182 GROWTH AND DECLINE OF CULTURE. 



its successor^ is a poor village of two thousand souls, a league 

 or so away.^ 



Among tlie lower races, degeneration is seen to take place as 

 a result of war, of oppression by other tribes, of expulsion into 

 less favourable situations, and of various other causes. But 

 arts which belong to the daily life of the man or the family, 

 and cannot be entirely suppressed by violent interference, do 

 not readily disappear unless superseded by some better contri- 

 vance, or made unnecessary or very difficult by a change of 

 life and manners. When the use of metals, of pottery, of the 

 flint and steel, of higher tools and weapons, once fairly esta- 

 bHshes itself, a falling back appears to be uncommon. The 

 Metal Age does not degenerate into the Stone Age except 

 under very peculiar circumstances. The history of a higher 

 weapon is generally that it supplants those that are less ser- 

 viceable, to be itself supplanted by something better. We 

 read of the Indian orator who exhorted his brethren to cast 

 away the flint and steel of the white man, and to return to the 

 fire-sticks of their ancestors, but such things are rather talked 

 of than done. 



Cases of savage arts being superseded by a higher state of 

 civilization are common enough. An African guide, or an 

 Australian, will know a man by his footmark, while we hardly 

 know what a footmark is like ; at least, nine Englishmen out 

 of ten of the shoe-weariug classes will not know that the foot- 

 prints in the Mexican picture- writings, as copied in Fig. 16, 



Fig. 16. 



are true to nature, till they have looked at the print of a wet 



foot on a board or a flagstone. Captain Burton remarked, on 



' Brasseur, ' Popol Vuh ;' pp. 315-7. See also Diego de Landa, Eel. 



