56 



NA TURE 



\_May 17, 1883 



the kettle carved out of potstone (lapis ollaris) is 

 ancient in Scandinavia, and the plain open dish lamp 

 occurs widely in Northern Europe (it lingered till lately 

 in the Scotch crusu). But the lowest races know nothing 

 of so cultured an invention as a lamp. It is of course 

 within the wide bounds of possibility that under the 

 stress of a climate so cold for loose-clad, half-naked 

 men, and where the scanty supply of wood drifted to 

 the shore was too precious for fuel, the Esquimaux, 

 driven by the warlike American Indian tribes of Algon- 

 quins and Athabascas, may have discovered how to 

 improve their clothing, and to warm and feed them- 

 selves by the aid of lamps, so that they could hold their 

 own against the rigour of polar nature. But if so, how 

 curious that they should have done this by inventing Hist 

 what the Not semen could have taught them. Inde- 

 pendent Greenland invention, if possible, is hardly 

 probable, and I think a strong case may be made for an 

 easier explanation. We know that the ancestors of the 

 Esquimaux had been in contact with Scandinavians since 

 before our Norman Conquest, when in 1004 the small, 

 sallow, broad-cheeked Skrallings in their skin canoes slew 

 Thorvald with their spears thrown with throwing-sticks, 

 and he was buried with a cross at head and feet at Cross- 

 ness, which may have been about where long afterwards 

 the Puritan emigrants landed from the Mayflower. It 

 seems clear that the Esquimaux had to go north from 

 these delightful regions of New England, but they lived 

 for ages within reach of the Norse settlers in Greenland, 

 whose last survivors in the fourteenth century are thought 

 even to have merged their race in some tribe of the 

 despised Skrallings. Thus it is not surprising that the 

 Scandinavians returning to Greenland after four hundred 

 years more should have found the Esquimaux shaping 

 their skins and furs into semi- European garb, and by the 

 aid of these and the stone lamps and kettles maintaining 

 a polar existence which, without these, would have been 

 difficult indeed. Even that curious Scandinavian institu- 

 tion, the scurrilous nith-songs with which the Norse 

 champions drove one another wild with fury, so that they 

 had to be prohibited by law under heavy penalties, had 

 be ome a regular Esquimaux custom, and Rink calls 

 them simply nid-vise, just as he would have called them 

 among his own Danish forefathers. His first specimen 

 is a Greenland song sung at festive winter gatherings, 

 in ide to ridicule one KukouV, who was a poor hunter and 

 ns s cr, but loved to make friends with the white men ; it 

 begins — 



" Wretched little Kukouk 

 He tikes care of himself;" &c. 



If this view of a Scandinavian element in the culture of the 

 Greenlanders is sound, we have the curious spectacle of 

 modern Danes going to civilise the wild men and de- 

 scribing their manners and customs as those of savages, 

 without a thought that some of the most curious of them 

 were relics of forgotten life of their own old Norse-land. 



That families can go down in the world is only too 

 well known, nay, that whole tribes and nations can in evil 

 diy, fall off from their old prosperity, intelligence, and 

 virtue. The question asked by the anthropologist is 

 whether a civilised race can sink to the barbaric level, 

 and thence to the lowest or savage level. The answer is 

 as vet in a confused state, but certain elements of truth 

 may already be got at. It appears at any rate that when 

 civilised men take to a wild life, and mix with the people 

 uf the wilderness, they may give rise to a race in whom 

 knowledge and comfort and morality are lowered from 

 the ancestral level. This is the familiar case of the 

 Gauchos of the Pampas, Spaniards in language and partly 

 in race, but leading a life which to the soldiers of Pizarro 

 would have seemed gross and brutal. In the forests of 

 Ceylo 1 there still roam families of wild men, the so-called 

 Yed-las or hunters who, as names of places show, once 

 lived widely over the country till dispossessed by the 



invading nations from India. The wildest V eddas are to 

 be found in the park-like hunting-grounds of Nilgala, and 

 in "the land of Bintan, all covered with mighty woods 

 and filled with abundance of deer," as Robert Knox 

 described it two centuries ago. These wild shy people, of 

 stature averaging under five feet, and in skin duskier than 

 the Singhalese around them, with tiny heads covered with 

 amass of shaggy hair, and showing in their dull and 

 melancholy faces that uniformity of feature and expression 

 so characteristic of low grades of culture, may seem at 

 first si<mt to lead a life comparable with that of the forest 

 savage's of Brazil or New Guinea. Yet their language is 

 a Singhalese dialect ; they are in fact the one known race 

 who may be called savages, and yet speak a language of our 

 own Aryan stock. The following is one of their charms, 

 intended to subdue an elephant in the forest, whom it 

 describes in terms which show a curious transition between 

 the charm and the riddle ; indeed, every one who remem- 

 bers our own nursery riddle about the cow will be struck 

 with its close resemblance to the Vedda charm : — 

 " Ichchata vallay 



Pachchaia vallay 



Dela devallay 



Situ appa situ." 



" In front a tail, 



Behind a tail, 



On the two sides two tails, 



Stay, bea t, stay ! " 

 This is almost Sanskrit, and it is obvious that with so dis- 

 tinctly Aryan language there must needs come some strain 

 of Aryan blood, for it is almost outside the possibilities 

 of social life that a tribe should adopt a language, without 

 su:h intermarriage with those who speak it that thence- 

 forth the people will in part have ancestry corresponding 

 to the new tongue. The Singhalese indeed hold the 

 Veddas to be of Aryan descent, and in the Mahawanso 

 they stand as offspring of no less an Aryan ancestor than 

 King Vijayo, who married the native princess Kuveni, 

 and by her means conquered the Island of Ceylon ; after- 

 wards, when he ungratefully divorced her and took a 

 daughter of King Pandavo of Madura, the native queen 

 wandered away, and her children married in-and-in, as 

 continued till lately to be Vedda custom. This, says the 

 poem, was the origin of these Pulinda or barbarians ; 

 and thus it is that they still claim royal descent, and look 

 down on the Singhalese. Combining the evidence of the 

 Vedda skulls and features with that of their language, we 

 may so far agree with poetic legend as to consider them 

 really outcasts of mixed Aryan and Dravidian or indigenous 

 race. If so, it must be granted that descendants of the 

 Aryan stock, " heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of 

 time," may be found among tiny, shy, wild men of the 

 woods, with sad dull features peering out of their matted 

 locks, who dwell in huts of boughs when they cannot get 

 the preferred shelter of a cave, who live on veniscn and 

 wild honey and fish drugged by putting poisonous fruit in 

 the pools, and who in their intercourse with the more 

 cultured Singhalese bring themselves into contempt by 

 their simple truthfulness, that utter incapability of cheat- 

 ing and lying which is as characteristic of the savage 

 state as it is rare at higher levels of culture. Truly the 

 condition of these poor relations of ours is of interest. 

 But they are not Aryans on their way upward from primi- 

 tive rudeness. Their kinsfolk actually till patches of 

 ground and are a settled if a rude people, and these 

 wildest Veddas are evidently a few dwindling clans of 

 outcasts sunk from a higher stage. There is not among 

 them any evidence that they have been in the Stone Age ; 

 a story is told of them like our own legend of Wayland 

 Smith's cave, that in oil times when they wanted arrows 

 they would carry loads of meat to the smith's shop in the 

 night, and hang it there with a leaf cut to the pattern of 

 the arrow- heads they expected him to leave out in ex- 

 change ; at any rate it is certain that they have always 



