CONCLUDING REMAEKS. 365 



state. The chapter on " Images and Names/' which explains 

 the arts of Magic as the effects of an early mental condition 

 petrified into a series of mystic observances carried up into the 

 midst of a higher culture, is indeed in the strongest opposition 

 to the view that these superstitious practices are mutilated 

 remnants of a higher system of belief which prevailed in former 

 times, and this latter view is one of the strong points of the 

 theory of degeneration. So far as may be judged from the 

 scanty and defective evidence which has as yet been brought 

 forward, I venture to think the most reasonable opinion to be 

 that the course of development of the lower civilization has 

 been on the whole in a forward direction, though interfered 

 with occasionally and locally by the results of degrading and 

 destroying influences. 



Granting the existence of this onward movement in the 

 lower levels of art and science, the question then arises, how any 

 particular piece of skill or knowledge has come into any parti- 

 cular place where it is found. Three ways are open, indepen- 

 dent invention, inheritance from ancestors in a distant region^ 

 transmission from one race to another ; but between these 

 three ways the choice is commonly a difficult one. Sometimes, 

 indeed, the first is evidently to be preferred. Thus, though the 

 floating gardens of Mexico and Cashmere are very similar de- 

 vices, it seems more likely that the Mexican cliinamija was in- 

 vented on the spot than that the idea of it was imported from 

 a distant region. Though the wattled cloth of the Swiss lake- 

 dwellings is so similar in principle to that of New Zealand, it 

 is much easier to suppose it the result of separate invention 

 than of historical connexion. Though both the Egyptians and 

 Chinese came upon the expedient of making the picture of an 

 object stand for the sound which was the name of that object, 

 there is no reason to doubt their having done so independently. 



But the more difficult it is to account for observed facts in 

 this way, and the more necessary it becomes to have recourse 

 to theories of inheritance or transmission to explain them, the 

 greater is their value in the eyes of the Ethnologist. Wherever 

 he can judge that the existence of similar phenomena in the 

 culture of distant peoples cannot be fairly accounted for, except 



