GROWTH AND DECLINE OF CULTURE. 183 



his road to the great Salt Lake^ that bones and skulls of cattle 

 were lying scattered about/ though travellers are often put to 

 great straits for fuel. The Gauchos of South America know 

 better, for when they kill a beast on a journey, they use the 

 bones as fuel to cook the flesh,^ as the Scythians did in the 

 time of Herodotus ; Hving in a country wanting wood, they 

 made a fire of the bones of the beasts sacrificed, and boiled the 

 flesh over it in a kettle, or if that were not forthcoming, in the 

 paunch of the animal itself, "and thus the ox boils himself, 

 and the other victims each the like."^ 



It sometimes happens that degeneration is caused by con- 

 quest, when the conquering race is in anything at a lower level 

 than the conquered. There is one art whose history gives some 

 extraordinary cases of this kind of decline, the art of irrigation 

 by watercourses. Within a few years one people, the Spaniards, 

 conquered two nations, the Moors and Ifie Peruvians, who were 

 skilful irrigators, and had constructed great works to bring 

 water from a distance to fertilize the land. These works were 

 for the most part allowed to go to rack and ruin, and in Peru, 

 as in Andalusia, great tracts of land which had been fruitful 

 gardens fell back into parched deserts ; while in Mexico the 

 rains of the great native aqueduct of Tetzcotzinco tell the same 

 tale. Here, as in the irrigation of British India under our own 

 rule, the results of higher culture in the conquered race de- 

 clined in the face of a lower culture of the conquerors, but the 

 sequel is still more curious. The Spaniards in America became 

 themselves great builders of watercourses, and their works of 

 this kind in Mexico are very extensive, and of great benefit to 

 the drier regions where they have been constructed. But when 

 a portion of territory that had been under Spanish rule was 

 transferred to the United States, what the Spaniards had done 

 to the irrigating works of the Moors and Peruvians, the new 

 settlers did to theirs. In Froebel's time they were letting the 

 old works go to ruin ; thus history repeats itself.* 



The disappearance of savage arts in presence of a higher 



' Burton, ' City of the Saints,' p. 60. " Darwin, Journal, p. 194. 



3 Herod., iv. 61. See Ezekiel xxiv. 5 in LXX. Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. p. 229 

 (bones rubbed with fat burnt by Esquimaux). ■* Tylor, ' Mexico,' pp. 157-161, 



