CHAP. VI.] MAN. 153 



able nature of the metal that it is never safe to form positive opinions 

 about it from merely negative evidence. This has been forcibly illus 

 trated by the discoveries of ancient iron- work in Assyria, and again by 

 the great iron column found in Delhi, apparently the work of the 

 fourth century, a cast of which has just been placed in the South 

 Kensington Museum. This column is a solid shaft of wrought iron, 

 more than fifty feet long, and about eighteen inches in diameter. No 

 other piece of iron- work at all like it has been found in the east ; and 

 two things are made clear by its discovery. It shows that the manu 

 facture of iron in large masses was practised in India at least two 

 thousand years ago ; for the art could not be in its infancy when this 

 column was made ; and it also shows that the old iron- work has dis 

 appeared, leaving no tradition of its former state. Nothing of any 

 considerable size in iron has been made in India in recent times.&quot; 

 ****** 



&quot; Observe, too, the special feature in America. Its civilisation once 

 lost was never recovered till help came from without, in the shape of 

 European intercourse and colonisation. To be isolated is plainly to 

 lose the power of recovery, and we may well believe, from the example 

 of Australia and equatorial Africa, that the longer the isolation the 

 more profound will be the decay.&quot; 



Mr. Herbert Spencer himself makes the following note 

 worthy admissions. He says of savages : * Mr. Herbert 



Spencer s. 



&quot; Probably most of them, if not all of tlem, had ancestors in higher 

 states ; and among their beliefs remain some which were evolved during 

 those higher states. While the degradation theory, as currently held, 

 is untenable, the theory of progression, taken in its unqualified form, 

 seems to me untenable also. If, on the one hand, the notion that 

 savagery is caused by lapse from civilisation, is irreconcilable with the 

 evidence ; there is, on the other hand, inadequate warrant for the notion 

 that the lowest savagery has always been as low as it is now. It is 

 quite possible, and, I believe, highly probable, that retrogression has 

 been as frequent as progression.&quot; 



He also adds : f 



&quot; That supplanting of race by race, and thrusting into corners such 

 inferior races as are not exterminated, which is now going on so 

 actively, and which has been going on from the earliest recorded times, 

 must have been ever going on. And the implication is that remnants 

 of inferior races, taking refuge in inclement, barren, or otherwise unfit 

 regions, have retrograded.&quot; 



Principles of Sociology, vol. i. p. 10b . f O t ,. dt. p. 109. 



