716 GEXERAL REMARKS 



has been said above (pp. 541, 645, 654, 655, 706) of the peculiar 

 characteristics of the 'priscan' human lower jaw, of the tumid 



of those primseval undecomposed sentences out of which the logical precision of a 

 French grammar or the severe grandeur of a Semitic prophecy were eventually to 

 come. Their cumbrous barbarism is due to poverty, not to profundity of thought. 

 Kelatively to the Bushman language, however, the same authority ^^Tites in answer 

 to an enquiry of mine; 'As regards phonology, the Bushmen with their clicks certainly 



stand on a far lower level than the Esquimaux In some gi-ammatical points, 



moreover, the Bushman language is what you aptly term "poor stufE." Thus the 

 plural is denoted by reduplication, and the verb has not been developed. However, 

 we do not yet know as much about the Bushman dialects as is desirable. Where the 

 Esquimaux — like most of the other inhabitant'? of the Old World — best represent 

 the primitive condition of speech is in the structure of the sentence. The in- 

 dependent word has not yet been evolved out of it.' 



I have above (^. 633) expressed my feeling of the strain which is put upon the imagina- 

 tion by the effort to think even of the neolithic races as genealogically connected with 

 the paleolithic; and a still greater effort is of course required for putting in thought 

 any still existing races into a similar relationship. The exertion necessary will however 

 become lighter in proportion to the hold which the uniformitarian doctrines of modern 

 geology obtain upon our minds, and in the meantime what is going on in the world at 

 the present day may teach us that it has not always been easy, and may sometimes, even 

 now, be impossible, entu'ely to extirpate a wild race of men in a wild country. Such 

 were of course the men and the country of the cave and other palaeolithic periods. 

 Neither, I apprehend, is it meant by speaking of affinity as existing between these 

 ancient races and the modem Esquimaux, that these stone- and bone-using men are to 

 be comiected together at all in the same way as the Massaliotes were connected with 

 the Phocoeans, or the Galatians of Asia Minor with the Gauls. No one supposes that 

 an immigi-ation has ever taken place from the district inhabited by the Esquimaux 

 into the regions now occupied by the French, English, and Belgians. Nothing that 

 is suggested by the facts goes beyond making us suppose that the countries in question 

 were in the times in question occupied by a race of very considerable uniformity of 

 physical structure, of habits, and of appliances for fighting their hard battle of life ; 

 and that the great changes which have since those ' unhappy far-off times ' taken 

 place alike in their inorganic and organic en\ironment have broken those tribes up 

 into fragments, of which some infinitesimal traces are perhaps still detectable amongst 

 us, and of which the still widely-spread Esquimaux may, however altered in the 

 com-se of ages, be with some probability held to be the most characteristic remnant. 



I take this opportunity of cb-awing attention to two instances of the tenacity with 

 which certain customs and practices have maintained themselves amongst some of the 

 races which we have bad imder comparison, leaving to the reader the task of deciding 

 how far such persistence may be explicable upon the principle rd. KaiccL avva-yu tovs 

 dfOpunovs (jVrist. Ehetor., i. 6. 22), that community of needs and distresses brings all 

 men together, and makes all men alike. First of these, as being less amenable than 

 the other to the objection just refei-red to, I will put the singular aversion to fish as an 

 article of food which has characterised certain of the inhabitants of Scotland from the 

 time of Sevems down to our owni time and has been noted as something remarkable in 

 the history of the modern Esquimaux. Dio Cassius (fl. A. d. 230), lib. Ixxii. 21, p. 866 c, 

 ed. Leunclavii, observes with the surprise not unnatural to an Italian, that the two 

 most powerful British tribes, the Majataj and the Caledonii, though they have no agri- 

 culture, but are dependent upon the produce of pastoral and hunting life and fruits, 

 such as nuts and acorns, make nevertheless no use of fish for food, though fish are avail- 

 alile in countless and inexhaustible quantities : e« re vojxtjs Kal Orjpas aKpodvcuv ri rivaiv 

 ^cuvres, tuv l-xOvoiv dneipwv Kat dirKfTajv ovtojv ov yevovTai. Logan, who in his work on the 

 Scottish Gael (vol. ii. p. 125) says that Herodian, a contemporary of Dio Cassius, makes 

 the same observation, a statement which I have not been able to verify, writes {I. c.) as 



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