fowKE] SIMILARITY OF ART PRODUCTS. 59 



The state of things among the lower tribes which presents itself to 

 the student is a substantial similarity in knowledge, arts, and customs, 

 running through the whole world. Not that the whole culture of all 

 tribes is alike — far from it ; but if any art or custom belonging to a low 

 tribe is selected at random, the likelihood is that something substantially 

 like it maybe found in at least one place thousands of miles off, though 

 it frequently happens that there are large intervening areas where it 

 has not been observed.' 



On the whole, it seems most probable that many of the simpler 

 weapons, implements, etc., have been invented independently by vari- 

 ous savage tribes. Though they are remarkably similar, they are at 

 the same time curiously difterent. The necessaries of life are simple 

 and similar all over the world. The materials with which men have to 

 deal are also very much alike; wood, bone, and to a certain extent 

 stone, have everywhere the same properties. The obsidian flakes of 

 the Aztecs resemble the flint flakes of our ancestors, not so much be- 

 cause the ancient Briton resembled the Aztec, as because the frac- 

 ture of flint is like that of obsidian. So also the pointed bones used as 

 awls are necessarily similar all over the world. Similarity exists, in 

 fact, rather in the raw material than in the manufactured article, and 

 some even of the simplest implements of stone are very different among 

 difierent races.'^ 



Tylor again says : 



When, however, their full value has been given to the diflferences in the produc- 

 tions of the Ground Stone Age, there remains a residue of a most remarkable kind. 

 In the first place, a very small number of classes, flakes, knives, scriipers, spear and 

 arrow heads, celts, and hammers take in the great mass of specimens in museums; 

 and in the second place, the prevailing character of these implements, whether 

 modern or thousands of year.s old, whether found on this side of the world or on the 

 other, is a marked uniformity. The ethnographer who has studied the stone imple- 

 ments of Europe, Asia, North or South America, or Polynesia, may consider the 

 specimens from the district he has studied as types from which those of other 

 districts diflfer, as a class, by the presence or absence of a few peculiar instruments, 

 and individually in more or less important details of shape or finish, unless, as some- 

 times happens, they do not differ perceptibly at all. So great is this uniformity iu 

 the stone implements of different places .and times, that it goes far to neutralize 

 their value as distinctive of different races. It is clear that no great help in tracing 

 the minute history of the growth and migration of tribes is to be got from an 

 arrowhead which might have come from Polynesia, or Siberia, or the Isle of Man, 

 or from a celt which might be, for all its appearance shows, Mexican, Irish, or 

 Tahitian. If an observer,- tolerably acquainted with stone implements, had an 

 unticketed collection placed before him, the largeness of the number of specimens 

 which he would not confidently assign, by mere inspection, to their proper countries, 

 would serve as a fair measure of their general uniformity. Even when aided by 

 mineralogical knowledge, often a great help, he would have to leave a large fraction 

 of the whole in an unclassified heap, confessing that he did not know within 

 thousands of miles or thousands of years where and when they were made. 



How, then, is this remarkable uniformity to be explained? The principle that 

 man does the same thing under the same circumstances will account for much, but 



' Tylor; Early History of Mankind, p. 169. 

 *Lubboclt, Sir John; Prehistoric Times, p. 569. 



