706 STONE AGE BASIS FOR ORIENTAL STUDY. ■ 



linliamia «-wr/-rtM"ma = talking .shadow. The spirit or god Bediarapa, 

 whose name was identified witli thunder and lightning, and who was 

 feared accordingly, is vouched for by full evidence; but the deity, 

 "whom they call the good spirit," and who presides over the day, is 

 not to be found in the vocabularies, and collapses on comparison of 

 documents. 



Taken all together, there is deliniteness in these accounts of a low 

 Stone Age people seen in actual modern existence. How is it that 

 modern savage man should differ so little from man at the highest 

 geological antiquity? The answer seems to be that of possible perma- 

 nence as well as possible development in culture. Let a tribe arrive 

 at a condition of equilibrium with surrounding nature, its '•'■ milieu 

 environnant,^^ to use the phrase of Lamarck, in which it can hold its 

 own, this may be a condition whicli suggests no progress. As there 

 were shells of the Tertiary period indistinguishable from those now 

 living, so there are men. Behind the Paleolithic period lies that unde- 

 fined past which, whether keeping tribes unchanged under unchanged 

 conditions or changing under changing conditions, has to account for 

 the condition of savage man, which indeed is within a moderate inter- 

 val of our own. It is a question not of nature, but of degree. 



The Oriental area thus i^resents a basis of man in the Paleolithic 

 stage of culture, relics of which remarkably occur in boundary districts. 

 Let us now examine the Oriental area occupied by traces of the Neo- 

 lithic stage. 



The South Sea Islanders are the best known of high Stone Age 

 peoples. On the continent of Asia history knows of some peoples, the 

 Ichthyophagi of the Beluchistau coast and the aboriginp! tribes of China, 

 as still using stone tools or weapons, but for the most part the former 

 use of these is only apparent by the celts and arrow-heads of stone 

 found in the ground, and exi^lained mystically by peoples who have 

 forgotten their real purpose. Hindus still worship a polished celt under 

 a sacred tree as a symbol of Mahadeva, and the Japanese see in the 

 arrow-heads they x^ick up in the fields the spirit-arrows of storm fights 

 in the sky. Egypt here, as usual, vindicates its place as the museum 

 of culture-development. The flint arrow-heads and ceremonial flint- 

 knives have long been known, and now the researches of Mr. Petrie 

 show Egypt, not in its remotest antiqui^y, actuallj'^ emerging from the 

 age of stone into that of copper and bronze, flint-flakes remaining in 

 use for cutting and chipping tools and to arm the reaper's sickle. This 

 is an industrial condition which may remind us of that of Mexico before 

 the Spanish conquest. 



This consideration of the Oriental world during the Neolithic or later 

 Stone Age raises a problem which is complementary, and in some 

 respects converse, to that of the development of culture. It leads us to 

 trace the migration of culture ft-om the higher nations into the lower. 

 Even in what is called the unchanging East the culture of the ruder 



