162 GROWTH AND DECLINE OP CULTURE, 



win's about tlie Fuegians, wWcli runs thus : ^ — " Their skill in 

 some respects may be compared to the instinct of animals ; for 

 it is not improved by experience : the canoBj their most inge- 

 nious work, poor as it iSj has remained the same^ for the last 

 two hundred and fifty years." But it must be noticed^ that 

 neither is the wretched hand-to-mouth life of the Fuegians 

 favourable to progress^ nor can a bark canoe ten feet long, 

 holding four or five grown persons, beside childi'en, dogs, 

 implements, and weapons, and in which a fire can be kept 

 burning on a hearth in the rough sea off Tierra del Fuego, 

 be without tolerable sea-going qualities. As to workmanship, 

 the modern Fuegian bark canoes are intermediate between the 

 very rude ones of the Australian coast and the highly finished 

 ones of North America, and it does not appear that their 

 build may not be considerably better (or worse) than at the 

 time of the visit of Sarmiento de Gamboa, in the sixteenth 

 century. But the most remarkable thing in the whole matter, 

 is the fact that the Fuegians should have had canoes at all, 

 while coast-tribes across the straits made shift with rafts. 

 This was of course a fact familiar to Mr. Darwin, and in the 

 very next sentence after that quoted above, he actually goes 

 on to ascribe to the Fuegian race the invention of their art of 

 boat-building. ''Whilst beholding these savages, one asks, 

 whence have they come ? What could have tempted, or what 

 change compelled a tribe of men to leave the fine regions of the 

 northj to travel down the Cordillera or backbone of America, 

 to invent and build canoes, and then to enter on one of the 

 most inhospitable countries within the limits of the globe ? " 

 Of this part of Mr. Darwin's remarks, however, Archbishop 

 Whately did not think it necessary to take notice. 



I have brought forward these statements of his, not for the 

 purpose of discussing his particular views, but of illustrating 

 the unsound relation in which theory has so often been placed 

 to fact. But far more profitable work than the criticism and 

 construction of speculative theories, may be done by collecting 

 facts or groups of facts leading to direct inferences. When 



1 Fitz Eoy and Darwin, Narrative of Yoyage of 'Adventure' and 'Beagle; ' 

 London, 1839, vol. iii. p. 236. See vol. i. p. 137. 



