GROWTH AND DECLINE OP CULTURE. 177 



down to it, so that it can fly but slowly, and lie can easily 

 follow it home to the hive, and get the honey. ^ The North 

 American bee-hunters do not appear to know this contrivance. 

 Again, there is the curious art of changing the colour of a live 

 macaw's feathers from blue or green to brilliant orange or 

 yellow, by plucking them and rubbing some liquid into the 

 skin (it is said the milky secretion from a small frog or toad), 

 which causes the new feathers to grow with a changed colour.^ 

 This is done in South America, but, so far as I know, not else- 

 where ; and it seems reasonable to suppose that it was invented 

 there. 



The pellet-bow, which is a bow strung with a broad strap, or 

 with a double string and net, and has been found in use for 

 shooting clay-pellets or stones at small game, and even as a 

 weapon in war, is a modification of the bow, used in South 

 America but perhaps not elsewhere.^ And the natives of the 

 Malayan peninsula have very likely a monopoly of the device 

 of perforating growing bamboos, so as to convert them into 

 living yEolian flutes.* 



When an art is practised upon some material which belongs 

 exclusively, or in a large degree, to the place where the art is 

 found, the probability that it was invented on the spot becomes 

 almost a certainty. No one would dispute the claim of the 

 Peruvians or Chilians to have discovered the use, for manure, 

 of the huanu, or, as we call it, " guano,'' which their excep- 

 tionally rainless climate has allowed to accumulate on their 

 coasts, nor the claim of the dwellers in the hot regions near 

 the Gulf of Mexico to have found out how to make their 

 chocollatl from a native plant. 



On the other hand, when tribes are found living among the 

 very materials which are turned to account by simple arts else- 

 where, and yet are ignorant of those arts, we have good ethno- 

 logical evidence as to their condition when they first settled in 



' Lang, p. 328. Backhouse, Austr., p. 380. 



2 Wallace, ' Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro ;' London, 1853, p. 294. 

 De la Condamine, in Pinkerton, vol. xiv. p. 248. 



•' DobrizhoflPer, vol. ii. p. 360. Klemm, C. Or., vol. ii. p. 17. Soulhej, vol. ii. 

 p. 369 ; vol. iii. p. 863. ■• Temient, ' Ceylon,' vol. i. p. 88. 



N 



