10 Timehri. 



Spruce says iu regard to Timehri figures : — 



"The execution of the figures may have ranged through several 

 centuries, a period which ia the existence of a savage people is but a 

 year in that of the highly civilised nations of modern Europe. In vain 

 shall we seek any chronological information from the Indian, who never 

 knows his own age, rarely that of his youngest child, and who refers all 

 that happened before his own birth to a vague antiquity, wherein are no 

 dates, and rarely any epochs to mark the sequence of events. 



We can appreciate this when we think of the uniformity of their 

 tasks ; the same thing goes on day after day and no impression is 

 made upon the memory unless something happens that is quite different 

 from the daily work. Even a painful experience is not long remembered 

 as we Bee in our children who often suffer from mistakes that are 

 repeated after short intervals. Most of our lessons are learnt through 

 repetitions of painful results, which lead us to avoid trouble by getting 

 out of bad habits. We have to remember well what happened when 

 certain things were done, but primitive man never does this though he 

 may ultimately get an instinctive dislike to do things which brought him 

 or his forefathers into trouble. 



In Mr. A. Winter's pamphlet on the pictured rocks there is an 

 attempt to bring in religious ideas. This is hardly justified for religion 

 implies thinking. Mr. im Thurn's elaborate animism also suggests that 

 our Indians have a rational, though mistaken, basis for their conduct. 

 We may safely state that these people are simply thoughtless and im- 

 pulsive, imitating what they see done by the parents or the tribe. 

 Like ourselves they try to got what is agreeable, and there is a feeling 

 of satisfaction when the supposed right thing has been done. 



At the base of all human actions is the ardent desire to gain what we 

 like. This leads us to try many things but we do not always succeed 

 or the result is not entirely to our liking. We have taken, as we think, 

 every precaution to avoid failure, and yet there appears to be an 

 adversary *hich has been personified as a devil or by more abstract ideas 

 of fortune, fate, luck and chance. To conciliate this adversary the Indian 

 has got his beenas and perhaps the figures on aprons, baskets, pottery 

 and weapons give hope and trust thus enabling him to gain better 

 success in his struggle with adverse circumstances. The devil and luck 

 are often excuses for idleness, but the Indian is not a fatalist for he tries 

 to overcome his difficulties. His efforts appear to us rather absurd and 

 yet they are not quite useless. He has a mainspring for action when 

 there ia a beena or charm to gain success in every undertaking, but the 

 charm means doing something ; if it is a prayer we can say he works and 

 prays at the same time. 



Anthropologists rarely have the judicial mind, hence their reports 

 are full of hearsay evidence which some do not attompt to examine as 



