MOTHERRIGHT 255 



anything else than violence to the machinations of an 

 evil-disposed person or spirit, no matter how old 

 or enfeebled by privation or hardship the deceased 

 may have been. Nor do they omit anything which 

 may render their ignorance on this point unambiguous ; 

 they proceed to discover and punish the sorcerer ; 

 they expel the malicious spirit ; they appease the 

 enraged or arbitrary divinity. 



Death has a character mysterious and awful, of 

 which no familiarity has been able to divest it, and 

 which not even the latest researches of physiologists 

 have been able to dispel. Ignorance of the real cause 

 of birth, it might be thought, on the other hand would 

 not long survive the habitual commerce of men and 

 women and the continual reproduction of the species. 

 It would not, in our stage of civilisation and with 

 our social regulations. But the theory of the evolu- 

 tion of civilisation postulates the evolution of man, 

 mentally and morally as well as physically. At the 

 moment when the anthropoid became entitled to be 

 properly denominated man his intellectual capacity 

 was not that of a Shakspeare a Newton a Darwin, or 

 even of an average Englishman of the twentieth 

 century. He was only endowed with potentialities 

 which, after an unknown series of generations andthanks 

 to what we in our nescience variously dub a fortunate 

 combination of circumstances or an over-ruling Provi- 

 dence, issued in that supreme result. The savage who 

 has not been thus favoured is still by comparison 

 undeveloped. His intellectual faculties are chiefly 

 employed in winning material subsistence, in gratifying 

 his passions, in fighting with his fellow-man and with the 

 wild beasts, often in maintaining a doubtful conflict 



