TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 165 



from which the arts have been disseminated into distant lands or handed down to 

 posterity. In all cases a continuous development must be traced before the problem 

 of origin can be considered solved ; the development may have been slow or it may 

 have been rapid, but the sequence of ideas must have been continuous, and until that 

 sequence is established our knowledge is at fault. As with the distribution of 

 plants, certain soils are favom-able to the growth of certain plants, but we do not 

 on that account assume them to be spontaneous offspring of the soil, so certain arts 

 and phases of culture may flourish among certain races or under certain conditions 

 of life. But it is as certain that each art, custom, and institution had its history of 

 natural growth ; it is that each seed which sprouts in the soil once fell from a parent 

 stem. The human intellect is the soil in which the arts and sciences may be said 

 to grow ; and this is the only condition of things compatible with the existence of 

 minds capable of adapting external nature, but possessing no power of originality. 

 If I am right in supposing that it is one of the primary objects of Anthropological 

 Science to trace out the history and som-ces of human cidture, a consideration of the 

 relative value of the various classes of evidence on which we rely for this pui-pose 

 will be admitted to be a question of no slight importance in connexion with our sub- 

 ject. We must distinguish between those branches of study which we are apt to look 

 upon as intrinsically the highest, and on that account the most attractive, and those 

 which are of most value as evidence of man in a low condition of culture. To the re- 

 ligions, myths, institutions, and language of a people we are naturally drawn, as af- 

 fording the best indications of their mental endowments ; but it is evident that these 

 carry us no further bacJi in time than the historic period; and however necessai-y to be 

 studied as branches of our science, they fail to anord us any direct evidence of those 

 vast ages during which our species appears to have gradually taken upon itself the 

 characteristics of humanity : every age has, however, left us the relics of its material 

 arts, which, when studied comprehensively in connexion with the geological record, 

 may be taken as evidence of mental development from the earliest period of time. 

 Nor is it in point of time alone, but also by reason of their stability, that the material 

 ails afford us the surest evidence on which to reconstruct om- social edifice. The 

 tendency to constant variation within narrow limits is a psychical characteristic of 

 the uncultivated man ; but the material arts are not subject to those comparatively 

 abrupt changes to which, prior to the introduction of writing, all branches of culture 

 are liable which are dependent for their transmissions on the memory, and which 

 are communicated by word of mouth. 



Few who liave read the works of Prof Max Mliller or Mr. Fan-ar can fail to be 

 struck witli the value of the evidence afibrded by language, so far as it goes, but, on 

 the other hand, with the very short distance to which it carries us back in investiga- 

 ting the origin of speech ; nor is this surprising when it is considered how constant 

 must have been the changes to which language was subject in prehistoric times. 

 Amongst the one hundred islands occupied by the Melanesian race, the Bishop of 

 Wellington informs us there are no less than two hundred languages, dift'ering fi-om 

 each other as much as Dutch and German ; and this diversity of languages and dia- 

 lects is confirmed by Mr. Turner, in his account of his nineteen years' residence in 

 Polynesia. Amongst the Penons, or savage tribes of Cambodia, we read of the great 

 number of dialects spolven by tribes whose manners and customs are the same. 

 Amongst the Musgu of Central Afi-ica, Barth tells us that, owing to the absence of 

 friendly intercourse between the several tribes and families, such a number of dialects 

 had sprung up as to render communication between them difficult. Upon the river 

 Amazon Mr. Bates mentions that in a single canoe he found several individuals 

 speaking languages so difierent as to be imintelligible to the others. In a state of 

 culture in which such diversity of tongues existed, what could have been the 

 chance of preserving unchanged the myths, religions, and all those manifestations 

 of intellect which are dependent on tradition ? It has, in fact, been found, by 

 those most competent to judge, that they are not reliable in any great degi-ee as 

 evidence of connexion between distant tribes and races in an early condition of 

 culture. Even in cases in which time and diversity of dialect, as causes change, 

 have been eliminated, the experience of everyday life proves how little reliance is 

 to be placed in the verbal transmission of ideas. In studying Gallic traditions, 

 Mr. Campbell, of Islay, who has collected a larger number of Gallic stories than 



