186 GROWTH AND DECLINE OF CULTURE. 



as recording decline. The sculptures and temples of Central 

 America are the work of the ancestors of the present Indians, 

 though if history, tradition, and transitional work had all 

 perished, it would hardly be thought so. The gardening of the 

 Bakalahari, if the account of their origin is to be received, is a 

 proof, not of an art gained, but of a higher level of civiH^iation 

 for the most part lost. 



It thus appears that, in the abstract, when there is found 

 among a low tribe an art or a piece of knowledge which seems 

 above their average level, three ways are open by which its 

 occurrence may be explained. It may have been invented at 

 home, it may have been imported from abroad, or it may be a 

 relic of a higher condition which has mostly suffered degrada- 

 tion, like the column of earth which the excavator leaves to 

 measure the depth of the ground he has cleared away. 



Ethnologists have sometimes taken arts which appeared to 

 them too advanced to fit with the general condition of their 

 possessors, and have treated them as belonging to this latter 

 class. But where such arguments have had no aid from direct 

 history, but have gone on mere inspection of the arts of the 

 lower races, aU that I can caU to mind, at least, seem open to 

 grave exception. 



Thus the boomerang has been adduced as proof that the 

 Australians were once in a far higher state of civilization.^ It 

 is true that the author who argued thus confounded the boome- 

 rang with the throwing-cudgel, or, as a Hampshire man would 

 call it, the squoyle, of the Egyptian fowler, so that he had at least 

 an imaginary high civilization in view, of which the boomerang 

 was an element. But, as has been mentioned, intermediate 

 forms between the boomerang and the war-club or pick, are 

 known in Australia, a state of things which fits rather with 

 growth than with degeneration.^ 



In South America, Humboldt was so struck Avith the cy- 

 linders of very hard stone, perforated and sculptured into the 

 forms of animals and fruits, that he founded upon them the 

 argument that they were rehcs of an ancient civilization from 



* W. Cooke Taylor, The Nat. Hist, of Society ; London, 1840, vol. i. p. 205. 

 2 See Eyre, vol. ii. p. 308 ; Klemm, C. G., vol. i. p. 316, pi. vii. 



