May 17, 1883] 



NA TURE 



57 



had iron by barter from more civilised neighbours, and 

 their occupations, especially the taking of wild honey, are 

 such as belong to the Singhalese. 



In the presence of such examples as these, anthro- 

 pologists admit that civilisation has always had its ups and 

 downs. A nation may themselves develop some thought 

 or art, or borrow it from abroad, and then ages afterwards 

 lose this knowledge or skill because they have no longer 

 the power or leisure to keep it up. It is only after taking 

 such cautionary examples of the migration and degenera- 

 tion of culture, that it becomes safe to trace the lines 

 along which civilisation has developed in the world. 



"When will hearing be like seeing?" says the Persian 

 proverb. Words of description will never give the grasp 

 that the mind takes through actual sight and handling of 

 objects, and this is why in fixing and forming ideas of 

 civilisation, a museum is so necessary. One understands 

 the function of such a museum the better for knowing 

 how the remarkable collection formed by General Pitt- 

 Rivers came into existence. About 1851 its collector, 

 then Colonel Lane Fox, was serving on a military sub- 

 committee to examine improvements in small arms. In 

 those days the British army was still armed (except 

 special riflemen) with the old smooth-bore percussion 

 musket, the well-known "Brown Bess." The improved 

 weapons of Continental armies had brought on the ques- 

 tion of reform, but the task of this committee of juniors 

 to press changes on the heads of the service was not an 

 easy one, even when the Duke of Wellington, at last con- 

 vinced by actual trial at the butts, decreed that he would 

 have every man in the army aimed with a rifle musket. 

 Colonel Fox was no mere theorist, but a practical man 

 who knew what to do and how to do it, and his place in 

 the history of the destructive machinery of war is marked 

 by his having been the originator and first instructor of 

 the School of Musketry at Hythe. While engaged in 

 this work of improving weapons, his experience led his 

 thoughts into a new channel. It was forced upon him 

 that stubbornly fixed military habit could not accept pro- 

 gress by leaps and bounds, only by small partial changes, 

 an alteration of the form of the bullet here, then a slight 

 change in the grooving of the barrel, and so on, till a 

 succession of these small changes gradually transformed 

 a weapon of low organisation into a higher one, while the 

 disappearance of the intermediate steps as they were 

 superseded left apparent gaps in the stages of the inven- 

 tion, gaps which those who had followed its actual course 

 knew to have been really filled up by a series of inter- 

 mediate stages. These stages Colonel Lane Fox collected 

 and arranged in their actual order of development, and 

 thereupon there grew up in his mind the idea that such 

 had been the general course of development of arts among 

 mankind. He set himself to collect weapons and other 

 implements till the walls of his house were covered from 

 cellar to attic with series of spears, boomerangs, bows, 

 and other instruments so grouped as to show the probable 

 history of their development. After a while this expanded 

 far beyond the limits of a private collection, and grew 

 into his Museum. There the student may observe in the 

 actual specimens the transitions by which the parrying- 

 stick used in Australia and elsewhere to ward off spears 

 must have passed into the shield. It is remarkable that 

 one of the forms of shield which lasted on latest into 

 modern times had not passed into a mere screen, but was 

 still, so to speak, fenced with : this was the target carried 

 by the Highland regiments in the Low Countries in 1747. 

 In this museum, again, are shown the series of changes 

 through which the rudest protection of the warrior by 

 the hides of animals led on to elaborate suits of plate and 

 chain armour. The principles which are true of the 

 development of weapons are not less applicable to peace- 

 ful instruments, whose history is illustrated in this collec- 

 tion. It is seen how (as was pointed out by the late Carl 

 Engel) the primitive stringed instrument was the hunter's 



bow, furnished afterwards with a gourd to strengthen the 

 tone by resonance, till at last the hollow resonator came to 

 be formed in the body of the instrument, as in the harp 

 or violin. Thus the hookah or nargileh still keeps some- 

 thing of the shape of the coco-nut shell from which it 

 was originally made and is still called after (Persian, 

 mil /il = coco-nut). But why describe more of these lines 

 of development when the very point of the argument is 

 that verbal description fails to do them justice, and that 

 really to understand them they ought to be followed in 

 the series of actual specimens. All who have been ini- 

 tiated into the principle of development or modified 

 sequence know how admirable a training the study of 

 these tangible things is for the study of other branches of 

 human history, where intermediate stages have more 

 often disappeared, and therefore trained skill and judg- 

 ment are the more needed to guide the imagination of 

 the student in reconstructing the course along which art 

 and science, morals and government, have moved since 

 they began, and will continue to move in the future. 



It is convenient in illustrating intellectual development 

 to choose a branch where every one, so to speak, carries 

 his specimens about with him. Some eighteen years 

 since I made an attempt to describe and analyse the 

 gesture-language, in order to show the consistency of 

 principle with which men debarred from spoken language, 

 whether deaf-mutes or men unacquainted with one another's 

 languages, contrive to utter their own thoughts and un- 

 derstand the thoughts of others through expressive 

 gestures. In these gestures we have a direct and uni- 

 versal outcome of the human mind, a system by which 

 a deaf and dumb scholar from an English asylum can 

 hold converse at first sight with Laplanders or Iroquoii 

 or Chinese. They understand each other because they use 

 signs for the most part self-expressive, and conveying their 

 own meaning to those who never saw them before. Now 

 any idea can be thus conveyed by self-expressive signs, 

 not in one way alone but many. A hunter of the prairie, 

 for example, has to express the idea "horse": this he 

 can do by various signs, as by the hand so held as to 

 imitate a horse's head, or by the act of straddling a pair 

 of forked fingers across the edge of the other hand, or 

 by the imitated motion of the gallop ; different as these 

 signs are, each tells its own tale. When, however, people 

 have been long used to converse together in gestures, they 

 are apt to cut them down into abbreviated forms which 

 do not show their meaning at first sight, and might even 

 seem to outsiders to be artificial. Thus, a white man, 

 seeing a Cheyenne Indian hold his bent arm forward with 

 the hand closed knuckles upwards, was puzzled as to what 

 this might mean ; the Indian, seeing his look of per- 

 plexity, took a stick, and bending his head and back, com- 

 pleted the picture into that of a bent old man leaning on 

 a staff, thus showing that the sign meant "old man." 

 Traditional signs may even go on after their reason has 

 passed away, as the sign for " stone," made by hammer- 

 ing with the closed fist on the other hand, a gesture 

 dating from the Stone Age, in which the Indians lived 

 within a few generations, when their only hammer was a 

 stone. These two examples are taken from the recent 

 careful collection of North American gesture-signs by 

 Col. Mallery, published by the Smithsonian Institution. 

 The labour and expense which anthropologists in the 

 United States are now bestowing on the study of the 

 indigenous tribes contrasts, I am sorry to say, with the in- 

 difference shown to such observations in Canada, where 

 the habits of yet more interesting native tribes are allowed 

 to die out without even a record. But to return to the 

 gesture-language. This passage of self-expressive signs 

 into what seem arbitrary signs throws strong light on 

 the principles of spoken language, where we find a few 

 self-expressive sounds, such as interjections and names of 

 animals imitated from their cries, while the great majority 

 of words are not even traceable back to the self-expressive 



