.GROWTH AND DECLINE OF CULTURE. 173> 



taken place^ are not to be lightly used as historical evidence of 

 connexion. It is safest to ascribe them to independent inven- 

 tion, unless the coincidence passes the limits of ordinary pro- 

 bability. Ancient as the art of putting in false teeth is in the 

 Old World, it would scarcely be thought to affect the originality 

 of the same practice in Quito, where a skeleton has been found 

 with false teeth secured to the cheek-bone by a gold wire/ nor 

 does the discovery in Egypt of mummies with teeth stopped 

 with gold, appear to have any historical connexion with the 

 same contrivance among ourselves.^ Thus, too, the Austra- 

 lians were in the habit of cooking fish and pieces of meat in hot 

 sand, each tied up in a sheet of bark, and this is called yudarn 

 rfoo^oo}^, or "tying-up cooking,"^ but it does not follow that 

 they had learnt from Europe the art of dressing fish en 2>opil- 

 lotte. 



Perhaps the occurrence of that very civilized instrument, the 

 fork for eating meat with, in the Fiji Islands, is to be ac- 

 counted for by considering it to have been independently in- 

 vented there. The Greeks and Eomans do not appear to have 

 used forks in eating, and they are said not to have been intro- 

 duced in England from the South of Europe, till the beginning 

 of the seventeenth century.* At any rate, Hakluyt thus trans- 

 lates, in 1598, a remark made by Galeotto Perera, concerning 

 the use of chopsticks in China ; — " they feede with two sticks, 

 refraining from touching their meate with their hands, even as 

 we do with forkes," but he finds it necessary to put a note in 

 the margin, "We, that is the Italians and Spaniards.^^^ How 

 long forks had been used in the South of Europe, and where 

 they originally came from, does not seem clear, but there is a 

 remark to the purpose in William of Euysbruck's description 

 of the manners of the Tatars, through whose country he tra- 

 velled about 1253. " They cut up (the meat) into little bits in a 

 dish with salt and water, for they make no other sauce, and then 



' Bollaert, Ees. in New Granada, etc. ; London, 1860, p. 83. 

 " Wilkinson, Pop. Ace, vol. ii. p. 350. ^ Grey, Journals, vol. ii. p. 276. 

 ■• Wright, ' Domestic Manners,' p. 457. 



* Hakluyt, ' The Principal Navigations, Voyages,' etc. ; London, 1598, vol. ii. 

 part ii. p. 68. ' 



