127 
The process of gradual degeneration is easy enough to 
imagine. At first, according to the evidence of all history, 
men kept together in great masses, and so kept each other 
cultured. Then, as divisions arose and population increased, 
emigrant bands would begin to go out. In the days of Peleg 
the earth was “ divided.”’ : 
Then would come hardships, and utter pre-occupation in the 
strugele with wild nature and wilder beasts of prey for sub- 
sistence. Hach generation would become more savage, and 
each generation would be less able to teach the next, and so 
each must see some art forgotten or lost, especially if, as must 
have occurred in the early world, the bands were isolated for 
many successive centuries. 
The author of Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, p. 110 
(C. King), says: “‘ The conspicuous retrograde seemed to me 
an example of the most hopeless phase of human hfe. If, as 
I suppose, we may all, sooner or later, give in our adhesion 
to the Darwinian theory of development, does not the same 
law which permits such splendid scope for the better, open to 
us also possible gulfs of degradation, and are not these chronic 
emigrants, whose broken-down wagons and weary faces greet 
you along the dusty highways of the Far West, melancholy 
examples of beings who have for ever lost the conservatism 
of home and the power of improvement ?” 
Here is the same law operating to-day which in times of 
yore reduced the Bushmen and Tasmanians to what they 
became, only that its operation is now checked by the in- 
creased density of population and facilities for intercourse 
and locomotion. 
It was apparently only in Mesopot 
peopled—that civilisation preserved a sees and a. head- 
centre from which to civilise the whole world. 
There can be no doubt that this view of the early, and, 
perhaps, Divine origin of civilisation and of the subsequent 
origin of savages, is extremely distasteful to the Development 
school. 
As Dr. Whately says: ‘The view we have taken of the 
condition of savages breaks the water-pitcher (as the Greek 
proverb expresses it) at the very threshold.” 
“ Supposing the animalcule safely conducted by a series of 
bold conjectures, through the several transmutations, till, from 
an ape it becomes a man, there is, as we have seen, a failure 
at the last stage of all; an insurmountable difficulty in the 
final step from the savage to the civilised man.” * 
* P26. 
