PRESIDENTS ADDRESS SECTION G. 147 



munities, as it has among- many savage tribes of the present 

 .hiy. 



Another consideration which seems to me to commend my 

 own line of research is the complete?iess of its evidence. In 

 the investigation of the framework and sti-ucture of Ancient 

 Society we have to go back a long way beyond the point at 

 which Sir Henry Maine begins in his Early History of 

 Institutions, for there is a history of them fiir earlier still, 

 and we can get at much of it by patient examination of 

 savage tribes who are within our easy reach. To quote 

 words which I wrote many years ago : " They unfold to us 

 that history which is before history, and which calls up the 

 shadowy forms of the long-forgotten past, clothing them 

 with substance, marshalHng them into order, and revealing to 

 us the stages of their onward marcii. For in the present 

 condition of savage tribes we see the infancy — or rather 

 the childhood — of (to use Dr. Temple's grand conception) 

 ' that colossal Man, whose life reaches from the Creation to 

 the Day of Judgment ; in whose existence the successive 

 generations of men are but as days ; whose works are the 

 discoveries and inventions which characterise the diiferent 

 epochs of the world's history ; and whose thoughts are the 

 creeds and doctrines, the opinions and principles of the 

 successive ages.' 



" Here we have, not merely as it were, a bone or two of 

 an extinct animal found under the stalagmite floor of an 

 ancient cave that was eaten out of the solid rock by streams 

 which have long since forgotten to flow, nor a flint tool dug- 

 out of the old river drift — fragmentary bits of evidence which, 

 after all the skill and care used in piecing- them together, 

 leave much to conjecture, and much open to doubt in the 

 reconstructed whole ; we have the earlier pei'iod actually 

 reproduced almost in its completeness before our eyes. It is 

 as if the old-forgotten time, before historians began to write, 

 were placed side by side with the new, showing us, where 

 now are crowded cities, and clanging factories, and cultivated 

 fields, vast herds of wild animals roaming over untilled plains, 

 or crashing through virgin forests, skin-clad tribes pursuing 

 them with weapons of stone, and hyenas dragging into their 

 caves the bones of the victims slain by the nobler beasts of 

 prey." 



We are indebted to the strong conservatism of savage tribes 

 for this reproduction of the past. The savage, when once he 

 has become set, so to speak, is a conservative of the conser- 



