IX.] EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. 223 



highly developed moral sense in the natives with whom he 

 became acquainted. In one case/ a Papuan who had been 

 paid in advance for bird-skins, and who had not been able 

 to fulfil his contract before Mr. Wallace was on the point 

 of starting, "came running down after us holding up a 

 bird, and saying with great satisfaction, ' Now I owe you 

 nothing ! ' * And this though he could have withheld pay- 

 ment with complete impunity. 



Mr. Wallace's observations and opinions on this head 

 seem hardly to meet with due appreciation in Sir John 

 Lubbock's recent work on Primitive Man. 2 But consider- 

 ing the acute powers of observation and the industry of 

 Mr. Wallace, and especially considering the years he passed 

 in farnilar and uninterrupted intercourse with natives, his 

 opinion and testimony should surely carry with it great 

 weight. He has informed the author that he found a 

 strongly marked and widely diffused modesty, in sexual 

 matters, amongst all the tribes with which he came in con- 

 tact. In the same way Mr. Bonwick, in his work on the 

 Tasmanians, testifies to the modesty exhibited by the naked 

 females of that race, who by the decorum of their postures 

 gave evidence of the possession in germ of what under 

 circumstances would become the highest chastity and re- 

 finement. 



Hasty and incomplete observations and inductions are 

 prejudicial enough to physical science, but when their effect 

 is to degrade untruthfully our common humanity, there is 

 an additional motive to regret them. A hurried visit to a 

 tribe, whose language, traditions, and customs are unknown, 



1 "Malay Archipelago," vol. ii. p. 365. 



- "The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man," 

 p. 261. Longmans, 1870. 



