120 REPORT— 1867. 



advantage ; and in the second, we find, even in the same family, among' children of 

 the same parents, the most opposite dispositions — in the same nation there are 

 families of high character, and others in which every member is more or less 

 criminal. But in this case, as in the last, the Archbishop's argument, if good at 

 all, is good against h)is own view. It is like an Australian boomerang, which 

 recoils upon its owner. The Archbishop believed in the unity of the human race, 

 arguing that man was originally civilized (in a certain sense). "How comes it, 

 then," I might ask him, "that the New Hollander is not now in the condition of 

 the European ? " In another passage, Archbishop Whately quotes with approba- 

 tion a passage from President Smith, of the College of New Jersey, who says, 

 that man, " cast out an orphan of nature, naked and helpless, into the savage forest, 

 must have perished before he could have learned how to supply his most imme- 

 diate and urgent wants. Suppose him to have been created, or to have started 

 into being, one knows not how, in the full strength of his bodily powers, how long 

 must it have been before he could have known the proper use of his limbs, or 

 how to apply them to climb the tree ? " &c. Exactly the same, however, might 

 be said of the goriUa or the chimpanzee, which certainly are not the degraded 

 descendants of civilized ancestors. Having thus very briefly considered the argu- 

 ments brought forward by Archbishop Whately, I will proceed to state, also veiy 

 briefly, some facts which seem to militate against the view advocated by him. 



First, I will endeavour to show that there are indications of progress even 

 among savages. Secondly, that among the most civilized nations there are traces 

 of original barbarism. The Archbishop supposes that men were from the beginning 

 herdsmen and cultivators. We know, however, that the Australians, Tasmanians, 

 North and South Americans, and several other more or less savage races, living in 

 countries eminently suited to our domestic animals, and to the cultivation of cereals, 

 were yet entirely ignorant both of the one and the other. It is, I think, impro- 

 bable that any race of men, who had once been agriculturists and herdsmen, should 

 entirely abandon pursuits so easy and so advantageous, and it is still more impro- 

 bable that if we accept Usher's very limited chronology, all tradition of such a 

 change should be lost. Moreover, even if the present colonists of (say) America 

 or Australia were to fall into such a state of barbarism, we shoidd still find in 

 those countries herds of wild cattle descended from those imported ; and, even if 

 these were exterminated, still we should find their remains, whereas we know that 

 no single bone of the ox, or, with one doubtful exception, the domestic sheep, has 

 been found either in Australia or in the whole extent of America. Moreover the 

 same argument applies to the horse, as the fossil horse of South America does 

 not belong to the domestic race. So, again, in the case of plants. We do not 

 know that any of our cultivated cereals woidd survive in a wild state, though it 

 is highly probable that in a modified form they would do so. But there are many 

 other plants which follow in the train of man, and by which the botany of South 

 America, Australia, and New Zealand has been almost as profoundly modified, 

 as their ethnology has been, by the arrival of the white man. The Maoris have 

 a melancholy pro\'erb, that the Maoris disappear before the white man, just as 

 the white man's rat destroys the native rat ; the European fly drives away the 

 Maori fly ; and the clover kills the New Zealand fern. A very interesting paper 

 on this subject, by Dr. Hooker, whose authority no one will question, is contained 

 in the Natural History Eeview for 1864: — "In Australia and New Zealand," 

 he says, " for instance, the noisy train of English emigration is not more surely 

 doing its work than the stealthy tide of English weeds, which are creeping over the 

 surface of the waste, cultivated, and virgin soil, in annually increasing numbers 

 of genera, species, and indiA-iduals. Apropos of this subject, a coiTespondent, 

 W. T. Locke Travers, Esq., F.L.S., a most active New Zealand botanist, wi-iting from 

 Canterbury, says, ' You would be surprised at the rapid spread of European and 

 foreign plants in this country. All along the sides of the main lines of road through 

 the plains, a Polyr/omim, called cow-grass, grows most luxuriantly, the roots some- 

 times two feet in depth, and the plants spreading over an area from four to five feet 

 in diameter. The dock {Rnmex ohtusifullus or Tt. crisptis) is to be found in every 

 river-bed extending into the valleys of the mountain-rivers, until these become 

 mere torrents. The Sow-thistle is spread all over the country, growing luxuriantly 

 nearly up to 6000 feet. The water-cress increases in our still rivers to such an 



