METHOD OF MENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY 583 



of the mind we may infer that many of the existing races of 

 mankind have lagged behind us, and that their various degrees 

 of mental development represent various degrees of retardation 

 in the evolutionary process, various stages in the upward march 

 of humanity. I say the upward march, because we have good 

 reason to believe that most, if not all, of these laggard races are 

 steadily, though very slowly, advancing ; or at least that they 

 were so till they came, for their misfortune, into fatal contact 

 with European civilisation. The old theory of the progressive 

 degeneracy of mankind in general from a primitive state of 

 virtue and perfection is destitute of even a rag of evidence. 

 Even the more limited and tenable view that certain races have 

 partially degenerated, rests, I believe, on a very narrow induc- 

 tion. Speaking for myself, I may say that in my reading of 

 savage records I have met with few or no facts which point 

 clearly and indubitably to racial degeneracy. Even among 

 the Australian aborigines, the least progressive of mankind, I 

 have not, so far as I remember, noted the least sign that they 

 once occupied a higher level of culture than that at which they 

 were discovered by Europeans. On the contrary, many things 

 in their customs and beliefs appear to me to plead very strongly 

 in favour of the conclusion that aboriginal Australian society, 

 so far as we can trace it backward, has made definite progress 

 on the upward path from lower to higher forms of social life. 

 That progress appears to have been assisted, if not initiated in 

 certain parts of Australia, by favourable physical conditions, 

 chiefly by a higher rainfall in the mountainous regions near the 

 coast, with its natural consequence of a greater abundance of 

 food, in contrast to the drought and sterility of the desert interior. 



Having said thus much, I hope I shall be acquitted of the 

 stale charge of treating any of the existing races of mankind 

 either as degenerate or as primitive in the strict sense of the 

 word. As to supposed degeneracy I have said enough ; but as 

 to the allegation that any competent anthropologist regards 

 even the lowest of living races as absolutely primitive, I will add 

 a few words, though in doing so I shall only be repeating a 

 protest which I have raised again and again. 



Those of us who hold, as I do, that our species has been 

 evolved in a series of gradual stages from the lowest form of 

 animal life, believe that the line of evolution has not been 

 everywhere the same nor the rate of evolution everywhere uni- 

 form. Whether the line was single from the outset and only 

 divaricated later, or whether from the beginning there were 

 several parallel or nearly parallel lines which afterwards diverged 

 from each other ; in other words, whether mankind has sprung 

 from a single pair of progenitors or from several pairs, is an old 

 question which is still debated and, for aught we can see, may 



