7 24 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



after escaping from the stronger into regions unfavorable to civ- 

 ilization, and, secondly, that many powerful nations have declined 

 and decayed, it was shown that the men in the most remote and 

 unfavorable 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 masses 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 ]ost every trace of it ; and that the same 

 tribes, having once had so simple a means of saving labor 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 sim- 

 ple 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 Eskimo are by no means the lowest race on 

 the American continent, and that various tribes far more cen- 

 trally 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 at least 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 



