CONCLUDING RKMARKS. 863 



tion of any uncivilized race, a single one to which something 

 closely analogous may not be found elsewhere among some 

 other race, unlike the first in physical characters, and living 

 thousands of miles off. It is taking a somewhat extreme case 

 to put the Australians to such a test, for they are perhaps the 

 most peculiar of the lower vai-ieties of Man, yet among the 

 arts, beliefs, and customs, found among their tribes, there are 

 comparatively few that cannot be matched elsewhere. They 

 raise scars on their bodies like African tribes ; they circumcise 

 like the Jews and Arabs ; they bar marriage in the female line 

 like the Iroquois ; they drop out of their language the names of 

 plants and animals which have been used as the personal names 

 of dead men, and make new words to serve instead, like the 

 Abipones of South America ; they bewitch their enemies with 

 locks of hail*, and pretend to cure the sick by sucking out 

 stones through their skin, as is done in so many other regions. 

 It is true that among their weapons they have one of very 

 marked, perhaps even specific peculiarity, the boomerang, but 

 the rest of their armoury, the spear, tlie spear-thrower, the 

 club, the throwing-cudgel, are but varieties of instruments 

 common elsewhere, and the same is true of their fire-drill, their 

 stone hatchet, their nets and baskets, their bark canoes and 

 rafts. And while among the Australians there are only a very 

 few exceptions to modify the general rule that whatever is 

 found in one place in the woi*ld may be matched more or less 

 closely elsewhere, piecemeal or as a whole, the proportion of 

 such exceptions is smaller, and consequently the uniformity of 

 development more strikingly marked, among most of the other 

 races of the Avorld who have not risen above the loWer levels of 

 culture. 



In the next place, the collections of facts relating to various 

 useful arts seem to justify the opinion that, in such practical 

 matters at least, the history of mankind has been on the whole 

 a history of progress. Over almost the whole world are found 

 traces of the former use of stone implements, now superseded 

 by metal ; rude and laborious means of making fire have been 

 supplanted by easier and better processes ; over large regions 

 of the earth the art of boiling in earthen or metal pots over the 



