372 THE STORY OP THE EAJRTH AND MAN* 



Sir Jolm Lubbock has, by a great accumulation of 

 facts, or supposed facts, bearing on the low mental 

 condition of savages, endeavoured to bridge over this 

 chasm. It is obvious, however, from his OYm data, 

 that the rudest savages are enabled to subsist only 

 by the exercise of intellectual gifts far higher than 

 those of animals; and that if these gifts were 

 removed from them, they would inevitably perish. 

 It is equally clear that even the lowest savages are 

 moral agents; and that not merely in their religious 

 beliefs and conceptions of good and evil, but also 

 in their moral degradation, they show capacities not 

 possessed by the brutes. It is also true that most 

 of these savages are quite as little likely to be speci- 

 mens of primitive man as are the higher races ; and 

 that many of them have fallen to so low a level as 

 to be scarcely capable, of themselves, of rising to a 

 condition of culture and civilisation. Thus they are 

 more likely to be degraded races, in " the eddy and 

 backwater of humanity,'' than examples of the 

 sources from whence it flowed. And here it must 

 not be lost sight of, that a being like man has 

 capacities for degradation commensurate with his 

 capacities for improvement ; and that at any point of 

 his history we may have to seek the analogues of 

 primeval man, rather in the average, than the extremes 

 of the race. 



Before leaving this subject, it may be well to con- 

 sider the fact, that the occurrence of such a being as 

 man iu the last stages of the world's history is, in 



