AS A TEST OF MENTAL CAPACITY. Ill 



These happy suggestions of M. Reclus call for certain qualifications. The author does 

 no more than justice to woman, but he does less than justice to man. He forgets certain 

 primary impulses, as strong in man as in woman, though different. If the nest-making 

 impulse, so to speak, is most powerful in her, the building instinct is strongest in him. 

 As soon as she began to rear a shelter for her brood, the mechanical faculty would be 

 arovised in him. The first cabin, like the first swallow's nest, would be the joint work 

 of the first mated pair. If woman tamed the first gentle animal as a pet, man would dis- 

 cern its usefulness for food and clothing, and become the first herdsman. If woman 

 sowed the first seeds, man fenced the field, and became the first agriculturist. This 

 mutual aid, which is theory as regards the past, is fact at the present day among the 

 Navajos and the Melanesians,' and the fact confirms the theory. 



Granting an intelligent people, dwelling in a fruitful region, under a climate genial 

 in summer, but rigorous enough in winter to make shelter and clothing necessary and 

 the storage of food desirable, — with useful animals and plants near at hand, — how long a 

 period would be needed for the arts essential to civilization to be invented and practised 

 by them ? Among some American nations, according to their traditions, less than five 

 centuries seems to have sufficed, even with a scanty stock of such animals and plants. 

 In five centuries the offspring of a single pair on an Arabian oasis, doubling in number 

 only four times in a century, would have grown to a people of five hundred thousand 

 souls, niTmerous enou^gh to send out emigrations to the nearest inviting lands, — to the 

 valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates. But these would have been bands of civilized 

 men and women, familiar with agriculture, the rearing of domestic animals, housebuilding, 

 weaving, and other arts of settled and regular life. We cannot imagine among them the 

 barbarous usages and laws of wife-capture, exogamy, slavery, caste, and other like institu- 

 tions, which have grown up in later ages among their debased descendants, who have 

 wandered or been thrust into wilder regions, and have had to struggle with harder condi- 

 tions. These luckless communities should be styled, not " primitive peoples," but 

 " degenerate peoples." Yet in their languages, and indeed in the purposes underlying 

 many of the very customs which are cited as proofs of their original and innate savagery, 

 may be discerned, when rightly analyzed, evidences of the survival of those intellectual 

 endowments which were displayed by their forefathers in the primeval civilizations of 

 Arabia, North Africa, and Central Asia. 



We return to the thesis with which our essay commenced. Unless it can be clearly 

 shown that man is separated from other animals by a line as distinct as that which sepa- 

 rates a tree from a stone or a stone from a star, there can be no proper science of anthro- 

 polog-y. G-eologists will readily admit that a stone is composed of star-dust, but they 

 will say that it is star-dust which has assumed a form totally distinct from its original 

 elementary condition. A treatise composed of facts and speculations showing how the 

 matter of the earth was probably derived from star-dust would doubtless be very interest- 

 ing to geologists, but it would not be deemed by them a treatise on geology. Geology 

 commences where star-dust ends and the stone begins. A treatise which should under- 

 take to show how inanimate matter became a plant or an animal would, of course, 



' See the excellent work of the Rev. Dr. Codrington, "The Melanesians, their Anthropology and Folk-Lore." 

 He tells us (p. o04), that " the respective shares of men and women in garden work are settled by local custom." 



