in love would be ; but in time the magic passed out of the process, and it became a mere game of dexterity played for a prize.'* If this be a typical case, and the rule be relied on that the serious use i)re- 1 E. Taylor, ' Xew Zealand,' pp. 206, 348, 387. 2 Smith's Die. art. 'talus.' ' Brand, ' Popular Antiquities,' vol. ii. p. 412. * D. & C. Livingstone, 'Exp. to Zambesi,' p. 51. 5 Doolittle, • Cliinese,' vol. ii. p. 108, 28ij— 7 Asien,'vol. iii. pp. 76, 125. ^ Smith's Die. art. ' cottahos. ' see 384; Bastian, 'Ocstl. •. 203. = IIAviinial, 138. Sb'KVlVAL IN CULTURE. 17 appears in no way far-fetche(' It is not long since an Iri.shwoman in New York was tried for killing her child ; she had made it stand on burning coals to find out whether it was really her own or a changeling^ The English nurse who says to a fretful child, " You got out of bed wrong foot foremost this morning," seldom or never knows the meaning of her saying ; but this is still plain in the German folklore rule, that to get out of bed left foot first will bring a bad day,^ one of the many examples of that simple association of ideas which connects right and left with good and bad respectively. "To be ready to jump out of one's skin " is now a mere phrase expressing surprise or delight, but in the old doctrine of Werewolves, not yet extinct in Europe, men who are versiptllos or turnskins have the actual faculty of jumping out of thei:* skins, to become for a time wolves. To conclude, the phrase ''cheating the devil " seems to belong to that familiar series of legends where a man makes a compact wdth the fiend, but at the last moment gets off scot- free by the interposition of a saint, or by some absurd evasion — such as whistling the gospel he has bound himself not to say, or refusing to complete his bargain • at the fall of the leaf, on the plea that the sculptured leaves in the church are still on their boughs. One form of the mediaeval compact was for the demon, when he had taught his black art to a class of scholars, to seize one of them for his professional fee, by letting them all run for their lives and catching the last — a story obviously connected with another popular saying : " devil take the hindmost." But even at this game the stupid fiend may be cheated, as is told in the folk-lore of Spain and Scotland. The apt scholar only leaves the master his shadow to clutch as the hindmost in the race, and with lliis unsubstantial payment he must needs be satisfied, while the new-made magician goes forth free, but ever after shadowless.'' It seems a fair inference to think folk-lore nearest to its l-\ V' ^ Jamieson, 'Scottish Dictionary,' s. v. 'coals;' R. Hunt, 'Popular Eo» mances,' 1st ser. p. 83. ' Wuttke, • Volksaberglaube,' p. 131. ' Rochholz, 'Dcutscher Glaube und Brauch,' vol. i, p. 120 ; Grimm, pp. 969 976; Wuttke, p. 116. 78 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. source where it has its highest place and moaning. Thus, if some old rhyme or saying has in one place a solemn import in philosophy or religion, while elsewhere it lies at the level of the ntirsery, there is some ground for treating the serious version as the more original, and the playful one as its mere lingering survival. The argument is not safe, but yet is not to be quite overlooked. For instance, there are two poems kept in remem- brance among the modern Jews, and printed at the end of their book of Passover services in Hebrew and English. One is that known as S"'"T2 in (Chad gadya) : it begins, " A kid, a kid, my father bought for two pieces of money ;" and it goes on to tell how a cat came and ate the kid, and a dog came and bit tlie cat, and so on to the end. — " Then came the Holy One, blessed be He ! and slew the angel of death, who slew the butcher, who killed the ox, that drank the water, that quenched the fire, that burnt the stick, tht-t beat the dog, that bi!; the cat, that ate the kid, that my father bought for two pieces of money, a kid, a kid." This composition is in the 'Sepher Haggadah,' and is looked on by some Jews as a parable concerning the past and future of the Holy Land. According to one interpretation, Palestine, the kid, is devoured by Babylon the cat ; Babylon is overthrown by Persia, Persia by Greece, Greece by Rome, till at last the Turks prevail in the land ; but the Edomites (i.e. the nations of Europe) shall drive out the Turks, the angel of death shall destroy the enemies of Israel, and his children shall be restored under the rule of Messiah. Irrespectively of any such particular interpretation, the solemnity of the ending may incline us to think that we really have the composition here in something like its first form, and that it was written to convey a mystic meaning. If so, then it follows that our familiar nursery tale of the old woman who couldn't get her kid (or pig) over the stile, and wouldn't get home till midnight, must be con- sidered a broken down adaptation of this old Jewish poem. The other composition is a counting-poem, and begins thus : — ' " "VVlio knoweth. one ? I (saith Israel) know One : One is God, who is over heaven and earth. Who knoweth two ? I (saith Israel) know two : Two tables of the covenant; but One is our God who is over the heavens and the earth." SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. 79 (And so forth, accumulating up to the last verse, which is — ) " Who knowoth thirteen ? I (saith Israel) know thirteen : Thirteen divine attributes, twelve tribes, eleven stars, ton v- mmandmonts, nine months preceding childbirth, eight days preceding circumcision, seven days of the week, six books of the Miahnah, five books of the Law, four matrons, three patriarchs, two tables of the covenant ; but One is our God who is over the heavens and the earth." This is one of a family of counting-pooms, apparently held in much favour in mediaeval Christian times ; for they are not yet quite forgotten in country places. An old Latin version runs : " Unus est Deus," etc., and one of the still-surviving English forms begins, " One's One all alone, and ever more shall be so," and reckons on as far as " Twelve, the twelve apostles." Here both the Jewish and Christian forms arc or have been serious, so it is possible that the Jew may have imitated the Christian, but the nobler form of the Hebrew poem here again gives it a claim to be thought the earlier.^ The old proverbs brought down by long inheritance into our modern talk are far from being insignificant in themselves, for their wit is often as fresh, and their wisdom as pertinent as it ever was. Beyond these practical qualities, proverbs are in- structive for the place in ethnography which they occupy. Their range in civilization is limited ; they seem scarcely to belong to the lowest tribes, but appear first in a settled form among some of the higher savages. The Fijians, who were found a few years since living in what archseologists might call the upper Stone Age, have some well-marked proverbs. They lau^h at want of forethought by the saying that " The Nakondo people cut the mast first" (i.e., before they had built the canoe) ; and when a poor man looks wistfully at what he cannot buy, they say, " Becalmed, and looking at the fish.''^ Among the list of the New Zealanders' " whakatauki," or pro- verbs, one describes a lazy glutton : " Deep throat, but shallow 1 Mendes, 'Service for the First Nights of Passover,' London, 1862 (in the Jewish interpretation, the word shunra,—'ca.\,' is compared with Shindr). Halliwell, ' Nursery Rhymes', p. 288 ; ' Popuhir Rhymes,' p. G. 2 Williams, 'Fiji,' vol. i. p. 110. )\^] i V'\ (■, 80 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. ,r ' I n m sinews ;" another says tliat the lazy often profit by tlio work of the industrious : " The large cliips made hy Hardwood fall to the share of Sit-stdl ;" a third moralizes that " A crooked part of a stem of toetoe can bo seen ; but a crooked part in the heart cannot be seen,"^ Among the Basutos of South Africa, "Water never gets tired of running," is a reproach to chatterers ; " Lions gi'owl while they are eating," means tliat there are people who never will enjoy anything; "The suwing-month is the head-ache-month," describes those lazy folks who make excuses when work is to be done ; " The thief eats iliunderbolts," means that he Avill bring down vengeance from heaven on himself.^ West African nations are especially strong in proverbial philo- sophy ; so much so that Captain Burton amused himself through the rainy season at Fernando Po in compiling a volume of native proverbs,^ among which there are hundreds at about as high an intellectual level as those of Europe. " He fled from the sword and hid in the scabbard," is as good as our " Out of the frying-pan into the fire ;" and " He who has only his eye- brow for a cross-bow can never kill an animal," is more picturesque, if loss terse, than our "Hard words break no bones." The old Buddhist aphorism, that " He who indulges in enmity is like one Avho throws ashes to windward, which come back to the same place and cover him all over," is put with less prose and as much point in the negro saying, " Ashes fly back in the face of hiin who throws them." When some one tries to settle an affair in the absence of the people concerned, the negroes will object that "You can't shave a man's head when he is not there," while, to explain that the master is not to be judged by the folly of his servant, they say, " The rider is not a fool because the horse is." Ingratitude is alluded to in " The sword knows not the head of the smith" (who made it), and yet more forcibly elsewhere, " When the calabash had saved them (in the famine), they said, let us cut it for a drinking-cup." The popular contempt for poor men's wisdom is put very neatly in the maxim, " When a poor man makes a proverb it does not 1 Shovtlantl, 'Traditions of K Z.' p. 196. - Casalis, ' Etudes sur la langue Sechuana.' ■'' R. F. Burton, 'Wit and Wisdom from West Africa.' Sec also Waitz, vol. ii. p. 245. SURVIVAL IN CULTUIIK. St work of ill to tho )art of a ic heart "Water itterers ; re people li is the I excuses ," means himself.^ il pLilo- through flume of ibout as led from "Out of his eye- is more reak no lulges in ch come ivith less fly back ! tries to ! negroes m he is 3 judged t a fool he sword let more 1 (in the /' The eatly in loes not itz, vol. ii. spread," while the very mention of making a proverb as some- thing likely to happen, shows a Innd where ]n-ovcrb-mnking is still a living art. Transplanted to the West Indies, the African keeps up this art, as witness these sayings : " Behind dog it is dog, ])ut before dog it is Mr. Dog ; " and " Toutc cabinetto tini maringouin " — " Every cabin has its mosquito." The proverb lias not changed its character in the course of history ; but has retained from first to last a precisely definite type. The proverbial sayings recorded among the higher nations of the world arc to be reckoned by tens of thousands, and have a large and well-knoAvn literature of their own. But though the range of existence of proverbs extends into the highest levels of civilization, this is scarcely true of their develop- ment. At the level of European culture in the middle ages, they have indeed a vast importance in popular education, but their period of actual growth seems already at an end. Cer- vantes raised the proverb-monger's craft to a j^itcli it never sur- passed ; but it must not be forgotten that the incomparable Sanclio's wares were mostly heirlooms ; for proverbs were even then sinking to remnants of an earlier condition of society. As such they survive among ourselves, who go on using much the same relics of ancestral wisdom as came out of the squire's in- exhaustible budget, old saws not to 1)e lightly altered or made anew in our changed modern times. We can collect and use the old proverbs, but making new ones has become a feeble, spiritless imitation, like our attempts to invent new myths or new nursery rhymes. Kiddles start near proverbs in the history of civilization, and they travel on long together, though at last towards different ends. By riddles are here meant the old-fashioned problems with a real answer intended to be discovered, such as the t^'pical enigma of the Sphinx, and not the modern verbal conundrums set in the traditional form of question and answer, as a way of bringing in a jest apropos of nothing. The original kind, which ma}- be defined as " sense-riddles," are found at home among the upper savages, and range on into the lower and middle civilization ; and while their growth stops at this level, many ancient specimens have lasted on in the modern VOL. I. a IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) // ^0 1.0 1.1 1.25 ■iilM |2.a |5o ^^~ H^H ^ 1^ 12.0 i U iim <9 ^ V] /^ % / /A Hiotographic Sciences Corpomtion 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, N.Y. 14580 (716) 872-4503 \ qy V Cv A r O ■Ki^^^ ^M^ fc & ^ ,1 i w \ 1 \ ! i ». ;! i 82 SURVIVAL in CULTUKE. nursery and by the cottage fireside. There is a plain reason why riddles should belong to only the higher grades of savagery ; their making requires a fair power of ideal comparison, and knowledge must have made considerable advance before this process could become so familiar as to fall from earnest into sport. At last, in a far higher state of culture, riddles begin to be looked on as trifling, their growth ceases, and they only sur- vive in remnants for children's play. Some examples, chosen among various races, from savagery upwards, will show more exactly the place in mental history which the riddle occupies. The following are specimens from a collection of Zulu riddles, recorded with quaintly simple native comments on the philosophy of the matter : — Q. " Guess ye some men who are many and form a row ; they dance the wedding-dance, adorned in white hip-dresses ?" A. " The teeth ; we call them men who form a row, for tlie teeth stand Uke men who are made ready for a wedding-dance, that they may dance well. When we say, they are ' adorned with white hip-dresses,' we put that in, that people may not at once think of teeth, but be drawn away from them by thinking, ' It is men who put on white hip-dresses,' and continually have their thoughts fixed on men," etc. Q. " Guess ye a man who does not lie down at night : he lies down in the morning until the sun sets ; he then awakes, and works all night ; he does not wark by day ; he is not seen when he works?" A. "The closing-poles of the cattle-pen." Q. "Guess ye a man whom men do not like to laugh, for it is known that his laughter is a very great cvi!, and is followed by lamenta- tion, and an end of rejoicing. Men weep, and trees, and grass ; and everything is heard weeping in the tribe where he laughs ; and they say the man has laughed who does not usually laugh?" A. " Fire. It is called a man that what is said may not be at once evident, it being concealed by the word ' man.' Men say many things, searching out the meaning in rivalry, and missing the mark. A riddle is good when it is not discernible at once," etc.^ Among the .Ba'utos, riddles are a recognized part of education, and are set like exercises to a whole company of i ' Callaway, ' Nursery Tales, etc. of Zulus,' vol. i. p. 364, etc. SUllVIVAL IN CULTURE. 83 more ;n say puzzled children. Q. " Do you know what throws itself from the mountain-top without being broken?" A. "A water- fall." Q. " There's a thing that travels fast without legs or wings, and no cliff, nor river, nor wall can stop it ?" A. " The voice." Q. " Name the ten trees with ten flat stones on the top of them." A. "The fingers." Q. "Who is the little im- movable dumb boy who is dressed up warm in the day and left naked at night?" A. "The bed-clothes' peg."i From East Africa, this Swahili riddle is an example : Q. " My lien has laid among thorns?" A. " A pineapple."^ From "West Africa, this Yoniba one : " A long slender trading woman who never gets to market?" A. "A canoe (it stops at the landing-place)."'' In Poljrnesia, the Samoau islanders are given to riddles. Q. "There are four brothers, who are always bearing about their father ? " A. "The Samoan pillow," which is a yard of three-inch bamboo resting on four leg's. Q. " A white-headed man stands above the fence, and reache- to the heavens?" A. " The smoke of the oven." Q. " A man who stands between two rav^ lous fish ?" A. "The tongue.""* (There is a Zulu riddle like this, which compares the tongue to a man living in the midst of enemies fighting.) The following are old Mexican enigmas : Q. " What are the ten stones one has at his sides ? " A. " The finger- nails." Q. " What is it we get into by three parts and out of by one ? " A. " A shirt." Q. " What goes through a valley and drags its entrails after it ? " A. " A. needle."^ These riddles found among the Ic v^er races do not differ at all in nature from those that have come down, sometimes modern- ized in the setting, into the nursery lore of Europe. Thus Spanish children still ask, " What is the dish of nuts that is gathered by day, and scattered by night ? " (the stars.) Our English riddle of the pair of tongs : " Long legs, crooked thighs, little head, and no eyes," is primitive enough to have been ^ Casalis, ' Etudes sur la langiic Sethuana,' p. 91 ; * Basutos,' p. 337. ' Steere, ' Swahili Tales,' p. 418. ' Burton, 'Wit and "Wisdom from West Africa,' p. 212. * Turner, 'Polynesia,' p. 216. See Polaek, ' New Zealanders,' vol. ii. p. 171. * Sahagun, ' Historia de Nueva Espaua,' in Kingsborough's ' Antiquities of Mexico,' vol. vii. p. 178. c 2 84 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. made by a South Sea Islander. The following is on the same theme as one of the Zulu riddles : " A flock of white sheep, On a red hill ; Here they go, there they go ; Now they stand still ? '* Another is the very analogue of one of the Aztec specimens : " Old Mother Twitchett had but one eye. And a long tail w^hich she let fly ; And every time she went over a gap, She left a bit of her tail in a trap ? " So thoroughly does riddle-making belong to the mythologie stage of thought, that any poet's simile, if not too far-fetched,^ needs only inversion to be made at once into an enigma. The Hindu calls the Sun Saptasva, i. e., " seven-horsed," while, with the same thought, the old German riddle asks, " What is the chariot drawn by seven white and seven black horses ? " (the year, drawn by the seven days and nights of the week.^) Such, too, is the Greek riddle of the two sisters. Day and Night, who give birth each to the other, to be born of her again : EiVl KatriytnfjTou Sirral, oiv i) fxla r'lKTti and the enigma of Kleoboulos, with its other like fragments of rudimentary mythology : Els 6 irari)p, na7S(s 8i SviiSeKa' tuiv Se 7' iKiSurrcp Tlatifs Kaat Tpi^Kovr' ^cSix"' «?5oy «x<'*"''<*'* 'Hi (jifv \(vKal iaffiv iSety, y 8* o5re jue\a(cat' 'Adivaroi 8e t' iovarai airo^divovaiv airacTM. " One is tho father, and twelve the children, and, born unto each one. Maidens thirty, whose form in twain is parted asunder, White to behold on the one side, black to behold on the other, All immortal in being, yet doomed to dwindle and perish."* Such questions as these may be fairly guessed now as in old times, and must be distinguished from that scarcer class which require the divination of some unlikely event to solve them. Of such the typical example is Samson's riddle, and there is an old Scandinavian one like it. The story is that Gestr found a * Grimm, p. ' Diog. Laert. i. 91 ; Atlienagorns, x. 451. SURVIVAL IN CULTUllE. 95 duck sitting on her nest in an ox's horned skull, and thereupon propounded a riddle, describing with characteristic Northman's metaphor the ox with its horns fancied as already made into drinking-horns. The following translation does not exaggerate the quaintness of the original : — " Joying in children, the bill- goose grew, And her building-timbers together drew ; The biting grass-shearer screened her bed, With the maddening drink- stream overhead." ^ Many of the old oracular responses are puzzles of precisely this kind. Such is the story of the Delphic oracle, which ordered Temenos to find a man mtli three eyes to guide the army, which injunction he fulfilled by meeting a one- eyed man on horseback.- It is curious to find this idea r.gain in Scandinavia, where Odin sets King Heidrek a riddle, '' Who are they two that fare to the Thing with three eyes, ten feet, and one tail ? " the answer being, the one-eyed Odin himself on liis eight-footed horse Sleipnir.^ The close bearing of the doctrine of survival on the study of manners and customs is constantly coming into view in ethno- graphic research. It seems scarcely too rAuch to assert, once for all, that meaningless customs must be survivals, that they had n practical, or at least ceremonial, intention when and where they first arose, but are now fallen into absurdity from having been carried on into a new state of society, where their original sense has been discarded. Of course, new customs introduced in particular ages may be ridiculous or wicked, but as a rule they have discernible motives. Explanations of this kind, by recourse to some forgotten meaning, seem on the whole to account best for obscure customs which some have set down to mere outbreaks of spontaneous folly. A certain Zimmermann, who published a heavy ' Geographical History of Mankind ' in * Mannhardt's • Zeitschr. fiir Deutsche Mytliologie,' vol. iii. p. 2, etc. : " Nog er forthun nosgfis vaxin, Barngjoni su er bar bdtimbr saman ; Hlifthu lieniii halms bitskdlmir, Th(5 Id Jrykkjar drynhronn yfir." •« See Grote, ' Hist, of Greece,' vol. ii. p. 5. * Mannhai-dt's 'Zeitschr.' ]. 0. 86 SURVIVAL IX CULTURE. I \ .i: i' u 'A the last century, remarks as follows on the prevalence of similar nonsensical and stupid customs in distant countries : — " For if two clever heads may, each for himself, hit upon a clever inven- tion or discovery, then it ife- far likelier, considering the much larger total of fools and blockheads, that like fooleries should bo given to two far distant lands. If, then, the inventive fool be likewise a man of importance and influence, as is, indeed, an extremely frequent case, then both nations adopt a similar folly, and then, centuries after, some historian goes through it to extract his evidence for the derivation of these two nations one from the other." ^ Strong views as to the folly of mankind seem to have been in the air about the time of the French Revolution. Lord Chester- field was no doubt an extremely different person from our German philosopher, but they were quite at one as to the absurdity of customs. Advising his son as to the etiquette of courts, the Earl writes thus to him : — " For example, it is respectful to bow to the King of England, it is disrespectful to bow to the King of France ; it is the rule to courtesy to the Emperor ; and the prostration of the whole body is required by Eastern Monarchs. These are established ceremonies, and must be complied with ; but why they were established, I defy sense and reason to tell us. It is the same among all ranks, where certain customs are received, and must necessarily be complied with, though by no means the result of sense and reason. As for instance, the very absurd, though almost universal custom of drinking people's healths. Can there be anything in the world less relative to any other man's health, than my drinking a glass cf wine? Common sense, certainly, never pointed it out, but yet common sense tells me I must conform to it." ^ Now, though it might be difficult enough to make sense of the minor details of court etiquette, Lord Chesterfield's example from it of the iiTationality of mankind is a singularly unlucky one. Indeed, if any one were told to set forth in few words the rela- tions of the people to their rulers in different states of society, M ' E. A. W. Zimmermann, ' Geographische Geschichte des Menschen,' etc., 1778 -83, vol. iii. See Roll ■ itoa'a Inaugural Address, British Association, 1870. 2 Earl of Chesterfield, ♦ Letters to his Son,' vol. ii. No. Ixviii. SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. he might answer that men grovel on their faces before the King of Siam, kneel on one knee or uncover before a European monarch, and shake the hand of the President of the United States as though it were a pump-handle. These are ceremonies at ouce intelligible and significant. Lord Chesterfield is more fortunate in his second instance, for the custom of drinking healths is really of obscure origin. Yet it is closely connected with an ancient rite, practically absurd indeed, but done with a conscious and serious intention which lands it quite outside the region of nonsense. This is the custom of pouring out libations and drinking at ceremonial banquets to gods and the dead. Thus the old Scandinavians drank the " minni " of Thor, Odin, and Freya, and of kings likewise at their funerals. The custom did not die out with the conversion of the northern nations, who changed the object of worship and drank the "minnc" of Christ, of Mary, of Michael, and then, in later centuries, of St. John and St. Gertrude, and so up to modem years, when it was reckoned a curious relic of antiquity that the priest of Otbergen still once a year blessed a goblet, and the people drank John's blessing in it. The " minne " was at once love, memory, and the thought of the absent, and it long survived in England in the " min- nying " or " mynde " days, on which the memory of the dead was celebrated by services or banquets. Such evidence as this fairly justifies the writers, older and neAver, who have treated these ceremonial drinking usages as in their nature sacrificial^ As for the practice of drinking the health of living men, its ancient history reaches us from several districts inhabited by Aryan nations. The Greeks in symposium drank to one an- other, and the Romans adopted the habit (jtpo-niviw, propi- nare, Graeco more bibere). The Goths cried " hails 1 " as they pledged each other, as we have it in the curious first line of the verses " De conviviis barbaris " in the Latin Anthology, which sets down the shouts of a Gothic drinking-bout of the fifth century or so, in words which still partly keep their sense to an English ear : — " Inter eila Goticum scapiamatziaia drincan Non audet quisqram dignos educere versus." ' See Giimii ip. 59.-5, 1201 ; Brand, vol. ii. pp. 311, 325, etc. 88 SURVIVAL IN CULTUBK. As for ourselves, though the old drinking salutation of " wa3S heel I " is no longer vulgar English, the formula lomains with us, stiffened into a noun. On the whole, the evidence of ancient and wide prevalence of the custom of drinking to the living seems not accompanied with a sufficient clue to its rational origin, although, by comparison with the custom of drinking to gods and the dead, we may take for granted that it had one. Let us now put the theory of survival to a somewhat severe test, by seeking from it some explanation of the existence, in practice or memory, within the limits of modern civilized society, of three remarkable groups of customs which civilized ideas totally fail to account for. Though we may not succeed in giving clear and absolute explanations of their motives, at any rate it is a step in advance to be able to refer their origins to savage or barbaric antiquity. Looking at these customs from the modern practical point of view, one is ridiculous, the others are atrocirus, and all are senseless. The iirst is the practice of salutation on sneezing, the second the rite of laying the founda- tions of a building on a human victim, the third the prejudice against saving a drowning man. In interpreting the customs connected with sneezing, it is needful to recognize a prevalent doctrine of the lowc^ races, of which a full account will be given in another chapter. As a man's soul is considered to go in and out of his body, so it is with other spirits, particularly such as enter into patients and possess them or afflict them with disease. Amotg the less cultured races, the connexion of this idea with sneezing is best shown i>,mong the Zulus, a people firmly persuaded that kindly or angry spirits of the dead hover about them, do them good or harm, stand visibly before them in dreams, enter into them, and cause diseases in them. The following particulars are abridged from the native statements taken down by Dr. Callaway: — When a Zulu sneezes, he will say, "I am now blessed. The Idhlozi (ancestral spirit) is with me ; it has come to me. Let me hasten and praise it, for it is it which causes me to sneeze ! " So he praises the manes of the family, asking for cattle, and Avives, and blessings. Sneezing is a sign that a sick person will be restored to health ; he returns thanks after SURVIV.^L IX CULTURE. 89 sneezing, saying, " Yo people of ours, I have gained that pros- perity which I wanted. Continue to look on nio with favour ! " Sneezing reminds a man that ho should name the Itongo (ancestral spirit) of his people without delay, because it is the Itongo which causes him to sneeze, that he may perceive by .sneezing that the Itongo is with him. If a man is ill and does not sneeze, those who come to him ask whether he has sneezed or not ; if he has not sneezed, they murmur, raying, " The disease is great ! " If a child sneezes, they say to it, " Grow ! " it is a sign of health. So then, it is said, sneezing among black men gives a man strength to remember that the Itongo has entered into him and abides with him. The Zulu diviners or sorcerers are very apt to sneeze, which they regard as an indica- tion of the presence of the spirits, whom they adore hy saying " Makosi ! " {I.e., lords or masters). It is a suggestive example of the transition of such customs as the.se from one religion to another, that the Amakosa, who used to call on their divine ancestor Utixo when tlioy sneezed, since their conversion to Christianity say, "Preserver, look upon me ! " or, "Creator of heaven and earth ! " ^ Elsewhere in Africa, similar ideas are mentioned. Sir Thomas Browne, in his ' Vulgar Errors,' made well known the story that when the King of Monomotapa sneezed, acclamations of blessing passed from mouth to mouth through the city ; but he should have mentioned that Godigno, from whom the original account is taken, said that this took place when the king drank, or coughed, or sneezed.^ A later account from the other side of the continent is more to the purpose. In Guinea, in the last century, when a principal persona^re .sneezed, all present fell on their knees, kissed the earth, clapped thoir hands, and wished him all happiness and prosperity.^ With a different idea, the negroes of Old Calabar, when a child sneezes, will sometimes exclaim, " Far from you ! " with an appropriate gesture as if throwing off some evil.* Polj-nesia is another region vhere the sneezing salutation is ^ Callaway, 'Religion of Amazulu,' pp. 64, 222—5, 263. ^ Godignus, 'Vita Tatris Gouzali SylveriiX}.' Col. Agripp. 1616 ; lib. ii. c. x. ■' Bosman, 'Guinea,' letter xviii. in Piiikerton, vol. xvi. p. 478. ^ Burton, ' Wit i).nd Wisdom from West Africa,' p. 373. 90 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. J Mi well marked. In New Zealand, a charm was said to prevent evil when a child sneezed ; ^ if a Samoan sneezed, the by- standers said, " Life to you ! " ° wliile in the Tongan gi-oup a sneeze on the starting of an expedition was a most evil pre- sage.' A curious American instance dates from Hernando de Soto's famous expedition into Florida, when Guachoya, a native chief, came to pay him a visit. " While this was going on, the cacique Guachoya gave a great sneeze ; the gentlemen who had come with him and wore lining the walls of the hall among the Spaniards there all at once bowing their heads, opening their arms and closing them again, and making other gestures of great veneration and respect, saluted him with diflferent words, all directed to one end, saying, ' The Sun guard thee, be with thee, enlighten thee, magnify thee, protect thee, favour thee, defend thee, prosper thee, save thee,' and other like phrases, as the words came, and for a good space there lingered the murmur of these words among them, whereat the governor wondering said to the gentlemen and captains with him, ' Do you not see that all the world is one ? ' This matter was well noted among the Spaniards, that among so barbarous a people should be used the same ceremonies, or greater, than among those who hold themselves to be very civilized. Whence it may be believed that this manner of salutation is natural among all nations, and not caused by a pestilence, as is vulgarly said," etc.* In Asia and Europe, the sneezing superstition extends through a wide range of race, age, and country.^ Among the passages relating to it in the classic ages of Greece and Rome, the follow- ing are some of the most characteristic, — the lucky sneeze of » Shortland, 'Trads. of New Zealand,' p. 131. ^ Turner, ' Polynesia,' p. 348 ; see also Williams, * Fiji,' vol i. p. 250. ■ Mariner, 'Tonga Is.' vol. i, p. 456. * Garcilaso de la Vega, ' His<;. do la Florida,' vol. iii. ch. xli. ' Among dissertations on the subject, see especially Sir Thos. Browne, ' Pseudodoxia Epideniica ' (Vulgar Errois), book iv. chap. ix. ; Brand, * Popular Antiquities,' vol. iii. p. 119, etc. ; R. G. Haliburton, ' New Materials for the History of Man.' Halifax, N. S. 1863 ;• Encyclopaedia Britannica,' art. 'snee- zing ;' "Wemsdorf, ' De Ritu Sternutantibus bene precandi.' Leipzig, 1741 ; see also Grimm, D. M. p. 1070, note. SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. !)1 a Telcmachos in tho Odysnoy ; ^ tho soltlicr's sneeze and the shout of adoration to tlio god which rose along the ranks, and which Xenophon appealed to as a favourable omen ; " Aristotle's remark that pe(>j)le consider a sneeze as divine {tov iuv Trrapfiov 6thv I'lyovixfOa tlvai), but not a cough,'' etc, ; tho Greek epigratu on the man with the long nose, who did not say Z«C (rwarov whvu ho sneezed, for the noise was too far oflf for him to hear ; ' Petro- nius Arbiter's mention of tho custom of saying " Salve ! " to one who sneezed ; " and Pliny's question, " Cur sternutamcntis salu- tamus?" apropos of which he remarks that even Tiberius Ca3sar, that saddest of men, exacted this observance." Similar rites of sneezin*; have long been observed in Eastern Asia." When a Hindu Kucezos, bystanders say, " Live ! " and the sneezer replies, " With you ! " It is an ill omen, to which among c thers the Thugs paid great regard on starting on an expedition, and which even compelled them to let tho travellers with them escape.** The Jewish sneezing formula is, "Tobim chayini ! " i.e., "Good life ! "» Th Moslem says, " Praise to Allah ! " when he sneezes, and his I'rir ds compliment him with proper for- mulas, a custom whi cms to be conveyed from race to race wherever Islam extL.ul Lastly, the custom ranged through mediseval into modern Europe. To cite old German examples, " Die Heiden nicht endorften niesen, dS, man doch sprichet * Nu helfiu Got ! '" " Wir sprechen, swer niuset, Got helfe dir." " For a combined English and French example, the following • Homer Odyss. xvii. 541. * Xenophon Anabasis, iii. 2, 9. ' Ai'istot. Problem, xxxiii. 7. * Anthologia Grteca, Brunck, vol. iii. p. 95. » Petron. Arb. Sat. 98. " Plin. xxviii. 5. 7 Noel, ' Die. dcs Origines ; ' Migne, 'Die. des Superstitions,' etc. Bastian, * Oestl. Asien,' vol. ii. p. 129. " "Ward, ' Hindoos,' voL i. p. 142 ; Dubois, • Peuples do I'lnde,' vol. i. p. 465 ; Sleeman, ' Ramaseeana,' p. 120. • Buxtorf, 'Lexicon Chaldaicum ;* Tendlau, ' Sprichworter, etc. Deutsch- Jiidischer Vorzeit.' Frankf. a. M.; 1860, p. 142. >" Lane, 'Modem Egyptians,' vol. i. p. 282. See Grant, in 'Tr. Etli. Soc' vol. iii. p. 90. " Grimm, 'D. M.' pp. 1070, 1110. ir 92 NUItVIVAL IN CULTUIIK. lincH (a.I). 1100) may serve, which Hhow our old formula "woes luL'I ! " (" may you bo well ! " — " wassail ! ") used also to avert being taken ill after a sneeze : — " E pur lino foyzo OHtornuor Tantot ([uidont mal trouor, Si ucahdl no dio/ aproz . " ' In the 'Rules of Civility* (a.D. 1(585, translated from the French) we read : — " If his lordship chances to sneeze, you are not to bawl out, ' God bless you, sir,' but, pulling off youi hat, bow to him handsomely, and make that obsecration to your- self." ^ It is noticed that Anabaptists and Quakers rejected these with other salutations, but they remained in the code of English good manners among high and low till half a century or so ago, and are so little forgotten now, that most people still see the point of the story of the fiddler anil his wife, where his sneeze and hnr hearty " God bless you ! " brought about the removal of the fiddle case. " Gott hilf ! " may still be h&ard in Germany, and " Feliciti^ ! " in Italy. It is not strange that the existence of these absurd customs should have been for ages a puzzle to curious inquireis. Espe- cially the legend-mongers took the matter in hand, and their attempts to devise historical explanations are on record in a group of philosophic myths, — Greek, Jewish, Christian. Prome- theus prays for the preservation of his artificial man, when it gives the first sign of life by a sneeze ; Jacob prays that man's soul may not, as heretofore, depart from his body when he sneezes ; Pope Gregory prays to avert the pestilence, in those days when the air was so deadly that he who sneezed died of it; and from these imaginary events legend declares that the use of the sneezing formulas was handed down. It is more to our purpose to notice the existence of a corresponding set of ideas and customs connected with gaping. Among the Zulus repeated yawning and sneezing arc classed together as signs of approach- * 'Manuel cles Pecclifis,' in Wedgwood, 'Die. English Etymology,' s. v. * wassail. ' 2 Brand, vol. iii. p. 126. ,! { SURVIVAL IN CULTUUK. 03 8. V. ing spiritual possession.^ Tho Hindu, wlicn lio gapes, must snap his thumh and Hnger, and lopeat tho name of somo god, as llama : to n(!glt'ct this is a sin as great as tho murder of a Bralnnan.^ Tho Persians ascribe yawning, sneezing, etc., to demoniacu! posscrisioii. Amung tho nio(h^rn Mosh'ms generally, when a man yawiH, lie puts tiio back of liis left lumd ^o his mouth, saying, " T seek refuge witli Alhdi from Satan tljo accursed ! " but tlio act of yawning is to bo avoided, for tlio Devil is in the habit of leaping into a gaping moutli.'' Tliis may very likely bo tho meaning of the Jewish proverb, " Open not thy mouth to Sr, an ! " The other half of this idea shows itself clearly in Josephus' story of his having seen a certain Jew, named Elcazar, euro demoniacs in Vespasian's time, by drawing the demons out through their nostrils, by means of a ring containing a root of mystic virtue mentioned by Solomon.* Tho accounts of the sect of the Mcssalians, who used to spit and blow their noses to expel the demons they might have drawn in with their breath,'' the records of the medijeval exor- cists driving out devils through tho patients' nostrils," and the custom, still kept up in tho Tyrol, of crossing oneself when one yawns, lest something evil should como into one's mouth,''' involve similar ideas. In comparing the modern Kafir ideas with those of other districts of the world, we find a distinct notion of a sneeze being due to a spiritual presence. This, which seems indeed the key to the whole matter, has been well brought into view by Mr. Haliburton, as displayed in Keltic folklore, in a group of stories turning on the super- stition that any one who sneezes is liable to be carried off' by the fairies, unless their po'ver be counteracted by an invo- cation, as " God bless you ! " ** The corresponding idea as to ' Callaway, p. 2G3. ' Waul, 1. c. * ' Pcnd-Nanieli,* tr. do Sacy, cli. Ixiii. ; Manrj', 'Magic,' etc., p. 302; Lane, 1. c. * G. IJrechcr, ' Daa Trauscendentale im Talmud,' p. 168 ; Joseph. Ant. Jud. viii. 2, 5. * Migne, ' Die. des Hdrdsies,' s. v. ^ Bastian, 'Mcnsch,' voL ii. pp. 115, 322. 7 Wiittke, 'Deutsclio Volksaberglaube,'p, 137. * Haliburton, op. cit. M r ?■■ & '! i Itf 1)4 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. ya\.ning is to be found in an Iceland folklore legend, where the troll, who has transformed herself into the shape of the beautiful queen, says, " When I yawn a little yawn, I am a neat and tiny maiden ; when I yawn a half-yawn, then I am as a half-troll ; when I yawn a whole yawn, then am I as a whole troll," ' On the whole, though the sneezing superstition makes no approach to universality among mankind, its wide distribu- tion is highly remarkable, and it would be an interesting problem to decide how far this wide distribution is due to independent growth in several regions, how far to conveyance from race to race, and how far to ancestral inheritance. Here it ha,s only to be maintained that it was not originally an arbi- trary and meaningless custom, but the working out of a prin- ciple.^ The plain statement by the modern Zulus fits with the hints to be gained from ihe superstition and folklore of other races, to connect the no+ions and practices as to sneezing with the ancient and savage doctrine of pervading and invading spirits, considered as good or evil, and treated accordingly. The lingering survivals of the quaint old formulas in modern Europe seem an unconscious record of the time when the explanation of sneezing had not yet been given over to physio- logy, but was still in the " theological stage." There is current in Scotland the belief that the Picts, to Avhom local legend attributes buildings of prehistoric antiquity, bathed their foundation-stones with human blood ; and legend oven tells that St. Columba found it necessary to bury St. Oran alive beneath the foundation of his monastery, in order to pro- pitiate the spirits of the soil who demolished by night what was built during the day. So late as 1843, in Germany, when a new bridge was built at Halle, a notion was abroad among the people that a child was wanted to be built into the founda- tion. These ideas of church or wall or bridge wanting human l)lood or an immured yictim to make the foundation steadfast, ' Powell and Magiiussen, ' Legends of Iceland,' 2nd ser. p. 448. - The cases in which a sneeze is interpreted under special conditions, as with reference to right and left, early riorning, etc. (see Plutarch. De Genio Socratis, etc.), are not considered here, as they helong to ordinary omen- divination. SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. 95 legend as with 3 Genio f omen- are not only widespread in European folklore, but local chro- nicle or adition asserts them as matter of historical fact in district utter district. Thus, when the broken dam of the Nogat had to be repaired in 1463, the peasants, ou the advice to throw in a living man, are said to have made a beggar drunk and buried him there. Thuringian legend declares that to make the castle of Liebenstein fast and impregnable, a child was oought for hard money of its mother and walled in. It was eating a cake while the masons were at work, the story goes, and it cried out, "Mother, I see thee still;" then later, "Mother, I see thee a little still ; " and, as they put in the last stone, " Mother, now I see thee no more." The wall of Copenhagen, legend says, sank as fast as it was built ; so they took an in- nocent little girl, set her on a chair at a table with toys and eatables, and, as she played and ate, twelve master-masons closed a vault over her; then, with clanging music, the wall was raised, and stood firm ever after. Thus Italian legend tells of the bridge of Arta, that fell in and fell in till they walled in the master-builder's wife, and she spoke her dying curse that the bridge should tremble like a flower-stalk henceforth. The Slavonic chiefs founding Detinez, according to old heathen custom, sent out men to take the first boy they met and bury him in the foundation. Servian legend tells how three brothers combined to build the fortress of Skadra (Scutari) ; but, year after year, the demon (vila) razed by night Avhat the three hundred masons built by day. The fiend must be appeased by a human sacrifice, the first of the three wives who should come bringing food to the workmen. All three brothers swore to keep the dreadful secret from their wives ; but the two eldest gave traitorous warning to theirs, and it was the youngest brother's wife who came unsuspecting, and they built her in. But she entreated that an opening should be left for her to suckle her baby through, and for a twelvemonth it was brought. To this day, Servian wives visit the tomb of the good mother, still marked by a stream of water which trickles, milky with lime, down the fortress wall. Lastly, there is our own legend of Vor- tigem, who could not finish his tower till the foundation-stone was wetted with the blood of a child born of a mother without 96 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. ■i f I- I a father. As is usual in the history of sacrifice, "we hear of sub- stitutes for such victims ; empty coffins walled up in Germany, a lamb walled in under the altar in Denmark to make the church stand fast, and the churchyard in like manner hand- selled by burying a live horse first. In modern Greece an evident relic of the idea survives in the superstition that the first passer-by after a foundation-stone is Li id will die within the year, wherefore the masons will compromise the debt by killing a lamb or a black cock on the stone. With much the same idea German legend tells of the bridge-building fiend cheated of his promised fee, a soul, by the device of making a cock run first across ; and thus German folklore says it is well, before entering a new house, to let a cat or dog run in.^ From all this it seems that, with due allowance for the idea having passed into an often repeated and varied mythic theme, yet written and unwritten tradition do preserve the memory of a bloodthirsty barbaric rite, which not only really existed in ancient times, but lingered long in European history. If now we look to less cultured countries, we shall find the rite actually known as matter of modern religion. The thing has been done within modern years, and very likely will be done again. In Africa, in Galam, a boy and girl used to be buried alive before the great gate of the city to make it impregnable, a practice once executed on a large scale by a Bambarra tyrant ; while in Great Bassam and Yarriba such sacrifices were usual at the foundation of a house or village." In Polynesia, Ellis heard of the custom, instanced by the fact that the central pillar of one of the temples at Maeva was planted upon the body of a human victim.^ In Borneo, among the Milanau Dayaks, at the erection of the largest house a deep hole was dug to receive the first post, which was then suspended over it ; a slave girl was placed in the excavation ; at a signal the lashings were cut, and the enormous timber descended, crushing the girl to death, a sacri- 1 W. Scott, •Minstrelsy of Scottisli Border ; ' Forbes Leslie, 'Early Races of Scotland,' vol. 1. p. 149, 487; Grimm, 'Deutsche Mytliologic,' p. 972, 1095; Bastian, ' Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 92, 407, vol. iii. p. 105, 112; Jiowring, 'Servian Popular Poetry,' p. 64. 2 Waitz, vol. ii. p. 197. 2 Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 346 ; Tyerman and Bennet, vol. ii. p. 39. if SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. 97 fice to the spirits. St. John saw a milder form of the rlto performed, when the chief of the Quop Dayaks set up a flag- staff near his house, a chicken being thrown in to be crushed by the descending pole.^ More cultured nations of Southern Asia have carried on into modern ages the rite of the foundation- sacrifice. A 17th century account of Japan mentions the belief there that a wall laid on the body of a willin*^ human victim would be secure from accident ; accordingly, when a great wall was to be built, some wretched slave would offer himself as foundation, lying down in the trench to be crushed by the heavy stones lowered upon him.^ When the gate of the new city of Tavoy, in Tenasserim, was built, perhaps twenty years ago, Mason was told by an eye-witness that a criminal was put in each post-hole to become a protecting demon. Thus it appears that such stories as that of the human victims buried for spirit-watchers under the gates of Mandalay, of the queen who was drowned in a Birmese reservoir to make the dyke safe, of the hero whose divided body was buried under the fortress of Thatung to make it impregnable, are the records, whether in historical or mythical form, of the actual customs of the land.^ Within our own dominion, when Rajah Sala Byne was building the fort of Sialkot in the Punjaub, the foundation of the south- east bastion gave way so repeatedly that he had recourse to a soothsayer, who assured him that it would never stand until the blood of an only son was shed there, wherefore the only son of a widow was sacrificed.'* It is thus plain that hideous rites, of which Europe has scarcely kept up more than the dim memoiy, have held fast their ancient practice and meaning in Africa, Polynesia, and Asia, among races who represent in grade, if not in chronology, earlier stages of civilization. When Sir Walter Scott, in the 'Pirate,' tells of Bryce the pedlar refusing to help Mordaunt to save the shipwrecked sailor from drowning, and even remonstrating with him on the rashness of ' St. John, ' Far East,' vol. i. p. 46 ; see Bastian, vol. ii. p. 407. ' Caron, 'Japan,' in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 623. • Bastian, ' Oestl. Asien,' vol. i. pp. 193, 214 ; vol. ii. pp. 91, 270 ; vol. iii. p. 16. * Bastian, 'Menscli.' vol. iii. p. 107. rah !• H 98 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. h such a deed, he states aD old superstition of the Shetlanders. "Are you mad ?" says the pedlar; "you that have lived sae lang in Zetland, to risk the saving of a drowning man ? Wot ye not, if you bring him to life again, he will be sure to do you some capital injury?" Were this inhuman thought noticed in this one district alone, it might be fancied to have had its rise in some local idea now no longer to be explained. But when mentions of similar superstitions are collected among the St. Kilda islanders and the boatmen of the Danube, among French and English sailors, and even out of Europe and among less civilized races, we cease to think of local fancies, but look for some widely accepted belief of the lower culture to account for such a state of things. The Hindu does not save a man from drowning in the sacred Ganges, and the islanders of the Malay archipelago share the cruel notion.^ Of all people the rude Kamchadals have the prohibition in the most remarkable form. They hold it a great fault, says Kracheninnikoff, to save a drowning man ; he who delivers him will be drowned himself.^ Steller's account is more extraordinary, and probably applies only to cases where the victim is actually dro^vning : he says that if a man fell by chance into the water, it was a great sin for him to get out, for as he had been destined to drown he did wrong in not drowning, wherefore no one would let him into his dwelling, nor speak to him, nor give him food or a wife, but he was reckoned for dead ; and even when a man fell into the water while others were standing by, far from helping him out they would drown him by force. Now these savages, it appears, avoided volcanoes because of the spirits who live there and cook their food ; for a like reason they held it a sin to bathe in hot springs ; and they believed with fear in a fish-like spirit of the sea, whom they called Mitgk.^ This spiritualistic belief among the Kam- chadals is, no doubt, the key to their superstition as to rescuing drowning men. There is even to be found in modem European superstition, not only the practice, but with it a lingering sur- vival of its ancient spiritualistic significance. In Bohemia, a ' Bastian, 'Mensch.' vol. iii. p. 210 ; Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. ii. p. 318. ^ Krachcninnikow, 'Descr. du Kamchatka, Voy. en Sib6rie,' vol. iii. p. 72. 3 Steller, 'Kamtsclxatka,' pp. 265, 274. i ^ \ 1 ii' SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. 99 p. 72. recent account (1864) says the fishermen do not venture to snatch a drowning man from the waters. They fear that the "Waterman" (i. e., water-demon) "would take away their luck in fishing, and drown themselves at the first opportunity.^ This explanation of the prejudice against saving the water-spirit's victim may be confirmed by a mass of evidence from various districts of the world. Thus, in discussing the doctrine of sacri- fice, it will appear that the usual manner of making an otFering to a well, river, lake, or sea, is simply to cast property, cattle, or men into the water, which personally or by its in-dwelling spirit takes possession of them.^ That the accidental drowning of a man is held to be such a seizure, savage and civilized folk- lore show by many examples. In New Zealand huge super- natural reptile-monsters, called Taniwha, live iu river-bends, and those who are dro^vned are said to be pulled under by them f the Siamese fears the Pniik or water-spirit that seizes bathers and drags them under to his dwelling;* in Slavonic lands it is Topielec (the ducker) by whom men are always drowned f when some one is drowned in Germany, people re- collect the religion of their ancestors, and say, " The river-spirit claims his yearly sacrifice," or, more'simply, " The nix has taken him:"c_ " Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen, Am Ende Fischer und Kahn ; Und das hat mit ihrem Singen Die Lorelei gethan." From this point of view it is obvious that to save a sinking man is to snatch a victim from the very clutches of the water-spirit, a rash defiance of deity which would hardly pass unavenged. In the civilized world the rude old theological conception of drowning has long been superseded by physical explanation ; and the prejudice against rescue from such a death may have ^ J. v. Grohmann, * Aborglaube und Gebriiuclio aus Bohmen,' p. 12. » Chap. XVIII. » R. Taylor, 'New Zealand,' p. 48. * Bastian, • Oestl. Asien,' vol. iii. p. 34. ' Hanusch, * Wissenschaft des Slawischen Mythus,' p. 299. « GriTnm, « Deutsche Myth.' p. 462. b2 100 SURVIVAL IN CULTUliE. now almost or altogether disappeared, hut archaic ideas, diifted on into modern folklore and poetry, still bring to our view an apparent connexion between the primitive doctrine and the surviving custom. As the social development of the world goos on, the weightiest thoughts and actions may dwindle to mere survival. Original meaning dies out gradually, each generation leaves fewer and fewer t j bear it in mind, till it falls out of popular memory, and in after days ethnography has to attempt, more or less success- fully, to restore it by piecing together lines of isolated or for- gotten facts. Children's sports, popular sayings, absurd customs may be practically vnimportant, but are not philosophically insignificant, bearing as they do on some of the most instructive phases of early culture. Tjgly and cruel superstitions njay prove to be relics of primitive barbarism, for in keeping up such Man is like Shakespeare's fox, " Who, no'er so tame, so cherish d, and lock'd up, Will have a wild trick of his ancestors." il'^ CHAPTER IV. SURVIVAL IN CULTURE (continued). Occult Sciences — [Magical powers attributed by higher to lower races — Magical processes based on Association of Ideas— Omens— Augury, etc. — Oneiro- mancy — Hanispication, Scapulimancy, Chiromancy, etc. — Cartomancy, etc. — Rhabdomancy, Dactyliomancy, Coscinomancy, etc. — Astrology — Intellec- tual conditions accounting for the peraistence of Magic —Survival passes into Revival — Witchcraft, originating in savage culture, continues in barbaric civilization ; its decline in early mediaeval Europe followed by revival ; its practices and counter-practices belong to earlier culture — Spiritualism has its source in early stages of culture, in close connexion with witchcraft — Spirit- rapi)ing and Spirit- writing— Rising in the air — Performances of tied mediums — I'jactical bearing of the study of Survival. In examining the survival of opinions in the midst of con- ditions of society becoming gradually estranged from them, and tending at last to suppress them altogether, much may be learnt from the history of one of the most pernicious delusions that ever vexed mankind, the belief in Magic. Looking at Occult Science from this ethnographic point of view, I shall instance some of its branches as illustrating the course of intellectual culture. Its place in history is briefly this. ,It belongs in its main principle to the lowest known stages of civilization, and the lower races, who have not partaken largely of the education of the world, still maintain it in vigour. From this level it may be traced upward, much of the savage art holding its ^ilace sub- stantially unchanged, and many new practices being in course of time developed, while both the older and newer developments have lasted on more or less among modern cultured nations. But during the ages in which progi'essive races have been learn- ing to submit their opinions to closer and closer experimental tests, occult science has been breaking down into the condition 102 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. of a survival, in which state we mostly find it among our- selves. The modern educated world, rejecting occult science as a contemptible superstition, has practically committed itself to the opinion that magic belongs to a lower level of civilization. It is very instructive to find the soundness of this judgment undesignedly confirmed by nations whose education has not advanced far enough to destroy their belief in the craft itself. In some cases, indeed, the reputation of a race us sorcerers may depend on their actually putting forward supernatural preten- sions, or merely on their being isolated and mysterious people. It is thus with the Lavas of Birma, supposed to be the broken- down remains of an ancient cultured race, and dreaded as man- tigers ^^ and with the Budas of Abyssinia, who are at once the smiths and potters, sorcerers and werewolves of their district.^ But the usual and suggestive state of tl igs is that nations who believe with the sincerest terror in the reality of the magic art-, at the same time cannot shut their eyes to the fact that it more essentially belongs +o, and is more thoroughly at home among, races less civilized than themselves. The Malays of Ihe Peninsula, who have adopted Mohammedan religion and civi- lization, have this idea of the lower tribes of the land, tribes more or less of their own race, but who have remained in their early savage condition. The Malays have enchanters of their own, but consider them infericx to the sorcerers or poyangs be- longing to the rude Mintira ; to these they will resort for the cure of diseases and the working of misfortune and death to their enemies. It is, in fact, the best protection the Mintira have against their stronger Malay neighbours, tliat these are careful not to oflfend them for fear of their powers of magical revenge. The Jakuns, again, are a rude and wild }'ace, whom the Malays despise as infidels and little higher than animals, but whom at the same time they fear extremely. To the Malay the Jakun seems a supernatural being, skilled in divination, sorcery, and fascination, able to do evil or good according to his pleasure, whose blessing will be followed by the most fortunate ' Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. i. p. 119. » 'Life of Nath. Pearce,' ed. by J. J. Halls, vol. i. p. 2£6. M SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. 103 success, and his curse by the most dreadful consequences ; he can turn towards the house of an enemy, at whatever distance, and beat two sticks together till that enemy will fall sick and die ; he is skilled in herbal physic ; he has the power of charm- ing the fiercest wild beasts. Thus it is that the Malays, though they despise the Jakuns, refrain, in many circumstances, from ill-treating thcm.^ In India, in long-past ages, the dominant Aryans described the rude indigenes of the land by the epithets t' "possessed of magical powers," "changing their shape at wi" "^ To this day, Hindus settled in Chota-Nagpur and Sing- bhum firmly believe that the Mundas have powers of witchcraft, whereby they can transform themselves into tigers and other beasts of prey to devour their enemies, and can witch away the lives of man and beast ; it is to the wildest and most savage of *.he tribe that such powers are generally ascribed.^ In Southern India, again, we hear in past times of Hinduized Dravidians, the Sudras of Canara, living in fear of the da^moniacal powers of the slave-caste below them.* In our own day, among Dravi- dian tribes of the Nilagiri district, the Todas and Badagas are in mortal dread of the Kurumbas, despised and wretched forest outcasts, but gifted, it is believed, with powers of destroying men and animals and property by witchcraft.^ Northern Europe brings the like contrast sharply into view. The Finns and Lapps, whose low Tatar barbarism was characterized by sorcery such as flourishes still among their Siberian kinsfolk, were accordingly objects of superstitious fear to their Scandinavian neighbours and oppressors. In the middle ages the name of Finn was, as it still remains among seafaring men, equivalent to that of sorcerer, while Lapland witches had a European celebrity as practitioners of the black art. Ages after the Finns had risen in the social scale, the Lapps retained much of their old half-javage habit of life, and with it naturally their witchcraft, so that even the magic-gifted Finns revered the occult powers * ' Joum. Ind. Archip.' vol. i. p. 328 ; vol. ii. p. 273; see vol. iv. p. 425. ' Muir, ' Sanskrit Texts,' part ii. p. 435. 3 Dalton, 'Kols,' iii 'Tr. Eth. Soc' vol. vi. p. 6 ; see p. 16. * Jas. Gardner, * Faiths of the World,' s. v. 'Exorcism.' * Shortt, 'Tribes of Neilgherries,' in 'Tr. Eth. Soc' vol. vii. pp. 247, 277 ; Sir W. Elliot in 'Trans. Congress of Prehistoric Archseology,' 1868, p. 253. 'I! lot SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. Mf 2. of a people more barbarous than themselves. Riihs writes thus early in the present century : " There arc still sorcerers in Fin- land, but tV' llest of them l)clievo that the Lapps far excel them ; oi a, well-experienced magician they say ' That is quite a Lapp,' and they journey to Lapland for such know- ledge." ^ All this is of a piece with the survival of such ideas among the ignorant elsewhere in the civi'ized world. Many a white man in the West Indies and Africa dreads the incanta- tions of the Obi-man, and Europe ascribes powers of sorcery to despi'iod outcast "races maudites," Gypsies and Cagots. To turn from nations to sects, the attitude of Protestants to Catholics in this matter is instructive. It was remarked in Scotland : "There is one opinion which many of them entertain, .... that a popish priest can cast out devils and cure madness, and that the Presbyterian clergy have no such power." So Bourne says of the Church of England clergy, that the vulgar think them no conjurors, and say none can lay spirits but popish priests.'^ These aeco^mts are not recent, but in Germany the same state of things appears to prevail still. Protestants get the aid of Catholic priests and monks to help them against witch- craft, to lay ghosts, consecrate horbs, and discover thieves ;^ thus with unconscious irony judging the relation of Rome toward modern civilization. The principal key to the understanding of Occult Science is to consider it as based on the Association of Ideas, a faculty which lies at the very foundation of human reason, but in no small degree of human unreason also. Man, as yet in a low intellectual condition, having come to associate in thought those things which he found by experience to be connected in fact, proceeded erroneously to invert this action, and to conclude that association in thought must involve similar connexion in reality. He thus attempted to discover, to foretell, and to cause events by means of processes which we can now see to have only an ideal significance. By a vast mass of evidence from savage, barbaric, and civilized life, * F. Eiihs, 'Finland,' p. 296 ; Bastian, 'Menscli.' vol. iii. p. 202. ' Brand, • Pop. Ant.' vol. iii. pp. 81—3 ; see 313. • Wuttke, 'Deutsche Yolksaberglaube,' p. 128 ; see 239. SURVIVAL IN CULTURE. 105 magic arts which have resulted from thus mistaking an ideal for a real connexion, may bo clearly traced from the lower culture which they are of, to the higher culture which they are in.^ Such are the practices whereby a distant person is to 1x5 affected by acting on something closely associated with him — his property, clothes ho has worn, and above all, cuttings of his hair and nails. Not only do savages high and low like the Australians and Polynesians, and barbarians like the nations of Guinea, live in deadly terror of this spiteful craft— not only have the Parsis their sacred ritual prescribed for burying their cut hair and nails, lest demons and sorcerers should do mischief with them, but the fear of leaving such clippings and parings about lest their former owner should be harmed through them, has by no means died out of European folklore, and the German peasant, during the days between his child's birth and baptism, objects to lend anything out of the house, lost witchcraft should be worked through it on the yet unconsecrated baby.^ As the negro fetish-man, when his patient does not come in person, can divine by means of his dirty cloth or cap instead,^ so the modern clairvoyant professes to feel sympathetically the sensa- tions of a distant person if communication be made through a lock of his hair or any object that Iras been in contact with him."* The simple idea of joining two objects with a cord, taking for granted that this communication will establish con- nexion or carry influence, has been worked out in various ways in the world. In Australia, the native doctor fastens one end of a string to the ailing part of the patient's body, and by sucking at the other end pretends to draw out blood for his relief.^ In Orissa, the Jeypore witch lets down a ball of thread ' For an examination of numerous magical arts, mostly coming under this category, see 'Eajly History of Slankind,' chaps, vi. and x. Stanbridge. 'Abor. of Victoria,' in 'Tr. Eth. Soc' vol. i. p. 299; Ellis, ' Polyn. lies.' vol. i. p. 364 ; J. L. Wilson, ' W. Africa,' p. 215 ; Spiegel, 'Avesta,' vol, i. p. 124 ; Wuttke, 'Deutsche Volksaberglaube,' p. 195 ; general references in ' Early History of Mankind,' p. 129. » Burton, « W. and W. from West Africa,' p. 411. * W. Gregory, 'Letters on Animal Magnetism,' p. 128. « Eyre, 'Australia,' vol. ii. p. 361; Collins, 'New South Wales,' vol. i. pp. 561, 694. •' M * 106 HUItVlVAL IN CULTUllK. through hiT enomy'H roof to rcacli his body, that by putting tho other end in her own moutli she may suck his blood.' When a reindeer is sacrificed at a sick Ostyak's tent-door, the patient holds in his bund a cord attached to tho victim offered for his benefit.^ Greek history shows a similar idea, wlicn the citizens of Ephosus carried a ropo seven furlongs from their walls to the temple of Artemis, thus to place themselves under her safeguard against the^ attack of Crujsus ; and in the yet more striking story of the Kylonians, who tied a cord to the statue of the goddess when they quitted the asylum, and clung to it for protection as they crossed v.nliallowed ground ; but by ill- fate the cord of safety broke and they were mercilessly put to death.' And in our own day, Buddhist priests in solemn cere- mony put themselves in communicatioi) with a sacred relic, by each taking hold of a long thread fastened near it and around tho temple."* Magical arts in which the connexion is that of mere analogy or symbolism are endlessly numerous throughout the course of civilization. Their common theory may be readily made out from a few typical cases, and thence applied confidently to the general mass. The Australian will observe the track of an insect near a grave, to ascertain the direction where the sorcerer is to be found, by whose craft the man died.^ The Zulu may be seen chewing a bit of wood, in order, by this symbolic act, to soften the heart of the man he wants to buy oxen from, or of the woman lie wants for a wife.* The Obi-man of West Africa makes his packet of grave-dust, blood, and bones, that this suggestive representation of death may bring his enemy to the grave.^ The Khond sets up the iron arrow of the War-god in a basket of rice, and judges from its standing upright that war must be kept up also, or from its falling that the quarrel may be let fall too ; and when he tortures human victims sacrificed » Shortt, in ' Tr. Eth. Soc' vol. vi. p. 278. 2 Bastian, 'Menseli.' vol. iii. p. 117. ' See Grote, vol. iii. pp. 113, 351. * Hardj', 'Eastern Monachism,' p. 241. 6 Oldfield, in ' Tr. Eth. Soc' vol. iii. p. 246. « Grout, ' Zulu-land,' p. 134. ' See specimen and description in the Christy Museum. SUUVIVAL IN CULTUUK. 107 to tho Earth-goddoss, ho rejoices to sco them shed j)leiitifiil tears, wliich betoken copious showers to fall upon his liuid.^ Those are fair examples of the syinhoh'c magic of tlio lower races, and they are fully rivalled in supers\itions which still hold their ground in Europe. With (juaint simplicity, tho German cottager declares that if a dog howls looking down- ward, it portends a death ; but if upward, then a recovery from sickness.^ Locks must be opened and bolts drawn in a