History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom Part 31

The labours of the Danish archaeologists have resulted in the formation of a great museum at Copenhagen, and on the specimens they have found, coupled with those of the drift and bone caves, is based the cla.s.sification between the main periods or divisions in the evolution of the human race above referred to.

It was not merely in Scandinavian lands that these results were reached; substantially the same discoveries were made in Ireland and France, in Sardinia and Portugal, in j.a.pan and in Brazil, in Cuba and in the United States; in fact, as a rule, in nearly every part of the world which was thoroughly examined.(192)

(192) For the general subject, see Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, p. 498, et pa.s.sim. For examples of the rude stone implements, improving as we go from earlier to later layers in the bone caves, see Boyd Hawkins, Early Man in Britain, chap. vii, p. 186; also Quatref.a.ges, Human Species, New York, 1879, pp. 305 et seq. An interesting gleam of light is thrown on the subject in De Baye, Grottes Prehistoriques de la Marne, pp. 31 et seq.; also Evans, as cited in the previous chapter. For the more recent investigations in the Danish sh.e.l.l-heaps, see Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, pp. 303, 304. For these evidences of advanced civilization in the sh.e.l.l-heaps, see Mortillet, p. 498. He, like Nilsson, says that only the bones of the dog were found; but compare Dawkins, p. 305. For the very full list of these discoveries, with their bearing on each other, see Mortillet, p. 499. As to those in Scandanavian countries, see Nilsson, The Primitive Inhabitants of Scandanavia, third edition, with Introduction by Lubbock, London, 1868; also the Pre-History of the North, by Worsaae, English translation, London, 1886. For sh.e.l.l-mounds and their contents in the Spanish Peninsula, see Cartailhac's greater work already cited. For summary of such discoveries throughout the world, see Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, pp. 497 et seq.

But from another quarter came a yet more striking indication of this same evolution. As far back as the year 1829 there were discovered, in the Lake of Zurich, piles and other antiquities indicating a former existence of human dwellings, standing in the water at some distance from the sh.o.r.e; but the usual mixture of thoughtlessness and dread of new ideas seems to have prevailed, and nothing was done until about 1853, when new discoveries of the same kind were followed up vigorously, and Rutimeyer, Keller, Troyon, and others showed not only in the Lake of Zurich, but in many other lakes in Switzerland, remains of former habitations, and, in the midst of these, great numbers of relics, exhibiting the grade of civilization which those lake-dwellers had attained.

Here, too, were acc.u.mulated proofs of the upward tendency of the human race. Implements of polished stone, bone, leather, pottery of various grades, woven cloth, bones of several kinds of domestic animals, various sorts of grain, bread which had been preserved by charring, and a mult.i.tude of evidences of progress never found among the earlier, ruder relics of civilization, showed yet more strongly that man had arrived here at a still higher stage than his predecessor of the drift, cave, and sh.e.l.l-heap periods, and had gone on from better to better.

Very striking evidences of this upward tendency were found in each cla.s.s of implements. As by comparing the chipped flint implements of the lower and earlier strata in the cave period with those of the later and upper strata we saw progress, so, in each of the periods of polished stone, bronze, and iron, we see, by similar comparisons, a steady progress from rude to perfected implements; and especially is this true in the remains of the various lake-dwellings, for among these can be traced out constant increase in the variety of animals domesticated, and gradual improvements in means of subsistence and in ways of living.

Incidentally, too, a fact, at first sight of small account, but on reflection exceedingly important, was revealed. The earlier bronze implements were frequently found to imitate in various minor respects implements of stone; in other words, forms were at first given to bronze implements natural in working stone, but not natural in working bronze.

This showed the DIRECTION of the development--that it was upward from stone to bronze, not downward from bronze to stone; that it was progress rather than decline.

These investigations were supplemented by similar researches elsewhere.

In many other parts of the world it was found that lake-dwellers had existed in different grades of civilization, but all within a certain range, intermediate between the cave-dwellers and the historic period.

To explain this epoch of the lake-dwellers, history came in with the account given by Herodotus of the lake-dwellings on Lake Prasias, which gave protection from the armies of Persia. Still more important, Comparative Ethnography showed that to-day, in various parts of the world, especially in New Guinea and West Africa, races of men are living in lake-dwellings built upon piles, and with a range of implements and weapons strikingly like many of those discovered in these ancient lake deposits of Switzerland.

In Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Scotland, and other countries, remains of a different sort were also found, throwing light on this progress. The cromlechs, cranogs, mounds, and the like, though some of them indicate the work of weaker tribes pressed upon by stronger, show, as a rule, the same upward tendency.

At a very early period in the history of these discoveries, various attempts were made--nominally in the interest of religion, but really in the interest of sundry creeds and catechisms framed when men knew little or nothing of natural laws--to break the force of such evidences of the progress and development of the human race from lower to higher. Out of all the earlier efforts two may be taken as fairly typical, for they exhibit the opposition to science as developed under two different schools of theology, each working in its own way. The first of these shows great ingenuity and learning, and is presented by Mr. Southall in his book, published in 1875, ent.i.tled The Recent Origin of the World.

In this he grapples first of all with the difficulties presented by the early date of Egyptian civilization, and the keynote of his argument is the statement made by an eminent Egyptologist, at a period before modern archaeological discoveries were well understood, that "Egypt laughs the idea of a rude Stone age, a polished Stone age, a Bronze age, an Iron age, to scorn."

Mr. Southall's method was substantially that of the late excellent Mr.

Gosse in geology. Mr. Gosse, as the readers of this work may remember, felt obliged, in the supposed interest of Genesis, to urge that safety to men's souls might be found in believing that, six thousand years ago, the Almighty, for some inscrutable purpose, suddenly set Niagara pouring very near the spot where it is pouring now; laid the various strata, and sprinkled the fossils through them like plums through a pudding; scratched the glacial grooves upon the rocks, and did a vast mult.i.tude of things, subtle and cunning, little and great, in all parts of the world, required to delude geologists of modern times into the conviction that all these things were the result of a steady progress through long epochs. On a similar plan, Mr. Southall proposed, at the very beginning of his book, as a final solution of the problem, the declaration that Egypt, with its high civilization in the time of Mena, with its races, cla.s.ses, inst.i.tutions, arrangements, language, monuments--all indicating an evolution through a vast previous history--was a sudden creation which came fully made from the hands of the Creator. To use his own words, "The Egyptians had no Stone age, and were born civilized."

There is an old story that once on a time a certain jovial King of France, making a progress through his kingdom, was received at the gates of a provincial town by the mayor's deputy, who began his speech on this wise: "May it please your Majesty, there are just thirteen reasons why His Honour the Mayor can not be present to welcome you this morning. The first of these reasons is that he is dead." On this the king graciously declared that this first reason was sufficient, and that he would not trouble the mayor's deputy for the twelve others.

So with Mr. Southall's argument: one simple result of scientific research out of many is all that it is needful to state, and this is, that in these later years we have a new and convincing evidence of the existence of prehistoric man in Egypt in his earliest, rudest beginnings; the very same evidence which we find in all other parts of the world which have been carefully examined. This evidence consists of stone implements and weapons which have been found in Egypt in such forms, at such points, and in such positions that when studied in connection with those found in all other parts of the world, from New Jersey to California, from France to India, and from England to the Andaman Islands, they force upon us the conviction that civilization in Egypt, as in all other parts of the world, was developed by the same slow process of evolution from the rudest beginnings.

It is true that men learned in Egyptology had discouraged the idea of an earlier Stone age in Egypt, and that among these were Lepsius and Brugsch; but these men were not trained in prehistoric archaeology; their devotion to the study of the monuments of Egyptian civilization had evidently drawn them away from sympathy, and indeed from acquaintance, with the work of men like Boucher de Perthes, Lartet, Nilsson, Troyon, and Dawkins. But a new era was beginning. In 1867 Worsaae called attention to the prehistoric implements found on the borders of Egypt; two years later Arcelin discussed such stone implements found beneath the soil of Sakkara and Gizeh, the very focus of the earliest Egyptian civilization; in the same year Hamy and Lenormant found such implements washed out from the depths higher up the Nile at Thebes, near the tombs of the kings; and in the following year they exhibited more flint implements found at various other places.

Coupled with these discoveries was the fact that Horner and Linant found a copper knife at twenty-four feet, and pottery at sixty feet, below the surface. In 1872 Dr. Reil, director of the baths at Helouan, near Cairo, discovered implements of chipped flint; and in 1877. Dr. Jukes Brown made similar discoveries in that region. In 1878 Oscar Fraas, summing up the question, showed that the stone implements were mainly such as are found in the prehistoric deposits of other countries, and that, Zittel having found them in the Libyan Desert, far from the oases, there was reason to suppose that these implements were used before the region became a desert and before Egypt was civilized. Two years later Dr. Mook, of Wurzburg, published a work giving the results of his investigations, with careful drawings of the rude stone implements discovered by him in the upper Nile Valley, and it was evident that, while some of these implements differed slightly from those before known, the great ma.s.s of them were of the character so common in the prehistoric deposits of other parts of the world.

A yet more important contribution to this ma.s.s of facts was made by Prof. Henry Haynes, of Boston, who in the winter of 1877 and 1878 began a very thorough investigation of the subject, and discovered, a few miles east of Cairo, many flint implements. The significance of Haynes's discoveries was twofold: First, there were, among these, stone axes like those found in the French drift beds of St. Acheul, showing that the men who made or taught men how to make these in Egypt were pa.s.sing through the same phase of savagery as that of Quaternary France; secondly, he found a workshop for making these implements, proving that these flint implements were not brought into Egypt by invaders, but were made to meet the necessities of the country. From this first field Prof. Haynes went to Helouan, north of Cairo, and there found, as Dr. Reil had done, various worked flints, some of them like those discovered by M. Riviere in the caves of southern France; thence he went up the Nile to Luxor, the site of ancient Thebes, began a thorough search in the Tertiary limestone hills, and found mult.i.tudes of chipped stone implements, some of them, indeed, of original forms, but most of forms common in other parts of the world under similar circ.u.mstances, some of the chipped stone axes corresponding closely to those found in the drift beds of northern France.

All this seemed to show conclusively that, long ages before the earliest period of Egyptian civilization of which the monuments of the first dynasties give us any trace, mankind in the Nile Valley was going through the same slow progress from the period when, standing just above the brutes, he defended himself with implements of rudely chipped stone.

But in 1881 came discoveries which settled the question entirely.

In that year General Pitt-Rivers, a Fellow of the Royal Society and President of the Anthropological Inst.i.tute, and J. F. Campbell, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of England, found implements not only in alluvial deposits, a.s.sociated with the bones of the zebra, hyena, and other animals which have since retreated farther south, but, at Djebel a.s.sas, near Thebes, they found implements of chipped flint in the hard, stratified gravel, from six and a half to ten feet below the surface; relics evidently, as Mr. Campbell says, "beyond calculation older than the oldest Egyptian temples and tombs." They certainly proved that Egyptian civilization had not issued in its completeness, and all at once, from the hand of the Creator in the time of Mena. Nor was this all. Investigators of the highest character and ability--men like Hull and Flinders Petrie--revealed geological changes in Egypt requiring enormous periods of time, and traces of man's handiwork dating from a period when the waters in the Nile Valley extended hundreds of feet above the present level. Thus was ended the contention of Mr. Southall.

Still another attack upon the new scientific conclusions came from France, when in 1883 the Abbe Hamard, Priest of the Oratory, published his Age of Stone and Primitive Man. He had been especially vexed at the arrangement of prehistoric implements by periods at the Paris Exposition of 1878; he bitterly complains of this as having an anti-Christian tendency, and rails at science as "the idol of the day." He attacks Mortillet, one of the leaders in French archaeology, with a great display of contempt; speaks of the "venom" in books on prehistoric man generally; complains that the Church is too mild and gentle with such monstrous doctrines; bewails the concessions made to science by some eminent preachers; and foretells his own martyrdom at the hands of men of science.

Efforts like this accomplished little, and a more legitimate attempt was made to resist the conclusions of archaeology by showing that knives of stone were used in obedience to a sacred ritual in Egypt for embalming, and in Judea for circ.u.mcision, and that these flint knives might have had this later origin. But the argument against the conclusions drawn from this view was triple: First, as we have seen, not only stone knives, but axes and other implements of stone similar to those of a prehistoric period in western Europe were discovered; secondly, these implements were discovered in the hard gravel drift of a period evidently far earlier than that of Mena; and, thirdly, the use of stone implements in Egyptian and Jewish sacred functions within the historic period, so far from weakening the force of the arguments for the long and slow development of Egyptian civilization from the men who used rude flint implements to the men who built and adorned the great temples of the early dynasties, is really an argument in favour of that long evolution. A study of comparative ethnology has made it clear that the sacred stone knives and implements of the Egyptian and Jewish priestly ritual were natural survivals of that previous period. For sacrificial or ritual purposes, the knife of stone was considered more sacred than the knife of bronze or iron, simply because it was ancient; just as to-day, in India, Brahman priests kindle the sacred fire not with matches or flint and steel, but by a process found in the earliest, lowest stages of human culture--by violently boring a pointed stick into another piece of wood until a spark comes; and just as to-day, in Europe and America, the architecture of the Middle Ages survives as a special religious form in the erection of our most recent churches, and to such an extent that thousands on thousands of us feel that we can not wors.h.i.+p fitly unless in the midst of windows, decorations, vessels, implements, vestments, and ornaments, no longer used for other purposes, but which have survived in sundry branches of the Christian Church, and derived a special sanct.i.ty from the fact that they are of ancient origin.

Taking, then, the whole ma.s.s of testimony together, even though a plausible or very strong argument against single evidences may be made here and there, the force of its combined ma.s.s remains, and leaves both the vast antiquity of man and the evolution of civilization from its lowest to its highest forms, as proved by the prehistoric remains of Egypt and so many other countries in all parts of the world, beyond a reasonable doubt. Most important of all, the recent discoveries in a.s.syria have thrown a new light upon the evolution of the dogma of "the fall of man." Reverent scholars like George Smith, Sayce, Delitzsch, Jensen, Schrader, and their compeers have found in the Ninevite records the undoubted source of that form of the fall legend which was adopted by the Hebrews and by them transmitted to Christianity.(193)

(193) For Mr. Southall's views, see his Recent Origin of Man, p. 20 and elsewhere. For Mr. Gosse'e views, see his Omphalos as cited in the chapter on Geology in this work. For a summary of the work of Arcelin, Hamy, Lenormant, Richard, Lubbock, Mook, and Haynes, see Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, pa.s.sim. As to Zittel's discovery, see Oscar Fraas's Aus dem Orient, Stuttgart, 1878. As to the striking similarities of the stone implements found in Egypt with those found in the drift and bone caves, see Mook's monograph, Wurzburg, 1880, cited in the next chapter, especially Plates IX, XI, XII. For even more striking reproductions of photographs showing this remarkable similarity between Egyptian and European chipped stone remains, see H. W. Haynes, Palaeolithic Implements in Upper Egypt, Boston, 1881. See also Evans, Ancient Stone Implements, chap. i, pp. 8, 9, 44, 102, 316, 329. As to stone implements used by priests of Jehovah, priests of Baal, priests of Moloch, priests of Odin, and Egyptian priests, as religious survivals, see Cartailhac, as above, 6 and 7; also Lartet, in De Luynes, Expedition to the Dead Sea; also Nilsson, Primitive Inhabitants of Scandanavia, pp. 96, 97; also Sayce, Herodotus, p. 171, note. For the discoveries by Pitt-Rivers, see the Journal of the Anthropological Inst.i.tute of Great Britain and Ireland for 1882, vol. xi, pp. 382 et seq.; and for Campbell's decision regarding them, see ibid., pp. 396, 397. For facts summed up in the words, "It is most probable that Egypt at a remote period pa.s.sed like many other countries through its stone period," see Hilton Price, F. S.

A., F. G. S., paper in the Journal of the Archaeological Inst.i.tute of Great Britain and Ireland for 1884, p. 56. Specimens of Palaeolithic implements from Egypt--knives, arrowheads, spearheads, flakes, and the like, both of peculiar and ordinary forms--may be seen in various museums, but especially in that of Prof. Haynes, of Boston. Some interesting light is also thrown into the subject by the specimens obtained by General Wilson and deposited in the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution at Was.h.i.+ngton. For Abbe Hamard's attack, see his L'Age de la Pierre et L'Homme Primitif, Paris, 1883--especially his preface. For the stone weapon found in the high drift behind Esneh, see Flinders Petrie, History of Egypt, chap. i. Of these discoveries by Pitt-Rivers and others, Maspero appears to know nothing.

CHAPTER IX. THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ETHNOLOGY.

We have seen that, closely connected with the main lines of investigation in archaeology and anthropology, there were other researches throwing much light on the entire subject. In a previous chapter we saw especially that Lafitau and Jussieu were among the first to collect and compare facts bearing on the natural history of man, gathered by travellers in various parts of the earth, thus laying foundations for the science of comparative ethnology. It was soon seen that ethnology had most important bearings upon the question of the material, intellectual, moral, and religious evolution of the human race; in every civilized nation, therefore, appeared scholars who began to study the characteristics of various groups of men as ascertained from travellers, and to compare the results thus gained with each other and with those obtained by archaeology.

Thus, more and more clear became the evidences that the tendency of the race has been upward from low beginnings. It was found that groups of men still existed possessing characteristics of those in the early periods of development to whom the drift and caves and sh.e.l.l-heaps and pile-dwellings bear witness; groups of men using many of the same implements and weapons, building their houses in the same way, seeking their food by the same means, enjoying the same amus.e.m.e.nts, and going through the same general stages of culture; some being in a condition corresponding to the earlier, some to the later, of those early periods.

From all sides thus came evidence that we have still upon the earth examples of all the main stages in the development of human civilization; that from the period when man appears little above the brutes, and with little if any religion in any accepted sense of the word, these examples can be arranged in an ascending series leading to the highest planes which humanity has reached; that philosophic observers may among these examples study existing beliefs, usages, and inst.i.tutions back through earlier and earlier forms, until, as a rule, the whole evolution can be easily divined if not fully seen. Moreover, the basis of the whole structure became more and more clear: the fact that "the lines of intelligence have always been what they are, and have always operated as they do now; that man has progressed from the simple to the complex, from the particular to the general."

As this evidence from ethnology became more and more strong, its significance to theology aroused attention, and naturally most determined efforts were made to break its force. On the Continent the two great champions of the Church in this field were De Maistre and De Bonald; but the two attempts which may be especially recalled as the most influential among English-speaking peoples were those of Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, and the Duke of Argyll.

First in the combat against these new deductions of science was Whately.

He was a strong man, whose breadth of thought and liberality in practice deserve all honour; but these very qualities drew upon him the distrust of his orthodox brethren; and, while his writings were powerful in the first half of the present century to break down many bulwarks of unreason, he seems to have been constantly in fear of losing touch with the Church, and therefore to have promptly attacked some scientific reasonings, which, had he been a layman, not holding a brief for the Church, he would probably have studied with more care and less prejudice. He was not slow to see the deeper significance of archaeology and ethnology in their relations to the theological conception of "the Fall," and he set the battle in array against them.

His contention was, to use his own words, that "no community ever did or ever can emerge una.s.sisted by external helps from a state of utter barbarism into anything that can be called civilization"; and that, in short, all imperfectly civilized, barbarous, and savage races are but fallen descendants of races more fully civilized. This view was urged with his usual ingenuity and vigour, but the facts proved too strong for him: they made it clear, first, that many races were without simple possessions, instruments, and arts which never, probably, could have been lost if once acquired--as, for example, pottery, the bow for shooting, various domesticated animals, spinning, the simplest principles of agriculture, household economy, and the like; and, secondly, it was shown as a simple matter of fact that various savage and barbarous tribes HAD raised themselves by a development of means which no one from outside could have taught them; as in the cultivation and improvement of various indigenous plants, such as the potato and Indian corn among the Indians of North America; in the domestication of various animals peculiar to their own regions, such as the llama among the Indians of south America; in the making of sundry fabrics out of materials and by processes not found among other nations, such as the bark cloth of the Polynesians; and in the development of weapons peculiar to sundry localities, but known in no others, such as the boomerang in Australia.

Most effective in bringing out the truth were such works as those of Sir John Lubbock and Tylor; and so conclusive were they that the arguments of Whately were given up as untenable by the other of the two great champions above referred to, and an attempt was made by him to form the diminis.h.i.+ng number of thinking men supporting the old theological view on a new line of defence.

This second champion, the Duke of Argyll, was a man of wide knowledge and strong powers in debate, whose high moral sense was amply shown in his adhesion to the side of the American Union in the struggle against disunion and slavery, despite the overwhelming majority against him in the high aristocracy to which he belonged. As an honest man and close thinker, the duke was obliged to give up completely the theological view of the antiquity of man. The whole biblical chronology as held by the universal Church, "always, everywhere, and by all," he sacrificed, and gave all his powers in this field to support the theory of "the Fall."

n.o.blesse oblige: the duke and his ancestors had been for centuries the chief pillars of the Church of Scotland, and it was too much to expect that he could break away from a tenet which forms really its "chief cornerstone."

Acknowledging the insufficiency of Archbishop Whately's argument, the duke took the ground that the lower, barbarous, savage, brutal races were the remains of civilized races which, in the struggle for existence, had been pushed and driven off to remote and inclement parts of the earth, where the conditions necessary to a continuance in their early civilization were absent; that, therefore, the descendants of primeval, civilized men degenerated and sank in the scale of culture. To use his own words, the weaker races were "driven by the stronger to the woods and rocks," so that they became "mere outcasts of the human race."

In answer to this, while it was conceded, first, that there have been examples of weaker tribes sinking in the scale of culture after escaping from the stronger into regions unfavourable to civilization, and, secondly, that many powerful nations have declined and decayed, it was shown that the men in the most remote and unfavourable regions have not always been the lowest in the scale; that men have been frequently found "among the woods and rocks" in a higher state of civilization than on the fertile plains, such examples being cited as Mexico, Peru, and even Scotland; and that, while there were many examples of special and local decline, overwhelming ma.s.ses of facts point to progress as a rule.

The improbability, not to say impossibility, of many of the conclusions arrived at by the duke appeared more and more strongly as more became known of the lower tribes of mankind. It was necessary on his theory to suppose many things which our knowledge of the human race absolutely forbids us to believe: for example, it was necessary to suppose that the Australians or New Zealanders, having once possessed so simple and convenient an art as that of the potter, had lost every trace of it; and that the same tribes, having once had so simple a means of saving labour as the spindle or small stick weighted at one end for spinning, had given it up and gone back to twisting threads with the hand. In fact, it was necessary to suppose that one of the main occupations of man from "the beginning" had been the forgetting of simple methods, processes, and implements which all experience in the actual world teaches us are never entirely forgotten by peoples who have once acquired them.

Some leading arguments of the duke were overthrown by simple statements of fact. Thus, his instance of the Eskimo as pushed to the verge of habitable America, and therefore living in the lowest depths of savagery, which, even if it were true, by no means proved a general rule, was deprived of its force by the simple fact that the Eskimos are by no means the lowest race on the American continent, and that various tribes far more centrally and advantageously placed, as, for instance, those in Brazil, are really inferior to them in the scale of culture.

Again, his statement that "in Africa there appear to be no traces of any time when the natives were not acquainted with the use of iron," is met by the fact that from the Nile Valley to the Cape of Good Hope we find, wherever examination has been made, the same early stone implements which in all other parts of the world precede the use of iron, some of which would not have been made had their makers possessed iron. The duke also tried to show that there were no distinctive epochs of stone, bronze, and iron, by adducing the fact that some stone implements are found even in some high civilizations. This is indeed a fact. We find some few European peasants to-day using stone mallet-heads; but this proves simply that the old stone mallet-heads have survived as implements cheap and effective.

The argument from Comparative Ethnology in support of the view that the tendency of mankind is upward has received strength from many sources.

Comparative Philology shows that in the less civilized, barbarous, and savage races childish forms of speech prevail--frequent reduplications and the like, of which we have survivals in the later and even in the most highly developed languages. In various languages, too, we find relics of ancient modes of thought in the simplest words and expressions used for arithmetical calculations. Words and phrases for this purpose are frequently found to be derived from the words for hands, feet, fingers, and toes, just as clearly as in our own language some of our simplest measures of length are shown by their names to have been measures of parts of the human body, as the cubit, the foot, and the like, and therefore to date from a time when exactness was not required.

To add another out of many examples, it is found to-day that various rude nations go through the simplest arithmetical processes by means of pebbles. Into our own language, through the Latin, has come a word showing that our distant progenitors reckoned in this way: the word CALCULATE gives us an absolute proof of this. According to the theory of the Duke of Argyll, men ages ago used pebbles (CALCULI) in performing the simplest arithmetical calculations because we to-day "CALCULATE." No reduction to absurdity could be more thorough. The simple fact must be that we "calculate" because our remote ancestors used pebbles in their arithmetic.

Comparative Literature and Folklore also show among peoples of a low culture to-day childish modes of viewing nature, and childish ways of expressing the relations of man to nature, such as clearly survive from a remote ancestry; noteworthy among these are the beliefs in witches and fairies, and mult.i.tudes of popular and poetic expressions in the most civilized nations.

So, too, Comparative Ethnography, the basis of Ethnology, shows in contemporary barbarians and savages a childish love of playthings and games, of which we have many survivals.

All these facts, which were at first un.o.bserved or observed as matters of no significance, have been brought into connection with a fact in biology acknowledged alike by all important schools; by Aga.s.siz on one hand and by Darwin on the other--namely, as stated by Aga.s.siz, that "the young states of each species and group resemble older forms of the same group," or, as stated by Darwin, that "in two or more groups of animals, however much they may at first differ from each other in structure and habits, if they pa.s.s through closely similar embryonic stages, we may feel almost a.s.sured that they have descended from the same parent form, and are therefore closely related."(194)

(194) For the stone forms given to early bronze axes, etc., see Nilsson, Primitive Inhabitants of Scandanavia, London, 1868, Lubbock's Introduction, p. 31; and for plates, see Lubbock's Prehistoric Man, chap. ii; also Cartailhac, Les Ages Prehistoriques de l'Espagne et du Portugal, p. 227. Also Keller, Lake Dwellings; also Troyon, Habitations Lacustres; also Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Great Britain, p. 191; also Lubbock, p. 6; also Lyell, Antiquity of Man,chap. ii. For the cranogs, etc., in the north of Europe, see Munro, Ancient Scottish Lake Dwellings, Edinburgh, 1882. For mounds and greater stone constructions in the extreme south of Europe, see Cartailhac's work on Spain and Portugal above cited, part iii, chap. iii. For the source of Mr.

Southall's contention, see Brugsch, Egypt of the Pharoahs. For the two sides of the question whether in the lower grades of savagery there is really any recognition of a superior power, or anything which can be called, in any accepted sense, religion, compare Quatref.a.ges with Lubbock, in works already cited. For a striking but rather ad captandum effort to show that there is a moral and religious sense in the very lowest of Australian tribes, see one of the discourses of Archbishop Vaughn on Science and Religion, Baltimore, 1879. For one out of mult.i.tiudes of striking and instructive resemblances in ancient stone implements and those now in use among sundry savage tribes, see comparison between old Scandanavian arrowheads and those recently brought from Tierra del Fuego, in Nilsson, as above, especially in Plate V. For a brief and admirable statement of the arguments on both sides, see Sir J. Lubbock's Dundee paper, given in the appendix to the American edition of his Origin of Civilization, etc. For the general argument referred to between Whately and the Duke of Argyll on one side, and Lubbock on the other, see Lubbock's Dundee paper as above cited; Tylor, Early History of Mankind, especially p. 193; and the Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, part iv. For difficulties of savages in arithmetic, see Lubbock, as above, pp. 459 et seq. For a very temperate and judicial view of the whole question, see Tylor as above, chaps. vii and xiii. For a brief summary of the scientific position regarding the stagnation and deterioration of races, resulting in the statement that such deterioration "in no way contradicts the theory that civilization itself is developed from low to high stages," see Tylor, Anthropology, chap. i.