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Savages are small isolated communities, situated usually 
in out-of-the-way continents, or lonely corners of the earth’s 
surface, just where the weak would be driven by the strong. 
They have no settled habitations, few weapons, few traditions, 
lead a wandering life, and gain a scanty and precarious exist- 
ence by eating everything that can be eaten. 
So far as we can see, they never invent anything, and 
cannot be easily persuaded to adopt superior weapons, or 
tools, or better modes of life, even when they. dimly realise 
their advantages. 
Neglected in infancy, and old age, and sickness, much ex- 
posed to the weather, and insufficiently nourished, they are 
dwindling down to the point of extinction. How, then, we 
ask, could they have gained the knowledge they at present 
possess of the manufacture of rude weapons,—some with 
strange scientific principles, like the boomerang; of subtle 
poisons lurking in insignificant plants, like the ‘ woorali” of 
Guiana; of the way to produce fire; and a few other pro- 
cesses, simple and necessary to life, and yet not intuitive ? 
If all savages were pretty nearly equal, then we might 
plausibly assume that the Creator had implanted just that 
amount of knowledge in their minds necessary to maintain 
life; but the reverse is the case. 
Almost every conceivable gradation is observable between 
savagery and civilisation; and, as we have shown that they 
never improve of themselves, this must be the result of various 
degrees of degradation from a higher state of knowledge. 
Sir John Lubbock, in his opening address to the British 
Association at Dundee, in 1862—an address subsequently 
elaborated into his interesting work on Pre-historic Man— 
opposed Archbishop Whately’s view, which he dubs “ the 
degradation theory,”’ stoutly. 
'The view of the evolutionists is strongly put by Sir Francis 
Galton, in his work on Hereditary Genius, p. 350, where he 
says that “the human race were utter savages at the begin- 
ning; and, after myriads of years of barbarism, man has 
but very recently found his way into the paths of morality and 
civilisation.”’ 
Now, as has been frequently pointed out, the difficulty of 
this view lies in the helplessness of man and the conditions 
of savage life. “ Nature,” as President Smith, of the College 
of New Jersey, U.S., once observed, “has furnished the in- 
ferior animals with many and powerful instincts to direct them 
in the choice of their food, &c.; but man must have been the 
most forlorn of all creatures. . . Cast out as an orphan of 
nature, naked and helpless, he must have perished before he 
