306 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 



by supposing that there has been a connexion by blood or by 

 intercourse between them, then he has before him evidence 

 bearing upon the history of civihzation and on the history of 

 mankind, evidence which shows that such movements as have 

 introduced guns, axes, books, into America in historic times, 

 have also taken place in unhistoric times among tribes whose 

 ancestors have left them no chronicles of past ages. Thus the 

 appearing of the Ma,lay smelting-furnace in Madagascar, and 

 of the outrigger canoe in East Australia and the Andaman Is- 

 lands, may be appealed to as evidence of historical connexion. 

 And it is possible that the Ethnographer may some day feel 

 himself justified in giving to this kind of argument a far wider 

 range, that he may clarm, for instance, for the bow and arrow 

 a common origin wherever it is found, that is, over the whole 

 world with perhaps no exception but part of Polynesia, and 

 part or the whole of Australia. So, noticing that the distri- 

 bution of the potter's art in North America is not sporadic, as 

 if a tribe here and a tribe there had wanted it and invented 

 it, but that it rises northwards in a compact field from Mexico 

 among the tribes East of the Rocky Mountains, he may 

 argue that it spread from a single source, and is at once a re- 

 sult and a proof of the transmission of civilization. Indeed, it 

 seems as though the recurrence of similar g-roups in the inven- 

 tories of instruments and works of the lower races, so remark- 

 able both in the presence of like things and the comparative 

 absence of unlike ones, might come to supply, in a more ad- 

 vanced state of Ethnography, the materials for an indefinite 

 series of arguments bearing on the early history of man. 



It is not to be denied, however, that there is usually a large 

 element of uncertainty in inferences of this kind taken alone, 

 and it is only in special cases that summary generalizations 

 from such evidence can as yet be admitted. Indeed, its proper 

 place is rather as accompanying the argumeiat from language, 

 mythology, and customs, than as standing by itself. Thus the 

 appearance, just referred to, of the Malay blast-furnace in 

 Madagascar has to be viewed in connexion with the afiinity in 

 language between Madagascar and the islands of the Eastern 

 Archipelago. Putting the two things togethei", we may assume 



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