Ld 
Reviews— Tylor on Civilization. 175 
extinct; or in Denmark, where the bones of the great Auk alone 
remain to testify of its recent existence. 
The Pyrenean Caves have given up the bones of a people, their 
inhabitants, who subsisted on herds of Reindeer, and were probably 
not more civilized than the Samoyedes or Laplanders ; while the 
eravel of the Somme has yielded the rudest forms of flint weapons 
that can be relied on as ar tificial, and which may have belonged to a 
still more ancient race, coeval with the Mammoth and the Sibert jan 
Rhinoceros. 
Looking, then, upon man as a species occurring in a fossil state, 
we are legitimately bound to study the earliest historic records of 
his geographical distribution, and the condition of his primitive life. 
The result of these inquiries is nearly always the same. Every 
country shelters, in some remote mountain or secluded shore, the 
remains of an older race than that which now dominates it, as 
Latham has well shown. The Kymri who were driven by many 
successive invaders to the more hilly and barren regions of these 
-islands, were themselves emigrants from the far East, and have left 
indications of their route in circles of stones. They appear to have 
entirely extirpated the ‘short-headed’ people, their predecessors, 
who were such successful miners, and traded with the Phcenicians 
in their ‘ships of Tarshish.’ South of us, the Basques still remain, 
the reliques of this race; and in the North, the Laplanders still 
retain much of their primitive habits, and the taste for metallurgy. 
From this country they wholly passed away, after bringing to 
perfection the art of making stone implements, and inaugurating an 
age of bronze. 
The evidence collected by Mr. Tylor respecting the condition of 
early and uncivilized tribes is very full and comprehensive. It goes 
to show that progress has been the general law; although some 
races have deteriorated after emigrating into less favoured regions, 
and those nations have declined whose civilization was based on 
conditions incompatible with the general advancement of society. 
However worthless the once-accepted doctrine that India was the 
cradle of the human race—because, being the highest portion of the 
solid world, it was the first to emerge from the sea, and become 
habitable,—there is something more in the argument of our Indian 
ceologists, that a country which has never been submerged since the 
Middle Tertiary Age would be the most likely to afford evidence of 
man’s early history. The most ancient indications found in Europe 
will probably fall far short of his real epoch. The oldest inhabitants 
of Europe, the Lapps, are a dark people; but it is a curious and 
significant fact, that the most primitive races of the East are not 
merely dark, but black ; and while there is no difficulty in under- 
standing how the black races have become superseded by those with 
lighter skins, there are physiological reasons which render it most 
unlikely that the blacks were derived from a brown or blonde 
people. 
The author has amusingly suggested that some of our modern 
customs are only intelligible in the. light of early history; such as the 
