The Doctrine of Evolution. 445 



confederacies as those of the Iroquois ; in the highest stage, 

 at the dawn of civilization, we begin to find nations imper- 

 fectly formed by conquest without incorporation, like abo- 

 riginal Peru or ancient Assyria. In the lower stages we see 

 captives tortured to death, then at a later stage sacrificed to 

 the tutelar deities, then later on enslaved and compelled to 

 till the soil. Through the earlier stages of culture, as in 

 Australasia and aboriginal America, we find the marriage 

 tie so loose and paternity so uncertain that kinship is reck- 

 oned only through the mother. But in the highest stage of 

 barbarism, as among the earliest Greeks, Romans, and Jews, 

 the more definite patriarchal family is developed and kin- 

 ship begins to be reckoned through the father. It is only 

 after that stage is reached that inheritance of property 

 becomes fully developed, with the substitution of individual 

 ownership for clan ownership, and so on to the development 

 of testamentary succession, individual responsibility for de- 

 lict and crime, and the substitution of contract for status. 

 In all such instances, and countless others might be cited, 

 we see the marks of an intelligible progression, a line of 

 development which human ideas and institutions have fol- 

 lowed. But in the most advanced societies we find numer- 

 ous traces of such states of things as now exist only among 

 savage or barbarous societies. Our own ancestors were once 

 polytheists, with plenty of traces of fetichisni. They were 

 organized in clans, phratries, and tribes. There was a time 

 when they used none but stone tools and weapons, when 

 there was no private property in land, and no political 

 structure higher than the tribe. Among the forefathers 

 of the present civilized inhabitants of Europe are unmis- 

 takable traces of human sacrifices and of the reckoning of 

 kinship through the mother only. When we have come to 

 survey large groups of facts of "this sort, the conclusion is 

 irresistibly driven home to us that the more advanced socie- 

 ties have gone through various stages now represented here 

 and there by less advanced societies ; that there is a general 

 path of social development, along which, owing to special cir- 

 cumstances, some peoples have advanced a great way, some a 

 less way, some but a very little way ; and that, by studying 

 existing savages and barbarians, we get a valuable clew to the 

 interpretation of prehistoric times. All these things are to- 

 day commonplaces among students of history and archaeology : 

 sixty years ago they would have been scouted as idle vaga- 

 ries. Yet to this change is entirely due the superior power 



