TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 159 



of development have originated independently in different localities. Neither are 

 we now, I think, in a position to doubt that civilization has been gradually and 

 progressively developed, and that a very extended, though not by any means 

 uniform, period of growth must have elapsed before we could arrive at the high 

 state of culture which we now enjoy. The arguments of our sectional President, 

 Sir John Lubbock, on this subject may, I think, be accepted generally as those of 

 the best exponent of these views in our own time ; such was the opinion, as we 

 learn from various authorities, that was held by most of the ancient authors, and 

 it tallies in all respects with the phenomena of progress now observable in the 

 world around us, or which have been recorded in history. Indeed it almost 

 appears probable that had it not been for certain dogmas inculcated in our youth, 

 and from the iutiueuce of which in biasing our iudgment it is difficult to disenorao:e 

 ourselves in after years, we should never for a moment have thought it possible 

 that civilization could have arisen through any other causes than those by which 

 we actually see it developing in our own times. 



IIow far the first beings worthy of being called men may have possessed superior 

 organic psychical powers to their predecessors, and whether the superior functions 

 of the human mind were developed slowly or rapidly is a point on which it is more 

 difficult to form an opinion. In contrasting the psychical differences between man 

 and the lower animals, it is so invariably the practice to include, and indeed so impos- 

 sible to avoid including, in our estimate of the human intellect all that conscious 

 education and unconscious infantile culture has added to the powers of the mind, 

 that unless we were able to try the experiment of the Egyptian king, and send 

 children to be brought up with animals apart from all intercourse with the human 

 race, we could not place ourselves in a position to compare truly the innate capacities 

 of the two, or to form any just estimate of the difficulties which primteval man, 

 even supposing him to have possessed mental powers equal to our own, must have 

 encountered in the first stages of human culture. It has been shown by Prof. 

 Huxley and others that there is really no cerebral barrier between men and animals ; 

 nor does it appear beyond the pale of possibility that a slight increase in the vivid- 

 ness or permanence of the impressions of external objects upon the mind over that 

 possessed by the brutes, might, by marking more clearly the sequence of events, 

 be sufficient to initiate that faculty for improvement which is the special charac- 

 teristic of man. 



Be that as it may, there is, I believe, nothing in the constitution of our own 

 minds which can lead us to doubt that the progress of our first parents must have 

 been extremely slow, or that the slight improvement observable in the implements 

 of the neolithic over those of the palaeolithic age did actually correspond to the 

 continuous progression of human culture during enormous periods of time. 



Now, if it is true that during the countless ages included in the palaeolithic and 

 neolithic periods (which we know to have been marked by great geological changes, 

 by the union and separation of great continents, by great changes of climate, and 

 by the migration of various classes of fauna into distant parts of the earth) the 

 progress of mankind was as slow and gradual as we are warranted in supposing it 

 to have been by the relics which have been left us, considering how short the 

 period of history during which the rapid development of civilization has taken 

 place is in comparison with the long periods of time of which we have been 

 speaking, and that progress is always advancing at a rapidly increasing ratio, we 

 need find no difficulty in supposing that where savages are now found in the 

 employment of implements corresponding to those of the neolithic age, they pre- 

 sent us with fairly correct pictures of neolithic culture, being really in point of 

 time only a little behind us in the race of improvement. It is reasonable also to 

 suppose that the use of such tools by savages, and the culture associated with 

 them, was also, like that of our neolithic parents, inherited from lower conditions 

 of life, and that, being slow and continuous, it was sufficiently stable to enable us 

 to trace connexions between people in the same stage now widely separated, and 

 between them and oiu- own neolitJiic ancestors. 



The most remarkable analogies are in reality found to exist between races in the 

 same condition of progress ; and it is to the study of these analogies, wiih the view 

 of ascertaining their causes and histories, that the attention of anthronologists has 



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