t»RESIDENT's ADDRESS — SECTION G. 149 



discipline of it. It teaches the student — sometimes by painful 

 lessons — to be cautious, steadfast, and to wait. It requires a 

 vast amount of patient work, covering a very wide field, and 

 collating and comparing facts from every part of it ; for the 

 student soon finds that it is very dangerous to generalise from 

 the facts discoverable in any one locality. No two tribes are 

 exactly alike. They may have started from the same point, 

 but they have not all come by the same road, and we do not 

 find them all in the same stage of the journey. In many 

 cases the differences are only superficial, or at least not far 

 down below the surface, and yet they sometimes present su 

 great a dissimilarity of appearance that nothing short of a 

 very close examination can determine the original identity. 

 " It is " (once more to quote my own words) " as if some 

 plastic material had been forced into roughly fashioned 

 moulds of the same shape, but each with cracks and flaws 

 peculiar to itself. The cores would be alike in the main, but 

 the surface irregularities might be so dissimilar as to make it 

 hard to believe that the moulds were of the same pattern ; 

 and these outer differences are made all the greater by the 

 fact that the mass is not composed of inanimate material. It 

 is organic— it has life in it. The excrescences ^rro?^, and their 

 growth exaggerates the original divergences. With infinite 

 trouble civiUsation rubs off these excrescences, but the roots 

 of them remain even in the most highly-civilised nations ; 

 and, however closely they may be worn down they often 

 retain vitality enough to sprout, and to throw out queer little 

 shoots of the old pattern — survivals in culture of old savage 

 notions." 



I have said that " we do not find all the tribes in the same 

 stage of the journey," and this implies that we do find them 

 all on the way. Stationary as they are now — or at least as 

 they appear to us because their progress, like that of the so- 

 called fixed stars, is imperceptible to us as we watch — yet it 

 is evident that, with the exception of a few wretched war- 

 driven remnants, they have progressed. The Degradation 

 Theory finds no support along this line. Examining, for 

 instance, the organization of a people like the Fijians, we 

 perceive unmistakable traces of a lower grade on which it is 

 an advance. In this lower grade we find a people somewhere 

 else, on whom also are plainly to be seen the tokens of an 

 upward movement, and so on for several stages downwards, 

 until we reach the lowest at present known, and even there 



