862 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 



curious fabrics of tied bundles of fibre, tbe similar step tlius 

 made in different times and places tends to prove tbe similarity 

 of the minds that made it. Moreover, to take a somewhat 

 weaker line of argument, the uniformity with which like stages 

 in the development of art and science are found among the 

 most unlike races, may be adduced as evidence on the same 

 side, in spite of the constant difficulty in deciding whether any 

 particular development is due to independent invention, or to 

 transmission from some other people to those among whom it 

 is found. For if the similar thing has been produced in two 

 places by independent invention, then, as has just been said, it 

 is direct evidence of similarity of mind. And on the other 

 hand, if it was carried from the one place to the other, or from 

 a third to both, by mere transmission from people to people, 

 then the smallness of the change it has suffered in transplant- 

 ing is still evidence of the like nature of the soil wherever it 

 is found. 



Considered both from this and other points of view, this uni- 

 form development of the lower civilization is a matter of gn-eat 

 interest. The state of things w^hich is found is not indeed that 

 one race does or knows exactly what another race does or 

 knows, but that similar stages of development recur in different 

 times and places. There is reason to suppose that our ances- 

 tors in remote times made fire with a machine much like that 

 of the modern Esquimaux, and at a far later date they used the 

 bow and arrow, as so many savage tribes do still. The fore- 

 going chapters treating of the history of some early arts, of the 

 practice of sorcerj", of curious customs and superstitions, are 

 indeed full of instances of the recurrence of like phenomena in 

 the remotest regions of the world. We might reasonably ex- 

 pect that men of like minds, when placed under widely difie- 

 rent circumstances of country, climate, vegetable and animal 

 life, and so forth, should develope very various phenomena of 

 civilization, and we even know by evidence that they actually 

 do so j but nevertheless it strikingly illustrates the extent cf 

 m.mtal uniformity among mankind to notice that it is really 

 difficult to find, among a list of twenty items of art or know- 

 ledge, custom or superstition, taken at random from a descrip- 



