CHAP. VI.] MAN. 137 



influence the appreciations of even well-meaning observers. 

 As to the theological prejudice, however, we can effectually 

 guard against that by building upon the facts and inferences 

 offered to us by the authors here referred to. Whatever 

 may be their most conspicuous merits, or their shortcomings, 

 theological prejudice will not be a vice we shall have to 

 guard against in them. Admissions made by them, favour 

 able to theology, may be accepted without apprehension upon 

 that score. 



As regards the influence of bias in this matter, I will cite 

 some remarks of Mr. Tylor himself which are well worthy 

 of consideration : 



&quot; While observers who have had fair opportunities of studying the 

 religions of savages have thus sometimes done scant justice to the facts 

 before their eyes, the hasty denials of others who have judged without 

 even facts can carry no great weight. A sixteenth-century traveller 

 gave an account of the natives of Florida which is typical of such : 

 Touching the religion of this people which we have found, for want of 

 their language we could not understand neither by signs nor gesture 



that they had any religion at all We suppose that they have no 



religion at all, and that they live at their own libertie. Better know 

 ledge of these Floridans nevertheless showed that they had a religion, 

 and better knowledge has reversed many another hasty assertion to the 

 same effect ; as when writers used to declare that the natives of Mada 

 gascar had no idea of a future state, and no word for soul or spirit, or 

 when Dampier inquired after the religion of the natives of Timor, and 

 was told that they had none; or when Sir Thomas Koe landed in 

 Saldanha Bay, on his way to the court of the Great Mogul, and 

 remarked of the Hottentots that they have left off their custom of 

 stealing, but know no God or religion. Among the numerous accounts 

 collected by Sir John Lubbock as evidence bearing on the absence or 

 low development of religion among low races, some may be selected as 

 lying open to criticism from this point of view. Thus, the statement 

 that the Samoan Islanders had no religion cannot stand in the face of 

 the elaborate description by the Kev. G. Turner of the Samoan religion 

 itself; and the assertion that the Tapinombas of Brazil had no religion, 

 is one not to be received without some more positive proof, for the 

 religious doctrines and practices of the Tapi race have been recorded 

 by Lery, De Laet, and other writers. Even with much time and care 

 and knowledge of language, it is not always easy to elicit from savages 

 the details of their theology. They rather try to hide from the prying 

 and contemptuous foreigner their worship of gods who seem to shrink, 



