CHAP. xix. RATE OF PROGRESS IN BARBAROUS AGES. 377 



leads to the conclusion that the state of the arts in those 

 early times remained stationary for almost indefinite periods. 

 There may, however, have been different degrees of civi 

 lisation, and in the art of fabricating flint tools, of which we 

 cannot easily detect the signs in the first age of stone, and 

 some contemporary tribes may have been considerably in 

 advance of others. Those hunters, for example, who feasted 

 on the rhinoceros and buried their dead with funeral rites 

 at Aurignac, may have been less barbarous than the savages 

 of St. Acheul, as some of their weapons and utensils have 

 been thought to imply. To a European who looks down 

 from a great eminence on the products of the humble arts 

 of the aborigines of all times and countries, the knives and 

 arrows of the Red Indian of North America, the hatchets of 

 the native Australian, the tools found in the ancient Swiss 

 lake-dwellings, or those of the Danish kitchen-middens and 

 of St. Acheul, seem nearly all alike in rudeness, and very 

 uniform in general character. The slowness of the progress 

 of the arts of savage life is manifested by the fact, that the 

 earlier instruments of bronze were modelled on the exact plan 

 of the stone tools of the preceding age, although such shapes 

 would never have been chosen, had metals been known from 

 the first. The reluctance or incapacity of savage tribes to 

 adopt new inventions, has been shown in the East, by their 

 continuing to this day to use the same stone implements as 

 their ancestors, after that mighty empires, where the use of 

 metals in the arts was well known, had flourished for three 

 thousand years in their neighbourhood. 



We see in our own times, that the rate of progress in the 

 arts and sciences proceeds in a geometrical ratio as knowledge 

 increases, and so, when we carry back our retrospect into the 

 past, we must be prepared to find the signs of retardation 

 augmenting in a like geometrical ratio ; so that the progress of 

 a thousand years at a remote period, may correspond to that of 



