TBE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES. 631 



cilasso de la Yega, is a unique example of a blend yielding a historian 

 of the races blended. 



Whether due to interbreeding or to mere coexistence, the part 

 of the primitive races in contemporary civilization is being daily 

 aggrandized. The so-called Aryan peoples are shown to be a mere 

 prolongation of the neolithic races. A number of specialists adduce 

 evidence from laws of succession, folklore, archaic customs, and 

 archaeological remains to prove that existing British institutions 

 strike their roots down through Teutonic invaders and their Celtic 

 forerunners to races that occupied the soil ages before. 



The reactions of the lower indigenous peoples on their conquerors 

 have been of a more spiritual sort. They have been phonographed 

 in the vast literature bequeathed by the navigators and travelers, 

 missionaries, military and naval officers, civil officers, and settlers who 

 have visited or been resident among them. How extensive that litera- 

 ture is will appear from the fact that the bibliography of a single 

 colony with less than sixty years of existence, and less than eight hun- 

 dred thousand of a population, contains over twelve hundred articles. 

 This great quarry is of incommensurable but unequal value: 1. It 

 is often uncritical. The facts have not been accurately reported, as 

 has been shown in detail of the Tasmanians; or they have been mis- 

 interpreted, as when a group of obscene songs have been published as 

 Maori myths; or (as Mr. Taylor has proved) missionaries have im- 

 ported their own theological beliefs into their accounts of the beliefs 

 of savages. 2. Much of it is unsympathetic. Observers have not 

 imported enough. They have failed to see in these peoples men with 

 feelings and thoughts akin to their own. The savage's fetich worship 

 and the barbarian's Nature worship are far from being the wild 

 absurdities they are sometimes represented to be, but are as rational 

 as the Calvinism and Wordsworthism which are their offspring. The 

 more we know of the lower races, as of the lower animals, the more 

 we discover that all organic Nature was made (as Newton put it) " at 

 one cast." 3. It is not always scientific. There are few travelers 

 like Humboldt or Darwin, few missionaries like Taylor or Callaway, 

 few officials like Schoolcraft, nor in the absence of special researches 

 do even these know what to look for or what questions to ask. Hence 

 races perish or institutions disappear before their secret has been 

 wrung from them. Perverse science is as mischievous as none. A 

 foregone conclusion made of Lewis Morgan's ponderous volume on the 

 classificatory system of Indian relationships a monument of misap- 

 plied ingenuity. Led astray by the same Will-o'-the-wisp, two in- 

 structed inquirers discovered among the Australian blacks the exist- 

 ence of polygamy on a scale that out-Solomons Solomon. Future 

 researches will be better guided. Twenty years ago the British Asso- 



