174 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP 



millionaire and the savage. And the hang-bird has 

 come by her home-making art through centuries 

 of improvement, just as the millionaire has arrived 

 at his. It is believed by ornithologists that the 

 first nests of birds were the niches of rocks or 

 simple hollows scooped in the sand and soil, such 

 as are still seen among the more primitive bird 

 races, and that from these aboriginal beginnings 

 have come, through ages of evolution, the elaborate 

 creations of the cotton-bird, weaver-bird, tailor- 

 bird, oven-bird, the baya-sparrow, the finches, and 

 the orioles. The savage who lives unmolested 

 generation after generation in the same land and 

 country builds his simple hut in just the same 

 way as his ancestors built theirs, and thinks the 

 same things his ancestors thought a thousand 

 years before him. Sir Samuel Baker, in a paper 

 on ' The Races of the Nile Basin,' points out that 

 each tribe of men in eastern Africa, like each 

 species of bird, has its own peculiar style of hut, 

 and that the huts of the various tribes are as 

 constant in their types as are the nests of 

 birds. The same thing is true of their head- 

 dresses as of their huts ; and this fixed character 

 exists also in their languages, customs, and re- 

 ligions. It is only some races of men that are 

 given to growth and fluidity, and only some men 

 of these special races. 



Right in our own country, among the remote 

 mountain recesses of Appalachia, surrounded on 

 all sides by the most wonderful development, 

 material and intellectual, the world has ever seen, 



