98 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



conscience, only the price of a cartridge. (Cf. Schaafhausen, in 

 The Anthropological Review, London, 1869, p. 368.) 



More recent and even more revolting exemplifications of this 

 tendency to relapse in barbarism are the atrocities committed by 

 Major Barttelot, and the conduct of Mr. Jameson, of Stanley's 

 Emin-Relief Expedition, who purchased a young negro girl and 

 gave her to a horde of cannibals in order to make sketches from 

 life of the manner in which she was torn in pieces and devoured. 



There are also instances on record of Englishmen, Dutchmen, 

 and Frenchmen who in their warfare with Indians adopted from 

 their savage foes the custom of scalping and torturing their cap- 

 tives. In fact, as Waitz has shown in his Anthropolgy (iii, 174), 

 there is scarcely a vice of barbarous tribes which Europeans 

 when removed from the restrains of civilization have not prac- 

 ticed. In the South Sea islands they have in some cases become 

 anthropophagous. 



Here we are suddenly brought face to face with the depressing 

 fact that men, who are heirs to ages of intellectual culture and 

 armed with all the powers and possibilities of good and evil 

 which modern science has put into their hands, yet relapse mor- 

 ally to the level of rude cave dwellers and contemporaries of the 

 mammoth in making their superiority of mental endowment and 

 material equipment minister to deeds and passions worthy of the 

 lowest stage of barbarism. 



All emigration to wild regions is, in a greater or less degree, 

 atavistic in its effects, and, by loosening or removing the many 

 leading strings of association by which the average man is kept 

 in an upright position and a straightforward course, lets him fall 

 back and retrograde, and thus tends to bring him nearer to his 

 flint-chipping neolithic ancestor. It throws each individual 

 upon his own ethical resources by releasing him from the con- 

 stant though hardly conscious social pressure of an environment 

 which is the resultant of long periods of human progress, and by 

 which alone the masses of so-called civilized nations are pre- 

 vented from relapsing into the original condition of the race. 



Happily, however, such extreme cases of moral reversion as 

 those of the early emigrants to Australia and the recent explorers 

 of Africa are only sporadic, and the ubiquity of humane and en- 

 lightened public opinion arising from greater frequency and 

 rapidity of international intercourse, and causing its immediate 

 influence to be felt in the remotest and roughest border lands 

 of savage and civilized life, will render them still rarer in the 

 future. The telegraph and the telephone are making it daily 

 more difficult and will eventually make it impossible for the most 

 pushing pioneer wholly to lose communication with the advanc- 

 ing body of organized forces behind him, or to break away from 



