THE STUDY OF MANKIND. 3 55 



world may be reduced, perhaps, to fifty or one hundred families. Little progress 

 has yet been made in tracing these to one or several ancestral stocks. The au- 

 thor's account of the development of writing is brief, but admirably presented. 



In approaching the subject of the arts of life, Mr. Tylor is on ground per- 

 fectly familiar to himself, and which he has made familiar to the reading public 

 through previous volumes and numerous memoirs in the ethnological and anthro- 

 pological journals. No man is able to speak with higher authority. It is not 

 surprising that he has given his favorite and most familiar themes the amplest de^ 

 velopment in this volume. One unacquainted with the author's previous publi- 

 cations may find the gist of them in these chapters and the following. We find 

 here, for instance, elementary statements of the evolution of many of the imple- 

 ments and mechanical combinations of civilized life, such as spears, axes and 

 knife, wheel-carriages, mills and plows, methods of hunting, fishing, and war, 

 dwellings, personal ornamentation and clothing, navigation, cookery, pottery, 

 metal working, money, and commerce. These subjects have been separately 

 elaborated by the author, at adequate length, in the anthropological journals ; 

 and the reader is here furnished outlines and conclusions from investigations of 

 new and striking interest. On the development of the arts of pleasure and the 

 sciences the author has been equally happy and original. 



One of the characteristic doctrines of the author, and one largely elucidated 

 in his previous works, has been designated " animism," and this subject is treated 

 with relative fulness in the present work, in the chapter entitled " The Spirit 

 World." Mr. Tylor entertains the opinion that the idea of the soul is the founda- 

 tion of all savage religions. Savages universally believe that the soul may exist 

 and act independently of the body. The souls of the dead condnue in existence, 

 and frequent their former abodes, and possess some power over the fortunes of 

 their surviving relatives. Souls, which are otherwise contemplated as spirits and 

 demons, may be moved by good or by evil motives. They bring prosperity or 

 sickness and misfortune. Men, therefore, begin to propitiate them. The souls 

 of ancestors acquire higher and higher dignity, and are held in ever increasing 

 reverence. The souls of great chiefs and warriors assume a divine character. 

 Their names become the names of gods. Thus the Mongols worship as good 

 deities the great Genghis Khan and his princely family. "The idea of the 

 divine ancestor may even be carried far enough to reach supreme deity, as where 

 the Zulus, working back from ghostly ancestor to ancestor, talk of Unkulunkulu, 

 the Old-Old-One, as the creator of the world." This is the extreme development 

 of animism. The theory is highly ingenious and we have an enormous array of 

 facts which admit of coordination under it. There is, we believe, much truth in 

 the doctrine ; but our own study of comparative religion leads to the conviction 

 that the savage notion of a supreme being is not the outcome of any animistic 

 tendency, but a gift incorporated in the constitution of the psychic nature of man. 

 We are inchned to think that it is the initial rather than the final term in animis- 

 tic progress. This intuitive notion of an invisible Supreme suggests the notion 

 of invisible powers of lower orders. In man is an invisible and powerful entity ; 



