ht. EARTHQUAKES AND OTHER EARTH MOVEMENTS. By Professor John Milne, Imperial College of Engineering, Tokio. With .38 Figures. $1.75. 56. MICROBES, FERMENTS, AND MOULDS. By E. L. Trouessart. With 107 Illustrations. $1..50. 57. THE GEOGRAPHICAL AND GEOLOGICAL DISTRIBUTION OF ANI- MALS. By Profes.sor Anoei.o Heilprin, Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia. $2.00. 58. WEATHER. A Popular Expoi-iiion of the Nature of Weather Changes from Day to Day. With 90 Diagrams. By Hon. Ralph Abercrombt. $175. The International Scientific Series.— (Continued.) 59. ANIMAL MAGNETISM. By Alfked Binet and Chakles Fere, Assistant Physician, Hospice Salpetriere, Paris. With 15 Figures. $1.50. eo. INTERNATIONAL LAW, with Materials for a Code of International Law. By Professor Leone Levi, King's College, London. §1.50. CI. THE GEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF PLANTS. With 79 Illustrations. By Sir J. William Dawson, LL. D., F. R. S. $1.75. 02. ANTHROPOLOGY. An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization. By Edward B. Ttlor, D. C. L., F. R. S. With 78 Illustrations. $2.00. 63. THE ORIGIN OF FLORAL STRUCTURES, THROUGH INSECT AND OTHER AGENCIES. By the Rev. George Henblow, M.A., etc. With 88 Illustrations. $1.75. 64. THE SENSES, INSTINCTS, AND INTELLIGENCE OF ANIMALS, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO INSECTS. By Sir John Lubbock, Bart., F. U.S., etc. With 118 Illustrations. $1.75. 65. THE PRIMITIVE FAMILY" IN ITS ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. By Dr. C. N. Starcke, University of Copenhagen. $1.75. 66. PHYSIOLOGY OF BODILY" EXERCISE. By F. Lagrange, M.D. 81-75. 67. THE COLORS OF ANIMALS : Their Meaning and Use. By Edwai:d Bagnall Poulton, F. R.S. With 36 Illustrations and 1 Colored Plate. $1.75. 68. SOCIALISM : New and Old. By Professor William Graham, M. A., Queen's College, Belfast. $1.75. 69. MAN AND THE GLACIAL PERIOD. By Professor G. Frederick Wright, D. D., Oberlin Theological Seminary. Vt'ith 108 Illustrations and 3 Maps. $1.75. 70. HANDBOOK OF GREEK AND LATIN PAL/EOGRAPHY. By Edward Maunde Thompson, D. C. L., etc. $2.00. 71. A HISTORY OF CRUSTACEA. Recent Malacostraca. By the Rev. Thomas R. R. Stebbing, M. A. With 51' Illustrations. £2.00. 72. RACE AND LANGUAGE. By Professor Andre Lefevre, Anthropological School, Paris. $1.50. 73. MOVEMENT. By E. J. Maret. Translated by Eric Pritcuard, M. A., M. B., B. Ch. (Oxon.). With 200 Elustrations. $1.75. 74. ICE -WORK, PRESENT AND PAST. By T. G. Bonnet, LL. D., etc. With Maps and Illustrations. $1 50. New York : D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue. ^ V y THE INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC SERIES a:^thropology AN INTRODUCTION TO TOE STUDY OF MAN AND CIVILIZATION BY EDWARD B. TYLOR, D. C. L., F. R. S. yCFUPPS iwsTrruTio. FOR WITH ILLUSTRATIONS NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 189G 90M ^_^j^^ T97^ LIBRARY SCRIPPS INSTITUTION OF OCEANOGRAPHY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LA JOLLA. CALIFORNIA > H ^- >" 'R i J In times when subjects of education have multiplied, it may seem at first siglit a hardship to lay on the already heavily-pressed student a new science. But it will be found that the real effect of Anthropology is rather to lighten than increase the strain of learning. In the mountains we see the bearers of heavy burdens contentedly shoulder a carrying-frame besides, because they find its weight more than compensated by the convenience of holding together and balancing their load. So it is with the science of Man and Civilization, which connects into a more manage- able whole the scattered subjects of an ordinary education. Much of the difficulty of learning and teaching lies in the scholar's not seeing clearly what each science or art is for, what its place is among the purposes of life. If he knows something of its early history, and how it arose from the simpler wants and circumstances of mankind, he finds him- self better able to lay hold of it than when, as too often happens, he is called on to take up an abstruse subject not at the beginning but in the middle. When he has learnt something of man's rudest means of conversing by gestures and cries, and thence has been led to see how the higher vi PREFACE. devices of articulate speech are improvements on such lower methods, he makes a fairer start in the science of language than if he had fallen unprepared among the subtleties of grammar, which .unexplained look like arbitrary rules framed to perplex rather than to inform. The dislike of so many beginners to geometry as ex- pounded by Euklid, the fact that not one out of three ever really understands what he is doing, is of all things due to the scholar not being shown first the practical common-sense starting-point, where the old carpenters and builders began to make out the relations of dis- tances and spaces in their work. So the law-student plunges at once into the intricacies of legal systems which have grown up through the struggles, the reforms, and even the blunders of thousands of years , yet he might have made his way clearer by seeing how laws begin in their simplest forms, framed to meet the needs of savage and barbaric tribes. It is needless to make a list of all the branches of education in knowledge and art ; there is not one which may not be the easier and better learnt for knowing its history and place in the general science of Man. With this aim in view, the present volume is an in- troduction to Antliropology, rather than a summary of all it teaches. It does not deal with strictly technical matter, out of the reach of readers who have received, or are receiving, the ordinary higher English education. Thus, except to students trained in anatomy, the minute modern researches as to distinction of races by skull measurements and the like would be useless. Much care PREFACE. vii has been taken to make the chapters on the various branches of the science sound as far as they go, but the more advanced work must be left to special students. While the various departments of the science of Man are extremely multifarious, ranging from body to mind, from language to music, from fire-making to morals, they are all matters to whose nature and history every well- informed person ought to give some thought. It is much, however, for any single writer to venture to deal even in the most elementary way with so immense a variety of subjects. In sucli a task I have the right to ask that errors and imperfections should be lightly judged. I could not have attempted it at all but for the help of friends eminent in various branches of the science, whom I have been able to consult on doubtful and difficult points. My acknowledgments are especially due to Pro- fessor Huxley and Dr. E. A. Freeman, Sir Henry Maine, Dr. Birch, Mr. Franks, Professor Flower, Major-General Pitt-Rivers, Professor Sayce, Dr. Beddoe, Dr. D. H. Tuke, Professor W. K. Douglas, Mr. Russell Martineau, Mr. R. Garnett, Mr. Henry Sweet, Mr. Rudler, and many other friends whom 1 can only thank unnamed. The illustrations of races are engraved from photographic portraits, many of them taken by the permission of Messrs. Dammann of Huddersfield from their valuable Albums of Ethnological Photographs. E. B. T. Febtuary, :SSi, CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE Man, Ancient and Modern i Antiquity of Man, i — Time required for Development of Races, i — of Languages, 7 — of Civilization, 13 — Traces of Man in the Stone Age, 25 — Later PeriDd, 26 — Earlier Quaternary or Drift-Period, 29. CHAPTER IL Man and other Animals 35 Vertebrate Animals, 35 — Succession and Descent of Species, 37 — Apes and Man, comparison of Structure, 38 — Hands and Feet, 42 — Hair, 44 — Features, 44— Brain, 45— Mind in Lower Animals and Man, 47. CHAPTER HL Races of Mankind 56 Differences of Race, 56 — Stature and Proportions, 56 — Skull, 60 — Features, 62— Colour, 66— Hair, 71— Constitution, 73— Tempera- ment, 74 — Types of Races, 75 — Permanence, 80 — Mixture, So — Variation, 84 — Race> of Mankind classified, 87. CONTENTS. CHAPTER IV. PAGE Language 114 Si^n-making, 1 14— Gesture-language, 114 — Sound-gestures, 120 — Natural Language, 122 — Utterances of Animals, 122 — Emotional and Imitative Sounds in Language, 124 — Change of Sound and Sense, 127 — Other exprcFsion of Sense by Sound, 128 — Children's Words, 128 — Arriculate Language, its relation to Natural Lan- guage, 129 — Origin of Language, 130. CHAPTER V. Language {coniimied) 133 Articulate Speech, 132 — Growth of Meanings, 133 — Abstract Words, 135 — Real and Grammatical Words, 136 — Parts of Speech, 138 — Sentences, 139 — Analytic Language, 139 — Word Combination, 140 — Synthetic Language, 141 — Affixes, 142 — Sound-change, 143 — Roots, 144 — Syntax, 146 — Government and Concord, 147 — Gender, 149— Development of Language, 150. CHAPTER VL Language and Race , 152 Adoption and loss of Language, 152— Ancestral Language, 153^ Families of Language, 155 — Ar>an, 156 — Semitic, 159— Ej^yptian, Berl)er, &c., 160 — Tatar or Turanian, 161 — South-Eai-t Asian, 162 — MalayoPolynesian, 163 — Dravidian, 164 — African, Bantu, Hot- tentot, 164 — American, 165 — Early Languages ar:d Race^-, 165. CHAPTER VII. Writing 167 Picture-writing, 168 — Sound-pictures, 169 — Chinese Writing, 170 — Cuneiform Writing, 172 — Egyptian Writing, 1 73 — Alphabetic Writing, 175— Spelling, 178 — Printing, 180. CONTENTS. XI CIIAI'TER VIII. J" AGE Arts of Life 1S2 Development of Instruments, iS3-Club, Hammer, 184 — Stone-flake, 185 — Hatchet, 188 — Sabre, Knife, 189 — Spear, Dagy;er, Sword, lyo — Carpenter's Tools, 192 — Mis.siles, Javelin, 193 — Sling, Spear- thrower, 194 — Bow and Arrow, 195 — Blow tube. Gun, 196 — Mechanical Power, 197 — Wheel- Carriage, 198 — Hand-mill, 200 — Drill, Lathe, 202 — Screw, 203 — Water-mill, Wiad-mill, 204. CHAPTER IX. Arts of Life {(ontinued) 206 Quest of wild food, 206 — Hunting, 207 — Trapping, 211 — Fishing, 212 — Agriculture, 214 — Implements, 216 — Fields, 218 — Cattle, pastur- age, 219 — War, 221 — Weapons, 221 — Armour, 2Z2 — Warfare of lower tribes, 223 — of higher nations, 225. CHAPTER X. Arts of Life {continued) 229 Dwellings : — Caver., 229 — Huts, 230 — Tents, 231 — Houses, 231 — Stone and Brick Building, 232— Arch, 235 — Development of Archi- tecture, 235 — Dress : — Painting skin, 236 — Tattooing, 237 — De- formation of Skull, &c., 240— Ornamenls, 241 — Clothing of Bark, Skin, &c., 244 — Mats, 246 — Spinning, Weaving, 246 — Sewing 249 — Garments, 249 — Navigation : — Floats, 252 — Boats, 253 — Rafts, 255 — Outriggers, 255 — Paddles and Oars, 256— Sails, 256 — Galleys and Ships, 257. CHAPTER XL Arts of I-ife {concluded) 260 Fire, 260— Cookery, 264— Bread, &c., 266— Liquors, 268— Fuel, 270 —Lighting, 272— Vessels, 274— Pottery, 274— Glass, 276— Metals, 277— Bronze and Iron Ages, 278— Barter, 281— Money, 2S2— Commerce, 285. xil CONTENTS. CHAPTER XII. PAGE Arts of Pleasure 287 Poetry, 287— Verse and Metre, 288— Alliteration and Rhyme, 289 — Poetic Metaphor, 289— Speech, Melody, Harmony, 290— Musical Instruments, 293 — Dancing, 296 — Drama, 298 — Sculpture and Painting, 300 — Ancient and Modern Art, 301 — Games, 305. CHAPTER XIII. Science 3^9 Science, 309 — Counting and Arithmetic, 310— Measuring and Weigh- ing, 316— Geometry, 318— Algebra, 322— Physics, 323— Chemistry, 328— Biology, 329— Astronomy, 332— Geography and Geology, 335 —Methods of Reasoning, 336— Magic, 338, CHAPTER XIV. The Spirit-World 342 Religion of Lower Races, 342— Souls, 343— Burial, 347— Future Life, ■jjjg — Transmigration, 350 — Divine Ancestors, 351 — Demons, 352 — Nature Spirits, 357— Gods, 358— Worship, 364— Moral Influenc-, CHAPTER XV. History and Mythology 373 Tradition, 373— Poetry, 375— Fact in Fiction, 377— Earliest Poems and Writings, 381— Ancient Chronicle and History, 383— Myths, 387 — Interpretation of Myths, 396— Diffusion of Myths, 397. CHAPTER XVL Society ' 4°' Social Stages, 401— Family, 402— Morals of Lower Races, 405— Public Opinion and Custom, 408— Moral Progress, 410— Ven- geance and Justice, 414— War, 418— Property, 419— Legal Cere- monies, 423— Family Power and Responsibility, 426 — Patriarchal and Military Chiefs, 428— Nations, 432— Social Ranks, 434— Government, 436. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. FIG. PAGE 1. Later Stone Age (neolithic) implements 27 2. Earlier Stone Age (paleolithic) flint picks or hatchets ... 29 3. Sketch of mammoth from cave of La Madeleine (Lartet and Christy) 31 4. Sketch of man and horse from cave (Lartet and Chri^ty) . . 32 5. Skeletons of ajies and man (after Huxley) 39 6. Hand and foot of chimpanzee and of man 42 7. Brain of chimpanzee and of man 46 8. Patagonian and Bushman 5^ 9. Top view of skulls 61 10. Side view of skulls 62 11. a, Swaheli; />, Persian 63 12. Female portraits 64 13. African negro 65 14. Section of negro skin, mucli magnified (after Killliker) . . 66 15. Sections of hair, highly magnified (after Pruncr) 73 16. Race or Population arranged by Stature (Gallon's method) . 76 17. Race or Population arranged by .Stature (Quetelet's method) . 77 18. Caribs 78 19. (a) Head of Kameses H., Ancient Egypt. (l>) Sheikh's son, Modern Egypt (after Ha'-tmann) 79 20. Malay Mother and Half-caste Daughters Si 21. Cafusa Woman 82 2 xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. FIG. PAGE 22. Cairene 84 23. Andaman Islanders 88 24. Aheta (Negrito), Philippine Islands 90 25. Melanesians . - 91 26. South Australian (man) 92 27. South Australian (woman) 92 28. Australian (Queensland) women 93 29. Dravidian hill-man (after Frjer) 94 30. Kalmuk (after Goldsmii) 95 31. G^ildi (Amu-) 96 32. Siamese actress s 97 33. Cochin-Chinese 98 34. Coreans 99 35. Finn (man) lOO 36. Finn (^veman) loo 37. Malays lOl 38. Malays loi 39. Dayaks 103 40. Kingsmill Lslander 104 41. Colorado Indian (North America) 106 42. Colorado Indian (North America) 107 43. Cauixana Indians (South America) 108 44. Georgians IIO 45. Swedes Ill 46. Gypsy 112 47. Picture-writing, rock near Lake Superior (after Schoolcraft) . 168 48. /"a/^r wi7j/^r in Mexican picture-writing (after Aubin) . . . 169 49. Chinese ancient pictures and later cursive forms (after Endlicher) 170 50. Chinese compound characters, pictures and sounds . . . , 1 71 51. Egyptian hieroglyphic and hieratic characters compared with letters of Phoenician and later alphabets (after De Rouge) . 176 52. Gunflint-maker's core and flakes (after Evans) 185 53. Stone Flakes 186 54. Later Stone Age (neolithic) iiiii)lements 187 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. xv FIG. l-AGE 55. Earlier Stone Age (paljcolithic) flint picLs or h .tchets . . . 187 56. Store Axe, &c l8i 57. a, Egyptian battle-axe ; l>, Fgyptian falchion ; c, Asiatic sabre ; i/, European sheath-kiiife ; t; Roman culter ; /, Hindu bill-hook 1S9 5S. a, Stone spear-head (Adiniialty Is); l>, stone spear-head or dagger-blade (England) ; r, bronze spear-head (Denmark); (/, bronze dagger ; <«, bronze leaf -shaped sword .... 191 59. Australian speir thrown with spear-thrower (after Brough Smyth) . .' 194 60. Bows 196 61. Ancient buUuck- waggon, from tlie Antonine Column . . . 199 62. Corn-crusher, Anglesey (after W. O. Stanley) 201 63. Hebrides womea grinding with the quern or hand-mill (after Pennant) 202 64. a, Australian digging-st'ck ; /', Swedish wooden hack . . 216 65. Ancient Egyptian hoe and plough 217 66. Natives of Lepers' Island (New Hebrides) 239 67. Hand of Chinese ascetic 241 68. Botocudo woman with lip- and ear-ornaments 242 69. a, Australian winder for hand-twisted cord ; //, Egyptian woman spinning with the spindle 247 70. Girl weaving, PVom an Aztec picture 248 71. Ancient Nile-boat, from wall-painting, Thebes 25S 72. Bushman diilling fire (after Chapman) 262 73. Ancient Egyptian Potter's Wheel (Beni Hassan) .... 275 74. Ancient Egyptian Glass-blowing (Beni Hassan) .... 277 75. Development of the Harp 295 76. Ancient Egyptian and A.ssyrian numeration 313 77. Mode of calculation by counters and by figures on Abacus . 315 78. Rudimentary practical Geometry 318 ANTHROPOLOGY. CHAPTER I. MAN, ANCIENT AND MODERN. Antiquity of Man, I — Time required for Development of Races, I — of I.angua'^es, ^ — of Civilii-ation, 13 — Traces of Man in the Stone A;re, 25 — Later Period, 26 — Earlier Quaternary or Drift-reriod, 29. The student who seeks to understand how mankind came to be as they are, and to live as they do, ought first to know clearly whether men are new-comers on the earth, or old inhabitants. Did they appear with their various races and ways of life ready-made, or were these shaped by the long, slow growth of ages? In order to answer this ques- tion, our first business will be to take a rapid survey of the varieties of men, their languages, their civilization, and their ancient relics, to see what proofs may thus be had of man's ace in the world. The outline sketch thus drawn will also be useful as an introduction to the fuller examination of man and his ways of life in the chapters which follow. First, as to the varieties of mankind. Let us suppose ourselves standing at the docks in Liverpool or London, looking at groups of men of races most different from 2 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. our own. There is the familiar figure of the African negro, with skin so dark-brown as to be popularly called black, and black hair so naturally frizzed as to be called woolly. Nor are these the only points in which he is unlike us. Indeed, the white men who blacken their faces and friz their hair to look like negros make a very poor imitation, for the negro features are quite distinct ; we well know the flat nose, wide nostrils, thick protruding lips, and, when the face is seen in profile, the remarkable projecting jaws. A hatter would at once notice that the negro's head is narrower in proportion than the usual oval of the hats made for Englishmen. It would be possible to tell a negro from a white man even in the dark by the peculiar satiny feel of his skin, and the yet more peculiar smell which no one who has noticed it is ever likely to mistake. In the same docks, among the crews of Eastern steamers, wi observe other well-marked types of man. The Coolie of South India (who is not of Hindu race, but belongs to the so-called hill-tribes,) is dark-brown of skin, with black. silky, wavy hair, and a face wide-nosed, heavy-jawed, fleshy- lipped. ISIore familiar is tlie Chinese, whom the observer marks down by his less than European stature, his jaundice- yellow skin, and coarse, straight black hair; the special cha- racter of his features is neatly touched ofl" on his native china-plates and paper-screens which show the snub nose, high cheek-bones, and that curious slanting set of the eyes which we can imitate by putting a finger near the outer corners of our own eyes and pushing upward. By com- paring such a set of races with our own countrymen, we are able to make out the utmost differences of complexion and feature among mankind. While doing so, it is plain that white men, as we agree to call ourselves, show at least two main race-types. Going on board a merchant-ship from I.] MAN, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 3 Copenhagen, we find the crew mostly blue-eyed men of fair complexion and hair, a remarkable contrast to the Genoese vessel moored alongside, whose sailors show almost to a man swarthy complexions and lustrous black eyes and hair. These two types of man have been well described as the fair-whites and the dark-whites. It is only within modern times that the distinctions among races have been worked out by scientific methods. Yet since early ages, race has attracted notice from its connexion with the political questions of countryman or foreigner, conqueror or conquered, freeman or slave, and in conse- quence its marks have been watched with jealous accuracy. In the Southern United States, till slavery was done away a few years ago, the traces of negro descent were noted with the utmost nicety. Not only were the mixed breeds regularly classed as mulattos, quadroons, and down to octa- roons, but even where the mixture was so slight that the untrained eye noticed nothing beyond a brunette complexion, the intruder who had ventured to sit down at a public dinner table was called upon to show his hands, and the African taint detected by the dark tinge at the root of the finger-nails. Seeing how striking the broad distinctions of race are, it was to be expected that ancient inscriptions and figures should give some view of the races of man as they were at the beginning of historical times. It is so in Egypt, where the oldest writings of the world appear. More than 4,000 years ago we begin to find figures of the Egyptians themselves, in features much the same as in later times. In the sixth dynasty, about 2,000 B.C., the celebrated inscrip- tion of Prince Una makes mention of the A'a/is/, or negroes, who were levied and drilled by ten thousands for the Egyp- tian army. Under the twelfth dynasty, on the walls of tlie 4 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. tomb of Knumhetp, there is represented a procession of Amu, who are seen by their features to be of the race to which Syrians and Hebrews belonged. Especially the wall- paintings of the tombs of the kings at Thebes, of the nine- teenth dynasty, have preserved coloured portraits of the four great races distinguished by the Egyptians. These are the red-brown Egyptians themselves, the people of Palestine witli their aquiline profile and brownish complexion, the flat-nosed, thick-lipped African negroes, and the fair-skinned Libyans. Thus mankind was already divided into well-marked races, distinguished by colour and features. It is surprising to notice how these old-world types of man are still to be recognised. The Ethiopian of the ancient monuments can at this day be closely matched. Notwithstanding the many foreign invasions of Egypt, the mass of the village popula- tion is true-bred enough for men to be easily picked out as representatives of the times of the Pharaohs. Their por- traits have only to be drawn in the stiff style of the monu- ments, with the eye conventionally shown full-front in the profile face, and we have before us the very Egyptians as they depicted themselves in the old days when they held the Israelites in bondage. In the same way, the ancient Egyptian portraits of captives from Palestine, whether Syrians, Phoenicians, or Hebrews, show the strongly-marked Israelite type of features to be seen at this day'in every city of Europe. Altogether, the evidence of ancient monu- ments, geography and history, goes to prove that the great race-divisions of mankind are of no recent growth, but were already settled before the beginning of the historical period. Since then their changes seem to have been comparatively slight, except in the forming of mixed races by intermarriage. Hence it follows that the historic ages are to be looked I.] MAN, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 5 on as but the modern period of man's life on earth. Be- hind them lies the prehistoric period, when the chief work , was done of forming and spreading over the world the races of mankind. Though there is no scale to measure the length of this period by, there are substantial reasons for taking it as a long stretch of time. Looking at an ethno- logical map, coloured to show w-hat race of men inhabits each region, it is plain at a glance that the world was not peopled by mere chance scattering of nations, a white tribe here and a brown tribe there, with perhaps a black tribe in between. Far from this, whole races are spread over vast regions as though they grew there, and the peculiar type of the race seems more or less connected with the climate it lives in. Especially it is seen that the mass of black races belong to the equatorial regions in Africa and the Eastern Archi- pelago, the yellow race to Central and Southern Asia, the white race to temperate Asia and Europe. Some guess may even be made from the map which district was the primitive centre where each of these races took shape, and whence it spread far and wide. Now if, as some have thought, the Negros, Mongolians, Whites, and other races, were distinct species, each sprung from a separate origin in its own region, then the peopling of the globe might require only a moderate time, the races having only to spread each from its own birthplace. But the opinion of modern zoologists, whose study of the species and breeds of animals makes them the best judges, is against this view of several origins of man> for two principal reasons. First, that all tribes of men, from the blackest to the whitest, the most savage to the most cultured, have such general likeness in the structure of their bodies and the working of their minds, as is easiest and best accounted for by their being descended from a common ancestry, howevjr distant. Second, that all the human races, 6 ANTHROPOLOGY. [ciiAr. notwithstanding their form and colour, appear capable of freely intermarrying and forming crossed races of every combination, such as the millions of mulattos and mestizos sprung in the New World from the mixture of Europeans, Africans, and native Americans ; this again points to a common ancestry of all the races of man. We may accept the theory of the unity of mankind as best agreeing with ordinary experience and scientific research. As yet, how- ever, the means are very imperfect of judging what man's progenitors were like in body and mind, in times before the forefathers of the present Negros, and Tatars, and Austra- lians, had become separated into distinct stocks. Nor is it yet clear by what causes these stocks or races passed into their different types of skull and limbs, of complexion and hair. It cannot be at present made out how far the peculi- arities of single ancestors were inherited by their descendants and became stronger by in-breeding ; how far, when the weak and dull-witted tribes failed in the struggle for land and life, the stronger, braver, and abler tribes survived to leave their types stamped on the nations sprung from them ; how far wliole migrating tribes underwent bodily alteration through change of climate, food, and habits, so that the i)eopling of the earth went on together with the growth of fresh races fitted for life in its various regions. Whatever share these causes and others yet more obscure may have had in varying the races of man, it must not be supposed that such differences as between an Englishman and a Gold Coast negro are due to slight variations of breed. On the contrary, they are of such zoological importance as to have been compared with the differences between animals which naturalists reckon distinct species, as between the brown bear with its rounded forehead, and the polar bear with its whitish fur and long flattened skull. If then wc arc to go back in thought to a I.] MAN, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 7 time when the ancestors of the African, the Australian, the Mongol, and the Scandinavian, were as yjt one undivided stock, the theory of their common descent must be so framed as to allow causes strong enough and time long enough to bring about changes far beyond any known to have taken place during historical ages. Looked at in this way, the black, brown, yellow, and white men whom we have supposed ourselves examining on the quays, a-e living re- cords of the remote past, every Chinese and Negro bearing in his face evidence of the antiquity of man. Next, what has language to tell of man's age on the earth? It appears that the distinct languages known number about a thousand. It is clear, however, at the first glance that these did not all spring up separately. There are groups of languages which show such close like- ness in their grammars and dictionaries as proves each group to be descended from one ancestral tongue. Such a group is called a family of languages, and one of the best known of such families may be taken as an example of their way of growth. In ancient times Latin (using the word in a ratlier wide sense) was the language of Rome and other Italian districts, and with the spread of the Roman empire it was carried far and wide, so as to oust the early languages of whole provinces. Undergoing in each land a different course of change, Latin gave rise to the Romance family of languages, of which Italian, Spanish, and French are well-known members. How these languages have come to differ after ages of separate life, we judge by seeing that sailors from Dieppe cannot make themselves understood in Malaga, nor does a knowledge of French ens.ble us to read Dante. Yet the Romance languages keep the traces of their Roman origin plainly enough for Italian, Spanish, and French sentences to be taken and every word referred to 8 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. something near it in classical Latin, which may be roughly- treated as the original form. Familiar proverbs are here given as illustrations, with the warning to the reader that, for convenience' sake, the comparisons are not all carried out in precise grammatical form. Italian. IL meglio r.n novo oggi che una gallina domani. es( 7neliiis niiiim ovum hodie (jtiid una ^allhia dc mane. i.e. Better is an e^g to-day than a hen to-mcrrow. Chi va piano va sano, chi va sano va lontano. (jiii vadit flanum vadit satiiim, qui 7'adit sanum vadit longiim. i.e. He who goes gently goes safe, he who gees safe goes far. Spanish. Quien canta sus males espanta. qutm cantat suos malos expaz'(fre). i.e. He who sings frightens away his ills. Tor la caile de despues se va a la ca^a de nunca. per illam callem de de-ex-post se vadit ad illam casam de nimquam. i.e. By the street of by and by one goes to the house of never. P'rench. Un tiens vaut mieux que deux tu 1' auras. unum tew valet melius quod duos tu ilium halicre-habes. uc. One lake-it is worth more than two thou-shalt-have-its. Parler de la corde dans la maison d' un pendu. parabola de illam chordam deintus illam mansionem de unum pend{o). i.e. (Never to) talk of a rope in the house of a hanged man. It is plain on the face of such sentences as these, that Italian, Spanish, and French aie in fact transformed Latin, their words having been gradually altered as they descended, generation after generation, fiuui tlie i)arent tongue. Now I.] MAN, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 9 even if I-atin were lost, philologists would still be able, by comparing tlie set of Romance languages, to infer that such a language must have existed to give rise to them all, though no doubt such a reconstruction of Latin would give but a meagre notion, either of its stock of words or its gram- matical inllexions. This kind of argument by which a lost parent-language is discovered from the likeness among its descendants, may be well seen in another set of European tongues. Let us suppose ourselves listening to a group of Dutch sailors; at first their talk may seem unintelligible, but after a while a sharp ear will catch the sound of well known words, and perhaps at last whole sentences like these: — Kom hicr ! Wat zegt gij? Hoe is het zueder? Het is een hei'ige storm, ik ben zeer koiid. Js de inaan op ? Ik weet nict. The spelling of these words, different from our mode, disguises their resemblance, but as spoken they come very near corresponding sentences in English, some- what old-fashioned or provincial, thus : — Come here ! What say ye ? How is the weather ? It is a heavy storm, I be sore cold. Js the moon up? I wit not. Now it stands to reason that no two languages could have come to be so like, unless both were descended from one parent tongue- The argument is really much like that as to the origin of the people themselves. As we say, these Dutch and English are beings so nearly alike that they must have descended from a common stock, so we say, these languages are so like that they must have been derived from a common language. Dutch and English are accordingly said to be closely related to one another, and the language of Friesland proves on examination to be another near relative. Thence it is inferred that a parent language or group of dialects, which may be called the original Low-Dutch, or Low-German, must once have been spoken, though it is not actually lo ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. to be found, not happening to have been \vrltt_'u down and so preserved. Now it is easy to see that as ages go on, and the languages of a family each take their separate course of change, it must become less and less possible to show their relation- ship by comparing whole sentences. Philologists have to depend on less perfect resemblances, but such are sufficient when not only words from the dictionary correspond in the two languages, but also these are worked up into actual speech by corresponding forms of grammar. Thus when Sanskrit, the ancient language of the Brahmans in India, is compared with Greek and Latin, it appears that the Sanskrit verb da expresses the idea to give, and makes its present tense by reduplicating and adding a person-affix, so becoming dadami, nearly as Greek makes didomi : from the same root Sanskrit makes a future participle dcUyamanas, corresponding to Greek dosomenos, while Sanskrit datar matches Greek doter^^wQX. So where T.atia has vox, vocis, voceni, voces, vociiin, vocibits, Sanskrit has vak, vcicas, vdc'am, vacas, vacain, vagbhyas. AVhcn such thoroughgoing analogy as this is found to run through several languages, as Sanskrit, Grejk, and Latin, no other explanation is possible but that an ancient parent language gave rise to them all, they having only varied off from it in different directions. \\\ this way it is shown that not only are these particular languages related by descent, but that groups of ancient and modern languages in Asia and Europe, the Lidian group, the Persian group, the Hellenic or Greek group, the Itaiic or Latin group, the Slavonic group to which Russian belongs, the Teutonic group which English is a member of, the Keltic group which Welsh is a member of, are all descendants of one common ancestral language, winch is now theoretically I.] MAN, ANCIENT AND MODERN. li called the Aryan, though practically its nature can only be made out in a vague way by comparing its descendant languages. Some of these have come down to us in forms which are extremely ancient, as antiquity goes in our limited chronology. The sacred books of India and Persia have preserved the Sanskrit and Zend languages, which by their structure show to the eye of the philologist an antiquity beyond that of the earliest Greek and Latin inscriptions and the old Persian cuneiform rock-writing of Darius. But the Aryan languages even in their oldest known states had already become so different that it was the greatest feat of modern philology to demonstrate that they had a common origin at all. The faint likeness by which Welsh still shows its relationship to Greek and German may give some idea of the time that may have elapsed since all three were developed off from the original Aryan tongue, which itself probably ceased to exist long before the historical period began. Among the languages of ancient nations, another great group holds a high ])lace in the world's history. This is the Semitic family wliich includes the Hebrew and Phoenician, and the Assyrian deciphered from the wedge-characters of Nineveh. Arabic, the language of the Koran, is the great modern representative of the family, and the close- ness with which it matches Hebrew may be shown in familiar phrases. The Arab still salutes the stranger with salihn a/aikiim, "peace upon you," nearly as the ancient Hebrew would have said s/ialom lacJicm, that is, " peace to you," and tlie often-heard Arabic exclamation bis- millah may be turned into Hebrew, as be-shem hCi-Elohiin, "in the name of God." So the Hebrew names of per- sons mentioned in the Bible give the interpretation of many Arabic proper names, as where Ebed-tnciec/i, 13 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. " servant of the king," who took Jeremiah out of the dungeon, bore a name nearly like that of the khalif Abd- el-Mc!ik, in Mohammedan history. But no one of these Semitic languages has any claim to be the original of the family, standing to the others as Latin does to Italian and French. All of them, Assyrian, Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, are sister-languages, pointing back to an earlier parent language which has long disappeared. The ancient Egyptian language of the hieroglyphics cannot be classed as a member of the Semitic family, though it shows points of resemblance which may indicate some remote connexion. There are also known to have existed before 2000 B.C. two important languages not belonging to either the Aryan or Semitic family ; these were the ancient Babylonian and the ancient Chinese. As for the languages of more outlying regions of the world, such as America, when they come into view they are found likewise to consist of many separate groups or families. This slight glimpse of the earliest known state of lan- guage in the world is enough to teach the interesting lesson that the main work of language-making was done in the ages before history. Going back as far as philology can take us, we find already existing a number of language- groups, differing in words and structure, and if they ever had any relationship with one another no longer showing it by signs clear enough for our skill to make out. Of an original primitive language of mankind, the most patient research has found no traces. The oldest tppes of language we can reach by working back from known languages sliow no signs of being primitive tongues of mankind. Indeed, it may be positively asserted that they are not such, but that ages of growth and decay have mostly obliterated the traces how each particular soimd came to express its particular I.] MAX, A^•CIE^■T AND MODERN. 13 sense. Man, since the historical period, lias done little in the way of absolute new creation of language, for the good reason that his wants were already supplied by the words lie learnt from his fathers, and all h^ had to do when a new idea came to him was to work up old words into some new sliape. Thus the study of languages gives much the same view of man's antiq.iity as has been already gained from the study of races. The philologist, asked how long he thinks mankind to have existed, answers that it must have been long enough for human speech to have grown from its earliest beginnings into elaborate languages, and for these in their turn to have developed into families spread far and wide over the world. This immense work had been already accomplished in ages before the earliest in- scriptions of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Phoinicia, Persia, Greece, for these show the great families of human speech already in full existence. Next, we have to look at culture or civih'zation, to see whether this also shows signs of man having lived and laboured in ages earlier than the earliest which historical records can tell of. For this jjurposc it is needful to under- stand what has been the general course of arts, knowledge, and institutions. It is a good old rule to work from the known to the unknown, and all intelligent people have much to tell from their own experience as to how civi- lization develops. The account which an old man can give of England as he remembers it in his schoolboy days, and of the inventicjns and improvements he has seen come in since, is in itself a valuable lesson. Thus, when start- ing from London by express train to reach Edinburgh by dinner-time, he thinks of when it used to be fair coach- travelling to get through in two days and nights. Catching sight of a signal-post on the line, he remembers how such 3 14 ANTHROPCLOGY. [cHAP. semaphores (that is, sign-bearers) were then the best means of telegraphing, and stood waving their arms on the hills between London and Plymouth, signalling the Admiralty messages. Thinking of the electric telegraph which has superseded them, reminds him that this invention arose out of a discovery made in his youth as to the connexion between electricity and magnetism. This again suggests other modern scientific discoveries that have opened to us the secrets of the universe, such as the spectrum-analysis which now makes out with such precision the materials of the stars, which is just what our fathers were quite certain no man on earth ever could know. Our informant can tell us, too, how knowledge has not only increased, but is far more widely spread than formerly, when the thriving farmer's son could hardly get schooling practically so good as ths labourer's son is now entitled to of right. He may then go on to explain to his hearers how, since his time, the laws of the land have been improved and better carried out, so that men are no longer hanged for stealing, that more is done to reform the criminal classes instead of merely punishing them, that life and property are safer than in old times. Last, but not least, he can show from his own recollection that people are niorally a shade better than they were, that public opinion demands a somewhat higher standard of conduct than in past generations, as may be seen in the sharper disapproval that now falls on cheats and drunkards. From such examples of the progress in civilization that has come in a single country and a single lifetime, it is clear that the world has not been standing still with us, but new arts, new thoughts, new institutions, new rules of life, have arisen or been developed out of the older state of things. Now this growth or development in civilization, so rapid in our own time, appears to have been going on more or i] MAN, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 15 less actively since the early ages of man. Proof of this comes to us in several different ways. History, so far as it reaches back, shows arts, sciences, and political institutions beginning in ruder states, and becoming in the course of ages more intelligent, more systematic, more perfectly arranged or organized, to answer their purposes. Not to give many instances of a fact so familiar, the history of parliamentary government begins with the old-world councils of the chiefs and tumultuous assemblies of the whole people. The history of medicine goes back to the times when epilepsy or " seizure " (Greek, epilepsis) was thought to be really the act of a demon seizing and convulsing the patient. But O-ir object here is to get beyond such ordinary information of the history books, and to judge what stages civilization passed through in times yet earlier. Here one valuable aid is archaeology, which for instance shows us the stone hatchets and other rudj instruments which belonged to early tribes of men, thus proving how low their state of arts was ; of this more will be said presently. Another useful guide is to be had from survivals in culture. Looking closely into the thoughts, arts, and habits of any nation, the student finds everywhere the remains of older states of things out of which they arose. To take a trivial example, if we want to know why so quaintly cut a garment as the evening dress- coat is worn, the explanation may be found thus. The cutting away at the waist had once the reasonable purpose of preventing the coat skirts from getting in the way in riding, while the pair of useless buttons behind the waist are also relics from the times when such buttons really served the purpose of fastening these skirts behind ; the curiously cut collar keeps the now misplaced notches made to allow of its being worn turned up or down, the smart facings represent the old ordinary lining, and the sliam cuffs now i6 ANTHROPOLOGY. [ciiAP. made with a seam round the wrist are survivals from real cuffs when the sleeve used to be turned back. Thus it is seen that the present ceremonial dress-coat owes its pecu- liarities to being descended from the old-fashioned practical coat in which a man rode and worked. Or again, if one looks In modern English life for proof of the Norman Con- quest eight centuries ago, one may find it in the " Oh yes ! Oh yes r^ of the town-crier, who all unknowingly keeps up the old French form of proclamation, " Oyez ! Oyez f" that is, " Hear ye ! Hear ye ! " To what yet more distant periods of civilization such survivals may reach back, is well seen in an example from India. There, though people have for ages kindled fire for practical use with the flint and steel, yet the Brahmans, to make the sacred fire for the daily sacri- fice, still use the barbaric art of violently boring a pointed stick into another piece of wood till a spark comes. Asked why they thus waste their labour when they know better, they answer that they do it to get pure and holy fire. But to us it is plain that they are really keeping up by unchanging custom a remnant of the ruder life once led by their rjmote ancestors. On the whole, these various ways of examining arts and sciences all prove that they never spring forth perfect, like Athene out of the spHt head of Zeus. They come on by successive steps, and where other information fails, the observer may often trust himself to judge from the mere look of an invention how it probably arose. Thus no one can look at a cross-bow and a common long-bow without being convinced that the long-bow was the earlier, and that the cross-bow was made afterwards by fitting a common bow on a stock, and arranging a trigger to let go the string after taking aim. Though history fails to tell us who did this and when, we feel almost as sure of it as of the known hisiorical facts that the cross-l)ow led up to 1.] MAN, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 17 the match-lock, and that again to the flint-lock mur.kct, and that again to the percussion musket, and that again to the breech-loading rifle. Putting these various means of information together, it often becomes possible to picture the whole course of an art or an institution, tracing it back from its highest state in the civilized world till we reach its beginnings in the life of the rudest tribes of men. For instance, let us look at a course of modern mathematics, as represented in the books taken in for university honours. A student living in Queen Elizabeth's time would have had no infinitesimal calculus to study, hardly even algebraic geometry, for what is now called the higher matheinatics was invented since then. Going back into the Middle Ages, we come to the time when algebra had been just brought in, a novelty due to the Hindu mathematicians and their scholars, the Arabs; and next we find the numeral ciphers, o, i, 2, 3, &:c., beginning to be known as an improvement on the old calculating board and the Roman I., II., III. In the classic ages yet earlier, we reach the time when the methods of Euklid and the other Greek geometers first appeared. So we get back to what was known to the mathematicians of the earliest historical period in Babylonia and Egypt, an arithmetic clumsily doing what children in the lower standards are taught with us to do far more neatly, and a rough geometry consisting of a few rules of practical mensuration. This is as far as history can go toward the beginnings of mathe- matics, but there are other means of discovering through what lower stages the science arose. The very names still used to denote lengths, such as cubit, hand, foot, span, nail, show how the art of mensuration had its origin in times when standard measures had not yet been invented, but men put their hands and feet alongside objjcts of which they wished 9011 1 8 ANTHROPCLOGY. [chap. to estimate the size. So there is abundant evidence that arithmetic came up from counting on the fingers and toes, such as may still be seen among savages. Words still used for numbers in many languages were evidently made during the period when such reckoning on the hands and feet was usual, and they have lasted on ever since. Thus a Malay expresses five by the word //>««, which (though he does not know it) once meant "hand," so that it is seen to be a survival from ages when his ancestors, wanting a word for five, held up one hand and said "hand." Indeed, the reason of our own decimal notation, why we reckon by tens instead of the more convenient twelves, appears to be that our forefathers got from their own fingers the habit of count- ing by tens which has been since kept up, an unchanged relic of primitive man. The following chapters contain many other cases of such growth of arts from the simplest origins. Thus, in examining tools, it will be seen how the rudely chipped stone grasped in the hand to hack with, led up to tlie more artificially shaped stone chisel fitted as a hatchet in a wooden handle, how afterwards when metal came in there was substituted for the stone a bronze or iron blade, till at last was reached the most perfect modern foresters' axe, with its steel blade socketed to take the well-balanced handle. Specimens such as those in Chapter VIII. show these great moves in the development of the axe, which began before chronology and history, and has been from the first one of man's chief aids in civilizing himself. It does not follow from such arguments as these that civilization is always on the move, or that its movement is always progress. On the contrary, history teaches that it remains stationary for long periods, and often falls back. To understand such decline of culture, it must be borne in mind that the highest arts and the most elaborate arrange- 1.] MAN, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 19 nients of society do not always prevail, in fact they may be too perfect to hold their ground, for people must have what fits with their circumstances. There is an instructive lesson to be learnt from a remark made by an Englishman at Singapore, wlio noticed with surprise two curious trades flourishing there. One was to buy old English-built ships, cut them down and rig them as junks ; the other was to buy English percussion muskets and turn them into old-fashioned flintlocks. At first sight this looks like mere stupidity, but on consideration it is seen to be reasonable enough. It was so difficult to get Eastern sailors to work ships of European rig, that it answered better to provide them with the clumsier craft they were used to ; and as for the guns, the hunters far away in the hot, damp forests were better off with gunflints than if they had to carry and keep dry a stock of caps. In both cases, what they wanted was not the highest product of civilization, but something suited to the situation and easiest to be had. Now the same rule applies both to taking in new civilization and keeping up old. When the life of a people is altered by emigration into a new country, or by war and distress at home, or mixture with a lower race, the culture of their forefathers may be no longer needed or possible, and so dwindles away. Such degeneration is to be seen among the descendants of Por- tuguese in the East Indies, who have intermarried with the natives and follen out of the march of civilization, so that newly-arrived Europeans go to look at them lounging about their mean hovels in the midst of luxuriant tropical fruits and flowers, as if they had been set there to teach by example how man falls in culture where the need of effort is wanting. Another frequent cause of loss of civilization is when people once more prosperous are ruined or driven from their homes, like those Shoshonee Intlians who have 20 ANTHRCPOLOGY. [chap. taken refuge from their enemies, the Blackfeet, in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains, where they now roam, called Digger Indians from the wild roots they dig for as part of their miserable subsistence. Not only the degraded state of such outcasts, but the loss of particular arts by other peoples, may often be explained by loss of culture under unfavourable conditions. For instance, the South Sea Islanders, though not a very rude people when visited by Captain Cook, used only stone hatchets and knives, being indeed so ignorant of metal that they planted the first iron nails they got from the English sailors, in the hope of raising a new crop. Possibly their ancestors never had metals, but it seems as likely that these ancestors were an Asiatic people to whom metal was known, but who, through emigration to ocean islands and separation from their kinsfolk, lost the use of it and fell back into the stone age. It is necessary for the student to be alive to the import- ance of decline in civilization, but it is here more particu- larly mentioned in order to point out that it in no way contradicts the theory that civilization itself is developed from low to high stages. One cannot lose a thing without having had it first, and wherever tribes are fallen from the higher civilization of their ancestors, this only leaves it to be accounted for how that higher civilization grew up. On the whole it appears that wherever there are found elaborate arts, abstruse knowledge, complex institutions, these are results of gradual development from an earlier, simpler, and ruder state of life. No stage of civilization comes into existence spontaneously, but grows or is developed out of the stage before it. This is the great principle which every scholar must lay firm hold of, if he intends to understand either the world he lives in or the history of the past. Let us now see how this bears on the I.] MAX, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 21 antiquity and early condition of mankind. The monuments of Egypt and Babylonia show that toward 5,000 years ago certain nations had alreatly come to an advanced state of culture. No doubt the greater part of the earth was then peopled by barbarians and savages, as it remained afterwards. Lut in tlie regions of the Nile and the Euphrates there was civilization. The ancient Egyptians had that greatest mark of a civilized nation, the art of v/riting ; indeed the hieroglyphic characters of their inscriptions appear to have been the origin of our alphabet. They were a nation skilled in agriculture, raising from their fields fertilized by the yearly inundation those rich crops of grain that provided subsist- ence for the dense population. How numerous and how skilled in constructive art the ancient Egyptians were, is seen by every traveller who looks on the pyramids which have made their name famous through all history. The great pyramid of Gizeh still ranks among the wonders of the world, a mountain of hewn limestone and syenite, whose size Londoners describe by saying that it stands on a square the size of Lincoln's-Inn Fields, and rises above the height of St. Paul's. The perfection of its huge blocks and the beautiful masonry of the inner chambers and passages show the skill not only of the stonecutter but of the practical geometer. The setting of the sides to the cardinal points is so exact as to prove that the Egyptians were excellent observers of the elementary facts of astronomy ; the day of the equinox can be taken by observing the sunset across the face of the pyramid, and the neighbouring Arabs still adjust their astronomical dates by its shadow. As far back as anything is known of them, the Egyptians appear to have worked in bronze and iron, as well as gold and silver. So their arts and habits, their sculpture and carpentry, iheir reckoning and measuring, their system of official life 22 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. with its governors and scribes, their reHgion witli its orders of priesthood and its continual ceremonies, all appear the results of long and gradual growth. What, perhaps, gives the highest idea of antiquity, is to look at very early monu- ments, such as the tomb of prince Teta of the 4th dynasty in the British Museum, and notice how Egyptian culture had even then begun to grow stiff and traditional. Art was already reaching the stage when it seemed to men that no more progress was possible, for their ancestors had laid down the perfect rule of life, which it was sin to alter by way of reform. Of the early Babylonians or Chaldaeans less is known, yet their monuments and inscriptions show how ancient and how high was their civilization. Their writing was in cuneiform or wedge-shaped characters, of which they seem to have been the inventors, and which their successors, the Assyrians, learnt from them. They were great builders of cities, and the bricks inscribed with their kings' names remain as records of their great temples, such, for instance, as that dedicated to the god of Ur, at the city known to Biblical history as Ur of the Chaldees. Written copies of their laws exist, so advanced as to have provisions as to the property of married women, the im- prisonment of a father or mother for denying their son, the daily fine of a half-measure of corn levied on the master who killed or ill-used his slaves. Their astrology, which made the names of Chaldosan and Babylonian famous ever since, led them to make those regular observations of the heavenly bodies which gave rise to the science of astronomy. The nation which wrote its name thus largely in the book of civilization, dates back into the same period of high antiquity as the Egyptian. These then are the two nations wliose culture is earliest vouched for by inscriptions done at tlie vory time of their ancient I J MAN, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 23 grandeur, and therefore it is safer to appeal to them than to other nations wliich can only show as proofs of their anticjuity writings drawn up in far later ages. Looking at their ancient civilization, it seems to have been formed by men whose minds worked much like our own. No super- human powers were required for the work, but just human nature groping on by roundabout ways, reaching great results, yet not half knowing how to profit by them when reached ; solving the great problem of writing, yet not see- ing how to simplify the clumsy hieroglyphics into letters ; devoting earnest thought to religion and yet keeping up a dog and cat worship which was a jest even to the ancients ; cultivating astronomy and yet remaining mazed in the follies of astrology. In the midst of their most striking efforts of civilization, the traces may be discerned of the barbaric condition which prevailed before ; the Egyptian pyramids are burial-mounds like those of pre- historic England, but huge in size and built of liewn stone or brick ; the Egyjitian hieroglyphics, with their pictures of men and beasts and miscellaneous things, tell the story of their own invention, how they began as a mere jjicture- writing like that of the rude hunters of America. Thus it appears that civilization, at the earliest dates where history brings it into view, had already reached a level which can only be accounted for by growth during a long proe-historic period. This result agrees with the conclusions already arrived at by the study of races and language. Without attempting here to draw a picture of life as it may have been among men at their first appearance on the earth, it is important to go back as far as such evidence of the progress of civilization may fairly lead us. In judg- ing how mankind may have once lived, it is also a great help to observe how they are actually found living. Human 24 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. life may be roughly classed into three great stages, Savage, Barbaric, Civilized, which may be defined as follows. The lowest or savage state is that in which man subsists on wild plants and animals, neither tilling the soil nor domesticating creatures for his food. Savages may dwell in tropical forests where the abundant fruit and game may allow small clans to live in one spot and find a living all the year round, while in barer and colder regions they have to lead a wandering life in quest of the wild food which they soon exhaust in any place. In making their rude implements, the materials used by savages are what they find ready to hand, such as wood, stone, and bone, but they cannot extract metal from the ore, and therefore belong to the Stone Age. Men may be considered to have risen into the next or barbaric state when they take to agriculture. With the certain supply of food which can be stored till next harvest, settled village and town life is established, with immense results in the improvement of arts, knowledge, manners, and government. Pastoral tribes are to be reckoned in the barbaric stage,- for though their life of shifting camp from pasture to pasture may prevent settled habitation and agriculture, they have from their herds a constant supply of milk and meat. Some barbaric nations have not come beyond using stone implements, but most have risen into the Metal Age. Lastly, civilized life may be taken as beginning with the art of writing, which by recording history, law, knowledge, and religion for the service of ages to come, binds together the past and the future in an unbroken chain of intellectual and moral progress. This classification of three great stages of culture is practically convenient, and has the advantage of not describing imaginary states of society, but such as are actually known to exist. So far as the evidence goes, it seems that civil-'zation has actually grown up in the 1.] MAN, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 25 world through those three stages, so that to look r.t a savage of the BraziUan forests, a barbarous New Zealander or Daho- man, and a civilized luiropean, may be the student's best guide to understanding the progress of civilization, only he must bo cautioned that the comparison is but a guide, not a full explanation. In this way it is reasonably inferred that even in countries now civilized, savage and low barbaric tribes must have once lived. Fortunately it is not left altogether to the imagination to picture the lives of these rude and ancient men. for many relics of them are found which may be seen and handled in museums. It has now to be considered what sort of evidence of man's age is thus to be had from archceology and geology, and what it proves. When an antiquary examines the objects dug up m any place, he can generally judge in what state of civilization its inhabitants have been. Thus if there are found weapons of bronze or iron, bits of fine pottery, bones of domestic cattle, charred corn and scraps of cloth, this would be proof that people lived there in a civilized, or at least a high barbaric condition. If there are only rude implements of stone and bone, but no metal, no earthenware, no remains to show that the land was tilled or catde kept, this would be evidence that the country had been inhabited by some savage tribe. One of the chief questions to be asked about the condition of any people is, whether they have metal in use for their tools and weapons. If so, they may be said to be in the metal age. If they have no copper or iron, but make dieir hatchets, knives, spear-heads, and other cutting and piercing instruments of stone, they are said to be in the stone age. Wherever such stone imple- ments are picked up, as they often are in our own ploughed fields, they prove that stone-age men have once dwelt in the 26 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap, land. It is an in.portant lact that in every region of the inhabited world ancient stone implements are thus found in the ground, showing that at some time the inhabitants were in this respect like the modern savages. In countries where the people have long been metal workers, they have often lost all memory of what these stone things are, and tell fancitul stories to account for their being met with in ploughing or digging. One favourite notion, in England and elsewhere, is that the stone hatchets are "thunderbolts" fallen from the sky with the lightning flash. It has been imagined that in the East, the seat of the most ancient civilizations, some district might be found without any traces of man having lived there in a state of early rudeness, so that in this part of the world he might have been civilized from the first. But it is not so. In Assyria, Palestine, Egypt, as in other lands, one may iii d sharp-chipped flints which show that here also tribes in the stone age once lived, before the use of metal brought in higher civilization. Whether it may be considered or not that Europe was a quarter of the globe inhabited by the earliest tribes of men, it so happens that remains found in Europe furnish at pre- sent the best proofs of man's antiquity. To understand these, it must be explained that the stone age had an earlier and a later period, as may be plainly seen in looking at a good collection of stone implements. Fig. i is in- tended to give some idea of those in use in the later stone age. The hatchet is neatly shaped and edged by rubbing oil a grinding-stone, as is also the hammer-head. The spear and arrows, scraper, and flake-knife it would have been waste of labour to grind, but they are chipped out with much skill. On the whole, these stone implements are much like those which the North American Indians have been using to our own day. The question is. how long ago I-l MAN, ANCIENT AND MODERN. tribes who made such stone implements were Using in Europe. As to this, we may fairly judge from the position in which they are found in Denmark, The forests of that country are mainly of beeches, but in tlie peat-mosses lie innumerable trunks of oaks, which show that at an earlier period oak forests jjrevailcd, and deeper still there lie trunks of pine trees, which show that there were pine-forests still older than the oak forests. Thus there have been three successive forest-periods, the beech, the oak, and the pine, and the depth of the peat-mosses, which in places Fig. 1.— Later Stone Age (neolithic) implements, a. Ft ne celt or hatchet . b. flint • iiear-head : c. .'cr.npcr ; d. .->.rr w-heads; e, flint flake kn ves . /. core tVom wii.ch tlin.-tlakes taken oil ; s, fl.utaw 1 ; h, fl.iit saw ; i, stone haiumcr-h-ad. is as much as thirty feet, shows that the period of the pine trees was thousands of years ago. While the forests have been changing, the condition of the people living among them has changed also. The modern woodman cuts down the beech trees with his iron axe, but among tlie oak trunks in the peat are found bronze swords and shield-bosses, which show that the inhabitants of the country were then in the bronze age, and lastly, a flint hatchet taken out from where it lay still lower in the peat beneath the pine trvmks, proves that stone age men in Denmark lived in the pine forest qS ANTHRCPOLCGY. [chap. period, which carries them back to liiyh antiquity. In England, the tribes who have left such stone implements were in the land before the invasion of that Keltic race whom we call the ancient Britons, and who no doubt came armed with weapons of metal. The stone hatchet-blades and arrow-heads of the older population lie scattered over our country, hill and dale, moor and fen, near the surface of the ground, or deeper underground in peat- mosses, or beds of mud and silt. Such bogs or mud-flats began at a date which chronologists would call ancient. But they are what geologists, accustomed to vaster periods of time, consider modern. They belong to the newer alluvial deposits, that is, they were formed within the times when the lay of the land and the flow of the streams were mucli as they are now. To get an idea of this, one has only to look down from a hillside into a wide valley below, and notice how its flat flooring of mud and sand, stretching right across, must have been laid down by flood-waters following very much their present course along the main stream and down the side slopes. The people of the newer stone age, whose implements are seen in Fig. i, lived within this historically ancient, but geologically mod- ern period, and relics of them are found only in places where man or nature could then have placed them. But there had been a still earlier period of the stone age, when yet ruder tribes of men lived in our parts of the world, when the climate and the face of the country were strangely different from the present state of things. On the slopes of river valleys such as that of the Ouse, in England, and the Somnic, in France, 50 or 100 feet above the present river- banks, and thus altogether out of the reach of any flood now, there are beds of so-called drift gravel. Out of these beds have been dug numerous rude implements of flint, I] MAN, ANCIENT AND MODERN. chipped into shape by the hands of men who had gained no mean dexterity in the art, as any one will find who will try his hand at making one, with any tools he thinks fit. The most remarkable implements of this earlier stone age are the picks or hatchets shown in Fig. 2. The coarseness of their finish, and the absence of any signs of grinding even at the edges of hacking or cutting instruments, show that the makers had not come nearly to the skill of the later Fig. 2. — Earlier Stone Age (palaeolithic) flint picks or hatchets. Stone age. It is usual to distinguish the two kinds of im- plements, and the periods they belong to, by the terms introduced by Sir J. Lubbock, palaeolithic and neolithic, that is "old-stone " and " new-stone." Looking now at the high gravel-beds inwhich palaeolithic implements such as those shown in Fig. 2 occur, it is evident from their position that they had nothing to do with the water-action which is now laying down and shifting sand-banks and mud-flats at the bottom of the valleys, nor with the present rain-wash which scours the surface of the hillsides. They must have been deposited in a former period when the condition of land 4 30 ANTHROPOLOGY. [cHAP. and water was different from what it is now. How far this state of things was due to the valleys not being yet cut out to near their present depth, to the wliole country lying lower above the sea-level, or to the rivers being vastly larger than at present from the heavier rainfall of a pluvial period, it would be raising too intricate geological questions to dis- cuss here. Geology shows the old drift-gravels to belong to times when the glacial or icy period with its arctic climate was passing, or had passed away, in Europe. From the bones and teeth found with the flint implements in the gravel-beds, it is known what animals inhabited the land at the same time with the men of the old stone age. The mammoth, or huge woolly elephant, and several kinds of rhinoceros, also extinct, browsed on the branches of the forest trees, and a species of hippopotamus much like that at present living frequented the rivers. The musk-ox and the grizzly bear, which England harboured in this remote period, may still be hunted in the Rocky Alountains, but the ancient cave-bear, which was one of the dangerous wild beasts of our land, is no longer on the face of the earth. The British lion was of a laiger breed than those now in Asia and Africa, and perhaps than those which Herodotus mentions as prowling in Macedonia in the fifth century B.C., and falling on the camels of Xerxes' army. To judge by such signs as the presence of the rein- deer, and the mammoth with its hairy coat, the climate of Europe was severer than now, perhaps like that of Siberia. How long man had been in the land there is no clear evi- dence. For all we know, he may have lasted on from an earlier and more genial period, or he may have only lately migrated into Europe from some warmer region. Implements like his are not unknown in Asia, as where in Southern India, above Madras, there lies at the foot of I] MAN, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 31 the Eastern Ghats a terrace of irony clay or laterite, con- taining stone implements of very similar make to those of the drift-men in Europe. These European savages of the mammoth-period resorted much to shelter at the foot of overhanging clifls, and to caverns such as Kent's Hole near Torquay, where the implements of the men and the bones of the beasts are found together in abundance. In Central France especially, the examination of such bone-caves has brought to light evidence of the whole way of life of a group of ancient Fig. 3. — Sketch of maiii ve of La Madeleine (Lartet and Christy). tribes. The reindeer whicli have now retreated to high northern latitudes, were then plentiful in France, as appears from their bones and antlers imbedded with remains of the mammoth under the stalagmite floors of the caves of Perigord. \Vith them are found rude stone hatchets and scrapers, pounding-stones, bone spear-heads, awls, arrow- straighteners, and other objects belonging to a life like that of the modern Esquimaux who hunt the reindeer on the coasts of Hudson's Bay. Like the Esquimaux also, these early French and Swiss savages spent their leisure time in carving figures of animals. Among many such figures found in the French caves is a mammoth, Fig. 3, scratched on a 32 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. piece of Its own ivory, so as to touch off neatly the shaggy hair and huge curved tusks which distinguish the mammoth from other species of elephant. There has been also found a rude representation of a man, Fig. 4, grouped with two horses' heads and a snake or eel ; this is interesting as being the most ancient human portrait known. Thus it appears that man of the older stone age was already living when the floods went as high above our present valley-flats as the tops of the high trees growing there now reach, and when the climate was of that Lapland kind suited to the woolly mammoth and the reindeer, and Fig. 4. — Sketch of man and horses from cave (Lartet and Chrisly). the rest of the un-English looking group of animals now perished out of this region, or extinct altogether. From all that is known of the slowness with which such altera- tions take place anywhere in the lie of the land, the climate, and the wild animals, we cannot suppose changes so vast to have happened without a long lapse of time before the newer stone age came in, when the streams had settled down to near their present levels, and the climate and the wild creatures had become much as they were within the historical period. It is also plain from the actual remains found, that these most ancient known tribes were wild hunters and fishers, such as we should now class as savages. It is best, however, not to apply to them the term primitive men, as this might be understood to mean that they were I.] MAX, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 33 the first men who appeared on earth, or at least like them. The life the men of the mammoth-period must have led at Abbeville or Torcjuay, shows on the face of it reasons against its being man's primitive life. These old stone-age men are more likely to have been tribes whose ancestors while living under a milder climate gained some rude skill in the arts of procuring food and defending them- selves, so that afterwards they were able by a hard struggle to hold their own against the harsh weather and fierce beasts of the quaternary period. How long ago this period was, no certain knowledge is yet to be had. Some geologists have suggested twenty thousand years, while others say a hundred thousand or more, but these are guesses made where there is no scale to reckon time by. It is safest to be content at present to regard it as a geological period lying back out of the range of chronology. It is thought by several eminent geologists that stones shaped by man, and therefore proving his pre- sence, occur in England and France in beds deposited before the last glacial period, when much of the continent lay submerged under an icy sea, where drifting icebergs dropped on what is now dry land their huge boulders of rock transported from distant mountains. This cannot be taken as proved, but if true it would immensely increase our estimate of man's age. At any rate the conclusive proofs of man's existence during the quaternary or mam- moth period do not even bring us into \iew of the remoter time when human life first began on earth. Thus geology establishes a principle which lies at the ^•ery foundation of the science of anthropology. Until of late, while it used to be reckoned by chronologists that the earth and man were less than 6,000 years old, the science of geology could hardly exist, there being no room for its long processes of 34 ANTHROPOLOGY. ' [chap. i. building up the strata containing the remains of its vast successions of plants and animals. These are now accounted for on the theory that geological time extends over millions of years. It is true that man reaches back comparatively little way into this immense lapse of time. Yet his first appearance on earth goes back to an age compared with which the ancients, as Ave call them, are but moderns. The few thousand years of recorded history only take us back to a prehistoric period of untold length, during which took place the primary distribution of mankind over the earth and the development of the great races, the formation of speech and the settlement of the great families of language, and the growth of culture up to the levels of the old world nations of the East, the forerunners and founders of modern civilized life. Having now sketched what history, archeology, and geology teach as to man's age and course on the earth, we shall proceed in the following chapters to describe more fully Man and his varieties as they appear in natural history, next examining the nature and growth of Language, and afterwards the development of the knowledge, arts, and institutions, which make up Civilization. CHAPTER II. MAN AND OTHER ANIMALS. Vertebrate Animals, 35— Succession and Descent of Species, 37 — Apes and Man, comparison of structure, 38 — Hands and Feet, 42— Hair, 44 — Features, 44 — Brain, 45 — Mind in Lower Animals and Man, 47. To understand rightly the construction of the human bod\-, and to compare our own Umbs and organs with those of other animals, requires a thorough knowledge of anatomy and physiology. It will not be attempted here to draw up an abstract of these sciences, for which such handbooks should be studied as Huxley's Elementary Physiology and Mivart's Elementary Anatomy. But it will be useful to give a slight outline of the evidence as to man's place in the animal world, which may be done without requiring special knowledge in the reader. That the bodies of other animals more or less correspond in structure to our own is one of the lessons we begin to learn in the nursery. Boys playing at horses, one on all-fours and the other astride on his back, have already some notion how the imagined horse matches a real one as to head, eyes, and ears, mouth and teeth, back and legs. If one questions a country lad sitting on a stile watching the hunters go by, he knows well enough that the huntsman and his horse, the hounds and the hare they 36 ANTHRCPOLCGY. [char are chasing, are all creatures built up on the same kind of bony scaftblding or skeleton, that their life is carried on by means of similar organs, bangs to breathe with, a stomach to digest the food taken in by the mouth and gullet, a heart to drive the blood through the vessels, while the eyes, ears, and nostrils receive in them all in like manner the impressions of sight, hearing, and smell. A^ery likely the peasant has taken all this as a matter of course without ever reflecting on it, and even more educated people are apt to do the same. Had it come as a new discovery, it Avould have set any intelligent mind thinking what must be the tie or connexion between creatures thus formed as it were on one original pattern, only varied in different modes for different ends. The scientific comparison of animals, even when made in the most elementary way, does at once bring this great problem before our minds,. In some cases, more exact knowledge shows that the first rough comparison of man and beast may want correction. For instance, when a man's skeleton and a horse's are set side by side, it becomes plain that the horse's knee and hock do not answer, as is popularly supposed, to our elbow and knee, but to our wrist and ankle. The examination of the man's limb and the horse's leads to a further and remarkable conclusion, that the horse's fore- and hind leg really cor respond to a man's arm and leg in which all the fingers and toes should have become useless and shrunk away, except one finger and one toe, which are left to be walked upon, with the nail become a hoof. The general law to be learnt from the series of skeletons in a natural history museum, is that throughorderafter order of fishes, reptiles, birds, beasts, up to man himself, a common type or pattern may be traced; belonging to all animals which are vertebrate, that is which have a backbone. Limbs may still be recognised II.] MAN AND OTHER ANIMALS. 57 though their shape and service have changed, and though they may even have dwindled into remnants, as if left not for use, but to keep up the old model. Thus, althougii a perch's skeleton ditifers so much from a man's, its pectoral and ventral fins still correspond to arms and legs. Snakes are mostly limbless, yet there are forms which connect them with the quadrupeds, as for instance, the boa-con- strictor's skeleton shows a pair of rudimentary hind-legs. The Greenland whale has no visible hind-limbs, and its fore-limbs are paddles or flippers, yet when dissected, the skeleton shows not only remnants of what in man would be the leg-bones, but the flipper actually has within it the set of bones which belong to the human arm and hand. It is popularly considered that man is especially distinguished from the lower animals by not having a tail ; yet the tail is plainly to be seen in the human skeleton, represented by the last tapering vertebras of the spine. All these are animals now living. But geology shows that in long-past ages the earth'-^has been inhabited by species different from those at present existing, and yet evidently related to them. In the tertiary period, Australia was distinguished as now by its marsupial or pouched animals, but these were not of any present species, and mostly far larger; even the tallest kangaroo now to be seen is a puny creature in comparison with the enormous extinct diprotodon, whose skull was three feet long. So in South America there lived huge edentate animals, now poorly represented by the sloths, anteaters and arma- dillos, to be seen in our Zoological Gardens. Elephants are found fossil in the miocene deposits, but the species were all different from those in Africa and India now. These are common examples of the great principle now received by all zoologists, that from remote geological antiquity 38 ANTHRCPOLCGY. [chap. there have from time to time appeared on earth new species of animals, so far similar to those which came before them as to look as if the old types had been altered to fit new conditions of life, the earlier forms then tending to die out and disappear. This relation between the older species of vertebrate animals and the newer species which have sup- planted them, is a matter of actual observation, and beyond diEpute. Many zoologists, now perhaps the majority, go a step farther than this, not only acknowledging that there is a relation between the new species and the old, but seeking to explain it by the hypothesis of descent or development, now often called, from its great modern expounder, the Darwinian theory. The formation of breeds or varieties of animals being an admitted fact, it is argued that natural varia- tion under changed conditions of life can go far enough to produce new species, which by better adaptation to climate and circumstances may supplant the old. On this theory, the present kangaroos of Australia, sloths of South America, and elephants of India, are not only the successors but the actual descendants of extinct ones, and the fossil bones of tertiary horse-like animals with three-toed and four toed feet show what the remote ancestors of our horses were like, in ages before the unused toes dwindled to the splint- bones which represent them in the horse's leg now. Ac- cording to the doctrine of descent, when several species of animals living at the same time show close resemblance in structure, it is inferred that this resemblance must have been inherited by all from one ancestral species. Now of all the mammalia, or animals which suckle their young, those whose structure brings them closest to man are the apes or monkeys, and among these the catarhine or near- nostrillcd apes of the Old World, and among these the group calljd anthropoid or manlike, which inhabit tropical II.J MAN AND OTHER ANIMALS. 39 40 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. forests frcm Africa to the Eastern Archipelago. By now comparing their skel^^tons, it will be seen that in any scale of nature or scheme of creation these animals must be placed in somewhat close relation to man. No competent anatomist who has examined the bodily structure of these apes considers it possible that man can be descended from any of them, but according to the doctrine of descent they appear as the nearest existing oftshoots from the same primitive stock whence man also came. Professor Huxley's Alan's Place in Nature, in which this anatomical comparison is made, contains a celebrated draw- ing which is copied in Fig. 5 as the readiest means of show- ing how the anthropoid apes correspond bone for bone with ourselves. At the same time it illustrates some main points in which their bodily actions are unlike ours. It has been said that the child first takes on him the dignity of man when he leaves off going on all-fours. But in fact, stand- ing and walking upright is not a mere matter of training ; it belongs to the arrangement of the human body being different from that of quadrupeds. The limbs of the dog or cow are so proportioned as to bring them down on all- f vurs, and this is to a less degree the case with the apes, while the head and trunk of the growing child are lifted toward the erect attitude by the disproportionate growth of the lower limbs. Though man's standing upright requires continued muscular effort, he is so built as to keep his balance more readily than other animals in this posi- t'on. It may be noticed from the figure how in man the opening at the base of the skull (occipital foramen) through which the spinal cord passes up into the brain, is farther to the front than in the apes, so that his skull, instead of pitching forward, is balanced on the toj) of the alias vertebra (so called from y\tlas sujijiorting the globe). II.] MAN AND OTHER ANIMALS. 41 The figure shows also the S-hke curvature of man's spine, and how the bony pelvis or basin forms a broad support for his intestines as he stands upright, in which attitude the feet serve as bases enabling the legs to carry the trunk. Thus the erect posture, only imitated with difficult effort by the showman's performing animals, is to man easy and unconstrained. Not through great differences of struc- ture, but by adjustments of bones and muscles, the fore- and hind- limbs of quadrupeds work in accord, while m man, whose muscular adaptation is for going on his legs, there is no such reciprocal action between the legs and arms. Of- the monkey tribes, many walk fairly on all- fours as quadrupeds, with legs bent, arms straightened forward, soles and palms touching the ground. But the higher man-like apes are adapted by their structure for a climbing life among the trees, whose branches they grasp with feet and hands. When the orang-utan takes to the ground he shambles clumsily along, generally putting down the outer edge of the feet and the bent knuckles of the hands. The orang and gorilla have the curious habit of resting on their bent fists, so as to draw their bodies forward between their long arms, like a crii)ijle between his crutches. The nearest approach that apes naturally make to the erect attitude, is where the gibbon will go along on its feet, touching the ground with its knuckles first on one side and then on the other, or will run some distance with its arms thrown back above its head to keep the balance, or when the gorilla will rise on its legs and rush forward to attack. All these modes of locomotion may be understood from the skeletons in the figure. The apes thus present interesting intermediate stages between quadruped and biped. But only man is so formed that, using his feet to carry him, he has his hands free for their special work. 42 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. In comparing man with the lower animals, it is wrong to set down his pre-eminence entirely to his mind, without noticing the superiority of his limbs as instruments for practical arts. If one looks at the illustrations to " Reynard the Fox," where the artist does his best to represent the lion holding a sceptre, the she-wolf flirting a fan, or the fox writing a letter ; what he really shows is, how ill adapted the limbs of quadrupeds are to such actions. Man's being the " tool-using animal " is due to his having hands to use the tool as well as mind to invent it ; and only the apes, as .6 c ^ Fig. 6. — a, hand, i, foot, of chlmpanzse (af.er Vogt) ; c, hand, d, foot, of man. most nearly approaching man in their limbs, can fairly imitate the use of such instruments as a' spoon or a knife. In Fig. 6 the hand and foot of the chimpanzee may be compared with those of man. Here the ape's foot b, looks so like a hand, that many naturalists have classed the higher apes under the name of four-handed animals, or quadrumana. In anatomical structure it is a foot, but it is a i)rehensile or grasping foot, able to clip or pinch an object by setting the great toe thumb-wise against the others, which the human foot ! c5^ II.J MAX AND OTHER ANIMALS. 47 the outer coating is formed of the "grey matter," contain- ing the brain-corpuscles or cells from which the fibres issue, and which are centres through which the combinations are made which we are conscious of as thoughts. As the coating of grey matter follows the foldings of the brain down into the fissures, it is evident that the increased complexity of the convolutions, combined with greater actual size of brain, furnishes man with a vastly more extensive and intricate thinking-apparatus than the animals nearest below him in the order of nature. Having looked at some of the important differences between the bodies of man and lower animals, we may venture to ask the still harder question, How far do their minds work like ours ? No full answer can be given, yet there are some well ascertained points to judge by. To begin, it is clear that the simple processes of sense, will, and action, are carried on in man by the same bodily machinery as in other high vertebrate animals. How like their organs of sense are, is well illustrated b}' the anatomist who dissects a bullock's eye as a substitute for a man's, to show how the picture of the outer world is thrown by the lenses on the retina or screen, into which spread the end- fibres of the optic ner\-e leading into the brain. Not but what the touch, sight, and other senses in the various orders of animals have their special differences, as where the eagle's eyes are focussed to see small objects far beyond man's range, while the horse's eyes are so set in his head that they do not converge like ours, and he must practically have two pictures of the two sides of the road to deal with. Such special differences, however, make the general resemblance all the more striking. Next, the nervous system in beast and man shows the same common plan, the brain and spinal cord forming a central nervous organ, to which 43 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. the sensory nerves convey the messages of the senses, and from which the motor nerves carry the currents causing muscular contraction and movement. The involuntary acts of animals are like our own, as when the sleeping dog draws his leg back if it is touched, much as his master would do, and when awake, both man and beast wink when a finger pretends to strike at their eyes. If we go on to voluntary actions, done with conscious will and thought, the lower creatures can for some distance keep company with man- kind. At the Zoological Gardens one may sometimes see a handful of nuts divided between the monkeys inside the bars and the children outside, and it is instructive to notice how nearly both go through the same set of movements, looking, approaching, elbowing, grasping, cracking, munch- ing, swallowing, holding out their hands for more. Up to this level, the monkeys show all the mental likeness to man that their bodily likeness would lead us to expect. Now we know that in the scramble, there passes in the children's minds a great deal besides the mere sight and feel of the nuts, and the will to take and eat them. Between the sensation and action there takes place thought. To describe it simply, the boy knows a nut by sight, wishes to renew the pleasant taste of former nuts, and directs his hands and mouth to grasp, crack, and eat. But here are complicated mental processes. Knowing a nut by sight, or having an idea of a nut, means that there are grouped together in the child's mind memories of a number of past sensations, which have so become connected by experience that a particular form and colour, feel and weight, lead to the expectation of a particular flavour. Of what here takes place in the boy's mind we can judge, though by no means clearly, from what wc know about our own thoughts and what others have told us about theirs. What takes place in the monkeys' minds II.] MAN AND OTHER ANIMALS. 49 we can only guess by watching their actions, but these are so like the human as to be most readily explained by con- sidering their brain-work also to be like the human, though less clear and perfect. It seems as though a beast's idea or thought of an object may be, as our own, a group of re- membered sensations compacted into a whole. What makes this the more likely is that when part of the sensations present themselves, the animal seems to judge that the rest must be there also, much as we ourselves are so apt to do. Thus a dog will jump upon a scum-covered stream which it takes for dry land, or when offered a sham biscuit will come for it, turning away when smell and taste prove that the rest of the idea does not agree with what sight suggested. In much the same way, all people who attend to the proceedings of animals, account for them by faculties more or less like their own. Not only do creatures of all high orders give unmistakable signs of pleasure and pain, but our dealings with the brutes go on the ground of their sharing with us such more complex emotions as fear, afitec- tion, anger, nay, even curiosity, jealousy, and revenge. Some of these show themselves in bodily symi)toms which are quite human, as every one must admit who has felt the trembling limbs and throbbing heart of a frightened puppy, or looked at the picture in Darwin's Expression of iJtc Emotions of the chimpanzee who has had liis fruit taken from him, and displays his sulkiness by a pout which is a caricature of a child's. Again, the lower animals show a well-marked will, which like man's is not simply wish, but the resultant or balance of wishes, so that it is possible for two people calling a dog different ways, or both offering him bones, to distract his will in a way that reminds us of the philosopher's imaginary ass that died of starvation between its hay and its water. As to the power of memory in brutes, 50 AxNTHROPOLCGY. [chap we have all had opportunities of noticing how lasting and exact it is. Some things which the animals remember may be explained simply by their ideas becoming associated through habit, as when the horse betrays its former owner's ways by stopping at every public-house ; this may only mean that the familiar door suggests to the beast the memory of rest, and he stops. But to watch a dog dreaming makes us think that whole trains of ideas from the storehouse of memory are passing before his consciousness, as in our dreams. A memory in which such a revival cf the past is possible, is a source of experience whence to extract understanding of the present, and foresight of the future. To make the memory of what has been, the means of con- trolling what shall be, is the great intellectual faculty in man, and in simple and elementary forms it comes into view among lower creatures. To tell but one of the in- numerable animal stories which show expectation and design founded on experience. A certain Mr. Cops, who had a young orang-utan, one day gave it half an orange, put the other half away out of its sight on a high press, and lay down himself on the sofa, but the ape's movements attracting his attention, he only pretended to go to sleep ; the creature came cautiously and satisfied himself of his master being asleep, then clim.bed up the press, ate the rest of the orange, carefully hid the peel among some shavings in the grate, examined the pretended sleeper again, and then went to lie down on his own bed. Such behaviour is only to be explained by a train of thought involving some- thing of what in ourselves we call reason. To measure the differences between beast and man is really more difficult than tracing their resemblances. One plain mark of the higher intellectual rank of man is that he is less dependent on instinct than the animals which II.] MAN AND OTHER ANIMALS. 51 migrate at a fixed season, or build nests of a fixed and complicated pattern peculiar to their kind. Man has some instincts plainly agreeing with those of inferior animals, such as the child's untaught movements to ward off danger, and the parental affection which preserves the offspring during the first defenceless period of life. But if man were possessed by a resistless longing to set off wandering southward before winter, or to build a shelter of boughs laid in a particular way, this would be less beneficial to his species than the use of intelligent judgment adapting his actions to climate, supply of food, danger from enemies, and a multitude of circumstances differing from district to district, and changing from year to year. If man's remote progenitors had instincts like the beavers' implanted in the very structure of their brain, these instincts have long ago fallen away, displaced by freer and higher reason. Man's power of accommodating himself to the world he lives in, and even of controlling it, is largely due to his faculty of gaining new knowledge. Yet it must not be overlooked that this faculty is in a less measure possessed by other animals. We may catch them in the act of learning by experience, which is indeed one of the most curious sights in natural history, as when telegraph-wires are set up in a new district, and after the second year partridges no longer kill themselves by flying against them, or where in Canada the wily marten baffles the trapper's ingenuity, finding out how to get the bait away, even from a new kind of trap, without letting it fall. The faculty of learning by imitation comes out in the apes in an almost human way. The anthropoid ape Mafuka, kept lately in the Zoological Gardens at Dresden, saw how the door of her cage was unlocked, and not only did it herself, but even stole the key and hid it under her arm for future use ; after watching the carpenter she scired 53 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. his bradawl and bored holes with it througli the little table she had her meals on ; at her meals she not only filled her own cup from the jug, but, what is more remarkable, she carefully stopped pouring before it ran over. The death of this ape had an almost human pathos; when her friend the director of the gardens came to her, she put her arms round his neck, kissed him three times, and then lay down on her bed and giving him her hand fell into her last sleep. One cannot but think that creatures so sagacious must learn in their wild state. Indeed less clever animals seem to some extent to teach their young, birds to sing, wolves to hunt, although it is most difficult for naturalists in such cases to judge what comes by instinct and what is consciously learnt. Philosophers have tried to draw a hard and fast line between the animal and human mind. The most celebrated of these attempts is Locke's, where in his Essay concerning Human Understanding he lays it down that beasts indeed have ideas, but are without man's faculty of forming ab- stract or general ideas. Now it is true that we have learnt to reason with abstract ideas, such as solidity and fluidity, quantity and quality, vegetable and animal, courage and cowardice ; and that there is not the least reason to suppose that such abstractions are formed by dogs or apes. But though the faculty of thus abstracting and generalising is one which rises to the highest flights of philosophic thought, it nmst be borne in mind that it begins in easy mental acts which seem quite possible to animals. Abstraction is noticing what several thoughts have in common, and neg- lecting their differences ; thus a general idea is obtained by not attending too closely to particulars. The simplest form of this is when only one sense at a time is attended to, as in Locke's example of the idea of whitenoss, as being that which chalk, snow, and milk, agree in. Cut, to judge by 11.] MAN AND OTPIER ANIMALS. 53 animals' actions, they also will attend to one sense at a time, as where a bull is excited by anything red. And it is most interesting to watch animals comparing a new object with their recollections or ideas of prcvioi'.s ones, practically recognising in it what is already familiar, and expecting it to behave like other individuals of its class. Cats or monkeys do not require to be shown the use of a fresh rug or cushion, when it is at all like the old one it is l)ut in place of, and the " dog of the regiment " will accept any man in the uniform as a master, whether he has seen him before or not. Thus, the very simplicity of animal thought foreshadows the results of man's higher abstraction and generalisation. Let us now read a few lines farther in Locke, and we shall see why he concludes that animals have not the power of forming abstract ideas. It is, he says, because they have no use of words or other general signs. But this itself is an easier point and far more worth arguing, than the hard question whether brutes have abstract ideas. In fact the power of speech gives about the clearest distinction that can be drawn between the action of mind in beast and man. It is far more satisfactory than another division attempted by philosophers who lay it down that while other animals have consciousness, man alone has self consciousness, that is, he not only feels and thinks, but is aware of himself as feeling and thinking. Man, we know, is capable of this self-consciousness, which is cultivated by his being able to talk about himself as he does about other persons ; but it has never been proved that animals, who we know are not apt to mistake their own bodies fot anything outside, have no consciousness of themselves. When we study the rules of sign making and language, we really ha\e some means of contrasting the animals with ourselves. Evidently it is by means of language that the 54 ANTHROPOLOGY. [cha?. human mind has been able to work out and mark the high abstract ideas we deal with so easily ; without words, how could we have reached results of combined and compared thought such as momentum, plurality, righteousness ? The great mental gap between us and the animals we study is well measured by the difference between their feeble beginnings in calling one another and knowing when they are called, and man's capacity for perfect speech. It is not merely that the highest anthropoid apes have no speech ; they have not the brain-organisation enabling them to acquire even its rudiments. Man's power of using a word, or even a gesture, as the symbol of a thought and the means of con- versing about it, is one of tlie points where we most plainly see him parting company with all lower species, and starting on his career of conquest through higher intellec- tual regions. In the comparison of man with other animals the standard should naturally be the lowest man, or savage. But the savage is possessed of human reason and speech, while his brain-power, though it has not of itself raised him to civili:!ation, enables him to receive more or less of the education which transforms him into a ci\-ilized man. To show how man may have advanced from savagery to civiliza- tion is a reasonable task, worked out to some extent in the later chapters of this volume. But tliere is no such evidence available for crossing the mental gulf that divides the lowest savage from the highest ape. On the whole, the safest con- chision warranted by facts is that the mental machinery of the lower animals is roughly similar to our own, up to a limit. Beyond this limit the human mind opens out into wide ranges of thought and feeling which the beast-mind shows no sign of approaching. If we consider man's course of life from birth to death, we see that it is, so to II.] MAN AND OTHER ANIMALS. s5 speak, founded on functions which he has in common with lower beings. Man, endowed with instinct and capable of learning by experience, drawn by pleasure and driven by pain, must like a beast maintain his life by food and Sleep, must save himself by flight, or fight it out with his foes, must propagate his species and care for the next generation. Upon this lower framework of animal life is raised the wondrous edifice of human language, science, art, and law. CHAPTER IIL RACES OF MANKIND. Differences of Race, 56 — Stature and Proportions, 56— Skull, 60 — Features, 62— Colour, 66— Hair, 71— Constitution, 73— Tempera- ment, 74 — Types of Races, 75 — Permanence, 80 — Mixture, 80 — Variation, 84 — Races of Mankind classified, 87. In the first chapter something has been already said as to the striking distinctions between the various races of man, seen in looking closely at the African negro, the Coolie of India, and the Chinese. Even among Europeans, the broad contrast between the fair Dane and the dark Genoese is recognised by all. Some further comparison has now to be made of the special differences between race and race, though the reader must understand that, without proper anatomical examination, such comparison can only be slight and imperfect. Anthropology finds race-dififerences most clearly in stature and proportions of limbs, conformation of the skull and the brain within, characters of features, skin, eyes, and hair, peculiarities of constitution, and mental and moral temperament. In comparing races as to their stature, we concern ourselves not with the tallest or shortest men of each tribe, but with the ordinary or average-sired men who may be taken as fair representatives of their whole tribe. The difference of CHAP. III.] RACES OF MANKIND. 57 general stature is well shown where a tall and a short people come together in one district. Thus in Australia the average English colonist of 5 ft. 8 in. looks clear over the heads of the 5 ft. 4 in. Chinese labourers. Still more in Sweden does the Swede of 5 ft. 7 in. tower over the stunted Lapps, whose average measure is not much over 5 ft. Among the tallest of mankind are the Patagonians, who seemed a race of giants to the Europeans who first watched them striding along their cliffs draped in their skin cloaks ; it was even declared that the heads of Magalhaens' men hardly reached the waist of the first Patagonian they met Modern travel- lers find, on measuring them, that they really often reach 6 ft. 4in., their mean height being about 5 ft. 11 in. — three or four inches taller than average Englishmen. The shortest of mankind are the Bushmen and related tribes in South Africa, with an average height not far exceeding 4 ft. 6 in. A fair contrast between the tallest and shortest races of mankind may be seen in Fig. 8, where a Patagonian is drawn side by side with a Bushman, whose head only reaches to his breast. Thus the tallest race of man is less than one-fourth higher than the shortest, a fact which seems surprising to those not used to measurements. Struck by the effect of such difference of stature one is apt to form an exaggerated notion of its amount, which is really small compared with the disproportion in si::e between various breeds of other species of animals, as the toy pug and the mastiff, or the Shetland pony and the dray-horse. In general, the stature of the women of any race may be taken as about one-sixteenth less than that of the men. Thus in England a man of 5ft. Sin. and a woman , of 5fL 4 in. look an ordinary well-matched couple. Not only the stature, but the proportions of the body diffei m men of various races. Care must be taken not to 58 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. confuse real race-differences with the alterations made by the individual's early training or habit of life, such as the bow- legs of grooms, and the still more crooked legs of the Indians of 'British Columbia, who get them misshaped by continually sitting cramped up in their canoes. A man's t lo. B. — Patagon.an and Bushman. measure round the chest depends a good deal on his way of life, as do also the lengths of arm and leg, which are not even the same in soldiers and sailors. But there are certain distinctions which are inherited, and mark different races. Thus there are long-limbed and short-limbed tribes of III.] RACES OF MANKIXD. 59 mankind. The African negro is remarkable for length of arm and leg, the Aymara Indian of Peru for shortness. Sup- posing an ordinary Englishman to be altered to the build of a negro, he would want 2 in. more in the arm and i in. more in the leg, while to bring him to the proportions of an Aymara his arm would have to be shortened h in. and his leg 1 in. from their present lengths. An instructive way of noticing these difterences is to look back to the skeletons of apes and man (Fig. 5). In an ui)right jjosition and reaching down with the middle fmger, the gibbon can touch its foot, the orang its ankle, the chim- panzee its knee, while man only reaches partly down his thigh. Here, however, there seems to be a real distinction among the races of man. Negro soldiers standing at drill bring .he middle finger-tip an inch or two nearer the knee than white men can do, and some have been even known to touch the knee-pan. Such differences, however, are less remarkable than the general correspondence in bodily ])ro- l)ortions of a model of strength and beauty, to whatever race lie may belong. Even good judges have been led to forget the niceties of race-type and to treat the form of the atl le e as everywhere one and the same. Thus Benjamin West, the American painter, when he came to Rome and saw the Belvedere Apollo, exclaimed, ." It is a young Mohawk warrior 1 " Much the same has been said of the proportions of Zulu athletes. Yet if fairly -chosen photographs of Kafirs be compared with a classic model such as the Apollo, it will be noticed that the trunk of the African has a somewhat w-all-sided straightness, wanting in the inward slope which gives fineness to the waist, and in the expansion below which gives breadth across the hips, these being two of the most noticeable points in the classic model which our painters recognise as an ideal of manly beauty. By this 6o ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. kind of comparison much may be done in distinguishing standard types of races. Yet, while acknowledging the reality of such varieties in the build of men of different race, we have again to remark how slight they are compared with the variation in the limbs of different breeds of lower animals. In comparing races, one of the first questions that occurs is whether people who differ so much intellectually as savage tribes and civilized nations, show any corresponding difference in their brain. There is, in fact, a considerable difference. The most usual way of ascertaining the quantity of brain is to measure the capacity of the brain-case by filling skulls with shot or seed. Professor Flower gives as a mean estimate of the contents of skulls in cubic inches, Australian, seventy-nine ; African, eighty-five ; European, ninety-one. Eminent anatomists also think that the brain of the European is somewhat more complex in its convolutions than the brain of a Negro or Hottentot. Thus, though these observations are far from perfect, they show a connexion between a more full and intricate system of brain-cells and fibres, and a higher intellectual power, in the races which have risen in the scale of civilization. The form of the skull itself, so important in its relation to the brain within and the expressive features without, has been to the anatomist one of the best means of distin- guishing races. It is often possible to tell by inspection of a skull what race it belongs to. The narrow cranium of the negro (Fig. c^a) would not be mistaken for the broad cranium of the Samoyed (Fig. 9^.) On taking down from a museum shelf a certain narrow, wall-sided, roof-topped, forward-jawed skull with unusually strong brow-ridges (Fig. I od), there is no difliculty in recognising it as Australian. In comparing skulls, some of the most easily noticeable distinctions are llie following. in.] RACES OF MANKIND. 6i When looked at from the vertical or top view, the pro- portion of breadth to length is sjen as in Fig. 9. Taking the diameter from back to front as 100, the cross diameter gives the so-called index of breadth, which is here about 70 in the Negro (a), 80 in the European (/'), and 85 in the Samoyed (c). Such skulls are classed respectively as dolichokepJialii\ or " long-headed ; " }nesokephaUc, or " middle- headed ; " and braiJiykcplialic, or " short-headed." A model skull of a flexible material like gutta-percha, if of the middle Fig. 9 — Top view of pkulls. a, Negro, index 70, doUchokepha'ic : h. European, inde.>c 80, me.sokephalic ; c, bamv/yed, index 85, brachykephalic. shape, like that of an ordinary Englishman, might, by pres- sure at the sides, be made long like a negro's, or by pressure at back and front be brought to the broad Tatar form. In the above figure it may be noticed that while some skulls, as b, have a somewhat elliptical form, others, as a, are ovoid, having the longest cross diameter considerably behind the centre. Also in some classes of skulls, as in a, the zygo- matic arches connecting the skull and face are fully seen ; while in others, as b and r, the bulging of the skull almost hides them. In the front and back view of skulls, the pro- portion of width to height is taken in much the same way 6 62 ANTHROPOLOGY, [chap. as the index of breadth just described. Next> Fig. lo, which represents in profile the skulls of an Australian (cz'), a negro {e), and an Englishman (/), shows the strong difference in the facial angle between the two lower races and our own. The Australian and African are prognathous, or " forward-jawed," while the European is ort/iognathous, or " upright-jawed." At the same time the Australian and African have move retreating foreheads than the European, Fig. io. — Side view of skulls, d, Atutralian, prognathous; / European, orthognathous. African, pr.-gnathous ; to the disadvantage of the frontal lobes of their brain as compared with ours. Thus the upper and lower parts of the profile combine to give the faces of these less-civilized peoples a somewhat ape-like slope, as distinguished from the more nearly upright European face. Not to go into nicer distinctions of cranial measurement, let us now glance at the evident points of the living face. To some extent feature directly follows the shape of the III.] RACES OF MANKIND. C3 skull beneath. Thus the contrast just mentioned, between the forward-sloping negro skull and its more upright form in the white race, is as plainly seen in the portraits of a Swaheli negro and a Persian, given in Fig. ii. On looking at the female portraits in Fig. 13, the Carolong girl (South Africa) may be selected as an example of the effect of narrowness of skull (/'), in contrast with the broader Tatar, and North American faces {d, f). Siie also shows the convex African forehead, wliile they, as well as the Vv; II. — a, Swahel. ; /', Per i:in. Hottentot M, show the effect of high cheek-bones. The Tatar and Japan.^se faces (d, e) show the skew-eyelids of the Mongolian raco. Miicli of the character of the human face dcpjnds on the shape of the softer parts — nose, lips, cheeks, chin, &c., which are often excellent marks to distinguish race. Contrasts in the form of nose may even exceed that hero shown between the aquiline of the Persian and the snub of the Negro in Figs. 11 and 13. Furopcan travellers in Tartary in the middle ages described its iku-nosed Fig. 12 — Female portraits, a. Negro (W. Africa) ; /), BaroLnsr (S. Afr'.ca); c, Hot- temot; d, Gilyak(N. Asia) ; e, Japanese ; / Col.rad^ Inj:an(N. America), g, English. III.] RACES OF MANKIND. 65 inhabitants as having no noses at all, but breathing through holes in their faces. By pushing the ti])s of our own noses upward, we can in some degree imitate the manner in which various other races, notably the negro, show the opening of the nostrils in full face. Our thin, close-fitting lips, differ in the extreme from those of the Fig. 13. — Afiican negro. negro, well seen in tlie portrait (Fig. 13) of Jacob Wain- wright, Livingstone's faithful boy. ^\'c cannot imitate the negro lip by mere pouting, but must push the edges up and down with the fingers to show more of the inner lip. The expression of the human face, on which intelligence and fueling write themselves in visible characters, requires an artist's training to understand and describe. The mere 66 ANTHROPOLOGY. [CPIAP. contour of the features, as taken by photography in an unchanging attitude, has dehcate characters which we ap- preciate by long experience in studying faces, but which elude exact description or measurement. With the purpose of calling attention to some well-marked peculiarities of the human face in different races, a small group of female faces (Fig. 12) is here given, all young, and such as would be considered among their own people as at least moderately Fig 14. — Secti n of negro skin, mnch ma.cnirir,i ( it .1 I . .lllcpr). a, dermis, or true sk.n ; /', c, rete muco.^uin ; ) has an oval or elliptical sec- tion ; the woolly African hair (c) is more flattened ; while the frizzy Papuan hair (t/) is a yet more extreme example of the flattened ribbon-like kind. Curly and woolly hair has a lop-sided growth from the root which gives the twist. Not only the colour and form of the hair, but its quantity, vary in different races. Thus the heads of the Bushmen are more scantily furnished with hair than lii.J RACES OF MANKIND. 73 ours, while among tho Crow Indians it was common for the warrior's coarse black hair to sweep on the ground behind him. The body-hair also is scanty in some races and plentiful in others. Thus the Ainos, the indigenes of Yeso, are a shaggy people, while the Japanese possessors of their island are comparatively hairless. So strong is the contrast, that the Japanese have invented a legend that in ancient times the Aino mothers suckled young bears, which gradually developed into men. That certain races are constitutionally fit and others unfit for certain climates, is a fact which the English have but too good reason to know, when on the scorch- ing plains of India they themselves become languid and Fig. 15. — Sections of ha'.r. hig'^lv magnified (after Pruner). n. Japanese ; /', German ; c, African negro ; d, Papuan sickly, while their children have soon to be removed to some cooler climate that they may not pine and die. It is well-known also that races are not affected alike by certain diseases. While in Equatorial Africa or the West Indies the coast-fever and yellow-fever are so fatal or injurious to the new-come Europeans, the negros and even mulattos are almost untouched by this scourge of the white nations. On the other hand, we English look upon measles as a trifling complaint, and hear with astonisli- ment of its being carried into Fiji, and there, aggravated no doubt by improper treatment, sweeping away the natives by thousands. It is plain that nations moving into a new 74 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. climate, if they are to flourisli, must become adapted in body to the new state of life ; thus in the rarefied air of the high Andes more respiration is required than in the plains, and in fact tribes living there have the chest and lungs developed to extraojdinary size. Races, though capable of gradual acclimatization, must not change too suddenly the climate they are adapted to. With this adaptation to particular climates the complexion has much to do, fitting the negro for the tropics and the fair-white for the temperate zone ; though, indeed, colour does not always vary with climate, as wheie in America the brown race extends through hot and cold regions alike. Fitness for a special climate, being matter of life or death to a race, must be reckoned among the chief of race-characters. Travellers notice striking distinctions in the temper of races. There seems no difference of condition between the native Indian and the African negro in Brazil to make the brown man dull and sullen, while the black is over, flowing with eagerness and gaiety. So, in Europe, the un- likeness between the melancholy Russian peasant and the vivacious Italian can hardly dopend altogether on climate and food and government. There seems to be in mankind inbred temperament and inbred capacity of mind. History points the great lesson that some races have marched on in civilization while others have stood still or fallen back, and we should partly look for an explanation of this in differences of intellectual and moral powers between such tribes as the native Americans and Africans, and the Old World nations who overmatch and subdue them. In mea- suring the minds of the lower races, a good test is how far their children are able to take a civihzed education. The account generally given by European teachers who have III.] RACKS OF MANKIND. 75 had the children of lower races in their schools is that, though these often learn as well as the white children up to about twelve years old, they then fall off, and are left behind by the children of the ruling race. This fits with what anatomy teaches of the less development of brain in the Australian and African than in the European. It agrees also with what the history of civilization teaches, that up to a certain point savages and barbarians are like what our ancestors were and our peasants still are, but from this common level the superior intellect of the i)rogressive races has raised their nations to heights of culture. The white man, though now dominant over the world, must remember that intellectual progress has been by no means the monopoly of his race. At the dawn of history, the leaders of culture were the brown Egyptians, and the lUbylonians, whose Akkadian is not connected with the language of white nations, while the yellow Chinese, whose Tatar affinity \z evident in their hair and features, have been for four thousand years or more a civilized and literary nation. The dark-whites, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, did not start but carried on the forward move- ment of culture, while since then the fair-whites, as part of the population of France, Germany, and England, have taken their share not meanly though latest in the world's progress. After thus noticing some of the chief points of difference among races, it will be well to examine more closely what a race is. Single portraits of men and women can only in a general way represent the nation they belong to, for no two of its individuals are really alike, not even brothers. What is looked for in such a race portrait is the general character belonging to the whole race. It is an often repeated observation of travellers that a European landing 76 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. among some people unlike his own, such as Chinese or Mexican Indians, at first thinks them all alike. After days of careful observation he makes out their individual peculiari- ties, but at first his attention was occupied with the broad typical characters of the foreign race. It is just this broad type that the anthropologist desires to sketch and describe, and he selects as his examples such portraits of men and women as show it best. It is even possible to measure the type of a people. To give an idea of the working of this problem, let us suppose ourselves to be examining Scotch- men, and the first point to be settled how tall they are. Obviously there are some few as short as Lapps, and some as tall as Patagonians; these very short and tall men DWARFS AVERAGE M£/J QIANTS S FT a IV I'lq. 16. — Race or Population arranged by Stature (Gal'.on's method). belong to the race, and yet are not its ordinary members. If, however, the whole population were measured and made to stand in order of height, there would be a crowd of men about five feet eight inches, but much fewer of either five feet four inches or six feet, and so on till the npmbers decreased on either side to one or two giants, and one or two dwarfs. This is seen in Fig. 16, where each indi- vidual is represented by a dot, and the dots representing men of the mean or typical stature crowd into a mass. After looking at this, the reader will more easily understand Quetelet's diagram. Fig. 17, where the heights or ordinates of the binomial curve show the numbers of men of each III.] RACES OF MANKIND. 77 stature, decreasing both ways from the central five feet eight inches which is the stcture of the mean or typical man. Here, in a total of near 2,600 men, there are 160 of five feet eight inches, but only about 150 of five feet seven inches or five feet nine inches, and so on, till not even ten men are found so short as five feet or so tall as six feet four inches. As the proverb says, " it takes all sorts to make a world," so it thus appears that a race is a body of people comprising a regular set of variations, which centre round one representative type. In the same way a race or nation is estimated as to other characters, as where a mean r / NO 130 / j 1 1 \ on 1 j 1 \ __ ftrt J / \ <0 /[ i\ - — 30 ! \ 11 !_^,^^ ^ "'^'s'.^ L' 5 8 6.0 6.4 6.8 Fig. 17.— Race or Population arranged by Stature (Quetelet's method). or typical Englishman may be said to measure 36 inches round the chest, and weigh about 144 pounds. So it is possible to fix on the typical shade of complexion in a nation, such as the Zulu black-brown. The result of these plans is to show that the rough-and-ready method of the traveller is fairly accurate, when he chooses as his representative of a race the type of man and woman which he finds to exist more numerously than any other. 7S ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. Fig. 18— Caribs. III.] RACES OF MANKIND. 79 The people whom it is easiest to represent by single portraits are uncivilised tribes, in whose food and way of life there is little to cause difference between one man and another, and who have lived together and intermarried fcr many generations. Thus Fig. i8, taken from a photograph of a party of Caribs, is remarkable for the close likeness running through all. In such a nation the race-type is peculiarly easy to make out. It is by no means always thus easy to represent a whole population. To see how difficult Fig. 19.— (") Head of Rameses II , Ancient Eg>'pt. (/■) Sheikh's son, Modem iigypu (After Ilartinunu.) it may be, one has only to look at an English crowd, with its endless diversity. But to get a view of the problem of human varieties, it is best to attend to the simplest cases first, looking at some uniform and well-marked So ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. race, and asliing what in the course of a^es may happea to it. The first thing to be noticed is its power of lasting. Where a people lives on in its own district, without too much change in habits, or mixture with other nations, there seems no reason to expect its type to alter. The Egyptian monuments show good instances of this permanence. In Fig. 19, (7 is drawn from the head of a statue of Rameses, evidently a careful portrait, and dating from about 3,000 years ago, while b is an Egyptian of the present day, yet the ancient and modern are curiously alike. Indeed, the ancient Egyptian rice, who built the I^yramids, and whose life of toil is pictured on the walls of the tombs, are with little change still represented by the fellahs of the villages, who carry on the old labour under new tax-gatherers. Thus, too, the ^Ethiopians on the early Egyptian bas-reliefs may have their counterparts picked out still among the White Nile tribes, while we recognise in the figures of Phoenician or Israelite captives the familiar Jewish profile of our own day. Thus there is proof that a race may keep its special characters plainly recognizable for over thirty centuries, or a hundred generations. And this permanence of type may more or less remain when the race migrates far from its early home, as when African negroes are carried into America, or Israelites naturalize themselves from Archangel to Singapore. Where marked change has taken place in the appearance of a nation, the cause of this change must be sought in intermarriage with foreigners, or altered conditions of life, or both. The result of intermarriage or crossing of races is familiar to all English people in one of its most conspicuous examples, the cross between white and negro called mulatto (Spanish ntulato, from inula, a nmle). The mulatto complexion and III.] RACES OF MANKIND. hair arc intermediate between those of the parents, and new intermediate grades of complexion appear in the children of white and mulatto, called quadroon or quarter- blood (Spanish ciiartcro/i), and so on ; on the other hand, tlie descendants of negro and mulatto, called sambo (Si>anish zambo) return towards the full negro t}'pe. This intermediate Fig. 20. — .M.iuiv .Mother and Half-caste- D.iugiiters. character is the general nature of crossed races, but with more or less tendency to revert to one or other of the parent types. To illustrate this, Fig. 20 gives the portrait of a Malay mother and her half-caste daughters, the father being a Spaniard ; here, while all the children show their mixed race, it is sometimes the European and sometimes the 82 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. Malay cast of features that prevails. The effect of mixture is also traceable in the hair, as may often be well noticed in a mulatto's crimped, curly locks, between the straighter European and the woolly African kind. The Cafusos of Brazil, a peculiar cross between the native tribes of the land and the imported negro slaves, are remarkable for their hair, which rises in a curly mass, forming a natural periwig which obliges the wearers to stoop low in passing through their liut doors. This is seen in the portrait of a Cafusa, Fig. 21, and seems easily accounted for by the long stiff hair of the native American having acquired in some degree the negro frizziness. The bodily temperament of mixed races also partakes of the parent-characters, as is seen in the mulatto who inherits from his negro ancestry the power of bearing a tropical climate, as well as freedom from yellow fever. Not only does a mixed race arise wherever two races inhabit the same district, but within the last few centuries it is well known that a large fraction of the world's popula- tion lias actually come into existence by race-crossing. i:i.] RACES OF MANKIND. 83 This is nowhere so evident as on the American continent, where since the Spanish conquest sucli districts as Mexico are largely peopled by the mestizo descendants of Spaniards and native Americans, while th.e importation of African slaves in the West Indies has given rise to a mulatto population. By taking into account such inter- crossing of races, anthropologists have a reason to give for the endless shades of diversity among mankind, without attenipting the hopeless task of classifying every little uncertain group of men into a special race. The water- carrier frcm Cairo, in Fig. 22, may serve as an example of the difficulty of making a systematic arrangement to set each man down to his precise race. This man speaks Arabic, and is a Moslem, but he is not an Arab proper, r either is he an Egyptian of the old kingdom, but the child of a land where the Nubian, Copt, Syrian, Bedouin, and many other peoples have mingled for ages, and in fact his ancestry may come out of three quarters of the globe. Among the natives of India, a variety of complexion and feature is found which cannot be classified exactly by race. But it must be remembered that several very distinct varieties of men have contributed to the population of the country, namely the dark-brown indigenes or hill-tribes, the yellow Mongolians who have crossed the frontiers from Tibet, and the fairer ancient Aryans or Indo-Europeans who poured in from the north-west ; not to mention others, the mixture of these nations going on for ages lias of course produced numberless crosses. So in Europe, taking the fair nations of the Baltic and the dark nations of the Mediterranean as two distinct races or varieties, their inter- crossing may explain the infinite diversity of brown hiir and intermediate complexion to be met with. If then it may be considered that man was already divided into a few 84 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. great main races in remote antiquity, tlieir intermarriage through ages since will go far to account for the innumerable slighter varieties which shade into one another. It is not enough to look at a race of men as a mere body of people happening to have a common type or likeness. For the reason of their likeness is plain, and indeed our calling them a race means that we consider them a breed whose common nature is inherited from common ancestors. Now experience of the animal world shows that a race or breed, III.] RACES OF MANKIND. 85 while capable of carrying on its likeness from generation to generation, is also capable of varying. In fact, the skilful cattle-breeder, by carefully choosing and pairing individuals which vary in a particular direction, can within a (gw years form a special breed of cattle or sheep. "Without such direct interference of man, special races or breeds of animals form themselves under new conditions of climate and food, as in the familiar instances of the Shetland i)onies, or the mustangs of the Mexican plains which have bred from the horses brought over by the Spaniards. It naturally suggests itself that the races of man may be thus accounted for as breeds, varied from one original stock. It may be strongly argued in this direction that not only do the bodily and mental varieties of mankind blend gradually into one another, but that even the most dissimilar races can intermarry in all directions, producing mixed or sub-races which, when left to themselves, continue their own kind. Advocates of the polygenist theory, that there are several distinct races of man, sprung from independent origins, have denied that certain races, such as the English and native Australians, produce fertile half-breeds. But the evidence tends more and more to establish crossing as possible between all races, which goes to prove that all the varieties of mankind are zoologically of one species. While this principle seems to rest on firm ground, it must be admitted that our knowledge of the manner and causes of race-variation among mankind is still very imperfect. The great races, black, brown, yellow, white, had already settled into their well-known characters before written record began, so that their formation is hidden far back in the pra^-historic period. Nor are alterations of such amount known to have taken place in any people within the range of history. It has been plausibly argued that our rude primitive ancestors, being C5 ANTHROPCLOGY. [chap, less able than their posterity to make themselves inde- pendent of climate by shelter and fire and stores of food, were more exposed to alter in body under the in- lluence of the new climates they migrated into. Even in modern times, it seems possible to trace something of race-change going on imder new conditions of life. Thus Dr. Beddoe's measurements prove that in England the manufacturing town-life has given rise to a population an inch or two less in stature than their forefathers when tliey came in from their country villages. So in the Rocky ^Mountains there are clans of Snake Indians whose stunted forms and low features, due to generations of needy outcast life, mark them off from their better nourished kinsfolk in the plains. It is asserted that the pure negro in the United States has undergone a charge in a few generations which has left him a shade lighter in comple?-:ion and altered his features, while the pure white in the same region has be- come less rosy, with .darker and more glossy hair, more prominent cheek-bones and massive lower jaw. These are perhaps the best authenticated cases of race-change. There IS great difficulty in watching a race undergoing variation, which is everywhere masked by the greater changes caused by new nations coming in to mingle and intermarry with the old. He who should argue from the Greek sculptures that the national type has changed since the age of Pcrikles, would be met with the answer that the remains of the old stock have long been inextricably blended with others. The points which have now been brought forward will suffice to show the uncertainty and difficulty of any attempt to trace exactly the origin and course of the races of man. Yet at the same time there is a ground-work to go upon in the fact that these races are not found spread indiscriminately over the earth's surface, but certain III.] RACES OF MANKIND. C7 races plainly belong to certain regions, seeming each to have taken shape under the influences of climate and soil in its proper district, where it flourished, and whence it spread far and wide, modifying itself and mingling with other races as it went. 'I'he following brief sketch may give an idea how the si)reading and mixture of the great races may have taken place. It embodies well-considered views of eminent anatomists, especially Professors Huxley and Flower. Though such a scheme cannot be presented as proved and certain, it is desirable to clear and fix our ideas by understanding that man's distribution over the earth did not take place by promiscuo.is scattering of tribes, but along great lines of movement whose regularity can be often discerned, where it cannot be precisely followed out. That there is a real connexion between the colour of races and the climate they belong to, seems most likely from the so-called black peoples. Ancient writers were satisfied to account for the colour of the ^-Ethiopians by saying that the sun had burnt them black, and though modern anthro- pologists would not settle the question in this off-hand way, yet the map of the world shows that this darkest race- type is principally found in a tropical climate. The main line of black races stretches along the hot and fjrtile regions of the equator, from Guinea in West Africa to that great island of the Eastern Archipelago, which has its name of New Guinea from its negro-like natives. In a former geological period an ctiuatorial continent (to v/hich Sclater has given the name of Lemuria) may even have stretched across from Africa to the far East, uniting these now separate lands. The attention of anthropologists has been particularly attracted by a line of islands in the Sea of Bengal, the Andamans, which might have been part of this former continent, and were found inhabited by a scanty population 88 ANTHROPOLOGY.* [chap. of rude and childlike savages. These Mincopis (Fig. 23) are small in stature {the men under five feet), with skin of blackness, and hair very flat in section and frizzled, which from their habit of shaving their heads must be imagined by the reader. But while in these points resembling the African \ ^5^ /T^'^-^' Fic;. 23. — Andaiiian Islanders. negro, they are unlike him in having skulls not narrow, but broad and rounded, nor have they lips so full, a nose so wide, or jaws so projecting as his. It has occurred to anatomists, and the opinion has been strengthened by Flower's study of their skulls, that the Andaman tribes may be a remnant of a very early human stock, perhaps the best representa- III.] RACES OF MANKIND. 89 lives of tlie primitive negro type which has since altered in various points in its spread oser its wide district of the world. The African negro race, with its special marks of narrow skull, projecting jaws, black-brown skin, woolly hair, flattjned nose, full and out-turned lips, has already been here described (see pages 61 to 67). Its type perhaps shows itself most perfectly in the nations near the equator, as in Guinea, but it spreads far and wide over the continent, shading off by crossing with lighter coloured races on its borders, such as the Berbers in the north, and the Arabs on the east coast. As the race spreads southward into Congo and the Kafir regions, there is noticed a less full negro complexion and feature, looking as though migration from the central region into new climates had somewhat modified the type. In this respect the small- grown Hottentot-Bushman tribes of South Africa (see Figs. 8, 12^) are most remarkable, for while keeping much negro character in the narrow skull, frizzy hair, and cast of features, their skm is of a lighter tint of brownish-yellow. There is nothing to suggest that this came by crossing the negro type with a fairer race, indeed there is no evidence of such a race to cross with. If the Bushman is a special modification of the Negro, then this is an excellent case of the transformation of races when placed under new conditions. To return now to Southern Asia, there are found in the Malay Peninsula and the Philippines scanty forest-tribes apparently allied to the Andamaners and classed under the general term Negritos {i.e. " little blacks "), seeming to belong to a race once widely spread over this part of the world, whose remnants have been driven by stronger new-come races to find refuge in the mountains. Fig. 24, represents one of them, an Aheta from the island of Luzon. Lastly come the wide-spread and go ANTHROPOLOGY. [CIIAP. complicated varieties of the eastern negro race in the region known as Melanesia, the "black islands," extending from New Guinea to Fiji. The group of various islanders (Fig. 25) belonging to Bishop Patteson's mission, shows plainly the resemblance to the African negro, though with some marked IDoints of difference, as in the brows being more strongly Fig. 24. — Aheta (Negrito), Philippine Islands. ridged, and the nose being more prominent, even aquiline — a striking contrast to the African. The Melanesians about New Guinea are called Papuas from their woolly hair (Malay J)apiiwah=^inzzQd), which is often grown into enormous mops. The great variety of colour in Melanesia, from the full brown-black down to chocolate or nut-brown, shows HI.] RACES CF MANKIND. 91 that there has been much crossing with hghter populations. Such mixture is evident in the coast-people of Fiji, where the dark Melanesian race is indeed predominant, but crossed with the lighter Polynesian race to which mucli of the lan- guage and civilization of the islands belongs. Lastly, the Tasmanians were a distant outlying population belongin;_, to the eastern blacks. Fig. -Mclanesians. In Australia, that vast i.-.land-continent, whose plants and animals are not those of Asia, but seem as it were survivors from a long-past period of the earth's history, there appears a thin population of roaming savages, strongly distinct from the blacker races of New Guinea at the north, and Tas- mania at the south. The Australians, with skin of dark ANTHROPOLCGY, [chap. tes^'c-^ HI.] RACES OF MANKIND. 93 Fig. 28. — Aii>iKii..ui ^vju^xn^iand) women. chocolate-colour, maybe taken as a special type of the brown races of man. While their skull is narrow and prognatlious like the negro's, it differs from it in special points which have 9+ ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. been already mentioned (page 60), and has, indeed, pecu- liarities which distinguish it very certainly from that of other races. In the portraits of Australians, Figs. 26, 27, 28, there may be noticed the heavy brows and projecting jaws, the wide but not flat nose, the full lips, and the curly but not woolly black hair. Looking at the map of the world to see F G. 29. — Dravidlan hill -man (after Fryer). where brown races next appear, good authorities define one on the continent of India. There the hill-tribes present the type of the old dwellers in south and central India before the conquest by the Aryan Hindus, and its purest form appears in tribes hardly tilling the soil, but living a wild life in the jungle, while the great mass, more mixed in race with tli^ Hindus, under whose influence they have III.l RACES OF MANKIND. 95 boen !or ages, now form the great Dravidian nations of the south, such as the Tamil and Telugu. Fig. 29 repre- sents one of ihe ruder Dravidians, from the Travancore forests. Farcher tvest, it has been thought that a brown Fig. 30. — Kalniuk (alter G-Iusiiudj. fp.ce may be distinguished in Africa, taking in Nubian tribes and less distinctly traceable in the Berbers of Algiers and Tunis. If so, to this race the ancient Egyptiftis would seem 56 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. main]y to belong, though mixed with Asiatics, who from remote antiquity came in over the Syrian border. The Egyptian drawings of themselves (as in Chaps. IX. to XL) require the eyes to be put in profile and the body coloured reddish-brown to represent the race to us. None felt more strongly than the Egyptian of ancient Thebes, that among Fig. 31. — Goldi (Amur). the chief distinctions between the races of mankind were the complexion and feature which separated him from the /Ethiopian on the one hand, and the Assyrian or Israelite on the other. Turning to another district of the world, the Mongoloid type of man has its best marked representatives on the vast i:i] RACES CF MANKIND. 97 steppes of northern Asia. Their skin is brownish-yellow, their hair of the head black, coarse, and long, but face- hair scanty. Their skull is characterized by breadth, pro- jection of cheek-bones, and forward position of the outer t lU. 3-. — :3.a.UlC^C aC»I'C^iCi. edge of the orbits, which, as well as the tliglitness of brow-ridges, the slanting aperture of the eyes, and the snub-nose, are observable in Tigs. 30 and 31, and in Fig. 12 d. The Mongoloid race is immense in rangj and 53 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. numbers. The great nations of south-east Asia show their connexion with it in the familiar complexion and features of the Chinese and Japanese. Figs. 32, 33, 34 are portraits from Siam, Cochin-ChiLa, and Corea. In his wide migra- tions over the world, the Mongoloid, through change of climate and life, and still farther by intermarriage with other races, loses more and more of his special points. It is so J'lG. 33. — Cochin-Cli.iitse. in the south-east, where in China and Jr.pan the characLer- istic breadth of skull is lessened. In Europe, where from remotest antiquity hordes of Tatar race have poured in, their descendants have often preserved in their languages, such as Hungarian and Finnish, clearer traces of their Asiatic home than can be made out in their present types of com- plexion and feature. Yet the I'"inns, Figs. 35 and 36, have not lost the race-differences which mark them off from the III.] RACES OF MANKIND. 99 Swedes among whom they dwell, and the stunted Lapps show some points of likeness to their Siberian kinsfolk, who wander like them with their reindeer on the limits of the Arctic regions. In pursuing beyond this point the examination of the races of the world, the problem becomes more obscure. On the Malay peninsula, at the extreme south-east corner of Asia, appear the first members of the Malay race. ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. i:i.] RACES OF MANKIND. ICI I02 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. seemingly a distant branch of the Mongoloid, which spreads over Sumatra, Java, and other islands of the Eastern Archipelago. Figs. 37 and 38 give portraits of the more civilised Malays, whib Fig. 39 shows the Dayaks of Borneo, who represent the race in a wilder and perhaps loss mixed state. From the Malay Archipelago there stretch into the Pacific the island ranges first of INIicronesia and then of Polynesia, till we reach Easter Island to the east and New Zealand to the south. The Micronesians and Polynesians show connexion with tlie Malays in language, and more or less in bodily make. But they are not Malays proper, and there are seen among them high faces, narrow noses, and small mouths which remind us of the European face, as in the Micronesian, Fig. 40, who stands here to represent this varied group of peoples. The Maoris are still further from being pure Malays, as is seen by their more curly hair, often prominent and even aquiline noses. It seems hkely that an Asiatic race closely allied to Malays may have spread over the South Sea Islands, altering their special type by crossing with tlie dark Melanesians, so that now the populations of different island groups often vary much in appearance. This race of sailors even found their way to Madagascar, where their descendants have more or .ess blended with a population from the continent of Africa. Turning now to the double continent of America, we find in this New World a problem of race remarkably different from that of the Old World. The traveller who should cross the earth from Nova Zemlya to the Cape of Good Hoi>e or Van Diemen's Land would find in its various climates various strongly-marked kinds of men, white, yellow, brown, and black. But if Columbus had surveyed America from the Arctic to the Antarctic regions, he would have found no such extreme unlikeness in the i:ij RACES OF MANKIND. 1^3 !■ 11.. ^j -U.y. I04 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. inhabitants. Apart from the Europeans and Africans who liave poured in since the fifteenth century, the native i'm 40 — ls.inj;smill Islander. Americans in general might be, as has often been said, of one race. Not that they are all alike, but their differences in stature, form of skull, feature, and complexion, though III.] RACES OF MANKIND. loj considerable, seem variations of a secondary kind. It is not as if several races had formed each its proper type ia its proper region, but as if the country had been peopled by migrating tribes of a ready-made race, who had only to spread and acclimatise themselves over both tropical and temperate zones, much as the European horses have done since the time of Columbus, and less perfectly the white men themselves. The race to which most anthropologists refer the native Americans is the Mongoloid of East Asia, who are capable of accommodating themselves to the ex- tremest climates, and who by the form of skull, the light- brown skin, straight black hair, and black eyes, show con- siderable agreement with the American tribes. Figs. 41 and 42 represent the wild hunting-tribes of North America in one of the finest forms now existing, the Colorado Indians, while in Fig. 43 the Cauixana Indians may stand as examples of the rude and sluggish forest-men of Brazil. While tribes of America and Asia may thus be of one original stock, we must look cautiously at theories as to the ocean and island routes by wliich Asiatics may have migrated to people the New World. It is probable that man had appeared there, as in the Old World, in an earlier geological period than the present, so that the first kinship between the Mongols and the North American Indians may go back to a time when there was no ocean between them. What looks like later communication be- tween the two continents, is that the stunted Eskimo with their narrow roof-topped skulls may be a branch of the Japanese stock, while there are signs of the comparatively civilized Mexicans and Peruvians having in somj \\ay received arts and ideas from Asiatic nations. We come last to the white men, whose nations have all through history been growing more and more dominant ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. Fig. 41— Colorado hid. an (Nor.h Amcnca). intellectually, morally, and politically on the earth. Though commonly spoken of as one variety of mankind, it is plain that they are not a single uniform race, but a varied and in.] RACES OF MANKIND. 107 Fic;. 42 — Ci/I>irad J Injiuii (Nijr;li Amcri.;.!). mixed population. It is a step toward classing them to separate them into two great divisions, the dark-whites and fair-wliites (melanochroi, xanthochroi). Ancient portraits ro;; ANTIIROPO" OCV. [CUAP. l'i(.. 43.— CauLxana Indians (South America). have come down to us of the dark-white nations, as Assy- rians, Phoenicians, I'ersians, Greeks, Romans ; and wluu III.] RACES OF MANKIND. log beside these are placed moderns siicli as the Andahisians, and the dark Welshmen or Bretons, and people from the Caucasus, it will be evident that the resemblance running through all these can only be in broad and general charac- ters. They have a dusky or brownish-white skin, black or deep brown eyes, black hair, mostly wavy or curly ; theii skulls vary much in proportions, though seldom extremely broad or narrow, while the profile is upright, the nose straight or aquiline, the lips less full than in othjr races. Rather for form's sake than for a real type of the dark-whites, a group of Georgians are shown in Fig. 44. Opposite them Fig. 45, a group of Swedes, somewhat better represents the fair-whites, whose transparent skin, flaxen hair, and blue eyes may be seen as well, though not as often, in England as in Scandinavia or North Germany. The earliest recorded appearance of fair-whites may be in the paintings where Egyptian artists represent with yellowish-white skin and blue eyes certain natives of North Africa, a district where remnants of blonde tribes are still known. These fair Libyans, as well as the fair red-haired people who appear about Syria, and are known to us as forming a type among the Jews, may perhaps be connected in race with the fair nations who were already settled over the north of Europe when the classic writers begin to give accounts of its barbar- ous inhabitants, from the Goths northward to the dwellers in Thule. The intermarriage of the dark and fair varieties which has gone on since these early times, has resulted in numberless varieties of brown-haired jieople, bjtween fair and dark in complexion. But as to the origin and first home of the fair and dark races themselves, it is hard to form an opinion. Language does much toward tracing the early history of the white nations, but it does not clear up the difiiculty of separating fair-whites from darlc-whites. Both 9 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. sorts have been living united by national language, as at this day German is spoken by the fair Hanoverian and the darker Austrian. Among Keltic people, the Scotch Highlanders often remind us of the tall red-haired Gauls described in classical history, but there are also passages which prove Fig. 44. — Georgians. that smaller darker Kelts like the modern Welsh and Bretons existed then as well. As a help in clearing up this ])roblem, which so affects our own ancestry, Huxley suggests that the fair-whites were the original stock, and that these crossing witli the brown races of the far soutli may have III.] RACES CF MANKIND. given rise to the various kinds of dark-whites. However this may be, such mixture of the whit6 and brown races seems indeed to have largely formed the population of countries where they meet. The Moors of North Africa, and many so-called Arabs who are darker than white men, Fig. 45. — Swedes. may be thus accounted for. It is thus that in India millions who speak Hindu languages show by their tint that their race is mixed between that of the Aryan conquerors of the land and its darker indigenes. An instructive in- stance of this very combination is to be seen in the 313 ANTHRCPCLCGY. [chap. Gypsies, low-caste wanderers who found their way from India and spread over Europe not many centuries since. Fig. 46, a Gypsy woman from Wallachia, is a favourable type of these latest incomers from the East, whose broken- down Hindu dialect shows that part of their ancestry Fig. 46.— Oypsy. comes from oar Aryan forefathers, while their complexion, swarthiest in the population of our country, marks also descent belonging to a darker zone of the human species. Thus to map out the nations of the world among a few III.J RACES CF ^IANKI:n"D. 113 main vari.jtic3 of man, and their combinations, is, in spite of its ditliculty and uncertainty, a profitable task. But to account for the origin of these great primary varieties or races themselves, and exactly to assign to them their earliest homes, cannot be usefully attempted in the present scan- tiness of evidence. If man's first appearance was in a geological period when the distribution of land and sea and the climates of the earth were not as now, then on both sides of the globe, outside the present tropical zones, there were regions whose warmth and luxuriant vegetation would have favoured man's life with least need of civilized arts, and whence successive waves of population may hr.ve spread over cooler climates. It may perhaps be reasonable to imagine as latest-formed the white race of the temperate region, least able to bear extreme heat or live without the appliances of culture, but gifted with the powers of knowing and ruling which give them sway over the world. CHAPTER IV. LANGUAGE. Sign-making, 114 — Gesture-language, 114 — Scund-gestures, 120 — Na- tural Language, 122 — Utterances of Animals, 122 — Emotional and Imitative Sounds in Language, 124 — Change of Si.und and Sense, 127 — Other expression of Sense by Sound, 128 — Children's Word-, 128 — Articulate Language, its relation to Natural Language, 129 — Origin of Language, 130. There aro various ways in which men can communicate witli one another. They can make gestures, utter cries, speak words, c\vz.\y pidures, write characters or letters. These are signs of various sorts, and to understand how they do their work, let us begin by looking at such signs as are most simple and natural. When for any reason people cannot talk together by word of mouth, they take to conversing by gestures, in what is called dumb show or pantomime. Every reader of this has iieen able from childhood to carry on conversation in this way, more or less cleverly. Imagine a simple case. A boy opens the parlour door, his brother sitting there beckons to liini to be fjuiet for his father is asleep; the boy now inti- mates by signs that he has come for the key of the box, to which his brother answers by other signs tliat it is in the CH. IV] LANGUAGE. 115 pocket of his coat hanging in the hall, concluding with a significant gesture to be oft" and shut the door quietly after him. This is the ^gesture-language as we all know how to use it. But to see what a full and exact means of communica- tion it may be worked up to, it should be watched in use among the deaf-and-dumb, who have to depend so much upon it. To give an idea how far gestures can be made to do the work of spoken words, the signs may be described in which a deaf-and-dumb man once told a child's story in presence of the writer of this account. He began ny moving his hand, palm down, about a yard from the cround, as we do to show the hcii^'ht of a child — this meant that it was a child he was thinking of. Then he tied an imaginary pair of bonnet-strings under his chin (his usual sign for female), to make it understood that the child was a litde girl. The child's mother was then brought on the scene in a similar way. She beckons to the child and gives her twopence, these being indicated by pretending to drop two coins from one hand into the other ; if there had been any doubt as to whether they were copper or silver coins, this would have been settled by pointing to some- thing brown, or even by one's contemptuous way of handling cojjpers which at once distinguishes them from silver. The mother also gives the child a jar, shown by sketching its shape w'ith the forefingers in the air, and going through the act of handing it over. Then by imitating the unmistake- able kind of twist with which one turns a treacle-spoon, it is made known that it is treacle the child has to buy. Next, a wave of the hand shows the child being sent off on her errand, the usual sign of walking being added, which is made by two fingers walking on the table. The turning of an imaginary door-handle now takes us into the slioj), where the counter is shown by passing the llat hands as it were Ii6 ANTHRCPCLCGY. [chap. over it. Behind tliis counter a figure is pointed out ; he is shown to be a man by the usual hign of putting one's hand to one's chin and drawing it down where the beard is or would be ; then the sign of tying an apron round one's Avaist adds the information that the man is the shopman. To him the child gives her jar, dropping the money into his hand, and moving her forefinger as if taking up treacle, to show what she wants. Then we see the jar put into an imaginary pair of scales which go up and down ; the great treacle-jar is brought from the shelf and the little one filled, with the proper twist to take up the last trickling thread ; the grocer puts the two coins in the till, and the little girl sets off with the jar. The deaf-and-dumb story-teller went on to shoAV in pantomime how the child, looking down at the jar, saw a drop of treacle on the rim, wiped it off with her finger and put the finger in her mouth, how she was tempted to take more, how her mother found her out by the spot of treacle on her pinafore, and so forth. The student anxious to master the principles of language will find this gesture-talk so instructive, that it will be well to explain its working more closely. The signs used are of two kinds. In the first kind things actually present are shown. Thus if the deaf-mute wants to mention '•' hand " or " shoe," he touches his own hand or shoe. Where a speaking man would say '• I," " thou," "he," the deaf-mute simply points to himself and the other persons. To express "red" or "blue" he touclies the inside of his own lip or points to the sky. In the second kind of signs ideas are conveyed by imitation. Thus pretending to drink may mean "water," or "to drink," or "thirsty." Laying the cheek on the hnnd exj)resses "sleep" or "bedtime." A significant jerk of the whip-hand suggests either "whi])" or "coachman," or "to drive," as tlie case may be. A IV.] LANGUAGE. 117 "lucifer" is indicated by pretending to strike a match, and " candle " by the act of holding up the forefinger like a candle and pretending to blow it out. Also in the gesture- language the symptoms of the temper one is in may be imitated, and so become signs of the same temper in others. Thus the act of shivering becomes an expressive sign for "cold"; smiles show "joy," "approval," " goodness," while frowns show " anger," "disapproval," "badness." It might seem that such various meanings to one sign would be confusing, but there is a -s^'ay of correcting this, for when a single sign docs not make the meaning clear, others are brought in to supplement it. Thus if one wants to express " a pen," it may not be sufficient to pretend to write with one, as that might be intended for " writing " or " letter,' but if one then pretends to wipe and hold up a pen, this •will make it plain that the pen itself is meant. The signs hitherto described are self-expressive, that i', their meaning is evitlent on the face of them, or at any rate may be made out by a stranger who watches their use. Of such self-expressive or natural signs, the gesture-language mostly consists But where deaf mutes live together, there come into use among them signs which a stranger can hardly make out until it is explained to him how they arose. They will, for instance, mention one another by nickname- signs, as when a boy may be referred to by the sign of sewing, which on inquiry proves to have been given him because his father was a tailor. Such signs may be very far-fetched ; for instance, at the Berlin Deaf-and-dumb Institution, the sign of chopping off a head means a Frenchman, and on inquiry it appears that the children, struck by reading of the death of Louis XVL in the history-book, had fixed on this as a sign-name for the whole nation. But to any new child who learnt these Ii8 ANTHROPCLCGY. [chap, signs without knowing why they were chosen, they would seem artiticia]. Next to studying the gesture-language among the deaf- and-dumb, the most perfect way of making out its principles is in its use by people who can talk but do not understand one another's language. Thus the celebrated sign-languages of the American prairies, in which conversation is carried on between hunting-parties of whites and natives, and even be- tween Indians of different tribes, are only dialects (so to speak) of the gesture-language. Thus "water" is ex- pressed by pretending to scoop up water in one's hand and drink it, "stag" by putting one's thumbs to one's temples and spreading out the fingers. There is a great deal of variety in the signs among particular tribes, but such a way of communication is so natural all the world over, that when outlandish people, such as Laplanders, have been brought to be exhibited in our great cities, they have been comforted in their loneliness by meeting with deaf-and- dumb children, with whom they at once fell to conversing with deHght in the universal language of signs. Signs to be understood in this way must be of the natural self-expressive sort. Yet here also there are some which a stranger might suppose to be artificial, till he learnt that they are old signs which have lost their once pUiin intention. Thus a North American sign for "dog" is to draw one's two first fingers along like poles being trailed on the ground. This seemingly senseless sign really belongs to the days when the Indians had few horses, and used to fasten the tent-poles on the dogs to be dragged from place to place; though the dogs no longer have to do this, custom keeps up the sign. It has to be noticed that the gesture-language by no means matches, sign for word, with our spoken language. IV.] LANGUAGE. 119 One reason is that it has so little powjr of expressing abstract ideas. The deaf-mute can show particular ways of making things, such as building a wall or cutting out a coat, but it is quite beyond him to make one sign include what is common to all these, as we use the abstract term to "make."' Even "in" and "out" must be expressed in some such clumsy way as by pretending to put the thing talked of in, and take it out. Next let us compare an English sentence with the signs by which the same meaning would be ex- pressed among the deaf-and ilumb. It will at once be seen that many words we use have no signs at all corresponding to them. Thus when we should say in words, "■The hat zvhich I left on the table is black," this statement can be practically conveyed in gestures, and there will be signs for what we may call the " real " words, such as hat, leave, black. But for what may be called the "' grammatical " words, the, which, is, there will be no signs, for the gesture-language has none. Again, grammars lay down distinctions between substantives, adjectives, and verbs. But these distinctions are not to be found in the gesture-language, where pointing to a grass-plot may mean "grass" or "green," and pre- tending to warm one's hands may suggest "warm" or "to warm oneself," or even "fireplace." Nor (unless where artificial signs have been brought in by teachers) is there anything in the gesture-language to correspond with the inflexions of words, such as distinguish i;;oest from go, hint from he, domiim from donnis. What is done is to call up a picture in the minds of the spectators by first setting up something to be thought about, and then adding to or acting on it till the whole story is told. If the signs do not follow in such order as to carry meaning as they go, the looker-on will be perplexed. Thus in conveying to a deaf- and-dumb child the thought of a green box, one must make I20 ANTHRCPCLCGY. [chap. a sign for " box " fast, and then show, as by pointing to the grass outside, that its colour is " green." The proper gesture- syntax is " box green," and if this order were reversed as it is in the English language, the child might fail to see what grass had to do with a box. Such a sentence as English " cats kill mice " does not agree with the order of the deaf- mute's signs, which would begin by showing the tiny mouse running, then the cat with her smooth fur and whiskers, and lastly the cat's pouncing on the mouse — as it were " mouse cat kill." This account of the gesture-language will have made it clear to the reader by what easy and reasonable means man can express his thoughts in visible signs. The next step will ho to show the working of another sort of signs, namely, the sounds of the human voice in language. Sounds of voice may be spoken as signs to express our feelings and thoughts on much the same principles as gestures are made, except that they are heard instead of being seen. One kind of sounds used by men as signs, consists of emotional cries or tones. Men show pain by uttering groans as well as by distortion of face ; joy is expressed by shouts as well as by jumping; when we laugh aloud, the voice and the features go perfectly together. Such sounds are gestures made with the voice, sound-gestures, and the greater number of what are called interjections are of this class. By means of such cries and tones, even the compli- cated tempers of sympathy, or pity, or vexation, can be shown with wonderful exactness. Let any one put on a laughing, sneering, or cross face, and then talk, he may r.otice how his tone of voice follows ; the attitude of features belonging to each particular temper acts direcdy on the voice, especially in affecting the musical quality of the vowels. 'J'l.us the speaker's tones become signs of th:: av.] LANGUAGE. 121 emotion he feels, or pretends to feel. That this mode of expression is in fact musical, is shown by its being imitated on the violin, \vhich by altering its quality of tone can change from pain to joy. The human voice uses other means of expression belonging to music, such as the con- trast of low and loud, slow and quick, gentle and violent, and the changes of pitch, now rising in the scale and now falling. A speaker, by skilfully managing these various means, can carry his hearer's mind through moods of mild languor and sudden surprise, tlie lively movement of cheer- fulness rising to eager joy, the burst of impetuous fury gradually subsiding to calm. We can all do this, and what is more, we do it without reference to the meaning of the words used, for emotion can be expressed and even delicately shaded off in pronouncing mere nonsense-syllables. For instance, the words of an Italian opera in England arc to a great part of the audience mere nonsense-syllables serving as a means of musical and emotional expression. Clearly this kind of utterance ought to be understood by all man- kind, whatever be the language they may happen to speak. It is so, for t'le most savage and outlandish tribes know how to make such interjections as ah ! oh ! express by their tone such feelings as surprise, pain, entreaty, threatening, disdain, and they understand as well as we do the growling jir-r-r .' of anger, or the ////// of contempt. The next class of sounds used as expressive signs are imitative. As a deaf-and-dumb child expresses the idea of a cat by imitating the creature's act of washing its face, so a speaking child will indicate it by imitating its muioic. If the two children wish to show that they are thinking of a clock, the dumb one will show with his hand the swinging of the pendulum, while the speaking one will say ^'tick-tacky Here again the sounds arc gestures made with the voice, or 122 ANTHROPOLOGY. [CIIAP. sound -gestures. In this way an endless variety of objects and actions can be brought to mind by imitating their proper sounds. Not only do children delight in such vocal imita- tions, but they have come into ordinary language, as when people speak of the coo of the pigeon, the /icc-/ta:i:> of the donkey, the ding-dong of the bell, and the rat-iat of the knocker. It need hardly be said that these ways of ex- pression are understood by mankind all the world over. Now joining gesture-actions and gesture-sounds, they will form together what may be called a Natural Language. This natural language really exists, and in wild regions even has some practical value, as when a European traveller makes shift to converse in it with a party of Australians round their camp fire, or with a Mongol family in their felt tent. What he has to do is to act his most expressive mimic gestures, with a running accompaniment of exclama- tions and imitative noises. Here then is found a natural means of intercourse, much fuller than mere pantomime of gestures only. It is a common language of all mankind, springing so directly from the human mind that it must have belonged to our race from the most remote ages and most primitive conditions in which man existed. Here a very interesting question arises, on which every student has the means of experimenting for himself. How far are the communications of the lower animals, by their actions and sounds, like this natural language of mankind? Every one who attends to the ways of beasts and birds is sure that many of their movements and cries are not made as messages to one another, but are merely symptoms of the creature's own state of mind ; for instance, when lambs frisk in the meadow, or eager horses paw in the stable, or beasts moan when suffering severe pain. Animals do thus when not aware that any other creature is present, just as when a IV.] LANGUAGE 123 man in a room by himself will clench his fist in anger, or groan in pain, or laugh aloud. When gestures and cries serve as signals to other creatures, they come nearer to real signs. The lower animals as well as man do make gestures and cries which act as communications, being perceived by others, as when horses will gently bite one another to invito rubbing, or rabbits stamp on the ground and other rabbits answer, and birds and beasts plainly call one another, especially males and females at pairing-time. So distinct are the gestures and cries of animals under different cir- cumstances, that by experience we know their meaning almost certainly. Human language does not answer its purpose more perfectly than the hen's cluck to call her chickens, or the bellow of rage with which the bull, tossing his head, warns off a dog near his paddock. As yet, how- ever, no observer has been able to follow the workings of mind even in the dog that jumps up for food and barks for the door to be opened. It is hard to say how far the dog's mir.d merely associates jumping up with being fed, and barking with being let in, or how far it foims a conception like ours of what it is doing and why it does it. Anyhow, it is clear that the beasts and birds go so far in the natural linguage as to make and perceive gestures and cries as signals. But a dog's mind seems not to go beyond this point, that a good imitation of a mew leads it to look for a cat in the room ; whereas a child can soon make out from the nurse saying viiaou that she means something about some cat, which need not even be near by. That is, a young child can understand what is not proved to have entered into the mind of the cleverest dog, elephant, or ape, that a sound may be used as the sign of a thought or idea. Thus, while the lower animals share with man the beginnings of the natural language, they hardly get beyond 124 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. its rudiments, while the liuman mind easily goes on to higher stages. In describing the natural language of gestures and excla- mations, we have as yet only looked at it as used alone where more perfect language is not to be had. It has now to be noticed that fragments of it are found in the midst of ordinary language. A people may speak English, or Chinese, or Choctaw, as their mother-tongue, but nevertheless they will keep up the use of the expressive gestures and inter- jections and imitations which belong to natural language. Mothers and nurses use these in teaching little children to think and speak. It is needless to print examples of this nursery talk, for unless our readers' minds have already been struck by it, they are not likely to study philology to much purpose. In the conversation of grown people, the self- expressive or natural sounds become more scanty, yet they are real and unmistakable, as the following examples will serve to show. As for gestures, many in constant use among our own and other nations must have come down from generation to generation since primitive ages of mankind, as when the orator bows his head, or holds up a threatening hand, or thrusts from him an imaginary intruder, or points to tlie sky, or counts his friends or enemies on his fingers. Next, as to emotional sounds, a variety of these is actually used in every language. For instances, a few may be cited from among the interjections set down in grammars : English— rt// .' oh ! ugh ! foh ! ha ! ha ! in!.' (t-t) sh ! Sanskrit — aho ! (surprise), aha! (reproach), ?'ptian). Crow = kaka (San-krit). Cat — mau (Chinese). Nightingale = bulbtd (Persian). Hoopoe = upupa (Latin). Rattlesnake = shi-shi-giua (Algonquin). P'LV — bumbcroo (Australian). Drum = dtindu (Sanskrit). Flute = uluU (Galla). Whistle = pipit (Malay). Bell = kioa-lal-L-wa-lal (Vakama), Blow -Tu HE = pub (Quiche). Gun — pmig (Botokudo). Such words are always springing up afresh in dialect or slang ; for instance English pop, meaning ginger-beer ; German gaggele, an egg, from the cackle of the hen as she laid it; French "maitre Jijj," a scavenger (as it were "master Jie-Jie "). In the same way many actions are expressed by appropriate sounds. Thus in the Tecuna language of Brazil the verb to sneeze is haiisc/iu, while the Welsh for a sneeze is tis. In the Chinuk jargon, the expressive sound humm means to stink, and the drover's kish-kish becomes a verb meaning to drive horses or cattle. It is even possible to find a whole sentence made with imitative words, for the Galla of Abyssinia, to express " the smith blows the bellows," says, tumtiin biifa bufti, much as an English child might say "the tumtum puffs the puffer." Such words being taken direct from nature, it is to be expected that people of quite different language should 126 ANTHROPOLOGY, [chap. sometimes hit on nearly the same imitations. Thus the Ibo language of West Africa has the word okoko for the bird we call a cock. The English verbs to pat and to ba?ig seem to come from imitations of sound, much the same being found elsewhere ; as when the Japanese say pata-pata to express the sound of flapping or clapping, and the Yoruba negros have the verb gbang, to beat. Students whose attention is once directed to this class of self-expressive words, will notice them at a glance in each fresh language they master. It takes more careful observa- tion to trace them when the sound has been transferred by the process of metaphor {i.e. carrying over) to some new meaning not close to the original sense, but there are plenty of clear cases to choose illustrations from. In the Chinuk jargon of the West Coast of America, a tavern is called a '"'' heehee-\vQ\\s,Q" a term which puzzles a foreigner till he understands that among the people who speak this curious dialect the imitative word hcehee signifies not only laughter but the amusement which causes it, so that the term in fact means "amusement-house." It might seem difficult to hit upon an imitative word to denote a courtier, but the Basuto of South Africa do this perfectly ; they .have a word nisi-ntsi\ which means a fly, being, indeed, an imitation of its buzz, and they simply transfer this word to mean also the flattering parasite who buz/es round the chief like a fly round meat. These instances from uncivilized languages are like those which appear among the most ])olished nations, as when we English take the imitative verb to ///^ from its proper sense of blowing, to express the idea of inflated, hollow praise. Now if the pronunciation of such Avords becomes changed, their origin may be only recognised by old records happen- ing to preserve their first sound. Thus when English 7voe is traced back to Anglo-Saxon wd, it is found to be an IV.] LANGUAGE. 127 actual groan turned (like German weJi) into a substantive expressing sorrow or distress. So an Englishman would hardly guess from the present pronunciation and meaning of the word pipe, what its origin was ; yet when he com- pares it with the Low Latin pipa, French J>ipe, pronounced more like our word peep, to chirp, and meaning such a reed-pipe as shepherds played on, he then sees how cleverly the very sound of the musical pipe has been made into a word for all kinds of tubes, such as tobacco-pipes and water-pipes. Words like this travel like Indians on the war-path, wiping out their footmarks as they go. For all we know, multitudes of our ordinary words may have thus been made from real sounds, but have now lost beyond recovery the traces of their first expressiveness. We have not yet come to the end of the intelligible ways in which sound can be made to express sense. When people want to show alteration in the meaning of a word, it is enough to make some change in its pronunciation. It is not difficult to see how, in the Wolof language of West Africa, where dagou means to walk, dagou signifies to walk proudly; daga7ia means to ask humbly, but dai^ana to de- mand. In the Mpongwe language the meaning can be actually reversed by changing the pronunciation: as "mi ionda^' I love, but "mi totida," I love not. The English reader can manage to do much the same tricks by varying the tones of his own verbs walk, ask, love. This process of expressing difference of sense by difference of sound may be carried much farther. An instructive instance of clear symbolism by sound is to be found in a word coined by the chemist Guyton de Morveau. In his names for chemical compounds he had already the term sulfate (made on a Latin pattern like sulphiiratiis\ but afterwards he wanted a word to denote a sulphur-salt of different proportions, and there- 128 ANTHROPOLOGY. [cHAP. upon, to express the fact that there was an alteration, he changed a vowel and made the term siclfite. He perhaps did not know that he was here resorting to a device found in many rude languages. Thus in Manchu, contrast of sound serves to indicate difference of sex, cliacha meaning " male " and cheche "female," ama "father" and erne ''mother." So distances are often expressed by altering the vowel, as in Malagasy ao means a little way off, eo still nearer, io close at hand. In this way it is easy to make sets of expressive personal pronouns ; as in the Tumal language ngi " I," iigo " thou," ngu "he." Another well-known pro- cess is reduplication or doubling, which serves a number of different purposes. It shows repetition or strengthening of meaning, as where the Polynesian aka " to laugh," be- come, akaaka " to laugh much," while loa " long," becomes lololoa " very long." Our words hmii-haio and bonbon are like these. It is also easy to form plurals by reduplication, as Malay oraiig "man," omng-orang "men;" Japanese ■fito " man," fito-bito " men." Among the kinds of redu- plication best known to us is that which marks tenses in verbs, like didoini and tetiipha in Greek, inomordi in Latin. These clever but intelligible devices for making the sound follow the sense, show how easily man gets beyond mere imitation. Language is one branch of the great art of sign-making or sign-choosing, and its business is to hit upon some sound as a suitable sign or symbol for each thought. Whenever a sound has been thus chosen there was no doubt a reason for the choice. But it did not follow that each language should choose the same sound. This is well shown by the peculiar class of words belonging to children's language or baby-language, of which the word baby itself is one. These words are made up all over the world from the few simple syllables which children first utter, chosen almost IV.] LANGUAGE. 129 anyhow to express the nursery ideas of mother, father, nurse, toy, sleep, &c. Thus while we have our way of using papa and mafiia, the Chilians say papa for "mother," and the Georgians mama for " father," while in various languages dada may mean " father," " cousin," " nurse ; " tata " father,'' "son," "good-bye"! Such children's words often find their way into the language of grown people, and any slight change makes them look like ordinary words. Thus in English one might hardly suspect pope and a/f^jf of having their origin in baby- words, yet this is evident when they are traced back to Latin />apa and Syriac al?l'a, both meaning "father." These nursery words have already come beyond the " natural language " of self- expressive gestures and sounds. From its simple and clear facts we thus pass to the more difficult and obscure principles of "articulate language." On examining English, or any other of the thousand tongues spoken in the world, it is found that most of the words used show no such connection between sound and sense as is so plain in the natural or self-expressive words. To illustrate the difference, when a child calls a pocket timepiece a tick-tick, this is plainly self-expressive. But when we call it a luaich, this word does not show why it is used. It is known that the instrument had its name from telling the hours like a uare, JuD'diuare ; or si cam ship, steam- ship, steamship. On listening to such joined words, it is found that one of the two has lost its stress, the whole compound having now but one stress. This is how in talking English our minds give a sign by our voices that two words have become one. The next step is when the sound of one of the part-words becomes slurred or broken down, as in the end-words of 7oatermaji, 7c>?-ofigfid. Or both the simple words may have broken down, as in boatswain and cox- srvain, where writing keeps up the original meaning of the swain in charge of the boat or cock-hoai, but in actual speak- ing the words have shrunk to what may be spelt bosun, coxun. Now this process of forming a new word by (so to speak) welding together two or more old ones, is one of the chief acts by which word-makers, ancient and modern, have furnished themselves with more manageable terms, which again as the meanings of the separate parts were less cared for, were cut shorter in speaking. When this has not gone too far, philologists can still get back to the original elements of such words, discerning the fourteen ni^:^Jit in fortnight , the unus and decern in undecim, shrunk still farther v.] LANGUAGE. 141 in French onze , the jus, dico, in Latin judex, which in Enghsh comes down to judge. As examples how word-compounding goes on in unfamihar tongues, may be taken the Malay term for " arrow," which is anak-panah, or '■'■ chiId-(of-the)-bow ; " and the native Australian term for "unanimous," which is gurdugyuyul, or '■heart-one-come." To show how such compound words become shortened, take the Mandingo word for " sister," vibadingrmiso, which is made up of mi bado dingo iiiuso, meaning "my-mother-child-female." The natives of Van- couver's Island gave to a certain long-bearded Englishman the name Yakpus ; this appears to have come from yakhpekukselkous, made up of words signifying " long-face- hair- man," which in speaking had been cut down \.o yakpus. No one who did not happen to be told the history of this word could ever have guessed it. This is an important lesson in the science of language, for it is likely that tens of thousands of words in the languages of the world may have come into the state in which we find them by the shorten- ing of long compound words, and when this has been done recklessly as in the last example, and the history lost, all reasonable hope is gone of ever getting back to the original form and meaning. Nor does this process of contraction affect only compound words, but it may act on a whole sentence, fusing it as it were into one word. Here the synthetic or compounding principle reaches its height. As a contrast to the analytic Chinese sentence given at page 139, to show the perfect distinctness of their words, we may take a sentence of an African language to show how utterly that distinctness may be lost. When a Grebo negro wishes to express that he is very angry, he says in his metaphorical way "it has raised a bone in my breast." His full words for expressing this would be e ya viu kra n'udi, but in 143 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. speaking he runs them together so that what he actually utters is yamukroure. Where such breaking down has gone on unchecked, it is easy to see how the language of a barbaric tribe may alter so much in a i^wf generations as hardly to be recognised. Indeed, any one who will attend to how English words run together in talking may satisfy himself that his own language would undergo rapid changes like those of barbaric tongues, were it not for the school- master and the printer, who insist on keeping our words fixed and separate. The few examples here given of new words made by compounding old ones may serve to illustrate the great prin- ciple that such combination, far from being a mere source of confusion, has been one of the great means of building up language. Especially, one of the great discoveries in modern philology is how grammatical formation and inflexion has partly come about by a kind of word-compounding. It must have seemed to the old scholars a mysterious and arbitrary proceeding that Latin should have fixed upon a set of meaningless affixes to inflect and make into difterent parts of speech ago, agis, agii, agere, agejis, actum, actor, actio, activus, active, &c. Bat the mystery to some extent disappeared when it was noticed how in modern languages the running together of words produced something of the kind. Thus the hood of liwmajihood, priesthood, which is now a mere grammatical suffix, was in old English a word of itself, had, meaning form, order, state ; and the suffix-/>' was once the distinct word " like," as is seen by Anglo-Saxon saying cwen-//r, " queen-///Cr," where modern English says queen/v. In Chaucer's English it is seen how the pronoun thou had dwindled into a mere verb-ending, "He pokyd Johaii, and seyde, SlepistcTTc; .? IlerdistoK' ever slik a sang er now?" v.] LANGUAGE. 143 In English the future tense of the verb to give is " I will give," or, colloquially, " I'll give." Here writing separates what speaking joins, but the modern French future tense dontierai, donneras, is the verb doiiner with the auxiliary verb ai, as, both spoken and written on to it, so that " je donnerai"is a phrase like "I have to give." The plural do/i/ierofis, donnerez, can no longer be thus taken to pieces, for the remains of the auxiliary verb have passed into meaningless grammatical affixes ons, ez. There is reason to suppose that many of the affixes of Greek and Latin grammar arose in this way by distinct words combining together and then shrinking. Not that it would be safe to assert that all affixes came into existence in this particular way. As was pointed out in the last chapter, men wanting to utter a thought are clever enough to catch up in Aery far-fetched ways a sound to express it. Thus the prefix ge, which German uses to make past participles with, seems to have originally signified " with " or " together," which sense it still retains in such words as gespicle, " playfellow ; " but by a curious shifting of purpose it c^me to serve as a means of forming participles, as spielen, to play, gespielt, played. It was so used also in Anglo-Saxon, as clypian, to call, gedypod, called, which word in its later form yclept still keeps up among us a trace of the old grammatical device. Philologists have to keep their eyes open to this power which language- makers have of using sounds for some new purpose they were not intended for. Thus, in English, the change of vowels in foot^ fed, and in find^ found, now serves as a means of declining the noun and conjugating the verb. But history happens to show that tlic vowel change was not originally made with this intention at all. The Anglo-Saxon declension proves that the vowel was not 144 ANTHROPOLOGY. . [chap. then a sign of number in the noun ; it was singular fot, fdfes,fet, YAxarviX fcf, fofa, fotiim. Nor was it a sign of tense in the Anglo-Saxon verb, where the perfect of Jindan, to find, had different vowels in its singular, ic fand, I found, and its plural, we fiindon, we found. It was the later Englishmen who, knowing nothing of the real reasons which brought about the variation of the vowels, took to using them to mark singular from plural, and present from perfect. It is the work of grammarians in examining any language to take all its combined words to pieces as far as possible. Greek and Latin grammars now teach how to analyze words by stripping off their affixes, so as to get down to the real part or root, which is generally a simple sound expressing a simple notion. A root is best understood by considering it to have been once a separate word, as it would be in such a language as English. Even in languages where the roots seldom appear without some affix attached, they may stand by themselves as imperative, like Latin die! say! Turkish sei^ ! love ! But in many languages roots can only be found as imaginary forms, by comparing a group of words and getting at the common part belonging to them all. Thus in Latin it appears from gnosco, gnotus, &c., that there must be a root gno which carries the thought ' of knowing. Going on to Greek, there is found in gig/iosko, g?idsis, gtuvjie, &c., the same root giw with the same mean- ing. Turning next to Sanskrit, a similar sound, j?ia, appears as the root-form for knowing. In this way, by com- paring the whole set of Aryan or Indo-European lan- guages, it appears that there must have been in ancient times a word something like gna, meaning to know, wliich is to be traced not only in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, but in many other languages of the family, as Russian znat. v.] ■ LANGUAGE. I45 Englisn know. A few more such Aryan roots, which the reader recognises at once in well-known languages, are sfa, to stand, satf, to sit, ga, to go, /, to go, ma, to measure, i/a, to give, riW, to see, ra^, to rule, 7;rar, to die. These simple sounds seem to have already become fixed to carry their meanings in the remote ages when the ancestors of the Aryan peoples wandered with their herds on the highlands of Central Asia. It is not needful to tell the student of an- thropology how interesting it is to arrive thus at the earliest known root-words of any family. But it should at the s.ime time be noticed that even in the earliest of these sets of roots, we seldom come to anything like an actual origin or beginning. Some few may indeed have been taken direct from the natural language, for instance ru, to roar, and if this was so here is a real origin. But most roots, to what- ever languages of the world they may belong, are like the group given above, where it is impossible to say con- fidently how their sound came to express their meaning. Unless this can be done, it is safest not to take such roots as really primitive formations, for they may have a long lost history of the utmost change. How this may happen, our own language has a useful lesson to teach. Imagine one who knows no language but English trying to get at its roots. To him the verb to ro// might seem a root-word, a primitive element of language ; indeed it actually has been fancied a natural sound imitating the act of rolling. Yet any philologist would tell him that English ro// is a comparatively modern form, which came through a long series of earlier stages ; it was borrowed from French ro//e, ro//er, now ro/e, rou/cr, all from Latin rotii/us, dimir.utive of rota, a wheel, even this coming from a more ancient verb and signifying a runner or goer. Still more adven- turous is the history of another English word wl.ich hr.s 146 ANTHROPOLOGY. [ckap. now all the parts of a verb, to check, checking, checked, besides such forms as a check in one's course, the check- string to stop the coachman, the check-vAvo. to stop the water in a pipe. This word check has all the simplicity of sound and sense which might belong to an original root- word. Yet strange to say, it is really the Persian word shah, meaning "king," which came to Europe with the game of chess as the word of challenge to the king, and thence by a curious metaphor passed into a general word for stopping anybody or anything. For all that is known, many root-words among the Greeks or Jews, or even the simple-looking monosyllables of the Chinese, may during pre-historic ages have travelled as far from their real origin as these English verbs. Thus the roots from which lan- guage grows may often be themselves sprung as it were from yet earlier seeds or cuttings, grown at home or imported from abroad, and though in our time words mostly come from the ancient roots, the power of striking new roots is not yet dead. Having now, in such a broad way as suits the present purpose, looked at the formation of words, something may be said as to how language contrives to show the relations among the words of a sentence. This is done by what grammarians call syntax, concord, and government. It has been seen (p. 119) that the gesture-language, though wanting in grammatical forms, has a strongly marked syntax. The deaf-mute's signs must follow one another in proper order, otherwise they may convey a wrong meaning or seem nonsense. So, in spoken languages which do not inflect their words, such as the Chinese, syntax is the main part of grammar ; thus li ping = sharp weapons, ping li = weapons (are) sharp ; chi kuo = to govern the kingdom, but kuo chi = the kingdom is governed. This seems quite natural to us, for v.] LANGUAGE. I47 modern English has come far towards the Chinese plan of making the sense of the sentence depend on the order of the words, thus marking the difference between rank of families Vir\d families of rank, or between men kill lions and lions kill men. In Latin it is very different, where words can be put about with such freedom, that the English reader maybe hardly able to make sense of one of Tacitus' sentences without fresh sorting the words into some order he can think them in. Especially in Latin verses there is often hardly more syntax than if the words were nonsense- syllables arranged only to scan. The sense has to be made out from the grammatical inflections, as where it is seen that in "vile potabis modicis Sabinum cantharis," the cheapness has to do with the wine and the smallness with the mugs. It is because so many of the inflections have disappeared from English, that the English translation has to obtain a proper understanding by stricter order of words. Where the meaning of sentences depends on order or syntax, that order must be followed, but it must be borne in mind that this order differs in different languages. For a single instance, in Malay, where orang = man and t/lan = forest, savages and apes are called orang ulan, which is just opposite to the English construction "forest man." Every one who can construe Greek and Latin sees what real service is done by government and agreement in show- ing how the words of a sentence hang together, what quality is stated of what thing, or who is asserted to act on what. But even Greek and Latin have changed so much from their earlier state, that tliey often fail to show the scholar clearly what they mean to do, and why. It is useful to make ac- quaintance with the languages of ruder nations, which show government and agreement in earlier and plainer stages of growth. One great object of grammatical construction is to 148 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. make it quite dear which of two nouns concerned is subject and which object, for instance, whether it was a chief who killed a bear, or a bear who killed a chief A particle properly attached will do this, as when tlie Algonquin Indians put on the syllable 2in both to noun and verb, in a way which we may try to translate by the pronoun /«>;/, thus ; — ■ Ogimau ogi iii sa;/« muk\v//«. chief he-did lu, the mark of the class to which kingdom be- longs, is repeated through every word referring to it. To give an idea how this acts in holding the sentence together, Dr. Bleek translates it by repeating the dom of kingi/om in a similar way ; " the king-dof/i, our t/cm, which dom is the great dom, the dom appears, we love the domT This is clumsy, but it answers the great purpose of speech, that of making one's meaning certain beyond mistake. So, by using different class-syllables for smgular and plural, and carrying them on through the whole sentence, the Zulu shows the agree- ment in number more plainly than Greek or Latin can do. But the Zulu language does not recognise by its class- syllables what we call gender. It is in fact one of the puzzles of philology, what can have led the speaker of Aryan languages like Greek, or Semitic languages like Hebrew, to classify things and thoughts by sex so un- reasonably as they do. For Latin examples, take the following groups: pes (masc), manus (fem.), brachium (neut.) ; avior (masc), virtus (fern.), delictum (neut. ). German shows gender in as practically absurd a state, as witness der Hund, die Ratte ; das Thier, die Pflanze. In Anglo-Saxon, 71'// (English zoife), was neuter, while ic'if-rnan (i.e. "wife-man," English ivomaii) was masculine. Modern English, in discarding an old system of grammatical gender that had come to be worse than useless, has set an example which Frencli and German might do well to follow. Vet it must be borne in mind that the devices of language, though they may decay into absurdity, were never origmally absurd. ijo ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. No doubt the gender-system of the classic languages is the remains of an older and more consistent plan. There are languages outside our classical education which show that gender (that is genus, kind, class,) is by no means necessarily according to sex. Thus in the Algonquin languages of North America, and the Dravidian languages of South India, things are divided not as male or female, but as alive or dead, rational or irrational, and put accordingly in the animate or major gender, or in the inanimate or minor gender. Having noticed how the Zulu concord does its work by regularly repeating the class-sign, we seem to understand how in the Aryan languages the signs of number and gender may have come to be used as a similar means of carrying through the sentence the information that this substantive belongs to that adjective and that verb. Yet even in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Gothic, such concord falls short of the fulness and clearness it has among the barbarians of Africa, while in the languages of modern Europe, especially our own, it has mostly disappeared, probably because with the advance of intelligence it was no longer found necessary. The facts in this chapter will have given the reader some idea how man has been and still is at work building up language. Any one who began by studying the gram- mars of such languages as Greek or Arabic, or even of such barbarous tongues as Zulu or Eskimo, would think them wonderfully artificial systems. Indeed, had one of these languages suddenly come into existence among a tribe of men, this would have been an event mysterious and un- accountable in the highest degree. But when one begins at the other end, by noticing the steps by which word-making and composition, declension and conjugation, concord and syntax, arise from the simplest and rudest beginnings, then the formation of language is seen to be reasonable, purpose- v.] LANGUAGE. 151 ful, and intelligible. It was shown in the last chapter that man still possesses the faculty of bringing into use fresh sounds to express thoughts, and now it may be added that he still possesses the faculty of framing these sounds into full articulate speech. Thus every human tribe has the capabilities which, had they not inherited a language ready- made from their parents, would have enabled them to make a new language of their own. CHAPTER VI. LANGUAGE AND RACE. Adoption and loss of Language, 152— Ancetral Language, 153— p^amilies of Lanjuage, 155— Aryan, 156— Semitic, 159— Egyptian, Berber, &c. 160 — Tatar or Turanian, 161 — South-East Asian, 162 — Malayo-Polynesian, 163 — Dravidian, 164 — African, Bantu, Hottentot, 164 — American, 165 — Early Languages and Races 165. The next question is, What can be learnt from languages as to the history of the nations speaking them, and the races these nations belong to ? In former chapters, in dividing mankind into stocks or races according to their skulls, complexions, and other bodily characters, language was not taken into account as a mark of race. In fact, a man's language is no full and certain proof of his parentage. There are even cases in which it is totally misleading, as when some of us have seen persons whose language is English, but their faces Chinese or African, and who, on inquiry, are found to have been brouench or Germ.an ancestry. Now not only individuals but wliolc jjopulations may liave their native cii. VI.] LANGUAGE AND RACE. 153 languages thus lost or absorbed. The negroes shipped as slaves to America were taken from many tribes and had no native tongwe in common, so that they came to talk to one another in the language of their white masters, and there is now to be seen the curious spectacle of black woolly-haired families talking broken-down dialects of English, French, or Spanish. In our own country the Keltic language of the Ancient Britons has not long since fallen out of use in Cornwall, as in time it will in Wales. But whether the Keltic language is spoken or not, the Keltic blood remains in the mixed population of Cornwall, and to class the modern Cornishmen as of pure English race because they speak English, would be to misuse the evidence of language. Much bad anthropology has been made by thus carelessly taking language and race as though they went always and exactly together. Yet they do go together to a great extent. Although what a man's language really proves is not his parentage but his bringing-up, yet most children are in fact brought up by their own parents, and inherit their language as well as their features. So long as people of one race and speech live together in their own nation, their language will remain a race-mark common to all. And although mi- gration and intermarriage, conquest and slavery interfere, from time to time, so that the native tongue of a nation can never tell the whole story of their ancestry, still it tells a part of it, and that a most important part. Thus in Corn- wall the English tongue is a real record of the settlement of the English there, though it fails to tell of the Keltic race who were in the land before them, and with whom they mixed. In a word, the information which the language of a nation gives as to its race is something like what a man's surname tells as to his famil}', by no means the whole history, but one groat line of it 154 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. It has next to be seen what the languages of the world can show as to the early history of nations. Great care has to be taken with the proofs of connexion between languages. It is of little use to compare two languages as old-fashioned philologists were too apt to do when, if they found half-a- dozen words at all similar, they took these without more ado to be remnants of one primitive tongue, the origin of both. In the more careful philological comparisons of the present day many similarities of words have to be thrown aside as not proving connexion at all. In any two lan- guages a few words are sure to be similar by mere accident, as where, in the Society Islands, tiputa means a cloak, like tippet with us. Words must only be compared when there is a real correspondence of meaning as well as sound, or the way would be opened for fancies like that of a writer who connects the well known Polynesian word tabu, sacred, with tabid, the Arabic name of the ark of the covenant, appa- rently because that was a very sacred object. Also, words imitated from nature prove nothing in this way, as where the Hindus and the savages of Vancouver's Island both call a crow kaka, this being not because their languages are connected, but because it is the bird's cry. What is most important of all is to make sure that tlie words compared really belong to the old stock of the language they are found in. ]>efore now a writer has proved to his own satis- faction that Turkisli, Arabic, and Persian are all branches of one primitive language, his argument being that the Turks call a man adain, as the Arabs call the first man, and a father pader, which is like the Persian word. The fact is true enough, but what the argument omits to notice is that the Turks have been for ages enriching their own barbaric language by taking words from the cultured Arabic and Persian, and adam and pader arc such lately borrowed VI.] LANGUAGE AND RACE. 155 words, not philologically Turkish at all. Borrowed words like these are indeed valuable evidence, but what they prove is not the common origin of languages, it is inter- course between the nations speaking them. They often give the clue to the country from which some new produce was obtained, or some new instrument, or idea, or insti- tution, was learnt. Thus in English it is seen by the very words how Italy furnished us with opera, sonata, chiaroscuro, while Spain gave galliiia and viulatto, how from the Hebrews we have sabbath and jubilee, from the Arabs zero and magazine, while Mexico has supplied chocolate and tomato, Haiti hammock and hurricane, Peru guano and quinine, and even the languages of the South Sea Islands are represented by taboo and tatoo. But in all this there is not one particle of evidence that any one of these languages is sprung from the same family with any other. When two languages have such a common descent, the philologist is not content to ascertain it by merely looking for a few words of similar sound. Indeed he expects to find that the words of the ancestral language will not only have changed in its descendant languages, but that they will often have changed according to different rules. Thus he knows that according to the rule called Grimm's law, the English ten, tame, should appear in German with a different initial, zcJin, zahm, while again these should be represented in Latin by decern, domare. With the same regularity of change, the sound which in some of the Poly- nesian languages is k, in others has become /; thus the word man, in the Sandwich Islands kanaka (whence our sailors call any South Sea Islander a kanaker), appears in New Zealand under the form of tangata. Going beyond the sound of words into their structure, the comparative philo- logist reckons that when two languages are allied, they 156 ANTHROPOLCGY. [cHAP. ought to show such similarity in the roots and in the putting together, that neither chance nor borrowing can account for the resemblance. In the first chapter, for another purpose, examples were given of languages continuing to show their intimate connexion while diverging from their parent tongues. The reader may find it worth while to look back to these illustrations (p. 8) before going on to the following sketch of the families of language belonging to the various races of man. The languages of white men mostly belong to two great families, the Aryan and Semitic. First as to the Aryan family, called also Indo-European, which takes in the lan- guages of part of South and West Asia, and almost the whole of Europe. The original tongue whence these are all descended may be called the Primitive Aryan. What the roots of this ancient language were like, and how they were put together into words, the student may gain an idea from Greek and Latin, but a still better from Sanskrit, where both roots and inflexions have been kept up in a more per- fect and regular state. As a rough illustration of the way in which words of our familiar European languages may be discerned in Sanskrit, one line of the first hymn of the Veda is here given, where the worshippers entreat Agni, the divine Eire, that he will be approachable to us as a father to a son, and will be near for our happiness : Sa mil pita-iva sunave A2ne su-upayauah Ijhava : sachasva nah svastaye. Here may be more or less clearly made out words connected with Latin, Greek, and English nos^ pater, son, ignis, up, be, sequi, citestb, and others. Though the original Aryan is a lost language, philologists try to reconstruct it by compar- ing its oldest and most perfect descendants, Sanskrit, Old Persian, Greek, Latin, Old Russian, Gothic, Old Irish, &:c. VI.] LANGUAGE AND RACE. 157 Granting that a primitive Aryan tongue once existed, there must once have been a nation who spoke it, and whose descendants carried it down to later ages. It is hard to draw any certain bodily picture of the primitive Aryans themselves (see page 109), for in their course of migra- tion and conquest they so mingled with other races, that now the nations united by Aryan speech range through the utmost varieties of white men, from the Icelander to the Hindu. The early home of the Aryans is supposed to have been in Inner Asia, perhaps in the present Turkestan, in the region of the Oxus and Yaxartes, for here the practicable way of migration for nomads with flocks and herds lies open down into Persia on the one side, and India on the other. As India and Persia have preserved in tlieir sacred languages the Aryan tongue less changed than elsewhere, it may be judged that the land whence the invading Aryans came was not far off. But it may have been further east in Central Asia, or farther west on the Russian plains. In this home-land, wherever it may have been, the Aryans lived in barbaric but not savage clans, tilling the soil and grazing their flocks and herds, workers in metal and skilled in many arts of life, a warlike folk who went forth to fight in chariots, a people able to govern and obey, to make laws and abide by them, a reli- gious people earnest in the worship of the sun, and sky, and fire, and waters, and with pious faith in the divine spirits of their ancestors. Carrying with them their language, laws, and religion, these nation-founders spread in radiating tracks of migration over South-\Vest Asia and all Europe. Where they went they found the land peopled by Dravidians, Tatars, and doubtless many other stocks once spread far and wide, like the Basques, whose language still lingers in the Pyrenees. Where the old languages have vanished, 158 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. the record of the early populations of Europe is only to be had from their tombs, and seen in the features of the pre- sent nations, which may be often more those of the original people than of the Aryan invaders. The earliest Aryan hordes who started on their westward migration may have been the ancestors of the Keltic nations, for their language has undergone most change, and they are found in the far west of Europe, as though they had been pressed on by the Teuton-Scandinavian tribes who followed them, distant kinsfolk but not friends. The ancestors of the Grosco-Italiaii nations migrated westward till they reached the Mediter- ranean, and last came the Slavonic peoples who now occupy Eastern Europe. Thus much of the beginnings of the Aryan nations may be learnt from their languages and their places on the map. It is not in the earliest ages of history that they appear on the world-stage where Egyptians and Baby- lonians had long played the great parts. The Aryans become prominent within a thousand years before the Christian era, when in India there arises among them the religion of Buddha, now reckoned the most numerous in the world ; when the Medes and Persians come into power, and Cyrus appears with his conquering host ; when the Greeks bring their wondrous intellect to bear on art, science, and philosophy ; and the Romans set up the military and legal system which gave them their empire. In later ages our Teutonic nations, who made their first appearance as the ravagers of culture, come to be its promoters. The Aryan nations have kept up in the modern world the career of conquest and the union with other peoples which they began in proi-historic ages. Outside the world known to the ancients, Aryan languages are now spoken on far conti- nents and islands, whether the men who speak them are white colonists from Europe, who have slain or driven out VI.] LANGUAGE AND RACE. 159 the old dwellers on tlie soil, or whether they have become blended with the native nations as in Mexico and Peru. To proceed now to the languages of the next family, the Semitic, an idea of these can be most easily gained from Hebrew. Any student seriously bent on the science of language should learn at least enough Hebrew to spell out a few chapters of Genesis, for all the other languages com- monly taught in England being of the Aryan family, this will serve to bring his mind out of that groove, by familiar- izing him with speech of a different material. A very moderate number of roots, mostly of three consonants, by altering their internal vowels and changing their affixes, are made to form the greater part of the language so regularly that Hebrew dictionaries are arranged throughout by the roots. Thus from the root vi-l-ch are derived verb and noun forms with the sense of reigning, as vialach = he reigned, inakhic = they reigned, yimloch = he shall reign, iimloch = thou shalt reign, viclech = king (fomiliar in the name of Mclchizedek, " king of righteousness "), melachim = kings, vialchcnu = our king, viakhah = queen, mamlachah = kmgdom, and so on. The principal languages belonging to the Semitic family are the Assyrian, Hebrew and Phoe- nician, Syrian, Arabic and Ethiopic. The Assyrian of the Nineveh inscriptions and the Arabic spoken by the desert Beduins between them best represent the original language they are all descended from. The ancient or modern peoples speaking Semitic tongues belong mainly to the dark-white race, the type in which they agree being now most plainly seen in the Jewish countenance, with its aquiline nose, full lips, and curly black hair. Yet by features alone it would not have been possible to distinguish the Jews, Assyrians, and Arabs, among the mass of dark- white nations. Here is seen the value of language, which i6o ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. comes in to show that a certain group of nations are connected by common ancestry from an ancient people, who spoke the lost tongue whence Arabic and Hebrew are offshoots, and who in the ages when history begins were dwelling in South- West Asia, and sending forth their migrat- ing tribes to found new nations, whose acts in the world form one of the great chapters of history. The conquering Assyrians took up and carried on the older Chaldoean civilisation. The Phoenicians became the great merchants of the old world, with trading colonies along the Mediter- ranean and commerce in the far East, nor was it only stuffs and spices that they carried, but they spread arts and thoughts into new regions, and in their hands the clumsy hieroglyphic writing became the alphabet. The Israelites, though as a nation they never reached such power or culture, made their conquests in the world of religion, and while the crowd of deities worshipped in Assyrian and Phoenician temples vanished away, the worship of Jehovah passed on into Christianity, and overspread the world. Latest, the warrior-tribes of Arabia carried the banner of their prophet among the nations around, and founded the faith of Islam, a civiUzing power in the middle ages, and even in these days of its decay an influence across the world from Western Africa to the islands of the far East. The language of the ancient Egyptians, though it cannot be classed in the Semitic family with Hebrew, has im- portant points of correspondence, whether due to the long intercourse between the two races in Egypt, or to some deeper ancestral connection ; and such analogies also appear in the Berber languages of North Africa. These difficult questions can merely be mentioned here. Attempts have been made, though with little result, to prove the Aryan and Semitic languages themselves to b2 descended from a VI.] LANGUAGE AND RACE. i6i single parent tongue. If it is so, then ages of change have so wiped away the traces of common origin that philologi- cal comparison fails to substantiate them. While speaking of the Aryan and Semitic families of language, it should be noticed that many philologists connect them as belonging to one class, as being " inflecting " languages, or such as can blend their roots and affixes, and alter the roots themselves internally so that, as the beginner in Greek grammar well knows, it is often no easy matter to see where the root ends and the termination begins. The inflecting families have certainly a power of compact word-formation which has done much to give expressiveness and accuracy to such poetical and philosophical languages as Greek and Arabic. But the distinction is by no means clear between the struc- ture of such inflecting languages and the agglutinating lan- guages of other nations, as the Tatars. Could the Aryan and Semitic families be both traced back to the same family, this would not prove the whole white race to have had one original language, fqr the Georgian of the Caucasus, the Basque of the Pyrenees, and several more would still lie outside, apparently unconnected with either of the great families, or with one another. In the middle and north of Asia, on the steppes or among the swamps and forests of the bleak norih, wandering hordes of hunters or herdsmen show the squal-built brown- yellow Tatar or Mongolian type, and speak languages of one family, such as Manchu and Mongol. Although principally belonging to Asia, these Tatar or Turanian languages have established themselves in Europe. At a remote period, rude Tatar tribes had spread over northern Europe, but they were followed up and encroached on by the invad- ing Aryans, till now only much-mixed outlying remnants of them, Esth<;; Finns, Lapps, are found speaking Tatar i62 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. languages. In later ages, history records how armies of Tatar race, Huns and Turks, poured into Europe in their turn, subduing the Aryan peoples, so that now the Hun- garian and Turkish languages remain records of these last waves of invasion from Central Asia. The Tatar hordes are first heard of in history as barbarians, as many tribes are still, but their chief nations becoming Buddhists, Mo- hammedans, or Cliristians, have adopted the civilisation belonging to these religions. The Tatar languages are of the kind called agglutinative, forming words by putting first the root, whicfi carries the sense and is followed by suffixes strung on to modify it. Thus in Turkish the root sev, to love, makes sevishdirihnediler, they were not to be brought to love one another. In some languages of this class, a remarkable law of vowel-harmony compels the suftix to conform its vowel to that of the root it is attached to, as if to make clear to the hearer that it belongs to it ; thus in Hungarian hdz — house, forms hdzam = my house, but szek = chair, forms szckem = my chair. The dense population of South-East Asia, comprising the Burmese, the Siamese, and especially the Chinese, shows a type of complexion and feature plainly related to the Tatar or Mongolian, but the general character of their language is different. The Chinese language is made up of mono- syllables, each a Avord with its own real or grammatical sense, so that our infant-school books in one syllable give some notion of Chinese sentences. Other neighbouring languages share this habit of using monosyllables, and as this limits them to an inconveniently small number of words, they have taken to the expedient of making the musical I)itch or intonation alter the meaning, as in Siamese, where the syllabic /la, according to the notes it is intoned on, means a pestilence, oi the number five, or the verb to seek. VI] LANGUAGE AND RACE. 163 Tims the intoning which in England serves to express emotion or distinguish question from answer is turned to account in the far East for making actually different words, an example how language catches at any available device when a means of expression is wanted. Looking on the map of Asia at this south-east group of nations, it is plainly not by accident that the people of such neighbouring districts should have come to talk in words of one syllable, but the habit seems to have come from a common ancestral source, and gives the whole set of languages a family character. These monosyllable languages are often used to illustrate what the simple childlike constructions of man's primitive speech may have been like. But it is well to mention that Chinese or Siamese, simple as they are, must not be relied on as primitive languages. The childlike Chinese phrases may be not primitive at all, but may come of the falling away of older complicated grammar, much as our own English tends to cut short the long words and drop the inflexions used by our ancestors. Chinese simplicity of grammar by no means goes with simplicity of thought and life. The Chinese nation, like the Egyptian and the Babylonian, had been raised to a highly artificial civilisation in ages before the Phoenicians and Greeks came out of barbarism. It is not yet clear to what race the old Babylonians belonged who spoke the Akkadian tongue, but this shows analogies which may connect it with the Tatar or Mongolian languages. It has been already seen (p. 102) how the Malays, Micro- nesians, Polynesians, and Malagasy, a varied and mixed population of partly ^Mongoloid race, are united over their immense ocean-district half round the globe by languages of one family, the Malayo-Polyncsian. The parent language of this family may have belonged to Asia, for in the Malay region the grammar is more complex, and words arc found i64 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. like tasik = sea and langit — sky, while in the distant islands of New Zealand and Hawaii these have come down to tat and lai, as though the language became shrunk and form- less as the race migrated further from home, and sank into the barbaric life of ocean islanders. The continent of India has not lost the languages of the tribes who were in the land before the Aryan invasion gave rise to the Hindu population. Especially in the south whole nations, though they have taken to Hindu civilisation, speak languages belonging to the Dravidian family, such as Tamil, Telugu, and Canarese. The importance of this element of Indian population may be seen by these non- Aryan tongues still extending over most of the great triangle of India south of the Nerbudda, besides remnants in dis- tricts to the north. Yet Aryan dialects are spoken in India by many mixed tribes who may have little of Aryan blood. In the forests of Ceylon are found the only people in the world leading a savage life who speak an Aryan language akin to ours. These aretheVeddas or "hunters," shy wild men who build bough huts, and live on game and wild honey, the chil- dren, as it seems, of forest-natives mingled with Singhalese outcasts whose language in a broken-down state they speak. Among the black races, whether or not the eastern negros of Melanesia are connected by race with the African negros, the Melanesian languages stand apart. Nor do all African negros speak languages of one family, but some, such as the Mandingo, seem separate from the great language-family of Central and South Africa, named the Bantu from tribes calling themselves simply " men " {ba-titii). One of the chief peculiarities of the Bantu languages is their working (just unlike the Tatar languages) by putting prefixes in front. Thus the African magician is called mga/iga, the plural of which is tvaganga, magicians. The Kafirs of a certain VI.] LANGUAGE AND RACE. 165 district bear the well-known name of the basufo, which is a plural form, a single native being called mosiifo, while his country is lesiiio, his language sesuto, and his character or quality bostito. In South Africa lies a very different language- family, the Hottentot-Bushman, remarkable for the way in which " clicks," much like what among us nurses make to children and coachmen to horses, do duty as consonants in words. Lastly, turning to America, the native languages fall into a variety of families. Some of these are known to English readers by a word or two, as the Eskimo of the Arctic coasts by the name of the kayak or single boat on which our sport canoes are modelled ; the Algonquin which pre- vailed from New England to Virginia at the time of the early colonists, and whence we have mocassin and toma- hawk ; the Aztec of Mexico known by the ocelot and the cacao- bean ; the Tupi-Carib of the West Indies and the Brazilian forests, the home of the toucan and Jaguar ; lastly the Quichua or Peruvian, the language of the tnca. In concluding this account of the chief families of language, it is to be noticed that there are many more, some only consisting of a few dialects or a single one. Altogether a list of fifty or a hundred might perhaps be made, of which no one has been satisfactorily shown to be related to any other. It may, indeed, be expected that often two or three which now seem separate may prove on closer examination to be branches of one family, but there seems no prospect of the families all coming together in this way as offshoots of one original language. The question whether there was one primitive speech, or many, has been in past times most useful in encouraging the scientific comparison of languages. Both theories claim to account for the actual state of language in the world. On the one hand it may be argued that the languages descended from the primitive i66 ANTHROPOLOGY [chap. vi. tongue have branched off so far apart as often no longer to show their connection ; on the other hand, if there were many primitive languages, of which those that survived have given rise to families, this would come to much the same state of things. But if, as seems likely, the original forma- tion of language did not take place all at once, but was a gradual process extending through ages, and not absolutely stopped even now, then it is not a hopeful task to search for primitive languages at all (see page 131). In the present improved state of pliilology it answers better to work back from known languages to the lost ancestral languages whence they must have come down. It has been seen that tliis study leads to excellent results as to the history, not only of the languages themselves, but of the nations speak- ing them, as when it gives the clue to the peopling of the South Sea Islands, or proves some remote ancestral con- nexion between the ancient Britons, and tlie English and Danes who came after them to our land. Yet thougli language is so valuable a help and guide in national history, it must not be trusted as if it could give the whole origin of a race, or go back to its beginning. All negroes do not speak languages of one family, nor all yellow, or brown, or white men. In exploring the early life of nations, their languages may lead us far back, often much farther than historical records, but they seem hardly to reach anywhere near the origins of the great human races, still less to the general origin of mankind. CHAPTER VII, WRITING. Picture-writing, i68 — Sound-pictures, 169— Chinese Wriling, 170 — Cuneiform Writing, 172 — Egyptian Writing, 173 — Alphabetic Writing, 175— Spelling, 178 — Printing, I So. Taught as we arc to read and write in early childhood, we hardly realize the place this wondrous double art fills in civilized life, till we see how it strikes the barbarian who has not even a notion that such a thing can be. John Williams, the South Sea Island missionary, tells how once being busy carpentering, and having forgotten his square, he wrote a message for it with a bit of charcoal on a chip, and sent this to his wife by a native chief, who, amazed to find that the chip could talk without a mouth, for long after- wards carried it hung by a string round his neck, and told his wondering countrymen what he saw it do. So in South Africa a black messenger carrying a letter has been known to hide it under a stone while he loitered by the way, lest it should tell tales of him, as it did of whatever was going on. Yet the art of writing, mysterious as it seemed to these rude men, was itself developed by a few steps of invention, which if not easy to make, are at any rate easy to unders.tand v.hen made. E\en unci\ilized races have made the first 1 68 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. step, that of picture-writing. Had the missionary merely made a sketch of his L-sq"''i''e on the chip, it would have carried his message, and the native would have understood the whole business as a matter of course. Beginning at this primitive stage, it will be possible to follow thence through its whole course the history of writing and printing. Fig. 47 shows a specimen of picture-writing as used by the hunting tribes of North America. It records an expedi- tion across Lake Superior, led by a chief who is shown on Fig. 47.— Picture-writing, rjck n^ar Lake Superior (afte.- S:'io .Icraft). horseback with his magical drumstick in his hand. There were in all fifty-one men in five canoes, the first of them being led by the chiefs ally, whose name, Kishkemunazee, that is, Kingfisher, is shown by the drawing of this bird. Their reaching the other side seems to be shown by the land- toitoise, the well-known emblem of land, wliilc by the picture of three suns under the sky it is recorded that the crossing took three days. Now most of this, childlike in its sim- plicity, consists in making pictures of the very objects meant to be talked of. lUit there are devices wliich go beyond this mere imitation. Tlius when the tortoise is put to represent VII.] WRITING. 169 land, it is no longer a mere imitation, but has become an emblem or symbol. And where the bird is drawn to mean not a real kingfisher, but a man of that name, we see the first step toward phonetic writing or sound writing, the principle of which is to make a picture stand for the sound of a spoken word. How men may have made the next move toward writing may be learnt from the common child's game of rebus, that is, writing words "by things." Like many other games, this one keeps up in child's sport what in earlier ages was man's earnest. Thus if one writes the word *' waterman " by a picture of a water-jug and a man, this is drawing the meaning of the word in a way hardly beyond the American Indian's picture of the kingfisher. But it is very different when in a child's book of puzzles one finds pa- te noch te. Fig. hZ.— Pater nosier in Mexican picture-writng (after Aubin). the drawing of a water-can, a man being shot, and a date- fruit, this representing in rebus the word "can-di-date." For now what the pictures have come to stand for is no longer their meaning, but their mere sound. This is true phonetic writing, though of a rude kind, and shows how the practical art of writing really came to be invented. This invention seems to have been made more than once, and in somewhat different ways. The old Mexicans, before the arrival of the Spaniards, had got so far as to spell their names of persons and places by pictures, rebus fashion. Even when they began to be Christianized, they contrived to use their picture-writing for the Latin words of their new religion. Thus they painted a flag (pan), a stone {(e), a prickly-pear {/loch) (Fig. 48), which were together pronounced I70 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. pa-ie-noch-te, and served to spell pater iioster, in a way that was tolerably exact for Mexicans who had no r in their language. In the same way they ended the prayer with the picture of water (<7),and aloe {me), to express ai)ien. This leads on to a more important system of writing. Looking at the ordinary Chinese characters on tea-chests or vases, one would hardly think they ever had to do with pic- tures of things. But there are fortunately preserved certain early Chinese characters, known as the " ancient pictures," which show how what were at first distinctly formed sketches of objects came to be dashed off in a few strokes of the rabbit's-hair pencil, till they passed into the mean- ingless-looking cursive forms now in use, as is seen in rig. 49- Ancient p^ "^ % % Modern |-| Fig. 49. — C'h'.nese ancient pictures and later cursive fjrms (after Endlicher). The Chinese did not stop short at making such mere pictures of objects, which goes but little way toward writing. The inventors of the present mode of Chinese writing wanted to represent the spoken sounds, but here they were put in a difficulty by their language consisting of monosyllables, so that one word has many different meanings. To meet this they devised an ingenious plan of making com- pound characters, or "pictures and sounds," in which one part gives the sound, while the other gives the sense. To give an idea of this, suppose it were agreed that a picture of a box should stand for the sound box. As, however, this sourd has several meanings, some sign must be added to show vii] WRITING. 171 which is intended. Thus a key might be drawn beside it to show it is a box to put things in, or a leaf if it is to mean the plant called Iwx^ or a hand if it is intended for a box on the ear, or a whip would show that it was to signify the box of a coach. This would be for us a clumsy proceeding, but it would be a great advance beyond mere picture-writing, as it would make sure at once of the sound and thj meaning. Thus in Chinese, the sound chow has various meanings, as ship, fluff, flickering, basin, loquacity. There- fore the character which represents a ship, chow, which is placed first in Fig. 50, is repeated afterwards with additional characters to show which particular meaning of cho^u is intended. A recognisable pair of feathers is ^ m 'it 'M i* ship fliift" flickering b.-is n loquacity Fig. 50.— Chinese compound chaiacters, pictures and sounds. placed by it to mean chow = fluff; next, the sign of fire makes it chow = flickering ; next, the sign of water makes it chow = basin ; and lastly, the character for speech is joined to it to make chow = loquacity. These examples, though far from explaining the whole mystery of Chinese writing, give some idea of the principles of its sound-characters and keys or determinative signs, and show why a Chinese has to master such an immensely complicated set of characters in order to write his own language. To have introduced such a method of writing was an effort of inventive genius in the ancient Chinese, which their modern descendants show their respect for by refusing to improve upon it. At tlie same time it is not entirely through conservatism that they have not taken to phonetic writing like that of tlie western 173 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. nations, fur this would for instance confuse the various kinds of chotu which their present characters enable them to keep separate. But the Japanese, whose language was better suited than the Chinese for being wTitten phonetically, actually made themselves a phonetic system out of the Chinese characters. Selecting certain of these, they cut them down into signs to express sounds, one to stand for /, another for ro, another for fa, &c. Thus a set of forty- seven such characters (which they call accordingly the I'rofa), serve as the foundation of a system with which they write Japanese by sound more accurately than our writing conveys it. Next, as to the cuneiform writing, such as is to be seen at the British Museum on the huge man-headed bulls of Nineveh, or on the flat baked bricks which were pages of books in the library of Sennacherib. The marks like wedges or arrow-heads arranged in groups and rows do not look much like pictures of objects. Yet there is evidence that they came at first from picture-writing ; for instance, the sun was represented by a rude figure of it made by four strokes arranged round. Of the groups of characters in an inscription, some serve directly to represent objects, as man, woman, river, house, while other groups are read phonetically as standing for syllables. The inventors of this ancient system appear to have belonged to the Akkadian group of nations, the founders of early Babylonian civilization. In later ages the Assyrians and Persians learned to write their languages by cuneiform characters, in inscriptions which remain to this day as their oldest records. But the cunei- form writing was cumbrous in the extreme, and had to give way when it came into competition with the alphabet. To understand the origin of that invention, it is necessary to go back to a plan of writing which dates from antiquity probably VII.] WRITING. 173 even higher than the cuneiform of Babylonia, namely, the hieroglyphics of Egypt, The earhest known hieroglyphic inscriptions of Egypt belong to a i)eriod ai)proaching 3,000 B.C. Even at this ancient time the plan of writing was so far developed that the scribes had the means of spelling any word phonetically, when they chose. But though the Egyptians had thus come to writing by sound, they only trusted to it in part, combin- ing it with signs which are evidently remains of earlier picture-writing. Thus the mere pictures of an ox, a star, a pair of sandals, may stand for ox, star, sandals. Even where they spelt words by their sounds, they had a remarkable way of adding what are called determinatives, which are pictures to confirm or explain the meaning of the spelt word. One short sentence given as an example from Renouf's Egyptian Grammar, shows all these devices. The meaning is : "I I I I '^^ Jv\ ^ I N sun god P ^^^i^^„ X K one R F enemy pi. p one walk T one T- cuk ra netar per cm xi:t er xcfiu — f I sun god coming from horizon ag.i!nst enemies — his forili (am) the Sun -god coming forth from the horizon against his enemies." Here part of the pictures of animals and things are letters to be read into Egyptian words, as shown under- neath. But others are still real pictures, intended to stand for what they represent. The sun is shown by his picture, with a one-mark below, and followed by the battle-axe which is the svmbol of divinity, while further on comes a picture of the horizon with the sun on it. Beside these, some of the 13 174 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. figures are determinative pictures to explain the words, the verb to walk being followed by an explanatory pair of legs, and the word enemy having the picture of an enemy after it, and then three strokes, the sign of plurality. It seems that the Egyptians began with mere picture-writing like that of the barbarous tribes of America, and though in after ages they came to use some figures as phonetic characters or letters, they never had the strength of mind to rely on them entirely, but went on using the old pictures as well. How they were led to make a picture stand for a sound is not hard to see. In the figure a character may be noticed which is read R. This is an outline of an open mouth, and indeed is often used to represent a mouth ; but the Egyptian word for mouth being ro, the sign came to be used as a character or letter to spell the sound RO or r wherever it was wanted. So much of the history of the art of writing may thus be read ■ in a single hieroglyphic sentence. These carefully drawn hieroglyphic or "sacred-sculpture" pictures, used as they were for the solemn records of church and state, were kept up for sacred purposes into the time of the Greek dynasty, and even the Roman empire in Egypt. Indeed after the secret of deciphering them had been lost for many ages, the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra were among the first identified by Dr. Thomas Young. But from very ancient times the Egyptian scribes, finding the elaborate pictures too troublesome for business writing on papyrus, brought them down (much as the Chinese did theirs) to a few quick strokes. These were the "hieratic" characters, a few of which are seen in the second column of Fig. 5 1 following their hieroglyphic originals. Yet even when they used these, the Egyptian scribes never freed themselves from the trammels of their early picture-writing, so as to do away with the unnecessary multitude of phonetic signs, and drop VII.] WRITING. 175 the determinative pictures as useless. This great move was made by foreigners. Tacitus, in a jiassage of his Annals describing the origin of letters, says that tlie Egyptians first depicted thoughts of the mind by figures of animals, which oldest monuments of human memory are to be seen stamped on the rocks, so that they (the Egyptians) appear as the inventors of letters, which the Phoenician navigators brought thence to Greece, obtaining the glory as if they had discovered what tiiey really borrowed. This account may be substantially true, but it does not give the PhcEnicians credit for their practical good sense, which they were able to follow, being strangers and not bound by the sacred traditions of Egypt. No doubt the Phoenicians (or some other Semitic nation), when they learnt the Egyptian hieroglyphics, saw that the picture-signs mixed with the spelt words had become mere surplusage, and tliat all they really wanted was a small number of signs to write the sound of their words with. Thus was invented the earliest so- called Phoenician alphabet. Some of its letters may have been actually copied from the Egyptian characters, as is seen by Fig. 51, which shows a selection from the compared set drawn up by De Rouge, so arranged as to pass from the original Eg}'ptian hieroglyphic to its hieratic form in the current writing, and thence to the corresponding letter of the Phoenician alphabet, with its value in our letters and examples of similar letters in other well known forms of the alphabet. It seems to have been about the tenth century r.c , that the original alphabet was made, forms of which were used by the Moabites, Phoenicians, Israelites, and other nations of the Semitic family to write their languages. A curious proof that it was among these Semitic nations that the alphabet \\'Zi% first shaped, has come down to us in it3 176 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. name. To understand this, it has to be noticed that the letters were named, each by a word beginning witli it. The Hebrew forms of these names are famihar to EngHsh readers from Psahn cxix., where they stand in their order alepli or " ox " for a, bet/i or " house '' ior l>, gimel or " camel " for x", and so on. This is a natural way of naming letters ; indeed our Anglo- Saxon ancestors had another such set of names belonging Egyptian hieroglyphic. Egyptian hieratic. Phoenician alphabet. \ D {aree1cj\>^ H V (Helrew\) w vu R {Grvelc^^ SorSHC/^t-fcrn/'tiT) Fig. 51. — Egyptian hieroglyphic .and hieratic characters CDmp.ired with letters cf Piioenician and later alphabets (after De Rouge'). to tlie rune-letters they used in old times, calling their letter h, bcorc or " birch," their letter ;;/, moti, their letter ///, thorn. Now what confirms the history that the Phoenicians had the alphabet first and the Greeks learnt the art of writ- ing from them, is that the Greeks actually borrowed the Phoenician names for the letters, which were like the Hebrew VII] WRITING. 177 ones just given, and which in Greek passed into the well- known forms alpha, beta, gamma, &c. Thence comes the word alphabet, which thus preserves the traces of the letters having been made and named by the Phoenicians, having passed from them to the Greeks and Latins, and at last came down to us. It is interesting to look through a book of alphabets, where not only may be traced the history of the Greek and Latin letters, and others plainly related to them, such as the Gothic and Slavonic, but it may even be made out that others at first sight so unlike as the Northmen's runes and the Sanskrit characters, must all be descendants of the primitive alphabet. Thus the Brahman writes his Veda, the Moslem his Koran, the Jew his Old and the Christian his New Testament, in signs which had their origin in the pictures on temple walls in ancient Egypt. Such changes, however, have taken place in writing, that it often requires most careful comparison to trace them. If one showed a Chinese an English note scribbled in modern handwriting, it would not be quite easy to prove to him that the characters were derived from old Phoenician ones such as those in Fig. 51. Our running-hand must be traced back through copybook-hand, and from small letters to Roman capitals, and so further back. Readers will find this worth doing as an exercise. They may also be recommended to look at old-fashioned English writing, such as a Parish Register of the i6th century, which will show how much more the writing of that period was like the crabbed hand in which it is still thought proper to write German. We English fortunately learnt a simpler and better style from the Italian writing-masters, who taught us the " Roman hand " which Malvolio recognizes in Twelfth Alight. Alterations in letters were not only made for convenience, but also for decoration. Thus among the scribes of the middle ages there arose 178 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. fanciful varieties such as what we call Old English and Black Letter, and still use for ornamental purposes. This style of manuscript being in fashion when printing was introduced in Europe, English books were at first printed in it, as many German books are still. One has only to read a page of a German book so printed to satisfy oneself how great a gain of clearness it was to discard these letters with forms broken by unmeaning lines, and return to the more distinct Latin letters we now use. Beside these general changes of alphabet, the history of writing shows how from time to time alterations have been made as to particular letters. The original Phoenician alphabet was weak in vowels, in a way which the learner of Hebrew can understand when he tries to read it without the vowel points, which are more modern marks put on for the benefit of those who do not know the language well enough to tell how each word should be pro- nounced. The Phoenician alphabet did not altogether suit the writers of Greek and Latin, who altered some letters and made new ones in order to write their languages more per- fectly, and thus other nations have made free in adding, dropping, and altering letters and fheir sounds, to get the means required for each to express its own tongue. To such causes may be traced letters not known to the ])rimitive alpha- bet, such as Greek O and English w, which are explained by their names of Omega or " great-o," and " double-u." The digamma or F fell out of use in Greek, and the two valu- able Anglo-Saxon //; letters, S and ]>, are lost to modern English. The letters H and x are examples of letters which in Greek served purposes other than those English uses them for. By arranging their alphabets to suit the sounds of their languages, nations contrive with more or fewer letters to spell with some accuracy, Italian managing this VII.] WRITING. 179 fairly with twenty-two letters, while Russian uses thirty^six. English has an alphabet of twenty-six letters, but works them without regular system, so that our spelling and pronunciation disagree at every turn. One cause of this state of things has been the attempt to keep up side by side two different spellings, English and French, as where ^ is used to spell both the English word get and the French •word gentle. Another cause has been the attempt to keep up ancient sounds in writing, although they have been dropped in speaking ; thus in t/iroiion, casile, s'cene, the now silent letters are relics of sounds which used to be really heard in Anglo-Saxon thuru, Latin casTeliuiii, Greek sKie/ie. What makes this the more perplexing is, that in many words Eng- lish writing does simply try to spell what is actually spoken ; English tail does not keep up the lost guttural of Anglo- Saxon t<^gel, nor does English palsy retain letters for the sounds that have vanished in its derivation from French paralysie. Our wrong spelling is the result not of rule but of want of rule, and among its most curious cases are those where the grammarians have managed to put both sound and etymology wrong at once, writing island, rhyme, scythe, where their forefathers rationally wrote Hand, rime, sit/ie. It is reckoned that on an average, a year of an English child's education is wasted in overcoming the defects of the present mode of spelling. The invention of writing was the great movement by which mankind rose from barbarism to civilization. How vast its effect was, may be best measured by looking at the low condition of tribes still living without it, dependent on memory for their traditions and rules of life, and unable to amass knowledge as we do by keeping records of events, and storing up new observations for the use of future genera- tions. Thus it is no doubt right to draw the line between i8o ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. barbarian and civilized where the art of writing comes in, for this gives permanence to history, law, and science. Such knowledge so goes with writing, that when a man is spoken of as learned, we at once take it to mean that he has read many books, which are the main source men learn from. Already in ancient times, as compositions of value came to be written, there sprang up a class of copyists or transcribers, whose business was to multiply books. In Alexandria or Rome one could go to the bibliopole or bookseller and buy a manuscript of Demosthenes or Livy, and in later ages the copying of religious books splendidly illuminated, be- came a common occupation, especially in monasteries. But manuscripts were costly, only the few scholars could read them, and so no doubt it would have remained had not a new art come in to multiply writing. This was a process simple enough in itself, and indeed well known from remote ages. Every Egyptian or Baby- lonian who smeared some black on his signet-ring or en- graved cylinder, and took off a copy, had made the first step towards printing. But easy as the further application now seems to us, no one in the Old World saw it. It appears to have been the Chinese who invented the plan of engrav- ing a whole page of characters on a wood-block and printing off many copies. They may have begun as early as the sixth century, and at any rate in the tenth century they were busy printing books. The Chinese writing, from its enormous diversity of characters, is not well suited to printing by movable types, but there is a record that this plan was early devised among them, having been carried on with separate terra- cotta types in the eleventh century. Moslem writers early in the fourteenth century describe Chinese printing, so that it was probably through them that the art found its way to Europe, where not long afterwards the VII.] WRITING. i8i so-called "block-books," printed from whole page wood- blocks after the Chinese manner, make their appearance, followed by books printed with movable types. Few ques- tions have been more debated by antiquaries than the claims of Gutenberg, Faust, and the others to their share of honour as the inventors of printing. Great as was the service these worthies did to the world, it is only fair to remember that what they did was but to improve the practical application of a Chinese invention. Since their time progress has been made in cheapening types, making paper by machineiy, improving the presses, and working them by steam-power, but the idea remains the same. Such is, in few -words, the history of the art of printing, to which perhaps, more than to any other influence, is due the difference of our modern life from that of the middle ages. In examining these methods of writing, we began with the rude hunter's pictures, passing on to the Egyptian's use of a picture to represent the sound of its name, then to the breaking down of the picture into a mere sound-sign, till in this last stage the connexion between figure and sound becomes so apparently arbitrary, that the child has to be taught, this sign stands for A, this for B. In curious con- trast with this is the modern invention of the phonograph, where the actual sound spoken into the vibrating diaphragm marks indentations in the travelling strip of tinfoil, by which the diaphragm can be afterwards caused to repeat the vibrations and re-utter the sound. When one listens to the tones coming forth from the strip of foil, tlie South Sea Islander's fancy of the talking chip seems hardly unreasonable. CHAPTER VIII. ARTS OF LIFE. Development of Instraments, 1S3 — Club, Hammer, 184— Stone-flake, 185— Hatchet, 188 — Sabre, Knife, 189 — Spear, Dagger, Sword, 190 — Carpenter's Tools, 192 — Missiles, Javelin, 193 — Sling, Spear-thrower, 194 — Bow and Arrow, 195 — Blow-tube, Gun, 196 — • Mechanical Power, 197 — Wheel carriage, 19S— Hand-mill, 200 — Drill, Lathe, 202 — Screw, 203 — Water-mill, Wind-mill, 204. The arts by wliich man defends and maintains himself, and holds rule over the world he lives in, depend so much on his use of instruments, that it will be well to begin with some account of tools and weapons, tracing them from their earliest and rudest forms. Man is sometimes called, to distinguish him from all lower creatures, the "tool-using animal." This distinction holds good in a general way, marking off man with his spjar and hatchet from the bull goring with his horns, or the beaver carpentering with his teeth. But it is instructive to see how plainly the ape tribes, coming nearest to ourselves in having hands, have also rudiments of the implement-using faculty. Untaught by man, they defend themselves with missiles, as when orangs in the durian trees furiously pelt passers-by with the thorny fruit. CHAP. VIII.] ARTS OF LIFE. 1C3 The chimpanzee in the forests is said to crack nuts with a stone, as in our Zoological Gardens monkeys are often taught to do by the keepers, where they take readily to the use of these and more difficult implements, as soon r.s the thought has been put into their minds. The lowest order of implements are those which nature provides ready-made, or wanting just a finish ; such are pebbles for slinging or hammering, sharp stone splinters to cut or scrape with, branches for clubs and spears, thorns or teeth to pierce with. These of course are oftenest found in use among savages, yet they sometimes last on in the civili/ed world, as when we catch up any stick to kill a rat or snake with, or when in the south of France women shell the almonds with a smooth pebble, much as the apes at Regent's Park would do. The higher implements used by mankind are often plainly improvements on some natural object, but they are adapted by art in ways that beasts have no notion of, so that it is a better definition of man to call him the " tool-maker " than the " tool-user." Looking at the various sorts of implements, we see that they were not invented all at once by sudden flashes of genius, but evolved, or one might almost say grown, by small successive changes. It will be noticed also that the instrument which at first did roughly several kinds of work, after\vards varied off in different ways to suit each particular purpose, so as to give rise to several different instruments. A Zulu seen at work scraping the stick that is to be the shaft of his assegai, with the very iron head that is to be fixed on it, may give an idea what early tool- making was like, before men clearly understood that the pattern of instrument suitable for a lance-head was not the best for cutting and scraping. We should be horrified at the thought of the blacksmith pulling out one of our teeth. l84 ANTHROPOLCGY. [CHAP. with his pincers, as our forefathers would have let him do ; the forceps we expect the dentist to use is indeed a variety of the smith's tool, but it is a special variety for a special purpose. Thus in the history of instruments, the tools of the mechanic cannot well be kept separate from the weapons of the hunter or soldier, for in several cases it will be seen that both tool and weapon had their origin in some earlier instrument that served alike to break skulls and cocoa-nuts, or to hack at the limbs of trees and of men. Among the simplest of weapons is the thick stick or cudgel, which when heavier or knobbed passes into the club. Rude champions have delighted in the ferocious roughness of such a gnarled club as Herkules in the pictures carries on his shoulder, while others spent their leisure hours in elegant shaping and carving, like that of the South Sea Island clubs to be seen in museums. From savage through barbaric times the war-club lasted on into the middle ages of Europe, when knights still smashed helmets in with their heavy maces. Mostly used as a weapon, it only now and then appears in peaceful arts, as in the ribbed clubs with which the Polynesian women beat out bark cloth. It is curious to see how the rudest of primitive weapons, after its serious warlike use has ceased, survives as a symbol of power, when the mace is carried as emblem of the royal authority, and is laid on the table during the sitting of Parliament or the Royal Society. While the club has been generally a weapon, the hammer has been generally an implement. Its history begins with the smooth heavy pebble held in the hand, such as African blacksmiths to this day forge their iron with, on another smooth stone as anvil. It was a great improve- ment to fasten the stone hammer on a handle ; this was VIII.] ARTS OF LIFE. 185 done in very ancient times, as is seen by the stone heads being grooved or bored on purpose (see Fig. 54 /). Though the iron hammer has superseded these, a trace of the oldei use of stone remains in our very name hammer^ which is the old Scandinavian hamarr, meaning both rock and hammer. From beating we come to hacking and cutting. At the earliest times known of man's life on the earth, his pointed and edged instruments of sharp stone are among his chief relics. Even in the mammoth-period he had already learnt not to be content with accidental chips of flint, but Fig. 52. — Gunfl.nt-maker's core and flakes (Evans), knew how to knock off two-edged flakes. This art of flaking flint or other suitable stones is the foundation of stone- implement making. Perhaps the best idea of it may be gained from the Suffolk gunflint makers who at this day carry on the primceval craft, though with better tools and for so different a purpose. Fig. 52 shows a gunflmt maker's core of flint, with the flakes replaced where he has knocked them off, and the mark of the blow is seen which brought away each flake. The flakes made by Stone Age men for 1 86 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. instruments may be three-sided like the Australian flake in Fig. 53 ^. But the more convenient flat-backed shape a, c, has been used from the earliest known times. The flint core, Fig. 54/ with the flakes e taken from it, shows how by previous flaking or trimming it was prepared for the new flake to come off with a suitable back. The finest 1 a & ^ FiG. 53.— Stone Flakes:— a, Palseolithic ; b, Modern Australia ; c, Ancient Denmark. flakes are those not struck off, but forced off by pressure with a flaking-tool of wood or horn. The neat Danish flake, Fig. 53^, was no doubt made so, and the still more beautiful sharp flakes of obsidian with which the native barbers of Mexico, to the astonishment of Cortes' soldiers, used to shave. A stone flake just as struck off may be fit for use as a knife, or as a spear head like that in Fig. 58 « ; or by further chipping it may be made into a scraper, arrowhead, or awl, like those in Fig. S4- VIII.] ARTS OF LIFE. 187 The oldest known tribes of men have left in the drift gravels of the quaternary or mammoth-period not only Fig. 54. — Later Stone Agt (neolithic) implement';, a. stone celt or hatchet ; /', flint spear-head ; c. scraper; 'P''>in Haitle-axe : /;. Egyp;ian falchion; c. .^siutic sabre; d, Jiuroptan sheaih-kiiife ; e, Roman cuher ; /, Hindu bill-ho-k. When metal came into use, the forms of the stone imple- ments were imitated in copper, bronze, or iron, and though the patterns were of course lightened and otherwise improved to suit the new material, it may be plainly seen that the stone hatchets anrl spear-heads in museums are the ancestors (so to speak) of the metal ones made ever since. But also the use of metal brought in new and useful forms which stone was not suited to. An idea of these important changes may be gained by careful looking at the series of metal 14 iQO ANTHRCPOLCGY. [chap. cutting-ins'.ruments in Fig, 57. We begin with a, which is an Egyptian bronze battle-axe, not very far changed froni the stone hatchet. But b, the bronze falchion carried also by Egyptian warriors, is a sort of axe-blade with the handle not at the back, but shifted down ; this convenient altera- tion could not have been made in the stone hatchet, which would have broken in the shank at the first blow, while in metal it answers perfectly. It may very well have been such transformed hatchets that led to the making of several most important classes of weapons and tools, in which a blade with stout back and front edge is fixed to a handle below it for chopping, slasliing, or cutting. Among these are all the various forms of the sabre or scimitar, represented by c, all our ordinary knives, represented here by the European sheath-knife d, and all cleavers, represented by the Roman culter e. Nor does the development stop here, for the group of instruments to which our bill-hook belongs is made with a concave edge, as in the Indian form, /, and this again leads on to the still more curved forms of the sickle and the scythe, which are not drawn here. Thus there is some reason to suppose that all these instruments, whether tools or weapons, or such as, like the bill-hooks of the early English and the modern Malays, served alike for peace and war, may have all originated from the early metal hatchet, which itself is derived from the still earlier hatchet of stone. From the early stone spear-heads another set of weapons seem to have gradually arisen, as may be seen in Fig. 58. Looking at the spear from the Admiralty Islands, a, the head of which is a large fiake of obsidian, it is i)lain that such a spear, when the shaft is broken oft" short, becomes a dagger. In fact one often cannot tell whether the flint blades of shapes like b, which are dug up in Europe, were intended for mounting as spears or as daggers. Now the VIII.] ARTS OF LIFE. i9t brittleness of stone was against the use of stone blades more than a few inches long, but when metal came in, the blades could be made long, taper, and sharp, thus developing into two-edged daggers of deadly effect. In old Egyptian pictures warriors are seen armed with spear and dagger, these two weapons having blades of similar shape, so that the dagger may be described as a large spear-head with a hilt to grasp in the hand. It seems as though the metal dagger, by further lengthening, passed into the two- edged sword, a weapon impossible m stone. To give an Fig. <;8. — tz. Stone spear-head (Admiralty I?.): i, stone Rpear-head or dagger-tlade (England): c, bronze spear-head (Denmark); battle, or the tribe or nation a negro belongs to may be indicated by his mark, for instance, a pair of long cuts down both cheeks, or a row of raised pimples down his forehead to the tip of his nose. Higher up in civihzation, tattooing still lasts on, as where Arab women will slightly touch up their faces, arms, or ankles with the needle, and our sailors amuse themselves with having an anchor or a ship in full sail done with gunpowder on their arms, but in this last case the original purpose is lost, for the picture is hidden under the sleeve. Naturally, as clothing comes more and more to cover the body, the primitive skin-decorations cease, for what is the use of adorning oneself out of sight? The head is frequently cropped or shaved close as a sign of mourning. Some tribes thus go bald always, like the Andaman islanders ; or let the hair grow in tonsure-fashion in a ring round the shaved crown, like the Coroado (that is. X.] ARTS CF LIFE. 239 "crowned") Indians of llrazil ; or wear a sliaven head with a long scalp-lock or pigtail like the North American Indians, or the Manchus of Tartary, from whom the modern Chinese Fi<;. 66. — Natives of Lepers' Island (Xew Hebrides.) have adopted this habit. A curious mode of twisting the hair with strips of bark into hundreds of long thin ringlets is seen in the portraits of natives of Lepers' Island, Fig. 66. 240 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. Various tribes grind their front teeth to points, or cut them away in angular patterns, so that in Africa and else- where a man's tribe is often known by the cut of his teeth. Long finger-nails are noticed even among ourselves as show- ing that the owner does no manual labour, and in China and neighbouring countries they are allowed to grow to a monstrous length as a symbol of nobility, ladies wearing silver cases to protect them, or at least as a pretence that they are there (see the portraits of Siamese actresses in royal dress, Fig. ^2). Or the nails may be let to grow as a sign that the wearer leads a religious life, and does no worldly work, as in the accompanying figure of the hand of a Chinese ascetic. Fig. 67. As any nation's idea of beauty is apt to be according to the type of their own race, they like to see their distinctive features exaggerated. Looking at a Hottentot face. Fig. 12 c-, one understands why the mothers would squeeze the babies' snub noses yet further in, while in ancient times a little Persian prince would have a bold aquiline nose shaped for him, to come like Fig. 1 1 /k Li all quarters of the globe is found the custom of compressing infants' heads by bandages and pads to make the little plastic skull grow to an approved shape. But as to what that shape ought to be, tastes differ extremely. Li the Columbia River district, some Flathead tribes will so flatten out the forehead that their front faces look like a pear with the large end upper- most, while neighbouring tribes press in the upper part of the skull so that their faces look like the pear with the small end up. Hippokrates, the ancient physician, mentions the artificially deformed skulls of the Makrokephali or " long-heads " of the Black Sea district. The genuine Turkish skull is of the broad Tatar form, while the nations of Greece and Asia Minor have oval skulls, which gives the X.] ARTS OF LIFE, 241 reason why at Constantinople it became the fashion to mould the babies' skulls round, so that they grew up with the broad head of the cont][uering race. Relics of such barbarism linger on in the midst of civilization, and not long ago a French physician surprised the world by the fact that nurses in Normandy were still giving the children's heads a sugar-loaf shape by bandages and a tight cap, - . Fig. 67.— Hand of Chinese ascetic. while in Brittany they preferred to press it round. No doubt they are doing so to this day. The propensity to beautify the body with ornaments belongs to human nature as low down as we can follow it. In South America the naked people were adorned with rings on legs and arms, and one tribe had as their only apparel 242 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. a macaw's feather stuck in a hole at each corner of their mouths, and strings of shells hanging from their noses, ears, and under-lips. This latter case is a good example of the ornaments being fastened into the body, which is pierced or cut to receive them, A^arious tribes wear labrets or lip-ornaments, some gradually enlarging the hole through the under-lip till it will take a wooden plug two or three inches across, as in the portrait (Fig. 68) of a woman of the Botocudos, a Brazilian tribe who owe their Fig 6S. — Botocudo woman with lip-and ear-ornaments. name to this labret, which the Portuguese compared to a botoque or bung. Ear-ornaments, as the figure shows, are put in the same way in the lobe of the ear, which they stretch so that when the disc of wood is taken out it falls in a loop and even reaches the shoulder. Thus it is possible that there may be some truth in the favourite wonder-tale of the old geographers, about the tribes whose great ears reached down to their shoulders, though the story had to be stretched a good deal farther when it was declared that X] ARTS OF LIFE. 243 they lay down on one ear and covered themselves with the other for a blanket. The great interest to us in these savage ornaments is in the tendency of higher civilization to give them up. In Persia one still finds the nose-ring through one side of a woman's nostril, but European taste would be shocked by this, though it allows the ear to be pierced to carry an ear-ring. As to ornaments which are merely put on, they are mostly feathers, flowers, or trinkets worn in the hair, or strung-ornaments or rings on the neck, arms, and legs. In what remote times man had begun to take pleasure in such decorations may be seen by the periwinkle-shells bored for stringing found in the cave of Cro-Magnon, which no doubt made necklaces and bracelets for the girls of the mammoth-period. In the modern world neck- laces and bracelets remain in unchanged use, though anklets, such as the bangles of the Hindu dancing-girl, have of course disappeared from the costume of civilized wearers of shoes and stockings. It would not suit our customs to keep an affectionate memory of dead relatives by wearing their finger and toe bones strung as beads, as the Andaman women do, but our ladies keep in flishion barbaric necklaces of such things as shells, seeds, tigers' claws, and especially polished stones. The wearing of shining stones as ornaments lasts on, whether they have come to be precious pearls or rubies, or glass beads which are imitation stones. Where metal becomes known it at once comes into use for ornament, and this reaches its height where amused travellers describe some Dayak girl with her arms sheathed in a coil of stout brass wire, or some African belle whose great copper rings on her limbs get so hot in the sun that an attendant carries a water-pot to sluice them down now and then. To see gold jewelry of the highest order, the student should examine that of the ancients, such as the Egyptian, 244 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. Greek, and Etruscan in the British Museum, and that of medicEval Europe. The art seems now to have passed its prime, and become a manufacture, of which the best pro- ducts are imitations from the antique. The cutting of precious stones such as diamonds into facets is, however, a modern art. As to finger-rings, if their use arose out of the signet-rings of Egypt and Babylon, then the few which are still engraved as seals keep up the original idea, while those which only carry pearls or diamonds have turned into mere ornaments. To come now to clothing proper. The man who wants a garment gets it in the simplest way when he takes the covering off a tree or a beast, and puts it on himself. The bark of trees provides clothes for rude races in many districts, as for instance in the curious use which natives of the Brazilian forests have long made of the so-called " shirt- tree " (lecythis). A man cuts a four or five feet length of the trunk, or a large branch, and gets the bark off in an entire tube, which he has then only to soak and beat soft and to cut slits for armholes, to be able to slip it on as a ready-made shirt ; or a short length will make a woman's skirt. 'J'he wearing of bark has sometimes been kept up as a sign of primitive simplicity. Thus in India it is written in the laws of Manu that when the grey-haired Brahman retires into the forest to end his days in religious meditation, he shall wear a skin or a garment of bark. A ruder people, the Kayans of Borneo, while in common life they like the smart foreign stuffs of the trader, when they go into mourn- ing throw them off and return to the rude native garment of bark-cloth. In Polynesia the manufacture of iaj^a from the bark of the paper-mulberry was carried to great perfection, the women beating it out with grooved clubs into a sort of vegetable felt, and ornamenting it with coloured patterns X.] ARTS OF LIFE 245 stamped on. The people were delighted with the white paper of the Europeans, and dressed themselves in it as a fine variety of tapa, till they found that the first shower of rain spoilt it. Leaves, also, are made into aprons or skirts which clothe various rude tribes. Not only are there " leaf- wearers " in India, but at a yearly festival in ALidras the whole low-caste population cast off their ordinary clothing, and put on aprons of leafy twigs. The skin garments worn by the savages of the ancient world have rotted away these many thousand years, but we may see how generally they used to be worn, by the vast numbers of skin-dressing implements of sharp stone (see Fig. 54, c), found in the ground. Till lately the Patagonians, when they came on their journeys to a place where suitable flint or obsidian was to be found, would load themselves with a supply of lumps to chip into these primitive currier's scrapers. Savages, that their fur robes or deer-skin shirts should not dry stiff, know how to dress the leather skilfully by such processes as rubbing in fat or marrow, and suppling with the hands ; they also smoke it, to keep. Thus the North Americans know how to prepare deer-skin for garments into something like what we call chamois leather. But it hardly seems as though the lower races had taught themselves the process of actual tanning with bark or galls, where the tannic acid forms in the substance of the skin insoluble compounds which resist change for ages, so that the beautiful cut and embossed work in tanned leather from ancient Egypt may still be seen perfectly preserved in our museums. In such riding countries as Mexico, suits of leather are still worn, while in Europe the buff jerkin and the huntsman's buckskins are disappearing ; but it is still everywhere acknowledged that there is nothing like leather for covering the feet. In wearing furs, our 246 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. height of kix.iry keeps curiously close to the sa\age fashion of the priiuilive world. Plaiting and matting are arts of such simplicity that they are known to savages. In hot countries matting is convenient for dress, as when South Sea Islanders make gowns of plaited grass, and the old art still provides the civilized world with hats and bonnets of straw or chip. Next, if we pull a scrap of woven cloth to pieces, we see that it is in fact a piece of matting done with thread. Therefore, to understand weav- ing, we have to begin with the making of string or thread. All mankind can twist string, but some tribes do it in a far lower way than we are accustomed to. They take vegetable fibre, wool or hair, and twist it by rolling between their flat palms, or with one hand on the thigh. It is quite worth the reader's while to try to imitate this process, by twisting two strands of tow, and then rolling these into one with- the reverse movement. At any rate he will find liow much practice he would take to do it as cleverly as the Australians when they have the women's hair cut to furnish a supply of fishing-lines, or the New Zealanders when they run out a handful of native flax by inches into a neat and perfect cord. But the higher nations use a mechanical contrivance, the spindle, for thread-making, and the question is how this came to be invented. Fig. 69 shows what may have happened. At a is figured a cross-stick, form- ing a simple reel or winder, on which the Australians wind their hair-string just mentioned. Now if it hatl occurred to one of these savages to secure his thread by drawing it into a split at the end of the stick, he might have seen that by giving the hanging reel a twirl he could make it twist a new strand for him much f-ister than he could do between his hands. The Australian never saw how to do this. But looking at h in the figure, which X.] ARTS OF LIFE. 247 represents an ancient Egyptian woman spinning, it is evident lliat such a si)indle as she is working with may have been invented l)y turning a mere reel to this new use. Such spindles were known over the ancient civilized world, and among the commonest objects dug up near old dwell- ings are the spindle-whorls of stone or terra-cotta, like ^reat buttons, which with a stick through, the middle formed the whole simple implement. Spindles may still be seen in the hands of peasant women in Italy or Switzerland. The spinning-wheel of the middle ages was a little machine to / r Fig. 6j.— a, Australian w!nJcr for hand-twisted cord ; b, Eg^'p;ian woman spinning with the spindle. drive a spindle, and the spinning-frames in factories show the ancient instrument worked with still more modern im- l)rovements, a hundred spindles in a row being driven rapidly by steam-power, and all tended by a single operative. The next point is how people provided with thread or yarn taught themselves to weave it into cloth. As has just been said, clodi is a sort of matting made with threads, but as these cannot be held stiff like rushes, a number of them ma\- be stretched in a frame to form a warp, and then tlie cress-thread or woof worked in and out with the 248 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. fingers, or on a stick, as the Mexican girl is doing in Fig. 70. This toilsome method still suits the difiicult patterns of the tapestry-weaver. But time-saving contrivances were invented very early. The ancient Egyptian pictures already show the alternate threads of the warp being lifted by cross-bars, so as to allow the woof-thread carried by a shuttle to be sent right across the piece of cloth at one throw. The looms of classic Greece and Rome were much the same, and little improvement was made in the machine during the middle ages. Indeed in out-of-the- way places such as the Hebrides, the tourist may still see Fig. 70. — Girl weaving. (From an Aztec picture.) the old cottage-loom which, exxept in being hori::ontal so that the weaver sits to it instead of standing, hardly differs from the loom at which Penelope may be imagined weaving the famous shroud that she undid at night. Only about a century ago improvement began again, when the "flying shuttle" was invented, which instead of being thrown by hand, was driven swiftly across by a pair of levers or arti- ficial arms. Of late years this improved loom has passed into the power-loom, the steam-engine now doing the hard labour instead of the weaver's hands and feet. The X.] ARTS OF LIFE. 249 ingenious device of the Jacquard loom with its perforated cards arranging the threads, has made it possible to weave even landscapes and portraits. The primitive tailor ox "cutter" {tailleur) had not only to cut his skin or bark into shape, but to join pieces by- means of sinew or thread. This art of sewing makes its appearance among savages, and is seen in its rudest form among the Fuegians who pierce their guanaco-skins with a pointed bone, push the thread through, and make a tie at each hole. Among tribes who have only such bone awls, or stiff thorns, to work with, sewing cannot get beyond the shoemaker's fashion of first making a row of holes and then pushing and pulling the thread through. But bone needles with eyes are found in the reindeer-caves of France, so that possibly the seamstresses of the mammoth- period may already have known how to stitch and embroider their soft skins. When the metal-period began, bronze needles came into use such as are to be seen in museums, and in modern times the fine steel needles have become an example how finish and cheapness may be gained by division of labour, one set of workpeople being entirely occupied in grinding the points, another in drilling the eyes, and so on. But the sewing-needle is still in principle that of the ancient world, and hand-sewing, after holding its place for thousands of years, has suddenly had to compete with the work of the new sewing-machine, which runs its more rapid seams in a mechanically different way. Next, as to the shape of garments. If we knew of no costume but what we commonly wear now, we might think it more a product of mere fancy than it really is. But on looking carefully at the dresses of various nations, it is seen that most garments are variations of a few principal kinds, each madj for a particular purpose in clothing the body. 250 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. The simplest and no doubt earliest garments are wraps wound or hung on the bod\', and by noticing how these are worn it may be guessed how they led to the later use of garments fitted to the wearer's shape. To begin with the simplest mantles, a skin or blanket with a hole through the middle forms a ready-made garment of the poncho kind. When one throws a rug or blanket over one's shoulders, it becomes a garment which requires flxstening in front, or on one shoulder, to leave the arm free. This fastening may be done with a thorn or bone pin, the primitive brooch^ that is, "skewer" (French broche) \ we now use the word brooch to mean the more civilized metal pin with a safety-clasp, the Y.dXxw fibula or "fixer." Now if one stands thus draped in a blanket or sheet, one has only to raise the arms to show how naturally sleeves came to be made by sewing together under tlie arms. Next, putting the blanket over the head and holding it under the chin, it is seen how the part over the head will make a hood, which can be thrown back when not wanted. A\'hen it was found convenient to make the hood separate, there arose various kinds of head-covering, whose baggy shape often shows their origin, for instance the pointed "fool's-cap." When the mantle thrown over the shoulders is short, it forms the cape or cope ; when long, it becomes the cloak, which owes its name to its likeness to a bell (French cloche). For convenience, many varieties of the mantle are cut into shape, as for instance the toga in which the ancient Roman draped himself was rounded off. But ever since the invention of w^eaving, certain garments have been worn just as they came from the loom, such as the Scotch plaid, and that ancient Eastern wrapper which we still know by its Persian name of sliaial {slial). Such woven garments are apt to keep a mark of their origin in the fringe, which X.] ARTS OF LIFE. 251 in its original form is the ends of the warp-threads left on by the weaver, and when these threads are tied together in bundles they give rise to tassels. Another great group of garments are tunics, seen in a simple form in the chiton of ancient Greek female dress, which has been compared to a linen sack open at both ends, and was held up by a brooch on each shoulder, leaving openings for the arms. The tunic, closed at the shoulders and generally provided with sleeves, is the most universal of civilized garments, whether worn hanging loose like a shirt, or drawn in at the waist by a girdle or belt. In its various forms it is seen as the tunic of the Roman legionary and the " red shirt " of the Garibaldian volunteer, the coat of the mediaeval noble, the smock-frock of the English peasant, the blouse of the French workman, and lastly, it led to our modern coats and waistcoats, which are tunics made to open in front and close with buttons. One of the great steps in personal cleanliness and therefore in culture made by our forefathers, was the adoption of a linen tunic next the skin, the "short" garment, or s/u'rf. Again, a piece of cloth wrapped round the body and held up by a girdle forms the skirt or kilt, and the way in which Eastern women fasten their skirts together between the feet for convenience of walking, shows how trousers were invented. Many ancient nations wore trousers, as the Sarmatians, whose modern-looking costume may be seen on Trajan's column, and the Gauls and Britons, so that it is a mistake to call the present Highland costume the "garb of old Gaul." The classic Greeks and Romans looked on the hracccc or breeches as belonging to barbarism, but their opinion has not been accepted by the civilized world. These remarks may lead readers to look attentively into books of costume, which indeed are full of curious 252 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. illustrations of tlie way in which things are not invented outright by mere fancy, but come by gradual alterations of what was already there. To account for our present absurd "chimney-pot " hat, we must see how it came by successive changes from the conical Puritan hat and the slouched Stuart hat, and these again from earlier forms. The sense of the hat-band must be found in its once having been a real cord to draw in the mere round piece of felt which was the primitive hat ; and to understand why our hat is covered with silk nap, it must be remembered that this is an imitation of the earlier beaver-fur hat, which would stand rain. Even the now useless seams and buttons on modern clothes (see page 15) are bits of past history. This chapter may be concluded with an account of boats and ships. He who first, laying hold of a floating bough, found it would bear him up in the water, had made a be- ginning in navigation. Naturally, history has kept no record of the origin of such an art. Yet the rudest forms of floats, rafts, and boats, may still be seen in use among savages, and even the civilized traveller coming to a stream or lake may be glad to make shift with a log or a bundle of bulrushes to help him across, and carry his gun and clothes over dry. Comparing these rough-and-ready means with the contri- vances made with skill and care for permanent use, a fair idea may be had of the stages tlirough which the shipwrights' art grew up. The mere float comes lowest, as where a South Sea Island child goes into the water with an unhusked coco-nut to hold on by ; or a Hottentot will swim his goats across the river, supporting his body by sprawling on one end of a drift-log of willow, which he calls his "wooden-horse." Australians have been known to come out to our ships sitting astride logs pointed at the ends, and paddling with their hands, X.] ARTS OF LIFE. 253 while native fishermen of Cahfornia will sit on a bundle of rushes tied rp in the shape of a sailor's hammock. Rude as these are, they at any rate show that the makers have noticed the advantage which the craft with a sharj) bow has over the blunt-ended log in getting through the water. In all quarters of the globe, men improve on the float by making it hollow for buoyancy; it thus becomes a boat. One way of doing this is to scoop out a log. Any one who happens to have been up country in America may have paddled himself in such a "dug-out" across a pond or river ; and after experience of the care required to keep a cylinder from rolling over in the water, he will know how great an improvement it was in boat-building when a keel was put on to steady the craft. To savages with their stone hatchets, the hollowing out of a log is a laborious business w^hen the wood is of a hard kind, and they are apt to use fire to help them, setting the tree-trunk alight along the proper line and hacking away the burning wood. Columbus was struck with the size of such vessels made by the natives of the West Indies, mentioning in his letters many canoes of solid wood, " multas scaphas solidi ligni," some so large as to hold seventy to eighty rowers. The Spaniards adopted their Haitian name canoa, whence our catioe. Yet this diig- oul, or moiioxyle (" one-tree "), to use its Greek name, was well known in other barbaric countries, and had been com- mon in Europe in ages before history, as may be seen by the specimens in museums, preserved by the peat or sand in which they were found imbedded. Even the Latin word scaplia, used above, carries the record of this early boat- building ; it is Greek skap/ie, which corresponds so exactly in meaning to the term " dug-out," as to be an evident relic of the time when boats were really scooped out of solid trunks; related to these words are English i-Zvjf and .f////, so iS 254 ANTHRCPOLCGY. [chap. that the line of connexion in names runs through from first to last. Another very simple way of making a boat is that seen among the Australians, where a man will strip a sheet of bark off the stringy-bark tree, tie it together at the ends, and paddle off in this improvised bark-canoe. If, however, it is to be used more than once, he sews the ends together, and puts in stretchers or cross-pieces of wood to keep it in shape. Thus appears the bark-canoe, not unknown in Asia and Africa, and attaining in North America its greatest perfection, with its framework of cedar and sheathing of sheets of birch-bark sewed together with fibrous cedar-roots. Such canoes are still in full use in districts like the Hudson's Bay territory, being well suited to a broken navigation where rapids make it needful to carry boat and cargo overland, or a " portage " has to be made from one river to another. The principle of skin-canoes is much the same, using hide for bark. North American Indians crossing rivers have been known to turn the skins of their tents into vessels by means of a kw twigs to keep them stretched. Scarcely above this are the round skin-covered boats of boughs of Mesopo- tamia, and the portable coracles of the ancient Britons ; on the Severn and the Shannon fishermen still go down to the river carrying on their backs their coracles, now made of tarred canvas on a frame, but modelled on the ancient type. The Esquimaux kayak has its framework of bone or drift-wood on which are stretched the seal-skins which convert it into a water-tight life-buoy, in which the skin-clad paddler can even turn over sideways and bring his boat up right on the other side. Our modern so-called canoes are imitations of this in wood. Next, when the barbaric shipwright comes to improving a dug-out canoe by sewing or lacing on a strip of thin board as a gunwale, or making his whole boat by sewing thin X.] ARTS OF LIFE. 255 boards together over tlie ribs, instead of skins or slieets of bark, he brings his vessel a stage nearer to our boats. From Africa across to the Mah\y Archipelago, such sewn ships used to be, and often still are, the ordinary native craft. The South Sea Island canoes, thus laced together with sinnet or coco-nut fibre braid so neatly that the joints hardly show, are marvels of barbaric carpentry. In the gulf of Oman, men used to go across to the coco-nut islands with their tools, cut down a few palms, make the wood into planks, sew these together with cord made from the bark, make sails of the leaves, load the new-made ships with the nuts, and set sail. Before coming to the ships of civilized nations, let us look back for a moment to the ruder floats. Two or three logs fastened together form a raft, which though clumsy to move has the advantage of not upsetting, and carrying a heavy load. At the time of the discovery of Peru, the Spaniards were amazed to meet with a native raft out in the ocean, and with a sail set. The rafts which bring goods down the Euphrates and Tigris are buoyed with blown sheep- skins ; at the end of the voyage the raft is broken up and the wood sold, so that only the empty skins have to go back to serve another time. With still more perfect economy, the rafts down the Nile are buoyed with earthen pots for sale in the bazar, so that nothing goes back. Timber- rafts, like those on the Rhine, are well arranged for merely floating down stream. But when a raft has to be driven through the water by oars or sails, its resistance is excessive, and it has occurred to the Fijians and other islanders that a raft formed by two parallel logs united by cross-poles and carrying a raised platform, would go more easily. Look- ing at this simple contrivance, it has been reasonably thought that it led up to the invention of the outrigger 256 ANTHROPCLCGY. chap. canoe, known in ancient Europe, and now prevailing in the Pacific and as far as Ceylon. One of the two logs is now represented by the canoe, the second remaining as the out- rigger log, fastened to the ends of the two projecting poles, so as to stoady the whole in rough weather. Or indeed the two logs may both become canoes, and the platform be retained ; thus we have the Polynesian double-canoe, whose principle has been lately turned to account in the double-steamboat to smooth the passage between Dover and Calais. Next, as to the ways by which boats are propelled through the water. The origin of rowing is plainly shown by the Australian straddling his pointed log and paddling with his hands, or by the fisherman of the Upper Nile propelling with his feet the bundle of stalks he sits astride on. The primitive wooden paddle, imitating the form and doing the work of the flat hand or foot, is well known to savages, who mostly use the single paddle with a blade or shovel end ; the double-ended paddle, such as our canoeists have borrowed from the Esquimaux, is a peculiar improved form. The paddle used free-handed to dig or sweep at the water, is best suited to the narrow bark- canoe or hollowed trunk, but for larger craft it is a rude contrivance as compared with the civilized oar, which is a lever pulled against a fulcrum so as to use more of the rower's force, and in a steadier pull. The difference between barbaric and civilized knowledge of mechanical principles, is well seen by comparing a large South Sea Island canoe with twenty paddlers shovelling the water, to one of our eight-oared launches. Of sails, perhaps the simplest idea is to be seen in Catlin's sketch of North American Indians standing up each in his canoe, holding up his blanket with outstretched arms with its lower end tied to his leg^ X.] ARTS OF LIFE. 257 and so going before the wind. Tlie rudest regular sail used anywhere is a mat or cloth held up by two sticks as stays at the upper corners and made fast below, or sup- ported by an upright pole and cross-piece, the primitive mast and yard. It is so common for the lower tribes of men never to sail their boats, that it is difficult to imagine that their ancestors ever knew how. Surely they ^\ould have kept it up, for the art of saving so much labour with so little pains would not easily have fallen out of mind. It seems more likely that the invention of the sailing vessel belongs to a period when civilization was far advanced. Yet this period was very ancient. Up to this point, in making out how the simpler kinds of boats came into existence, history gives no help. Not only does their origin mostly lie beyond record, but by the time we come fairly into history we find the ancient nations knowing how to build vessels of more advanced order, framed with keel and ribs, and sheathed with nailed planks, in fact the direct predecessors of our own ships. Egypt, or somewhere else in that Old World region of ancient culture, may have been the original centre whence the higher shipwrights' craft spread over the world. It is instructive to study the ancient Egyptian vessel (Fig. 71) depicted on the wall of a Theban tomb, and to see how fiir it already has in a rudimentary state the parts which we recognise as belonging to the fully-developed ship. As was common, it was a combination of rowing-galley and sailing-ship. The rowers sit on cross benches, pulling at the oars which pass through loops, while at the stern is worked the great steering-oar which is the ancestor of our rudder (this used to be merely an oar, which its name originally meant, like ruder in German). There is a mast held up by stays and carrying yards, with 253 ANTHROPOLOGY. [CKAP ropes rigged to hoist them and to furl the sail. The forecastle and poop are already represented by raised struc- tures on the deck. In the Egyptian pictures of war-ships it is seen how these served as stations for the archers, while the fighting-men were also protected behind a bul- wark, and there is even the "crow's nest" on the top of the mast serving as a place for slingers to hurl stones from at the enemy, from which comes our "mast-head." Com- paring with the Egyptian vessels the ancient galleys and ships of the Mediterranean, wliether Phoenician, Greek, Fig. 71. — Ancient Nile-boat, from wall-painting, Thebes. or Roman, it is impossible to think these can have come into existence by separate lines of invention ; the family likeness among them is too strong. Even farther off, the likeness of the craft still used in the Ganges to the ancient Nile-boats is surprising, and the eye of Osiris painted on the Egyptian funeral bark that carried the dead across the lake to the western burial-place, may ]:)erhaps have first suggested the painting of eyes as ornamerts on the bows of boats, from the barks in Valetta harbour in the west to the junks of Canton in the ,cast. In following the course of x] ARTS OF LIFE. 255 development from the ancient to the modern ship, we notice that from time to time new appliances come in, as metals heathing to protect the planks from the boring teredo, the iron duked anchor instead of a great stone, the capstan for hauling, (S:c. More masts and spars now served to carry more sails, and tier above tier of rowers impelled the classic bireme and trireme. The war-galley lasted on into our own time in the Venetian navy, kept in use in spite of its bad sea-going quality, for its power of dashing upon sailing-vessels helpless in a calm. The galley-slaves who laboured at the huge oars were captives or criminals, and though the French galleys no longer remain for penal servitude, the term galcrien or galley-slave still means a convict. The vast improvement of European sailing-vessels in the middle ages is in great measure due to an invention Ijarnt from the far east — the mariner's compass. Ships, now able to steer their courses on long voyages out of sight of land, were improved in build and rigging, while the men- of-war with several decks armed with tiers of cannon became floating castles. Lastly, during the present century, steam-power has been applied to propel the ship from within, the paddle-wheel or screw in fact taking the place of the old banks of oars, and the changeable wind-power being now only turned to account as an occasional aid and means of saving fuel. It is needless to describe the changes wliich modern armour-plating and huge guns have made in the construction of ships of war, but even these still show plainly enough how they were formed by successive alterations from the primitive canoe. CHAPTER XI. ARTS OF LIFE — [concluded). Fire, 260 — Cookery, 264 — Bread, &c., 266 — Liquors, 268 — Fuel, 270 — Lighting, 272 — Ve?sels, 274 — Pottery, 274 — Glass, 276 — Metals, 277 — Bronze and Iron Ages, 278 — Barter, 2S1 — Money, 282 — Commerce, 2S5. The subject next to be considered is Fire and its uses. Man understands fire and deals with it in ways quite beyond the intelligence of the lower animals. There is an old story how, in the forests of equatorial Africa, when travellers had gone away in the morning and left their fires burning, the huge manlike apes called pongos (probably our gorillas) would come and sit round the burning logs till they went out, not having the sagacity to lay more wood on. This story is often repeated to contrast human intelligence with the dulness of even the highest apes. Of course there had been forest-fires in ages before man, as when the trees had been set in flames by lightning or by a lava stream. But of all creatures man alone has known how to manage fire, to carry it from place to place with Inirning brands, and when it went out to produce it afresh. No savage tribe Seems really to have been found so low as to be without fire. In the limestone caverns, among the rolics of the CH. XI.] ARTS OF LIFE. 261 mammoth period, morsels of charcoal and burnt bones are found imbedded, which show that even in that remote antiquity the rude cave-men made fires to cook their food and warm themselves by. As to the art of producing fire, the savage way was mostly by the friction of two pieces of wood, and to this day travellers may now and then see the simple apparatus at work. The hand fire-drill consists of a stick like an arrow- shaft cut to a blunt point, which is twirled like a chocolate- muUer between the hands (shifted up when they get too far down) with such speed and pressure as to bore a hole into an under-piece of wood, till the charred dust made by the boring takes fire. Fig. 72 shows a Bushman thus drilling fire while his companion attends to the tinder. The Polynesian way is different, pushing the pointed stick along a groove of its own making in the under-piece of wood. Either method will make fire in a few minutes, but knack and proper choice of wood are needed, and one of us will hardly succeed. For easier working, some nations have long had a mechanical improvement on the simple savage fire-drill, by driving it with a thong wound a couple of turns round the stick, and pulled to and fro ; also, working it with a bow like the common bow- drill of our tool-shops is not unknown. In either case a top piece is rcquiretl to keep the drill down (not too hard) on its bearing. Among civilized nations, the old fire-drill had already in ancient times been superseded in common use by better contrivances, especially. the flint and steel. But although discarded from practical life, it has boen kept up for ceremonial purposes. As has been already mentioned, (p. 16) the Brahmans may be still seen "churning" with a fire-drill driven by a hair-cord the pure divine fire for 262 AxNTHROPOLOGY. [chap. their sacrifices, thus rehgiously keeping to the old-fashioned instrument used in daily life by the early Aryans. The ancient Romans had such a survival of their past state of arts in the law that if the vestal virgms let out the sacred fire, it was to be made afresh by drilling into a wooden board. The old art has even lasted on in Europe to our own day as the orthodox means of kindling the "'need-fire," with which, when there was a murrain, the peasants in many parts used to light bonfires to drive the horses and cattle through, to save them from the pestilence. This rite, inherited from the religion of prse-Christian times, Fig. 72. — Bushman drilling fir>; (after Chapman). requires new wild-fire made by friction, not the tame fire of the hearth. The last need-fire on record in Great Britain is perhaps one that was made in Perth in 1826, but they may still be seen in Sweden and elsewhere when there is cholera or other pestilence about. In the last century there was a law passed forbidding the superstitious friction- fire in Tonkoping, the' very district now famous for its clieap tandstickor or tinder-sticks, that is, lucifer-matches. So curiously do the extremes of civilization come together in the world. The fire-drill is a ir.eans of convertinc: mechanical force XI.] ARTS OF LIFE. 263 into heat till the burning-point of wood is reached. But all that is really wanted is a glowing hot particle or spark, and this can be far more easily got in other ways. Breaking a nodule of iron pyrites picked up on the sea-shore, and witli a bit of flint striking sparks from it on tinder, is a way of fire-making quite superior to the use of the wooden drill. It was known to some modern savages, even the miserable natives of Tierra del Fuego ; to the proehistoric men of Europe, as appears from the bits of pyrites found in their caves ; and of course to the old civilized world, as witness the Greek name of the mineral, purites ox "fierj'." Sub- stitute for this a piece of iron, and we have the flint-and- steel, the ordinary apparatus of nations from their entry into the iron age till modern times. Yet even this has now been so discarded that the old-fashioned kitchen tinder-box with its flint and U-shaped steel, and damper for preparing the tinder from scraps of burnt linen to light the brimstone- match with, has become a curiosity worth securing when found by chance in some farmhouse. oNIention need hardly be made here of the burning -lens and the concave mirror known in ancient Greece, nor of the wooden condensing syringe (much like that described in our books on physics) known in the Chinese region ; these are rather curious than practically important. Quite othervvi-e with the invention of the lucifer-match, dating from about 1840. Its action depends on phosphorus igniting by being nibbed, the head of an ordinary lucifer being of an inflammable composition, containing chlorate or nitrate of potash, which is fired by particles of phosphorus mixed in with it ; for the safety- match, these particles of phosphorus are put, not in the match head, but on the rubber instead. In the low levels of civilization the hut is often so small that the fire has to be made outside. But when it becomes 264 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. spacious enough, the fire of logs burns on the hard-trodden earth in the middle of the hut, the smoke finding its way out as it can by door and cracks. Those who have chanced to spend a night lying on the ground with their feet to the fire in such a dweUing, know both what pLace the fire has in barbaric comfort, and how that comfort was increased when builders took the trouble to make a smoke- hole in the roof, and afterwards came to a real chimney. The history of artificial warming from this point lies so plainly before us as not to need a long description. From the fire of a few sticks on the cottage hearth, we come to the wide fire-places in the halls of country houses, with their fire-dogs, after the fashion of the middle ages. Then come the coal-fires in open grates, the closed stoves, and the arrangements for warming the house with currents of hot air, or circulating pipes of hot water. From house-warming we come to cookery. The heat applied in cooking food, bursting the cells and softening the tissues so as to make it easier to chew, is an important aid to digestion, saving energy which would be wasted on as- similating raw flesh or vegetables. It would not indeed be impossible for man to live on uncooked food, and perhaps the nearest approach to this is found on some coral islands of the Pacific, where raw fish and coco-nuts form a great part of the native diet. Low tribes, especially half-starved wanderers of the deserts, such as the Australians, eat insects, grubs, shellfish, and small reptiles, raw as they find them ; and Brazilian forest-men have been seen to imitate the ant-bear by poking a stick into an ant-hill, and letting the ants run up it into their mouths. These practices shock Europeans, who thjmselves however have no scruples as to oysters and cheese-mites, to which they happen to be accustomed. I'ut these rude tribes know how to cook, as XI.] ARTS CF LIFE. 265 indeed all mankind do, the familiar definition of man as the "cooking animal" having no proved exception, ancient or modern. Civilized nations have come so thoroughly to this way of assisting nature, that they cook almost every- thing they eat, only keeping up primitive habits in eating nuts, berries, and other fruit raw as more pleasing to the taste. It has long been looked on as a sign of low culture to eat raw meat, like the Eurytanes of the interior of Greece whom Thukydides mentions as " most ignorant in their speech, and said to be raw-eaters {oniop/iagoi)." Even the native tribes of New England were struck with this habit among the roving race of the far north, whom they called accordingly Eskimantsic or " raw-flesh-eaters," a name they still bear m its French form Esquimaux. The roughest ways of rooking are to be seen among savages, who broil their meat on the burning logs, or roast it stuck on the primitive spit, a pointed stake planted sloping over the fire, or bury it in the hot embers as boys do chestnuts or potatoes. From this latter mode comes the invention of the oven, which in its simplest form may be a hollow tree set on fire and smouldering inside, or a pit dug in the ground and heated by a wood-fire, often with red-hot stones put in to help the baking. Brazilian tribes set up four posts with a grating of branches across, on which they laid their game and fish with a slow fire underneath. Meat prepared on such a boiuan will keep a long while ; the pirates of the West Indies used thus to prepare their stores of meat, whence comes the word bucanecr. 7 o the buffalo-hunting tribes of North America belongs the invention o( pern //i tea ti, meat dried and pounded for keeping, wlule in many parts of the world people know how to dry sheets or strips of meat in the hot sun ; this is called jerked meat, and will keep. The use of hot 266 ANTHROPOLOGY. [ci:ap. stones in baking has just been mentioned. From this the important art of boihng food may have been derived. In many parts of the world, among tribes who do not know how to make an earthen pot, there is found the curious art of stone-boihng, which is a sort of wet baking. The Assinaboins of North America have their name, which means "stone-boilers,'' from their old practice of digging a hole in the ground, lining it with a piece of the slaughtered animal's hide, and then putting in the meat with water, and hot stones to boil it. Tribes of the far West actually managed by means of red-hot stones to boil salmon and acorn- porridge in their baskets made of close-plaited roots of the spruce fir. The process of stone-boiling has lasted on even in Europe where found convenient for heating water in wooden tubs. Linnaeus on his northern tour found the Both- land people brewing beer in this way, and to this day the "rude Carinthian boor" drinks such "stone-beer," as it is called. As soon as the cooks anywhere are provided with earthen pots or metal kettles, boiling over the fire becomes easy. Yet it is curious to notice the absence of boiled meats from the feasts of the Homeric heroes, where there is so much about the joints stuck on spits to roast, and the vengeful Odysseus rolling to and fro on his bed is compared to an eager roaster turning a stuffed paunch before the blazing fire. Among the old Northmen it was otherwise, for it is told in the Edda how the warriors feast every night in Walhalla on the sodden flesh of the boar Srehrimnir, who is daily boiled in the huge kettle, and comes to life again ready for the morrow's hunt. The simplest ways of making bread, such as seem to have come in with the earliest cultivation of grain, answer so well for some purposes that they may still be seen almost unchanged. Thus in a north country cottage the XI.] ARTS CF LIFE. 267 housewife moistens the oatmeal and kneads it into dough, which spread out thin is baked into oatcakes on the hot iron girdle (it used to be a hot stone) ; and the damper of the AustraHan colonist is as simply made with flour and water in thick cakes, baked in the embers. These take us back near the primitive stages of an art which almost more than any other has civilized mankind. Such unleavened bread being first in use, the invention of leavened bread would follow as a matter of course, by the sour dough on the uncleaned vessel fermenting into leaven (French levain, lightening), which starts fermentation through the fresh dough, disengagmg bubbles of carbonic acid within it which expand it into a spongy mass. In later times the yeast from brewing was found to be a better means than leaven ; and there are modern processes of introducing the gas by means of baking-powder (such as sal-aeratus or aerated salt, bicarbonate of soda), or the bread may be aerated by mixing the carbonic acid gas mechanically. The other great means of preparing farinaceous or starchy food is by boiling, which lets the starch out to mix with the water by bursting the tiny granules in which it is enclosed. Rice boiled whole furnishes about half the food of mankind, and among other staple articles of vegetable food are the various kinds of pap or porridge made with wheat, barley, oats, maize, sago, cassava, &c. Look- ing over a modern cookery book, it is seen what an endless list of dishes and sauces have been contrived by clever cooks, to please the palate and make one wish for more. As to progress in cookery in this way, no doubt the moderns have left the ancients behind. But, after all, the main purpose of cooking food is to bring it into a proper condition for keeping up and working the human machine, body and mind. Examining it from this point of view, it 268 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap, is curious to notice what an old-world business it is. Its main processes of roasting, baking, and boiling, belong to the barbaric stage of culture, and had their origin in ages before history. The liquors drunk by man may next be noticed. Savage tribes such as the Australians were water-drinkers when discovered by the Europeans, and even the Hottentots and North American Indians knew no fermented drinks. It is difficult to suppose that an indulgence so tempting would ever be forgotten, if once known ; so that possibly the ancestors of these peoples may have from the first been ignorant of the art of fermenting liquor. But in most countries, especially where grain and fruit were cultivated, one would think that the process must sooner or later discover itself, by the accident of some suitable juice or mash being left to stand. In Mexico the milky juice of the aloe is fermented into pulque ; in Asia and Africa palms are tapped for palm-wine or toddy ; cider from apple-juice, and mead from honey and water, are well known ; the Tatars ferment their mares' milk into kumiss. Especially liquors of the beer kind prevail widely; the first mentioned in history is the beer brewed from barley by the ancient Egyptians, whence may perhaps be traced the ancient ale or beer of Europe ; allied to it are the kvass or rye-beer of Russia, the pombe or millet-beer of Africa, the so-called rice-wine of the Chinese, the chicha made with maize or cassava by the natives of America. Wine seems not less ancient, and the Egyptian paintings show the vineyards, the wine-presses, the wine-jars ; indeed, wine-making is still much what it was in those early ages of history. In ancient times it is curious to notice the frank undoubting delight of men in intoxicating drink, as a divinely given means of drowning care and XI.] ARTS CF LIFE. 269 stimulating dulness into wild joy. They drank it .solemnly in their religious feasts and oftered it to their gods. The ancient bards of the Yedic hymns thought no ill in singing of Indra the Heaven-god, reeling drunk with the libations of the sacred soma poured out by his worshipjjers, and in later ages the Greeks chanted in bacchanal processions the praises of the beneficent Dionysos, who made all nations happy with the care-dispelling juice of the grape. But in early times also there comes into view an opposite doctrine. The guardians of religion, sensible of the evil of drunken- ness, begin to proclaim not only excess as hateful, but the very tasting of strong drink a sin. The Brahmans, although the libation of the soma remains by old tradition among their sacred rites, yet account the drinking of spirituous liquors one of the five great sins ; wliile in the old rival religion of Buddha, one of the ten precepts or command- ments which the novice promises to obey, is that forbidding the use of intoxicating liquor. Though the religion of jMohammed arose in great measure out of Judaism and Christianity, he cast off their ancient honour for wine and its use in sacred rites, forbidding it as an abomination. It was not till the middle ages that distilled spirit, though more ancient in the East, came into use among the western nations. It was generally accepted as beneficial, as is well seen in the name of "water of life," Latin aqiiavitce, French can de-vie, Irish usquebaugh (for shortness 7c>hisky). Alco- holic spirit is now produced in immense quantities from the refuse of wine-making, brewing, sugar-refining, &c. Its employment as a habitual stimulant is among the greatest evils of the modern world, bringing about in the low levels of the population a state of degradation hardly matched ia the worst ages of history. On the other hand, modern civilized life has gained in comfort by taking to the use of 19 270 ANTHRCPOLCGY. [chap. warm slightly stimulant drinks. Tea, at first valued by the Buddhist monks in Central Asia as a drug to keep the ascetic awake for his nightly religious duties, seems to have been introduced as a beverage in China at about the Christian era, and has spread fi-om thence all over the world. Coffee is at home in Arabia, and the world owes its general use to the Moslems. Chocolate was brought by the Spaniards from old Mexico, where it was a favourite drink. With these, mention has to be made of tobacco, also an importation from America, where at the time of the discovery it was smoked by natives of both the north and south continent. In here describing fires and fire-places (p. 264), wood has been taken as the primitive fuel. Indeed, the fire of fallen boughs made at a picnic in the woods may take our minds fairly back to prae-historic life. When m the savage hut the logs are piled on the earthen floor, this simple hearth already becomes the gathering-place of the family and the type of home. But in treeless districts the want of fuel is one of the diiTiculties of life, as where on the djsert plains the buffalo-hunter has to pick up for the evening fire the droppings which he calls " bufQilo-chips " or '•' bois dc vache." Even in woodland countries, as soon as people collect in villages, the fire-wood near by is apt to run short. When some American Indians were asked what reason they supposed had brought the white men to their country, they answered quite simply that no doubt we had burnt up all our wood at home, and had to move. The guess was so far good, that something of the kind must really have happened had we depended on the fuel from our forests and peat bogs, for the supply in England was giving out. Thus what was in old times the forest-land of Kent and Sussex, and has still kept its name of the Weald {i.e. wood), XI] ARTS OF LIFE ayr is not now well-timbered, but this is because in Queen Elizabeth's time it liad been stripped to make charcoal for the iron furnaces. Indeed, there then seemed danger that as jjopulation increased and manufactures throve, England might become like North China now, where in the cold weather people huddle at home wrapped in furs, fuel being too scarce except for the cooking-stove But instead of this coming to pass, there took place an industrial change in England, which multiplied the population and brought on our present prosperity. This was the use of coal, on which our modern manufacturing system depends. Even for household purposes the coal-cellar has almost superseded the wood stack, and the blazing yule-log has become a picturesque relic of the past. The very word coal, which in the English Ijible keeps its original sense of burning wood, has since been usurped by the mineral. It must not, however, be supposed that the use of coal was only dis- covered in modern times. The Chinese have mined it from time immemorial. In the thirteenth century, the famous Venetian traveller, Marco Polo, related that in Cathay there is a kind of black stones, which are dug out of veins in the mountains, and burn like faggots ; and I can tell you (he says) that if you pat them on the fire in the evening so that they catch well, they will burn all night and even be alight in the morning. That this was told and received as a wonder in Europe, shows how unfamiliar the use of coal then was. Though lllhanthrax or " stone-coal " was not unknown to the ancients, its full importance to modern life only came gradually into view. Having first been brought in for economy to meet the scarcity of wood, it afterwards became, when applied to the steam-engine, an almost boundless source of power for all mechanical work. A steam-engine, for every few shovelfuls of coal 272 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. its furnace is fed with, will do the day's work of a horse. Thus the yearly output of millions of tons of steam- coal in Great Britain alone, furnishes a supply of force in comparison with which what was formerly available from windmills and watermills and the labour of men and beasts was quite small, while the workman's task becomes more and more that of directing this brute force to grind and hammer, to spin and weave, to carry across land and sea. It is like the difference between driving the waggon and carrying the sacks of corn to market on one's own back. It is an interesting problem in political economy to reckon the means of subsistence in our country during the agricultural and pastoral period, and to compare them with the re- sources we now gain from coal, in doing home-work and manufacturing goods to exchange for foreign produce. Perhaps the best means of realizing what coal is to us, will be to consider, that of three Englishmen now, one at least may be reckoned to live by coal, inasmuch as without it the population would have been so much less. The Australian savage would catch up a blazing brand from the camp-fire, to light him into the dark forest and scare away the demons. Thus there is as yet no difference between his primitive means of artificial heat and light. The two begin to separate when resinous pine-splints or the like are set aside to serve as natural flambeaux, and from this the next step is to make artificial flambeaux, of which the commonest is the twist or torch (from Latin torquere) of oakum dipped in pitch or wax. Till this century we used torches much as the ancient Romans did, but they are now seldom to be seen, and by their disuse the picturesque side of life loses many striking effects of torchlight glare and shadow on banquet and procession— the delight of painters and poets. Not half the passers-by in old-fashioned streets XI.] ARTS OF LIFE. 273 now know that the extinguishers on the iron raiUngs were to put out the hnks or torches carried to h'ght the company to their coaches. The candle looks as though it might have been invented from the torch. The rushlight, made of the pith of the rush dipped in melted fat, was in com- mon use in Pliny's time, as was also the wax or tallow candle with its yarn wick. The old classic lamp was a Hattish oval vessel with a nozzle {i.e., nostril) at one end for the wick to come out at. Simple as this construction is, it has had a long unchanged use. Museums have few Greek and Roman objects more plentiful than such earthen- ware lamps, nor more exquisite specimens of metal-work than the bronze ones ; and to this day the traveller off the main road in Spain or Italy is lighted to his bedroom with a brass stand-lamp much after the manner of the ancients, with its pick-wick hanging to it by a chain. The lamp only came into its improved modern make about a century ago, when Argand let the air in from below, and put on the glass chimney to set up a draught. The gas-lamp is still later, only having come into practical use during the last sixty years. But it is curious to notice that natural gas-lighting had long been known in places where decomposing bi- tuminous beds underground set free carburetted hydrogen. Thus at the famous fire-temples of Baku (west of the Caspian), a hollow cane was stuck in the ground near the altar, through which the gas rose and burnt at its mouth, while the pilgrim fire-worshippers prostrated themselves and adored the sacred flame. In China, at salt springs where such a supply of natural gas comes up, the practical- minded people are content to lay it on through bamboos into the buildings, to boil the brine-kettles and light up the works. The examination here made of tiie modes of cooking 2/4 ANTHROPOLOGY. [.iiap. requires some notice of vessels. For water-vessels men can make shift without the art of the potter, using joints of bamboo, coco nut shells, calabash rinds, buckets scooped out of wood, pails of bark, bottles of skin. The horseman in desert regions carries his water-gourd at his saddle-bow, and even where a glass imitation has come in, the French go on calling it d. gourde, just as we keep up the name of the old leather bottle for the glass ones we use now. It was one of the greatest household inventions to make earthen pots to stand the fire for boiling. When and where pottery was invented, is too flir back to say. On the sites of ancient dwellings, wherever earthenware was in use, potsherds may be picked up in the ground. Where they are not to be found, as among the relics of tribes of the rein- deer-period in the caves of France, it may be safely concluded that these early savages had not come so far in civilization. The same is true of the Australians, Fuegians, and many other modern savages who had no pottery, and no broken bits in their soil to show that their predecessors ever had. One asks, how did men first hit upon the idea of making an earthen pot? It may not look a great stretch of invention, but invention moved by slow steps in early cul- ture, and there are some facts which lead to the guess that even pots were not made all at once. There are accounts of rude tribes plastering their wooden vessels with clay to stand the fire, while others, more advanced, moulded clay over gourds, or inside baskets, which being then burnt away left an earthen vase, and the marks of the plaiting remained as an ornamental pattern. It may well have been through such intermediate stages that the earliest potters came to see that they could shape the clay alone and burn it hard. This shaping was doubtless at first done by hand, as in America or Africa the native women may still be seen building up XL] ARTS 07 LIFE. 27: large and shapely jars or kettles from the bottom, moulding on the clay bit by bit. So in Europe, as any museum of an- tiquities shows, the funeral urns and other earthen vessels of the stone and bronze ages were hand-made ; and even now tourists who visit the Hebrides buy eartlien cups and bowls of an old woman who makes them in ancestral fashion without a potter's wheel, and ornaments them with lines drawn with a pointed stick. Yet the potter's wheel was known in the world from high antiquity. Fig. 73 re- presents Egyptian potters at work, as shown in the Avall- paintings of the Tombs of the Kings. It is seen that they turned the wheel by hand. So the Hindu potter is described Fig 73.— Ancient Egyptian Potter's Wheel (Eenl Hassan). as now going down to the river side when a flood has brought him a deposit of fine clay, wlien all he has to do is to knead a batch of it, stick up his pivot in the ground, balance the heavy w-ooden table on tlie top, give it a spin round, and set to work. It wms an improvement on this simplest wheel to work it from below by the foot, and in our potteries a labourer drives it with a wheel and band, but the principle remains unchanged. As we watch with untirmg pleasure the potter with this simple machine so easily bring- ing shape out of shapelessness, we can well understand how in the ancient world it seemed the very type of creation, so that the Egyptians pictured one of their deities as a 276 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. potter moulding Man on the wheel. Fine art made some of its earliest and most successful efforts in shaping the earthen vase, engraving and moulding patterns or figures on it. and painting it with pictures of gods and heroes, or scenes from myth or daily life, so that much of our know- ledge of such nations as Etruscans and even Greeks is derived from the paintings on their vases, art-relics almost everlasting though so fragile. A great part of tiie pottery of the world is still of the first and simplest kind, mere baked clay (Italian terra cottd) without glaze like our flower- pots, and therefore porous. To cure this fault, some people, as the Peruvians, varnished it, while even the Greeks often burnt in bitumen. The great improvement of glazing, that is, melting on a glassy coating in the furnace, was already known in ancient Egypt and Babylonia, while in later ages glazed earthenware reached high artistic excellence in the Persian ware and the majolica (from Majorca). In China a more perfect ware had been made above a thousand years before European potters got at the secret of imitating it. AVe call it china, or by the curious name porcelain, which originally meant a kind of oriental nacre or mother-of-pearl. China or porcelain dishes are made of fine white kaolin or porcelain clay, and fired so intensely that the ware becomes vitrified not only at the glazed surface but through the sub- stance. The common principle in all these varieties of earthenware is tliat silica (which with alumina is present in all clay) forms fusible glassy silicates, which in te'ra cotta bind the mass together, and in glazed earthenware and china coat it on the surface or through. Glass itself is a fusible silicate of this kind, the base being potash, soda, and sometimes lead. There is a fanciful story told by Pliny, djscril)ing its invention as having taken place on a sandy shore of Phoenicia, where a ship happening XI ] ARTS OF LIFE. 277 to be moored, the mercliants finding no stones to boil ilicir kettle on, brought on shore lumps of nitre with which the ship happened to be laden, whereupon the fire melted the silica and alkali into glass. But the fixct is that glass- making was an Egyptian art ages before the rise of Phoenician commerce, and to all appearance the Phoenicians and other nations learnt it from thence. Fig. 74 shows an Egyptian glass blower. Among other things he would have made flasks to be covered with reed, much like our present oil-flasks The ancient Egyptians made glass bjads, and variegated glass cups, whicli even the Venetian glassworks Fio 74. — Ancient Egyptian Glass-bl jwing (Ben. Hassan). can hardly match. But modern Europe may claim the clever art of making crown glass for window-panes by twirling the red-hot blown globe till it opens in a circular sheet, and also the polisliing of sheets of plate-glass, which make possible our great looking-glasses with their backs of brilliant tin amalgam. Fire is so important a means in extracting metal from the ore and working it afterwards, that some account of the use of metal may properly come in this chapter. But in thinking how men were led to the difficult processes of smelting ores to extract the metal, it has to be remembered that some metals are found in the metallic state. Thus the native copper near Lake Superior was used in long-past ages 278 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. by the tribes then living in the country, who treated bits of the metal as a kind of malleable stone, hammering it cold into hatchets, knives, and bracelets. The same is true of gold, natural nuggets of which can be beaten cold into ornaments. It is only a guess that metal-working may have begun in this simple way ; still it seems a likely guess. Iron also is found in the metallic state, especially in the aerolites or meteoric stones which fall on the earth from time to time. Though in many of these the metal is apt to shiver to bits under the hammer, there is some meteoric and other native iron fit to be made into implements when heated white-hot in the forge, and it can even be to some extent worked cold. Some of the ores of metal are themselves so metallic- looking that the smith would attempt to work them in the fire, and this may have led to proper smelting. Thus magnetic iron ore not only looks like iron, but can be heated in the forge, and then and there hammered into such things as horse-shoes. It is a question whether men first worked copper or iron. In classic times, indeed, people felt certain that bronze was in use before iron. This bronze is an alloy of copper with about a ninth of tin to harden it, what an English mechanic would now call "gun-metal." An often-cjuoted line of Hcsiod's tells how the men of old worked in bronze when as yet black iron was not ; and Lucretius, the Epicurean poet, tauglu that after the primitive time when men fought with sticks and stones, iron and bronze were discovered, but bronze was known before iron. However, the Greeks and Romans did not really remember very ancient times, and in some countries the use of iron was early. Egyptian and Babylonian inscriptions make mention of iron as well as copper. A piece of wrought iron taken xi.J ARTS OF LIFE. 279 out ol the masonry of the great pyramid may be seen in the British Museum, and there are Egyptian pictures even shelving the blue steel which the butcher h,ad hanging at liis side to sharpen his knife on. Now what is to be particularly noticed is that the Egyptians, though they thus had iron, mostly made their carpenters' tools of bronze. Among the Homeric Greeks, the smiths knew of iron, and even of steel or steely iron, if one may judge so from the famous passage in the Odyssey (ix. 391), about the hissing of the axe as the smith dips it in the cold water to strengthen the iron. Yet all the while bron/e was the ordmary material not only for the warrior's armour and shield, but for his spear and sword. Clearly we have here a state of arts very unlike our own now, and it is worth while to try to understand the difference. An instructive remark in Kaempfer's account of Japan rear two cen- turies ago, may help to explain it, where he says that both copper and iron were smelted in the country, and were about the same price, so that iron tools cost as much as copper or brass ones. The state of things far back in the ancient world may have been something like this. Iron, though kno.vn, was hard to smelt from the ore, and Homer's calling it the "much-wrought iron" shows how difficult the smiths found it to forge. But copper was jjlentiful, one well-known source being the island of Cyprus, wlunce its name of ces Cypniim {copper). '\'\xi had not to be fetched from the ends of the world ; tliere were mines in Georgia, Khorassan, and elsewhere in inner Asia, where l)erhaps the discovery was made of using it to harden copper into bron.;e. When once this had been hit upon, the ease with which bronze could be melted, and such things as hatchets cast in stone moulds, would make it more con- venient than iron to the ancient artificer. This may have 2So ANTHRCPOLCGY. [chap. been the real reason why the " bronze age " set in over a great part of Europe and Asia, and was only followed by the "iron age" when iron coming to be better worked, cheaper and more plentiful, and steel especially being improved, brought out that superiority to bronze for tools and weapons wliicb. to us seems a matter of course. The remains of the lake-dwellings of Switzerland show how central Europe was once inhabited by rude tribes using stone implements, how at a later period bronze hatchets and spears prevailed, and lastly iron came in. Such, too, has been the history of the stone, bronze, and iron ages, traced by archaeologists in the burial-places of old Scandinavia, whether the use of the new metals was learnt by the native nations or brought in by conquering invaders. Nations living in the bronze age are known to history, especially the Mexicans and Peruvians, whom the Spaniards at the conquest found working in bronze with some skill, but knowing nothing of iron ; their state was like that of the Massagetse of central Asia, described by Herodotus some two thousand years earlier. Most of Africa, on the other hand, seems to have had no bronze age, but to have passed directly from the stone age to the iron age. Iron-smelting seems to have come into Africa in the north, and only spread lately down to the Hottentot?, who still remember in their stories the time when their ancestors used to cut down trees with stones. The Africans easily dig up their rich iron ore and smelt it with wood in simple furnaces which may be mere holes in the ground, the draught being generally by bellows. The primitive pair of bellows may there be seen, made of whole skins of goats or other animals, of which the one full of air is jjressed or trodden on, while the empty one is pulled up to fill itself through a slit or valve. This shows iron-smelting not far. from its rudest and probably earliest state. Among the xi.J ARTS OF LIFE. 281 various improvements -which liave now made iron more plentiful than in ancient times are the use of coke instead of charcoal for smelting ; the introduction of cast-iron, which seems old in China, but was not common in England till the last century; the use of machinery for rolling and forging. The progress of steel-making has been such as lately to make it possible for railways to be laid down with steel at a penny a pound. Other metals and their effect on civilization may be spoken of briefly. Silver has from ancient times been the companion of gold, as precious metals. Lead was easily extracted, and served the Romans for roofs and water-pipes. The alloy of copper and zinc was made by the Romans not by fusing together the two metals, but by heating copper with the zinc ore called calamine ; the result was brass, an inferior kind of bronze. Quicksilver was known to the ancients, who distilled it from the red cinnabar, and understood its use in extracting gold and silver, and for gilding. Of the many metals which have become known in modern times some have practical uses. Thus platinum is valuable for vessels which have to bear extreme heat or resist the action of acids, and aluminium is useful for its remarkable lightness. But we still mostly depend on the metals whose origin is lost in antiquity — iron, copper, tin, lead, silver, and gold. The mention of these last precious metals leads us to notice the important part which coin has had in developing civilization, and this again belongs to the general history of trade or commerce. The modern Englishman, accustomed to shops and counting-houses, hardly realises from what rude beginnings our complex commercial system arose. It is instructive to see trade in its lowest form among such tribes as the Australians. The tough greenstone, valuable for making hatchets, is carried hundreds of miles by natives 232 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. who receive from other tribes in return the prized products of their districts, such as red ochre to paint their bodies with ; they have even got so far as to let peaceful traders pass unharmed through tribes at war, so that trains of youths might be met, each lad with a slab of sandstone on his head to be carried to his distant home and shaped into a seed-crusher. When strangers visit a tribe, they are re- ceived at a friendly gathering or corrobboree, and presents are given on both sides. No doubt there is a general sense that the gifts are to be fair exchanges, and if either side is not satisfied there will be grumbling and quarrelling. But in this roughest kind of barter w^e do not yet find that clear notion of a unit of value which is the great step in trading. This higher stage is found among the Indians of British Columbia, whose strings of haiqua- shells, worn as orna- mental borders to their dresses, serve them also as currency to trade with, a string of ordinary quality being reckoned as worth one beaver's skin. In the Old World many traces have come down of the times when value was regularly reckoned in cattle ; as where in the Iliad, in the description of the funeral games, we read of the great prize tripod that was valued at twelve oxen, while the female slave who was the second prize was only worth four oxen. Kere the principle of unit of value is already recognised, for not only could the owner of oxen buy tripods and slaves with them, but also he who had a twelve-ox tripod to sell could take in exchange three slaves reckoned at four oxen each. To this day various objects of use or ornament pass as currency, especially where money is scarce. Thus the traveller in Abyssinia may have to buy what he wants with cakes of salt, while elsewhere in Africa he has to carry iron hoe-blades, pieces of cloth, and strings of beads as money. Cowry- shells are still small change in South Asia, as they XI.] ARTS OF LIFE. 283 have been since time immemorial. These things do more or less clumsily what metal money does so conveniently. The use of money arose out of gold and silver being in old times bartered by weight for goods, as may be seen in the pictures of tlie ancient Egyptians weighing in scales heaps of rings of gold and sih-er, which shows that these were not yet real money. It is thus still with much of the gold and silver traded with in the East, where the little ingots have to be weighed and reckoned for what each is worth. The invention of coin comes in when pieces of metal are made of a fixed weight and standard, and marked with a figure or inscription to certify them, so that they may be taken without weighing or testing. This looks a simple thing to do, but the old Egyptians and Babylonians are not known to have hit upon it. Perhaps the earliest money may have been the Chinese little marked cubes of gold, and the pieces of copper in the shapes of shirts and knives, as though intended to represent real shirts or knives. Coins api)ear in Lydia and /Egina, in their early form, as rude dumps of precious metal stamped on one side only with a symbol such as the tortoise, the other side showing the mark of the anvil or tool they were placed on to be struck, which accidental back-pattern came to be improved in later coins into the ornamental re- verse. Art came on fast in coinage, so that among the most beautiful coins in the world are the gold staters of Philip of Macedon, with the laurel-crowned head on one side and the two-horse chariot on the other. But one reason why coins are no longer struck in such high relief is because they would be rubbed down by wear. The Roman as was not stamped but cast ; it seems to have been at first a pound of copper, its name meaning " one " (as ace at cards still does). From early ages the coinage has been a government 284 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. monopoly, and the practice soon began of lowering the standard and lessening the weight for the profit of the royal treasury. How this debasing the coinage was carried on in Europe by one king after another may be seen in the fact that the libra or pound of silver came down in value to the French livre or franc, worth tenpence, and to the "-pound Scots," worth twenty pence. Though changed in value, the coinage of old times may be traced on to the present day, in our still keeping accounts in the ;£ s. d. (librEe, solidi, denarii) of the Romans. For small trading and at home, metal money answers well. But there is great trouble and risk in sending coin hundreds of miles to pay for goods bought at a distance. An easily carried substitute for gold and .silver is the bank- note, a promise to pay so much, issued by the treasury or some banker, and passing as money from hand to hand. The Emperor of China appears to have issued such notes in exchange for treasure about the eighth century, and in the thirteenth century Marco Polo, the famous merchant-traveller in Tartary, describes the Great Khan's money of stamped pieces of mulberry-bark. It is plain from this account that the notion of paper-money was still strange to the mind of an European trader, but since then bank-notes have be- come an important part of the world's currency. Even more useful to commerce was the invention of bills of ex- change. Suppose a merchant of Genoa to have sent silks to a merchant in London. He does not send for his money in return, but gives an order on a slip of paper that his cor- respondent in London, who owes him so much, is to pay it in so many days. This slip of paper is a bill of exchange, and is bought by another Genoese merchant who happens to owe money in London, and pays it by sending over tlie bill which claims the payment of the money there. Thus, XI.] ARTS OF LIFE. 285 instead of gold being sent backwards and forwards to pay for shipments between London and Genoa, one debt is set off against another. This is describing in its simplest form the system which is so worked in the exchanges of mer- cantile cities all over the world, that the immense transac- tions of commerce are carried on by mutual credit, with only so much actual travelling of gold and silver as is necessary to adjust the balances between the different countries. The main princij)le cf modern commerce is still just what it was among the rude Indians of Brazil, where the tribes who make the deadly arrow-poison prepare more than they want for their own use, so as to exchange the rest for spears of the hard wood that grows in other districts, or the hammocks of palm-fibre netted by tribes elsewhere. Wealth is created by trade as well as by manufactures. The Canadian trapper wants for his own use but few of his plentiful furs, but all he can take are wealth to him, because the trader brings him in exchange the clothes and groceries and other things he wants. The general history of com- merce in the world, which is the develoi)ment of this simple principle, need not be dwelt on here by giving details of the ancient traffic of Egypt with Assyria and India, the Phoenician trading colonies on the Mediterranean, the old trade-routes across Asia and Europe, the rise of the mer- chant princes of Genoa and Venice, the first voyages round the Cape to the East Indies, the discovery of America, the rise of ocean steam-navigation. It is specially interesting to the student of civilization to notice that the travelling merchant had in early ages another business hardly less im- portant than conveying ivory and incense and fine linen from where they were plentiful to where they were scarce. He was the bringer of foreign knowledge and the explorer of 20 286 ANTKROPOLCGY. [chap xi. distant regions in days when nations were more shut up than now within their own borders, or went across them only as enemies to ravage and destroy. The merchants did much to break down the everlasting jealousy and strife between nations into peaceful and profitable intercourse. More- over it may be plainly proved that the old hostile system of nations is kept up by every kind of restriction on trade, every protective duty imposed to force the production of commodities in countries ill-suited to them, to prevent their coming in cheap and good from where they are raised with least labour. There is no agent of civilization more beneficial than the free trader, who gives the inhabitants of every region the advantages of all other regions, and whose business is to work out the law that what serves the general profit of mankind serves also the private profit of the individual man. CHAPTER XII. ARTS OF PLEASURE, Poetry, 287 — Verse and Metre, 28S — Alliteration and Rhyme, 289 — Poetic Metaphor, 2S9 — Speech, Melody, Harmony, 290 — Musical In^truoaents, 293 — Dancin;^, 296 —Drama, 29S — Sculpture and Painting, 300 — Ancient and Modern Art, 301 — Games, 305. To those who have not thought particularly about straight- forward prose talk, and poetry which is set in metre and rhyme, and song which is chanted to a tune, it may seem that these are three clearly distinct things. But on careful examination it is found that they shade into one another, and it can be made out how human speech passed into all three states. Savage tribes have some set form in their chants, which shows they feel them different from common talk. Thus Australians, to work themselves into fury before a fight, will chant, "Spear his forehead! — Spear his breast ! ■ — Spear his liver ! — Spear his heart ! " and so on with the other parts of the enemy's body. Another Australian chart is sung at native funerals, the young women taking the first Ime, the old women the second, and all together the third and fourth. " Kardang garrj " Young-brother ogai.i Mammul garro Son again Mela nadjo Hereafter I-shall Nunjja broo." See never." 288 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. Here the words of the savage chant are no longer mere prose, but have passed into a rude kind of verse. All bar- baric tribes hand down such songs by memory, and make new ones. The North American hunter has chants which will bring him on the bear's track next morning, or give him victory over an enemy. The following is the translation of a New Zealand song : — " Thy body is at Waitemata, But thy spirit came hither And aroused me from my sleep. Chorus — Ha-ah, ha-ah, hi-ab, ha ! " This last shows a feature extremely common in barbaric songs, the refrain of generally meaningless syllables. We moderns are often struck with the absurdity of the nonsense- chorus in many of our own songs, but the habit is one which seems to have been kept up from the stages of culture in which the Australian savage sings " Abang ! abang ! " over and over at the end of his verse, or a Red Indian hunting- party enjoy singing in chorus " Nyah eh wa ! nyah eh wa ! " to an accompaniment of rattles like thosj which children use with us. It is among nations at a higher stage of culture that there appears regular metre, where the verses are measured accurately in syllables. The ancient hymns of the Veda are in regular metre, and this is proof how far the old Aryans had advanced beyond the savage state. Indeed the re- semblances between the metre of the most ancient Indian and Persian and Greek poetry show that in the remote ages of their national connection their measured verse had already begun. Metre is best known to us from Greek and Latin ver.ses, but there are more metres in the world than Horace knew of. For instance, when Longfellow versified a collection Xii.] ARTS OF PLEASURE. 289 of American native tales in his "Song of Hiawatha," he found no metre among the Indians themselves, who were not cultured enough to have such a device ', so he imitated the peculiar metre of the Kalewala, the epic poem chanted by the native bards of Finland. Our own poetry, where the verses are scanned by accent, differs in i;s nature from the classic metres whose syllables are measured by quantity or length. Later than the invention of metre, came other means by which the poet could please his hearers with new effects of matched and balanced sounds. Thus our early English forefathers rejoiced in alhteration, where the same consonant comes in again and again, with a frequency which would weary our modern taste, though our ear is pleased with occasional touches of it, as " Sober he seemde, and very sagely sad." — Spexser. " He rushed into the field, and, foremost fighting, fell." — Byron. Rhyme, too, seems comparatively modern in the world's history of poetry. Its clumsy beginnings may be judged from such lines as these of an old Latin poet (perhaps Ennius) quoted by Cicero : — - " Coelum nitescere, arbores fronde^cere, Vites h\:tificce pampinis pubescere, Kami bacaruin ubertate incurvescere." Thus the Christian hymns of the middle ages, such as the famous " Dies Iras," did not bring in rhyme as quite a novelty, but they used it skilfully and made it common, and jt was taken up also by the Troubadours, the masters and teachers of Europe in the poetic art. The best poetry of our own day is full of quaint fancy and delicate melody, the setting of lovely thought in har- monious language, at once pictures for the imagination and 290 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. music for the ear. But besides this, it has a curious interest to the student of history, as keeping aUve in our midst the ways of thought of the most ancient world. Much of poetic art hes in imitating the expressions of earlier stages of culture, when poetry was the natural utterance of any strong emotion, the natural means to convey any solemn address or ancestral tradition. The modern poet still uses for picturesqueness the metaphors which to the barbarian were real helps to express his sense. This may be seen in analyzing a poem of Shelley's : — " How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother. Sleep ! One, pale as yonder waning moon, With lips of lurid blue ; The other, rosy as the morn When throned on ocean's wave It blushes o'er the world." Here the likeness of death and sleep is expressed by the metaphor of calling them brothers, the moon is brought in to illustrate the notion of paleness, and the dawn of redness ; while to convey the idea of the dawn shining over the sea the simile of its sitting on a throne is introduced, and its reddening is compared on the one hand to a rose, and on the other to blushing. Now this is the very way in • which early barbaric man, not for poetic affectation, but simply to find the plainest words to convey his thoughts, would talk in metaphors taken from nature. Even our daily prose is full of words, now come down to ordinary use, which show vestiges of this old nature-poetry, and the etymologist may, if he will, set up again the pictures of the old poetic thoughts which made the words. To read or recite poetry as we moderns do is to alter its proper nature, for the purpose of poetry was to be chanted. XII.] ARTS OF PLEASURE. 291 But this very chanting or singing grew out of talking. On listening carefully to the talk going on around us, we may observe that it does not run in an unchanged monotone, but that all sentences are intoned to an imperfect tune, a rise and fall of pitch marking the i)hrases, distinguishing question and answer, and touching emphatic words with a musical accent. This half-melody of common speech may be roughly written down in notes; it is not the same in English and German ; and mdeed one way in which a Scotchman's talking is known from an Englishman's is the different in- toning of his phrases. When speech becomes solemn or impassioned, it passes more and more into natural chanting, which at devotional meetings may be heard nearly passing into distinct tune. The intoning in churches arose from the same natural utterance of religious feeling, but in course of time it became fixed by custom, and was forced into the regular intervals of the musical scale. So the artificial recitative of the opera is a modern musical working up of what has come down by tradition of the ancient tragic declamation, which once swayed the listening throng of the Greek theatre. We are apt to take it as a matter of course that all music must be made up of notes in scale, and that scale the one we have been used to from childhood. But the chants of rude tribes, which perhaps best represent singing in its early stages, run in less fixed tones, so that it is difficult to write down their airs. The human voice is not bound to a scale of notes, for its pitch can glide up and down. Nor among nations who sing and play by musical scales are the tones of these scales always the same. The question how men were led to exact scales of tones is not easy to answer fully. But one of the simplest scales was forced upon their atten- tion by that early musical instrument the trumpet, rude 292 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. forms of which are seen in the long tubes of wood or bark blown by forest tribes in South America and Africa. A trumpet (a six feet length of iron gas pipe will do) will sound the successive notes of the " common chord," which may be written ?) arid a k\v minutes' trial will not fail to convince us of the superiority of our ciphers. To understand how the art of ciphering came to be in- vented, it is necessary to go back to a ruder state of things. In Africa, negro traders may be seen at market reckoning with pebbles, and when they come to five, putting them aside in a little heap. In the South Sea Islands it has been noticed that people reckoning, when they came to ten, would not put aside a heap of ten things, but only a single bit of coco-nut stalk to stand for ten, and then a bigger piece when they wanted to represent ten tens or a hundred. Now to us it is plain that this use of different kinds of 314 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. markers is unnecessary, but all that the reckoner with little stones or beans has to do, is to keep separate his unit-heap, his ten-heap, his hundred-heap, &c. This use of such things as pebbles for "counters," which still survives in England among the ignorant, was so common in the ancient world, that the Greek word for reckoning was fse/>/iizei/i, from psephos, a pebble, and the corresponding Latin word was caladare from calculus, a pebble, so that our word ca/ai- late is a relic of very early arithmetic. Now to work such pebble-counting in an orderly n^anner, what is wanted is some kind of abacus or counting-board with divisions. These have been made in various forms, as the Roman abacus with lines of holes for knobs or pegs, or the Chinese swan-pan with balls strung on wires, on which the native calculators in the merchants' counting-houses reckon with a speed and exactness that fairly beats the European clerk with his pencil and paper. It may have been from China that the Russian traders borrowed the ball-frame on which they also do their accounts, and it is said that a Frenchman noticing it in Russia at the time of Napoleon's invasion was struck with the idea that it would serve perfect'y to teach little children arithmetic; so he introduced it in France, and thence it found its way into English infants' schools. Now whatever sort of abacus is used, its principle is always the same, to divide the board or tray into columns, so that in one column the stones, beans, pegs, or balls, stand for units, in the next column they are tens, in the next hundreds, and so on, Fig. 77. Here the three stones in the right-hand column stand for 3, the nine in the next column for 90, the one in the fourth column for 1,000 and so on. The next improvement was to get rid of the troublesome stones or beans, and write down numbers in the columns, as is here shown with Greek and Roman XIII.] SCIENCE. 315 numerals. But now the calculator could do without the clumsy board, and had only to rule lines on his paper, to make columns for units, tens, hundreds, &c. The reader should notice that it is not necessary to the principle of the abacus that each column should stand for ten times the one next it. It may be twelve or twenty or any other number of times, and in fact the columns in our account-books for ^ s. d. or cwts. qrs. lbs., are surviving representatives of the old method of the abacus. Such reckoning had still the defect that the numbers could not be taken out of the columns, for even when each number from one to * i" r '- B A A r n I^' I IX m - 1- 1 3 Fig. 77. — MoJe of calculation by counters and by figures en Abacus. nine has a single figure to stand for it, there would still be here and there an empty column (as is purposely left in Fig. 77) which would throw the whole into con- fusion. To us now it seems a very simple thing to put a sign to show an empty column, as we have learned to do with the zero or o, so that the number expressed in the picture of the abacus can be written down without any columns, 241093. This invention of a sign for nothing, was practically one of the greatest moves ever made in science. It is the use of the zero which makes the dif- ference between the old arithmetic and our easy ciphering. 3i6 ANTHROPGLOGV. [chap. We give the credit of the invention to the Arabs by using the term Arabic numerals, while the Arabs call them Indian, and there is truth in both acknowledgments of the nations having been scholars in arithmetic one to the other. But this does not go to the root of the matter, and it is still unsettled whether ciphering was first devised in Asia, or may be traced further back in Europe to the arithmeticians of the school of Pythagoras. As to the main point, how- ever, there is no doubt, that modern arithmetic comes out of ancient counting on the columns of the abacus, improved by writing a dot or a round O to show the empty column, and by this means young children now work calculations which would have been serious labour to the arithmeticians of the ancient world. Next as to the art of measuring. Here it may be fairly guessed that man first measured, as he first counted, on his own body. When barbarians tried by finger-breadths how much one spear was longer than another, or when in building huts they saw how to put one foot before the other to get the distance right between two stakes, they had brought mensuration to its first stage. We sometimes use this method still for rough work, as in taking a horse's height by hands, or stepping out the size of a carpet. If care is taken to choose men of average size as measurers, some approach may be made to fair measurement in this way. That it was the primitive way can hardly be doubted, for civilized nations who have more exact means still use the names of the body-measures. Besides the cubit, hand, foot, span, nail, already mentioned in p. 17, we have in English the ell, (of which the early meaning of arm or fore- arm is seen in ^/-bow, the arm-bend), also the fathom or cord stretched by the outspread arms in sailors' fashion, and the pace or double step (Latin passus) of which a thousand XIII.] SCIENCE. 317 {mille) made the inilc. But though tlieso names keep up the recollection of early measurement by men's limbs, they are now only used as convenient names for standard measures which they happen to come tolerably near to, as for instance one may go a long way to find a man's foot a foot long by the rule. Our modern measurements are made by standard lengths, which we have inherited with more or less change from the ancients It was a great step in civilization when nations such as the Egyptians and Babylonians made pieces of wood or metal of exact lengths to serve as standards. The Egyptian cubit-rules with their divisions may still be seen, and the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid measures very exactly 20 cubits by 10, the cubit being 20-63 of our inches. Our foot has scarcely altered for some centuries, and is not very different from the ancient Greek and Roman feet. The French at the first Revolution made a bold attempt to cast off the old traditional standards and go straight to nature, so they established the metre, which was to be a ten-millionth of the distance from the i)ole to the equator. The calculation however ])roved inexact, so that the metre is now really a standard measure of the old sort, Init so great is the convenience of using the same measures, that the metre and its fractions are coming more and more into use for scientific work all over the world. The use of scales and weights, and of wet and dry measures, had already begun among the civilized nations in the earliest known times. Our modern standards can even to some extent be traced back to those of the old world, as for instance the pound and ounce, gallon and pint, come from the ancient Roman weights and measures. From measuring feet in length, men would soon come to reckoning the contents, say of an oblong floor, in square feet. But to calculate the contents of less simple figures required 22 3'8 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. more difficult geometrical rules. The Greeks acknowledged the Egyptians as having invented geometry, thot is, " land- measuring," and there may be truth in the old story that the art was invented in order to parcel out the plots of fertile mud on the banks of the Nile. There is in the British Museum an ancient Egyptian manual of mensuration (the Rhind pap}rus), one of the oldest books in the world, Fig. 78.— Rudimentary practical Geometry, i, scalene triangle ; 2, folded right angle ; ^, folded triangle ; 4, rectangle folded ia c.rcle. originally written more than i,ooo years before Eukl id's time, and which shows what the Egyptians then knew and did not know about geometry. From its figures and examples it appears that they used stjuare measure, but reckoned it roughly ; for instance, to get the area of the triangular field ABC Fig. 78 (i) they multiplied half ac by ab, which would only be correct when bag is a right angb. When the XIII.] SCIENXE. 319 Egyptians wanted the area of a circular fijld, they sub- tracted one-ninth from the diameter and squared ; thus if the diameter were 9 perches, they estimated that the circle contained 64 square perches, which the reader will find on trial is a good approximation. All this was admirable for the beginnings of geometry, and the record may well be believed that Greek philosophers such as Thalt s and Pythagoras, when they came to Egypt, gained wisdom from the geometerqiriests of the land. But tliese Egyptian mathematicians, being a priestly order, had come to regard their rules as sacred, ar.d therefore not to be improved on, while their Greek disciples, bound by no such scientific orthodoxy, were free to go on further to more perfect methods. Greek geometry thus reached results which have come down to us in the great work of Euklid, who used the theorems known to his predecessors, adding new ones and proving the whole in a logical series. It must be ckarly understood that elementary geometry was not actually in- vented by means of d finitions, axioms, and demonstrations like Euklid's. Its beginnings really arose out of the daily practical work of land-measurers, masons, carpenters, tailors. This may be seen in the geometrical rules of the altar-builders of ancient India, which do not tell the bricklayer to draw a plan of such and such hues, but to set up poles at certain distances, and stretch cords between them. It is instructive to see that our term straight line still shov/s traces of such an early practical meaning ; line is linen thread, and straight is the participle of the old verb to stretch. If we stretch a thread tight between two pegs, we see that the stretched thread must be the shortest possible ; which suggests how the straight line came to be defined as the shortest distance between two points. Also, every carpenter knows the nature of a right angle, and he is accustomed to parallel 320 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. lines, or such as keep the same distance from one another. To the tailor, the right angle presents itself in another way. Suppose him cutting a doubled piece of cloth to open out into the gore or wedge-shaped piece bac in Fig. 78 (2). He must cut ADB a right angle, or his piece when he opens it will have a projection or a recess, as seen in the figure. When he has cut it right, so that bdc opens in a straight line, then he cannot but see that the sides ab, ac, and the angles ABC, acb must exactly match, having in fact been cut out on one another. Thus he arrives, by what may be called tailor's geometry, at the result of Euklid I. 5, which now often goes by the name of the " asses' bridge." Such easy properties of figures must liave been practically known very early. But it is also true that the ancients were long ignorant of some of the problems which now belong to elementary teaching. Thus it has just been mentioned how the Egyptian land-surveyors failed to make out an exact rule to measure a triangular field. Yet had it occurred to them to cut out the diagram of a triangle from a sheet of papyrus, as we may do with the triangle abc in Fig. 78 (3), and double it up as shown in the figure, then they would have found that it folds into the rectangle efhg, and, therefore, its area is the product of the height by half the base. It would be seen that this is no accident, but a property of all triangles, while at the same time it would appear that the three angles at a, b, c, all folding together at d, makeup two right angles. Though the more ancient Egyptian geometers do not seem to have got at either of these properties of the triangle, the Greek geometers had in some way become well aware of them before Euklid's time. The old historians who tell the origin of mathematical discoveries do not always seem to have understood what they were talking of. Thus it is said of Thales that he was the fiist to inscribe xiii.] SCIENCE. 321 llie right-angled triangle in the circle, and thereupon sacri- ficed a bull. But a mathematician of such eminence could hardly have been ignorant of what any intelligent carpenter has reason to know, how an oblong board fits into a circle symmetrically ; the problem of the right-angled triangle in the semicircle is involved in this, as is seen by (4) in the present figure. Perhaps the story really meant that Thales was the first to work out a strict geometrical demonstration of the problem. The tale is also told of Pythagoras, and another version is that he sacrificed a hekatomb on discover- ing that the square on the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides (Euklid I. 47). 'i'he story is not a likely one of a philosopher who forbad the sacrifice of any animal. As for the proposition, it is one which may present itself practically to masons working with square paving stones or tiles ; thus, when the base is 3 tiles long, and the perpendicular 4, the hypothenuse will be 5, and the tiles which form a square on it will just be as many as together form squares on the other two sides. Whether Pythagoras got a hint from such practical rules, or whether he was led by studying arithmetical scpiares, at any rate he may have been the first to establish as a general law this property of the right-angled triangle, on which the whole systems of trigonometry and analytical geometry depend. The early history of matliematics seems so far ckar, that its founders were the Egyptians with their practical survey- ing, and the Babylonians whose skill in arithmetic is plain from the tables of square and cube numbers drawn up by them, which are still to be seen. Then the Greek philo- sophers, beginning as disciples of these older schools, soori left their teachers behind, and raised mathematics to be, as its name implies, tlie "learning" or " discii)line" of the 322 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. human mind in strict and exact thought. In its fir^t stages, mathematics chiefly consisted of arithmetic and geometry, and so had to do with known numbers and quantities. But in ancient times the Egyptians and Greeks had already begun methods of dealing with a number without as yet knowing what it was, and the Hindu mathematicians, going further in the same direction, introduced the method now called algebra. It is to be noticed that the use of letters as symbols in algebra was not reached all at once by a happy thought, but grew out of an earlier and clum- sier device. It appears from a Sanskrit book that the venera- ble teachers began by expressing unknown quantities by the term " so-much-as," or by the names of colours, as "black," " blue," " yellow," and then the first syllables of these words came to be used fur shortness. Thus if we had to express twice the square of an unknown quantity, and called it " so much squared twice," and then abbreviated this to so sq 2, this would be very much as the Hindus did in working out the following problem, given in Colebrooke's Hindu Algebra : '• The square root of half the number of a swarm of bees is gone to a shrub of jasmin : and so are eight-ninths of the whole swarm : a female is buzzing to one remaining male, that is humming within a lotus, in which he is confined, having been allured to it by its fragrance at night. Say, lovely woman, the number of bees." This Hindu equation is worked out clumsily from the want of the convenient set of signs = + — , which were invented later in Europe, but the minus numbers are marked, and the solution is in principle an ordinary quadratic. The Arab mathematicians learnt from India this admirable method, and through them it became known in Europe in the middle ages. The Arabic name given to it is al-jabr u.u's, 343 — Burial, 347 — Future Life, 349 — Transmigration, 350 — Divine Ance-tors, 351 — Demons, 352 — Nature Spirit;, 357 — G^ds, 358 — Worship, 3'^4 — Moral In- fluence, 368. It does not belong to the plan of this book to give a general account of the many faiths of mankind. The anthropologist, who has to look at the religions of nations as a main part of their life, may best become acquainted with their general principles by beginning with the simple notions of the lower races as to the spirit-world. That is, he has to examine hoW and why they believe in the soul and its existence after death, the spirits who do good and evil in the world, and the greater gods who pervade, actuate, and rule the universe. Any one who learns from savages and barbarians what their belief in spiritual beings means to them, will come into view of that stage of culture where the religion of rude tribes is at the same time their philo- sophy, containing such explanation of themselves and the world they live in as their uneducated minds are able to receive. The idea of the soul which is held by uncultured races, and is the foundation of their religion, is not difficult to us CHAP. XIV.] THE SPIRIT-WCRLD. 343 to understand, if we can fancy ourselves in their place, ignorant of the very rudiments of science, and trying to get at the meaning of life by what the senses seem to tell. The great question that forces itself on their minds is one that we with all our knowledge cannot half answer, Avhat the life is which is sometimes in us, but not always. A person who a few minutes ago was walking and talking, with all his senses active, goes off motionless and unconscious in a deep sleep, to wake after a while with renewed vigour. In other con- ditions the life ceases more entirely, when one is stunned or falls into a swoon or trance, where the beating of the h.-art and breathing seem to stop, and the body, lying deadly pale and insensible, cannot be awakened ; this may last for minutes or hours, or even days, and yet after all the patient revives. Barbarians are apt to say that such a one died for a while, but his soul came back again. They have great difficulty in distinguishing real death from such trances. They will talk to a corpse, try to rouse ic and even feed it, and only when it becomes noisome and must be got rid of from among the living, they are at last certain that the life has gone never to return. What, then, is this soul or life which thus goes and comes in sleep, trance, and death ? To the rude philosopher, the question seems to be answered by the very evidence of his senses. When the sleeper awakens from a dream, he believes he has really somehow been away, or that other people have come to him. As it is well known by experience that men's bodies do not go on these excursions, the natural explanation is that every man's living self or soul is his phantom or image, which can go out of his body and see and be sjen itself in dreams. Even waking men in broad daylight sometimes see these human phantoms, in what are called visions or hallucinations. They are further kd to believe that th:: soul does not die with the 344 ANTHROPOLOGY. [cHAP. body, but lives on after quitting it, for although a man may- be dead and buried, his phantom-figure continues to appear to the survivors in dreams and visions. That men have such unsubstantial images belonging to them is familiar in other ways to the savage philosopher, who has watched their reflexions in still water, or their shadows following them about, fading out of sight to reappear presently somewhere else, while sometimes for a moment he has seen their living breath as a faint cloud, vanishing though one can feel that it is still there. Here then in few words is the savage and barbaric theory of souls, where life, mind, breath, shadow, reflexion, dream, vision, come together and account for one another in some such vague confused way as satisfies the untaught reasoner. The Zulu will say that at death a man's shadow departs from his body and becomes an ancestral ghost, and the widow will relate how her husband has come in her sleep and threatened to kill her for not taking care of his children ; or the son will describe how his father's ghost stood before him in a dream, and the souls of the two, the living and the dead, went off together to visit some far-otT kraal of their people. The Malays do not Hke to wake a sleeper, lest they should hurt him by disturbing his body while his soul is out. The Ojibwas describe how one of their chiefs died, but while they were watching the body, on the third night his shadow came back into it, and he sat up and told them how he had travelled to the River of Death, but was stopped there and sent back to his people. The Nicaraguans, when questioned by the Spaniards as to their religion, said that when a man or woman dies, there comes out of their mouth something that resembles a person and docs not die, but the body remains here — it is not precisely the heart that goes above, but the breath that comes f/om their mouth and is XIV.] THE SPIRIT-WORLD. 345 called the life. The lower races sometimes avoid such confusion of thoughts as this, by treating the breath, the dream-ghost, and other appearances, as being separate souls. Thus, some Greenlanders reckoned man as having two souls, his shadow and his breath ; and the Fijians said that the " dark spirit " or shadow goes down to the world below, but the " light spirit " or reflexion seen in water stays near where he dies. The reader may call to mind examples how such notions of the soul lasted on hardly changed in the classic world ; how in the Iliad the dead Patroklos comes to the sleeping Achilles, who tries in vain to grasp him with loving hands, but the soul like smoke flits away below the earth ; or how Hermotimos, the seer, used to go out from his body, till at last his soul, coming back from a spirit-journey, found that his wife had burnt his corpse on the funeral pile, and that he had become a bodiless ghost. At this stage the idea of the soul was taken up by the Greek philosophers and refined into more metaphysical forms ; the life and mind were separated by dividing the soul into two, the animal and the rational soul, and the conception of the soul as of thin ethereal substance gave place to the definition of the immaterial soul, which is mind without matter. To follow the discussion of these transcendental problems in ancient and modern philosophy will occupy the student of meta- physics, but the best proof how the earlier and grosser soul- theory satisfied the uncultured mind is that to this day it remains substantially the belief of the majority of the hum.an race. Even among the most civilized nations language still plainly shows its traces, as when we speak of a person being in an ecstasy or " out of himself" and " coming back to himself," or when the souls of the dead are called shades (that is, " shadows ") or spirits ox ghosts (that is, " breaths "), terms which are relics of men's earliest theories of life. 34'3 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap It may have occurred to some readers that the savage philosopher ought, on precisely the same grounds, to believe his horse or dog to have a soul, a phantom-likeness of its body. This is in fact what the lower races always have thought and think still, and they follow the reasoning out in a way that surprises the modern mind, though it is quite consistent from the barbarian's point of view. If a human soul seen in a dream is a real object, then the spear and shield it carries and the mantle over its shoulders are real objects too, and all lifeless things must have their thin flitting shadow-souls. Such are the souls of canoes and weapons and earthen pots that the Fijians fancy they see swimming down the stream pellmell into the life to come, and the ghostly funeral gifts with which the Ojibwas imagine the souls of the dead laden on their journey to the spirit-land — the men carrying their shadowy guns and pipes, the women their baskets and paddles, the litde boys their toy bows and arrows. The funeral sacrifices, which in one shape or other are remembered or carried on still in every part of the globe, give us the clearest idea how barbaric religion takes in together the souls of men, animals, and things. In Peru, where a dead prince's wives would hang themselves in order to continue in his service, and many of his attendants would be buried for him to take their souls with him, people declared that they had seen those who had long been dead walking about with their sacrificed wives, and adorned widi the things that were put in the grave for them. So only a few years since in Madagascar it was said that the ghost of King Radama had been seen dressed in a uniform buried with him, and mounted on one of the horses that were killed at his tomb. With such modern instances before us, we understand the ancient funeral rites of which the traces remain in the burial-mounds on our own hills, with their XIV.] THE SPIRIT-WORLD. 347 skeletons of attendants lying round the chief, and the bronze weapons and golden arm-rings. Classic literature abounds in passages which show how truly the modern barbarian represents the ancient; such are the burning of Patroklos with the Trojan captives and the horses and hounds, the ac- count of the Scythian funerals by Herodotus, and his story of Melissa's ghost coming back shivering because the clothes liad not been burnt for her at her burial. There are dis- tricts in India where the suttee or "goodwife" is even now burnt on her husband's funeral pile. In Europe, long after the wives and slaves ceased thus to follow their master, the warrior's horse was still solemnly killed at his grave and buried with him. This was done as lately as 1781 at Treves, when a general named Friedrich Kasimir was buried according to the rites of the Teutonic Order; and in England the pathetic ceremony of leading the horse in the soldier's funeral is the last remnant of the ancient sacrifice. Other quaint relics of the old funeral customs are to be met with. There are German villages where the peasants put shoes on the feet of the corpse (the " hell- shoon " with which the old Northmen were provided for the dread journey to the next world), and elsewhere a needle and thread is put in for them to mend their torn clothes, while all over Europe, at an Irish wake for instance, the dead has a piece of money put in his hand to pay his way with. Mention has just been made of ancient burial-mounds. Seeing how barbarians reverence and fear the souls of the dead, we may understand the care they take of their bodies, leaving the hut as a dwelling for the dead, or drying the corpse and setting it up on a scaffold, or burying it in a canoe or coffin, or building up a strong tomb over it, or for the ashes, if the people have taken to cremation. 34,8 ANTHROPCLCGY. [chap. Prehistoric burial-places in our own country are still won- ders to us for the labour they must have cost their barbaric builders. Most conspicuous are the great burial-mounds ^ of earth or cairns of stones. Some of the largest of these appear to date from the stone-age. But their use lasted on through the bronze-age into the iron-age ; and to this day in the Highlands of Scotland the memory of the old cus- tom is so strong, that the mourners, as they may not build a cairn over the grave in the churchyard, will sometimes set up a little one where the funeral procession stops on the way. Within the old burial-mounds or barrows, there may be a cist or rude chest of stone slabs for the interment, or a chamber of rude stones, sometimes with galleries. Many such stone structures are to be seen above ground, especially the dolmens, i.e. stone tables, formed of three or four great upright stones, with a lop-stone resting on them, such as Kit's Coty House, not far from Rochester, The remains dug up show that the dolmens were tombs. Another kind of early stone monuments are the menhirs, i.e. long stones set up singly. It happens that the Khasias of north-east India have gone on to modern times setting up such rude pillars as memorials of the dead, so that it may be reasonably guessed that those in Brittany for instance had the same purpose. Another kind of rude stone structures well known iu Europe are the cromlechs, or stone circles, formed of upright stones in a ring, such as Stanton Drew, not far from Bristol. There is proof that the stone circles have often to do with burials, for they may surround a burial-mound, or have a dolmen in the middle. But considering how tombs are apt to become temples where the ghost of the buried chief or prophet is worshipped, it is likely that such stone circles should also serve as temples, as in the case of South India at the present time, where cocks are actually sacrificed to XIV.] THE SPIRIT-WORLD. 349 the village ceity, who is represented by the large stone in the centre of a cromlech. Rude stone monuments may be traced in a remarkable line on the map, from India across to North Africa, and up the west side of Europe [see Fergusson's map.) The purpose of them all is not fully understood, especially the lines of great stones at Carnac and Abury, and Stonehenge with its great hewn upright and cross stones. But, as has been here shown, there are facts which go far to explain the meaning of dol- mens, menhirs, and cromlechs. The fanciful speculations of the old-fashioned antiquaries, such as that the dol- mens were " Druid's altars," are givmg place to sober examination such as the reader may hnd in Lubbock's Prehistoric Times. In the barbaric religion, which has left such clear traces in our midst, what is supposed to become of the soul aftjr death ? The answers are many, but they agree in this, that the ghosts must be somewhere whence they can come to visit the living, especially at night time. Some tribes say that the soul continues to haunt the hut where it died, which is accordingly deserted for it; or it hovers near the burial- ground, which is sometimes the place of village resort, so that the souls of ancestors can look on kindly, like the old people sitting round the village green watching the youngsters at their sports ; or tlie ghosts flit away to some region of the dead in the deep forests or on mountain-tops or far-away islands over the sea, or up on the plains above the sky, or down in the depths below the ground where the sun descends at night. Such people as the Zulus can show the holes where one can descend by a cavern into the under-world of the dead, an idea well known in the classic lake Avernus, and which has lasted on to our own day in St. Patrick's Purgatory in Lough Dearg. By a train of fancy 24 )5o ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. easy to follow, it is often held that the home of the dead has to do with that far-west region where the sun dies at night. Islanders like the Maoris imagine the souls speed- ing away from the westernmost cape of New Zealand, just as on the coast of Brittany, where Cape Raz stands out westward into the ocean, there is the " bay of souls," the launching-place where the departed spirits sail off across the sea. Many rude tribes think the spirit-world to be the pleasant land they see in dreams, where the dead live in their spirit-villages, and there is game and fish in plenty, and the sun always shines ; but others fancy it the dim land of shadows, the cavernous under-world of night. Both ideas are familiar to us in poetry — one in the earthly paradise of the legends, the other in such passages as describe Odysseus' visit to the bloodless ghosts in the dreary dusk of Hades, or the shadows of the dead in Purgatory wondering to see Dante there, whose fleshly body, unlike their own phantom forms, stops the sunlight and casts a shadow. Hitherto we have been speaking of the bodiless souls or ghosts of the dead, but it also agrees with their nature that they may enter into new bodies and live again on earth. In fact one of the most usual beliefs of the lower races is that the souls of dead ancestors are re-born in children, an idea which explains the fact of children having a likeness to the father's or mother's family. For instance, the Yoruba negroes greet a new-born child with the salute, "Thou art come!" and then set themselves to decide what ancestral soul has returned. It does not, however, follow that the body in which the soul takes up its new abode should be human : it may enter into a bear or jackal, or fly away in a bird, or, as the Zulus think, it may pass into one of those harmless snakes which creep about in the huts, liking the warmth of the family hearth, as they did while they were old people, XIV.] THE SPIRIT-WCRLD. 351 and still kindly taking the food given by their grandchildren. In such simple forms there appears among the lower races the notion of transmigration which in Brahmanism and JjLuklhism becomes a great religious doctrine. To return to the souls of the dead which tlit to and fro as ghosts. These, wherever they dwell, are naturally believed to keep up their interest in the living, and their families hold kindly intercourse with them. Thus, in North America a Mandan woman will talk by the hour to her dead husband or child ; and a Chinese is bound to announce any family event, such as a wedding, to the spirits of his ancestors, present in their memorial tablets. The ghosts of dead kinsfolk are not only talked to but fed ; the family offer them morsels of food at their own meals, and hold once a year a feast of the dead, when the souls of ancestors for genera- tions back are fancied present and invisibly partaking of the food. Such offerings to the dead not only go on through the savage and barbaric world, but last on into higher civilization, their traces still remaining in Europe. The Russian peasant, who fancies the souls of his forefathers creeping in and out behind the saints' pictures on the little icon-shelf, puts crumbs of cake there for them. One has only to cross the Channel to see how the ancient feast of the dead still keeps its primitive character in the festival of All Souls, which is its modern representative; even at the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise they still put cakes and sweet- meats on the graves, and in Brittany the peasants that night do not forget to make up the fire and leave the fragments of the supper on the table, for the souls of the dead of the family who will come to visit their home. All this belongs to the ancestor-worship or religion of the divine dead, which from remote antiquity has been, as it is even now, the main faith of the larger half of mankind. But this worship does 352 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. not come only from family affection, for the ghosts of the dead are looked upon as divine beings, powerful both for good and harm. The North American Indian, who prays to the spirits of his forefathers to give him good weather or luck in hunting, if he happens to fall into the fire will believe he has neglected to make some offering to the spirits, and they have pushed him in to punish him. In Guinea the negroes who regularly bring food and drink to the images of their dead relatives look to them for help in the trials of life, and in times of peril or distress crowds of men and women may be seen on the hill-tops or the skirts of the forest, calling in the most piteous and touching tones on the spirits of their ancestors. Such accounts help us to understand what real meaning there is in the ancestor-worship which to a Chinese or Hindu is the first business of life, and how the pious rites for the dead ancestors or lares formed the very bond which held a Roman family together. Our modern minds have rather lost the sense of this, and people often think the apotheosis of a dead Roman emperor to have been a mere act of insane pride, whereas in fact it was an idea under- stood by any barbarian, that at death the great chief should pass into as great a deity. That barbarians should imagine the manes or ghosts of their dead to be such active powerful beings, arises naturally from their notions of the soul ; but this requires a word of explanation. As during life the soul exercises power over the body, so after death when become a ghost it is beheved to keep its activity and power. Such ghosts interfering in the affairs of the living are usually called good and evil spirits, or demons. There is no clear disdnction made between ghosts and demons ; in fact, savages generally consider the demons who help or plague them to be souls of dead men. Good or evil, the' man keeps after death the temper he had in mortal XIV.] THE SPIRIT-WORLD. 353 life. Not long ago, in South India, where the natives are demon-worshippers, it was found that they had lately built a shrine of which the deity was the ghost of a British officer, a mighty hunter, whose votaries, mindful of his tastes in life, were laying on his altar offerings of cheroots and brandy. The same man will be a good spirit to his friends and an evil spirit to his enemies, and even to his own people he may be sometimes kind and sometimes cruel, as when the Zulus believe that the shades of dead warriors of their tribe are among them in battle and lead them to victory; but if these ghostly allies are angry and turn their backs, the fight will go against them. When people like the American Indians or the African negroes believe that the air around them is swarming with invisible spirits, this is not nonsense. They mean that life is full of accidents which do not happen of themselves ; and when in their rude philosophy they say the spirits make them happen, this is finding the most dis- tinct causes which their minds can understand. This is most plainly seen in what uncivilized men believe about disease. We have noticed already that they account for fainting or trance by supposing the soul to leave the body for a time, and here it may be added that weakness or failure of health is in the same way thought to be caused by the soul or part of it going out. In these cases, to bring the soul back is the ordinary method of cure, as where the North American medicine-man will i)retend to catch his patient's truant soul antl put it back into his head, or in Fiji a sick native has been seen lying on his back, bawling to his own soul to come back to him. But in other conditions of disease the patient's behaviour seems rather that of a man who has got a soul in him that is not his proper soul. In any painful illness, especially when the sick man is tossing and shaking in fever, or 354 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. writhing in convulsions on the ground, or when in delirium or delusion he no longer thinks his own thoughts or speaks with his own voice, but with distorted features and strange, unearthly tones breaks into wild raving, then the explanation which naturally suggests itself is that another spirit has entered into or possessed him. Any one who watches the symptoms of a hysterical-epileptic patient, or a maniac, will see how naturally in the infancy of medical science demoniacal possession came to be the accepted theory of disease, and the exorcism or expulsion of these demons the ordinary method of treatment. It is so among savages, as when a sick Australian will believe that the angry ghost of a dead man has got into him and is gnawing his liver ; or when in a Patagonian skin hut the wizards may be seen dancing, shouting, and drumming to drive out the evil demon from a man down with fever. Such ideas were at home in ancient history, as in the well-known Egyptian memorial tablet of the time of Rameses Xll (12th cen- tury B.C.) to be seen in the Paris Library, and translated in Records of the Past, where the Egyptian god Khons was sent in his ark to cure the little princess Bentaresh of the evil movement in her limbs. When he came, the demon said, *' Great god who chasest demons, I am thy slave, I will go to the place whence I came." Then they made a sacrifice for that spirit, and he went in peace, leav- ing the patient cured. As far back as the history of medicine reaches, we find the contest between this old spirit-theory of disease and the newer ideas of the physicians, with their diet and drugs ; and though the doctors have now taken the upper hand, yet in any nation short of the most civilized the earlier notions may still be found unchanged. When Prof. Bastian, the anthropologist, was travelling in Burma, his cook had an apoplectic fit, and the wife was doing her best to XIV.J THE SPIRIT-WORLD. 355 appease the offended demon who had brought it on, by putting little heaps of coloured rice for him, and prayers, " Oh, ride him not 1 Ah, let him go 1 Grip him not so hard I Thou shalt have rice ! Ah, how good that tastes ! " In countries where this theory of disease prevails, the patients' own delusions work in with and confirm it in most striking ways. As fully persuaded as the bystanders of the reality of their demons, they will recognise them in the figures they dream of or see in their delirium, and what is more, under delusion or diseased imagination they so lose their sense of being themselves, as to talk with what they believe to be the voice of the demon within them, answering in its name, just as the sick princess did in Syria three thousand years ago. Englishmen in India and the far East often have the opportunity of being present at these strange old-world scenes, and hearing the demon-voice whisper, or squeak, or roar, out of the patient's mouth, that he is the spirit so-and- so, and tell what he is come for ; at last, when satisfied with what he wants, or subdued by the exorcist's charms and threats, the demon consents to go, and then the patient leaves off his frantic screams and raving, his convulsive writhing quiets down, and he sinks into an exhausted sleep, often relieved for a time when the malady is one where mental treatment is effective. Nor is it necessary to go to India or China for illustrations of this early theory of disease. In Spain the priests still go on exorcising devils out of the mouths and feet of epileptic patients, though this will probably cease in a few years, when it is known how successfully that hitherto intractable disease may be treated with potassium bromide. In other ways the notion of spirits serves to account for whatever happens. That certain unusually fierce wolves or tigers are " man-eaters " is explained by the belief that the 356 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. souls of wicked men go out at night and enter into wild- beast bodies to prey on their fellow-men ; these are the man-tigers and were-wolves — that is, " man-wolves " — which still live in the popular superstition of India and Russia. Again, we all know that many living people grow pale and bloodless and pine away ; in Slavonic countries this is thought to be caused by blood-sucking nightmares, whose dreadful visits the patient is conscious of in his sleep, and these creatures are ingeniously accounted for as demon-souls dwelling in corpses, whose blood accord- ingly keeps fluid long after death ; they call them vam- pires. It has been suggested that primitive men gained from their ideas of souls and spirits their first clear notions of a cause of anything, and this is at any rate so far true that rude tribes do find in the doings of spirits around them a reason for every stumble over a stone, every odd sound or feeling, every time they lose their way in the woods. Thus, in the scores of good and evil chances which meet the barbarian from hour to hour, he finds work for many friendly or unfriendly spirits. Especially his own luck or fortune takes shape in a guardian spirit who belongs to him and goes about widi him. This may be, as the rude Tasmanians have thought, a dead father's soul looking after his son, or such a ])alron-spirit as the Norih American warrior fasts for till he sees it in a dream ; or it may be, like the genius of the ancient Roman, a s]nrit born with him for a companion and guardian through life. The genius of Augustus was a divine being to be prayed and sacrificed to, but how we moderns have left behind the thoughts of the ancients, while still using their words, is curiously seen in the changed meaning with which we now talk of the genius of Handel or Turner. Not less striking is the change which has com^ in our thoughts about the XIV.] THE SPIRIT-WORLD. 357 world around us, the sky and the sea, the mountains and the forests. We have learnt to watch the operation of physical laws of gravity and heat, of growth and decomposi- tion, and it is only with an effort that we can get our imagination back to the remote days when men looked to an infinite multitude of spiritual beings as the causes of nature. Yet this belief arises plainly from the theory of the soul, for these spirits are looked upon as souls working nature much as human souls work human bodies. It is they who cast up the fire in the volcano, tear up the forest in the hurricane, spin the canoe round in the whirlpool, inhabit the trees and make them grow. The lower races not only talk of such nature-spirits, but d.al with them in a thoroughly personal way which shows how they are modelled on human souls. Modern travellers have seen North Americans paddling their canoes past a dangerous place on the river and throwing in a bit of tobacco with a prayer to the river- spirit to let them pass. An African woodcutter who has made the first cut at a great tree has been known to take the precau- tion of pouring some palm-oil on the ground, that the angry tree-spirit coming out may stop to lick it up, while the man runs for his life. The state of mind to which these nature-spirits belong must have been almost as clearly remembered by the Greeks, when they could still fancy the nymphs of the lovely groves, and springs, and grassy mea- dows, coming up to the council of the Olympian gods and sitting around on the polished seats, or the dryads growing with the leafy pines and oaks, and uttering screams of pain when the woodman's axe strikes the trunk. The Anglo-Saxon dictionary preserves the curious word woodmare for an echo {iviidii-mcEr = wood-nymph), a record of the time when Englishmen believed, as barbarians do still, that the echo is the voice of an answering spirit ; the word mare, for spirit or 358 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. demon, appears also in nightmare^ the throttling dream- demon who was as real to our forefathers as he is to the natives of Australia now. Superseded by physical science, the old nature-spirits still find a home in poetry and folk- lore ; the Loreley is only a modernized version of the river- demon who drowns the swimmer in the whirlpool ; the heal- ing water-spirits of the old sacred wells have only taken saints' names, the little elves and fairies of the woods are only dim recollections of the old forest-spirits. It may surprise the readers of Huxley's Physiography to recognise in fairy- tales the nature-spirits in whose personal shape prehistoric man imagined the forces of nature. Above the commonalty of souls, demons, and nature- spirits, the religions of all tribes recognise higher spirits, or gods. Where ancestor-worship prevails, the souls of great chiefs and warrior^ or any celebrated persons may take this divine rank. Thus, the Mongols worship as good deities the great Genghis Khan and his princely family. The Chinese declare that Pang, who is worshipped by carpenters and builders as their patron divinity, was a famous artificer who lived long ago in the province of Shangtung, while Kwang-tae, the War-god, was a distinguished soldier who lived under the Han dynasty. The idea of the divine ancestor may even be carried far enough to reach supreme deity, as where the Zulus, working back from ghostly ancestor to ancestor, talk of Unkulunkulu, the Old-Old-one, as the creator of the world ; or the Brazilian tribes say that Tamoi the Grandfather, the first man, dwelt among them and taught them to till the soil, at last rising to the sky, where he will receive their souls after death. Among the nature-spirits also the barbarian plainly perceives great gods who rule the universe. The highest deity of the African negroes is the Sky, who gives the rain and makes the grass grow, and when they wake in the XIV.] THE SPIRIT-WCRLD. 359 morning thej- thank him for opening the door to let the sun in, Thus tliey are at the same stage of thought as our Aryan ancestors, whose great deity Dyu, sung of in the hymns of the Veda, was at once the soUd personal Sky that rains and thunders, and the Heaven-god who animates it. This deity remains even in name in the Greek Zeus, and Latin Jupiter, the Heaven-father, both religions keeping up its double sense of sky and sky-god, belonging to the barbaric theology which could see massive life in the over- arching firmament, and could explain that life by an in- dwelling deity, modelled on the human soul. We may best understand what was meant by the Heaven-god, if we think of him as the soul of the sky. Among all the relics of barbaric religion which surround us, few are more striking than the phrases which still recognise as a deity the living sky, as '' Heaven forgive me ! " " The vengeance of Heaven will overtake him." The rain and thunder are mostly taken as acts of the Heaven-god, as where Zeus hurls the thunder- bolt and sends the showers. But some peoples have a special Rain god, like the Khonds of Orissa, who pray to Pidzu Pennu that he will pour down the waters through his sieve upon their fields. Others have a special Thunder- god, like the Yorubas, who say it is Shango who casts down with the lightning-flash and the thunder clap his thunder- axes, which are the stone celts they dig up in the ground \ we English keep up the memory of the god Thunder or Thor in our word Thursday, which is a translation of Dies /oris. In barbaric theology. Earth, the mother of all things, takes her place, as when the pious Ojibwa Indian digging up his medicine-plants is careful to leave an offering for great-grandmother Earth. No fancy of nature can be plainer than that the Heaven-father and the Earth-mother are the universal parents, nor could 36o ANTHRCPOLCGY. [chap. any ceremony acknowledge them more naturally than the Chinese marriage when bride and bridegroom prostrate themselves before Heaven and Earth. The Earth-goddess IS clear in classic religion, Demeter, Terra ISIater, and per- haps the last trace of her worship among ourselves may be the leaving of the last handful of corn-ears standing in the field or the carrying it in triumph in the harvest-home. In modern times it is among the negroes of the Guinea coast that the clearest idea of the Sea-god is to be found, when the native kings, praying him not to be boisterous, would have rice and cloth and botUes of rum, and even slaves, cast into the sea as sacrifices. So a Greek or Roman general, before embarking on the dangerous waves, would sacrifice a bull to Poseidon or Neptune. To men who could thus look on the sky, earth, and sea as animated, intelligent beings, the Sun, giver of light and life to the world, rising and crossing the sky and descending at night into the under-world whence he arose, has the clearest divine personality. There is a quaint simplicity in the account which not many years ago a Samoyed woman gave of her daily prayers ; at sunrise, bowing to the sun, she said, " When thou, God, risest, I too rise from my bed ! " and in the evening, "When thou, God, goest down, I too get me to rest." As far back as ancient history reaches, the Sun-god appears, as where, in the pictures on Egyptian mummy-cases, R.a, the Sun, is seen travelling m his boat through the upper and lower regions of the universe. Every morning those modern ancients, the Brahmans, may be seen standing on one foot with their hands held out before them and their faces turned to the east, adoring the Sun : among the oldest prayers which have come down unchanged from the old Aryan wodd is that which they daily repeat, " Let us meditate on the desirable light of the divine Sun ; may he rouse our minds ! " The Moon- xiv] THE SPIRIT-WORLD. 361 god or goddess marks tlic festivals of rude forest tribes who dance by the Hglit of the full moon. It is not un- common for the Moon to rank above the Sun, as perhaps for astronomical reasons was the case in ancient Babylonia; but more usually the Sun stands first, as seems to us more natural ; and commonly Sun and Moon are looked on as a pair, brother and sister, or husband and wife. It is easy to understand why at the famous temple in Syria, Sun and Moon had no images like the other gods, because they themselves were to be seen by" all men. No doubt this is why of all the old nature-gods they alone still have personal obeisance done to them among us to this day •, in Germany or France one may still see the peasant take off his hat to the rising sun, and in England the new moon is saluted with a bow or curtsey, as well as the curious practice of " turning one's silver," which seems a relic of the offering of the moon's proper metal. Fire, though hardly a deity of the first order, is looked upon as a personal being, and wor- shipped both for the good and harm it does to man, and as minister of the greater gods. Among the Aryan nations, the first word of the Veda is the name of yigni, the Fire- god (Latin Ignis), the divine priest of sacrifice ; the Parsis, representatives of the religion of ancient Persia, whose most sacred place is the temple at the burning wells of Baku (P- 273), are typical fire-worshippers; among the old Greeks Hestia, the sacred hearth, was fed with fat and libations of sweet wine, and her name and worship went on in Rome in the temple of ^'esta, with the eternal fire in her sanctuary. The Wind-gods are as well known to the North American Indians and the South Sea Islanders as they were to the Greeks, from whose religion they have come down to us so that every ploughman's child hears of rude Boreas and gentle Zephyr. To conclude the list, the Rivers have seemed 362 ANTHROPOLOGY. [cHAP. beings so far greater than the little spirits of the brooks, that they often, Uke Skamandros and Spercheios, had temples and priests of their own ; men swore by them, for they could seiz^ and drown the perjurer in their floods, and to the Hindus still the most awful of oaths is by a divine river, above all the Ganges. Such a list of gods, the vast souls of the sky, earth and sea, of the sun and moon, and the rest of the great powers of nature, each with his own divine personality, his own rational purpose and work in the world, goes far to explain polytheism, as it is found in all quarters of the globe. The explanation cannot, however, be complete, because both the names and natures of many gods have become confused. A deity worshipped in several temples is apt to split up into several deities, and men go on worshipp'ng these by different names after their first sense is forgotten. Among nations who have become blended by alliance or conquest, the religions also mix, and the vaiious gods lose their distinct personality. The classical dictionary is full of examples of all this. The thundering sky and the rainy sky, Jupiter Tonans and Jupiter Pluvius, came to be adored like two distinct beings. The Latin Neptunus and the Greek Poseidon, put together into one because both were sea-gods, form a curious divine compound. Under the name of Mercurius, god of trade, comes in another ancient deity, the Greek Hermes, messenger of the gods, leader of the dead into the land of Hades, god of tliieves and merchants, of writing and science, who himself bears traces of having been pieced together out of yet older deities, among them the writing- god of ancient Egypt, the ibis-headed Thoth. This will give a notion of the confusion which begins in religion as soon as the worshippers cease to think of a deity by his first meaning and purpose, and only know of him xiv] THE SPIRIT-WGRLD. 363 as tlic god so-and-so, whose image stands in such-and- such a temple. The wonder is not that the origin of so many ancient gods is now hard to make out, but that so many show so clearly as they do what they were at first, a divine ancestor, or a sun, or sky, or river. The gods of barbaric religion also show plainly at work, in the minds of the rude theologians, a thought destined to vast importance in higher stages of civilization. Regarding the world as the battle-ground of good and evil spirits, some religions see these ranged in two contending armies with higher good and evil gods over them, and above all the sovereign good deity and evil deity. This system of dualism, as it is called, is worked out in the contest between the powers of light and darkness, under Ormuzd and Ahriman, the good and evil spirits, in the religion of ancient Persia. In barbaric stages of religion there appears also in rude forms the system of divine government, so well known in the faiths of more cultured nations. As among the worshippers themselves there are common men, and chiefs above them, and great rulers or kings above all, with high and low officers to do their bidding; so among their gods they frame schemes of lower and higher ranks of deiujs, with above all the majesty of a supreme deity. It is not agreed everywhere which god is to have this supremacy. As has been already said, men who look to the souls of the dead as their gods may hold even the highest divinity to be such a soul, an ancestor expanded into creator and ruler of the world. Often, and naturally, the heaven-god is looked upon as supreme creator and controller of the universe. Among the nations of West Africa, some say Heaven does his will through his servants, the lesser spirits of the air, but others think him too high above to trouble himself much with earthly things. The doctrine of the Congo negroes shows a thoughtful, if not a 364 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. happy, philosophy of life. They say it is the crowd of good and evil spirits, souls of the departed, who are still active in the concerns of life, and mostly the evil spirits have the best of it ; but now and then, when they have made the world unbearable, the great Heaven rouses himself, terrifies the bad demons with his thunder, and lets fly his thunder- bolts at the most obstinate ; then he goes back to rest, and lets the spirits rule as before. A more cheerful view of nature-spirits working beneath heaven is familiar to us in the Homeric court of the gods on Olympus, where Zeus, the personal sky, sits enthroned above, holding sway over the lower gods of earth, air, and sea. In other countries the Sun may be looked upon as supreme, as he is among many hill-tribes of India, where he rules over the gods of the forest and the plain, the tribe-gods, and the ancestral ghosts. Or there may be, as among the native tribes of North America, a Great Spirit, who is, as it were, the soul of the universe, which he created and still controls, supreme over even such mighty nature-gods as the sun and moon. When the reader goes on to study the religion and philosophy of the ancient civilized world, he will find men's thoughts working in these same two ways toward pantheism or monotheism, according as they conceive the whole universe as one \ast body animated by one divine soul, or raise to the same divine height the one deity who reigns supreme over the rest. It lies beyond our range to follow this argument further here. Let us now look at the chief acts of barbaric worship, which are not hard to understand when it is borne in mind that the deities they are paid to are actual human souls, or transformed human souls, or beings modelled on human souls. Even among savages, prayer is already found ; in- deed, nothing could be more natural than that the worshipper XIV.] THE SPIRIT WORLD. 365 should address with respectful words and entreaties for help a divine being who is perhaps his own grandfather. Tlie prayers of barbarians have often been listened to and written down. Thus among the Zulus, the sacrificer says : " There is your bullock, ye spirits of our people. I pray for a healthy body that I may live comfortably, and thou so-and-so, treat me with mercy, and thou so-and-so" (mentioning by name the dead of the family). The following is part of a prayer of the Khonds, when offering a human sacrifice to the Earth- goddess : " By our cattle, our flocks, our pigs, and our grain we procured a victim and offered a sacrifice. Do you now enrich us. Let our herds be so numerous that they cannot be housed ; let children so abound that the care of them shall be too much for the parents, as shall be seen by their burnt hands ; let our heads ever strike against brass pots innumerable hanging from our roofs ; let the rats form their nests of shreds of scarlet cloth and silk ; let all the kites in the country be seen in the trees of our village, from beasts being killed there every day. We are ignorant of what it is good to ask for. You know what is good for us. Give it to us." These two specimens of prayers are chosen because they show how closely prayer is connected with sacrifice, how the offering is brought and the favour asktd with it, just as would be done to a living chief. Barbaric sacrifices are not mere formal tokens of respect ; they are mostly food, and will be consumed by the divinity, though he, boing a spirit, is apt to take only the spirit, flavour, or essence, of the viands ; or he snufis up the steam or smoke as it ascends from the altar fire, a spiritual food of much the same thin ethereal substance which the spirit or god himself is thought to be of. It IS in the higher religions that the sacrificial rite loses its grosser sense of feeding the deity, so that although the 25 366 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. drink-oftering is slill poured out and the bullock burnt on the altar, the act has passed into the giving up of some- thing prized by the worshipper, and a sign of adoration acceptable to the god. There are several ways in which the worshipper can hold personal intercourse with his deities. These, being souls or spirits, are of course to be seen at times in dreams and visions, especially by their own priests or seers, who thus get (or pretend to get) divine answers or oracles from them. Being a soul, the god can also enter a human body, and act and speak through it, and thus hysterical and epileptic symptoms, which we have seen to be ascribed to an evil demon possessing the patient, are looked on more favourably when the spirit is considered to be a deity come to inspire his minister and talk by his voice. The convulsions, the unearthly voice in which the possessed priest, answers in the name of the deity within, and his falling into stupor when his god departs, all fit together, and in all quarters of the world the oracle-priests and diviners by familiar spirits seem really diseased in body and mind, and deluded by their own feelings, as well as skilled in cheating their votaries with sham symptoms and cunning answers. The inspira- tion or breathing-in of a spirit into the body of a priest or seer appears to such people a mechanical action, like pouring water into a jug. Also, as in the ordinary trans- migration of souls, a deity is considered able to enter into the body of an animal, as when he flies from place to place in the form of a sacred bird, or lives in the divine snake fed and worshipped among the negroes of the Slave coast. This leads on to a belief which seems still stranger to our minds. The modern Englishman wonders that a human being, however ignorant, should prostrate himself before a stake stuck in the ground or a stone picked up by XIV] THE SPIRIT-W..RLD. 367 the wayside, and even talk to it and offer it food : but when the African or Hindu explains that he believes this stock or stone to be a receptacle in which a divine spirit has for a time embodied itself, this shows that there is a rational meaning in the act. Images of gods, from the rudely carved figures of ancestors which the Ostyaks set up in their huts, to the Greek statues shaped by Phidias or Praxiteles to represent the heaven-god or the sun-god, are mostly formed in the likeness of man — an additional proof of how these nature-gods are modelled on human beings. When such images stand to represent gods, the worshipper may look on them as mere signs or portraits, but commonly he is led by his spirit-philosophy to treat them as temporary bodies for the deities. A Tahitian priest, when asked about his carved wooden idol, Avould explain that his god was not always in the image, but only now and then flew to it in the body of a sacred bird, and at times would come out of the idol and enter his own (the priest's) body, to give divine oracles by his voice. This takes us back to the times when, fifteen hundred years ago, Minucius Felix describes the heathen gods entering into their idols and fattening on the steam of the altars, or creeping as thin spirits into the bodies of men, to distort their limbs and drive them mad, or making their own priests rave and whirl about. Lastly, rude tribes may believe in ar.d worship spirits without having come to build houses for them and set up tables for their food. Yet such temples and altars appear far back in barbaric re- ligion, and remain still with the thoroughly human character of the worship as plain as ever in them ; as when in India the image of Vishnu is washed and dressed by his attendants, and set up in the place of honour in his temple with a choice feast before him, and musicians and dancing girls to divert him. This is the more instructive to us, because we 3G3 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. know Vishnu before his original meaning was so spoilt, when he was a sun-god, an animating principle or soul of the sun in personal human shape, and thus a remnant of pre- historic natural pliilosophy. We have hitherto only looked at barbaric religion as such an early system of natural philosophy, and have said nothing of the moral teaching which now seems so essential to any religion. The philosophical side of religion has been kept apart from the moral side, not only because a clearer view may be had by looking at them separately, but because many religions of the lower races have in fact little to do with moral conduct. A native American or African may have a distinct belief in souls and other spirits as the causes of his own life and of the events of the surround- ing world, and he may worship these ghostly or divine beings, gaining their favour or appeasing their anger by prayers and offerings. But though these gods may require him to do his duty towards them, it does not follow that they should concern themselves with his doing his duty to his neighbour. Among such peoples, if a man robs or murders, that is for the party wronged or his friends to avenge ; if he is stingy, treacherous, brutal, then punishment may fall on him or he may be scouted by all good people ; but he is not necessarily looked upon as hateful to the gods, and in fact such a man is often a great medicine-ntan or priest. While they hold also that the soul will continue to exist after death, flitting as a ghost or demon among the living or passing to the gloomy under-world or the shining spirit-land, they often think its condition will be rather a keeping-up of earthly character and rank, than a reward or punishment for the earthly life. If some readers find it difficult to under- stand such theology separate from morals, they may be reminded how, among more civilized nations, religions XIV.] THE SPIRIT-WORLD. 369 may drop into the same state by losing the use of the moral laws they profess ; as when a Hindu may lead the wickedest of lives, while the priests for gifts make his peace with the gods, or as in Europe brigands are notoriously devout church goers. As a rule, the faiths of the higher nations have more and better moral influence than the faiths of the ruder tribes. Yet even among savages the practical effect of religion on men's lives begins to show itself. The worship of the dead naturally encourages good morals ; for the ancestor who, when living, took care that his family should do right by one another, does not cease this kindly rub when he be- comes a divine ghost powerful to favour or punish. This manes-worship does not bring in new doctrines or reforms ; indeed it is felt that nothing displeases the ancestral deity like changing the old customs he was used to. But for keeping up old-fashioned family goodness, the worship of ancestors has an influence over the many nations among whom it still prevails, from the Zulu, who believes that he must not ill- ireat his brothers lest the father should come in a dream and make him ill, to the Chinese, who lives ever in presence of the family spirits, and fears to do wrong lest they should leave him to fall into distress and die. In the great old-world religions, where a powerful priesthood are the intellectual class, the educators and controllers of society, we find moral teaching fully recognised among the great duties of religion. The gods take on themselves the punishment of the wicked ; the Heaven-god smites the perjurer with his thunderbolt, and the Nation-god brings sickness and death on the murderer. Tha doctrine of the transmigration of souls is brought to bear as a moral power ; as where the Hindu books threaten evil-doers with being re- born in other bodies in punishment for their sins done in this, when the wicked shall be born again blind or deformed, 370 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. the scandal-monger shall have foul breath and the horse- stealer shall go lame, the cruel man shall be born as a beast of prey, the grain-stealer as a rat ; and thus, eating the fruits of past actions, men shall work out the consequences of their deeds, souls sunk in darkness being degraded to brutes, while the good rise in successive births to become gods. Even more widely spread is the doctrine that man's life is followed by judgment after death, when evil-doers are doomed to misery, and only those who have lived righteously on earth will enter into bliss. How this doctrine prevailed in ancient Egypt, the papyrus strips of the Book of the Dead, and its pictures and hieroglyphic formulas on the mummy- cases, remain to show. Thus in any museum we may still see the scene of the weighing of the soul of the deceased, and his trial by Osiris, the judge of the dead, and the forty- two assessors, while Thoth, the writing-god, stands by to enter the dread record on his tablets. In the columns of hiero- glyphics are set down the crimes of which the soul must clear itself, a curious mingling of what we should call cere- monial and moral sins, among them the following: " I have not privily done evil against mankind. I have not told falsehoods in the tribunal of Truth. I have not done any wicked thing. I have not made the labouring man do more than his ta.-^k daily. I have not calumniated the slave to his master. I have not murdered. I have not done fraud to men. I have not changed the measures of the country. I have not injured the images of the gods. I have not taken scraps of the bandages of the dead. I have not committed adultery. I have not withheld milk from the mouths of sucklings. I have not hunted wild animals in the pasturage. I have not netted sacred birds. I am pure, I am pure, I am pure ! " Thus, among the cultured old- world nations, already in the earliest historical ages theology XIV.] THE SPIRIT-WORLD. 371 had joined with ethics, and religion as a moral power was holding sway over society. Animism, or the theory of souls, has thus been shown as the principle out of which arose the various systems of spirits and deities, in barbaric and ancient religions, and it has been noticed also, how already among rude races such beliefs begin to act on moral conduct. We here see under their simplest aspects the two sides of religion, its philosophical and its moral side, which the reader should keep steadily in view in further study of the faiths of the world. In looking at the history of a religion, he will have to judge how far it has served these two great purposes — on the one hand that of teaching man how to think of himself, the world around him, the awful boundless power pervading all — on the other hand that of practically guiding and strengthening him in the duties of life. One question the student will often ask himself — how it is that faiths once mighty and earnest fall into decay and others take their place. Of course to no small extent such changes have come by conquest, as where in Persia the religion of Mohammed well nigh stamped out the old Zoroastrian faith of Cyrus and Darius. But the sword of the conqueror is only a means by which religions have been set up and put down in the world by main force, and there are causes lying deeper in men's minds. It needs but a glance through history at the wrecks of old religions to see how they failed from within. Tiie priests of Egypt, who once represented the most advanced knowledge of their time, came to fancy that mankind had no more to learn, and upheld their tradition against all newer wisdom, till the world passed them by and left them grovelling in super- stition. The priests of Greece ministered in splendid temples and had their fill of wealth and honours, but men who sought the secret of a good life found that this was not 372 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. xiv. the business of the sanctuary, and turned away to the philosophers. Unless a rehgion can hold its place in the front of science and of morals, it may only gradually, in the course of ages, lose its place in the nation, but all the power of statecraft and all the wealth of the temples will not save it from eventually yielding to a belief that takes in higher knowledge and teaches better life. CHAPTER XV. HISTORY AXD MYTHOLOGY. Tradition, 373— Poetry, 375— Fact in Fiction, 377— Earliest Poems and Writings, 381 — Ancient Chronicle and History, 3S3 — Myths, 3S7 — Interpretation of Myths, 396 — Diffusion of Myths, 397. History is no longer looked to for a record of the earliest ages of man. As the first chapter of this volume shows, we moderns know what was hidden from the ancients them- selves about the still more ancient ancients. Yet it does not at all follow that ancient history has lost its value. On the contrary, there are better means than ever of confirming what is really sound in it by such evidence as that of antiquities and language, wliile masses of very early writings are now newly opened to the historian. It was never more necessary to have clear ideas of what tradition, poetry, and written records can teach as to the times when history begins. The early history of nations consists more or less of traditions handed down by memory from ages before writing. Our own experience does not tell us much as to what such oral tradition may be worth, for it has so fallen out of use in the civilised world, that now one knows little of what happened beyond one's great-grandfather's time, unless it has been written down. But writing has not yet quite 374 ANTHRCPOLCGY. [chap. overspread the globe, and there are still peoples left whose whole history is the tradition of their ancestors. Thus the South Sea Islanders, who till quite lately had no writing, were intelligent barbarians, much given to handing down recol- lections of bygone days, and in one or two cases which it has been possible to test among them, it seems as though memory may really keep a histoiical record long and correctly. It is related by Mr. Whitmee the missionary that in the island of Rotuma there was a very old tree, under which according to tradition, the stone seat of a famous chief had been buried ; this tree was lately blown down, and, sure enough, there was a stone seat under its roots, which must have been out of sight for centuries. In the EUice group^ the natives declared that their ancestors came from a valley in the distant island of Samoa generations before, and they preserved an old worm-eaten staff, pieced to hold it together, which in their assemblies the orator held in his hand as the sign of having the right to speak ; this staff was lately taken to Samoa, and proved to be made of wood that grew there, while the people of the valley in question had a tradition of a great party going out to sea exploring, who never came back. Among these Polynesian traditions the best known are those handed down by the Maoris as to the peopling of New Zealand by their ancestors. They tell how, after a civil war, their forefathers migrated in canoes from Hawaiki in the far north-east ; they give the names of the builders and crews of these vessels and show the places where they landed ; they repeat, generation by generation, the names of the chiefs descended from those who came in the canoes, by which they reckon about eighteen genera- tions, or 400 to 500 years, since their taking possession of the islands. Notwithstanding that, as might be expected, the traditions of various districts disagree a good deal, they XV.] HISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY. 375 are admitted as the title-deeds by which the natives hold land in the right of their ancestors who landed in the canoes Shark {Arataa) and God's-Eye {Mata-atua), and it can hardly be doubted that such genealogies, constantly repeated among people whose lands depended on them, are founded on fact. Yet these Maori traditions are about half made up of the wildest wonder-tales ; when the builder of one of the canoes cuts down a great tree to make the hull, on coming back to the forest next morning he finds that the tree has got up again in the night; and when the canoe is finished and puts to sea, a certain magician is left behind, but on getting to New Zealand there he is before them on the shore, having come across the ocean on the back of a sea-monster, like Arion on his dolphin. These traditions of a modern barbarous people may give us not an unfair idea of the mixture of real memory and mythic fancy in the early history of Egypt or Greece, where it has come down by tradition from the distant past when there was as yet no scribe to engrave on a stone tablet even the names of kings. Traditions are yet more lasting when handed down in fixed words, which is especially when the poets have set them in verse. Even now in England some notable event may be made into a ballad and sung through the length and breadth of the land. In days before printing, the import- ance of the poet as historian was far greater, and many an old European chant has touches of true chronicle. The old songs of Brittany are often very true to history, as where in one there is mention of Bertrand du Guesclin's hair being like a lion's mane, and in another, Jeanne de Montforb (Jeanne-la-Flamme) going forth from Hennebont with sword and burning brand to fire the French camp, is described as putting on her suit of armour, which history 376 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. elsewhere records that she really wore. But though the poet or minstrel preserves many picturesque incidents like these, he has not the historian's conscience about facts. Eager to rouse and delight his audience, to flatter the national pride of his people and the family pride of the chief- tain in whose halls he sang, the singer brought in real names and events, but he shifted them as would best suit his dramatic scenery, or he even made his own history outright. The great German epic, the Nibelungen Lied, begins in Burgundy, where the three kings hold court at Worms on the Rhine, their sister is the lovely Kriemhilt, whose hus- band Sifrit is treacherously slain at the well by Hagen's spear ; afterwards she marries Attila the Hun-king, and the tale of blood, ending with her vengeance and death, leaves Attila and Theodoric of Verona (Etzel and Dietrich von Bern) weeping together over the slaughter of their men. Here are places and personages historical enough to make a poem history, if history could be made by such means ; but the reader of Gibbon knows that Attila really died two years before Theodoric was born. In fact the poem is a late version of a story preserved in an earlier shape in Scandinavia as the saga of the Volsungs ; the court at Worms, and the tournament, and the rest of the historic names and local circumstances, are worked in to give poetic substance and colour. If poets ventured thus to falsify history in the middle ages, when the chronicles were there to convict them, how are we to tell fact from fiction in the poems of ages where the check of history is wanting? The Iliad and the Odyssey may contain many memories of real men and their deeds, an Agamemnon may have reigned in Mykenai, there may have been a real siege of Troy, perhaps round the very mound where Schliemann has dug out the golden cups ar.d recklace. But it is too hard XV.] HISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY. 377 a task to sift out historic truth in Homer, where natural events are as hopelessly mixed up with miracles as in the Maori legends. It is too hard to judge how far chronicles of old nations are impartially preserved by a bard whose rule it is (as Mr. Gladstone points out in his Primer of Homer) that no considerable Greek chieftain is ever sl.iin in fair fight by a Trojan. Were nothing to be had out of ancient poetry except distorted memories of historical events, the anthropologist might be wise to set it aside altogether. Yet, looked at from another point of view, it is one of his most perfect and exact sources of knowledge. Although what the poet relates may be fiction, what he mentions is apt to be history. In the names of nations and countries and cities, he is unconsciously pourtraying for us the world and its inhabitants as they were in his time. The catalogue of ships and men in the second book of the Iliad is a chart and census of the Mediterranean. Homer knows of the .4?^gyptians, their irrigated fields and their skill in medi- cine, and of the ship-famed Phoenicians and their purple stuffs. The name of Kadmos belongs to the Phoenician tongue, and signifies the "Eastern," while the "seven-gated" Thebes built by his people shows that they had that reverence for the mystic number seven, which has its origin in the worship of the seven planets in Babylon. The poet can hardly have thought, when he told his wonder-tales with the circum- stances of the actual world around him, how future ages would prize for itself that record of real life. Odysseus clinging under the belly of the great ram, or sailing to the land of Hades to the weak shades of the dead, is mere myth. Yet the description of Polyphemos is one of the few ancient pictures of the manners of low barbarians, and the visit to Hades is a chapter of old Greek religion, recording what men thought of the dull ghost-life beyond 378 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. the tomb. So it is with the descriptions of life and manners. Nausikaa, the king's daughter, drives the wain with the pair of mules down to the river's mouth to carry the clothes to be washed. Odysseus walks through the streets of the sea- faring Phaiakians, wondering at the haven and the mighty walls and bastions, till he crosses the bronze threshold of the palace of Alkinoos, and entering, clasps the knees of Queen Arete ; then he crouches on the hearthstone in the ashes, till the king, mindful of Zeus the Thunderer standing near to care for the suppliant, takes the guest by the hand, and makes him sit by him on his own son's glittering seat. Thus follow- ing the romantic fortunes of the many- wiled Odysseus, we see as in the scenes of a dissolving-view how the heroes of old days went spear in hand with their swift dogs at their heel, how at the house-door they threw aside their garments to go into the bath chamber, and came forth anointed with oil to the feast where with no such refinements as plates or knives they ate their fill of roast meat and cakes of bread; how they diverted themselves with throwing quoits on the smooth turf, or lounged on outspread hides in the sunshine playing merells ; how in solemn rites they poured the libations of dark wine and burned the meat in sacrifice, with prayers for what their hearts desired, yet knowing all the while that the gods would, as they listed, this grant and that deny. All this is not only history, but history of the finest kind. Looked at by the student of culture, even the wild mixture of the natural and supernatural, so bewildering to the modern mind, is the record of an early stage of religious thought. The gods meet in council in the halls of cloud-gathering Zeus, to settle what shall be done with their contending armies of worshippers on the plains below. In the very fray of mortal warriors divine beings take part ; Poseidon plucks out the bronze tipped spear from the shield XV.] HISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY. 379 of Aineias, lifts up the Trojan hero and bears him away un- harmed over the heads of the warriors ; even the goddesses set on one another like mortal shrews, when Here tears away the bow and quiver of Artemis, and with scornful laughter boxes her ears with them till the virgin huntress goes off in tears, leaving her bow behind. It would be wrong to think that all this seemed mere make-believe and poetic ornament to the men who first listened to the wondrous rhapsodies. They were in the changing state of religion described in the last chapter (see p. 362) when the spiritual beings, which to their ruder forefathers had served as personal causes of nature and events, were passing away from their first clearness, yet were still regarded as divinities presiding over nature and interfering with men's lives. Contrasting such a state of thought with that of the present day will help us to realize one of the greatest events in all history, the change of men's minds from the mythological temper to the historical temper. This change did not happen all at once, but has for many ages been gradually coming about. There is hardly a more instructive chapter in Grote's History of Greece, than that in which he describes the philo- sophic age, when the Greeks were beginning to notice with perplexity and pain that the Homeric poems, become to them a sacred book, agreed but ill with their own experience of life, so that they asked themselves, can the world have really so changed since the days when men sat at table with the gods ? Much of what is called ancient history has to be looked at in this way. Historical criticism, that is, judgment, is practised not for the purpose of disbelieving but of believ- ing. Its object is not to find fault with the author, but to ascertain how much of what he says may be reasonably taken as true. Thus a modern reader may have a sounder opinion 38o ANTHRCPOLCGY. [chap. about early Roman history than the Romans themselves had in the time of Livy and Cicero. We see more plainly than they, that the name of Rome is less likely to have been given from a man called Romulus, than that the name of Romulus was invented to account for the city being called Rome. To modern minds, the whole famous story of the wolf-fostermother of Romulus and Remus collapses when it is known to be only a version of the same old wonder-tale told by Herodotus as the story of the birth of Cyrus. Yet here again may be seen the indirect value of history even where its events are most questionable. Though there may never have been any such person as Romulus, the legend of the tracing of the city walls by his bronze plough-share is a true record of the ceremony with which cities were anciently founded. Even later history, where the historian had written records to go upon, must often be sifted in this way. Suppose a class reading the 35th book of Livy. Such matters as Hannibal's oath, and the preparations for war with Antiochus, are taken without question as good history. But when it comes to the story that about this time an ox belonging to one of the consuls uttered the awful words " Roma, cave tibi ! " there is a laugh. Here it is not enough for the form-master simply to pass the story by as Livy's nonsense. He has to ajjmit that the historian probably took it from the official record of pro- digies, so that at any rate it is good historical evidence that in ancient Rome men not only believed that an ox might speak, but that its so doing would be a divine portent, and notions of this kind had so become part of the national religion and government, that the augurs took care a regular supply of such omens should be forthcoming to guide the rulers of the state, or at least to enable them to impose upon the multitude. Thus the passages of history which seem at XV.] HISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY. 381 first sight most silly and false, may be solid facts in the history of civilisation. It is plain that the compositions which serve as records of old-world life need not have been intended as history. If only the genuine words and thoughts of the ancients about anything have been handed down, it is for the moderns to extract history from them. Thus the Sanskrit hymns collected in the Veda serve as a record of the daily life of the early Aryans who chanted them. For when a hymn to the wmd gods brings them in as driving in chariots with strong felloes and well-fashioned reins and cracking whips, then it is plain to the modern reader that the Aryan people among whom the hymn was made drove themselves in such chariots. Where the bright gods have gold chains on their breasts for beauty, carry spears on their shoulders and daggers at their sides, this mythical fancy gives a real picture of the accoutrement of the Aryan warrior. Thus, piece by piece, this praehistoric hymn-book shows the old patriarchal Aryan life, with the herds of cattle roaming over wide pastures or shut in the winter cow-stall, the ploughing of the fields and the reaping of the corn, the family ties and legal rights, the worship of the great nature-gods of sky and earth, sun and dawn, fire and water and winds, the intense belief in the shining regions of the immortal dead, the honour to the almsgiver and praise to the just man. In the sacred books of the old Persians, collected in the Avesta, have come down the long-remembered traditions of another branch of the Aryan race, who, dividing off from their Brahman kinsfolk, followed the faith of Zarathustra. The deep schism between the two religions is seen in the Zarathustrians having degraded the bright gods {devd) of the Brahmans into evil demons {daei'o). Their horror of defiling the sacred fire by burning corpses as the Brahmans 26 382 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. do had already led them to expose the dead to be devoured by wild beasts and carrion birds, as the Parsis still do in their "towers of silence." In the beginning of the Avesta, there is mentioned as first and best of the good regions created by the good deity, the country called Airyatia vaejo, the " Aryan seed," which afterwards the evil deity cursed with ten months' winter ; this description of the climate looks as though the old Persians believed their early Aryan home was on the bleak slopes of Central Asia toward the sources of the Oxus and Yaxartes. Here and there among the sacred verses comes a touch of the life of these proud fierce herdsmen and tillers of the soil, little like the corrupt Persian and the thrifty Parsi of modern times. Their enthusiasm for the rough work of making the earth fit for man's abode is quaintly shown where they sing of the delight the earth feels when the husbandman drains the wet soil and waters the dry, how she brings wealth to him who tills her with the right arm and the left, with the left arm and the right : " When the corn grows, then the demons hiss ; When the shnots sprout, then the demons cough ; When the stalks rise, then the demons weep ; When the thxk ears come, then the demons fly." So necessary were the fierce dogs which kept the wolf from the fold and the thief from the village, that there are solemn ordinances about them, how the dog who does not bark and is not right in his mind is to be muzzled and tied up, and what punishment is to be inflicted on the man who gives a dog bad food ; it is as sinful (they say) as if he had done it to a well-to-do householder. One forms a lifelike picture of the sturdy farmers who made these laws to be repeated to their children's children and carried on to future ages. XV.] HISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY. 383 While these rough Aryans were handing on memories of the past by word of mouth in their sacred verses, more cultured nations had long since begun to write down memorials of their own times. The best way to bring to our minds what this earliest contemporary history was like, is to look at the translations of Egyptian and Assyrian documents in Records of the Past, published under the directions of the Society of Biblical Archceology. Here is to be found, for in- stance, Dr. Birch's translation of the inscription recording the e.xpeditions of Una, crown-bearer to king Teta, before 2,000 B.C. (see page 3), and of the account on the sanctuary walls of Karnak, of the battle of Megiddo, where Thothmes III., about 1,500 B.C., overcame the armies of Syria and Mesopotamia and opened the way into the interior of Asia. It is related how the king, marching from Gaza, reached the south of Megiddo on the shore of the waters of Kaner, where he pitched his tent and made a speech before his whole army : " Hasten ye, put on your helmets, for I shall rush to fight with the vile enemy in the morning !" The watchword was passed, " Firm, firm, watch, watch, watch actively at the king's pavilion ! " It was on the morning of the festival of the new moon that the king went forth in his golden decorated chariot in the midst of his army, the god Amun being the protection in his active limbs, and he pre- vailed over his enemies ; they fell prostrate before him, left their horses and chariots, and fled to the fort, where the garrison shut up inside pulled off their clothes to haul them up over the walls. The Egyptians slaughtered their enemies till they lay in rows like fish, and con([uering entered the fort of Megiddo, where the chiefs of the land came bearing tribute, silver and gold, lapis lazuli and alabaster, vessels of wine and flocks. The lists of spoil, made with curious minuteness, include living captives 240, hands (cut off the 3S4 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. dead) 83, mares 2,041, fillies 191, an ark of gold of the enemy, 892 chariots of the vile army, and so on. A later part of the inscription commemorates the liberal endow- ments bestowed by the victorious king on the god Amen Ra, the fields and gardens to supply his temple, the pairs of geese to fill his lakes, to supply him with the two trussed geese daily at sunset, a charge to remain for ever, and so on with the loaves of bread and pots of beer for daily rations. As the king says in his inscription, he does not boast of what he has done, saying that he has done more when he has not, and so causing men to contradict him. Here we see the check of public opinion beginning to act in history. It does not really compel exact truth, it allows national victories to be exaggerated and defeats kept out of sight, but even the vainglorious scribes of Egypt would hardly venture to record events without a foundation of fact. Turning now to the inscriptions of the Babylonian- Assyrian district, we may take as an example a temple-brick of the famous city Ur of the Chaldees, now called Mugheir, which bears these words in cuneiform writing : " To (the god) Ur, eldest son of Bel lii^ king, Urukh, the powerful man, the fierce wariior, King of (the city) Ur, king of Sumir and Akkad, Bit-tim^al the house of his delight bui.t." Sumir and Akkad, here mentioned, were the seats of the old Chaldaean civilisation. As early as the i6th century B.C., Hammurabi overcame these nations, a great event in the change that absorbed their ancient culture and religion into the conquering Assyrian empire. In an inscription of this king of Babylon, he says, " the favour of Bel gave into my government the people of Sumir and Akkad, for them I dug out afresh the canal called by my name, the joy of men, a stream of abundant waters for the people, all its XV.] HISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY. 385 banks I restored to newness, new supporting walls I heaped up, perennial waters I provided for the people of Sumir arid Akkad." By the aid of such contemporary writings, historians are now able to check the recorded lists of ancient kings, and to piece together something like a continuous line of dynasties in Egypt and Babylonia since the foundation of the great cities Memphis and Ur. We may notice where the records and traditions of the Israelites, written down in later ages in the historical books of the Old Testament, come in contact with ancient history from the monuments. Israelite tradition records (Gen. xi., xii.) that their ancestors had been in the Chaldean district of Ur, and in Egypt, which is evidence of their intercourse with the two great nations of the ancient world. The mention in Exodus (i. 11) of the Israelites being set to build for Pharaoh a city called Rameses, points to their oppression in Egypt having been under the Great Rameses II. of the XIX. dynasty, apparently about 1400 B.C., which makes a point of contact between Egyptian and Hebrew chronology. In the books of Kings there come into view later persons and events, well known in the contemporary records of other countries, as in the mention of Shishak, king of Egypt, who fought against Rehoboam and plundered the temple (i K. xiv. 25). It seems likely, when Herodotus (ii. 141) describes the army of Sennacherib, king of Assyria, being put to flight from the mice gnawing the soldiers' bows, that this is a version of the great disaster of Sennacherib, of which the Bible gives a different account (2 K. xix.). With Herodotus the student comes in view of the Old World as it was known to a Greek traveller and geo- grapher of the 5th century b.c. The Father of History, as he has been called, wrote not as a chronicler of his own 586 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. nation, but with the larger view of an anthropologist to whom all knowledge of mankind was interesting. The way in which modern discoveries have come in to confirm his statements, justifies us in relying on ancient historians when, like him, they are careful to distinguish mere legend or hearsay from what they have themselves enquired into. Thus Herodotus tells the strange story of the impostor who passed himself off as Smerdis, and sat on the throne of Persia till he was detected by his cropped ears, and Darius slew him. When, a few years ago, the cuneiform characters of the inscription sculptured in a high wall of rock near Behistan in Persia were deciphered, it pro\ed to be the very record set up by Darius the king in the three languages of the land, and it matches the account given by Herodotus closely enough to show what a real grasp he had of the course of events in Persia a century before his time. Yet more remarkable is the test which can be put to what Herodotus says he learnt fiom the priests in Egypt about their kings who reigned 2000 years before. From their dictation he wrote down the names of the jiyramid-kings Cheops, Chephren, Mykerinos. In later ages critics had sometimes come to doubt whether these kings belonged to fact or fable, but when the lost mean- ing of the Egyptian hieroglyphics was anew interpreted by modern scholars, there stood the names recognisable as the Greek historian heard them. The best ancient history is apt to receive such confirmation from long-lost monuments. Thucydides relates (vi. 54) that Peisistratos (the younger) dedicated two altars, from one of which the Athenians erased the inscription, but the other (the his- torian says) may still be read, though in faint letters : "this monument of his archonship Peisistratos son of Hippias set up in the enclosure of Pythian Apollo." Professor Newton XV.] HISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY. 387 reports that this very stone with its inscription is declared to have been found in 1878 in a courtyard near the Ihssos. How lively a sense of reality such monuments give to history may be understood by the student who, fresh from his books, goes to the British Museum and sees among the ancient coins the grand head of Alexander the Great with the ram's horns, commemorating that curious episode of his life whe n he was declared to be son of Zeus Ammon ; or who notices with surprise the gold coins that prove Cymbeline, now best known in Shakspere, to have been a real British king who coined money with his name. Having thus looked at the sources of early history as belonging to the study of mankind, we need not go over the well-trodden ground of later history. It remains to notice myth, tlie stumbling-block which historians have so often fliUen over. Myth is not to be looked on as mere error and folly, but as an interesting product of the human mind. It is sham history, the fictitious narrative of events that nevor happened. Historians, especially in writing of early a,:^es, have copied down the traditions of real events so mixed up with myths, that it is one of the hardest tasks of the student to judge what to believe and what to reject. He is fortunate when he can apply the test of possibility, and declare an event did not happen because he knows enough of the course of nature to be sure it could not For instance, cultured nations have learnt from science that what appears to be a blue dome or firmament above our heads, the sky or heaven, is not really the solid vault the ancients thought it was, but only thin air and watery vapour. The consequence of knowing this is that people have had to strike out of their history the old myths of gods dwelling in palaces and 388 ANTHRCPOLCGY. [chap. holding courts in the skies, of men cUmbing or flying up from earth into heaven, of giants heaping mountain Ossa on PeUon, to scale the cloudy heights and wage battle with the gods above. Besides this way of detecting myth by its relating what could not have taken place, there are other means of judging it. It is often possible to satisfy oneself that some story is not really history, by knowing the causes which led to its being invented. We know how strong our own desire is to account for everything. This desire is as strong among barbarians, and accordingly they devise such explanations as satisfy their minds. But they are apt to go a stage further, and their explanations turn into the form of stories with names of places and persons, thus becoming full-made myths. Educated men do not now consider it honest to make fictitious history in this way, but people of untrained mind, in what is called the myth-making stage, which has lasted on from the savage period and has not quite disappeared among ourselves, have no such scruples about converting their guesses at what may have happened, into the most life-like stories of what they say did happen. Thus, when comparative anatomy was hardly known, the finding of huge fossil bones in the ground led people to think they were the remains of huge beasts, and enormous men, or giants, who formerly lived on the earth. Modern science decides that they were right as to the beasts, which were ancient species of elephant, rhinoceros, &c., but wrong as to the giants, none of the great bones really belonging to any creature like man. But while the belief lasted that they were bones of giants, men's imagination worked in making stories about these giants and their terrific doings, stories which are told still in all quarters of the globe as though they were traditions of real events. Thus the Sioux of the western XV.] HISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY. 389 prairies of North America say their land was once inhabited by great animals, bits of whose bones they still keep for magic, and also they tell of the giant Ha-o-kah, who could stride over the largest rivers and the tallest pines, and to whom they sing and dance at their festivals. It appears that fossil bones, very likely of the mastodon, had to do with this native belief in old monstrous beasts, nor need we be surprised at the giants coming into the story, con- sidering that so lately as the last century Dr. Cotton Mather, the Puritan divine, sent to our Royal Society an account of the discovery of such bones in New England, which he argued were remains of antediluvian giants. Another thing which in all parts of the world has set the imagination of myth-makers to work, is the fact that people live in tribes or nations, each known by a particular name, such as Ojibwa, Afghan, Frank. The easiest and favourite way of accounting for this is to suppose each tribe or nation to have had an ancestor or chief of the like name, so that his descendants or followers inherited their tribe-name from him. It really happens so sometimes, but in most cases a pre- tended tradition of such an eponymic or name-ancestor arises from the makers of genealogies first inventing him out of the name of the tribe, and then treating him as a historical personage. They may now and then be caught in the act of doing this. Thus among the native race of Brazil and Paraguay, some tribes are called Tupi and others Giiarani, so to account for this division, a tradition is related that two brothers named Tupi and Guarani came over the sea to Brazil, and with their children peopled the country, but a talking parrot made strife between the wives of the two brothers, and this grew into a quarrel and separation, Tupi staying in the land, and Guarani going off with his family into the region of La Plata. Now there 390 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. happens to be a means of checking this story, for Martius says that the name guarani (meaning warrior) was first given by the Jesuits to the southern Indians whom they collected in their missions, so that the tale of the two ancestor-brothers must be a myth of modern manufacture. Such eponymic myths of national ancestors were not only made in ancient times, but are mixed up in the chronicles of Old World nations as though they were real history. The classical student knows the legends of the twin brothers Danaos and Aigyplos, ancestors of the Danaoi (Greeks) and ■Egyptians ; and of Hcllen, father of the Hellenes, whose three sons Aiolos, Doros, Xouthos, were fathers of the ALoliajis, Dorians, &c. Having looked at these two frequent kinds of myths derived from fossil bones and national names, it is worth while to notice how both come together in our own country. The History of the Britons, compiled in the 12th century by Geoffrey of Monmouth, relates that our island was in old time called Albion, and was only inhabited by a few giants ; but Brutus, a banished Trojan prince, landed with his followers and called the land Britain, after his own name, and his companions Britons. With him came a leader called Goriiieus, and he called the part of the country which fell to him Corinea and his people Corineans, that is, Cornish. In that part the giants were most numerous, and one especially, named Cf^w^^v?/ (elsewhere called Gogmagog) was twelve cubits high, and could pull up an oak like a hazel wand. On a certain day, when there had been a battle and the Britons had overcome a party of giants and slain all except this hugest monster, he and Corineus had a wrestling-match, when Corineus caught the giant up in his arms, and running with him to the top of the clitf now called the Hoe at Plymouth, cast him over, wherefore XV.] HISTORY AND MYTHOLCGY. 391 (says the chronicler) the place is called " Goemagot's leap " to this day. Quaint as this legend is, it is not hard to find the sense of it. It was the fashion to trace the origin of nations from Troy ; Brutus and Corweus were invented to account for the names of Britain and Cormvall ; Goemagot or Gogmagogxs the Biblical G^^^and Magog rolled into one, these personages being recognised in tradition as giants. But why the story of his having been thrown over the Hoe at Ply- mouth ? The answer seems to be that this is a place where the bones of fossil animals are actually dug up, such as were looked upon as remains of giants. Even in modern times, when excavations were being made on the Hoe for the fortifi- cations, huge jaws and teeth were found, which were at once settled by public opinion to be the remains of Gogmagog. These are examples of the myths easiest for modern civilised minds to enter into, for they are little more than inferences or guesses as to what may have actually happened, worked up with picturesque details which give them an air of reality. But to understand another kind of myths we must get our minds into a mood which is not that of scientific reasoning in the class-room, but of telling nursery tales in the twilight, or reading poetry in the woods on a summer afternoon. Former chapters have shown how, in old times and among uncultured people, notions of the kind which still remain among us as poetic fancy were seriously believed. When to the rude philosopher the action of the world around him was best explained by supposing in it nature-life like human life, and divine nature-souls like human souls, then the sun seemed a personal lord climbing proudly up the sky, and descending dim and weary into the under-world at night ; the stormy sea was a fearful god ready to swallow up the rash sailor ; the beasts of the forest were half-human in thought and speech ; even tlie forest-trees were the bodily 392 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. habitations of spirits, and the woodman, to whom the rustling of their leaves seemed voices, and their waving branches beckoning arms, hewed at their trunks with a half- guilty sense of doing murder. The world then seemed to be " such stuff as dreams are made on ; " transformation of body and transmigration of spirit were ever going on ; a man or god might turn into a beast, a river, or a tree ; rocks might be people transformed into stones, and sticks trans- formed snakes. Such a state of thought is fast disappearing, but there are still tribes living in it, and they show what the men's minds are like who make nature-myths. When a story-teller lives in this dreamland, any poetic fancy becomes a hint for a wonder-tale, and though (one would think) he must be aware that he is romancing, and that the adventures he relates are not quite history, yet when he is dead, and his story has been repeated by bards and priests for a few generations, then it would be disrespectful, or even sacri- legious, to question its truth. This has happened all over the world, and the Greek myths of the great nature-gods which Xenophanes and Anaxagoras ventured to disbelieve with such ill consequences to themselves, were of much the same fabric as those of modern barbarians like the South Sea Islanders. Let us look at a few nature-myths, choosing such as most transparently show how they came to be made. The Tahitians tell tales of their sea-god Hire, whose followers were sailing on the ocean while he was lulled to sleep in a cavern in the depths below ; then the wind-god raised a furious storm to destroy the canoe, but the sailors cried to Hiro, till, rising to the surface, he quelled the storm, and his votaries came safe to port. So in Homer, Poseid5n the sea-god, dweller in caves of ocean, sets on the winds to toss the frail bark of Odysseus among the thundering XV.] HISTORY AND MYTHCLCGY. 393 waves, till Ino comes to his rescue and bids him strip and swim for the Phaiakian shore. Both tales are word- pictures of the stormy sea told in the language of nature- myth, only with different turns. The New Zealanders have a story of Maui imprisoning the winds, all but the wild west- wind, whom he cannot catch to shut into its cavern by a great stone rolled against its mouth ; all he can do is to chase it home sometimes, and then it hides in the cavern, and for a while dies away. All this is a mythic description of the weather, meaning that other winds are occasional, but the west wind prevalent and strong. These New Zealanders had never heard of the classic myth of .zEolus and the cave of the winds, yet how nearly they had come to the same mythic fancy, that it is from such blow-holes in the hill-sides that the winds come forth. The negroes of the West Indies tell a tale of the great quarrel between Fire and Water, how the Fire came on slowly, stopped by the stream, till he called the Wind to his aid, who carried him across everything, and the great fight came off, the Bon Dieu looking on from behind a curtain of clouds. It is not likely that these negro slaves had ever heard of the twenty-first Iliad, to know how the same world-old contest of the ele- ments is told in the great battle between the Fire-god and the Rivers, when the Winds were sent to help, and carried the fierce flames onward, and the eels and fish scuttled hither and thither as the hot breath of the blast came upon them. The beams of light darting down from the sun through openings in the clouds seem to have struck people's fancy in Europe as being like the rope over the pulley of an old- fashioned draw-well, for this appearance is called in popular phrase, " the sun drawing water." The Polynesians also see the resemblance of the rays to cords, which they say are the ropes the sun is fastened by, and they tell 394 ANTHRCPOLOGY. [chap. a myth how the sun once used to go faster, till a god set a noose at the horizon and caught him as he rose, so that he now travels bound and slowly along his daily appointed path. In English such an expression as that the sun is " swallowed up by night " is now a mere metaphor, but the idea is one which in ancient and barbaric times people took more seriously. The Maoris have made out of it the story of the death of their divine hero Maui. You may see, they say, Maui's ancestress, Great- Woman-Night, flashing and as it were opening and shutting out on the horizon where sea and sky come together; Maui crept into her body and would have got through unharmed, but just at that moment the little flycatcher, the tiwakazvaka, broke out with its merry note and awoke the Night, and she crushed Maui. That this is really a nature-myth of the setting sun dying as he plunges into the darkness, is proved by the mention of the bird, which has the peculiarity of singing at sunset. Of all the nature-myths of the world, few are so widely spread as those on this theme of night and day, where with mythic truth the devoured victims were afterwards disgorged or set free. The Zulu story-tellers describe the maw of the monster as a country where there are hills and houses and cattle and people living, and when the monster is cut open, all the creatures come out from the darkness ; with a neat touch of nature which shows that the story-teller is thinking of the dawn, the cock comes out first, crying, '' kukuliikn ! I see the world ! " Our English version of the old myth is the nursery tale of Little Red Ridinghood, but it is spoilt by leaving out the proper end (which German nurses have kept up with better memory), that vi'hen the hunter ripped up the sleeping wolf, out came the little damsel in her red satin cloak, safe and sound. Such stories are fanciful, but the fancy of the myth-maker XV.] HISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY. 395 can take yet further flights. The mythic persons as yet de- scribed have been visible obj jcts hke the sun, or at least what can be perceived by the senses and made real objects of, such as wind, or day. But when the poet is in the vein of myth- making, whatever he can express by a noun and put a verb to, becomes capable of being treated as a person. If he can say, summer comes, sleep falls on men, hope ris.s, justice demands, then he can set up sumuier and sleep, hope and justice, in human figures, dress them, and make them walk and talk. Thus the formation of myth is helped by what Professor Max Miiller has called a " disease of language." This, however, is not the whole matter. We saw in the last chapter how the notion of soul or spirit helped men on to the notion of cause. When the cause of anything presents itself to the ancient mind as a kind of soul or spirit, then the cause or spirit of summer, sleep, hope, justice, comes easily to look like a person. No one can really understand old poetry without knowing this. Homer could fancy on the field of battle the awful Ka% whose figure was shown on the shield of Achilles with blood-stained garment flung over her shoulders as she seized some warrior wounded to the death, or dragged a corpse by the feet out of the fighting throng. This being is not merely a word turned into a reality, she is a personal cause, a spirit-reason, why one warrior is slain and not another. So far is the idea of her spread in Aryan mytho- logy, that it appears again among the Northmen, when Odin sends to every battle the maidens who in Walhalla serve the feast and fill the bowls with ale for the spirits of the heroes ; these maidens are the Valkyriur, who guide the event of victory, and choose the warriors who shall fall. Another well-known mythic group shows again how what to us moderns are but ideas expressed in words, took personal form in the minds of the ancients. In the classic books of 396 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. Greece and Rome we read of the three fate-spinners, the Moirai or Parcas, and their Scandinavian counterparts appear in the Edda as the three wise women whose dwelling is near the spring under the world-ash Ygdrasill, the Norns who fix the lives of men. The explanation of these three mythic beings is that they are in personal shape the Past, Present, and Future, as is shown by the names they bear, JVas, Is, Shall ( Urdhr, Verd/iandt, Skuld). Stories are always changing and losing their meanings, and from age to age new bards and tale-tellers shape the old myths into new forms to suit new hearers. Considering how stories thus grow and change, one must expect their origins to be as often as not lost beyond recovery. While, as we have seen, it may be often possible to make out what they came from, this must be done cautiously. Clever writers are too apt to sit down and settle the mythic origin of any tale, as if this could be done by ingenious guessing. Even if it is nonsense and never was intended for anything else, the myth- interpreter can find a serious origin for it all the same. Thus a learned but rash mythologist declares that in our English nursery rhyme, " the cow jumped over the moon," is a remnant of an old nature-myth, describing as a cow a cloud passing over the moon. What is really wanted in interpreting myths is something beyond simple guessing ; there must be reasons why one particular guess is more probable than any other. It would have been rash to judge that Prometheus the fire-bringer is a personification of the wooden fire-drill (p. 262), were it not known that the Sanskrit name of this instrument is pramatitha ; taken together, the correspondence of name and nature amounts to a high probability that we have got back to the real origin of the Prometheus-legend. We may choose another ex- ample from the mythology of India, in the story of Vamana, XV.] HISTCRY AND MYTHOLOGY. 397 the tiny Brahman, who, to humble the pride of King Bah', begs of him as much land as he can measure in three steps, but when the boon is granted, the little dwarf expands into the gigantic form of Vishnu, and, striding with one step across the earth, another across the air, and a third across the sky, drives Bali down into the infernal regions, where he still reigns. This most remarkable of all the Tom Thumb stoiies seems really a myth of the sun, rising tiny above the liorizon, then swelling into majestic power and crossing the universe. For Vamana, the " dwarf," is one of the incarnations of Vishnu, and Vishnu was originally the Sun. In the hymns of the Veda the idea of his three steps is to be found before it had become a story, when it was as yet only a poetic metaphor of the Sun crossing the airy regions in his three strides. " Vishnu traversed (the earth), thrice he put down his foot ; it was crushed under his dusty step. Three steps hence made Vishnu, unharmed preserver, upholding sacred things." It remains to see how myths spread. Whenever a good story is told, whether real or made-up does not matter, it becomes part of tlie story-teller's stock, who puts to it any new name that will suit, and often succeeds in planting it not only in popular legend, but even in history. There is a fragment by Demaratus preserved in the collection of Stobaeus, where there is related with Greek names, as an episode of the history of Arkadia, the grand story which we were taught as an event of Roman history, the legend of the Horatii and Curiatii. Roman history, it seems, only borrowed it from an earlier tale, much as modern Swiss history borrowed from older folklore the tale of the archer and the apple, to adorn their national hero. Tell. To show how legend is put together from many sources, historical and mythical, let us take to pieces 27 393 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. one of the famous children's tales of Europe. Blue Beard was a historical person. He was Gilles de Retz, Sieur de Laval, Marshal of France, nicknamed Barbe Bleue from having a beard of blue-black shade. Persuaded by an Italian alchemist that his strength could be restored by bathing in the blood of infants, he had many children entrapped for this hideous purpose into his castle of Champtoce on the Loire, the ruins of which are still to be seen. At last the horrible suspicions of the country folk as to what was going on were brought to proof, and the monster was burnt at the stake at Nantes in 1440. In all this, however, there is not a word about murdered wives. Indeed the historical Blue Beard, in his character of murder- ous monster, seems to have inherited an older tale belonging to the wife-murderer of Breton legend, Comor the Cursed, Count of Poher, whose name and deeds are set down to near a thousand years earlier, in the legendary chronicles which tell of him as a usurper and tyrant who married and murdered one wife after another, till at last when he had wedded and killed the beautiful Trifine, vengeance overtook him, and he was defeated and slain by the rightful prince. It is not easy to say whether this is a version of a yet older story, or whether there is a historical foundation for it ; if Henry VIII. of England had lived in those times, such a legend might have gathered round his name. Other points of the modern Blue Beard appear already in the story of Trifine, her sending for aid to her kinsmen when she knows her danger, and her discovery of the murder of the former wives. This last, however, does not come to pass in the modern way ; in the legend, Trifine goes down into the chapel to pray in the hour of need, and there the tombs of the four murdered wives open and their corpses stand upright, each with the knife or cord or what- XV.] HISTCRY AND MYTHCLCGY. 399 ever she was murdered with in her hand. Instead of this powerful and ghastly scene, the modern version brings in the hackneyed episode of the forbidden chamber, which had long been the property of story-tellers for use on suitable occasions, and is to be found in the Arabian Alg/its. The old Trifine legend has a characteristic ending. Her wicked husband pursues her into the forest and cuts Iier head off, but St. Gildas makes her body carry it back to Comor's castle, which he overthrows by flinging a handful of dust at it, then he puts Trifine's head on for her again, and she retires into a convent for the rest of her life. The story-tellers of later times prefer a more cheerful if more commonplace finish. The miracle-legend just quoted brings us back to the historical use of myth, which was spoken of earlier in this chapter. The story of St. Gildas bringing the fair Trifine back to her castle with her head in her hand, and his after- wards putting it back on her shoulders, is history. It records the intellectual state of the age when it was held edifying to tell such wonders of holy men, for holy men were believed able to do them. Old tales which seem extravagant to our minds are apt thus to have historical value by point- ing back to the times when, seeming possible, they were made. This is true even of ^sop's fables. In the stage of thought when human souls are thought able to live in animals' bodies, when a wolf may have one's enemy's soul in him, or one's grandfather may be crawling on the hearth in the body of a snake, stories of rational beasts themselvjs seem rational. Among the Buddhists, where beast- tales early became moral apologues, they are told as incidents of thi many births or transmigrations of the great founder of the religion. It was Buddha himself who, as a bird, took the bone out of the lion's throat, and was repaid by being told 400 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. xv. that he was lucky to be so well out of it. It was Buddha Avho, born in the body of a i>easant, listened to the ass in the lion's skin, and said he was but an ass. That millions of people should have this as part of their sacred literature is a fact of interest in the study of civilization, warning us not to cast aside a story as worthless, because it is mythical. For understanding the thoughts of old-world nations, their myths tell us much we should hardly learn from their history. CHAPTER XVI. SOCIETY. Social Stages, 401 — Family. 402 — Morals of Lower Kaces, 405 — Public Opinion and Custom, 408 — Moral Progress, 410 — Vengeance and Justice, 414 — War, 418 — Property, 419 — Legal Ceremonies, 423 — Family Power and Responsibility, 426 — Palrlarclial and Military Chiefs, 428 — Nations, 432 — Social Ranks, 434 — Government, 436. In the reports of crimes which appear daily in the news- papers of our civiUzed land, such phrases often occur as savage fury, barbarous cruelty. These two words have come to mean in common talk such behaviour as is most wild, rough, and cruel. Now no doubt the life of the less civilized people of the world, the savages and barbarians, is more wild, rough, and cruel than ours is on the whole, but the difference between us and them does not lie altogether in this. As the foregoing chapters have proved, savage and barbarous tribes often more or less fairly represent stages of culture through which our own ancestors passed long ago, and their customs and laws often explain to us, in ways we should otherwise have hardly guessed, the sense and reason of our own. It should be understood that it is out of the question to give here even a summary of the complicated systems of society : all that can be done is to put before the 402 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. reader some of its leading principles in ancient and modern life. Mankind can never have lived as a mere struggling crowd, each for himself. Society is always made up of families or households bound together by kindly ties, controlled by rules of marriage and the duties of parent and child. Yet the forms of these rules and duties have been very various. Marriages may be shifting and temporary pairing, or unions where the husband may have several wives, and the wife several husbands. It is often hard to understand the family group and its ties in the rude and ancient world. Thus it seems to us a matter of course to reckon family descent in the male line, and this is now put in the clearest way by the son taking the father's surname. But in lower stages of civilization, on both sides of the globe, many tribes take the contrary idea as a matter of course. In most Australian tribes the children belong to the mother's clan, not the father's ; so that in native wars father and son constantly meet as natural enemies. Chiefship often goes down in the royal mother's line, as among the Natchez, who had their sun-temples in what is now Louisiana. Yet this widespread law of female descent, deep as it Hes in the history of society, had been so lost sight of among the ancient civilized nations, that when Herodotus noticed it among the Lykians, who took their names from their mothers and traced their pedigrees through the female branches only, the historian fancied this was a peculiar custom, in which they were unlike all other people. In the savage and barbaric world there prevails widely the rule called by McLennan exogamy or marrying-out, which forbids a man to take a wife of his own clan — an act which is considered criminal, and may even be punished with death. It is a strange contrast to the popular idea that savage life has no XVI.] SOCIETY. 403 rules, when we find Australian tribes where every man is bound to marry into the particular clan which is, so to speak, the wife-clan to his own. Among the Iroquois of North America the children took the clan-name or totem of the mother ; so if she were of the Bear clan, her son would be a Bear, and accordingly he might not marry a Bear girl, but might take a Deer or Heron. Such laws appear also among higher nations who reckon descent in the male line. Thus in India a Brahman is not to marry a wife whose clan-name (her " cow-stall," as they say) is the same as his ; nor may a Chinese take a wife of his own surname. Though the family and tribe rules of the savage and barbaric world are too in- tricate to be fully discussed here, there are some instructive points to which attention should be called. Marriage is in early stages of society a civil contract. Thus, among the wild hunting-tribes of Nicaragua, the lad who wishes a girl for a wife kills a deer and lays it with aheap of firewood at the door of her parents' hut, which symbolic act is his offer to hunt and do man's work ; if the gift is accepted, it is a marriage, without further ceremony. Among peoples of higher culture more formal promises and ceremonies come in, with feasts and gatherings of kinsfolk; and then, as in other important matters of life, the priest is called in to give divine blessing and sanction to the union. Where this is done, a wedding has come to be very different from what it was in the rough times of marriage by capture, such as might be seen in our own day among fierce forest tribes in Brazil, where the warriors would make forays on distant villages and by main force bring home wives. Ancient tradition knows this practice well, as where the men of Benjamin carry off the daughters of Shiloh dancing at the feast, and in the famous Roman tale of the rape of the Sabines, a legend putting in historical form the wife-capture 404 ANTHROPOLCGY. [chap. which in Roman custom remained as a ceremony. What most clearly shows what a recognised old-world custom it was, is its being thus kept up as a formality where milder manners really prevail. It had passed into this state among the Spartans, when Plutarch says that though the marriage was really by friendly settlement between the famihes, the bridegroom's friends went through the pretence of carrying oft" the bride by violence. Within a few generations the same old habit was kept up in Wales, where the bridegroom and his friends, mounted and armed as for war, carried off the bride ; and in Ireland they used even to hurl spears at the bride's people, though at such a distance that no one was hurt, except now and then by accident, as happened when one Lord Hoath lost an eye, which mischance seems to have put an end to this curious relic of antiquity. It was one of the consequences of increase of property in the world, that the practice of buying wives came in, as where a Zulu bargains with a girl's people to let him have her perhaps for five oxen or ten. This was the custom in England among our barbaric fore- fathers, as appears in the West-Saxon law of Ine — " If a man buy a wife," &:c. Cnut somewhat later forbade the wife to be sold, but the husband might give something of his own will. It is an interesting problem in the history of law how the money once paid as the btide's price passed into a gift or dower for her; some provision of this kind became necessary when the widow was no longer provided for by being taken, as she would have been in a ruder state of society, as a wife by her husband's brother. Marriage has been here spoken of first, because upon it depends the family, on which the whole framework of society is founded. What has been said of the ruder kinds of family XVI.] SOCIETY. 405 union among savages and barbarians shows that there cannot be expected from them the excellence of those well-ordered households to which civilized society owes so much of its goodness and prosperity. Yet even among the rudest clans of men, unless depraved by vice or misery and falling to pieces, a standard of family morals is known and lived by. 'i'heir habits, judged by our notions, are hard and coarse, yet the family tie of sympathy and common interest is already formed, and the foundations of moral duty already laid, in the mother's patient tenderness, the father's desperate valour in defence of home, their daily care for the little cnes, the affection of brothers and sisters, and the mutual forbearance, helpfulness, and trust of all. From the family this extends to a wider circle. The natural way in which a tribe is formed is from a family or group, which in time increases and divides into many households, still recognising one another as kindred, and this kinship is so thoroughly felt to be the tie of the whole tribe, that, even when there has been a mixture of tribes, a common ancestor is often invented to make an imaginary bond of union. Thus kindred ax\d kind- ness go together — two words whose common derivation expresses in the happiest way one of the main principles of social life. Among the lessons to be learnt from the life of rude tribes is, how society can go on without the policeman to keep order. It is plain that even the lowest men cannot live quite by what the Germans call " faustrecht," or " fist-right," and we call " club law." The strong savage does not rush into his weaker neighbours hut and take possession, driving the owner out into the forest with a stone-headed javelin sent flying after him. Without some control beyond the mere right of the stronger, the tribe would break up in a week, whereas in fact savage tribes last on for ages. Under 4o6 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. favourable circumstances, where food is not too scarce nor war too v/asting, the life of low barbaric races may be in its rude way good and happy. In the West Indian islands where Columbus first landed, lived tribes who have been called the most gentle and benevolent of the human race. Schomburgk, the traveller, who knew the warlike Caribs well in their home life, draws a paradise-like picture of their ways, where they have not been corrupted by the vices of the white men ; he saw among them peace and cheerful- ness and simple family affection, unvarnished friendship, and gratitude not less true for not b^ing spoken in sounding words ; the civilized world, he says, has not to teach them morality, for though they do not talk about it, they live in it. • At the other side of the world in New Guinea, Kops, the Dutch explorer, gives much the same account of the Papuans of Dory, who live in houses built on piles in the water, like the old lake-men of Switzerland ; he speaks of their mild disposition, their inclination to right and justice, their strong moral principles, their respect for the aged and love for their children, their living without fastenings to their houses — for theft is considered by them a grave offence, and rarely occurs. Among the rude non-Hindu tribes of India, Eng- lish officials have often recorded with wonder the kindliness and cheerfulness of the rude men of the mountains and the jungle, and their utter honesty in word and deed. Thus Sir Walter Elliot mentions a low poor tribe of South India, whom the farmers employ to guard their fields, well knowing that they would starve rather than steal the grain in their charge ; and they are so truthful that their word is taken at once in disputes even with their richer neighbours, for people say "a Kurubar always speaks the truth." Of course these accounts of Caribs and Papuans show them on the friendly side, while those who have fouglit with them XVI.] SOCIETY. 407 call them monsters of ferocity and treachery. But cruelty and cunning in war seem to them right and praiseworthy ; and what we are here lookhig at is their home peace-life. It is clear that low barbarians may live among themselves under a fairly high moral standard, and this is the more instructive because it shows what may be called natural morality. Among them religion, mostly concerned with propitiating souls of ancestors and spirits of nature, has not the strong moral influence it exerts among higher nations; indeed their behaviour to their fellows is little aflFected by divine command or fear of divine punishment. It has more to do with their life being prosperous or miserable. When want or the miseries of war upset their well-being, they (like their betters) become more brutal and selfish in their ways, and moral habits are at all times low among the comfortless hordes of savages whose daily struggle for existence is too harsh for the gentler feelings to thrive. Moreover, there is this plain difference between low and high races of men, that the dull-minded barbarian has not power of thought enough to come up to the civilized man's best moral standard. The wild man of the forest, forgetful of yesterday and careless of to-morrow, lolling in his hammock when his wants are satisfied, has little of the play of memory and foresight which is ever unrolling before our minds the panorama of our own past and future life, and even sets us in thought in the places of our fellows, to partake of their lives and enter into their joys and sorrows. Much of the wrong-doing of the world comes from want of imagination. If the drunkard could see before him the misery of next year with something of the vividness of the present craving, it would overbalance it. Ofttimes in the hottest fury of anger, the sword has been sheathed by him across whose mind has flashed the prophetic picture of the women weeping round the blood-stained 4o8 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. corpse. The lower races of men are so wanting in foresight to resist passion and temptation, that the moral balance of a tribe easily goes wrong, while they are rough and wantonly cruel through want of intelligent sympathy with the sufferings of others, much as children are cruel to animals through not being able to imagine what the creatures feel. What we now know of savage life will prevent our falling into the fancies of the philosophers of the last century, who set up the "noble savage" as an actual model of virtue to be imitated by civilized nations. But the reality is quite as instructive, that the laws of virtue and happiness may be found at work in simple forms among tribes who make hatchets of sharpened stones and rub sticks together to kindle fire. Their hfe, seen at its best, shows with unusual clearness the great principle of moral science, that morality and happiness belong together — in fact that morality is the method of happiness. It must not be supposed that in any state of civilization a man's conduct depends altogether on his own moral sense of right and wrong. Controlling forces of society are at work even among savages, only in more rudimentary ways than among ourselves. Public opinion is already a great power, and the way in which it acts is particularly to be noticed. Whereas the individual man is too apt to look to his own personal interest and the benefit of his near friends, these private motives fall away when many minds come together, and public opinion with a larger selfishness takes up the public good, encouraging the individual to set aside his private wishes and give up his property or even his life for the commonwealth. The assembled tribe can crush the mean and cowardly with their scorn, or give that reward of glory for which the high-spirited will risk goods and life. Travellers have remarked that the women, XVI.] SOCIETY. 409 however down-trodden, know how to make their influence felt in tliis way, and many a warrior whose heart was faiUng him in face of the enemy, has turned from flight when he thought of the girls' mockery when he should slink home to the village, safe but disgraced. This pressure of public opinion compels men to act according to custom, which gives the rule as to what is to be done or not done in most affairs of life. Explorers of wild countries, not finding the machinery of police they are accustomed to at liome, have sometimes rashly concluded that the savages lived un- restrained at their own free will. We have here already noticed that this is a mistake, for life in the uncivilized world is fettered at every turn by chains of custom. To a great extent it is evident that customs have come into existence for the benefit of society, or what was considered so. For instance, it is generally held right in wild countries that hospitality shall be freely given to all comers, for every one knows he may want it any day himself. But whether a custom is plainly usefiil or not, and even when its purpose is no longer known, once established as a custom it must be conformed to. Savages may have finger- joints cut off, or undergo such long and severe fasts that many die ; but often the only reason they can give for inflicting such suffering on themselves is that it was the custom of their ancestors. In some parts of Australia custom forbade to the young hunters, and reserved for the old men, much of the wild fowl and the best joints of the large game. No doubt this was in some measure for the public benefit, as the experienced elders, who were past the fatigue of hunting, were able to stay in camp, make nets and weapons, teach the lads, and be the repositories of wisdom and the honoured counsellors of the tribe. Nothing could prove more plainly how far society is, even among such 4IO ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. wild men of the desert, from being under the mere sway of brute force. Thus communities, however ancient and rude, always have their rules of right and wrong. But as to what acts have been held right and wrong, the student of history must avoid that error which the proverb calls measuring other people's corn by one's own bushel. Not judging the customs of nations at other stages of culture by his own modern standard, he has to bring his knowledge to the help of his imagination, so as to see institutions where they belong and as they work. Only thus can it be made clear that the rules of good and bad, right and wrong, are not fixed alike for all men at all times. For an example of this principle, let us observe how people at different stages of civilization deal widi the aged. Some of the lower races take much care of their old folks even after they are fallen into imbecility, treating them with almost gentle considerateness and very commonly tending them till death, when respect to the living ancestor passes into his worship as an ancestral spirit. But among other tribes filial kindness breaks down earlier, as among those fierce Brazilians who knock on the head with clubs the sick and aged, and even eat them, whether they find their care too burdensome, or whether they really think, as they say, that it is kind to end a life no longer gladdened with fight and feast and dance. We realize the situation among roving tribes. The horde must move in quest of game, the poor failing creature cannot keep up in the march, the hunters and the heavily laden women cannot carry him ; he must be left behind. Many a traveller has beheld in the desert such heartrending scenes as Catlin saw when he said farewell to the white-haired old Puncah chief, all but blind and shrunk to skin and bone, crouched shivering by a few burning sticks, for his shelter a XVI.] SOCIETY. 411 buffalo-hide set up on crutches, for his food a dish of water and a few half-picked bones. This old warrior was abandoned at his own wish when his tribe started for new hunting-grounds, even as years before, he said, he had left his own fixther to die when he was no longer good for any- thing. When a nation settled in the agricultural state iias reached something of wealth and comfort, there is no longer the excuse of necessity for killing or abandoning the aged. Yet history shows how long the practice was kept up even in Europe, pardy with the humane intent of putting an end to lingering misery, but more through the survival of a custom inherited from harder and ruder times. The Wends in what is now Germany practised the hideous rite of putting the aged and infirm to death, cooking and eating them, much as Herodotus describes the old Massagetae as doing. In Sweden there used to be kept in the churches certain clumsy wooden clubs, called "family- clubs," of which some are still preserved, and with which in ancient times the aged and hope- lessly sick were solemnly put to death by their kinsfolk. It is interesting to trace in the old German records the change from such hard ancient barbarism to gentler manners, when the infirm old house-father, dividing his substance among his children, is to sit henceforth well cared for in the "cat's place" by the hearth. One of the marks of advancing civilization was the growing sense of the sacredness of human life, even apart from its use and pleasure, and under this feeling the cutting short of even a burdensome and suffering existence, which our ancestors resorted to without reproach, has come to be looked upon with horror. It must be clearly understood also tiiat the old-world rules of moral conduct were not the same towards all men. 412 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. A man knew his duty to his neighbour, but all men were not his neighbours. This is very clearly seen in the history of men's ideas of manslaughter and theft. The slaying of a man is scarcely held by the law of any people to be of itself a crime, but on the contrary it has been regarded as an allowable or praiseworthy act under certain conditions, especially in self-defence, war, revenge, punishment, and sacrifice. Yet no known tribe, however low and ferocious, has ever held that men may kill one another indiscrimi- nately, for even the savage society of the desert or the jungle would collapse under such lawlessness. Thus all men acknowledge some law "thou shall not kill," but the question is how this law applies. It is instructive to see how it works among those fierce tribes who approve the killing of men simply as a proof of valour. Thus the young Sioux Indian, till he had killed his man, was not allowed to stick the feather in his head-dress and have the title of brave or warrior ; he could scarcely get a girl to marry him till he had " got the feather." So the young Dayak of Borneo could not get a wife till he had taken a head, and it was thus with the skull or scalp which the Naga warrior of Asam had to bring home, thereby qualifying himself to be tattooed and to marry a wife, who had perhaps been waiting years for this ugly marriage-licence. The trophy need not have been taken from an enemy, and might have been got by the blackest treachery, provided only that the victim were not of the slayer's own tribe. Yet these Sioux among themselves hold manslaughter to be a crime unless in blood- revenge ; and the Dayaks punish murder. This state of things is not really contradictory ; in fact its explanation lies in the one word " tribe." The tribe makes its law, not on an abstract principle that manslaughter is right or wrong, but for its own preservation. Their existence depends oh XVI.] SOCIETY. 413 holding their own in deadly strife with neighbouring tribes, and thus they put a social premium on the warrior's proof of valour in fight against the enemy, though in these degenerate days they allow the form to be meanly fulfilled by bringing in as a warrior's trophy the head of some old woman or wretched waylaid stranger. In this simple contrast between one's own people and strangers, the student will find a clue to the thought of right and wrong running through ancient history, and slowly passing into a larger and nobler view. The old state of things is well illustrated in the Latin word hostis, which, meaning originally stranger, passed quite naturally into the sense of enemy. Not only is slaying an enemy in open war looked on as righteous, but ancient law goes on the doctrine that slaying one's own tribesman and slaying a foreigner are crimes of quite different order, while killing a slave is but a destruction of property. Nor even now does the colonist practically admit that killing a brown or black man is an act of quite the same nature as killing a white countryman. Yet the idea of the sacredness of human life is ever spreading more widely in the world, as a principle applying to mankind at large. The history of the notion of theft and plunder follows partly the same lines. In the lower civilization the law, " thou shalt not steal," is not unknown, but it applies to tribesmen and friends, not to strangers and enemies. Among the Ahts of British Columbia, Sproat remarks that an article placed in an Indian's charge on his good faith is perfectly safe, yet thieving is a common vice where the property of other tribes or of white men is concerned. But, he says, it would be unfair to regard thieving among these savages as culpable in the same degree as among ourselves, for they have no moral or social law forbidding thieving between tribe and tribe, which has been commonly practised 2i 414 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap; for generations. Thus, although the Africans within their own tribe-limits have strict rules of property, travellers describe how a Zulu war-party, who have stealthily crept upon a distant village and massacred men, women, and children, will leave behind them the ransacked kraal flaring on the horizon and return with exulting hearts and loads of plunder. The old-world law of a warlike people is well seen among the ancient Germans in Caesar's famous sentence, " Robberies beyond the bounds of each com- munity have no infamy, but are commended as a means of exercising youth and diminishing sloth." Even in the midst of modern civilization, a declaration of war may still carry society back to the earlier stages of plunder and prize- money- But in peace the safety of property as well as life is becoming more settled in the world. The extradition treaties by which criminals, deprived of their old refuge over the border, are now given up to justice in the country where they offended, mark the modern tendency to unite nations in one community, which recognises among all its members mutual right and duty. Hitherto we have been looking at right and wrong chiefly as worked by men's own moral feelings and by public opinion. But stronger means have at all times been necessary. It is now reckoned one of the regular duties of civilization to have a criminal law to punish wrong-doers with fine, imprisonment, blows, and even death. This system, however, only gradually arose in the world, and history can show plain traces of how it grew up from the early state of things when there were as yet no professional judges or executioners, but it was every man's right and duty to take the law into his own hands, and that law was what we now call vengeance. When in barbaric life fierce passion breaks loose and a man is slain, this rule of vengeance comes XVI.] SOCIETY. 415 into action. How it works as one of the great forces of society may well be seen among the Australians. As Sir George Grey says in his account of it, the holiest duty a native is called on to perform is to avenge the death of his nearest relation. If he left this duty unfulfilled, the old women would taunt him ; if he were unmarried, no girl would speak to him ; if he had wives, they would leave him ; his mother would cry and lament that she had given birth to so degenerate a son, his father would treat him with contempt, and he would be a mark for public scorn. But what is to be done if the murderer escapes, as must in so wild and thinly peopled a country be easy ? Native custom goes on the ancient doctrine that the criminal's whole family are re- sponsible ; so that when it is known that a man has been slain, and especially when the actual culprit has escaped, his kinsfolk run for their lives ; the very children of seven years old know whether they are of kin to the manslayer, and, if so, they are off at once into hiding. Here then we come in view of two principles which every student of law should have clearly in his mind in tracing its history up from its lowest stages. In the primitive law of vengeance of blood, he sees society using for the public benefit the instinct of revenge which man has in common with the lower animals ; and by holding the whole family answerable for the deed of one of its members, the public brings the full pressure of family influence to bear on each individual as a means of keeping the peace. No one who sees the working of blood- vengeance can deny its practical reasonableness, and its use in restraining men from violence while there are as yet no judges and executioners. Indeed among all savages and barbarians the avenger of blood, little as he thinks it himself in his wild fury, is doing his part toward saving his people from perishing by deeds of blood. Unhappily his usefulness 4i6 ANTHROPOLOGY. [cHAP. is often marred through ignorance and delusion turning his vengeance against the innocent. These AustraHans are among the many savages who do not see why anybody should ever die unless he is killed, so they account for what we call natural death by settling it that some enemy killed the sufferer by magic art, wounding him with an invisible weapon, or sending a disease-demon to gnaw his vitals. Therefore, when a man dies, his kinsmen set themselves to find out by divination what malignant sorcerer did him to death, and when they have fixed on some one as the secret enemy the avenger sets out to find and slay him ; then of course there is retaliation from the other side, and a heredi- tary feud sets in. This is one great cause of the rancorous hatred between neighbouring tribes which keeps savages in ceaseless fear and trouble. Passing to higher levels of civilization, among the nations of the ancient world we still find the law of blood-vengeance, but it is being gradually modified by the civilization which m time ousts it altogether. Thus the law of the Israelites, while still authorizing the avenger of blood, provides that there shall be cities of refuge, and that the morally inno- cent manslayer shall not be as the wilful murderer. Among nations where wealth has been gathered together, and espe- cially where it has come to be measured by money, the old fierce cry for vengeance sinks into a claim for compensa- tion. In Arabia to this day the earlier and later stages may be seen side by side ; while the roaming Beduin tribes of the desert carry on blood-feuds from generation to generation with savage ferocity, the townsfolk feel that life can hardly go on with an assassin round every street-corner, so they take the blood-money and loose the feud. This state of things is instructive as boing like that of our own early ancestors when the Teutonic law was still that a man took vengeance XVI.] SOCIETY. 417 for hurt done to him or his, unless he compounded it. The Anglo-Saxon word for such composition was 7uer-g{ld, probably meaning "man-money," 200 shillings for a free man, less for lower folk, and less for a Welshman than an English- man. Again, where the rule of vengeance is a life for a life, lesser hurts are also repaid in kind, which is the Roman lex talionis, or " law of the like " — retaliation. This is plainly set forth in the Jewish law, life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. It is still law in Abyssinia, where not long since a mother prosecuted a lad who had accidentally fallen from a fruit-tree on her litde son and killed him ; the judges decided that she had a right to send another son up into the tree to drop on the boy who had un- intentionally caused the first one's death, which remedy however she did not care to avail herself of Of course retaliation came to be commuted into money, as when old English laws provide that, if any one happen to cut off the fist or foot of a person, let him render to him the half of a man's price, for a thumb half the price of a hand, and so on down to 5^-. for a little finger and ^d. for a little-finger nail. In the times we live in, justice has passed into a higher stage, where the State takes the duty of punishing any serious wilful hurt done to its citizens. Reading some murderous tale of a Corsican " vendetta,' we hardly stop to think of it as a relic of ancient law lingering in a wild mountain island. Yet our criminal law grew out of such private vengeance, as is still plain to those who attend to traces of the past, when they hear such phrases as " the vengeance of the law," or think, what is meant by the legal form by which a private person is bound over to prosecute, as though he must still be suing, as he would have done in long-past ages, for his own revenge or compensation. It is now really the State that is seeking to punish the criminal for the ends of public 4i8 ANTHROPOLCGY. [ckap. justice. The avenger of blood, once the guardian of public safety, would now be himself punished as a criminal for taking the law into his own hands, while the moralists, now that the conditions of society are changed, lay it down that vengeance is sinful. Law, however, though it has so beneficially taken the place of private vengeance, has not fully extended its sway over the larger quarrels between State and State. The rela- tion of private vengeance to public war is well seen among rude tribes, such as inhabit the forests of Brazil. When a murder is done within the tribe, then of course vengeance lies between the two families concerned ; but if the murderer is of another clan or tribe, then it becomes a public wrong. The injured community hold council, and mostly decide for war if they dare; then a war- party sets forth, in which the near kinsmen of the murdered man, their bodies painted with black daubs to show their deadly office, rush foremost into the fight. Among neighbouring tribes the ordinary way in which war begins is by some quarrel or trespass, then a man is killed on one side or the other, and the vengeance for his death spreads into blood-feud and tribal war ever ready to break out from generation to generation. This barbaric state of things lasted far on into the history of Europe. It was old German law that any freeman who had been injured in body, honour, or estate might, with the help of his own people, avenge himself if he would not take the legal commutation ; that is to say, he had the right of private war. It was a turning-point in English history when King Edmund made a law to restraiu this " unrighteous fighting," but it was not stopped at once, especially in Northumberland, and we know how it went on into modern times between clan and clan in the wild Scotch Highlands. Long after the mere freeman ceased to go to war with his neighbours, XVI.] SOCIETY. 419 there were nobles who stood to their old riglit. As late as the time of Edward IV. Lord Berkeley and his followers fought a battle with Lord Lisle at Nibley Green in Glouces- tershire. Lord Lisle was slain, and in the end Lord Berkeley compounded by a money payment to the widow. Freeman, who in his Comparatrve Politics mentions this curious in- cident of fifteenth-century history, thinks it the last English example either of private war or the payment of the we'r- gild. The law of England which forbids the levying of private war represents one of tlie greatest steps in national progress. The State now replaces, by the justice of legal tribunals, the barbaric expedients of private vengeance and private war. But State and State still fight out their quarrels in public war, which then becomes on a larger scale much what deadly feud used to be between clan and clan. The civil law of property may, like the criminal law, be traced from the ideas of old times. A fair notion may be had of what early rules of property were like, by noticing what they are in the uncivilised world still. Among the lower races, the distinction which our lawyers make between real and personal property appears in a very intelligible way. Of the land all have the use, but no man can be its absolute owner. The simplest land-law, which is also a game-law, is found among tribes who live chiefly by hunting and fish- ing. Thus in Brazil each tribe had its boundaries marked by rocks, trees, streams, or even artificial landmarks, and trespass in ])ursuit of game was held so serious that the ofiiender might be slain on the spot. At this stage of society in any part of the world, every man has the right to hunt within the bounds of his own tribe, and the game only becomes private property when struck. Thus there is a distinct legal idea of common property in land belonging to the clan or tribe. There is also a clear idea of family 420 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. property : the hut belongs to the family or group of fami- lies who built it ; and when they fenced in and tilled the plot of ground hard by, this also ceased to be common land, and became the property of the families, at least while they occupied it. To each family belonged also the hut-furniture, such as hammocks, mealing-stones, and earthen pots. At the same time personal ownership appears, though still under the power of the family, through the father or head. Personal or individual property was chiefly what each wore or carried — the man's weapons, the orna- ments and scanty clothing of both sexes, things which they had some power to do as they liked with during life, and at death very commonly took away with them to the world beyond the grave (see p. 346). Here then we find barbarians already acquainted with the ideas of conimon land, family freehold, family and personal property in movables, which run through the systems of old-world law. Not that they are worked out in the same way everywhere. Thus in the village communities which had so great a part in settling Asia and Europe, and whose traces still remain in modern England, not only the hunting-grounds and meadows were held in common, but the families did not even own the ploughed fields, which were tilled by common labour or re-allotted from time to time among the households, so that the family freehold did not reach beyond its house and garden-plot. At various times in history, the rise of military nations revolutionised the earlier ways of land-holding. In invaded countries, lands of the conquered were distributed by the king or leader to be held by his captains or soldiers doing military service in return ; the greatest and best-known example is the feudal system of Europe in the Middle Ages. It is instructive to notice how in England, before the Norman Conquest, the folk-land, the common property of the state, XVI.] SOCIETY. 421 was already passing into the haruls of the king to grant at his pleasure. Or in a niihtary state the sovereign may be- come the universal landlord, allowing his subjects to hold lands on payment of an annual tribute or tax — a system well known in ancient Egypt and modern India. In Roman history we find the state, or families owning large lands, letting portions of them as farms to tenants who paid part of the produce in return. This shows the beginning of rent, a thing unknown to primitive law. While these changes were coming on as to the land, movable property was becoming more and more important. War-captives kept as slaves to till the soil became part of the wealth of the family, and the pastoral life brought in cattle, not only for food, but to plough the fields. The manufacture of valuable goods, the growth of commerce, the accumulation of treasure, and the use of money, added other possessions. If now we look at our modern ways of dealingwith property, it is seen what great changes we have made by taking it out of the hands of the family and allowing an individual owner to hold and dispose of it — an arrangement suited to our age of shifting trading enterprise. Even land is bought and sold by indi- viduals, though the law, by making a field and cottage transferable by a different process and with greater formality and cost than a diamond necklace or a hundred chests of tea, keeps up traces of the old system under which it could only have changed hands, if at all, with difficulty and by the consent of many parties. Through all changes it is instructive to notice how far the old family system of pro- perty holds its place. This is well seen by considering what becomes of a man's property when he dies. The two most usual arrangements made in early times are tlie simplest, namely, either that the family sliall go on living on the undivided property, or that it shall be divided among the 422 ANTHROPCLOGY. [jiiap. children, or sons. When the eldest son is patriarchal head of the family, to keep up this dignity he may have an extra or double portion for his "birth-right" ; this is a well- known ancient rule, common to the Aryan and Semitic nations, for it is both in the Hindu laws of Manu and in Deuteronomy. In France at this day the ancient principle of division is legally enforced, and the family take their shares as a matter of right. In England the power of wills has become so great, that in theory a man may leave his property to whom he pleases ; but practically this is kept within bounds by moral feeling and public opinion, which condemn it as an unnatural act for a man to strip his own children to endow a stranger or a hospital. If the Englishman dies without leaving a will, the law re- cognises the rights of his family by fairly dividing among them his personal property. It is otherwise with the land or real estate, which in most cases will pass to the eldest son. Why the law should thus allow the claims of the rest of the family to the money, but not to the land, is an in- teresting point of history. The reader of Maine's Ancient Law will find how, in Europe about a thousand years ago, lands held as fiefs came to pass to the eldest son, not by any means for the purpose of enriching him by disinheriting the others, but that the united kinsfolk might live upon the land and defend it under him as chief of the little clan. If in modern times the head of the family has become possessed of the family estate for his own use, this is because old laws working under new circumstances are apt to produce results which those who framed them never foresaw. Primogeniture did not prevail over the whole of England, but older rules of family inheritance have in some parts lasted on from times before feudal- ism. The best known of these is where at the father's XVI.] SOCIETY. 423 deatli the land is divided among the sons, as Domesday Book shows was usual in Edward the Confessor's time. This is now known as gavelkind, or the custom of Kent, but it appears elsewhere ; for instance, Kentish Town in the north of Lon Ion is supposed to have its name from lands so held there. There even exists in England a rule of inheritance which sejms to belong to a yet earlier state of society. This is the custom of borough-english, by which, for instance at Hackney or Edmonton, if a man die intes- tate the land passes to his youngest son. This right of the youngest, strange as it seems to us, is still found here and there in Europe and Asia. It is a reasonable law of in- heritance of the settlers in a new country, where there is yet plenty of land to be had for the taking, and the sons as they grow up and marry go out and found new homesteads of their own. But the youngest stays at home and takes care of the old father and mother ; he is, as the Mongols say, the "fire-keeper," and at their death he naturally succeeds to the family home. This is one of the hundreds of cases of customs which seem arbitrary and unreasonable, because they have lost their sense by lasting on from the state of life to which they properly belonged. In the old days before there were lawyers and law books, solemn acts and rights were made plain to all men by picturesque ceremonies suited to lay hold of unlettered minds. Many of these old ceremonies are still kept up and show their meaning as plainly as ever. For example, when two parties wish to make firm peace or friendship, they will go through the ceremony of mixing their blood, so as to make themselves blood-relations. Travellers often now ally themselves in such blood-brotherhood with bar- barous tribes ; an account of East Africans performing the rite describes the two sitting together on a hide so as to 424 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap; become "of one skin," and then they made little cuts in one another's breasts, tasted the mixed blood, and rubbed it into one another's wounds. Thus we find still going on in the world a compact which Herodotus describes among the ancient Lydians and Scythians, and which is also men- tioned in the Sagas of the old Northmen and the ancient Irish legends. It would be impossible to put more clearly the great principle of old-world morals, that a man owes friendship not to mankind at large but only to his own kin, so tliat to entitle a stranger to kindness and good faith he must become a kinsman by blood. With much the same thought even rude tribes hold that eating and drinking together is a covenant of friendship, for the guest becomes in some sort one of the household, and has to be treated as morally one of the family. This helps to explain the vast importance people everywhere give to the act of dining together. Among the millions of India at this day the very constitution of society turns on the caste rules whom a man may or may not eat with. Among the marriage ceremonies of the world, one well known in the far East is that the couple by eating together out of one dish become man and wife. How ceremony expresses meaning in still more striking metaphor is seen in the Hindu marriage, where the skirts of the bridegroom and bride's garments are tied together as a sign of union, and the bride steps on a stone to show she will be as firm as stone. A custom is described among English vagrants of the last century, where a man and woman would join hands across the body of a dead beast, thus promising that they would be joined till death should part them. Among the dramatic ceremonies known to European law is the scene in an ancient Roman law-court, where a man put in his claim to a slave by stepping forward and touching him with a rod which represented a spear ; or XVI.) SOCIETY. 425 when in old Germany a piece of land was transferred by the owner handing over a sod of the turf with a green twig stuck up in it; or when in feudal times the vassal placed his hands between the lord's, and so " putting himself in his hands" became his man. There were ceremonies in old-world law which were more than such gesture-language. Barbaric law early began to call on magical and divine powers to help in the difficult tasks of discovering the guilty, getting the truth out of wit- nesses, and making a promise binding. This led to the wide-spread system of ordeals and oaths. Some ordeals have really served to discover truth by their effect on the conscience of the evil-doer. It is thus with the mouthful of rice taken by all of a suspected household in India, which the thiefs nervous fear often prevents him from swallowing. This used to be done in England with the corsnaed or trial- slice of consecrated bread or cheese ; even now peasants have not forgotten the old formula, " May this bit choke me if I lie ! " Another of the (gw ordeals that linger in popular memory may be seen when, in some out-of-the-way farm- house, . all suspected of a theft are made to hold a bible Jianging to a key, which is to turn in the hands of the thief; this keeps up a form of divination practised in the classic world with a sieve hanging by the points of an open pair of shears. Ordeals have had their day, and are now discarded from the laws of the most civilised nations. Nowadays one has to go to such countries as Arabia to find the ordeal by hot iron recognised by law, as it was in England in the days when the legend was told of Queen Emma walking over the red-hot ploughshares ; the conjurors now go through this ancient performance as a circus-show. Yet even of late years, English rustics have been known to duck some wretched old woman supposed to be a witch, little 426 ANTHROPOLOGY. [c.iap. knowing that they were keepuig up the ancient writer ordeal, where the sacred element rejects the wrong and accepts the right, so that the guilty floats and the innocent sinks — a judicial rite which forms part of the old Hindu law- book of Manu, and which in English law, till the beginning of the 13th century, was a legal means of trying those accused of murder or robbery. Ordeals by which the taker brings down present harm on himself if he is guilty, are of much the same nature as oaths. It is usual, however, for oaths to call down future punishment, in this life or after death, as when, in Russian law-courts in Siberia, the curious spec- tacle may be seen of bringing in a bear's head that an Ostyak may bite at it, thereby calling on a bear to bite him if he is forsworn. The legal oaths in our own country bear in their gestures the traces of high antiquity. In Scotland the witness holds up his hand toward heaven, the gesture by which Greek and Jew took the supreme Deity to witness, and called down divine vengeance on the perjurer. In England the kissing of the book comes from the practice of touching a halidome, or sacred object, as an ancient Roman touched the altar, or Harold the casket of relics. The form " So help me God," is inherited from ancient Teutonic- Scandinavian law, under which the old Nortliman, touching the blood-daubed ring on the altar, swore " So help me Frey, and Niordh, and the almighty god " (that is, Thor). The first and last of these are the two old English gods whose names we keep up in Friday and Thursday. To come now to the last subject of this volume, the history of government. Complicated as are the political arrangements of civilised nations, their study is made easier by their simple forms being already found in savage and barbaric life. The foundation of society, as has been already seen, is the self-government of each family. Its XVI.] SOCIETY. 427 authority is apt to bj vested in the head of the household ; thus among low barbaric tribes in the Brazilian forests, the father may do as he pleases with his own wives and children, even selling them for slaves, and the neighbours have no right or wish to interfere. Even what civilised nations now take as a matter of course, that every human being coming into the world has a right to live, is scarcely recognised by the lower races. In such a life of hardship as the Australians and many savages lead, new-born children are often put out of the way from sheer need, because the parents have already as many mouths as they can feed. That among such tribes this comes of hardness of life, rather than hardness of heart, is often seen when the parents will go through fire and water to save the very child they were doubting about, a fjw weeks before, whether it should live or die. Even where the struggle for existence is not so severe, the wretched custom of infan- ticide remains still common in the world. Nothing more clearly shows that European nations came up from a barbaric stage than the law which the ancient Romans had in com- mon with our Teutonic ancestors, that it was for the father of the family to say whether the new-born child should be brought up or exposed. Once become a member of the household, the child has a firmer assurance of life ; and when the young barbarian grows up to be a warrior, and becomes himself the head of a new household, he is usually a free man. But the oldest Roman law shows the head of the family ruling with a strictness hardly imaginable to our modern minds, for the father might chastise or put to death his grown-up sons, give them in marriage or divorce them, and even sell them. With the advance of civilization, in Rome as elsewhere, the sons gradually gained their rights of person and property; and in comparing old-world 428 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. life with our own, it is plainly seen how Christianity, look- ing not to family rights but to individual souls, tended toward jDersonal freedom. With all the growth of individual freedom in modern life, the best features of family despot- ism remain in force ; it is under parental authority that children are trained for their future duties, and the law is careful how it gives the child personal rights against the parent, lest it should weaken the very cement which binds society together. As, however, the family ceased to be so perfect a little kingdom within itself, the individual became responsible for his own doings. We have seen how, in rude society, when a crime is committed, the family of the aggrieved take vengeance on the culprit's family. Modern ideas of justice may teach us that this is wrong, that it is punishing the innocent for the guilty. But in the lower barbaric life it is practically the best way to keep order, and to those who live under it it seems right and natural, as where, among the Australians, when one of a family has done a murder the others take it as a matter of course that they are guilty too. Far from this idea being confined to savages, the student becomes familiar with it in the law of ancient nations, such as Greece and Rome. Here it will be enough to quote the remarkable passage from the Hebrew law which at once records what the old principle was, and reforms it by bringing in the ideas of higher juris- prudence : — " The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers : every man shall be put to death for his own sin." (Deut. xxiv. 1 6.) Wherever the traveller in wild regions meets a few families roaming together over the desert, or comes upon a cluster of huts by a stream in the tropical forest, he may find, if he looks closely enough, some rudiments of government; for XVI.] SOCIETY. 429 there is business which concerns the whole Uttle community, such as a camping-ground to be chosen, or a fishery quarrel to be settled with the next tribe down the river. Even among the Greenlanders, as little governed a people as almost any in the world, it was noticed that when several families lived together all the winter, one weather-wise old fisherman would have the north end of the snow-house for his place and be appointed to look after the inmates, taking care about their keeping the snow walls in repair, and going out and coming in together so as not to waste heat ; also when they went out in hunting parties an experienced pathfinder would be chosen as leader. It is common to find among rude tribes such a headman or chief, chosen as the most important or shrewdest ; but he has little or no actual authority over the families, and gets his way by persuasion and public opinion. Naturally such a headman's family is of consequence already, or, if not, he makes them so, and thus there is a tendency for his office to become hereditary. In tribes formed under the rule of female kinship, where the chief 's own son may be out of the succession, the new chosen chief will probably be a younger brother or a nephew on the mother's side. Under the rule of succession on the father's side, which is so much more familiar to us, the very growth of the family brings on a patriarchal government. Suppose a single household to move out into the wilds and found a new settlement, it begins under the rule of the father, who, as new huts are built round the first home, remains head of the growing clan ; but as old age comes on, his eldest son more and more acts in his name, and at his death will be recognised as succeeding him in the headship of the community. Here then is seen the rise of the hereditary chief or patriarch of the tribe, first in rank as representing the ancestor, and with 29 430 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. more or less of real autliority. But here also there is a practical power of setting the successor aside if he is too timid or wilful or dull, when perhaps his uncle or brother will be put in his place, though the line of succession is not set aside by this. The patriarchal system extends far on in civilization. It is not confined to one particular race or nation, but may at this day be studied alike among the brown hill-men of India and the negroes of West Africa- To us it is especially well known from the Old Testament, which shows it in the form it takes in a pastoral nation, and which still may be seen with little change among the Arabs of the desert, whose clans and tribes are governed by their patriarchs, the sheykhs or old men. Not less does it lie at the foundation of the politics of the Aryan race, where its remains may still be traced in the village communities of India and Russia, the village elder presiding in the council of " white-heads " being the modern representative of the earlier patriarch with the chiefs of younger branches of the clan around him. Under such mild rule, people of few wants may prosper in time of peace, in the kindly commu- nism which is possible where there are no rich and no poor» The weak point of such a society is that it can hardly advance, for civilization is at a standstill where it is regu- lated by ancestral custom administered by great-grandfathers. Everywhere in the world, in war some stronger and more intelligent rule than this is needed and found. The changes which have shaped the descendants of wild hordes into civilized nations have been in great measure the work of the war-chief. When among such uncultured tribes war breaks out, the peace-chief is pushed aside and a leader chosen, or in war- like tribes the war-chief may be the acting head at all times. Of course he is a tried warrior, and his endurance may even XVI.] SCCIETY. 431 be put to a special examination, as wlien the Caribs would test a candidate for war-chief by mercilessly Hogging and scratching him, smoking him in a hammock over a fire of green leaves, or burying him up to the middle in a nest of stinging-ants. We even find in America the principle of competitive examination for king, when Chilian tribes would choose as their chief the man who could lift the biggest tree on his shoulder and carry it longest. In these rude countries the change is wonderful when war turns the loose crowd into an army under a leader, with powers of life and death to enforce discipline. When Martius the naturalist was travelling through a Brazilian forest with a Miranha chief, they came to a fig-tree where the skeleton of a man was bound to the trunk with cords of creepers, and the chief grimly explained that this was one of his men who had disobeyed orders by not summoning a' neighbouring tribe to help against the invading Umauas, and he had him tied up there and shot to death with arrows. In barbarous countries the tribe-chief and the war-chief may be found side by side ; but when the power of the bow and spear once asserts itself, it is apt to grow further. Throughout history, war gives the bold and able leader a supremacy which may nomi- nally end with the campaign, but which tends to pass into dictatorship for life. Military government in civil affairs is, in fact, despotism ; and if the military leader can thus become the tyrant of his own land, still more can he rule with a rod of iron a conquered country. The negro kingdom of Dahome, the result of two centuries of barbaric military rule, is an astounding specimen of what a people will submit to from a despot whom they regard as a kind of deity; they approach him grovelling on all-fours, and throwing dust over their heads ; the whole nation are his slaves, whose lives he takes at will ; the women are all 432 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. his, to give or sell ; the land is all his, and none owns any- thing but at his pleasure. The kings of Asiatic nations have been theoretically as absolute as this, but practically in advancing civilization the king makes or sanctions laws which bind himself and his successors, making society more fixed and life more tolerable. Also, as soon as religion becomes a power in the state, it becomes joined or mixed with civil and military government. Thus among negroes the high- priest and war-chief may be the two heads of the govern- ment, while the Incas of Peru, as descendants and re- presentatives of the divine sun, ruled their nation with paternal despotism which settled for the people what they should do and eat and wear, and whom they should marry. In such a kingdom royalty must be hereditary in the divine ruling family. Indeed, monarchy, however gained, tends to become hereditary, and especially the military usurper will found a dynasty on the model of a patri- archal chief. Thus sovereignty may be elective, hereditary, military, ecclesiastical, and, difficult as is the history of kingdoms, some combination of these causes can always be traced in them. The effects of war in consolidating a loosely formed society are described by travellers who have seen a barbaric tribe prepare to invade an enemy or defend their own borders. Provisions and property are brought into the common stock ; the warriors submit their unruly wills to a leader, and private quarrels are sunk in a larger patriotism. Distant clans of kinsfolk come together against the common enemy, and neighbouring tribes with no such natural union make an alliance, their chiefs serving under the orders of a leader chosen by them all. Here are seen in their simplest forms two of the greatest facts in history, — the organised army, where the several forces are led by their own captains under XVI.] SOCIETY. 433 a general, and the confederation of tribes, such as in higher civihsation brings on political federations of states like those in Greece and Switzerland. Out of such alliances of tribes, when they last beyond the campaign, there arise nations, where often, as in old Mexico, the head of the strongest tribe will become king. Tribes which thus unite are apt to be of common race, speaking kindred dialects, for this is everywhere a natural bond of union ; and when they have allied themselves into one people, and come to bear a common name, such as Dorians or Hellenes, they willingly take up the old patriarchal idea, and imagine themselves more closely of one fiation or "birth " than they really are, even setting up, as we have seen (p. 389), a fictitious as a national ancestor. Events take a different course, but with a somewhat like effect, when some Kafir leader conquers other tribes around, and, setting himself above them all, forces the conquered chiefs to bring him tribute and warriors to fight his battles. This is empire on a small scale and with rude surroundings, but on the same principles as that of a Caesar or a Napoleon. Thus one understands why in the early history of nations it is so inextricably difficult to make out how far any people have grown up from a single unmixed tribe, or have been built up by alliance and conquest. What shows how this piecing together of nations must have gone on, is the number and variety of their gods. While a tribe grows of itself, the names and worship of the same tribe-gods will be a bond of union in all the clans, and even when they move far off they will sometimes go on pilgrimage to the shrines of their old home. But when peoples amalgamate, their different gods are kept up, as when the Peruvians gave places to the gods of conquered tribes under their own great deities. Every district in ancient Egypt shows by its varied combination of gods how many 434 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. little states and local religions went to make up the great despotism and hierarchy. It was plainly through this growth of nations, which had been going on we know not how long before history began, that the higher civilization of mankind arose. Scattered families of barbarians in a land where there is still elbow room may thrive without strong govern- ment ; but when men live in populous nations and crowded cities, there has to be public order. That this political order came out of military order cannot be doubted. War not only put into the hands of the sovereign the power over a whole nation, but his army served as his model on which to organize his nation. It is one of the plainest lessons of history that through military discipline mankind were taught to submit to authority and act in masses under com- mand. Egypt and Babylon, with military system pervading not only the standing army, but the orders of priests and civilians, developed industry and wealth highest in the ancient world, and were the very founders of literature and science. They built up for future ages the framework of government, which we freer moderns of our own will submit ourselves to for our own benefit. A constitutional govern- ment, whether called republic or kingdom, is an arrange- ment by which the nation governs itself by means of the machinery of a military despotism. As society in tribes and nations became a more complex system, it early began to divide into classes or ranks. If we look for an example of the famous first principle of the United States, "that all men are created equal," we shall in fact scarcely find such ecjuality except among savage hunters and foresters, and by no means always then. The greatest of all divisions, that between freeman and slave, appears as soon as the barbaric warrior spares the life of his enemy when he has him down, and XVI.] SOCIETY. 435 brings him home to drudge for him and till the soil. How low in civilization this begins appears by a slave caste for- bidden to bear arms forming part of several of the lower American tribes. How thoroughly slavery was recognized as belonging to old-world society may be seen by the way it formed part of tne Hebrew patriarchal system, where the man-servant and maid-servant are reckoned as a man's wealth just before his ox and his ass. It was no less so under Roman law, as is evident from the very word famt'/y, which at first meant not the children but the slaves (famu/us). We live in days when the last remains of slavery are disappear- ing from the Jiigher nations ; but though the civilized world has outgrown the ancient institution, the benefits which early society gained from it still remain. It was through slave labour that agriculture and industry increased, that wealth accumulated, and leisure was given to priests, scribes, poets, philosophers, to raise the level of men's minds. Out of slavery probably arose the later custom of hired service, the very name of which, as derived from semis, a slave, tells the story of a great social change. The master at first let out his slaves to work for his profit, and then free men found it to their advantage to work for their own profit, so that there grew up the great wage-earning class whose numbers and influence make so marked a difference between ancient and modern society. In all communities, except the smallest and simplest, the freemen divide themselves into ranks. The old Northmen divided men into three classes, '• earls, churls, and thralls," which roughly match what we should now call nobles, freemen, and slaves. Nobles again fall into different orders, especially those who can claim royal blood forming a princely order, and looking down on the chief- tains and officers of the army, state, and church who fill the lower ranks of nobility. 436 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. As nations become more populous, rich, and intelligent, the machinery of government has to be improved. The old rough-and-ready methods no longer answer, and the division of labour has to be applied to politics. Thus, one of the chief's early duties was to be judge. A Kafir chief- tain will make it his business to hear suits between his people ; each side brings him a gift of oxen. At higher levels of civilization the Eastern monarch sits in the gate of justice ; and it was so among the ancient Germans, where the king sat crowned and gave judgment in his own court. It is still the king's court, but the actual administration has long passed into the hands of professional judges. So with other departments of government. By the time civili- zation had come to the level of ancient Egypt and Babylon public affairs were administered by officials in grades like an army, who collected the taxes, attended to public works, punished offences, and did justice between man and man. It has just been noticed how far a modern nation is worked by an official system similar to that of the ancients, and how we, really among the freest of peoples, preserve the forms of an absolute monarchy, where sovereign power is administered through servants of the Crown down to the exciseman and constable. In the politics of savages and barbarians, the outlines of the civilized system of government already come into view. We have seen how among such rude tribes the chief or king appears, who holds his place in some form through higher nations. Even the consul or president of a republic is a kind of temporary elective king. Of not less antiquity is the senate. The old men squatting round the council fire of an Indian tribe on the prairies have in their way a greater influence than a civilized senate, for where there are no written records and books the old men are the very sources and treasuries of XVI ] SOCIETY. 437 wisdom. In llic nations of the world, seats at such councils are given to wise old men, priests and officers of high rank, and heads of great families, so that the two terms senate and house of lords both have their proper meaning, and the two claims of wisdom and rank are more or less com- bined. With the very beginning of pohtical life appears also the popular assembly. In small tribes the whole com- munity, or at least the freemen, come together. It may be only a forest tribe in Brazil called together by the chief to decide some question of an expedition to net wildfowl or attack a neighbouring tribe, yet solemn form will be observed. There is silence for the orators, and if the assembly approve they will at last cry " good ! " or " be it so ! " More civilized forms of the assembly of the people may be studied in Freeman's comparison of the Achaian agora described in the second book of the Iliad, with the *' great meeting " held outside London in Edward the Confessor's time. Even in our own day the great meeting of the people has not disappeared from Europe. The wonderful sight is still to be seen of the people of a Swiss canton gathered together in a wide meadow or market-place to vote Yes or No on the great questions which their supreme authority decides. With the growth of nations the folk- moot or assembly of the whole people, never a good deliberative body, soon becomes unmanageable by mere numbers ; but there is a way by which its authority may be kept in a less unwieldy form when the people, no longer able to go themselves, send chosen representatives to act for them. This seems a simple device enough, and indeed the first savage tribe that ever sent a discreet orator to negotiate peace or war on its behalf had seized the idea of a political representative. But in fact it is one of the most remarkable points in 438 ANTHROPOLOGY [chap. political history, how the principle of popular representation has been worked out in England from the time of Simon de Montfort's famous parliament in the 13th century. It is for historians to discuss how the knights and burgesses who came up to grant the king's supplies passed into the lower house of parliament as it is now ; what has to be noticed here is the change which, while the huge pro- miscuous assembly of the people shrank into an aristocratic upper house, gave us a new elective popular body, the house of commons. It is not too much to say that no event in English history has had so great an effect in shaping the course of modern civilization. On the whole, looking at what government is coming to among the most enlightened nations, it will be seen that it attains its ends, not so much by casting off the methods of our remote bar- baric ancestors, as by improving and regulating them. The administration of the state under the system of sovereign authority, the control of the senate, and the source of political power in the will of the nation itself, are made to work together and restrain one another so as fairly to keep the benefits and neutralize the excesses of all, while the con- stitution has within it the power of continual reform, so that the machine of government may be ever shaping itself into more perfect fitness to its work. Here this sketch of Anthropology may close. The ex- amination of man's age on the earth, his bodily structure and varieties of race and language, has led us on to enquire into his intellectual and social history. In his many-sided life there may be clearly traced a development, which, not- withstanding long periods of stoppage and frequent falling back, has on the whole adapted modern civilized man for a far higher and happier career than his ruder ancestors. In this development, the preceding chapters have shown a XVI.] SOCIETY. 439 difference between low and high nations, which it only remains to put before the reader as a practical moral to the tale of civilization. It is true that both among savage and civilized peoples progress in culture takes place, but not under the same conditions. The savage by no means goes through life with the intention of gathering more knowledge and framing better laws than his fathers. On the contrary, his tendency is to consider his ancestors as having handed down to him the perfection of wisdom, which it would be impiety to make the Ijast alteration in. Hence among the lower races there is obstinate resistance to the most desirable reforms, and progress can only force its way with a slowness and difficulty which we of this century can hardly imagine. Looking at the condition of the rude man, it may be seen that his aversion to change was not always unreasonable, and indeed may often have arisen from a true instinct. With his ignorance of any life but his own, he would be rash to break loose from the old tried machinery of society, to plunge into revolutionary change, which might destroy the present good without putting better in its place. Had the experience of ancient men been larger, they would have seen their way to faster steps in culture. But we civilized moderns have just that wider knowledge which the rude ancients wanted. Acquainted with events and their consequences far and wide over the world, we are able to direct our own course with more con- fidence toward improvement. In a word, mankind is pass- ing from the age of unconscious to that of conscious pro- gress. Readers who have come thus far need not be told in many words of what the facts must have already brought to their minds — that the study of man and civilization is not only a matter of scientific interest, but at once passes into the practical business of lif_\ We have in it 440 ANTHROPOLOGY. [chap. xvi. the means of understanding our own lives and our place in the world, vaguely and imperfectly it is true, but at any rate more clearly than any former generation. The knowledge of man's course of life, from the remote past to the present, will not only help us to forecast the future, but may guide us in our duty of leaving the world better than we found it. SELECTED BOOKS, &c. Physical and Descriptive Anthropology : — Waitz, Anthropobgie der Naturvolker. Topinard, AnthicpoLigy. Darwin, Descent of Man. Huxley, Man's Place in Nature ; Geographical Distribution of Mankind ^\i\ /ouj-nal of Ethnologicul Socie'y,Vo\. II. 1870). Vogt, Lectures on Man. Prichard, Natural History of Man. Wood, Natural Hihtory: Man, Peschel, Races of Man. Qualrefages, Human Species. 1 rjf. Flower's Hunterian Lectures on "The Comparative Anatomy of Man." Nature, July 1879 (Vol. XX., Nos. 505, 506, 507), and May and June 1880, (Vol. XXH., Nos. 551. 552, 553). , , . , ^. Broca, Instructions Craniologiques, Anthropological Notes ana Queries for Travellers, &c. (British A- sociation). ■ Journal of the Anthropological Institute (London). Revue d' Anthropologic (Paris). Zeitschrift fiir Ethnologic (Berlin). Accounts of races by travellers and missionaries, such as Catlin, North American Indians ; Elbs, Polynesian Researches ; Wallace, Travels on the Amazon, and Malay Archipelago ; Burton, Lake Regions of Central Africa; J. L. Wils.in, Western Africa ; Grey, Travels in Au.-tralia; etc., etc. Ge >L0OY AND ARCH.T.OLOGY OF MaN : — Lubbock, Prehistor.c Times. Lyell, Antiquity of Man. Dawkins, Cave-hunting ; Early Man in Britain. Evans, Ancient Stone Implements of Great Bntain. Fergu-son, Rude Stone Monuments. Keller and Lee, Lake Dwellings of Switzerland. Nilsson, Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia. Wilson, Prehistoric Man. 442 SELECTED BOCKS, ETC. Philology : — Max Miiller, Lectures on the Science of Language. Sayce, Comparative Philology ; Introduciiju to the Science of Language. Whitney, Language and the Study of Lan?uage. Hovelacque and Vinson, The Science of Language. Pictet, Origines Indo-Europeenne-. Steinthal, Charakteristik der hauptiachlichsten Typea dj; Sprachbaues, Civilisation : — Maine, Ancient Law. Lubbock, Origin of Civihsation. Bagehot, Physics and Polirics. Freeman, Comparative Politics ; Historical Essays. Draper, Intellectual Development of Europe. McLennan, Studies in Ancient History. Morgan, Ancient Society. Spencer, Principles of Sociology. Klemm, AUgemeine Culturgesctiichte ; Culturwissenchift. Tylor, Early History of Mankind ; Primitive Culture. INDEX. Abacus, 314 Abstract ideas, 52, no n, words, 135 Acclimatisati n. 74 Administraii.n, 4 4 AV.p, 399 Atnxes, 1^2 Africans, 2, 57, 65. 87 language^, 164 Aged. 409 Agglutinating languages, 161 Agriculture, 214 Ainos, 73 Alb.nos, 68 Alchemv, 328 Alcoholic liquors. 2GS Algebra, 322 All.teration. 289 Alphabet, 175 Alar, 367 Amentum, 194 Americans, 6j, 102, 168 anguages, 165 Analogy, 338 Analytic languages, 139 Anatjmy, 330 Ancestor-worship, 3r2 ,r8 nf,-. Animals, cries of, ,22 ^^ domest.caied, 219 quaternary, 30 succession of, 37 Anim.sm, 371 Antiquiiv ( f Afan t «- Apes\nd\M'ai'^3"8; 3,^^io^^'^°'"3-^^ Arabs, 109 language, n, 159 Arch, 235 Arch.ttclure. 21, 232 Arist cracy, 225. 4^5 Ar thmetic, 17, 314 Am )ur, 222 Army, 226. 434 Arrow, 26, 195. 212 P-is ned, 221 Artillery, 227 Aryans, 10, 109, 156. 381 languages, 10, 1^6 Assyrians, 22, 160. 3^3, 3S4 language, 160 Astr, logy, 339 Ajtr nomy. 21. 332 Australians. 57, 91 Auxiliary words 1 37 Avesta, 381 B Babylonians, 22. 163, 172 .'-in^uage, 163 ■Baking, 266 Ball. 307 Rantu languages, 149. ,64 Barbaric .tage, 24. 401 tsark-clothing. 244 Barometer, 325 Barter, 281 Basuti. 165 Beast-fables, 3^3 Beer, 26S Birbtrs. 95 langu.age, 160 BibJical history, 385 Bill-ho'jk, 190 Bills of exchange. 284 Black races, 2, 5, 80, 87 Blood-brotherhood, 423 Blood-vengeance. 414 Bl .w-tube. 196 Blue Beard, 398 Bjat, 252 BoJy-nieasures, 17, :,:6 Boil.ng, 26O Bjomerang, 193 B irer, 192 B-^tany, 329 Bjw, 16, 1C3. 212 B.-achykep!ial.c, 61 444 INDEX. Brain, 45, 60 Brand-tillage, 218 Bread, 266 Brick, 234 Broiling, 265 Brunze, 21, 278 Bronze Age, 25, 279 Brown races, 2, 5, 91 Buddha, 399 Bur.al, 347 B.irning-lens and mirror, 263 Bushmen, 57, 89, 165 C Cafusos, 82 Candle, 27.; Cannibalism, 224, 410 Canoe, 252 Cardinal points, 21, 334 Car.bs, 78 Caste, 69 Cattle, 219 Cause, spirit, 356 Cave-men, 30, 261 Caves, 229 Celt, 26, 187 Cereals, 215 Ceremonies, 365, 403, 423 Chaldeans, 22, 3S4 Che.nistry, 328 Chess, 308 Ch.efs, 428 Ch.lcirea's language, 128 Chimney, 264 Chinese, 2, 57, 63, 162, 170 language, 162 Civilisation, 13, 18, 24, 75, 180, 406 Civilised stage, 24, 401 Clicks, 165 Clothing, 15, 236 Club, 184 Coffee, 270 C )in, 283 Coljiir, 66, 81, 85 Comedy, 2q9 Commerce, 285 Common land, 419 Compass, 28, 341 Concord, 147 Consciousness, 53 C nstitution of races, 73 C nstitutionalism, 438 Cookery, 264 Copper, 277 C jrn, 215 Counting, 18, 310 Creator, 358 Cromlech, 348 Cross-b >vf, 16, 196 Crossed races, 6, 80 Cultivation, 215 Ciuneiform writing, 172, 31 Cujtom, 4C9 Dagger, 190 Danc»ng. 224, 296 Dark-whites, 2, 56, 68, 107 Dead, worship of, 352 Deaf-and-dumb signs, 115 Death, 343 Decimal counting, 311 Decline of culture. 19 Defjrmation of skull, &c., 240 Degeneration, 19. 86 Demoniacal possession, 353 Demons, 352 Demon-worship, 353 Descent, female and male, 402 Despotism, 431 Digging-stick, 216 Diseases, 73, 353 Distilling, 269, 328 Dog, 209 D jl.chokephalic, 2, 61 Dolmen, 348 Domesticated animals, 219 Drama, 298 Dravidians, 94 languages, 164 Drawing, 31, 300 Dreams, 343 Drift, animals of. 30 implements of, 28, 1S7 Drift-period, 28 Drill, 202 Drum, 293 Dryads 357 Dualism, 363 Dutch, 9 Dwellings, 229 E Ear- and nose-ornaments, 242 Karth-god, 359 Echo, 357 Education, capacity for, 74 Egyptians, 3, 21. 69, 79, 95, 173, 383 language, 160 Electricity, 327 Elephants, fossil, 30. 388 Emotional sound, 120, 124 Empire, 433 English, 133 Eponymic myths, 389 Esquimaux, 105, 265 Ethiopians, 69 Etymology, 126, 134 Europeans, 60, 109 Evolution, 36, 331 Exogamy, 402 Exorcism. 354 Eyes, 2, 6j, 70 ^ INDEX. 445 Facial angle, 62 Fair-whites. 2, 56, 68, 107 Families of lan,;uage, 9, 155 Family, 402, 426 Fates, 395 Father, power of, 427 Features, 44, 63 Federation, 433 Female succession, 429 Feudalism, 420 Fiction, 379 Fields, 218. 420 Figures. 312 Fijiins, 90 F.nger- and toe-coi-.nting. i3, 311 Finger-nails 240 Fi.ins, 98 Fire, 260 Firearms, 17, 197. 227 Fire-drill, 16, 261 Fire-god, 361 First man, 358 Fish-ho^k, 213 Fishing, 212 Flakes, stone, 26, 185 Flint-and-steel, 261 Fo )d, 206, 264 Forests, succession of, 27 Fortification, 228 Ffssil bones. 388 Fowling. 208 Freemen, 225, 434 Fruits, 216 Future life, 344, 349 Grimm's law, 155 Guardian spiri.s, 356 Gypsies, 112 H Hair, 2, 44, 71, 82 Ha r-dressmg, 238 Hammer, 1S5 Hand and fo^t, 42 counting en, i3, 310 Harmony, 293 Harp, 204 Harpoon, 214 Hatchet, 188 Hawk.ng, 2-9 Heat, 327 Heaven-god, 359 Hebrew, 11, 159 Herodotus, 385 Hieroglyph.es, 173 Hindus, III, 157 Histjric period, 5, 22, 373 Hoe, 216 H.jratii and Curiatii, 397 Hospitality, 409 Hottentots, 89, 165 language, 165 House, 231 Houses of Lords and Commons, 437 Hung.irians, 98 language, 162 Hunting, 207, 220 Hut, 230 Game law, 419 Games, 305 Garments, 249 Gas, 273 Gender, 149 Genius, 356 Geography, 335 Geologi', 29, 32, 336 Geometry, 17, 318 Germans, no language, 9 Gesture-language, 114, 12. Ghosts, ^44, 349 Giants. 388 Glacial period, 30 Glass, 276 liods, 358 Gogmagog, 390 < -overnment, 15, 428, 437 Grain, 215 I irammar. 119, 146. 156 ("■rammatical words, 137 (iravitation, 325 Greeks, 158 30 Ideas, 52, 119, 135 Id ,1s, 365 Im.tative signs, 116 sounds, 124 words, 121 Implements, 183 Index, Kephalic, 61 India, hill-tribes, 2, 94 laterite, 31 races, in, 164 Individuals, 421, 428 infanticide. 427 Inflict. ng languages, 161 Inheritance. 421 Inipiratiun, 366 Instinct, 51 Intcrjectijns, 121, 124 Intonati-jn, 162, 291 Ir^n, 21. 277 Iron Age, 25, 279 ItaLans, 158 Javelin, 193 Jews. 4. 109, 159, 385 Justice, 43O 446 INDEX. K Keltic pejples, 28, 71, xio, 153 languages, 158 Kephalic index, 61 Killing, 412 eld and infirm, 410 K.ng, 430, 4j6 Ku.fe, 189 L Labret, 242 Lamp, 272 Lancet, 192 Land, common, 21Q, 419 Land-law, 218, 419 Language, 7, 53, 129, 152, 337 analytic and symhet.c, 139 and race, 166 children's, 128 connex.on of, 154 development cf, 130 famil.es of, 9, 155 natural, 122 or.g.n of, 130, 165 Lapps, gS Lathe, 203 Latin, 7, 156 Law, 405. 412, 423 Laz), 212 Leather, 245 Lens, 263 Libyans, 69 Life, future, 344, 349 Light, 326 Li n, cave, 30 Liquors, 26S Logic, 336 L .ng-bow, 16, 105 Lojm, 248 Lucifer-niatches, 263 M Mach'nes, 198 Magic. 338 Ma.ze, 215 Malayo-Folynesians, 102 Language, 163 Malays, 99 Mainmotn, 30 Man, 38, 45 antiquity of, i, 25, 33, 40. 113, 166 first, 358 primit.ve, 33. 40, 113 unity of, 6, 85 races <_f, I, 56, 75 85, 113 Manes, 352, 35S Manilaughttr, 412 Ma ris, 102, 374 Mariner's compass, 328, 341 Marriage, 402 Masonry, 21, 233 Mathematics, 17, 321 Mats, 246 Maui, 393 Measures, 17, 316 Mechanics, 323 Medicine, 15, 330 Mclanesians, 89 Melanochroi, 107 Melody, 293 IMemory, 49 Menhir, 348 Mensuration, 317 Mes .k phalic, 61 Melal Age, 25, 189 Metals, 20, 189, 277 Metaphor, 126, 290 Metre, 288 Mexicans, 105, 169 Micri.nes.ans, 102 Mill, 200, 204 M.nd, 47 M.rr^r, 2C3, 326 Missiles, 193 Mixed races, 80, 85 Monarchy, 431 Money, 282 Mongolians. 5, 63. 96 languages. 162 Monosyllab.c languages, 162 Monotheism, 364 Meon-god, 361 Mo^rs, III Morals, 368, 405 Mourning. 237 Mulattos, 80 Music, 291 Mutilati ins, 240 INIyth, 387 N Nation, 433 Natural language, 122 Nature-mytds, 391 Nature-sp.rits, 356, 391 Need-fire, 262 Needle, 249 Negritos, 89 Negro-European dialects, 153 Negros, 2, 57, 65, S7 Neolithic implemen.s, 26, 1S7 Nets, 212 Nightmare, 337 Nobles, 435 Nomades, 219 Norns, 395 Nose, 63 Nubians, 94 Numerals, 18, 310 Nymphs, 357 Oar, 256 Oath, 362, 425 Obli [Ue eyes, 2. 63 Oracle-priests, 366 INDEX. 447 Ordeal. 425 Origin of hmgur.ge, 13^, 165 of man, 85 Ornaments, 241 ( irthognathous, 62 Outrigger, 255 Paddle. 256 Pa.iit.njj. 301 body. ^37 Pa.a;olithiciiiipl;ments, 25, 1^6 Panihcism. 364 Pantoiiiime. 114. 2j8 Paper-money. 2S4 Papuas. 72, 90 Parts of speech, 138 Pasturage, 219 Paiagon.ans. 57 Paternal p jwer. 427 Patriarchal system, 429 Pendulum. 324 Persians, 63, 157, 381 Personal pr perty, 420 Personification, 395 Peruvians. 59, 105 Phoenicians, 175 language, 59 Physics, 323 i'icture-writing, i68 Pipe, 294 Pla.ting, 246 Plants, 214 Plough, 217 P etry, 287. 375 ■rois n. arrow-, 221 fish. 213 Polynesians, 102. 374 l:ingiiage, 163 Polythe.sm, 362 P. pular assembly, 437 Porcelain, 276 Possession, demoniacal, 15, 353 Potato, 215 Pottery. 274 wheel. 275 Prae-historic period, 5, 37^ Pr.iyer, 360. -^(4 Prinogenitiire, 422 Printing. 180 Private war, 419 Pr gnathous, 62 Pr me:heus. 396 Pronouns, 138 Pr perty. 419 Pr porti' ns of body, 58 P.-ose, 287 Public opinion, 408 Pi:IIev, 198 Punishment, 414 Pyramids, 21, 233, 334 Pyn^es, 263 Qu.idroons. 80 Quaternary purijd. 25 Qainary numeration, 311 R Races and languages, 153, 165 characters of, i. 56, 75, 80, 113 degeneration of, 86 mixture or crossing of, 80, 85 permanence of. 80 variation of, 80, 85 Raft, 255 Rain-goJ. 359 Rank, 434 Real words, 137 Reason. 50, 336 Red Ridmehood, 394 Renuplicaii-n, 128 Religion, 342, 368, 407, 432 Rent, 420 Representation, ixjjitical, 437 Retal.at.on, 417 Retribution, future. 368 Rhyme. 289 Kight of l.fe, 427 Kiver-god. 361 Ro nance languages, 7 Romulus and Re.nus, 380 Roots, 144 Rude stone monuments, 34S Rudimentary organs. 36 Sacrifice, 346, 360, 365 Sa I, 236 Samo' eds, 60 ijanskr.t, 10. 156 Savage stage, 24, 32, 4 i Saw. 192 Scandinavians, iii, 158 Screw. 192, 203 Sculpture. 300 Sea-god, 360 Semit.c nations, 4. 69, 80 languages, 11, 159 Senate, 436 Sentences, 139 Sew.ng, 249 Shield, 222 Ship, 257 Siamese, 97, 162 Sign-language, 114 Skin, 2, 66, 81 Skull, 2, 60 deformation, 240 Sky-god, 359 Slavery, 225, 421, 434 Sling, 194 Smell of races, 2, 70 Society, 401 448 Song, 224, 287, 375 Soul, 343, 350, 369 Sound, 326 South-East Asiau languages, ife Spade, 216 Spear, 186, 194, 213 Spear-throwers, 191 Species, descent of, 36, 331 Spelling, 17S Spinn.ng, 246 Spirit, 344, 349, 356, 391 Stature, 56, 76 Steam-power, 204, 259, 271 Steel, 278 Stone Age, 25, 28, 187, 279 implements, 26, 187 monuments, 348 Stove, 264 String, 246 Succession, 429. 432 Sun-god, 360, 368 Sun-myth, 394, 397 Supreme deity, 364 Survivals, i j Sword, 190 Symbolic souad. 126, 145 Syntax, irg, 139, 146 Synthetic languages, 141 Syrians, 69, 80 Tactic?, 226 Tanning. 245 Tasmanians, 91 Ta;ars, 98 language, 161 Tatooing, 2^7 Tea, 270- Temperament of races, 74 Temple, 318, 367 Tent, 231 Teutons, 158 Theatre, 298 Theft, 413 Thunderbolt, 26, 359 Thunder-god, 359 Tools, 183, 192 Torch, 272 Totem, 403 Trade. 285 Tradition, 373 Tragedy, 299 Trance, 343 1 ransmigration of soul, 350, 369 Trapping, 2H INDEX. Tree-spirits, 357 Tribe-land, 419 Trumpet, 293 Turanian languages, 161 Typical men, 76 Vampire, 356 Variation of races, 84 Veda, 156, 381 Veddas. 164 Vengeance, 414 Verse, 287 Vertebrates, 35, 47 Vessels, 274 Vigesimal counting, 311 Village community, 219, 420 Vishnu, 367, 397 Vis.ons. 343 W Wages, 435 War. 221. 418, 432 War-chief, 430 Wattr-wheel, 204 Weapons, 184, 221 Wealing. 247 Werewolf, 356 Wergild, 416 Wheel-carriage, 198 White race, 2, 5. 57, 69, 109, 11; Widow, 346, 404 Wife-capture, 225, 305, 403 Wife-purchase, 404 Wilhelm Tell, 397 Wind-gcd, 361 Windmill, 204 Wine, 268 Words, borrowed. 155 combination, 140 formation, 126, 140 Worship, 364 Wr.ting, 169 X Xanthochroic, 107 Yellow race, 2, 5, 69, 96 Zoology, 329 D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL SERIES. " Will be hailed with delight by scholars and scientific specialists, and it will be gladly received L-/ others who aspire after the useful knowledge it will impart."— A'f in i ork Home Journal. NOW READY. TJ/^ OMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CUL- ^''^ TURK. By Otis Tufton Mason, A. M., Curator of the Department of Ethnology in the United States National Mu- seum. With numerous Illustrations. i2mo. Cloth, $1.75. " A most interesting r««/«/ofthe revelations which science has made concerning the habits of human beinj;s m primitive times, and especially as to the place, the duties, and the customs oi v!On\Gn."~ Philadelphia higuirer. "A highly entertaining and instructive book. . . , Prof. Mason's bright, graceful style must do much to awaken a lively interest in a study that has heretofore received such scant attention." — Baltimore Aiiietican. " The special charm of Mr. M.nson's book is that his studies are ba.sed mainly upon ctually existing types, ra.her than upon mere tnKdit\oi^."—/AilaJel/>hia Times. y^IIE PYGMIES. By A. de Quatrefages, late -^ Professor of Anthropology at the Museum of Natural History, Paris. With numerous Illustrations. i2mo. Cloth, $1.75. " Probably no one was better equipped to illustrate the general subject than Quatre- fages. While constantly occupied upon the anatomical and osseous phases of his sub- ject, he was none the less well acquainted with what literature and history had to say concerning the pygmies. . . . This book ought to be in every divinity school in which man as well as God is studied, and from which missionaries go out to convert the human being of reality and not the man of rhetoric and text-books." — Boston Literary WorUi. " It is fortunate that American students of anthropology are able to enjoy as lumi- nous a translation of this notable monograph as that which Prof Starr now submits to the public." — Philaiielphia Press. " It is regardeil by scholars entitled to offer an opinion as one of the half-dozen most important works of an anthropologist whose ethnographic publications numbered nearly Dne hundred." — Chicago Evening Post. HE BEGINNINGS OF WRITING. By \V. J. IIOFFMA.N, M. D. With numerous Illustrations. l2mo. Cloth, $i-75- This interesting book gives a most attr.nctive account of the rude methods employed by primitive man for recording his deeds. The earliest writing consists of pictogr<»phs which were traced on stone, wood, bone, skins, and various paperlike substances. Dr. Hoffman shows how the s:-veral classes of symbols used in these records are to bt in- terpreted, and traces the growth of conventional signs up to syllabaries and alphal'.r?T,i— the two classes of signs employed by modern peoples. IX PREPARATION. THE SOUTH SEA ISLANDERS. By Dr. Schmelt^ THE ZUf^I. By Frank Hamilton Cushing. THE AZTECS. By Mrs. Zelia Nuttall. New York : D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue. T D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. THE CRIMINOLOGY SERIES. Edited by W. Douglas Morrison. (CRIMINAL SOCIOLOGY. By Professor E. Ferri. ^ i2mo. Cloth, $1.50. " A most valuable book. It is suondon. With Illustrations. "Thoroughly interesting, and it is doubtful if the fascinating story of the planet on which we live lias been previou.sly told so cle.irly and at the same time so compre- hensively." — Boston Advertiser. T HE STORY OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM. By G. F. Chambers, F. R. A. S. "Any intelligent reader can get clear ideas of the movements of the worlds about us. . . . Will impart a wise knowledge of astronomical wonders." — Chicago hiter-Occan. n^IIE STORY OF A PIECE OF COAL. By E. -* A. Martin. T HE STORY OF ELECTRICITY. By John MUNRO, C. E. New York : D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue. D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. W, AGES AND CAPITAL. An Examination of the Wages Fund Doctrine. By F. W. Taussig, Professor of Political Economy in Harvard University, author of " Tariff History of the United States " and " The Silver Situation in the United States." i2mo Cloth, $1.50. "An extremely judicious exr.mination of the wage fund theorj'." — The Outlook. " The work is one of great importance to all students of political econ- omy."— 5a« Francisco Argonaut. "There can be no question as to the importance of Dr. Taussig's tem- perate discussion of a question which has long engaged the attention of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. Our author offers the conclusions which a brilliant and independent mind has reached after patient and im- partial investigation of an exceedingly difficult question." — Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. " This important and searching contribution to econcmic theory will have a wide-reaching effect on the development of political economy in the future, and will be indispensable for all who teach or investigate general economic theor)*." — Boston Transcript. "Abounding in facts of value and fully instructive. The book is free of all demagogy, and eminently fair to every question discussed." — Chicago Inter-Ocean. "A searching and valuable contribution to eccnrmic literature, which can not be ignored by future writers on the subject, and which will be found as interesting as it is important." — Brooklyn Standard-Union. "A most valuable contribution to the discussion of the economic prob- lems of the day. . . A notable contribution to economic literature." — Boston Advertiser. " Prof. Taussig's valuable contribution should be welcomed by the public." — New York Herald. "The book will be found invaluable in economic study for its scholarly presentation of a complicated and exceedingly important question." — Chi- cago Record. "The .subject is an important one, and Prof. Taussig handles it with strong intelligence."— J//««t'(7/(?//j Journal. " Prof. Taussig's book is so radical in import that it is sure to attract a great deal of attention from those interested in current domestic discussion." — Boston Beacon. New York : D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue. / D. APPLETON & CO 'S PUBLICATIONS. Recent Volumes of the International Scientific Series. CE WORK, PRESENT AND PAST. By T. G. BONNEY, D. Sc, F. R. S., F, S. A., etc., Professor of Geology at University College, London. No. 74, International Scientific Series. i2nao. Cloth, $1.50. The student of ice and its work frequently finds tliat books upon the subject are written more with a view to advocating some paiticular inteiprelation of facts than of describing the facts themselves In his work Prof, l.onney has endeavored to give greater prominence to those facts of glacial geology on which all inferences must be founded. After setting forth the facts shown in various regions he has given the various interpretations which have been proposed, adding his comments and' criticisms. He also explains a method by which he believes we can appioximate to the temperature at various places during the Glacial epoch, and the different explanations of this gen- eral refrigeration are stated and briefly discussed. T HE SUN. By C. A. Young, Ph. D., LL. D., Pro- fessor of Astronomy in Princeton University. New and revised edition, with numerous Illustrations. No. 34, International Scientific Series. i2mo. Cloth, $2.00. Since the original publication of this book, in 1881, great advances have been made in our knowledge of the sun ; and although, in subsequent editions, noies and appen- dices have kept the work fairly up to date, ihe author has deemed it best to thoroughly revise it, embodying the notes in the text, and rewriting ceiiain portions. 'Ibis edi'ion is therefore representative of the solar science ot to day, including important spectro- scoplc discoveries which have been made during the revision. J\J0VEMENT. By E. J. Marey, Member of the -^ '-'■ Institute and of the Academy of Medicine ; Professor at the College of France ; author of " Animal Mechanism." Trans- lated by Eric Pritchard, M. A. With 200 Illustrations. No. 73, International Scientific Series. i2mo. Cloth, $1.75. The present work describes the methods employed in the extended development of photography of moving objects attained in the last few year?, and shows the impor- tance of such researches in mechanics and ot'.er departments of physics, the fine arts, physiology, and zoology, and in regul.iting tlie walking or marching of men and the gait of horses. T^ACE AND LANGUAGE. By Andre Lefevre, -*• *- Professor in the Anthropological School, Paris. i2mo. Cloth, $1.50. " A most scholarly exposition of the evolution of language, and a comprehensive account of the Indo European group of tongues." — Boston Advertiser. "A welcome contribution to the study of the obscure and complicated subject with which it deals." — San Francisco Chrotiicle. " One of the few scientific works which promise to become popular, both with those who read for instruction and those who read for recreation." — Pliiladelphia Item. New York : D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue. D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. NEW EDITION OF PROF. HUXLEY'S ESSAYS. COLLECTED ESSA YS. By Thomas H. Huxley. New complete edition, with revisions, the Essays being grouped according to general subject. In nine volumes, a new Intro= duction accompanying each volume. i2mo. Cloth, $1.25 per volume. Vol. I.— method AND RESULTS. Vol. II.— DARWINIANA. Vol. III.-SCIENCE AND EDUCATION. Vol. IV.— science AND HEBREW TRADITION. Vol. v.— SCIENCE AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. Vol. VI.— HUME. Vol. VII.— MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. Vol. VIII.— DISCOURSES, BIOLOGICAL AND GEOLOGICAL. Vol. IX.— EVOLUTION AND ETHICS, AND OTHER ESSAYS, " Mr. Huxley has covered a vast variety of topics during the last quarter of a century. It gives one an agreeable surprise to luok ever the tables of contents and note the immense territory which he has explored. To read these books carefully and studiimsly is to become thoroughly acquainted with the most advanced thought on a large number of topics." — Neiv York Herald. " The series will be a welcome one. There are few writings on the more abstruse problems of science better adapted to reading by the general public, and in this form tne books will be well in the reach of the investigator. . . . The revisions are the last expected to be made by the author, and his introductions are none of earlier date than a few months ago [1893I, so they may be considered his final and most authorita- tive utterances." — Chicago Times. " It was inevitable that his essays should be called for in a completed form, and they will be a source of delight and profit to all who read them. He has always commanded a hearing, and as a master of the literary style in writing scientific essays he is wortliy of a place aiming the great English essayists of the day. This edition of his essays will be widely read, and gives his scientific work a permanent form." — Boston Herald. " A man whose brilliancy is so constant as that of Prof. Huxley will always com- mand readers; and the utterances which are here collected are not the least in weight and luminous beauty of those with which the author has long oelighted the reading world." — Philadeiphia Press. "The connected arrangement of the essays which their reissue permits brings into filler relief .Mr. Huxley's masterly powers of exposition. Sweeping the suhject-inatter dear of all logomachies, he lets the light of common day fall upon it. He shows that the place of hypothesis in science, as the starting point of verification of the phenomena to be explained, is but an extension of the assumptions which underlie actioi;s in every- day affairs; and that the method of scientific investigation is only the method which rules the ordinal y business of life." — London Chronicle. New York : D. APPLETON S: CO., 72 Fifth Avenue. o D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 17J^ HEREDITY FROM GOD. Consisting of Lectures on Evolution. By E. P. Powell. Fourth edition. i2mo. Cloth, $1.75. "It is written in a simple, homely, fresh, and piquant style, that will engage the interest of every intelligent reader. Even those who have prejudged the matter in debate, if they once begin to read, will find it hard to stop ; and when they reach the end, if they do not make an unconditional surrender, they will find that some of their heavy guns are missing, a good deal of their light artillery, and a great deal of their useless baggage of contempt and scorn for doctrines which they did not understand."^ Christian Register. " Mr. Powell traces the rise of intelligence and morals out of and above all preced- ing developments, until he reaches the great questions of God and immortality. As a statement of the process of conviction by which the doctrine of evolution is established for the development of physical life the work is entitled to confidence, and will interest and instruct its readers." — Boston Herald. " An earnest and profound thinker, Mr. Powell is a logical, forcible, and brilliant writer as well. It is safe to say that no one of the very numerous works which of late years have sought to demonstrate the unknowable, unprovable mysteries of which Larwin and Spencer are the chief apostles and enunciators, has done so in more lucid, scholarly fashion." — New Orleans Times- Democrat. " All parts of the book are instructive, and while they instruct they never fail to interest. The driest facts of the evolution problem are made plain, and happily illus- trated ; but it is in such chapters as close the work that the interest culminates and the purpose of the work is seen. No one will regret owning and reading Mr. Powell's work." — Boston New Ideal. iTTUDIES IN HEGEL S PHILOSOPHY OE RE- ^ LIGION. With an Appendix on Christian Unity in America. By J. MacBride Sterrett, D. D., Professor of Ethics and Apologetics in the Seabuiy Divinity School ; author of " Reason and Authority in Religion." Second edition. i2mo. Clolh, $2.00. "Professor Sterrett's ' Studies ' are well written and careful. . . . If one wishes to know about Hegel on the Philosophy of Religion, there is really no better book than the present. ... It gives an excellent general view of the Hegelian position." — London Saturday Review. "A book for study and prolonged consideration. No one can read it without receiving much intellectual and spiritual stimulus." — Bibliotheca Sacra. "The American book I hold worthy of a place beside Z7/J- Mjindi. It gives the logical method which Lux Mundi applies in a less technical and more popular tpeat- ment. They are studies at first hand, . . . earnest and noble, and offer noble aid to thought that would climb the loftiest and most difficult steep of knowledge. The path they trace is clear to the peak."— Rev. R. A. Holland, D. D., in The Living Church. " Dr. Sterrett is far more than a slavish expositor. . . . We cordially commend it as giving to the general reader a valuable idea of the great German's method in philos- ophy, as well as initiating him into the latter's treatment of some of the most important departments of human thinking." — London Literary World. " Dr. Sterrett has given to the elucidation of Hegel those literary and critical abilities which make his book a valuable contribution to 'theology. No one can lead it without profit. Dr. Sterrett is a helpful guide. He is careful, honest, frank, and scholarly." — The Standard of the Cross and the Church. New York : D. APPLETON & CO.. 72 Fifth Avenue. D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. New Volumes in the International Education Series. TJERB ART'S A B C OF SENSE-PERCEP- 11 TIOX, AND INTRODUCrORY WORKS. By William J. ECKOFF, Ph. D., Pd. D., Professor of Pedagog)' in the Uni- versity of Illinois; Author of "Kant's Inaugural Dissertation." i2mo. Cloth, $1.50. This volume comprises a graded series of pedagogical essays of Herbart. The A B C of Sense- Perception is completed by Herbart for immediate applic.ntion in the schi)olroom, and has been tested by actual use in American public schools under the author's direction. The other works are graded and connected by prefaces and ex- planatory remarks so as to ail in the thorough comprehension of the ABC. The whole constitutes a course delivered before students preparing for service in the public schools. HTEACHING THE LANGUAGE-ARTS. Speech, 1 Reading, Composition. By B. A. HiNSDALE, Ph. D., LL. D., Professor of Science and the Art of Teaching in the University of Michigan. i2mo. Cloth, $1.00. This work is not a co'lection of " Exercises" and "Composition Lessons," but a clear and full discussion of the principles which underlie the acquisition of the language- art in its oral and written forms. The book is addressed to teachers, .-ind will prove a valuable aid to them in an important branch of their educational work. 'J^PTE SCHOOL SYSTEM OF ONTARIO. By 1 the Hon. George W. Ross, LL. D., Minister of Education for the Province of Ontario. l2mo. Cloth, $1.00. This book shows the evolution of the school system of Ontario from its inception down to the present time. iLs main purpose, however, is to supply information with regard to the organization and management of the different departments of the system, and the means which have been provided for promoting its efficiency through uniform examinations, the training of teachers in both public and high schools, and its thorough supervision by means of the Kducatinn Department. The work will be found specially interesting to those concerned in school administration, and as an illustration of a school system organized to meet the conditions of a laree and progressive Anglo-Saxon population will be of value in the comparative study of the institutions of a self-govern- ing community. rHE SONGS AND MUSIC OF FROEBEUS MOTHER PLAY. Prepared and arranged by Susan E. Blow. Fully illustrated. i2mo. Cloth, $1.50. This is the second and concluding volume of Miss Blow's version of Froebel's noted work which laid the foundarion for that important branch of early education, the kindergarten. The first volume, "The Mottoes and Commentaries," may be desig- nated as the Teacher's or Mother's book, and "The Songs and Music," the present volume, as the Children's book. In the latter, many of the pictures have been en- larged in parts to bring out the details more distinctly. New translations are made of the songs, eliminating the crudities of poetic composition that have appeared in the literal imitations of Froebel, and new music is substituted where the original has been discarded. New York : D. APPLETON & CO,, 72 Fifth Avenue. D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. T HE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THE- OLOG Y. A History of the Warfare of Science loith Theology in Christendom. By Andrew D. White, LL. D., late Presi- dent and Professor of History at Cornell University. In two volumes. 8vo. Cloth, $5.00. "The story of the struggle of searchers after truth with the organized forces of ignorance, bigotry, and superstition is the most inspiring chapter in the whole history of mankind That story has never been better told than by the ex-President of Cor- nell University in these two volumes. ... A wonderful story it is that he tells." — London Daily Chronicle. " A literary event of prime importance is the appearance of ' A History of the War- fare of Science with TheoKigy in Chrisiendo.-n.' " — t hiladelpliia Press. " Such an honest and thorough treatment of the subject in all its bearings that it will carry weight and be accepted as an authority in tracing the process by which the scientific method has come to be supreme in modem thought and life. " — Boston Herald. " A great work of a great man upon great subjects, and will always be a religio- scientific classic." — Chicago Evening Post. " It is graphic, lucid, even-tempered- never bitter nor vindictive. No student of human progress should fail to read these volumes. While they have about them the fascination of a well-told tale, they are also crowded with the facts of history that have had a tremendous bearing upon the development of the race." — Brooklyn Eagle. " The same liberal spirit that marked his public life is seen in the pages of his book, giving it a zest and interest that can not fail to secure for it hearty commendation and honest praise." — Philadelphia Public Ledger. " A conscientious summary of the body of learning to which it relates accumulated during long years of research. ... A monument of industry." — iV. V. Lvening Post. " A work which constitutes in many ways the most instructive review that has ever been written of the evolution of human knowledge in its conflict with dogmatic belie/. ... As a contribution to the literature of liberal thought, the book is one the impor- tance of which can not be easily overrated." — Boston Beacon. " The most valuable contribution that has yet been made to the history of the con- flicts between the theologists and the scientists " — Buffalo Cointnercial. " Undoubtedly the most exhaustive treatise which has been written on this subject. . . . Able, scholarly, critical, impartial in tone and exhaustive in treatment. "— j?f.f/fl« A dvertiser. New York : D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue. T D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. ^HE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRIC/- 7'F. A History. By Park Benjamin, Ph.D., LL.B., Member of the American Institute of Mechanical Engineers, Associate Member of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engi- neers, etc. With Three Portraits. 8vo. Cloth, $4.00. " Mr. Benjamin surely hns produceii a book that will find interested readers through- out the entire woild, for wherever electricity goes as a commc-rcial commodity a desire to know of its discovery and development will be awakened, and the desire can be satis- fied through no more delightful channel than through the infurmation contained in this book." — New York Tintes. "Mr. Benjamin has pe formed his self imposed task in an admirable fashion, and has produced a work which has a distinct historical value" — Brooklyn Eagle. " A work that takes a high rank as a history dealing with an abstruse topic, but bestowing on it a wealth of vital inteiest, pouring over it streams of needed light, and touching all with a graceful literary skill that leaves nothing to be desired. " — AVw i'ori Mail and Express. " A very comprehensive and thorough study of electricity in its infancy. He pre- sents his matter clearly and in an interesting form. His volume is one of especial value to the electrical student, and the average reader will read it with interest." — Milwaukee Joitrnal. " The work is distinctly a history. No technical preparation is required to read it, and it is free from all mathematical or other discussions which might involve difficulty. The style is, in the main, excellent." — Science. "A remarkable book. ... A book which every electrician ought to have at hand for reference — historic, not scientific reference — and which will prove instructive reading to the thoughtful of all classes." — New York Herald. "The most complete and satisfactory survey of the subject yet presented to the reading public. ... A volume which will appeal to an ever-increasing body nf people ; and as a reference book it will prove invaluable to writers on the development and utility of electricity." — Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. "The leading work on the subject in any language." — New York Evening Post. " One of the best works devoted to the development of the great force of modem time that has been published in the last decade." — New York Commercial Advertiser. " The author has written a plain and simple history of the beginnings of electrical science, none the less but rather the more valuable because, without dilution or snc- rifice of accuracy, he has excluded mere technicalities and gratuitous scientific demon- strations." — Philadelphia Press. New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Filth Avenue. D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. r 'HE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY OF HER- BERT SPENCER. In nine volumes. i2mo. Cloth, $2.00 per volume. The titles of the several volumes are as follows , (I.) FIRST PRINCIPLES. I. The Unknowable. II. Laws of the Knowable. (2.) THE PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGY. VoL I. I. The Data of Biology. IL The Inductions of Biology. III. The Evolution of Life. {3.) THE PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGY. Vol.11. IV. Morphological Development. V. Physiological Development. VI. Laws of Multiplication. (4.) THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY. Vol. I. I. The Data of Psychology. HI- Gcneml Synthesis. II. The Inductions of Psychology. IV. Special bynlhesis. V. Phy.sical Synthesis. (5.) THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY. Vol. II. VI. Special Analysis. VIII. Congruities. VII. General Analysis. IX. Corollaries. (6.) THE PRINCIPLES OF SOCIOLOGY. Vol. I. I. The Data of Sociology. II. The Inductions of Sociology. III. The Domestic Relations. (7.) THE PRINCIPLES OF SOCIOLOGY. Vol. II. IV. Ceremonial Institutions. y. Political Institutions. VI. Ecclesiastical Institutions. (8.) THE PRINCIPLES OF SOCIOLOGY. Vol. III. * * * * (9.) THE PRINCIPLES OF ETHICS. Vol. I. 1. The Data of Ethics. II. The Inductions of Ethics. HI. The Ethics of Individual Life. (10.) THE PRINCIPLES OF EIHICS. Vol. II. IV. The Ethics of Social Life: Justice. V. The Ethics of Social Life : Negative Beneficence. VI. The Ethics of Social Life: Positive Beneficence. r\ESCPIPTIVE SOCIOLOGY. A Cyclopcedia of -Ly Social Facts. Representing the Constitution of Every Type and Grade of Human Society, Past and Present, Stationary and Progressive. By Herbert Spencer. Eight Nos., Royal Folio. No. I. ENGLISH ^4 "o No. II. MEXICANS, CENTRAL AMERICANS, CHIBCHAS, and PE- RUVIANS 4 00 No. HI. LOWEST RACES, NEGRITO RACES, and MALAYO-POLY- NESIAN RACES 4 00 No. IV. AFRICAN RACES 4 00 No. V. ASIATIC RACES 4 <» No. VI. AMERICAN RACES 4 0° No. VII. HEBREWS and PHCENICIANS 400 No. VIII. FRENCH (Double Number) 7 00 New York : D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Ilfih Avenue. UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY AA 000 787 218 7 University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACIUTY inc; De Neve Drive - Parking Lot 17 • Box Qbuou ^°^ LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90095-1388 RetumUiisiT^^ MRMMNMMMWMMaW THK .^^mo^ SCIENTIFIC SERIES If^ 4»H»MiMawMMaw c >»»w « M w amag w>« < i i iin[ i «> i i i mM^