8io POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



It is therefore probable that the idea of murder is a preroga- 

 tive of the human race, or that the human race is the only one 

 which has arrived at the conception with great clearness, and that 

 this superiority in man is a characteristic which differentiates 

 him from all the other species of animals. Probably it was in 

 this direction that, at a very early period, in the first beginnings 

 of human life, and in that variety from which Homo sapiens 

 emerged by selection, the intellectual force of the human species 

 was directed, and that the comprehension of the difference be- 

 tween the state of life and the state of death, with the perception 

 of the fact that living creatures might be made through certain 

 co-ordinate actions to pass from the first state to the second, was 

 one of the first and grandest discoveries of the human race. It is 

 easy indeed to understand of what great use this discovery was 

 to man in his struggle with animals physically superior to him- 

 self, to find himself in possession of the grand secret of life and 

 death. The work of selection accomplished by man among the 

 enemies of his species thus became systematic ; it became, not- 

 withstanding the physical feebleness of man's constitution, infi- 

 nitely more efficacious than the destruction effected by man's 

 foes, who were so much stronger, in the ranks of the human race. 

 Governed and regulated by the clear idea of killing, with deliber- 

 ate artifice, the enemies of the human race, this selection not only 

 became a terrible weapon and assured victory to man in the 

 struggle for existence, but it impelled him to perfect indefinitely 

 those means of slaughter to which he owed his victory. 



This discovery has been of such capital importance that one 

 might say that the idea of killing and being killed is the funda- 

 mental idea underlying the mental system of the most savage 

 human races those that are nearest akin to animals such as the 

 Australian aborigines, the Botocudos, and the American Indians. 

 It is well known that the savage races suffer from a perfect de- 

 lirium of persecution, as witness their continual slaughter through 

 some subtle invention of other men. The Australians even have 

 no idea of natural death can not conceive of a man's dying from 

 any other than a violent cause ; they believe that every one who 

 dies has been killed by some hidden agency of destruction, just as 

 he may have laid one low with an arrow. Hence the well-known 

 Australian custom that, on the death of a member of the tribe, a 

 relative must seek out some member of another tribe and kill 

 him to revenge the supposed murder. Superstitions and cruel 

 practices of primitive life, such as we find among the Australians, 

 have their origin in the abuse of generalization from the one 

 primitive discovery that one man has power over the life of an- 

 other man, and one of the first mental efforts of humanity has 

 lain in connecting these two general extensions of an idea which 



