606 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
dans les deux Indes,’ published in Geneva in 1781, is also too late; but Raynal in 
particular had a wide acquaintance, and his ideas were current in French society 
long before his book came out; so we are probably safe in crediting Rousseau 
with at all events a gossiping acquaintance with a type of savagery which was 
enjoying a considerable vogue in his time. 
‘Wild Peter. 
Both Rousseau and Montesquieu were, of course, also in a position to enjoy 
the perplexities of the advocates and assailants of the doctrine of innate ideas 
when a real live specimen of Homo sapiens ferus turned up in the Hanoverian 
forests in the year 1724. The story of ‘ Wild Peter’ is probably familiar reading, 
but though the literature which this poor creature provoked is in parts diverting 
both to the anthropologist and to the philosopher, I should encumber my story 
unduly if I digressed. Montesquieu, having been in England and having his 
friends in London, has not very much to say; but Rousseau gives ‘ Wild Peter’ 
a long note, and was evidently considerably impressed, 
The South Sea Islanders. 
Rousseau wrote just too early to be able to make use of what must have 
appeared to his contemporaries a remarkable confirmation of his view of the State 
of Nature—namely, the discovery by Cook, Bougainville, and La Pérouse of the 
Polynesian Islanders. But this discovery, coming as it did so closely after 
Rousseau’s manifesto, and so markedly confirming certain phases of his sketch, 
seems to have attracted some attention and to have been given more than its 
due weight. For it came, at all events to the public mind, as the revelation of 
a new type of Man and Society, still more remote from contact with the modern 
world even than the Carib and the Iroquois, still more likely therefore to have 
withstood the attacks of reason, if not of time, and consequently to have preserved 
some traces of the original State. The South Seas had, of course, been traversed 
cursorily since the days of Magellan; Dampier had done much to make their 
natives known; and I have indicated the share which his work may have had in 
forming the portrait of Man Friday. But it was not till after the publication of 
Rousseau’s ‘ Discourse’ that the significance of these data was appreciated; and 
ethnology owes much in this instance to philosophy for the impulse which was 
given, in the generation which follows, to the study of ‘Pacific Man,’ in more 
senses than one; though I think the debt is in part repaid when we see what 
Herder owes to ethnology. 
The Pacific Islanders, of course, with their Garden of Eden existence, chal- 
lenged all preconceived notions of the defective mentality of races remote from 
Europe, and effected analmost Copernican revolution in the self-centred ethnology 
of the discoverers. If a South Sea Islander like Omai could pick up English, play 
chess, and behave like a gentleman after a few months’ consort with Europeans, 
there could not be much amiss with his ‘ mind’; and it was clearly time to amend 
current conceptions as to the identity of the primitive with the remote. 
George Forster, for example, who wrote the first really philosophical account 
of the voyages of Captain Cook, with whom his father had sailed as one of the 
chief naturalists of the expedition, was completely convinced by his experiences 
that the Biblical record was true after all, and that the primitive state of man 
was a state of innocence and happiness. It was a reaction against the ideas of 
Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu, which went far beyond what was contemplated 
even by Rousseau, and it did more to retard the progress both of anthropology and 
of general biology than anything else in that century. 
So long as the sentimental enthusiasm aroused by Rousseau persisted, there 
was little hope of advance in the direction of a solid ethnology. But in England 
the contagion was slighter, the contact with the facts of exploration closer, and 
the reaction earlier; and Germany too was already well awake, with Herder, 
almost before the Revolution was ablaze. 
‘TI take this opportunity,’ writes Chamisso, who had himself been in the 
