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The Evolution of Culture, and Other Essays

by Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers · English · Gutenberg #44844 · 624,139 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Evolution of Culture, and Other Essays

Author: Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers

Author of introduction, etc.: Henry Balfour

Editor: Sir John Linton Myres


        
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Transcriber's Note


Superscript text is indicated by caret signs.




  THE
  EVOLUTION OF CULTURE
  AND OTHER ESSAYS

  BY THE LATE
  LT.-GEN. A. LANE-FOX PITT-RIVERS
  D.C.L., F.R.S., F.S.A.

  EDITED BY J. L. MYRES, M.A.
  STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD

  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
  HENRY BALFOUR, M.A.
  FELLOW OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD
  CURATOR OF THE PITT-RIVERS MUSEUM

  TWENTY-ONE PLATES

  OXFORD
  AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
  1906




  HENRY FROWDE, M.A.

  PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

  LONDON, EDINBURGH

  NEW YORK AND TORONTO




PREFACE


These Essays, or rather Lectures, contain the first-fruits of the
earliest systematic attempt to apply the theory of Evolution to the
products of human handiwork. In their original form they have long been
difficult to obtain; and they are reprinted now to supply the needs of
candidates for the Oxford Diploma in Anthropology, and of the numerous
visitors to the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford. But they will certainly
appeal to a far wider public also, as a brief and authentic statement
of their author’s discoveries.

The four Essays are reprinted substantially as they were first
delivered and published. But verbal errors and actual misquotations
have been corrected; and allusions to specimens or diagrams exhibited
during the original discourses, but not published, have been replaced
so far as possible by references to similar objects figured in the
Plates.

The Plates are photographic reproductions of the original
illustrations, with the exception of Plates V, XIII, XVII, XVIII. Of
these, Plate XIII has simply been re-drawn, from a faded original;
Plates XVII and XVIII have been translated, without loss of detail,
from colours to monochrome shading; Plate V has been reconstituted
from illustrations quoted in the text, with the permission of their
publisher, Mr. Murray. Plate XXI is reproduced, by permission of Sir
John Evans, from the paper which it illustrated originally.

The footnotes demand a word of explanation. The author, as the original
publications show, was not precise in indicating his sources: he
frequently gave, as a quotation, the general sense rather than the
exact words of his authority; and occasionally his memory played him
false. In the reprint, the precise references have been identified,
and are given in full, and obvious errors in the text have been either
amended or corrected in a footnote. The editor desires to acknowledge
much valuable help in the search for references from Miss C. M. Prior,
of Headington.




CONTENTS


                                         PAGE

  PREFACE                                 iii

  INTRODUCTION                              v

  PRINCIPLES OF CLASSIFICATION (1874)       1

  ON THE EVOLUTION OF CULTURE (1875)       20
  WITH PLATES I-V, AND XXI

  PRIMITIVE WARFARE. I (1867)              45
  WITH PLATES VI-XI

  PRIMITIVE WARFARE. II (1868)             89
  WITH PLATES XII-XVI

  PRIMITIVE WARFARE. III (1869)           144
  WITH PLATES XVII-XX

  EARLY MODES OF NAVIGATION (1874)        186




INTRODUCTION[1]


It was about the middle of last century that an officer in Her
Majesty’s Army began to apply the lessons which he had learnt in
the course of some of his professional experimental work to studies
pursued by him as a hobby in a far wider field of science. The story
of the famous ethnographical collection of Colonel Lane Fox is well
known, and I need but briefly refer to it. During his investigations,
conducted with a view to ascertaining the best methods whereby the
service firearms might be improved, at a time when the old Tower musket
was being finally discarded, he was forcibly struck by the extremely
gradual changes whereby improvements were effected. He observed that
every noteworthy advancement in the efficiency, not only of the whole
weapon, but also of every individual detail in its structure, was
arrived at as a cumulative result of a succession of very slight
modifications, each of which was but a trifling improvement upon the
one immediately preceding it. Through noticing the unfailing regularity
of this process of gradual _evolution_ in the case of firearms, he
was led to believe that the same principles must probably govern the
development of the other arts, appliances, and ideas of mankind. With
characteristic energy and scientific zeal Colonel Lane Fox began at
once, in the year 1851, to illustrate his views and to put them to
a practical test. He forthwith commenced to make the ethnological
collection with which his name will always be associated, and which
rapidly grew to large proportions under his keen search for material
which should illustrate and perhaps prove his theory of progress by
evolution in the arts of mankind.

Although as a collector he was omnivorous, since every artefact
product fell strictly within his range of inquiry, his collection,
nevertheless, differed from the greater number of private ethnological
collections, and even public ones of that day, inasmuch as it was built
up _systematically_ with a definite object in view. It is unnecessary
for me to describe in detail the system which he adopted in arranging
his collection. His principles are well known to ethnologists, either
from the collection itself or from his writings, more especially from
the series of lectures which he gave at the Royal United Service
Institution, in the years 1867-9, upon ‘Primitive Warfare’; from
his paper read before the Anthropological Institute in 1874 on ‘The
Principles of Classification, as adopted in the arrangement of his
Anthropological Collection’, which was then exhibited at the Bethnal
Green Museum; from that portion of the _catalogue raisonné_ of his
collection which was published in 1877; and from numerous other
papers dealing with special illustrations of his theory. Suffice it
to say that, in classifying his ethnological material, he adopted
a _principal_ system of groups into which objects of like form or
function from all over the world were associated to form series, each
of which illustrated as completely as possible the varieties under
which a given art, industry, or appliance occurred. Within these main
groups objects belonging to the same region were usually associated
together in _local_ sub-groups. And wherever amongst the implements or
other objects exhibited in a given series there seemed to be suggested
a _sequence of ideas_, shedding light upon the probable stages in
the evolution of this particular class, these objects were specially
brought into juxtaposition. This special grouping to illustrate
sequence was particularly applied to objects from the same region as
being, from their local relationships, calculated better to illustrate
an actual continuity. As far as possible the seemingly more primitive
and generalized forms--those simple types which usually approach most
nearly to _natural_ forms, or whose use is associated with primitive
ideas--were placed at the beginning of each series, and the more
complex and specialized forms were arranged towards the end.

The primary object of this method of classification by series was
to demonstrate, either actually or hypothetically, the origin,
development, and continuity of the material arts, and to illustrate the
variations whereby the more complex and specialized forms belonging
to the higher conditions of culture have been evolved by successive
slight improvements from the simple, rudimentary, and generalized forms
of a primitive culture.

The _earlier_ stages in these sequence series were more especially the
object of investigation, the later developments being in the greater
number of cases omitted or merely suggested. It was necessary for
Colonel Lane Fox to restrict the extent of the series, any one of
which, if developed to the full extent, would easily have filled a
good-sized museum. The earlier stages, moreover, were less familiar,
and presented fewer complications. The general principles of his theory
were as adequately demonstrated by the ruder appliances of uncivilized
races as by the more elaborate products of peoples of higher culture;
and, moreover, there was doubtless a great attraction in attacking
that end of the development series which offered a prospect at least
of finality, inasmuch as there was always a chance of discovering
the absolute origin of a given series. Hence the major part of his
collection consisted of specimens procured from savage and barbaric
races, amongst whom the more rudimentary forms of appliances are for
the most part to be found.

The validity of the general views of Colonel Lane Fox as to evolution
in the material arts of Man was rapidly accepted by a large number of
ethnologists and others, who were convinced by the arguments offered
and the very striking evidence displayed in their support. I have heard
people object to the use of the term ‘evolution’ in connexion with
the development of human arts. To me the word appears to be eminently
appropriate, and I think it would be exceedingly difficult to find one
which better expresses the succession of extremely minute variations
by means of which progress has been effected. That the successive
individual units of improvement, which when linked together form the
chain of advancement, _are_ exceedingly small is a fact which any one
can prove for himself if he will study _in detail_ the growth of a
modern so-called ‘invention’. One reason why we are apt to overlook
the greater number of stages in the growth of still living arts is
that we are not as a rule privileged to watch behind the scenes. Of
the numberless slight modifications, each but a trifling advance upon
the last, it is but comparatively few which ever meet the eye of the
public, which only sees the more important stages; those, that is to
say, which present a sufficiently distinct advance upon that which has
hitherto been in use to warrant their attracting attention, or, shall
we say, having for a time a marketable value. The bulk of the links in
the evolutionary chain disappear almost as soon as they are made, and
are known to few, perhaps none, besides their inventors. Even where the
history of some invention is recorded with the utmost care it is only
the more prominent landmarks which receive notice; the multitude of
trifling variations which have led up to them are not referred to, for,
even if they be known, space forbids such elaborately detailed record.
The smaller variations are, for the most part, utterly forgotten,
their ephemeral existence and their slight individual influence upon
the general progress being unrecorded at the time, and lost sight of
almost at once. The immediately succeeding stage claims for the moment
the attention, and it again in its turn becomes the stepping-stone upon
which the next raises itself, and so on.

Before proceeding further, let me give as briefly as I can an example
of a development series worked out, in the main, upon the general line
of inquiry inaugurated by Colonel Lane Fox. It is commonly accepted as
a fact, which is borne out by tradition, both ancient and modern, that
certain groups of stringed instruments of music must be referred for
their origin to the bow of the archer. The actual historical record
does not help us to come to a definite conclusion on this point, nor
does the direct testimony of archaeology; but from other sources very
suggestive evidence is forthcoming. A comparative study of the musical
instruments of modern savage and barbaric peoples makes it very clear
to one that the greater portion of the probable chain of sequences
which led from the simple bows to highly specialized instruments of
the harp family may be reconstructed from types still existing in use
among living peoples, most of the well-defined early stages being
represented in Africa at the present day[2]. The native of Damaraland,
who possesses no stringed instrument proper, is in the habit of
temporarily converting his ordinary shooting-bow into a musical
instrument. For this purpose he ties a small thong loopwise round
the bow and bow-string, so as to divide the latter into two vibrating
parts of unequal length. When lightly struck with a small stick the
tense string emits a couple of notes, which satisfy this primitive
musician’s humble cravings for purely rhythmic sound. Amongst many
other African tribes we find a slight advance, in the form of special,
rather slightly made bows constructed and used for musical purposes
only. In order to increase the volume of sound, it is frequently the
custom amongst some of the tribes to rest the bow against some hollow,
resonant body, such as an inverted pot or hollow gourd. In many parts
again, we find that the instrument has been further improved by
_attaching_ a gourd to the bow, and thus providing it with a permanent
resonating body. To achieve greater musical results, it would appear
that somewhere in Africa (in the West, I suspect) two or more small
bows were attached to a single gourd. I have, so far, been unable to
trace this particular link in Africa itself, but, curiously enough,
this very form has been obtained from Guiana. It may be thought that I
am applying a breaking strain to the chain of evidence when I endeavour
to work an instrument from South America into an African developmental
series. But, when we recall the fact that evidence of the existence of
_indigenous_ stringed instruments of music in the New World has yet to
be produced, coupled with the certain knowledge that a considerable
number of varieties of musical instruments, stringed and otherwise,
accompanied the enforced migration of African natives during the days
of the slave trade, and were thus established in use and perpetuated
in many parts of the New World, including the north-east regions of
South America, we may, I think, admit, with some confidence, that, in
this particular instance, from Guiana to Guinea is no very far cry,
and that the more than probable African origin of this instrument
from South America gives it a perfect claim to take its place in the
African sequence. I still anticipate that this type of instrument will
be forthcoming from some hinterland region in West Africa. Were _no_
evidence at all forthcoming of such a form, either in past or present,
we should be almost compelled to infer that such a one had existed,
as this stage in the sequence appears to be necessary to prevent a
break in the continuity of forms leading to what is apparently the
next important stage, represented by a type of instrument common in
West Africa, having five little bows, each carrying its string, all of
which are fixed by their lower ends into a box-like wooden resonator.
This method of attaching the bows to the now improved body of the
instrument necessitates the lower attachment of the strings being
transferred from the bows to the body, so that the bow-like form begins
to disappear. The next improvement, of which there is evidence from
existing types, consists in the substitution of a single, stouter,
curved rod for the five little ‘bows’, all the five strings being
serially attached to the upper end of the rod, their lower ends to
the body as before. This instrument is somewhat rare now, and it may
well be a source of wonder to us that it has survived at all (unless
it be to assist the ethnologist), since it is an almost aggressively
inefficient form, owing to the row of strings being brought into
two different places at right angles to one another. The structure
of this rude instrument gives it a quaintly composite appearance,
suggesting that it is a banjo at one end and a harp at the other. This
is due to the strings remaining, as in the preceding form, attached
to the resonating body in a line disposed _transversely_, while the
substitution of a single rod for the five ‘bows’ has necessitated the
disposal of their upper attachments in a _longitudinal_ series as
regards the longer axis of the instrument. Inefficient though it be,
this instrument occupies an important position in the apparent chain
of evolution, leading on as it does through some intermediate types to
a form in which the difficulty as regards the strings is overcome by
attaching their _lower_ ends in a longitudinal series, and so bringing
them into the same plane throughout their length. In this shape the
instrument has assumed a harp-like form--a rude and not very effective
one, it is true, but it is none the less definitely a member of the
harp family. The modern varieties of this type extend across Africa
from west to east, and the harps of ancient Egypt, Assyria, Greece,
and India were assuredly elaborations of this primitive form. The
Indian form, closely resembling that of ancient Egypt, still survives
in Burma, while elsewhere we find a few apparently allied forms. In
all these forms of the harp, from the rudest Central and West African
types to the highly ornate and many-stringed examples of Egypt and
the East, one point is especially noteworthy. This is the invariable
_absence of the fore-pillar_, which in the modern harps of Western
Europe is so important, nay, essential a structural feature. In spite
of the skill and care exercised in the construction of some of the
more elaborate forms, none were fitted with a fore-pillar, the result
being that the frame across which the strings were stretched was
always weak and disposed to yield more or less to the strain caused by
the tension of the strings. This implied that, even when the strings
were not unduly strained, the tightening up of one of them to raise
its pitch necessarily caused a greater or less slackening of all the
other strings, since the free end of the rod or ‘neck’ would tend
to be drawn slightly towards the body of the instrument under the
increased tension. The mere addition of a simple, strut-like support
between the free end of the ‘neck’ and the ‘body’ would have obviated
this difficulty and rendered the instrument relatively efficient and
unyielding to varying tension. And yet, even in Western Europe, this
seemingly obvious and invaluable addition did not appear, as far as I
can ascertain, until about the seventh or eighth century A.D.; and even
then it seems to have been added somewhat half-heartedly, and a very
long time had yet to elapse before the fore-pillar became an integral
part of the framework and was allotted its due proportion in the
general design.

I have purposely selected this particular series for my illustration,
not because it is something new--indeed, it is already more or less
familiar, and, maybe, has even some merit in its lack of newness,
since, in accordance with a popular dictum, it may urge a greater
claim to be regarded as true--nor because it is specially striking,
but rather for the reason that it illustrates suitably several of
the points upon which I wish briefly to touch. Even in the severely
condensed form in which I have been obliged to present this series of
developments from bow to harp, there is, I think, demonstrated the
practical application of several of the general principles upon which
is based the theory whereby Colonel Lane Fox sought to elucidate the
phenomena of human progress.

A series of this kind serves, in the first place, to demonstrate
that the absence of historical and archaeological evidence of the
_actual_ continuity in development from simple to complex does not
preclude investigations into the early history of any product of human
ingenuity, nor prevent the formation of a suggestive and plausible
if largely hypothetical series, illustrating the probable chain of
sequences along which some highly specialized form may be traced back
link by link to its rudimentary prototypes, or even to its absolute
origin, which in this particular instance is the ordinary shooting bow
_temporarily_ converted into a musical instrument. Where an actual
chronological series is not forthcoming, a comparative study of
such types as are available, even though they be _modern_ examples,
reveals the fact that, if classified according to their apparent
morphological affinities, these types show a tendency to fall into
line; the gap between the extreme forms--that is, the most simple and
the most advanced--being filled by a succession of intermediate forms,
more or less completely linked together, according to the number of
varieties at our disposal. We are thus, at any rate, in possession of
_a_ sequence series. Is it unreasonable for us to conclude that this
reflects, in great measure, _the_ actual chronological sequence of
variations through which in past times the evolutionary history of the
instrument was effected, from the earliest rudimentary form?

It is difficult to account, at all, for the existence of many of the
forms, such as I have briefly described, except on the supposition
that they are _survivals_ from more or less _early stages_ in a
series of progressive evolution; and, for myself, I do not believe
that so inefficient and yet so elaborate an instrument, as, to take
an example, the harp of ancient Egypt, Assyria, and India, could have
come into being by any sudden inventive process, by ‘spontaneous
generation’, as it were, to use a biological term; whereas, the innate
conservatism of the human species, which is most manifest among the
lower and more primitive races (I use the term conservatism, I need
hardly say, in a non-political sense), amply accounts for such forms
having been arrived at, since the rigid adherence to traditional types
is a prevailing characteristic of human culture, and only admits
of improvement by very slight and gradual variations upon existing
forms. The difficulty experienced by man, in a primitive condition of
culture, of emancipating himself from the ideas which have been handed
down to him, except by a very gradual and lengthy process, causes him
to exert somewhat blindly his efforts in the direction of progress, and
often prevents his seeing very obvious improvements, even when they are
seemingly forced upon his notice. For instance, the early Egyptian,
Assyrian, and Greek harps, as I have already stated, were destitute of
a fore-pillar, and this remained the case for centuries, in spite of
their actually existing in an environment of other instruments, such
as the lyre and _trigonon_, which in their rigid, unyielding frames
possessed, and even paraded, the very feature which was so essential
to the harp, to enable it to become a really efficient instrument. The
same juxtaposition of similar types, without mutual influence, may be
seen in modern Africa among ruder forms of these instruments.

And yet, in spite of instances such as this--where a valuable feature
suggested by one instrument has not been adopted for the improvement
of another, even though the two forms are in constant use side by
side--we must recognize that progress, in the main, is effected by a
process of bringing the experience gained in one direction to bear upon
the results arrived at in another. This process of grafting one idea
upon another, or, as we may call it, the hybridization of ideas and
experience, is a factor in the advancement of culture whose influence
cannot be overestimated. It is, in fact, the main secret of progress.
In the animal world hybridization is liable to produce _sterile_
offspring; in the world of ideas its results are usually far different.
A fresh stimulus is imparted, which may last through generations
of fruitful descendants. The _rate_ at which progress is effected
increases steadily with the growth of experience, whereby the number of
ideas which may act and react upon one another is augmented.

It follows, as a corollary, that he who would trace out the
phylogenetic history of any product of human industry will speedily
discover that, if he aims at doing so _in detail_, he must be prepared
for disappointments. The tangle is too involved to be completely
unravelled. The sequence, strictly speaking, is not in the form of
a simple chain, but rather in that of a highly complex _system_ of
chains. The time-honoured simile afforded by a river perhaps supplies
the truest comparison. The course of the _main stream_ of our evolution
series may be fairly clear to us, even as far as to its principal
source; we may even explore and study the general effect produced
by the more important tributaries; but to investigate in detail the
contributions afforded in present and past of the innumerable smaller
streams, brooks, and runlets is clearly beyond any one’s power, even
supposing that the greater number had not changed their course at
times, and even, in many cases, run dry. While we readily admit that
important effects have been produced by these numberless tributary
influences, both on the course and on the volume of the river, it is
clear that we must in general be content to follow the main stream. A
careful study of the series of musical instruments, of which I gave but
a scanty outline, reveals very clearly that numberless ideas borrowed
from outside sources have been requisitioned, and have affected the
course of development. In some cases one can see fairly clearly whence
these ideas were derived, and even trace back in part their own
phylogenetic history; but a complete analysis must of necessity remain
beyond our powers and even our hopes.

It will have been observed that, in the example of a sequence series
which I have given, the early developmental stages are illustrated
entirely by instruments belonging to _modern savage races_. It was a
fundamental principle in the general theory of Colonel Lane Fox that in
the arts and customs of the still living savage and barbaric peoples
there are reflected to a considerable extent the various strata of
human culture in the past, and that it is possible to reconstruct in
some degree the life and industries of Man in prehistoric times by a
study of existing races in corresponding stages of civilization. His
insistence upon the importance of bringing together and comparing the
archaeological and ethnological material, in order that each might
serve to throw light upon the other, has proved of value to both
sciences. Himself a brilliant and far-seeing archaeologist as well as
ethnologist, he was eminently capable of forming a conclusion upon this
point, and he urged this view very strongly.

The Earth, as we know, is peopled with races of the most heterogeneous
description, races in all stages of culture. Colonel Lane Fox argued
that, making due allowance for possible instances of degradation from
a higher condition, this heterogeneity could readily be explained by
assuming that, while the progress of some races has received relatively
little check, the culture development of other races has been retarded
to a greater or less extent, and that we may see represented conditions
of at least partially arrested development. In other words, he
considered that in the various manifestations of culture among the less
civilized peoples were to be seen more or less direct _survivals_ from
the earlier stages or strata of human evolution; vestiges of ancient
conditions which have fallen out at different points and have been left
behind in the general march of progress.

Taken together, the various living races of Man seem almost to form a
kind of living genealogical tree, as it were, and it is as an epiphyte
upon this tree that the comparative ethnologist largely thrives; while
to the archaeologist it may also prove a tree of knowledge the fruit of
which may be eaten with benefit rather than risk.

This certainly seems to be a legitimate assumption in a general way;
but there are numerous factors which should be borne in mind when we
endeavour to elucidate the past by means of the present. If the various
gradations of culture exhibited by the condition of living races--the
savage, the semi-civilized or barbaric, and the civilized races--could
be regarded as accurately typifying the successive stages through
which the higher forms of culture have been evolved in the course of
the ages; if, in fact, the different modern races of mankind might
be accepted as so many sections of the human race whose intellectual
development has been arrested or retarded at various definite stages
in the general progression, then we should have, to all intents and
purposes, our genealogical tree in a very perfect state, and by its
means we could reconstruct the past, and study with ease the steady
growth of culture and handicrafts from the earliest simple germs,
reflecting the mental condition of primaeval man, up to the highest
manifestations of the most cultured races.

These ideal conditions are, however, far from being realized.
Intellectual progress has not advanced along a single line, but, in its
development, it has branched off in various directions, in accordance
with varying environment; and the tracing of lines of connexion
between different forms of culture, as is the case with the physical
variations, is a matter of intricate complexity. Migrations, with the
attendant climatic changes, change of food, and, in fact, of general
environment, to say nothing of the crossing of different stocks,
transmission of ideas from one people to another, and other factors,
all tend to increase the tangle.

Although in certain instances savage tribes or races show obvious signs
of having _degenerated_ to some extent from conditions of a higher
culturedom, this cannot be regarded as the general rule, and we must
always bear in mind the seemingly paradoxical truth that degradation
in the culture of the lower races is often, if not usually, the direct
result of contact with peoples in a far higher state of civilization.

There can, I think, be little doubt that Colonel Lane Fox was well
justified in urging the view that most savage races are in large
measure strictly _primitive_, survivals from early conditions, the
development of their ideas having from various causes remained
practically stationary during a very considerable period of time. In
the lower, though not degenerate, races signs of this are not wanting,
and while few, possibly none, can be said to be absolutely in a
condition of arrested development, their normal progress is at a slow,
in most cases at a _very_ slow, rate.

Perhaps the best example of a truly primitive race existing in recent
times, of which we have any knowledge, was afforded by the native
inhabitants of Tasmania. This race was still existing fifty years ago,
and a few pure-blooded survivors remained as late as about the year
1870, when the race became extinct, the benign civilizing influence
of enlightened Europeans having wiped this extremely interesting
people off the face of the earth. The Australians, whom Colonel Lane
Fox referred to as being ‘the lowest amongst the existing races of
the world of whom we have any accurate knowledge’, are very far in
advance of the Tasmanians, whose lowly state of culture conformed
thoroughly with the characteristics of a truly primitive race, a
survival not only from the Stone Age in general, but from almost the
earliest beginnings of the Stone Age. The difference between the
culture of the Tasmanians and that of the Australians was far greater
than that which exists between man of the ‘River Drift’ period and
his Neolithic successors. The objects of everyday use were but slight
modifications of forms suggested by Nature, involving the exercise of
merely the simplest mental processes. The stone implements were of
the rudest manufacture, far inferior in workmanship to those made by
Palaeolithic man; they were never ground or polished, never even fitted
with handles, but were merely grasped in the hand. The _varieties_ of
implements were very _few in number_, each, no doubt, serving a number
of purposes, the function varying with the requirements of the moment.
They had no bows or other appliances for accelerating the flight of
missiles, no pottery, no permanent dwellings; nor is there any evidence
of a previous knowledge of such products of higher culture. They
seem to represent a race which was isolated very early from contact
with higher races; in fact, before they had developed more than the
merest rudiments of culture--a race continuing to live under the most
primitive conditions, from which they were never destined to emerge.

Between the Tasmanians, representing in their very low culture the one
extreme, and the most civilized peoples at the other extreme, lie races
exhibiting in a general way intermediate conditions of advancement or
retardation. If we are justified, as I think we are, in regarding the
various grades of culture, observable among the more lowly of the still
existing races of man, as representing to a considerable extent those
vanished cultures which in their succession formed the different stages
by which civilization emerged gradually from a low state, it surely
becomes a very important duty for us to study with energy these living
illustrations of early human history, in order that the archaeological
record may be supplemented and rendered more complete. The material
for this study is vanishing so fast with the spread of civilization
that opportunities lost now will never be regained, and already even
it is practically impossible to find native tribes which are wholly
uncontaminated with the products, good or bad, of higher cultures.

The arts of living races help to elucidate what is obscure in those
of prehistoric times by the process of reasoning from the known
to the unknown. It is the work of the zoologist which enables the
palaeontologist to reconstruct the forms of extinct animals from such
fragmentary remains as have been preserved, and it is largely from the
results of a comparative study of living forms and their habitats that
he is able, in his descriptions, to equip the reconstructed types of a
past fauna with environments suited to their structure, and to render
more complete the picture of their mode of life.

In like manner, the work of the ethnologist can throw light upon the
researches of the archaeologist; through it, broken sequences may be
repaired, at least suggestively, and the interpretation of the true
nature and use of objects of antiquity may frequently be rendered
more sure. Colonel Lane Fox strongly advocated the application of the
reasoning methods of biology to the study of the origin, phylogeny, and
etionomics of the arts of mankind, and his own collection demonstrated
that the products of human intelligence can conveniently be classified
into families, genera, species, and varieties, and must be so grouped
if their affinities and development are to be investigated.

It must not be supposed--although some people, through misapprehension
of his methods, jumped at this erroneous conclusion--that he
was unaware of the danger of possibly mistaking mere accidental
resemblances for morphological affinities, and that he assumed that
_because_ two objects, perhaps from widely separated regions, appeared
more or less identical in form, and possibly in use, they were
necessarily to be considered as members of one phylogenetic group.
On the contrary, in the grouping of his specimens according to their
form and function, he was anxious to assist as far as possible in
throwing light upon the question of the monogenesis or polygenesis of
certain arts and appliances, and to discover whether they are exotic
or indigenous in the regions in which they are now found, and, in
fact, to distinguish between mere analogies and true homologies. If
we accept the theory of the monogenesis of the human race, as most of
us undoubtedly do, we must be prepared to admit that there prevails a
condition of unity in the tendencies of the human mind to respond in a
similar manner to similar stimuli. Like conditions beget like results;
and thus instances of independent invention of similar objects are
liable to arise. For this very reason, however, the arts and customs
belonging to even widely separated peoples may, though apparently
unrelated, help to elucidate some of the points in each other’s history
which remain obscure through lack of the evidence required to establish
_local_ continuity.

I think, moreover, that it will generally be allowed that cases of
‘independent invention’ of similar forms should be considered to have
established their claim to be regarded as such only after exhaustive
inquiry has been made into the possibilities of the resemblances being
due to actual relationship. There is the alternative method of assuming
that, because two like objects are widely separated geographically, and
because a line of connexion is not immediately obvious, therefore the
resemblance existing between them is fortuitous, or merely the natural
result of similar forms having been produced to meet similar needs.
Premature conclusions in matters of this kind, though temptingly easy
to form, are not in the true scientific spirit, and act as a check
upon careful research, which, by investigating the case in its various
possible aspects, is able either to prove or disprove what otherwise
would be merely a hasty assumption. The association of similar forms
into the same series has therefore a double significance. On the
one hand, the sequence of related forms is brought out, and their
geographical distribution illustrated, throwing light, not only upon
the evolution of types, but also upon the interchange of ideas by
transference from one people to another, and even upon the migration
of races. On the other hand, instances in which two or more peoples
have arrived independently at similar results are brought prominently
forward, not merely as interesting coincidences, but also as evidence
pointing to the phylogenetic unity of the human species, as exemplified
by the tendency of human intelligence to evolve independently identical
ideas where the conditions are themselves identical. Polygenesis in
his inventions may probably be regarded as testimony in favour of the
monogenesis of Man.

I have endeavoured in this review to dwell upon some of the main
principles laid down by Colonel Lane Fox as a result of his special
researches in the field of Ethnology, and my object has been twofold.
First, to bear witness to the very great importance of his contribution
to the scientific study of the arts of mankind and the development
of culture in general, and to remind students of Anthropology of the
debt which we owe to him, not only for the results of his very able
investigations, but also for the stimulus which he imparted to research
in some of the branches of this comprehensive science. Secondly, my
object has been to reply to some criticisms offered in regard to points
in the system of classification adopted in arranging his ethnographical
collection. And, since such criticisms as have reached me have appeared
to me to be founded mainly upon misinterpretation of this system, I
have thought that I could meet them best by some sort of restatement of
the principles involved.

It would be unreasonable to expect that his work should hold good
in all details. The early illustrations of his theories were to
be regarded as tentative rather than dogmatic, and in later life
he recognized that many modifications in matters of detail were
rendered necessary by new facts which had since come to light. The
crystallization of solid facts out of a matrix which is necessarily
partially volatile is a process requiring time. These minor errors and
the fact of our not agreeing with all his details in no way invalidate
the general principles which he urged, and we need but cast a cursory
glance over recent ethnological literature to see how widely accepted
these general principles are, and how they have formed the bases
of, and furnished the inspiration for, a vast mass of research by
ethnologists of all nations.

  HENRY BALFOUR.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Extracted from Mr. Henry Balfour’s address to the Anthropological
Section of the British Association at Cambridge in 1904.

[2] _The Natural History of the Musical Bow_, by H. Balfour: Clarendon
Press, Oxford, 1899.




PRINCIPLES OF CLASSIFICATION

(1874)[3]


I gladly avail myself of the opportunity that has been afforded me of
explaining the principles of classification that I have adopted in the
arrangement of my collection, in the hopes that, by offering them to
the consideration of anthropologists, their soundness may be put to the
test, and that they may elicit criticism on the part of those who have
devoted their attention to the subject of primitive culture.

The collection is divided into four parts. The first has reference
to physical anthropology, and consists of a small collection of
typical skulls and hair of races. This part of the collection, as it
relates to a subject that has received a large amount of attention
from anthropologists, and has been frequently treated by abler hands
than mine, I do not propose to enter into. The remainder of the
collection is devoted to objects illustrating the development of
prehistoric and savage culture, and consists of--Part II. The weapons
of existing savages. Part III. Miscellaneous arts of modern savages,
including pottery and substitutes for pottery; modes of navigation,
clothing, textile fabrics, and weaving; personal ornament; realistic
art; conventionalized art; ornamentation; tools; household furniture;
musical instruments; idols and religious emblems; specimens of the
written character of races; horse furniture; money and substitutes for
money; fire-arms; sundry smaller classes of objects, such as mirrors,
spoons, combs, games, and a collection of implements of modern savages,
arranged to illustrate the mode of hafting stone implements. Part IV
refers to the prehistoric series, and consists of specimens of natural
forms simulating artificial forms, for comparison with artificial
forms; a collection of modern forgeries for comparison with genuine
prehistoric implements; palaeolithic implements; neolithic implements;
implements of bronze, iron, and bone.

The collection does not contain any considerable number of unique
specimens, and has been collected during upwards of twenty years, not
for the purpose of surprising any one, either by the beauty or value
of the objects exhibited, but solely with a view to instruction. For
this purpose ordinary and typical specimens, rather than rare objects,
have been selected and arranged in sequence, so as to trace, as far as
practicable, the succession of ideas by which the minds of men in a
primitive condition of culture have progressed from the simple to the
complex, and from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.

Many ethnological museums exist in this country and elsewhere, and
therefore, in claiming to have accomplished a useful purpose in forming
this collection, I am bound to endeavour to show that it performs some
function that is not performed by the majority of the other museums
that are to be found. I propose, therefore, to consider, in the first
place, what the defect of an ethnological museum usually is.

The classification of natural history specimens has long been a
recognized necessity in the arrangement of every museum which professes
to impart useful information, but ethnological specimens have not
generally been thought capable of anything more than a geographical
arrangement. This arises mainly from sociology not having until
recently been recognized as a science, if indeed it can be said to be
so regarded by the public generally at the present time. Travellers, as
a rule, have not yet embraced the idea, and consequently the specimens
in our museums, not having been systematically collected, cannot be
scientifically arranged. They consist of miscellaneous objects brought
home as reminiscences of travel, or of such as have been most easily
procured by sailors at the seaports. Unlike natural history specimens,
which have for years past been selected with a view to variety,
affinity, and sequence, these ethnological _curiosities_, as they have
been termed, have been chosen without any regard to their history or
psychology, and, although they would be none the less valuable for
having been collected without influence from the bias of preconceived
theories, yet, not being supposed capable of any scientific
interpretation, they have not been obtained in sufficient number or
variety to render classification possible.

This does not apply with the same force to collections of prehistoric
objects, which during the last ten or fifteen years have received
better treatment. It is to the arts and implements of modern savages
that my remarks chiefly relate.

Since the year 1852 I have endeavoured to supply this want by selecting
from amongst the commoner class of objects which have been brought to
this country those which appeared to show connexion of form. Whenever
missing links have been found they have been added to the collection,
and the result has been to establish, however imperfectly, sequence in
several series.

The primary arrangement has been by form--that is to say, that the
spears, bows, clubs, and other objects above mentioned, have each
been placed by themselves in distinct classes. Within each there is a
sub-class for special localities, and in each of these sub-classes, or
wherever a connexion of ideas can be traced, the specimens have been
arranged according to their affinities, the simpler on the left and the
successive improvements in line to the right of them. This arrangement
has been varied to suit the form of the room, or of the screens, or the
number of specimens, but in all cases the object kept in view has been,
as far as possible, to trace the succession of ideas.

This is the distinctive difference between my collection and most
others which I have seen, in which the primary arrangement has been
geographical, that is to say, all the arts of the same tribe or
nation have been placed together in one class, and within this there
may perhaps have been in some cases a sub-class for special arts or
special forms. Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages.
By a geographical or racial arrangement the general culture of each
distinct race is made the prominent feature of the collection, and it
is therefore more strictly _ethnological_, whereas in the arrangement
which I have adopted, the development of specific ideas and their
transmission from one people to another, or from one locality to
another, is made more apparent, and it is therefore of greater
_sociological_ value. Different points of interest are brought to
light by each, and, in my judgement, a great National Anthropological
Collection, should we ever possess such a desideratum, can never be
considered complete until it embraces two series, arranged upon these
two distinct systems.

Following the orthodox scientific principle of reasoning from the known
to the unknown, I have commenced my descriptive catalogue with the
specimens of the arts of existing savages, and have employed them, as
far as possible, to illustrate the relics of primaeval men, none of
which, except those constructed of the more imperishable materials,
such as flint and stone, have survived to our time. All the implements
of primaeval man that were of decomposable materials have disappeared,
and can be replaced only in imagination by studying those of his
nearest congener, the modern savage.

This being the system adopted, one of the first points to which I
desire to invite your attention is the question, to what extent the
modern savage truly represents primaeval man, or rather to what extent
may we take the arts of modern savages to represent those of the first
progenitors of our species?

In order to do this it is necessary to view the question in its
psychological aspects. This I shall touch upon as lightly as possible,
avoiding all technicalities, which in a cursory view of the matter,
might tend to confuse, and confining myself to those parts of the
subject which appear to have a direct bearing on evolution.

It is a matter of common observation that animals act by instinct, that
is to say, that in the construction of their habitations and other
arrangements for providing for their wants, they act intuitively, and
apparently without the intervention of reason; and that the things
which they construct, though often of a more or less complex character,
are usually of a fixed type; that they are repeated by nearly all
animals of the same kind with but little variety; and that within the
limited space of time during which we are able to observe them, they do
not appear to be susceptible of progress, although evidence has been
adduced to show that animals, even in a wild state, do change their
habits to a certain extent with the change of external conditions.

On the other hand, we recognize in many animals the operation of a
reasoning mind. In their efforts to escape, or when conditions of a
novel character are presented to them, they act in a manner that shows
clear evidence of intelligence, although they show this to a very
limited extent as compared with man. We also know that habits acquired
by animals during domestication, or taught them by the exercise
of their reasoning faculties, become instinctive in them, and are
inherited in their offspring, as in the familiar case of the pointer
dog. We also know that under domestication animals lose the instincts
acquired in a wild state.

In the human mind we recognize the presence of all these phenomena,
only in a different degree. We are conscious of an intellectual mind
capable of reasoning upon unfamiliar occurrences, and of an automaton
mind capable of acting intuitively in certain matters without effort
of the will or consciousness. And we know that habits acquired by the
exercise of conscious reason, by constant habit, become automatic,
and then they no longer require the exercise of conscious reason to
direct the actions, as they did at first; as, for example, the habit
of walking upright, which the child learns with pain and labour, but
in time performs without conscious effort of the mind. Or the habit
of reading and writing, the learning of which requires a strong and
continuous effort of the intellect, but which in time becomes so
completely automatic that it becomes possible to read a whole page
aloud whilst the intellectual mind is conscious of being engaged in
other things.

We perceive clearly that this automatic action of the brain is
dependent on frequent repetition by the intellectual brain, as in
the familiar case of learning by heart; and also that the transfer
of the action from the intellectual to the automaton brain--if
indeed there are separate portions of the brain allotted to these
separate functions, as appears probable--is a gradual and not a sudden
process, and that there are intermediate stages in which an action
may be performed partly by direction of the intellect and partly
automatically. This is shown in the case of a person who, wishing to
make an effective speech at a public meeting, reasons out his address
carefully, and then learns it partially by heart. When the time comes
to address the assembly, the speech having been partly referred to the
automaton brain, the intellect is relieved from action, and, being
unoccupied, is apt to wander and engage itself in other matters that
are passing at the time; but the automaton brain, being insufficiently
prepared to bear the whole responsibility, is unable to continue, and
the intellectual brain, having already started on a journey elsewhere,
is unable to return quick enough to take up the thread of the
discourse. The result is that the would-be orator breaks down pitiably
in the middle of his speech, owing to his having learnt his lesson too
well for one function of his mind, and not well enough for the other.
The same is seen in many business transactions, which, from frequent
repetition, become what is called a second nature, and in the conduct
of which the conscious intellect is partly freed from the control of
the actions.

We see also that both automatic and intellectual activity are inherited
in different degrees by different persons. Thus it is a matter of
common observation that there are some persons who are able to acquire
with great facility the power of conversing upon simple subjects in
many different languages, whilst upon more complex subjects, requiring
intellectual effort, they never acquire the power of conversing in any
language. Thus, also, it is frequently seen that some children show
a remarkable aptitude for learning in their youth. It is said to be
a pleasure to educate them; everything speedily becomes automatic in
them; great hopes are entertained of their future prospects; but they
frequently become a grievous disappointment to their parents, who have
built castles in the air upon the strength of their apparent precocity,
whereas an acute observer might have seen that they had never from the
first showed signs of great intellectual capacity. On the other hand,
we hear of dunces who are the despair of their tutors, who can with
difficulty be taught to read and write and spell, but in after years
become philosophers and scientists, all which might have been foretold
from the first if the system of education had been such as to call
forth the intellectual powers.

It is not merely that some inherit automatic capacity whilst in others
the capacity is intellectual. There is, without doubt, in both cases
an hereditary capacity for special things. Thus, whilst some acquire
a knowledge of music with facility, others can never be made to
appreciate a note of music, and so with respect to other arts.

How then are we to account for this innate indifference in the
capacity of individuals, unless by supposing it to be proportioned
to the length of time during which, or the degree of intensity with
which, the ancestors of the individuals have had their minds occupied
in the particular branch of culture for which capacity is shown?
Unfortunately the difficulty of tracing the channel of hereditary
transmission stands in the way of obtaining any certainty on this
point, although the labours of our Vice-President, Mr. Galton, have
already thrown much light on this interesting subject. But on this
assumption, it is easy to account for the more perfect action of
instinct in the lower animals than in men, when it is considered
that the minds of their progenitors must have been confined to the
experience of those particular things for which instinct is shown, far
longer than is the case with man; and this brings us to the point which
has an important bearing upon the question before us, viz. that every
action which is now performed by instinct, has at some former period in
the history of the species been the result of conscious experience.

But, in adopting this theory, it is not necessary to assume that the
ideas themselves have been communicated by hereditary transmission.
The doctrine of innate ideas, exploded by Locke, I believe, can never
again establish itself. What is inherited is no doubt a certain
organization of the nervous system, which, by repeated use through
many generations, aided by natural selection, has become exquisitely
adapted to the recognition of experience of a particular kind, and
which, by the constant renovation that is going on within the body,
has grown in harmony with those experiences, so that, when the spring
is touched, as it were, the machinery is at once set in motion; but,
until the necessary external conditions are presented to the mind,
there can be no consciousness of them in the mind. The mind creates
nothing apart from experience; its function is limited to building with
the materials presented to it through the medium of the senses. The
broader the basis of experience, the more lofty the superstructure that
can be raised upon it. Or, to use the words of Mr. Herbert Spencer[4],
‘the supposition that the inner cohesions are adjusted to the outer
persistencies by accumulated experience of these outer persistencies,
is in harmony with all our actual knowledge of mental phenomena. Though
in so far as reflex actions and instincts are concerned, the experience
hypothesis seems insufficient; yet, its seeming insufficiency occurs
only where the evidence is beyond our reach. Nay, even here, such few
facts as we can get, point to the conclusion that automatic physical
connexions result from the registration of experiences continued for
numberless generations.’ And further on he says: ‘In the progress of
life at large, as in the progress of the individual, the adjustment of
inner tendencies to outer persistencies must begin with the simple and
advance to the complex, seeing that, both within and without, complex
relations, being made up of simple ones, cannot be established before
simple ones have been established.’

From the foregoing considerations it follows that, in studying the
evidence of intellectual progress, the phenomena which we may expect
to observe are--firstly, a continuous succession of ideas; secondly,
that the complexity of the ideas will be in an increasing ratio in
proportion to the time; and thirdly, that the tendency to automatic
action upon any given set of ideas will be in proportion to the length
of time during which the ancestors of the individual have exercised
their minds in those particular ideas. Hence it follows, as a corollary
to this, that at the present time the tendency to automatic action
will be greater in the lower animals than in the higher, because the
minds of their progenitors have been exercised in the simple ideas, for
which instinct is shown, for a greater length of time than those of the
higher animals, amongst whom the simpler ideas have, at a comparatively
recent period in the history of the race, been replaced, or otherwise
modified, by ideas of a more complex character, which latter have not
yet had time to become instinctive. And this is in accordance with what
is practically observed in nature.

Now, in applying these principles to the study of progress in man, we
must expect to find that the phenomena observed will be in proportion
to the spaces of time we have to deal with in treating of man as
compared with animals in general.

Assuming this psychological standard of humanity to have been at the
level at which we find the highest of the lower animals that exist at
the present time, we may suppose primaeval man to have been so far
acquainted with the use of tools as to be able to employ a stone for
the purpose of cracking the shells of nuts, but incapable of trimming
the stone into any form that would answer his purpose better than that
into which it had been shaped by rolling in a river bed or upon the
seashore.

By the repeated use of stones for this and similar purposes, it would
be found that, as Sir John Lubbock has pointed out, they sometimes
split in the hand, and that the sharp edges of the fractured portions
were more serviceable than the stones before fracture. By constant
repetition of the same occurrence, there would grow up in the mind of
the creature an association of ideas between the fracture of the stone
and the saving of labour effected by the fractured portion, and also a
sequence of ideas by which it would be perceived that the fracture of
the stone was a necessary preliminary to the other, and ultimately, by
still continued repetition, the creature would be led to perform the
motions which had been found effectual in cracking the stone before
applying it to the purposes for which it was to be used. So also in
using the various natural forms of the branches of trees which fell
into his hands, it would be found that particular forms were of use
for particular purposes; and by constant repetition there would arise
an association of ideas between those forms and the purposes for which
they were useful, and he would begin to select them for such purposes;
and in proportion to the length of time during which this association
of ideas continued to exist in the minds of successive generations of
the creatures which we may now begin to call men, would be the tendency
on the part of the offspring to continue to select and use these
particular forms, more or less instinctively--not, indeed, with that
unvarying instinct which in animals arises from the perfect adaptation
of the internal organism to external condition, but with that modified
instinct which assumes the form of a _persistent conservatism_.

‘The savage,’ says Mr. Tylor, ‘is firmly, obstinately conservative.
No man appeals with more unhesitating confidence to the great
precedent-makers of the past; the wisdom of his ancestors can control
against the most obvious evidence of his own opinions and actions.’

In a similar manner mankind would be led to the conception of many
other ideas, but of the majority of them no record would be preserved;
it is only where the ideas have been associated with material forms
that any record of them would be kept in prehistoric times; and this
brings us to what I conceive to be the object of an anthropological
collection--to trace out, by means of the only evidence available, the
sequence of ideas by which mankind has advanced from the condition of
the lower animals to that in which we find him at the present time, and
by this means to provide really reliable materials for a philosophy of
progress. We may not be able to find in these objects any associations
that may lead us to form an estimate of the highest aspirations of
the mind at any period of its development, but their importance to
anthropologists consists in their value as evidence. Affording us
as they do the only available evidence of man in his most primitive
condition, they are well worthy of our attention, in order that by
studying their grammar, we may be able to conjugate their forms.

Yet, although our data are thus limited to the material arts of
mankind, only a small portion of those of prehistoric races are
available for our purpose. As already said, only those tools and
implements which were constructed of durable materials have remained;
the rest have perished, and we have only the implements of existing
savages by which to judge of them. The question, therefore, is, to what
extent they may be taken as the representatives of the implements of
prehistoric men, seeing that in point of time they are contemporaneous
with the arts of the most civilized races, and not with those of
prehistoric races.

Scattered over the world in various localities are savage races
showing various degrees of culture, some higher and some lower than
others, many of which have now been greatly influenced by contact with
civilized races, but of the majority of which we have more or less
detailed records, dating from the time of their first discovery by
Europeans, when their arts may be regarded as indigenous, or, at any
rate, free from any admixture with the arts of civilized races.

If these savage races have been degraded from a higher condition of
culture, then, seeing that sequence of ideas is necessary to the
existence of any ideas whatever, we must inevitably find traces in
their arts of those higher arts from which they descended. But if, on
the other hand, they have risen from a lower state, and their present
savage condition arises from their having advanced less rapidly than
those races which are now above them in the social scale, then what are
the conditions which we must expect to find prevailing amongst them?

We shall find, firstly, that the forms of their implements, instead of
showing evidence of having been derived from higher and more complex
forms, will, in proportion to the low state of their civilization, show
evidence of being derived from natural forms, such as might have been
employed by man before he had learnt the art of modifying them to his
uses; and secondly, we shall find that the persistency of the forms is
proportioned to the low state of their culture.

Now this is found to be the case with nearly every race of savages of
whose condition we have any knowledge. Lowest amongst the existing
races of the world of whom we have any accurate knowledge are the
Australians. All their weapons assimilate to the forms of nature; all
their wooden weapons are constructed on the grain of the wood, and
consequently their curves are the curves of the branches out of which
they were constructed. In every instance in which I have attempted to
arrange my collection in sequence, so as to trace the higher forms
from natural forms, the weapons of the Australians have found their
place lowest in the scale, because they assimilate most closely to the
natural forms.

Of this many examples may be given. I will not now again enter into the
history of the boomerang, to which I have already drawn the attention
of the Society on former occasions. Those who wish to see the subject
treated in greater detail will find it discussed in my catalogue of
the collection, in which are also given the authorities for many facts
that are mentioned here, and which the limits of time and space do
not enable me to quote at length. Suffice to say that the whole of
the Australian weapons can be traced by their connecting links to the
simple stick, such as might have been used by an ape or an elephant
before mankind appeared upon this earth, and I have arranged them so as
to show this connexion on the screens. Here also we are able to trace
the development of the idea of a shield to cover the body, which in
its simplest form is a simple parrying-stick held in the centre, and
which expands gradually into an oval shield. It is also shown upon the
screens how the simple waddy, or club with a lozenge-shaped head, by a
gradual development of one side, grew into a kind of wooden hatchet,
which ultimately became converted into a hatchet-boomerang.

The whole of the Australian weapons, without exception, are of this
simple character, and in proof of the persistency with which this
nation has continued to employ the same forms, no further evidence
is necessary than the fact that they are the same, with but slight
variations, over the whole continent. The slight differences between
them, as Mr. Oldfield has pointed out, are so minute as scarcely to
be perceptible to a European, but sufficient to enable a native to
determine at a glance from what locality any specimen that may be shown
him has been obtained.

But although all the connecting forms between the forms of nature
and the more advanced forms are found amongst the _existing_ weapons
of these savages, we are not to assume from this that the whole of
the progress observed has been effected in modern times. The whole
sequence of ideas connecting these weapons (which are now constructed
in a manner to show that the art of producing them is partly
automatic) was reasoned out by such processes of the mind as stood for
reason, at various former periods in the history of the race, each
successive improvement constituting a link in the chain of progressive
development. Each link has left its representatives, which, with
certain modifications, have survived to the present time; and it is by
the means of these _survivals_, and not by the links themselves, that
we are able to trace out the sequence that has been spoken of.

This is the hypothesis put forward, and which I profess to justify by
the facts accumulated in this collection.

Every form marks its own place in sequence by its relative complexity
or affinity to other allied forms, in the same manner that every word
in the science of language has a place assigned to it in the order of
development or phonetic decay.

If there is such a thing as a science of language, and none can doubt
it, who shall affirm that there is no such thing as a science of the
arts? Language, it is true, embraces a wider sphere, and includes the
arts; but, on the other hand, it is liable to sources of uncertainty
for the purposes of science, from which the arts are free. Language
is impalpable, invisible to the eye, except through the medium of a
written character, which may or may not accurately express the sounds,
and subject to acoustic changes in the collection of the materials,
which are a perpetual cause of error and misclassification.

In tracing the development of the material arts, on the other hand,
we have, in the earliest periods, the support of collateral evidence
afforded by the fauna with which they are associated and by geological
sequence, all which is wanting in the science of language.

Why, then, has language hitherto received more scientific treatment
than the arts? Merely on account of the greater facility with which the
data are collected. Whilst words take seconds to record, hours and days
may be spent in the accurate delineation of form. Words cost nothing,
are packed in folios, transmitted by post, and stored on the shelves
of every private library. A million classified words may be carried in
the coat pocket without inconvenience, whilst a hundredth part of that
number of material objects require a museum to contain them, and are
accessible only to a few. This is the reason why the arts have never
been subjected to those classifications which form the groundwork of a
science.

Then, again, in approaching prehistoric times, or in studying modern
savages who represent prehistoric man, language loses its persistency,
or fails us altogether. Although, in an advanced stage of civilization,
especially when it has been committed to writing, it affords the
surest test of culture, this is certainly not the case with the
lowest savages, amongst whom language changes so rapidly that even
neighbouring tribes cannot understand one another. And if this is the
case in respect to language, still more strongly does it apply to all
ideas that are communicated by word of mouth. In endeavouring to trace
back prehistoric culture to its root forms, we find that in proportion
as the value of language and of the ideas conveyed by language
diminishes, that of ideas embodied in material forms increases in
stability and permanence. Whilst in the earliest phases of humanity the
names for things change with every generation if not more frequently,
the things themselves are handed down unchanged from father to son and
from tribe to tribe, and many of them have continued to our own time,
faithful records of the condition of the people by whom they were
fabricated.

Of the antiquity of savages we at present know little or nothing;
but when archaeologists have exhausted the antiquities of civilized
countries, a wide and interesting field of research will be open to
them in the study of the antiquities of savages, which are doubtless to
be discovered in their surface and drift deposits; and if the stability
of their form has been such as we have reason to believe, we shall then
be able to arrive at something like certainty in respect to the degree
of slowness or rapidity, as well as the order, in which they have been
developed.

Leaving now the Australians, and turning to other existing races in
a higher, though still in a low, stage of civilization, such as, for
example, the Fijians, who at the time of their discovery were still in
the stone age, we find, on examining the forms of their implements,
that we are in a higher stratum of culture, the characteristics of
which correspond exactly to what might have been expected to be found
on the principle of gradual evolution. The forms of their tools and
weapons present the same connexions of form between themselves as
amongst those of the Australians, but they are of a more complex
type, and are no longer directly traceable to the natural forms of
the limbs of trees, &c. The links of connexion between weapons of the
same kind are as close as before, but in their varieties they present
forms so singular as scarcely to make it possible to infer that they
were designed for the purposes of use. They appear rather to have
varied through the instrumentality of some law of succession similar
to that by which species of animals have been evolved. In many cases,
indeed, the sequence of ideas has led to the use of forms that are
absolutely unserviceable as weapons and tools, and human selection,
corresponding to natural selection, appears to have retained for use
only such forms as could be employed, whilst the others have been
consigned to state purposes or applied to symbolic uses. In many cases
we find that their clubs have been converted into the forms of animals’
heads, and in all such cases (and there are several in the collection)
we see, by grouping a sufficient number of like forms together, that
those which are in the shape of animals’ heads have not been designed
for the purpose of representing animals’ heads, but their forms have
simply been evolved during the numerous variations which the weapon
has undergone in the process of development, and when the idea of an
animal’s head suggested itself, it has merely been necessary to add an
eye, or a line for the mouth, in order to give them the resemblance in
question. Examples of this may be seen in the collection of specimens
from Africa, New Caledonia, New Zealand, and Solomon Isles.

In ornamentation, the stability of form is very remarkable. Particular
forms of ornamentation fix themselves on a tribe or nation, and are
repeated over and over again with but little variation of detail, as,
for example, in the case of the coil and broken coil ornaments amongst
the New Zealanders and the inhabitants of New Guinea, which were
probably derived from Assam, or the representation of the head of an
albatross amongst the Indians of the north-west coast of North America,
or that of a human head amongst the inhabitants of New Ireland.

In the transformations of this latter ornament, which I took occasion
to bring to the notice of the meeting of the Anthropological Department
of the British Association at Brighton in 1872[5], and which are
represented in Plate IV, we see a remarkable example of degradation of
form, produced by gradual changes, caused by these people in copying
from one another until the original design is lost. The representation
of a human figure is here seen to lose gradually its limbs and body,
then the sides of the face, leaving only the nose and ears, and
ultimately the nose only, which finally expands at the base, and is
converted into the representation of a half moon. In this sequence we
have an exact parallel to the transformations observed upon ancient
British coins by Mr. Evans[6], by which a coin of Philip of Macedon,
representing a chariot and horses, becomes converted by a succession
of similar changes into the representation of a single horse, and
ultimately into fragments of a horse. Other examples of similar
transformations from other countries are also shown.

Amongst other advantages of the arrangement by form, is the facility it
affords for tracing the distribution of like forms and arts, by which
means we can determine the connexion that has existed in former times
between distant countries, either by the spread of race, or culture, or
by means of commerce. Thus I have been able to trace the distribution
of the bow over a large area, with evidence of its having spread from a
common centre. In the Asiatic islands and the Pacific, the line of its
southern boundary is very clearly defined, marking off as non-bow-using
races the whole of the inhabitants of Australia except Cape York,
Tasmania, and formerly New Zealand and New Caledonia. Above this line
the use of the bow spread from the Asiatic isles, and its transmission
to the Papuan and Polynesian isles is due to the Malays, the Malay
word for it--viz. ‘panna’--being used over the whole of the region in
question with but slight variations.

In the southern hemisphere, where suitable materials for the
construction of it are abundant, the bow is of the form of the arcus,
or simple arch; but in the frigid regions to the north, there are large
tracts in Europe, Asia, and America which are either totally destitute
of trees, or covered with coniferous forests, yielding few if any
woods that have sufficient spring for the construction of a bow, and
there is reason to believe, from the traces of forests discovered at
low levels beneath the soil in various places, that this inhospitable
region extended more to the southward in ancient prehistoric times.
In such a region it is unlikely that the invention of the bow should
have originated, and when the knowledge of it was communicated from the
south, it would be necessary to employ some other elastic material to
combine with the stiff pinewood, and give it the necessary elasticity;
hence the composite bow, which is the bow of the northern hemisphere,
and which consists of a combination of wood and sinew, or wood and
bone. In its varieties I have traced this bow over the whole of the
northern hemisphere, including Lapland, Siberia, and the northern
part of North America. It is the bow of the ancient Persians and
Scythians. The northern people carried it into India and into China,
and also eastward into America, where its distribution is traced in two
channels, one extending along the region inhabited by the Esquimaux
into Greenland, and the other along the west coast as far south as
California; and throughout the region mentioned, its varieties show it
to have sprung from a common prototype.

Here also I may select, from amongst other illustrations of the same
kind that are to be found, a single example of the manner in which the
implements of modern savages may be made to explain the construction of
those of races of antiquity, described upon their monuments. Quivers
for arrows do not admit of much variety by which to trace improvement,
and for this reason they must have continued unchanged in form much
longer than contrivances which were susceptible of development; but
the combination of quiver and bow case in one, may be traced over the
whole of the region of the composite bow, the sinews of which made
it necessary that it should be kept dry. Mr. Rawlinson, in his _Five
Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World_ (London, 1864, vol.
ii. p. 57), gives an illustration of an Assyrian quiver taken from
ancient sculptures at Khorsabad. ‘It had an ornamental rod attached to
it, which projected beyond the arrows and terminated in a pomegranate
blossom or other similar carving. To this rod were attached the rings
which received the strap by which it was suspended to the shoulders.’
The learned author adds: ‘It is uncertain whether the material of the
quivers was wood or metal.’ The conventional mode of representing
these objects and the imperfect command which the Assyrians had over
the hard stone of the sculptures, give to the majority of the objects
represented, the appearance of having been constructed of some hard
material, as is clearly seen in the case of the hair and drapery; but,
on turning to the quivers now used by the Indians of California, we at
once see that the material of the quiver is explained by the form and
position of the above-mentioned rod, which is fastened on the outside
of it for the purpose of keeping the _limp_ skin bag that contains the
arrows stiff and straight, and thereby enabling the bowman to draw out
his arrows with the necessary rapidity. And this enables us clearly to
understand why, as stated by Mr. Rawlinson, not a single example of
a quiver was found in the Assyrian excavations. In the Californian,
as in the Assyrian quivers, the rod extends beyond the quiver, and is
probably intended to guard the arrows from injury.

It is unnecessary in this place to add to the number of examples. The
object of this paper, as already stated, is to explain the principles
of classification. For the evidence on which these principles are
based I must refer you to the catalogue. Whether these principles of
classification are correct or not is a matter of less consequence than
the arrangement of the facts, by which every person is enabled to form
his own idea of the manner in which progress has been evolved in early
times.

Human ideas, as represented by the various products of human industry,
are capable of classification into genera, species, and varieties, in
the same manner as the products of the vegetable and animal kingdoms,
and in their development from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous they
obey the same laws. If, therefore, we can obtain a sufficient number
of objects to represent the succession of ideas, it will be found that
they are capable of being arranged in museums upon a similar plan.

The resemblance between the arts of modern savages and those of
primaeval man may be compared to that existing between recent and
extinct species of animals. As we find amongst existing animals and
plants, species akin to what geology teaches us were primitive species,
and as among existing species we find the representatives of successive
stages of geological species, so amongst the arts of existing savages
we find forms which, being adapted to a low condition of culture, have
survived from the earliest times, and also the representatives of
many successive stages through which development has taken place in
times past. As amongst existing animals and plants, these survivals
from different ages give us an outline picture of a succession of
gradually improving species, but do not represent the true sequence by
which improvement has been effected, so, amongst the arts of existing
people in all stages of civilization, we are able to trace a succession
of ideas from the simple to the complex, but not the true order of
development by which those more complex arrangements have been brought
about. As amongst existing species of animals, innumerable links are
wanting to complete the continuity of structure, so amongst the arts
of existing peoples there are great gaps which can only be filled
by prehistoric arts. What the palaeontologist does for zoology, the
prehistorian does for anthropology. What the study of zoology does
towards explaining the structures of extinct species, the study of
existing savages does towards enabling us to realize the condition of
primaeval man. To continue the simile further, the propagation of new
ideas may be said to correspond to the propagation of species. New
ideas are produced by the correlation of previously existing ideas in
the same manner as new individuals in a breed are produced by the union
of previously existing individuals. And in the same manner as we find
that the crossing of animals makes it extremely difficult to trace
the channel of hereditary transmission of qualities in a breed, so the
crossing of ideas in this manner makes it extremely difficult to trace
the sequence of ideas, although we may be certain that sequence does
exist as much in one case as in the other.

Continuing still further the simile, we find that, as in the breeding
of animals, when the divergence of races has gone so far as to
constitute what is called distinct species, they cannot interbreed,
so when the development of ideas has run in distinct channels far
enough to create a hiatus, no intercommunication can take place. Two
men of very different culture may travel in the same coach together,
and, though speaking the same language, may find themselves unable
to communicate except upon commonplace topics in which the simple
ideas are common to both. Or two nations in very different stages of
civilization may be brought side by side, as is the case in many of our
colonies, but there can be no amalgamation between them. Nothing but
the vices and imperfections of the superior culture can coalesce with
the inferior culture without break of sequence.

Progress is like a game of dominoes--like fits on to like. In neither
case can we tell beforehand what will be the ultimate figure produced
by the adhesions; all we know is that the fundamental rule of the game
is _sequence_.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] A Paper read at a Special Meeting of the Anthropological Institute
of Great Britain and Ireland on July 1, 1874, on the occasion of the
opening of the Anthropological Collection to the public: and published
in the _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, iv (1875), pp.
293-308.

[4] _The Principles of Psychology_ (London, 1881), i.^3 pp. 424-6.

[5] Address to the Department of Anthropology--Report of the British
Association, 1872 (London, 1873), p. 168.

[6] _The Coins of the Ancient Britons_, by John Evans, F.R.S. (1864),
pp. 24-32.




ON THE EVOLUTION OF CULTURE

(1875)[7]


If we accept the definition of the term science as ‘organized common
sense’, we necessarily reject the idea of it as a ‘great medicine’
applicable only to particular subjects and inapplicable to others;
and we assume that all those things which call forth the exercise
of our common sense are capable of being scientifically dealt with,
according as the knowledge which we pretend to have about them is based
on evidence in the first place, and in the sequel is applied to the
determination of what, for want of a better word, we call general laws.

But in using this term ‘law’, we do not employ it in the sense of a
human law, as a regulating or governing principle of anything, but
merely as deduction from observed phenomena. We use it in the sense of
a result, rather than a cause of what we observe, or at most we employ
it to express the operation of proximate causes; and of the ultimate
causes for the phenomena of nature we know nothing at all.

Further, in this development of the principle of common sense it has
been said that the inductive sciences pass through three phases, which
have been termed the empirical, the classificatory, and the theoretical.

Of these, the first or empirical stage may be defined as representing
that particular phase of unorganized common sense in which our
knowledge is simply a record of the results of ordinary experience,
such as might be acquired by any savage or uneducated person in his
dealings with external nature.

But as this condition of knowledge might perhaps be denied the claim to
be considered scientific, it might be better perhaps to extend the term
so as to embrace all that can be included under a practical knowledge
of the subjects treated, in which these subjects are studied for their
own sakes, or on account of their practical uses to man, and not with
a view to generalizing upon them.

In this way it may be said that agriculture represents the empirical
or practical stage of botany; mining, that of geology; hunting and the
domestication of animals, that of zoology; the trade of the butcher,
that of anatomy; navigation by means of the stars, that of astronomy.

Passing now over the boundary line which separates what are generally
recognized as the physical sciences from the science of culture, in
which the subjects treated are emanations from the human mind, we find
that these also have their corresponding phases of development.

Commencing first with the science of language, which has been the
earliest and perhaps the most important branch of human culture the
study of which has been scientifically treated as yet, we find that
Professor Max Müller, in the series of lectures delivered in this
Institution in 1861-3,[8] has shown that the science of language
has its corresponding empirical or practical stage, in which it is
studied only for its own sake, or for its utility as a means of
intercommunication; not as a means of generalizing upon language as
a whole, but merely for the purpose of understanding the particular
languages which we wish to make use of in our intercourse with others.

In like manner passing from language to the particular department
of culture which, for the reasons to be explained hereafter, I
shall make the subject of this discourse, viz. the material arts, I
shall endeavour to show that there exists also in relation to them
a practical or empirical stage, which is the stage that we are now
in with respect to them, in which we may include the whole of the
constructive arts of mankind, from the simple flint knife to the most
complex machine of modern times, when viewed from the standpoint of
the mechanic or the artificer, not as subjects for generalization, but
merely from an utilitarian point of view.

There are many persons no doubt who regard utility, not as a primary
stage, but as the final and highest result of science. But the highest
achievements of science, even the highest practical achievements, would
never have been reached by the mere utilitarian. There is a force
within us by which we are moved in the direction of acquiring knowledge
for its own sake and for the sake of truth, regardless of any material
advantage to be derived from such knowledge. Sooner or later such
knowledge is sure to bear practical fruits, even though we may not live
to realize them.

It is in this spirit that men of science have advanced to the
second or classificatory stage, in which, with a view to higher
generalization, the subjects studied are grouped together according to
their affinities, and specific points of resemblance are taken as the
representatives of each class.

These classes are at first grouped round independent centres; but such
an arrangement of them, having no existence in reality, is purely
subjective and can only be transitional. The margins of the classes so
formed represent only the margins of our knowledge or our ignorance, as
the case may be.

By degrees, as the classes become extended, sub-classes are formed, and
they are seen to arrange themselves in the form of branches radiating
from a central stem. By still further observation, the stems of the
several classes are seen to tend towards each other, and we are led to
trace them to a point of union.

Thus from the classificatory or comparative we pass gradually into the
third stage, which I have spoken of as the theoretical, but which may
perhaps be more clearly defined as the evolutionary. By the use of this
term ‘evolutionary’ we make it apparent that our third stage is but a
development of the second, evolution being merely the necessary and
inevitable result of the extension of classification, implying greater
unity and broader generalizations.

These three stages then, the empirical or practical, the classificatory
or comparative, and the evolutionary, are applicable to the development
of all the inductive sciences.

But it has been held by some that a broad line of demarcation must
be drawn between the physical sciences properly so called, such as
zoology, botany, and geology, which deal with external nature, and
those sciences which have been termed historic, which deal with the
works of man.

This question has been ably treated by Professor Max Müller in the
series of lectures to which I have referred, a course of lectures
which must be regarded as a starting-point and basis of instruction for
all who follow after him in the same path.

But in claiming for the science of language, and for language only,
a place amongst the physical sciences, he has made admissions to
opponents which, in my humble judgement, ought not to be made, and
which are inconsistent with that more extended view of the subject by
which I contend that, if language, then all that comes under the head
of culture must be included amongst the physical sciences. Thus, for
example, we find him admitting this passage as a sound and reasonable
argument on the part of those who deny the claim of language to be
included amongst the physical sciences: ‘Physical science,’ he says,
‘deals with the work of God, historical science with the works of man.’

Now if in dealing with what are here termed the historical sciences,
we were to take the subjects of such sciences, as for example the arts
or language, implements or words, and were to regard them as entities
to be studied apart from their relation to mind, and were to endeavour
to deduce from them the laws by which they are related to each other,
it is evident that we should be dealing with a matter which could not
be correlated with the physical sciences; but such a course would be
absurd. It would be as absurd to speak of a boomerang as being derived
by inheritance from a waddy, as to speak of a word in Italian being
derived by inheritance from a corresponding word in Latin; these words
and these implements are but the outward signs or symbols of particular
ideas in the mind; and the sequence, if any, which we observe to
connect them together, is but the outward sign of the succession of
ideas in the brain. It is the mind that we study by means of these
symbols.

But of the particular molecular changes or other processes which
accompany the evolution of ideas in the mind, we know no more than
we do of the particular molecular changes and other processes which
accompany the evolution of life in nature, or the changes in chemistry.

If then we are to understand the expression ‘the work of God’ as
implying the direct action of ultimate causes, it is evident that
we are not in a position either to affirm or to deny or to make any
statement whatever respecting such ultimate causes, which may operate
either as directly or as indirectly in the one case as the other. We
know nothing about them, and therefore to invoke ultimate causes as a
reason for distinguishing between the sciences is to take up a position
which cannot be scientifically maintained.

With equal if not greater truth we may combat the assertion that the
science of culture is historical, whilst nature, on the other hand, as
dealt with by the physical sciences, is incapable of progress. However
valid this objection might have appeared during the empirical and
comparative stages of the physical sciences, it cannot be maintained,
since the researches of Darwin and others have fairly landed them in
their evolutionary phase. The principles of variation and natural
selection have established a bond of union between the physical and
culture sciences which can never be broken. History is but another
term for evolution. There are histories and histories, as any one may
determine who has read Green’s _Short History of the English People_,
and compared it with the kind of matter which passed for history in
his school days. But our position with regard to culture has always
been one which has forced on our comprehension the reality of progress,
whilst with respect to the slow progress of external nature, it has
been concealed from us, owing to the brief span of human existence and
our imperfect records of the past. The distinction, therefore, between
the sciences, as historical and non-historical, is but a subjective
delusion, and not an objective reality; and herein, I believe, lies the
secret of most of those errors that we have to contend with.

But the point in which I venture more particularly to differ from the
conclusions of the learned author of the _Science of Language_ is the
line which he has drawn between language and the other branches of
culture by including language amongst the physical sciences whilst he
excludes the rest. ‘If language,’ he says, ‘be the work of man in the
same sense in which a statue, a temple, a poem, or a law, are properly
called works of man, the science of language would have to be classed
as an historic science’; and again he says, ‘It is the object of these
lectures to prove that language is not a work of human art in the same
sense as painting, or building, or writing, or printing.’

In dealing with this question it is material, as regards the relative
claims of language and the arts to be studied as physical sciences,
to distinguish between the general and the particular. If it is said
that language as a whole is not a work of human design, the same may
with equal truth be said of the arts as a whole. A man who constructs
a building, a tool, or a weapon, can no more be said to have devised
a scheme of arts, than the introducer of a new word can be said to
have invented a language; but each particular word bears the impress
of human design as clearly as a weapon or a coin. A word may be said
to be a tool for the communication of thought, just as a weapon is an
implement of war.

But, says Professor Müller, ‘art, science, philosophy, religion, all
have a history; language or any other production of nature admits
only of growth.’ But unless it can be shown that words are entities
having the power of generating and producing other words, which arts,
tools, or weapons, do not possess, the word growth can only be applied
figuratively to language as it is to the arts, and in that case growth
and history are synonymous terms. But this is absurd. Words, as I said
before, are the outward signs of ideas in the mind, and this is also
the case with tools or weapons. Words are ideas expressed by sounds,
whilst tools are ideas expressed by hands; and unless it can be shown
that there are distinct processes in the mind for language and for the
arts they must be classed together.

But it is said, ‘language has the property of progressing gradually
and irresistibly, and the changes in it are completely beyond the
control of the free will of man.’ This, however, can only be accepted
relatively. We know that in certain phases of savage life the use of
particular words may be tabooed in the same manner that the use of
particular implements or weapons may be tabooed; but it would be quite
as hopeless for any individual to attempt to change the entire course
of the constructive arts as to change the form of a language; the
action of the individual man is limited in both cases to the production
of particular words or particular implements, which take their place
like bricks in a building.

Man is not the designer in the sense of an architect, but he is the
constructor in the sense of a brickmaker or a bricklayer.

But the difficulty of tracing fleeting words to their sources operates
to a great extent in effacing the action of the individual in language.
Words become public property before they are incorporated in a
language. It would be difficult to establish a system of patents for
new words. Here again we see that the line drawn between language and
the arts is a subjective delusion, not an objective reality. It is not
true that words do not originate with individual men, but merely that
we do not perceive it.

Modifications of words, like modifications in the forms of the
arts, result from the succession of ideas or other causes affecting
particular minds. They obtain acceptance through natural selection by
the survival of the fittest.

The chance which a new word or a new implement has of surviving depends
on the number of words or implements to be superseded, on their
relative importance to the art or the language, and the persistency
with which these superseded words or implements are retained. The truth
of this is seen in the fact that vocabularies change far more rapidly
than grammatical forms; because the same grammatical terminations are
employed with a large number of different words, and they are therefore
a more constant necessity of speech.

Hence early and barbaric languages may be connected by their
grammatical forms long after their vocabularies have entirely changed.
The same truth is seen in the fact admitted by philologists, that in
small communities new words and modifications of words gain more ready
acceptance than in large communities; because the struggle of the new
words for existence is less in small than in large communities, and the
dialects therefore change more rapidly. And the same causes influence
the transformations which take place in the arts. Objects in common
use change more slowly than those which are but little employed; the
difference is merely one of degree and not of kind.

In dealing with the arts, each separate contrivance occupies a larger
share of our attention, to the exclusion of any comprehensive survey
of them as a whole. The arts present themselves to our mental vision
on a larger scale, and we view them analytically; we are as it were in
the brickmaker’s yard seeing each brick turned out of hand, whereas in
dealing with language we see only the finished building; the details
are lost. We view language synthetically. The arts may be said to
present themselves to us as a sea beach in detached fragments; language
in the form of a compact sandstone. The empiric or the utilitarian may
deny that there is any resemblance between them; but the geologist
knows that the mode of deposition has been the same in both cases, and
he classes the whole as rocks.

Then again there are facilities for collecting and arranging the data
for the study of language which do not exist in the case of the arts.
Whilst words take seconds to record, hours and days may be spent in
the accurate delineation of form. Words cost nothing, may be packed
in folios, transmitted by post, and stored on the shelves of every
private library. Ten thousand classified words may be carried in
the coat pocket without inconvenience, whilst a tenth part of that
number of material objects require a museum to contain them, and are
accessible only to a few: this is the reason why the arts have never
been subjected to those classifications which form the groundwork of a
science.

But when we say that words and implements are both tools employed
for the expression of thought, it is important to bear in view one
difference between them, which has a practical bearing on the relative
value of the two studies as a means of tracing the evolution of culture
in prehistoric times and amongst savages. The word is the tool of the
ear, the implement the tool of the eye; and for this reason language is
the science of historic times, whilst the arts constitute the subject
of science to be studied in relation to prehistoric times.

Every new tool or weapon formed by the hand of man retains the same
form as long as it continues to exist; it may be handed from man to
man, from tribe to tribe, from father to son, from one generation
to another; or, buried in the soil, it may under special conditions
continue for untold ages without change of form, until in our time it
may be discovered and employed as evidence of the condition of the arts
at the time it was fabricated. Very different, however, is the history
of words. Each word coined by the exercise of the inventive faculty of
man to express an idea is liable to change as it passes from mouth to
ear. Its continued identity is dependent solely on memory, and it is
subject to phonetic and acoustic changes from which the forms of the
arts are exempt.

When by the invention of writing each word receives its equivalent in
forms that are appreciable to the sense of sight, it gains stability,
which places it on a footing of equality with the arts, and enables us
to trace with certainty the changes it has undergone; and therefore
in historic times language is the surest test of social contact that
we can have. But in prehistoric times, before it had acquired this
permanence through the invention of writing, the forms of language
were, to use Mr. Sayce’s expression, in a constant state of flux.

The truth of this is seen in the immense number of dialects and
languages employed by savages at the present time. Thus amongst the
one hundred islands occupied by the Melanesian race, the Bishop of
Wellington tells us, and his statement is confirmed by the late
lamented Bishop Patteson, that there are no less than two hundred
languages, differing so much that the tribes can have but very little
interchange of thought; and similar accounts are given of rapid changes
of language in Cambodia, Siberia, Central Africa, North, Central, and
South America.

The greater stability of the material arts as compared with the
fluctuations in the language of a people in a state of primaeval
savagery, is well shown by a consideration of the weapons of the
Australians, and the names by which they are known in the several parts
of that continent. These people, from the simplicity of their arts,
afford us the only living examples of what we may presume to have been
the characteristics of a primitive people. Their weapons are the same
throughout the continent; the shield, the throwing-stick, the spear,
the boomerang, and their other weapons differ only in being thicker,
broader, flatter, or longer, in different localities; but whether
seen on the east or the west coast, each of these classes of weapons
is easily recognized by its form and uses. On the other hand, amongst
the innumerable languages and dialects spoken by these people, it
would appear that almost every tribe has a different name for the same
weapon. The narrow parrying-shield, which consists of a piece of wood
with a place for the hand in the centre, in South Australia goes by
the name of ‘heileman’, in other parts it is known under the name of
‘mulabakka’, in Victoria it is ‘turnmung’, and on the west coast we
have ‘murukanye’ and ‘tamarang’ for the same implement very slightly
modified in size and form. Referring to the comparative table of
Australian languages compiled by the Rev. George Taplin, in the first
number of the _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_ (i, 1872, pp.
84-8), we find the throwing-stick, which on the Murray River is known
by the name of ‘yova’, on the Lower Darling is ‘yarrum’, in New South
Wales it is ‘wommurrur’, in Victoria ‘karrick’, on Lake Alexandrina
‘taralye’, amongst the Adelaide tribes of South Australia it is
‘midla’, in other parts of South Australia it is called ‘ngeweangko’,
and in King George’s Sound ‘miro’.

From these considerations we arrive at the conclusion that in the
earliest stages of culture the arts are far more stable than language:
whilst the arts are subject only, or chiefly, to those changes which
result from growth, language, in addition to those which result from
growth, is also affected by changes arising from phonetic decay.

The importance therefore of studying the grammar, so to speak, of the
arts becomes apparent, as it is by this means alone that we can trace
out the origin and evolution of culture in the earliest times.

The task before us is to follow by means of them the succession of
ideas by which the mind of man has developed, from the simple to the
complex, and from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous; to work out
step by step, by the use of such symbols as the arts afford, that
law of contiguity by which the mind has passed from simple cohesion
of states of consciousness to the association of ideas, and so on to
broader generalizations.

This development has to be considered under the two heads of culture
and constitution, that is to say, that we have to consider not only the
succession of ideas in the mind resulting from experience, but also the
development by inheritance of the internal organism of the mind itself,
or, to use the words of Mr. Herbert Spencer, ‘In the progress of life
at large, as in the progress of the individual, the adjustment of
inner tendencies to outer persistencies must begin with the simple and
advance to the complex, seeing that, both within and without, complex
relations, being made up of simple ones, cannot be established before
simple ones have been established’ (_Princ. of Psych._, i^3, p. 426).

We find no difficulty in assenting to the general proposition that
culture has been a work of progress. Our difficulty lies in realizing
the slow stages of its early development, owing to the complexities
both of our mental constitution and of the contemporaneous culture
from which experience is drawn, or, again to use Mr. Spencer’s more
expressive words, of our ‘inner tendencies’, and ‘outer persistencies’;
we are apt to regard as intuitive, if not congenital, many simple
ideas which in early culture can only have been worked out through the
exercise of experience and reason during a long course of ages.

We see this error of our own minds constantly displayed in the
education of children. The ideas in a child’s mind, like those of
mankind at large, are necessarily built up in sequence. The instructor
makes use of some word, the meaning of which is clearly understood
by him, but which does not fall into the sequence of the child’s
reasoning; the conception associated with it in the child’s mind must,
however, necessarily conform to such sequence. Hence a confusion of
ideas, which is often attributed to the stupidity of the child, but
which is in reality due to the inexperience of the instructor; as,
for instance, in the case exemplified by Pip, in Dickens’ _Great
Expectations_, who, having imbibed the precept that he was to ‘walk in
the same all the days of his life’, was led by his sequence of ideas to
infer therefrom that he was invariably to walk to school by the same
path, and on no account go round by the pastrycook’s.

And so in studying savages and early races whose mental development
corresponds in some degree to that of children, we have to guard
against this automorphism, as Mr. Spencer terms it; that is to say, the
tendency to estimate the capacity of others by our own, which appears
almost completely to incapacitate some people from dealing with the
subject.

The question of the free will of man enters largely into this study. I
shall not be expected to say much upon a subject which has so lately
occupied the attention of the public, having been discussed by some of
our ablest scientists; but I cannot avoid quoting, in reference to this
point, a passage from Dr. Carpenter’s _Mental Physiology_, who in this
controversy is certainly entitled to be regarded as the champion of
free will; and therefore by quoting him we run no risk of overstating
the case against free will. ‘Our mental activity,’ he says (p. 25), is
‘entirely spontaneous or automatic, being determined by our congenital
nervous organism.... It may be stated as a fundamental principle that
the will can never originate any form of mental activity....’ But
it has the power, he continues, of selecting any one out of several
objects that present themselves either simultaneously or successively
before the mental vision, and of so limiting and intensifying the
impression which that particular object makes upon the consciousness,
that all others shall be for the time non-existent to it.

The truth of this, in so far as regards the limitation of the will,
cannot fail to force itself upon the student of culture. It is,
I venture to think, by classifying and arranging in evolutionary
order the actual facts of the manifestations of mind, as seen in the
development of the arts, institutions, and languages of mankind, no
less than by comparative anatomy, and far more than by metaphysical
speculation, that we shall arrive at a solution of the question,
to what extent the mental Ego has been, to use Professor Huxley’s
expression, a conscious spectator of what has passed.

I propose, therefore, with your permission, to give a few examples,
by means of diagrams, of material evolution derived from the earliest
phases of culture. In language and in all ideas communicated by word
of mouth there is a hiatus between the limits of our knowledge and the
origin of culture which can never be bridged over, but we may hold in
our hand the first tool ever created by the hand of man.

It has been said that the use of speech is the distinctive quality of
man. But how can we know that? We are literally surrounded by brute
language. We can imitate their calls, and we find that animals will
respond to our imitations of them. But who has ever seen any of the
lower animals construct a tool and use it.

The conception of man, not as a tool-_using_ but as a tool-_making_
animal, is clear, defined, and unassailable; probably if we could
trace language to its sources, we should be able to draw the same line
between natural sounds employed as a medium of communication, and the
created word. Thus the arts which we can study may perhaps be taken to
illustrate the origin of language, which we cannot study in this phase.

The ape employs both sticks and stones as missiles and as hammers to
crack the shells of nuts. But we have no evidence that he ever selects
special forms for special uses. The arts therefore afford us a clearly
defined starting-point for the commencement of culture.

To go in search of a particular form of stick or stone in order to
apply it to a particular use would require greater effort of the will
in fixing attention continuously on the matter in hand than is found to
exist amongst the lower animals except in cases of instinct, which term
I understand to mean an inherited congenital nervous organism which
adapts the mind to the ready reception of experience of a particular
kind. But this instinct does not exist in the case in question; there
is no tool-making instinct: our tool has to be evolved through reason
and experience, without the aid of any special organism for the purpose.

The process we have to assume therefore is that, in using stones as
hammers, they would occasionally split. In using certain stratified
rocks this would occur frequently, and so force itself on the attention
of the creature. The creature going on hammering, it would force itself
on his notice that the sharp fractured end was doing better work than
before. It would be perceived that there were hard things and soft
things, that the hard things split the stone, and the soft things were
cut by it; and so there would grow up in the mind an association of
ideas between striking hard things and splitting, and striking soft
things and cutting, and also a sequence by which it would be perceived
that the fracture of the stone was a necessary preliminary to the
other; and in the course of many generations, during which the internal
organism of the mind grew in harmony with this experience, the creature
would be led to perform the motions which had been found effectual in
splitting the stone before applying it to the purposes for which it was
to be used.

Thus we arrive at a state of the arts in which we may suppose man to
be able to construct a tool by means of a single blow. By constantly
striking in the same direction, flakes would be produced; and by still
further repeating the same motions, it would at last be found that by
means of many blows a stone could be chipped to an edge or a point so
as to form a very efficient tool.

But this continued chipping of the stone in order to produce a tool,
implies a considerable mental advance upon the effort of mind necessary
to construct a tool with one blow.

It implies continued attention directed by the will to the
accomplishment of an object already conceived in the mind, and its
subsequent application to another object which must also have been
conceived in the mind before the tool was begun.

Now we know from all experience, and from all evolution which we can
trace with certainty, that progress moves on in an accelerating ratio,
and that the earlier processes take longer than the later ones.

[Illustration: PLATE XII.

_Diagram 1._]

But the implements of the drift, which are the earliest relics of human
workmanship as yet recognized, are most of them multi-flaked tools,
such as the implements figured on Plate XII, Nos. 1-10, requiring a
considerable time to construct, and the use of innumerable blows in
order to trim to a point at one end.

It appears therefore evident that in the natural course of events
the drift period must have been preceded by an earlier period of
considerable extent characterized by the use of single-flaked tools.
And we may therefore consider it probable that should any evidences of
man be hereafter discovered in miocene beds, they will be associated
with such large rude flakes as those now exhibited, which require a
feebler effort of attention and of reason to construct.

If we examine the forms of the flint implements of the drift, we
find that out of many intermediate shapes we may recognize three in
particular, which have been minutely described by Mr. Evans in his
valuable work on the stone implements of Britain[9]: (1) a side-tool,
consisting of a flint chipped to an edge on one side and having the
natural rounded outside of the flint left on the other side, where it
appears to have been held in the hand; (2) a tongue-shaped implement
chipped to a point at one end, and having the rounded surface for the
hand at the big end; and (3) an oval or almond-shaped tool, which is
often chipped to an edge all round.

We have no evidence to show which of these kind of tools was the
earliest; but that they were employed for different uses there can be
little reason to doubt. But have we any evidence to throw light on the
way in which these several forms originated in the minds of men in the
very low condition of mental development which we may suppose to have
existed at the time?

About eight years ago, whilst examining the ancient British camps on
the South Downs, I chanced to discover in the camp of Cissbury, near
Worthing, a large flint factory of the neolithic age. There were some
sixty or more pits from which flints had been obtained from the chalk,
and these pits were full of the débris of the flint-workers. The
factory was of the neolithic age, the most characteristic tool of which
is the flint celt, a form which differs but slightly from the oval
or almond-shaped palaeolithic form, but the cutting edge of which is
more decidedly at the broad end. The débris, some six hundred or more
specimens of which were collected, consisted chiefly of these celts in
various stages of manufacture.

If any one will attempt to make a flint celt, as I have done sometimes
(and Mr. Evans, from whom I learnt that art, has done frequently), he
will find that it is difficult to command the fracture of the flint
with certainty; every now and then a large piece will come off, or a
flaw will be discovered which spoils the symmetry of the tool, and it
has to be thrown away. In arranging and classifying the remains of this
flint factory, I found that all the palaeolithic forms were represented
by one or other of these unfinished celts, so much so as to make it
doubtful whether some of them may not actually have been used like them.

A celt finished at the thin end, and abandoned before the cutting edge
was completed, represented a tongue-shaped palaeolithic implement; a
celt finished only on one side represented a palaeolithic side-tool;
and a celt rudely chipped out, and abandoned before receiving its
finishing strokes, represented almost exactly an oval palaeolithic
tool, only differing from it in being somewhat rougher, and showing
evidence of unfinish.

Taking a lesson then from this flint-worker’s shop of the later
neolithic age, we see how the earlier palaeolithic forms originated.
They were not designed outright, as the nineteenth-century man would
have designed them for special uses, but arose from a selection of
varieties produced accidentally in the process of manufacture. The
forms were also suggested by those of the nodules out of which they
were made. We see, by examining the outside surfaces that were left on
some of them, how a long thin nodule produced a long thin celt, a broad
thick nodule a broad thick celt, and so forth. Indeed, so completely
does the fabricator appear to have been controlled by the necessities
of his art, that in tracing these successive forms one is almost
tempted to ask whether the principle of causation lay mostly in the
flint or in the flint-worker, so fully do they bear out the statement
of Dr. Carpenter and the other physiologists, that nothing originates
in the free will of man.

[Illustration: PLATE I.]

[Illustration: PLATE II.]

On these two diagrams (Plates I and II) I have shown how, from the same
form of palaeolithic implement already described, the more complex
forms of the spear and axe-blade of the subsequent periods were
developed. The point developed into a spear, and the broad end into an
axe-blade. You will see by reference to Plate I that the oval tool of
the drift suggested the smaller leaf-shaped spear-head of the early
neolithic age. This, by a gradual straightening of the sides, became
the lozenge-shaped form, which latter developed into the barbed form,
and this last into the triangular form, which consists of barbs without
a tang.

On the other hand, this same oval tool of the drift (Plate II), when
used as an axe-blade with the broad end, became the celt of the
neolithic period, chipped only at first and subsequently polished. This
gave rise to the copper celt of the same form having convex surfaces,
which grew into the bronze celt with flat sides. Then the bronze celt
was furnished with a stop to prevent its being pressed too far into
the handle by the blow. Others were furnished with projecting flanges
to prevent them from swerving by the blow when hafted on a bent stick.
Others had both stops and flanges. By degrees the flanges were bent
over the stops and over the handle, and then the central portion above
the stops, being no longer required, became thinner, and ultimately
disappeared, the flanges closed on each other, and by this means the
weapon grew into the socket celt. On this socket celt you will see that
there is sometimes a semicircular ornamentation on each side. This
semicircular ornament, as I pointed out in a paper on primitive warfare
read some time ago, is a vestige of the overlapping flange of the
earlier forms out of which it grew, which, like the rings on our brass
cannon, are survivals of parts formerly serving for special uses (pp.
182-3 below).

In the vertical columns I have given, in the order of their
occurrence, the successive periods of prehistoric time, viz. the early
palaeolithic, late palaeolithic, early neolithic, late neolithic,
early bronze, late bronze and iron periods, beneath which I have placed
lines for two distinct phases of modern savage culture, viz. the
Australian and the American Indian. A cross beneath each form denotes
the periods in which they occur, and a vertical bar denotes that they
are of rare or doubtful occurrence; so that the sequence of development
may be seen at a glance, and it is only a glance that I ask you to take
at these diagrams on the present occasion. I have checked them with Mr.
Evans’ work and also with Sir William Wilde’s Catalogue,[10] and I do
not think that any of the statements made in them will be challenged;
but as these forms were not developed for the purpose of filling in the
spaces in rectangular diagrams, such diagrams only imperfectly convey
an idea of the evolution which has taken place, and must be regarded
only as provisional and liable to be improved.

In tracing the evolution of prehistoric implements, we are of course
limited to such as were constructed of imperishable materials. No doubt
our prehistoric ancestors used also implements of wood, but they have
long since disappeared; and if we wish to form an idea of what they
were, we must turn to those of his nearest congener, the modern savage.

In speaking of savages, the question of progression versus degeneration
is probably familiar to most of those present, through the writings of
Sir John Lubbock and Mr. E. B. Tylor. To the several weighty arguments
in favour of progression given by those writers I will add this one
derived from the sequence of ideas.

If the Australians, for example, were the degenerate descendants of
people in a higher phase of culture, then, as all existing ideas are
made up of previous ideas, we must inevitably find amongst their arts
traces of the forms of earlier and higher arts, as is the case amongst
some of the savages of South America who early came in contact with
Peruvian civilization; but the reverse of this is the case: all the
forms of the Australian weapons are derived from those of nature.

In the same way that we saw that the forms of the palaeolithic flint
implements were suggested by accidental fractures in the workshop, so
the several forms of the Australian wooden implements were suggested
by the various forms of the stems and branches out of which they were
made. These savages, having only flint tools to work with, cannot
saw out their weapons to any form they please; they can only trim
the sticks into a serviceable shape. All their weapons are therefore
constructed on the grain of the wood, and their forms and uses have
arisen from a selection of the natural curves of the sticks.

[Illustration: PLATE III.]

I have arranged, on Plate III, drawings of nearly all the weapons used
by the Australians, placing them together according to their affinities
in such a manner as to show hypothetically their derivation from a
single form. As all the forms given on this diagram are drawings of
weapons in use at the present time, and there are many intermediate
forms not given here, I have not arranged them in horizontal lines,
as in the previous diagrams, to show their place in time, but have
arranged them as radiating from a central point. We know nothing of
the antiquities of savage countries as yet, and therefore cannot trace
their evolution in time. The development has therefore been shown by
means of survivals of early forms existing at the present time.

In the centre I have placed the simple cylindrical stick, as being
the simplest form. By a gradual development of one end I have traced
upwards the formation of a sharp ridge and its transition into a
kind of mushroom form. To the right upwards I have traced the same
development of the mushroom head, the projecting ridge of which
is constantly liable to fractures by blows; and as savages always
systematize accidental fractures so as to produce symmetry, scollops
have been cut out of the ridge in different places for this purpose,
which had the effect of concentrating the force of the blow on the
projections. These were further developed; one of the pilei of the
mushroom head was made larger than the others, and this suggested the
form of a bird’s head, so that it was only necessary to add a line for
the mouth and a couple of eyes to complete the resemblance. To the
right we see that the plain stick held in the centre gave the first
idea of a defensive weapon, and was used to parry off the darts of the
assailant; an aperture was then made in the stick for the hand, and
the face of it became broader, developing into a shield, the narrow
ends, however, being still retained for parrying. Below I have shown
that the long stick simply pointed at one end became a lance; a row
of sharp flints were gummed on to one side to produce a cutting edge,
and these were then imitated in wood, and by pointing them obliquely
they were converted into barbs. To the right another kind of barb was
produced by binding on a piece of sharp-pointed wood. Between this
and the shields we see that the first idea of the throwing-stick,
employed to project these lances, was simply constructed like the
barbed point of the lance itself. The gradual expansion of the stick
arose from its being employed like a battledore, to fence off the
enemy’s lances. To the left below I have shown the gradual development
of a peculiar curved weapon, called the ‘malga’, formed from a stem
and the branch projecting from it at different angles. The part where
the continuation of the stem was cut off was trimmed to a kind of
ridge; this ridge developed, and suggested the crest of a bird’s head;
ultimately the eyes were added, in the same manner as in the club
on the opposite side of the diagram. To the left we see the plain
round stick first flattened, then curved. Savages are in the habit
of throwing all their weapons at their adversaries and at animals.
In throwing a flat curved stick it rotates of its own accord, and as
the axis of rotation continues parallel to itself, the thin edge is
presented to the resistance of the air in front; this increases the
range, and its peculiar flight must have forced itself on the attention
of the savage as the result of experience: but he has never had the
slightest knowledge of the laws of its flight. The different curves
of the boomerang are the natural curves of the sticks, and like all
the Australian weapons, they are made on the grain of the wood. Some
are thicker than others; some will fly in the curves peculiar to that
weapon, and others will not: scarcely two are alike.

To the left above, we see the mushroom-headed ‘waddy’, with its
projecting ridge flattened, then curved; one side becomes more
developed than the other, and this being thrown develops into the waddy
boomerang, the ridge of the earlier forms being still represented by a
mark on the flat head of the weapon; an intermediate link connects it
with the true boomerang.

Many other examples might be given to illustrate the continuity which
exists in the development of all savage weapons; but I only ask you
to glance at the sequence shown in this diagram and the preceding ones
in order to convince you of the truth of the statement which I made
at the commencement of this discourse, that although, owing to the
complexity of modern contrivances and the larger steps by which we
mount the ladder of progress in the material arts, their continuity
may be lost sight of, when we come to classify the arts of savages and
prehistoric men, the term ‘growth’ is fully as applicable to them as to
the development of the forms of speech, and that there are no grounds,
upon the score of continuity, history, or the action of free will, to
separate these studies generically as distinct classes of science.

But in dealing with evolution we have to speak not only of growth,
but, as in all other natural sciences, of the principle of decay. By
decay I do not mean the decay of the materials of the arts, but the
decomposition of the mental ideas which produced them.

As complex ideas are built up of simple ones, so there is also a
further process by which they become disintegrated, and the parts go to
form parts of other ideas.

This decay in the arts corresponds to what is called phonetic decay
in language; and in both cases it arises either from incapacity, the
desire to save trouble, or the necessity of abbreviating when ideas
originally evolved for one purpose come to form parts of other ideas to
which they are merely accessory and subordinate, as in the well-known
dialectic changes of speech. Every sound in language had originally a
distinct meaning of its own; gradually these sounds or roots came to
form parts of words in which the original meanings of the sounds were
lost.

I will now endeavour to draw a parallel to this in the arts, by means
of what may be termed realistic degeneration.

I will not say much as to the place of realism in culture. The
archaeological world has lately been somewhat startled by the
discovery of well-executed designs of elephants and other animals in
the French caves in association with the rude stone implements of the
palaeolithic age, and by the more recent discovery of Mariette Bey,
that the earliest Egyptian sculptures of the third dynasty are the most
truthful representations of the human form that are to be found in
that country. I see nothing surprising in this, when we consider the
power that is developed in many children of eight or nine years old of
making drawings of animals and other objects, which, when allowance is
made for the feeble hand of childhood, are often as truthful as those
of the cave-period men, at a time when their minds have acquired but
little power of reasoning or generalizing, or even of taking care of
themselves; all which goes to prove that this power of imitation, which
is a very different thing from ideal art, is one of the most early
developed faculties of the mind of man.

When the power of imitation had once been developed, it would
naturally be made use of as a means of intercommunication; thus the
drawing of a stag would be made to convey information to people at
a distance that there was a herd of deer in the neighbourhood to be
hunted; and as the object of the drawing was no longer to depict
truthfully the peculiarities of the beast, but merely to convey
information, the amount of labour expended upon it would be the
least that could be employed for the required purpose. All written
characters have originated in this way; and no one now requires to be
told how pictographic representations developed into hieroglyphic and
subsequently into phonetic characters.

But realistic degeneration would equally take place in all cases in
which pictorial representations came to be employed for other purposes
than those for which they were originally designed, as in the case of
ornamental designs.

[Illustration: PLATE XXI.

EVOLUTION OF TYPES ON ANCIENT BRITISH COINS.]

So also a coin receives upon its surface the image of a king or a god
as a stamp of authority. When from any cause the object of the original
design is lost, the object of the stamp being no longer to convey a
likeness, but being merely used as a test of genuineness, or perhaps
amongst an unlettered people to denote its value, the tendency to
realistic degeneration would be proportioned to the difficulties of
execution; no further labour would be expended on it than was necessary
for the object to be attained. Here I must again remind you of the
interesting discourse delivered in this Institution on May 14, 1875,
by Mr. Evans, on the evolution of British coins.[11] His examples are
figured in his _Coins of the Ancient Britons_, pp. 24-32. With his
permission I have introduced some of his diagrams (Plate XXI). You will
remember how the coin of Philip of Macedon having been introduced into
Britain, the head on the obverse gradually disappeared, leaving only
the wreath as a band across the coin, which was ultimately converted
into a cross; and how on the reverse, the chariot and two horses
dwindled into a single horse, the chariot disappeared, leaving only
the wheels, the driver became elevated, not elevated after the manner
unfortunately but too common amongst London drivers, but elevated
after the manner of the Spiritualists, except that you see he had the
precaution to take on a pair of wings, differing also both from the
London driver and the Spiritualists, inasmuch as instead of having lost
his head he has lost his body, and nothing but the head remains; the
body of the horse then gradually disappears, leaving only four lines to
denote the legs.

I will now show you an exact parallel to these transformations in a
collection of designs, supposed to be tribal marks, which are drawn
upon the paddle blades of the New Irelanders, a race of Papuan savages
inhabiting an island on the north-east coast of New Guinea.

Having noticed one or two allied varieties of design in specimens that
came into my possession, I determined to collect all that I could
find as they came to this country. In the course of several years I
succeeded in obtaining the series represented upon Plate IV.

[Illustration: PLATE IV.

ORNAMENTATION OF NEW IRELAND PADDLES, SHOWING THE TRANSITION OF FORM.]

The first figure you will see clearly represents the head of a Papuan:
the hair or wig is stuffed out, and the ears elongated by means of
an ear ornament, after the manner of these people; the eyes are
represented by two black dots, and the red line of the nose spreads
over the forehead. This is the most realistic figure of the series. In
the second figure the face is somewhat conventionalized: the line of
the nose passes in a coil round the eyes; there is a lozenge pattern
on the forehead, representing probably a tattoo mark; the body is
represented sitting in full. In the third figure the man is represented
sitting sideways, simply by lopping off an arm and a leg on one side.
In the fourth figure the legs have disappeared. In the fifth figure
the whole body has disappeared. In the sixth figure the nose has
expanded at the base, and the sides of the face are made to conform
to the line of the nose; the elongated ears are there, but the ear
ornament is gone: the nose in this figure is becoming the principal
feature. In the seventh figure nothing but the nose is left: the sides
of the face and mouth are gone; the ears are drawn along the side of
the nose; the head is gone, but the lozenge pattern on the forehead
still remains; the coil round the eyes has also disappeared, and is
replaced by a kind of leaf form, suggested by the upper lobe of the
ear in the previous figures; the eyes are brought down into the nose.
In the eighth figure the ears are drawn at right angles to the nose.
In the ninth figure the nose has expanded at the base; all the rest is
the same as in the last figure. In the tenth figure the lozenge pattern
and the ears have disappeared, and a vestige of them only remains, in
the form of five points; the base of the nose is still further expanded
into a half moon. In the last figure, nothing but a half moon remains.
No one who compared this figure with the first of the series, without
the explanation afforded by the intermediate links, would believe that
it represented the nose of a human face. Unfortunately we do not know
as yet the exact meaning of these designs, but when further information
is obtained about them it will throw considerable light on similar
transformations in prehistoric times.

My next and last illustration is taken from the relics of Troy,
recently brought to light by Dr. Schliemann.[12] In the valuable
work lately published by him he gives illustrations of a number of
earthenware vases and other objects, called by him idols, having on
them the representation of what he conceives to be the face of an owl,
and which he believes to represent Athena, the tutelary goddess of
Troy, called by Homer ‘Glaukopis Athene’, which signifies, according
to him, ‘with the face of an owl.’ Professor Max Müller has given his
opinion that the word ‘glaukopis’ cannot possibly be taken to mean
owl-faced, but can only mean large- or bright-eyed. On this point
I will venture no opinion, but accepting Professor Müller’s high
authority for the usually received interpretation of it being correct,
I shall in no way weaken the evidence in favour of Dr. Schliemann’s
discovery of the true site of Troy if I succeed in proving that,
according to the true principle of realistic degeneration, this figure
does not represent an owl but a human face.

[Illustration: PLATE V.

REALISTIC DEGENERATION.

ILLUSTRATED BY REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HUMAN FACE, FOUND BY DR.
SCHLIEMANN AT TROY.

[_The numerals in brackets give_--(1) _the number of the figure in
Schliemann’s_ Troy and its Remains, (2) _the depth at which the figure
was found, in metres_.]]

The figures on Plate V are all taken from Dr. Schliemann’s
representations, and as the depth of each is given it will be seen
that the different varieties of face occur in all the different strata
excavated by him except the highest, and therefore no argument as to
antiquity can be based upon the depth at which they were found. The two
first figures, it will be seen, are clearly intended to represent a
human face, all the features being preserved. In the two next figures
(3, 4) the mouth has disappeared, but the fact of the principal feature
being still a nose and not a beak, is shown by the breadth of the base
and also by the representation of the breasts. In the two succeeding
figures (5, 6) the nose is narrowed at the base, which gives it the
appearance of a beak, but the fact of its being still a human form
is still shown by the breasts. Had the idea of an owl been developed
through realistic degeneration in these last figures, it would have
retained this form, but in the two succeeding figures (7, 8) it will be
seen that the nose goes on diminishing.

In the remaining figures, some of which are (12-16) of solid stone,
not earthenware, and are believed by Dr. Schliemann to be gods, it is
clearly shown by the rude scratches representing the eyebrows, and
their want of symmetry, that this degeneration of form is the result of
haste.

What then are these solid stone objects? I cannot for a moment doubt,
from their resemblance to the vases, from the marks denoting the
junction of the cover with the vase, and from the representations of
handles, that they are votive urns of some kind, similar to those
Egyptian stone models of urns represented in the two figures above.
Urns of this kind were used by the Egyptians to contain the viscera of
the mummies; but with the cheaper form of burial, in which the viscera
were retained in the body, stone models of urns, of which these figures
are drawings from originals in the British Museum, were deposited in
the graves as vestiges of the earlier and more expensive process; these
objects therefore cannot be idols, but votive urns. The fact of human
remains having been found in some of the human-headed urns, and the
hasty scratches on the stone models, show that they are merely models
appertaining to the conventionalized survival of some earlier or more
elaborate system of urn burial.

We see from these facts that both growth and decay, the two component
elements of evolution, are represented in the study of the material
arts.

My object in this discourse has been not, as I fear it may have
appeared to you from the brief time at my disposal and my imperfect
treatment of the subject, to extol the material arts as being
intrinsically of more interest or importance than other branches
of culture, but to affirm the principle that it is by studying the
psychology of the material arts alone that we can trace human culture
to its germs.

The theory of degradation is supported only by the study of those
branches of culture of which the early history is lost.

The tree is the type of all evolution: all trees are seedlings,
but they differ in their mode of growth. Some, like the beech and
oak, throw their branches upwards, and these are typical of the
development of the material arts; others, like the straight-stemmed
pine, throw off their branches downwards, and these are typical of the
development of some other branches of culture. It is quite true, as
stated by mythologists, that the history of myths is one of continued
degeneration in so far as they can be traced, and that the element
of decay enters far more into their composition than that of growth.
But the whole accessible history of these myths represents drooping
branches from the upward-growing stem of free thought out of which they
sprang. What is the space of time which separates us from the Vedas, as
compared with the whole upward growth of humanity before and since!

There are huge gaps in our knowledge of the history of the human race,
and it has been the pleasure of mankind in all ages to people these
gaps with jugglers and bogies; but surely, if slowly, science will open
up these desert places, and prove to us that, so far as the finite mind
of man can reach, there is nothing but unbroken continuity to be seen
in the present and in the past.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] A Lecture delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain on
Friday, May 28, 1875, and published in _Proc. Roy. Inst._, vol. vii.
pp. 496-520, Pl. i-iv.

[8] _Lectures on the Science of Language_ (London, 1861), i, Lecture 1.

[9] John Evans, _The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons, and Ornaments
of Great Britain_ (London, 1872^1), 1897^2, p. 641.

[10] Sir W. Wilde, _Catalogue of the Antiquities of the Museum of the
Royal Irish Academy_ (Dublin, 1863).

[11] John Evans, ‘On the Coinage of the Ancient Britons and Natural
Selection,’ _Journal of the Royal Institution_, vii. p. 476 ff.; with a
Plate, which is reproduced, by permission, in Plate XXI.

[12] For illustrations, see _Troy and its Remains_, by Dr. Henry
Schliemann (Murray, 1875). The figures may be taken in the following
order: No. 185, No. 74, No. 132, No. 13, No. 173, No. 207, No. 12, No.
11, No. 133, No. 141, No. 165. [Plate V has been compiled from the
references here given.]




PRIMITIVE WARFARE[13]


I

Although it is more in accordance with the purposes for which this
establishment has been organized, that the Lecture-room should be
devoted chiefly to subjects of practical utility connected with the
improvement of our military system and the progress of the mechanical
appliances, the organization, and general efficiency of our Army and
Navy, than to the efforts of abstract science, yet the fact of your
possessing in the three large apartments that are devoted to your
armoury, one of the best assortments of semi-civilized and savage
weapons that are to be found in this country, or, perhaps, in any
part of the world, is sufficient to prove that it is not foreign to
the objects of the Institution that the science of war should be
ethnographically and archaeologically, as well as practically, treated.

The requirements of our advancing age demand that every vein of
knowledge should be opened out, and, in order to make good our title
to so interesting a collection of objects as that comprised in what
may very properly be called our ethnographical military department, it
should be shown that, whether or not the subject may be considered to
fall within the ordinary functions of the Society, our Museum is made
available for the purposes of science.

The age in which we live is not more remarkable for its rapid onward
movement than for its intelligent retrospect of the past. It is
reconstructive as well as progressive. The light which is kindled by
the practical discoveries of modern science, throws back its rays,
and enables us to distinguish objects of interest, which have been
unnoticed in the gloom of bygone ages, or passed over with contempt.

Men observe only those things which their occupations or their
education enable them to understand and appreciate. When a savage is
introduced on board the deck of a European vessel, he notices only
those objects with the uses of which he is familiar--the sewing of a
coat, a chain, or a cable, at once rivets his attention, but he passes
by the steam-engine without observation, and if a work of art is forced
upon his notice, he is unable to say whether it represents a man, a
ship, or a kangaroo![14] So in past ages the flint implements of the
drift, the parents of all our modern implements, whether for war or
handicraft, must have been carted away in hundreds, unobserved, and in
ignorance that these inconspicuous objects would one day be the means
of upsetting the received chronology of our species.

Whilst, therefore, we devote our energies chiefly to progress, and
fix our attention upon the present and future of war, it cannot fail
to interest those who are actively engaged in the duties of their
profession, if we occasionally take a glance backward and see what
recent discoveries have done towards elucidating its origin and early
history.

It might, perhaps, assist a right understanding of the principles on
which the weapons and implements of savages deserve to be studied, if
I were to notice some of those great questions respecting the origin
of our species, and man’s place in nature, which the investigations
of science have been the means of raising in our day. I need hardly
say that the rude implements, which I am about to describe, are of
little practical interest in themselves, as models for instruction or
imitation. We have no need of bows and arrows in the existing state
of war, and if we did require them, the appliances of modern times
would enable us to construct them in far greater perfection than could
be acquired by any lessons from savages. These weapons are valuable
only, in the absence of other evidence, from the light they throw
on prehistoric times, and on those great questions to which I have
alluded, and from their enabling us to trace out the origin of many of
those customs which have been handed down to us by past generations.

As, however, the discussion of these interesting subjects would lead
me into matters that are hardly suited to the Lecture-room of this
Institution, I must pass over the consideration of them with a few
brief remarks.

In so doing, I may appear to postulate some opinions upon points
that are still the subject of animated controversy in the scientific
world. But it would require a far broader field of investigation than
is here afforded me, in order to treat these inquiries successfully,
and to adduce all the evidence that would be necessary to support the
hypotheses put forward; and I am anxious to devote no greater space to
these preliminary remarks than is necessary to point out some of the
main features of interest that are involved in the particular study
which forms the subject of my lecture.

We are apt to speak of the creation of the universe as a thing of
the past, and to suppose that the world, with all the varied life
upon it, previous to man’s appearance, having been created for his
especial happiness and supremacy, was afterwards left to his control
and government. But this view of the subject belongs to an age in which
the laws of nature in their all-sufficiency and completeness were but
little studied and appreciated. Modern science finds no evidence of
any such abandonment of the universe to man’s jurisdiction. The more
comprehensively the subject is viewed, the more restricted appear to be
those limits over which the free will of mankind is permitted to range,
and the more evident it becomes, that in his social advancement, his
laws, arts, and wars, he moves on under the influence and development
of those same laws which have been in force from the very first dawn
of creation. The lower the archaeologist searches in the crust of the
earth for the relics of human art, the more faint become the traces of
that broad gulf, which in our times appears to separate man from the
brute creation. In all the numerous and varied offsprings of the human
intellect, in the arts, and even in speech, the more we investigate and
trace them back, the more clearly they appear to point to a condition
of the human race in which they had no existence whatever. The great
law of nature, ‘natura non facit saltum,’ was not broken by the
introduction of man upon the earth. He appears to have been produced in
the fullness of time, as the work of creation required a more perfect
tool, and to have ameliorated his condition, only as the work to be
performed became more complicated and varied, just as in the hands of
man, the rougher tool is employed for felling, and the finer tool for
finishing and polishing.

By this view we come to look upon even the most barbarous state of
man’s existence, as a condition, not so much of degradation, as of
arrested or retarded progress, and to see that, notwithstanding many
halts and relapses, and a very varied rate of movement in the different
races, the march of the human intellect has been always onward.

As, in the lower creation, we find no individuals that are capable of
self-improvement, though some appear, by their imitative faculties,
to contain within them the germs of an improving element, so the
aboriginal man, closely resembling the brutes, may have passed through
many generations before he began to show even the first symptoms
of mental cultivation, or the rudiments of the simplest arts; and
even then his progress may have been, at first, so slow, that it is
not without an effort of imagination that the civilized races of
our day can realize, by means of the implements which he has left
us, the minute gradations which appear to mark the stages of his
advancement. This appears to be the view taken by Sir Charles Lyell in
his _Antiquity of Man_, when, in comparing the flint implements found
in the higher and lower-level gravels of the valley of the Somme, he
arrives at the conclusion ‘that the state of the arts in those early
times remained stationary for almost indefinite periods’. ‘We see,’
he says, ‘in our own time, that the rate of progress in the arts and
sciences proceeds in a geometrical ratio as knowledge increases,
and so, when we carry back our retrospect into the past, we must
be prepared to find the signs of retardation augmenting in a like
geometrical ratio; so that the progress of a thousand years at a remote
period, may correspond to that of a century in modern times, and in
ages still more remote man would more and more resemble the brutes in
that attribute which causes one generation exactly to imitate, in all
its ways, the generation which preceded it’ (4th ed. 1873, p. 421).

In order to understand the relationship which the savage tribes of
our own time bear to the races of antiquity, it is necessary to keep
in view that, neither in historic nor prehistoric times is there any
evidence that civilization has been equally or universally distributed;
on the contrary, it appears always to have been partial, and confined
to particular races, whose function it has been, by means of war and
conquest, to spread the arts amongst surrounding nations, or to
exterminate those whose low state of mental culture rendered them
incapable of receiving it.

Assuming the whole of the human species to have sprung originally
from one stock, an hypothesis which, although disputed, appears to me
by all existing evidence and analogy of known facts, to be the most
reasonable assumption, the several races appear to have branched off at
various and remote periods, many of them, perhaps, previously to the
present geographical arrangement of land and water, and to have located
themselves in the several regions in which they are now found, in a
state which probably differs but little from that in which they existed
at the time of their separation from the parent stem.

Each race, after separation, shows evidence of arrested growth; and,
finally, the intellect of the nation fossilizes and becomes stationary
for an indefinite period, or until destroyed by being brought again in
contact with the leading races in an advanced stage of civilization,
precisely in the same way that the individuals composing these races,
after propagating their species, stagnate, and ultimately decay, or, in
a low state of savagery, are often destroyed by their own offspring.

Taking a comprehensive view of the development of civilization, it may
be compared to the growth of those plants whose vigour displays itself
chiefly in the propagation of their leading shoots, which, overtopping
the older and feebler branches, cause them to be everywhere replaced by
a fresh growth of verdure. The vegetable kingdom thus furnishes us with
the grand type of progress; continuity and bifurcation are principles
of universal application, uniting the lowest with the highest created
thing.

The analogy of tree growth has been frequently employed in relation
to natural phenomena, and it may very well be taken to explain the
distribution of the human race, and the progress and expansion of the
arts. It forms the key to the Darwinian theory of natural selection,
which is essentially monogenistic in its application to the origin of
the human race.

Thus the existing races of mankind may be taken to represent the
budding twigs and foliage, each in accordance with the relative
superiority of its civilization, appertaining to branches higher and
higher placed, upon the great stem of life.

So little is as yet known of the early history of any but our own
family of nations, that in the existing state of knowledge, the
attempt to classify and place them on their proper branches, must be
attended with much difficulty, and great liability to error. However,
by arranging the existing races according to their civilization, a
tolerably correct judgement may perhaps be formed as to the value of
this system of classification, if we distribute them with those of
antiquity in some two or three broad divisions. The Caucasian races
of modern Europe, for example, may be said to bear to their ancestors
of the historical period the same relationship that geologists have
shown the existing mammalia of our forests to bear to the mammalia
of the tertiary geological period. The semi-civilized Chinese and
Hindoos, in like manner, may be classed with the races of ancient
Assyria, Egypt, and other nations immediately prior to the first dawn
of history, the civilization of which nations they still so greatly
resemble, and appear to have retained, in a state of retarded progress
from those ages to our own. A third division may perhaps be made of the
Malay, Tartar, and African negro nations, which, though now in an age
of iron, may, by the state of their arts, and more especially by the
form of their implements, be taken as the best representatives of the
prehistoric bronze period of Europe, towards which they appear to hold
the same relationship that the fish and reptiles of our seas bear to
those of the secondary geological period. In a fourth division may be
included the still more barbarous races of our times, the Australian,
Bushman, and hunting races of America, whose analogy to those of the
stone age of Europe may be typified by that of the mollusca of recent
species to the mollusca of the primary geological period.

In all these existing races, we find that the slowness of their
progression and incapacity for improvement is proportioned to the low
state of their civilization, thereby leading to the supposition that
they may have retained their arts with but slight modification from the
time of their branching from the parent stem, and may thus be taken
as the living representatives of our common ancestors in the various
successive stages of their advancement.

Many examples of this immobility on the part of savages and
semi-civilized races may be given.

[Illustration: PLATE VI.]

Throughout the entire continent of Australia the weapons and implements
are alike, and of the simplest form, and the people are of the lowest
grade. The spear, the waddy, and the boomerang, with some stone
hatchets, are their only weapons; but amongst these it has been noticed
that, like the implements of the drift, there are minute differences,
scarcely apparent to Europeans, but which enable a native to determine
at a glance to what tribe a weapon belongs.[15] This, whilst it
proves a tendency to vary their forms, shows at the same time either
an incapacity, or, what answers the same purpose, a retarding power
or prejudice, which prevents their effecting more than the smallest
appreciable degree of change. In the island of Tahiti, Captain Cook
was unable to make the natives (a superior race to the Australians)
appreciate the uses of metal, until he had caused his armourer to
construct an iron adze (Plate VI, fig. 1 _a_)[16] of precisely the
same form as their own adzes of basalt (Fig. 1 _b_). After that, metal
tools came into general use amongst them, though their old forms are
in a great measure preserved to this day. When, during the American
War, the English endeavoured to utilize the Indians by arming them,
they were compelled to construct for them tomahawks after their own
pattern, having a pipe in the handle (Fig. 2). When the Purus Indians
of South America receive a knife from Europeans they break off the
handle, and fashion the knife according to their own ideas, placing the
blade between two pieces of wood, and binding it round tight with a
sinew.[17] The natives of Samoa now use iron adzes, constructed after
the exact pattern of their ancient stone ones.[18] The Fiji Islanders,
though they have now the means of obtaining good blades and chisels
from Sheffield, and axes from America, prefer plane irons to any other
form of implement, because they are able to fix them by lashing them
on to their handles in the same fashion as the ancient stone adzes of
their own manufacture, which they resemble.[19] The Andaman Islanders
use the European metal that falls into their hands, only to grind it
down into spear- and arrow-heads of the same form as their stone ones.
The same applies to the whole of the Aborigines of North and South
America, which have stood by, for nearly three centuries, passive
spectators of the arts of Europeans, without attempting to copy them.
Crawfurd, in his _History of the Indian Archipelago_,[20] comments
on the obstinate adherence of the Javanese to ancient customs, in
accounting for the kris having been retained by them long after the
causes which produced that peculiar weapon had ceased to operate.
Tylor, in his account of the Anahuac, observes upon the preservation
of old types amongst the present inhabitants of Mexico, which have
remained almost unchanged from generation to generation, enabling
the historian to distinguish clearly those which are of Aztec from
those which are of Spanish origin.[21] Herodotus describes the spears
carried by the Ethiopians in the army of Xerxes as being armed with the
sharpened horn of the antelope.[22] Consul Petherick found still in
use by the Djibba negroes, more than two thousand years after, these
identical spears, armed with the straightened and sharpened horn of the
antelope, and their other weapons also resembled in character those
described by Herodotus, although they had passed from the stone weapons
then used, into an age of metal.[23] The Scythian bow (Plate VI, fig.
3) is the bow still used by the whole of the Tartar races (Fig. 4).
The celt of the Tartar, and the celt and sword of the Negro (Fig. 5)
are still the celt and sword of the European bronze period (Fig. 6),
and this resemblance is not confined to the general outline of the
weapons, but extends to the style and patterns of ornamentation. The
same identity of form exists between the ‘manillas’ (Fig. 7) used as a
medium of exchange in the Eboe country of West Africa and the so-called
penannular rings or ring money (Fig. 8) of gold and bronze which are
found in Ireland, and which, with some modifications, belong also to
Germany and the Swiss Lakes. The corrugated iron blade of the Kaffir
assegai, a section of which is shown in Fig. 9, and which is used also
in Central and West Africa, is identical with those found in the Saxon
graves (Fig. 10), and is intended to give a spiral motion to these
missiles. Chevalier Folard observes that the Gauls were remarkable for
the tenacity with which they clung to their ancient customs, while the
Romans, their conquerors, are mentioned by all historians as peculiar
in their time for the facility with which they adopted the customs of
others, and developed their own.[24] In modern Europe, the Gipsies have
also been noticed as being distinguished from the Europeans in all
the various localities in which they are found, for their remarkable
adherence to especial arts, savouring of an extinct civilization.
Amongst the Chinese and Hindoos, the conservatism which has caused them
to remain for ages in nearly the same condition is too well known to
require comment. It will, however, be remembered (in illustration of
the fact that customs of minor importance often survive great political
changes, and serve to keep up the continuity that would otherwise be
broken), that after the Manchu Tartars had conquered and established
themselves in the Chinese territory, they were nearly driven again
from the country, on account of their forcing upon the subject people
the custom of wearing pigtails, after the fashion of their conquerors;
showing how difficult it is to ingraft, upon an alien race, customs
that are not indigenous.

These, and many other notices of a similar character that are to
be found in the pages of travel, establish it as a maxim, that the
existing races, in their respective stages of progression, may be
taken as the bona fide representatives of the races of antiquity;
and, marvellous as it may appear to us in these days of rapid
progress, their habits and arts, even to the form of their rudest
weapons, have continued in many cases, with but slight modifications,
unchanged throughout countless ages, and from periods long prior to
the commencement of history. They thus afford us living illustrations
of the social customs, the forms of government, laws, and warlike
practices, which belonged to the ancient races from which they remotely
sprang, whose implements, resembling, with but little difference,
their own, are now found low down in the soil, in situations, and
under circumstances in which, alone, they would convey but little
evidence to the antiquary, but which, when the investigations of the
antiquary are interpreted by those of the ethnologist, are teeming with
interesting revelations respecting the past history of our race; and
which, in the hands of the anthropologist, in whose science that of
antiquity and ethnology are combined with physiology and geology, are
no doubt destined to throw a flood of light, if not eventually, in a
great measure, to clear up the mystery, which now hangs over everything
connected with the origin of mankind.

That such a combination of the sciences should have been brought about
so opportunely in our days, appears to me to be one of those many
indications of an overruling power directing in the aggregate the minds
of men, which must, at all times, strike even the most superficial
observer of nature; for there can be little doubt that in a few years
all the most barbarous races will have disappeared from the earth, or
will have ceased to preserve their native arts.

The law which consigns to destruction all savage races when brought
in contact with a civilization much higher than their own, is now
operating with unrelenting fury in every part of the world. Of the
aborigines of Tasmania, not a single individual remains; those of New
Zealand are fast disappearing. The Australian savage dies out before
the advancing European. North and South America, and the Polynesian
Islands, all tell the same tale. Wherever the generous influences of
Christianity have set foot, there they have been accompanied by the
scourge. Innumerable and often unseen causes combine in effecting the
same purpose; diseases which are but little felt by Europeans, act as
plagues when introduced into uncivilized communities, and cause them
to fall before their ravages, like wheat before the sickle; and the
vices of civilization, taking a firmer hold of the savages than its
virtues, aid and abet in the same work. The labours of the missionary,
if they have produced no other benefit, have been useful in teaching
us the great truth, that notwithstanding the philanthropic efforts
of the intruding race, the law of nature must be vindicated. The
savage is morally and mentally an unfit instrument for the spread of
civilization, except when, like the higher mammalia, he is reduced to
a state of slavery; his occupation is gone, and his place is required
for an improved race. Allowing for the rapidly increasing ratio in
which progress advances, it is not too much to assume, that in half a
century from the present time, savage life will have ceased to have a
single true representative on the face of the globe, and the evidence
which it has been the means of handing down to our generation will have
perished with it.

When we find that the condition of the aboriginal man must have
been one of such complete inanity as to render him incapable of
spontaneously initiating even the most rudimentary arts, it follows
as a matter of course that in the earliest stages of his career, he
must, like children of our own day, have been subject to compulsory
instruction. And in looking to nature for the sources from which such
early instruction must have been derived, we need not, I think, be long
in coming to the conclusion, that the school of our first parent must
be sought for in his struggles for mastery with the brute creation,
and that, consequently, his first lessons must have been directed to
attaining proficiency in the art of war.

Hence it follows that it is to the lower animals that we must look
for the origin of all those branches of primitive warfare which it is
the object of this lecture to trace out. Nor indeed shall we fail to
find abundant evidence that there is hardly a single branch of human
industry which may not reasonably be attributed to the same source.

The province of war extends downward through the animal kingdom,
showing unmistakable evidence of its existence in forms, offensive
and defensive, differing but little from those of the human era,
through the unnumbered ages of the geological periods, long prior to
man’s advent; proving, beyond the possibility of doubt, that from the
remotest age in which we find evidence of organized beings, war has
been ordained to an important function in the creative process.

Judging by results, which I apprehend is the only true method of
investigating the phenomena of life, three primary instincts appear
to have been implanted in nearly all the higher animals[25]:
alimentiveness, for the sustenance of life; amativeness, for the
propagation of species; and combativeness, for the protection of
species, and the propagation by natural selection of the most energetic
breeds; on which latter subject much important information has been
given to the world by Mr. Darwin, in his celebrated work on the origin
of species.

Much might, I believe, be said on the connexion which subsists between
these functions, all of which are, in some form or other, necessary to
a healthy condition. Suffice, however, to observe, that as regards the
dawn of an Utopia, in which some men who think themselves practical
appear to indulge; whether we study the subject by observing the
uses to which animals apply the various and ingeniously constructed
weapons with which Providence has armed them, or whether we view it in
relation to the prodigious armaments of all the most civilized nations
of Europe, we find no more evidence in nature, of a state of society
in which wars shall cease, than we do of a state of existence in which
we shall support life without food, or propagate our species by other
means than those which nature has appointed.

The universality of the warlike element is shown in the fact, that the
classifications of the weapons of men and animals are identical, and
may be treated under the same heads.

Many constructive arts are brought to greater perfection in animals
by the development of faculties, especially adapting them to the
peculiar implements with which nature has furnished them, than can be
attained by man, and especially by the aboriginal man, whose particular
attribute appears, by all analogy of savage life, to have been an
increase of that imitative faculty which, in the lower creation, is
found only in a modified degree in apes.

The lower creation would thus furnish man not only with the first
element of instruction, but with examples for the improvement of the
work commenced, or, to use the words of Pope:--

  From the creatures thy instructions take,
  Thy arts of building from the bee receive;
  Learn from the mole to plough, the worm to weave;
  Learn from the little nautilus to sail,
  Spread the thin oars, and catch the driving gale;
  Here, too, all forms of social reason find,
  And hence let reason late instruct mankind.[26]

In the art of war, as we shall see, he would not only derive his first
instruction from the beasts, but he would improve his means of offence
and defence from time to time by lessons derived from the same source.

It therefore appears desirable that, before entering upon that branch
of the subject which relates to the _progress_ and _development_ of
the art of war, I should point out briefly the analogies which exist
between the weapons, tactics, and stratagems of savages and those of
the lower creation, and show to what extent man appears to have availed
himself of the weapons of animals for his own defence.

In so doing the subject may be classified as follows:--

_Classification of the Weapons of Animals and Savages._

    Defensive.     Offensive.    Stratagems.
  Hides.           Piercing.   Flight.
  Solid plates.    Striking.   Concealment.
  Jointed plates.  Serrated.   Tactics.
  Scales.          Poisoned.   Columns.
                   Missiles.   Leaders.
                               Outposts.
                               Artificial defences.
                               War cries.

Firstly, with respect to the combative principle itself. The identity
of this instinct in men and animals may be seen in the widely-spread
custom of baiting animals against each other, a practice which is not
derived from any one source, but is indigenous in the countries in
which it prevails, and arises from the inherent sympathy which exists
between men and animals in the exercise of this particular function.

In the island of Tahiti, long before the first European vessel was seen
off their shores, the inhabitants were accustomed to train and fight
cocks, which were fed with great care, and kept upon finely-carved
perches.[27] Cock-fighting also prevails amongst the Malays, Celebes,
and Balinese. The Javanese fight their cocks like the Mahommedans
of Hindustan, without spurs; the Malays, Bugis, and Macassars with
artificial spurs shaped like a scythe.[28] It also prevails in Central
Africa, Central America, and Peru. The Sumatrans fight their cocks for
vast sums; a man has been known to stake his wife and children, son,
mother, or sister on the issue of a battle, and when a dispute occurs,
the owners decide the question by an appeal to the sword. In like
manner Adrastus, the son of Midas, King of Phrygia, is said to have
killed his brother in consequence of a quarrel which took place between
them in regard to a battle of quails.

When Themistocles led the Greeks out against the Persians, happening
to see two cocks fight, he showed them as an example to his soldiers.
Cock-fighting was afterwards exhibited annually in presence of the
whole people, and the crowing of a cock was ever after regarded as a
presage of victory.[29]

The Javanese also fight hogs and rams together. The buffalo and
tiger are matched against each other. In Butan the combat is between
two bulls. Combats of elephants took place for the amusement of the
early Indian kings. The Chinese and Javanese fight quails, crickets,
and fish. The Romans fought cocks, quails, and partridges, also the
rhinoceros. In Stamboul two rams are employed for fighting. The
Russians fight geese, and the betting runs very high upon them.[30]
We find horses, elephants, and oxen standing side by side with man in
hostile array, and dogs were used by the Gauls for the same purpose.
Amongst the ancients, the horse, the wolf, and the cock were offered on
the altar of Mars for their warlike qualities.

Who can doubt with these examples before us, that an instinct so widely
disseminated and so identical in men and animals, must have been
ordained for special objects?

The causes which give rise to the exercise of the function, vary with
the advance of civilization. We have now ceased to take delight in the
mere exhibition of brute combats, but the profession of war is still
held in as much esteem as at any previous period in the history of
mankind, and we bestow the highest honours of the State upon successful
combatants.

This, however, leads to another subject, viz. the causes of war amongst
primitive races, which is deserving of separate treatment.


_Defensive Weapons._

We may pass briefly over the defensive weapons of animals and savages,
not by any means from the analogy being less perfect in this class of
weapons, but rather because the similarity is too obvious to make it
necessary that much stress should be laid on their resemblance.

_Hides._ The thick hides of pachydermatous animals correspond to the
quilted armour of ancient and semi-civilized races. Some animals, like
the rhinoceros and hippopotamus, are entirely armed in this way; others
have their defences on the most vulnerable part, as the mane of the
lion, and the shoulder pad of the boar.[31] The skin of the tiger is of
so tough and yielding a nature, as to resist the horn of the buffalo
when driven with full force against its sides.[32] The condor of Peru
has such a thick coating of feathers, that eight or ten bullets may
strike without piercing it.[33]

[Illustration: PLATE VII.]

According to Thucydides, the Locrians and Acarnanians, being professed
thieves and robbers, were the first to clothe themselves in armour.[34]
But as a general rule it may be said, that the opinions of ancient
writers upon the origin of the customs with which they were familiar,
are of little value in our days. There is, however, evidence to show
that the use of defensive armour is not usual amongst savages in the
lowest stages of culture. It is not employed, properly speaking, by
the Australians, the Bushmen, the Fuegians, or in the Fiji or Sandwich
Islands. But in other parts of the world, soon after men began to
clothe themselves in the skins of beasts, they appear to have used the
thicker hides of animals for purposes of defence. When the Esquimaux
apprehends hostility, he takes off his ordinary shirt, and puts on
a deer’s skin, tanned in such a manner as to render it thick for
defence, and over this he again draws his ordinary shirt, which is
also of deer-skin, but thinner in substance. The Esquimaux also use
armour of eider drake’s skin.[35] The Abipones and Indians of the Grand
Chako arm themselves with a cuirass, greaves, and helmet, composed
of the thick hide of the tapir, but they no longer use it against the
musketry of the Europeans.[36] The Yucanas also use shields of the same
material. The war-dress of a Patagonian chief from the Museum of the
Institution is exhibited (Plate VII, figs. 11, 12); it is composed of
seven thicknesses of hide, probably of the horse, upon the body, and
three on the sleeves. The chiefs of the Musgu negroes of Central Africa
use for defence a strong doublet of the same kind, made of buffalo’s
hide with the hair inside.[37] The Kayans of Borneo use hide for
their war-dress, as shown by a specimen belonging to the Institution
(Fig. 13). The skin of the bear and panther is most esteemed for this
purpose.[38] The inhabitants of Pulo Nias, an island off the western
coast of Sumatra, use for armour a ‘baju’ made of leather. In some
parts of Egypt a breastplate was made of the back of the crocodile
(Fig. 14). In the island of Cayenne, in 1519, the inhabitants used a
breastplate of buffalo’s hide.[39] The Lesghi of Tartary wore armour
of hog’s skin.[40] The Indians of Chili, in the seventeenth century,
wore corselets, back and breast plates, gauntlets, and helmets of
leather, so hardened, that it is described by Ovalle as being equal
to metal.[41] According to Strabo (p. 306), the German Rhoxolani wore
helmets, and breastplates of bull’s hide, though the Germans generally
placed little reliance in defensive armour. The Ethiopians used the
skins of cranes and ostriches for their armour.[42]

[Illustration: PLATE VIII.]

We learn from Herodotus that it was from the Libyans the Greeks derived
the apparel and aegis of Minerva, as represented upon her images, but
instead of a pectoral of scale armour, that of the Libyans was merely
of skin.[43] According to Smith’s _Dict. of Gr. and Roman Antiquities_
(s.v. _lorica_), the Greek ‘thorax’, called στάδιος, from its standing
erect by its own stiffness, was originally of leather, before it was
constructed of metal. In Meyrick’s _Ancient Armour_, there is the
figure of a suit, supposed formerly to have belonged to the Rajah of
Guzerat (Plate VIII, fig. 15). The body part of this suit is composed
of four pieces of rhinoceros hide, showing that, in all probability,
this was the material originally employed for that particular class of
armour, which is now produced of the same form in metal, a specimen of
which, from the Museum of the Institution, taken from the Sikhs, is now
exhibited (Fig. 16).

[Illustration: PLATE IX.]

In more advanced communities, as skins began to be replaced by woven
materials, quilted armour supplied the place of hides. In those parts
of the Polynesian Islands in which armour is used, owing probably
to the absence of suitable skins, woven armour appears to have been
employed in a comparatively low state of society. Specimens of this
class of armour from the Museum of the Institution are exhibited; they
are from the Kingsmill Islands, Pleasant Island, and the Sandwich
Islands. A helmet from the latter place (Pl. VIII, fig. 17) much
resembles the Grecian in form, while the under tippet, from Pleasant
Island (Pl. VII, fig. 18), may be compared to the pectoral of the
Egyptians (Fig. 19, _a_ and _b_), which, as well as the head-dress (Pl.
VIII, fig. 20), was of a thickly quilted material. The Egyptians wore
this pectoral up to the time of Xerxes, who employed their sailors,
armed in this way, during his expedition into Greece. Herodotus says
that the Indians of Asia wore a thorax of rush matting.[44] In 1514,
Magellan[45] found tunics of quilted cotton, called ‘laudes’, in
use by the Muslims of Guzerat and the Deccan. An Indian helmet of
this description from my collection (Fig. 21) is exhibited; in form
it resembles the Egyptian, and an Ethiopian one (Fig. 22), composed
of beads of the same form, brought from Central Africa by Consul
Petherick, is exhibited. Fig. 23 shows that the same form, in India,
was subsequently produced in metal. A suit of quilted armour formerly
belonging to Koer Singh, and lately presented to the Institution by Sir
Vincent Eyre, is also exhibited (Plate VII, fig. 24). The body armour
and helmet found upon Tippoo Sahib at his death, which are now in the
Museum of the Institution (Plate IX, fig. 25, _a_, _b_, and _c_), were
thickly quilted. Upon the breast, this armour consists of two sheets
of parchment, and nine thicknesses of padding composed of cocoons of
the _Saturnia mylitta_, stuffed with the wool of the _Eriodendron
anfractuosum, D.C._, neatly sewn together, as represented in fig. 25
_b_.[46] The Aztecs and Peruvians also guarded themselves with a wadded
cotton doublet.[47] Quilted armour or thick linen corselets were used
by the Persians, Phoenicians, Chalybes, Assyrians, Lusitanians, and
Scythians, by the Greeks, and occasionally by the Romans.[48] By the
Persians it was used much later; and in Africa to this day, quilted
armour, of precisely the same description, is used both for men and
horses by the Bornouese of Central Africa, and is described by Denham
and Clapperton[49] (Plate VIII, fig. 26). Plate VII, fig. 27, is a suit
of armour in the Institution, from the Navigator Islands, composed of
coco-nut fibre coarsely netted. Fig. 28 is part of a Chinese jacket of
sky-blue cotton, quilted with enclosed plates of iron; it is precisely
similar to the ‘brigandine jacket’ used in Europe in the sixteenth
century, which was composed of ‘small plates of iron quilted within
some stuff’, and ‘covered generally with sky-blue cloth’.[50] This
class of armour may be regarded as a link connecting the quilted with
the scale armour, to be described hereafter.

As a material for shields, the hides of animals were employed even more
universally, and up to a later stage of civilization. In North America
the majority of the wild tribes use shields of the thickest parts of
the hides of the buffalo.[51] In the New Hebrides the skin of the
alligator is used for this purpose, as appears by a specimen belonging
to the Institution. In Africa the Fans of the Gaboon employ the hide of
the elephant for their large, rectangular shields.[52] The Wadi, the
Wagogo, and the Abyssinians in East Africa, have shields of buffalo’s
hide, or some kind of leather, like the Ethiopians of the time of
Herodotus. The ox-hide shields of the Greeks are mentioned in Homer’s
_Iliad_; that of Ajax was composed of seven hides with a coating of
brass on the outside. The spear of Hector is described as piercing six
of the hides and the brass coating, remaining fixed in the seventh
hide.[53] The Kaffirs, Bechuanas, Basutos, and others in South Africa,
use the hide of the ox.[54] The Kelgeres, Kelowi, and Tawarek, of
Central Africa, employ the hide of the Leucoryx antelope.[55] Shields
of the rhinoceros hide, from Nubia, and of the ox, from Fernando Po,
are exhibited. In Asia the Biluchi carry shields of the rhinoceros
horn, and the same material is also used in East Africa. A specimen
from Zanzibar is in the Institution. In the greater part of India the
shields are made of rhinoceros and buffalo’s hide, boiled in oil, until
they sometimes become transparent, and are proof against the edge of a
sabre.[56]

In a higher state of civilization, as the facilities for constructing
shields of improved materials increased, the skins of animals were
still used to cover the outside. Thus the negroes of the Gold Coast
made their shields of osier covered with leather.[57] That of the
Kanembu of Central Africa is of wood covered with leather,[58] and very
much resembles in form that of the Egyptians, which, as we learn from
Meyrick and others, was also covered with leather, having the hair on
the outside like the shields of the Greeks.[59] The Roman ‘scutum’ was
of wood covered with linen and sheepskin. According to the author of
_Horae Ferales_, the Saxon shield was of wood covered with leather; the
same applies to the Scotch target, and leather was used as a covering
for shields as late as the time of Henry VIII.

_Head Crests._ The origin of the hairy crests of our helmets is clearly
traceable to the custom of wearing for head-dresses the heads and hair
of animals. The Asiatic Ethiopians used as a head-covering, the skin
of a horse’s head, stripped from the carcase together with the ears
and mane, and so contrived, that the mane served for a crest, while
the ears appeared erect upon the head (Hdt. vii. 70). In the coins
representing Hercules, he appears wearing a lion’s skin upon the head.
These skins were worn in such a manner that the teeth appeared grinning
at the enemy over the head of the wearer (as represented in Plate
VIII, fig. 29, which is taken from a bronze in the Blacas collection),
a custom which seems also to have prevailed in Mexico.[60] Similar
head-dresses are worn by the soldiers on Trajan’s Column. The horns
worn on the heads of some of the North American Indians (Fig. 30), and
in some parts of Africa[61], are no doubt derived from this practice
of wearing on the head the skins of animals with their appendages.
The helmet of Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, was surmounted by two goat’s
horns. Horns were afterwards represented in brass, on the helmets of
the Thracians (Fig. 31), the Belgic Gauls, and others. Fig. 32 is an
ancient British helmet of bronze lately found in the Thames, surmounted
by straight horns of the same material.[62] Horned helmets are figured
on the ancient vases. Fig. 33 is a Greek helmet having horns of brass,
and traces of the same custom may still be observed in heraldry.[63]

The practice of wearing head-dresses of feathers, to distinguish the
chiefs from the rank and file, is universal in all parts of the world,
and in nearly every stage of civilization. Amongst the North American
Indians the feathers are cut in a particular manner to denote the rank
of the wearer, precisely in the same manner that the long feathers
of our general officers distinguish them from those wearing shorter
feathers in subordinate ranks. This custom, Mr. Schoolcraft observes,
when describing the head-dresses of the American Indians, may very
probably be derived from the feathered creation, in which the males, in
most of the cock, turkey, and pheasant tribes, are crowned with bright
crests and ornaments of feathers.[64]

_Solid Plates._ It has often struck me as remarkable that the shells of
the tortoise and turtle, which are so widely distributed and so easily
captured, and which would appear to furnish shields ready made to the
hand of man, should seldom, if ever, in so far as I have been able
to learn, be used by savages for that purpose. This may, however, be
accounted for by the fact that _broad_ shields of that particular form,
though common in more advanced civilizations, are never found in the
hands of savages, at least in those localities in which the turtle, or
large tortoise, is available.

It will be seen subsequently, in tracing the history of the shield,
that in the rudest condition of savage life, this weapon of defence has
a history of its own; that both in Africa and Australia it is derived
by successive stages from the stick or club, and that the broad shield
does not appear to have been developed until after mankind had acquired
sufficient constructive skill to have been able to form shields of
lighter and more suitable materials than is afforded by the shell of
the turtle. It is, however, evident that in later times the analogy
was not lost sight of, as the word ‘testudo’ is a name given by the
Romans to several engines of war having shields attached to them, and
especially to that particular formation of the legionary troops, in
which they approached a fortified building with their shields joined
together, and overlapping, like the scaly shell of the imbricated
turtle, which is a native of the Mediterranean and Asiatic seas.

_Jointed Plates._ In speaking of the jointed plates, so common to all
the crustacea, it is sufficient to notice that this class of defence in
the animal kingdom, may be regarded as the prototype of that peculiar
form of armour which was used by the Romans, and to which the French,
at the commencement of the seventeenth century, gave the name of
‘écrevisse’, from its resemblance to the shell of a lobster. The fluted
armour, common in Persia, and in the middle ages of Europe, is also
constructed in exact imitation of the corrugated shell defences of a
large class of the Mollusca.

_Scale Armour._ That scale armour derived its origin from the scales of
animals, there can be little doubt. It has been stated on the authority
of Arrian (_Tact._ 13. 14), that the Greeks distinguished scale armour
by the term λεπιδωτός, expressive of its resemblance to the scales of
fish; whilst the jointed armour, composed of long flexible bands, like
the armour of the Roman soldier, and the ‘écrevisse’ of the middle
ages, was called φολιδωτός from its resemblance to the scales of
serpents. The brute origin of scale armour is well illustrated by the
breastplate of the Bugo Dyaks, a specimen of which, from the Museum
of the Institution, is represented in Plate IX, fig. 34. The process
of its construction was described in a notice attached to a specimen
of this armour in the Exhibition of 1862. The scales of the Pangolin
are collected by the Bugis as they are thrown off by the animal, and
are stitched on to bark with small threads of cane, so as to overlap
each other in the same manner that they are arranged on the skin of
the animal. When the front piece is completely covered with scales, a
hole is cut in the bark for the head of the wearer. The specimen now
exhibited appears, however, to be composed of the entire skin of the
animal. Captain Grant, in his _Walk across Africa_, mentions that the
scales of the armadillo are in like manner collected by the negroes of
East Africa, and worn in a belt ‘three inches across’, as a charm.[65]

It is reasonable to suppose that the use of scale armour, in most
countries, originated in this manner by sewing on to the quilted armour
before described, fragments of any hard material calculated to give
it additional strength. Plate VIII, fig. 35, is a piece of bark from
Tahiti, studded with pieces of coco-nut stitched on. The Sarmatians and
Quadi are described by Ammianus Marcellinus as being protected by a
‘lorica’, composed of pieces of horn, planed and polished, and fastened
like feathers upon a linen shirt.[66] Pausanias also, who is confirmed
by Tacitus, says that the Sarmatians had large herds of horses, that
they collected the hoofs, and after preparing them for the purpose,
sewed them together, with the nerves and sinews of the same animal,
so as to overlap each other like the surface of a fir cone, and he
adds, that the ‘lorica’ thus formed was not inferior to that of the
Greeks either in strength or elegance. The Emperor Domitian had, after
this model, a cuirass of boar’s hoofs stitched together.[67] Fig. 36
represents a fragment of scale armour made of horn, found at Pompeii.
A very similar piece of armour (Fig. 37), from some part of Asia, said
to be from Japan, but the actual locality of which is not known, is
figured in Meyrick’s _Ancient Armour_, pl. iii. 1. It is made of the
hoofs of some animal, stitched and fastened so as to hold together
without the aid of a linen corselet. An ancient stone figure[68]
(Plate IX, fig. 38), having an inscription in a character cognate to
the Greek, but in an unknown language, and covered with armour of this
description, is represented in the third volume of the _Journal of the
Archaeological Association_. The Kayans, inhabiting the eastern coast
of Borneo, form a kind of armour composed of little shells placed one
overlapping the other, like scales, and having a large mother-of-pearl
shell at the end. This last portion of the armour is shown in the
figure of the Kayan war-dress already referred to (Plate VII, fig. 13).
Plate VIII, fig. 39, is a back- and breast-piece of armour from the
Sandwich Islands, composed of seals’ teeth, set like scales, and united
with string.

Similar scales would afterwards be constructed in bronze and iron.
It was thus employed by the Egyptians (Plate IX, fig. 40), two scales
of which are shown in Fig. 41; also by the Persians, Assyrians,
Philistines, Dacians, and most ancient nations.

The armour of Goliath is believed to have been of scales, from the
fact of the word ‘kaskassim’, used in the text of 1 Sam. xvii,
being the same employed in Leviticus and Ezekiel, to express the
scales of fish.[69] Amongst the Romans, scale armour was regarded as
characteristic of barbarians, but they appear to have adopted it in the
time of the Emperors. A suit of Japanese armour in my collection shows
four distinct systems of defence, the back and breast being of solid
plates, the sleeves and leggings composed of small pieces of iron,
stitched on to cloth, and united with chain, whilst other portions are
quilted with enclosed pieces of iron (Fig. 42, _a_ and _b_). Fig. 43,
_a_ and _b_, is a suit of Chinese armour, in the Museum, having large
iron scales on the inside (Fig. 44). This system was also employed in
Europe. Fig. 45 is the inner side of a suit of ‘jazerine’ armour of the
fifteenth or sixteenth century, in my collection. Fig. 46 represents
a similar suit in the Museum of the Institution, probably of the same
date, having large scales of iron on the outside. A last vestige of
scale armour may be seen in the dress of the Albanians, which, like the
Scotch and ancient Irish kilt, and that formerly worn by the Maltese
peasantry, is a relic of costume of the Greek and Roman age. In the
Albanian jacket the scales are still represented in gold embroidery.[70]


_Offensive Weapons of Men and Animals._

[Illustration: PLATE X.]

_Piercing Weapons._ The Gnu of South Africa, when pressed, will attack
men, bending its head downwards, so as to pierce with the point of
its horn.[71] The same applies to many of the antelope tribe. The
rhinoceros destroys the elephant with the thrust of its horn, ripping
up the belly (Plate X, fig. 47). The horn rests on a strong arch formed
by the nasal bones; those of the African rhinoceros, two in number,
are fixed to the nose by a strong apparatus of muscles and tendons,
so that they are loose when the animal is in a quiescent state, but
become firm and immovable when he is enraged, showing in an especial
manner that this apparatus is destined for warlike purposes.[72] It
is capable of piercing the ribs of a horse, passing through saddle,
padding, and all.[73] Mr. Atkinson, in his Siberian travels, speaks of
the tusk of the wild boar, which in those parts is long, and as sharp
as a knife, and he describes the death of a horse which was killed
by a single stroke from this animal, delivered in the chest.[74] The
buffalo charges at full speed with its horn down.[75] The bittern, with
its beak, aims always at the eye.[76] The walrus (Fig. 48) attacks
fiercely with its pointed tusks, and will attempt to pierce the side
of a boat with them.[77] The needle-fish of the Amazons is armed
with a long pointed lance.[78] The same applies to the sword-fish of
the Mediterranean and Atlantic (Fig. 49), which, notwithstanding its
food is mostly vegetable, attacks the whale with its spear-point on
all occasions of meeting. There is an instance on record, of a man,
whilst bathing in the Severn near Worcester, having been killed by the
sword-fish.

The weapon of the sword-fish is used as a spear-head by the wild tribes
of Cambodia, and some idea may be formed of its efficiency for this
purpose, and of the confidence with which it is used, by the following
account of an attack on a rhinoceros with this weapon, by Mons.
Mouhot.[79] He says:--

‘The manner in which the rhinoceros is hunted by the Laotians is
curious, on account of its simplicity and the skill they display....
They had bamboos, with iron blades, something between a bayonet and a
poignard. The weapon of the chief was the horn of a sword-fish, long,
sharp, strong, supple, and not likely to break. Thus armed, we set
off into the thickest part of the forest, with all the windings of
which our leader was familiar, and could tell with tolerable certainty
where we should find our expected prey. After penetrating nearly two
miles into the forest, we suddenly heard the crackling of branches, and
rustling of the dry leaves. The chief went on in advance, signing to us
to keep a little way behind, but to have our arms in readiness. Soon
our leader uttered a shrill cry, as a token that the animal was near;
he then commenced striking against each other two bamboo canes, and the
men set up wild yells to provoke the animal to quit his retreat.

‘A few minutes only elapsed before he rushed towards us, furious at
having been disturbed. He was a rhinoceros of the largest size, and
opened a most enormous mouth. Without any sign of fear, but on the
contrary of great exultation, as though sure of his prey, the intrepid
hunter advanced, lance in hand, and then stood still, waiting for the
creature’s assault. I must say I trembled for him, and loaded my gun
with two balls; but when the rhinoceros came within reach, and opened
his immense jaws to seize his enemy[80], the hunter thrust his lance
into him to a depth of some feet, and calmly retired to where we were
posted.’ After the animal was dead, the chief withdrew his sword-fish
blade, and presented it to Mons. Mouhot.

The narwhal has a still more formidable weapon of the same kind (Pl.
X, fig. 50). It attacks the whale, and occasionally the bottoms of
ships, a specimen of the effect of which attack, from the Museum of
the Institution, is represented in Fig. 51. The Esquimaux, who, in
the accounts which

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