CONCLUDING REMARKS. 369 



tribes of modern times. It is useful to work back to tliis 

 point, at least as a temporary resting-place in tlie argument, 

 seeing that a state of tilings really known to exist is generally 

 more convenient to reason upon than a purely theoretical one. 

 But if we may judge that the present condition of savage tribes 

 is the complex result of not only a long but an eventful history, 

 in which development of culture may have been more or less 

 interfered with by degradation caused by war, disease, oppres- 

 sion, and other mishaps, it does not seem likely that any tribe 

 known to modern observers should be anything like a fair 

 representative of primary conditions. Still, positive evidence 

 of anything lower than the known state of savages is scarce 

 in the extreme. If indeed we may feel certain that the men 

 whose tools and weapons are found in the Drift Beds, in the 

 Bone Caves, and in the Shell-Heaps of Denmark, were not in 

 the habit of grinding the edges of any of their stone imple- 

 ments, such a state of things may be instanced as evidence of 

 a condition of one of the useful arts lying below anything that 

 has been observed among the lowest savage tribes. Even if it 

 should be established that a few isolated specimens of ground 

 implements occur among the thousands of unground ones be- 

 longing to this lowest division of the Stone Age, its general 

 character, as consisting almost exclusively of unground imple- 

 ments, would remain nearly as distinct as ever from anything 

 recorded among tribes known to travellers or historians. 



To turn to a very different department of culture, some of 

 the facts belonging to the history of custom and superstition 

 may for the last time be referred to, as perhaps having their 

 common root in a mental condition underlying anything to be 

 met with now. The remarkable custom of the Gouvade, which 

 in several distant regions of the world appears a mere dark 

 superstitious mystery, finds an intelligible explanation among 

 the South American tribes who consciously believe that dif- 

 ferent persons are not necessarily separate beings, as we take 

 them to be, but that there is such a physical connexion between 

 father and son, that the diet of the one aff'ects the health of 

 the other. The early fusion of objective and subjective rela- 

 tions in the mind, of the eflFects of which in superstitious prac- 



2 B 



