INTEODUCTION. O 



faulty the study of Civilization, Culture- Hi story as it is conve- 

 niently called in Germany, becomes itself an important aid to 

 the historian, as a means of re-constructing the lost records of 

 early or barbarous times. But its use as contributing to the 

 early history of mankind depends mainly on the answering of 

 the following question, which runs through all the present 

 essays, and binds them together as various *cases of a single 

 problem. 



When similar arts, customs, or legends are found in several 

 distant regions, among peoples not known to be of the same 

 stock, how is this similarity to be accounted for? Sometimes 

 it may be ascribed to the like working of men's minds under 

 like conditions, and sometimes it is a proof of blood relationship 

 or of intercourse, direct or indirect, between the races among 

 whom it is found. In the one case it has no historical value 

 whatever, while in the other it has this value in a high degree, 

 and the ever-recurring problem is how to distinguish between 

 the two. An example on each side may serve to bring the 

 matter into a clearer light. 



The general prevalence of a belief in the continuance of the 

 soul's existence after death, does not prove that all mankind 

 have inherited such a belief from a common source. It may 

 have been so, but the historical argument is made valueless 

 by the fact that certain natural phenomena may have sug- 

 gested to the mind of man, while in a certain stage of develop- 

 ment, the idea of a future state, and this not once only, but 

 again and again in different regions and at different times. 

 These phenomena may prove nothing of the kind to us, but 

 that is not the question. The reasoning of the savage is not 

 to be judged by the rules which belong to a higher education ; 

 and what the ethnologist requires in such a case, is not to 

 know what the facts prove to his own mind, but what inference 

 the very differently trained mind of the savage may draw from 

 them. 



The belief that man has a soul capable of existing apart from 

 the body it belongs to, and continuing to live, for a time at 

 least, after that body is dead and buried, fits perfectly in such 

 a mind with the fact that the shadowy forms of men and women 



