4i6 



NATURE 



\August 28, 1879 



swords of the Gauls bent at the first blow against the pikes of 

 Flaminius' soldiers. On the whole, Prof. Virchow's remarks 

 in the Transactions of the Berlin Anthropological Society for 

 1876, on the question whether it may be desirable to recognise 

 instead of three only two ages, a Stone Age and a Metal Age, 

 seem to put the matter on a fair footing. Iron may have been 

 known as early as bronze or even earlier, but nevertheless there 

 have been periods in the life of nations when bronze, not iron, 

 has been the metal in use.| Thus there is nothing to interfere with 

 the facts resting on archfeological evidence, that in such districts 

 as Scandinavia or Switzerland a Stone Age was at some ancient 

 time followed by a Bronze Age, and this again by an Iron Age. 

 We may notice that the latter change is what has happened in 

 America within a few centuries, where the Mexicans and Peru- 

 vians, found by the Spaniards living in the Bronze Age, were 

 moved on into the Iron Age. But the question is whether we 

 are to accept as a general principle in history the doctrine ex- 

 pounded in the poem of Lucretius, that men first used boughs 

 and stones, that then the use of bronze became known, and 

 lastly iron was discovered. As the evidence stands now, the 

 priority of the Stone Age to the Metal Age is more firmly 

 established than ever, but the origin of both bronze and iron is 

 lost in antiquity, and we have no certain proof which came 

 first 



Passing to another topic of our" science, it is satisfactory to see 

 with what activity the comparative study of laws and customs, 

 to which Sir Henry Maine gave a new starting-point in England, 

 is now pursued. The remarkable inquiry into the very founda- 

 tions of society in the structure of the family, set afoot by 

 Bachofen in his "Miitterrecht," and M'Lennan in his "Primi- 

 tive Marri^e," is now bringing in every year new material. Mr. 

 L. H. Morgan, who, as an adopted Iroquois, became long ago 

 familiar with the marriage laws and ideas of kinship of uncul- 

 tured races, so unlike those of the civilised world, has lately 

 made, in his "Ancient Society," a bold attempt to solve the 

 whole difficult problem of the development of social life. I will 

 not attempt here any criticism of the views of these and other 

 writers on a problem where the last word has certainly not been 

 said. My object in touching the subject is to mention the 

 cturious evidence that can still be given by rude races as to their 

 former social ties, in traditions which will be forgotten in an- 

 other generation of civilised life, but may still be traced by 

 missionaries and others who know what to seek for. Thus, such 

 inquiry in Polynesia discloses remarkable traces of a prevalent 

 marriage-tie which was at once polygamous and polyandrous, as 

 where a family of brothers were married jointly to a family of 

 sisters ; and I have just noticed in a recent volume on "Native 

 Tribes of South Australia," a mention of a similar state of things 

 occiuring there. As to the general study of customs, the work 

 done for years past by such anthropologists as Prof. IJastian, of 

 Berlin, is producing substantial progress. Among recent works 

 I will mention Dr. Karl Andree's " Ethnologische Parallelen " 

 and Mr. J. A. Farrer's " Primitive Manners." In the compari- 

 son of customs and inventions, however, the main difficulty still 

 remains to be overcome, how to decide certainly whether they 

 have sprung up independently alike in different lands through 

 likeness in the human mind, or whether they have travelled from 

 a common source. To show how difficult this often is, I may 

 mention the latest case I have happened to meet with. The 

 Orang Dongo, a mountain people in the Malay region, have a 

 custom of inheritance that when a man dies the relatives each 

 take a share of the property, and the deceased inherits one share 

 for himself, which is burnt or buried for his ghost's use, or eaten 

 at the funeral feast. This may strike many of my hearers as 

 quaint enough and unlikely to recur elsewhere ; but Mr. Charles 

 Elton, who has special knowledge of our ancient legal customs, 

 has pointed out to me that it was actually old Kentish law, thus 

 laid down in Law-French :—" Ensement seient les chateus de 

 gauylekendeys parties en treis apres le exequies e les dettes 

 rendues si il y est issue mulier en vye, issi que la mort eyt la une 

 partie, e les fitz e les filles muliers lautre partie e la femme la 

 tierce partie." — " In like sort let the chattels of gavelkind 

 persons be divided into three after the funeral and payment of 

 debts, if there be lawful issue living, so that the deceased have 

 one part, and the lawful sons and daughters the other part, 

 and the wife the third part." The Church had indeed taken 

 possession, for pious uses, of the dead man's share of his own 

 property ; but there is good Scandinavian evidence that the 

 original custom before Christian times was for it to be put in his 

 burial-mound. ^Thus the right of the rude Malay tribe corre- 



sponds with that of ancient Europe, and the question which the 

 evidence does not yet enable us to answer, is whether the custom 

 was twice invented, or whether it spread east and west from a 

 common source, perhaps in the Aryan district of Asia. 



It remains for me to notice the present state of Comparative- 

 Mythology, a most interesting, but also most provoking part of 

 Anthropology. More than twenty years ago a famous essay, by 

 Prof. Max Miiller, made widely known in England how far the 

 myths in the classical dictionary and the story-books of our own 

 lands might find their explanation in poetic nature-metaphors of 

 sun and sky, cloud and storm, such as are preserved in the ancient 

 Aryan hymns of the Veda. Of course it had been always known 

 that the old gods and heroes were in some part personifications 

 of nature — that Helios and Okeanos, though they walked and 

 talked and begat sons and daughters were only the Sun and Sea 

 in poetic guise. But the identifications of the new school went 

 farther. The myth of Endymion became the simple nature- 

 story of the setting Sun meeting Selene the Moon; and 

 I well remember how, at the Royal Institution, the aged scholar. 

 Bishop Thirlwall, grasped the stick he leant on, as if to make 

 sure of the ground under his feet, when he heard it propounded 

 that Erinys, the dread avenger of murder, was a personification 

 of the Dawn discovering the deeds of darkness. Though the 

 study of mythology has grown apace in these later years, and 

 many of its explanations will stand the test of future criticism, 

 I am bound to say that mythologists, always an erratic race, 

 have of late been making wilder work than ever with both myth 

 and real history, finding mythic suns and skies in the kings and 

 heroes of old tradition, with da\\Tis for love-tales, storms for 

 wars, and sunsets for deaths, often with as much real cogency as 

 if some mythologist a thousand years hence should explain the 

 tragic story of Mary Queen of Scots as a nciture-myth of a 

 beauteous Dawn rising in splendour, prisoned in a dark cloud- 

 island, and done to death in blood-red sunset. Learned treatises 

 have of late, by such rash guessings, shaken public confidence in 

 the more sober reasonings on which comparative mythology is 

 founded, so that it is well to insist that there are cases where the 

 derivation of myths from poetic metaphors is really proved 

 beyond doubt. Such an instance is the Hindu legend of King 

 Bali, whose austerities have alarmed the gods themselves, when 

 Vamana, a Brahmanic Tom Thumb, begs of him as much land 

 as he can measure in three steps ; but when the boon is granted, 

 the tiny dwarf expands gigantic into Vishnu himself, and striding 

 with one step across the earth, with another across the air, and 

 a third across the sky, drives the king do^^ n into the infernal 

 regions, where he still reigns. There are various versions of the 

 story, of which one may be read in Southey ; but in the ancient 

 Vedic hymns its origin may be found when it was not as yet a 

 story at ,all, only a poetic metaphor of Vishnu, the Sun, whose 

 often-mentioned act is his crossing the airy regions in his three 

 strides. "Vishnu traversed (the earth), thrice he put down his 

 foot ; it was crushed under his dusty step. Three steps hence made 

 Vishnu, unharmed preserver, upholding sacred things." Both in 

 the savage and civilised world there are many myths which may be 

 plainly traced to such poetic fancies before they have yet stiffened 

 into circumstantial tales ; and it is in following out these, rather 

 than in recklessly guessing myth-origins for every tradition, 

 that the sound work of the mythologist lies. The scholar 

 must not treat such nature-poetry like prose, spoiling its light 

 texture with too heavy a grasp. In the volume published by our 

 new Folk-Lore Society, which has begun its work so well, Mr. 

 Lang gives an instance of the sportive nature-metaphor which 

 still lingers among popular story-tellers. It is Breton, and 

 belongs to that wide-spread tale of which one version is natura- 

 lised in England as "Dick Whittington and his Cat." The 

 story runs thus : — The elder brother has the cat, while the next 

 brother, who has a cock left him, fortunately finds his -way to a 

 land where (there being no cocks) the king has every night to 

 send chariots and horses to bring the dawn ; so that here the 

 fortunate owner of Chanticleer has brought him to a good 

 market. Thus we see that the Breton peasant of our day has 

 not even yet lost the mythic sense with vi'hich his remote Aryan 

 ancestors could behold the chariots and horses of the dawn. But 

 myth, though largely based on such half-playful metaphor, runs 

 through all the intermediate stages which separate poetic fancy 

 from crude philosophy embodied in stories seriously devised as 

 explanations of real facts. No doubt many legends of the 

 ancient world, though not really history, are myths which have 

 arisen by reasoning on actual events, as definite as that which, 

 some four years ago, was terrifying the peasant mind in North 



