IO 



NATURE 



{May 3) 1883 



fir better kno»>-n than are the causes which bring them 

 about. Yet it would be too much to say that we do not 

 know how to alter the type of a race. For instance, 

 S'ature is one point of race-type, and we know by actual 

 experience that if a population of the Yorkshire dales is 

 brought in to live in factory towns, in two generations 

 they are found to be ii inch lower in average stature than 

 their countrybred kinsfolk. Indeed, it appears from Bed- 

 doe's careful statistics that the stature of the London 

 population is gradually lessening. The great means of 

 change of race-type is acclimatisation Dr. Acland has 

 here called attention to the interesting problem presented 

 by the tribes of "unhealthy districts " in India, who live 

 where tribes allied to them in race and language cannot 

 exist, nor can they themselves go back, without falling sick, 

 to the plains whence their ancestors came. That this 

 acclimatisation affects the secretions and hue of skin is 

 certain, but this topic is one on which only a pathologist 

 can speak with any authority. If, however, we look at 

 the map of the world, it is as evident to us as it was to 

 Hippocrates that race depends in some measure on cli- 

 mate and mode of life. The leading fact is the lie of the 

 negro type along the equator, as contrasted with the 

 xanthous or blond type in the northern temperate zone. 

 The permanence of the races of mankind, such as the 

 Egyptian, which the polygenist school interpreted as 

 evidence that it was a species by itself, is better explained 

 in Draper's words that " its durability arises from its 

 perfect correspondence with its environment.'' It is 

 only when moved into different conditions that a race has 

 to change into harmony with these new conditions. 



Turning now from the development of races to the 

 development of their civilisation, the task is made easy 

 by the help of evidence geological in its character. The 

 presence of stone implements in every part of the world 

 proves that they were once used there, and that the races 

 using them had no metal. But now stone implements 

 are distinguished into the ruder Palaeolithic and the more 

 finished Neolithic. The ruder, discovered in gravels of 

 great antiquity with the remains of the mammoth and 

 other prehistoric animals in Europe, must therefore be 

 the older, but this also seems to be evident from their 

 very nature. If men with bronze weapons had no more 

 bronze, they might very likely fall back on the best sub- 

 stitute they could make, the hard, ground stone celt ; but 

 it seems against all reason that those who knew how to 

 grind a hatchet on a whetstone should have lost that 

 simple if laborious art. Thus culture confirms what 

 geology teaches, that the rude stage of man's history to 

 which the rude implement belongs is also the earlier 

 stage, and the higher polished implement comes later. 

 It comes on indeed into modern times, for the general 

 extinction of the Stone Age in Australia or America 

 only dates from this century, and even at this day 

 in Australia the traveller learns from the blackfellow 

 how the rude chipped axe-flake is to be gummed to 

 the helve, or the white hunter sits down in California 

 to be shown how to chip out the neat obsidian arrowhead 

 with the point of deerhorn. In a few ages after metal has 

 come in, the new people forgets that the old people ever 

 used such things. Thus it comes to pass that, across the 

 world from Iceland to Japan, stone hatchets and arrow- 

 heads dug up in the ground are supposed to be the 

 material weapons hurled or shot from the sky, whose flight 

 is seen in the lightning-flash Such "thunderbolts" have 

 for ages been valued for magical power, especially the 

 appropriate uses of guarding against fire and inflam- 

 matory disease ; Pythagoras was purified with a thunder- 

 bolt, and stone arrowheads form the centre-pieces of 

 some of the most beautiful of Etruscan gold necklaces. 

 Even a bronze implement may be taken for a thunderoolt 

 by those who have forgotten its nature ; the bronze celt 

 here produced was dug up in Wiltshire, where the 

 lightning had struck an oak, and it has since for many 



years been the magical thunderbolt of a west country 

 hamlet. 



Even where the old use dwindles and changes, sur- 

 vival in altered shape may keep on the old ideas : 

 our own life is full of survivals. In ceremonial processions 

 we still see the javelins and halberds belonging to war be- 

 fore gunpowder, and though the mace no longer smashes 

 helmets, it remains as an emblem of power and dignity. 

 Our books are ornamented with gilt lines which once 

 represented the real cross-binding ; as in perhaps the 

 most modern of survivals, where the tape which bound 

 the registered letter has dwindled to blue cross-lines 

 printed on the envelope. Language is full of such records 

 of the past ; as when one hears people declare they do 

 not care a groat, a doit, or a rap, when they would not 

 recognise if they saw them these oil-fashioned varieties of 

 small change. Thus what with the lasting on of old things 

 among outlying peoples, and what with the survival of 

 them among the civilised world, the thread of connection 

 is by no means lost from remotest times. For my own 

 part, when I look at the utter likeness of the working 

 processes of the mind among the races most different in 

 skin, and when I see the resemblance of rude ideas 

 and customs throughout the inhabited world, I cannot 

 but think that much of the thought and habit of mankind 

 not only goes back to the remote Palaeolithic age, but that 

 it may be older than the divisions of race which sepa- 

 rate us from the Chinese or the Negro. Let me offer 

 examples of a mental state yet surviving which may have 

 its origin in the very childhood of mankind. Uneducated 

 men, from the savage to the peasant, remain more or 

 less in that childlike state of mind where the distinction 

 between dreams and real events is not yet perfectly 

 made ; dreams seem to be visits from phantom souls 

 of others coming to the sleeper, or excursions of his own 

 phantom or soul away from his body. The state of 

 primitive thought in which psychology thus grows out of 

 the phenomena of dreams has perhaps never been better 

 displayed ihan in a recent account by Mr Im Thurn in 

 the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of his Indian 

 boatmen in British Guiana. One morning a young 

 Macusi was so enraged against him that he refused to 

 stir, declaring that his master, without consideration for 

 his weak health, had taken him out in the night and 

 made him drag the canoe up a series of cataracts. 

 Nothing would persuade him that it was only a dream, 

 and it was long before he was sufficiently pacified to 

 throw himself sullenly into the bottom of the canoe. 

 Food was scarce, and such dreams in consequence fre- 

 quent, so that morning after morning the Indians were 

 complaining that some man (whom they named) had 

 visited their hammocks in the night, and beaten or other- 

 wise maltreated them. In the middle of one night Mr. 

 Im Thurn was awakened by his headman, an Arawak 

 named Sam, who addressed him in these bewildering 

 words : " George speak me very bad, boss ; you cut his 

 bits." On explanation, it proved that Sam had dreamt 

 that George, one of the men under him, had spoken im- 

 pudently to him, and had come at once to his master to 

 demand that the culprit should be punished by cutting 

 so many bits (i.e. fourpenny pieces) off his wages. 



This instance of mental rudeness comes from among 

 tribes who are hardly above the savage level, but not less 

 remarkable survivals of primitive thought may be found 

 among peasants. Thus that most archaic practice, the 

 burial of objects for the use of the dead in the future 

 life, is still continued in Europe. One of the latest 

 instances comes from the village of Liickendorf in 

 Saxony, where the schoolmaster, Herr Kiihne, describes 

 how when a mother dies in childbirth, they bury in the 

 coffin all she wants for the child gone before — the little 

 earthen pipkin and spoon, and a supply of groats, the 

 baby-clothes, with needle and thread, thimble and scis- 

 sors to mend them, and even a tiny model of the mangle, 



