220 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XL No. 275 



and an anthropological work on the Eskimo, both of which he left 

 unfinished. Besides this, he wrote a popular account of Eskimo 

 life, which it is hoped will be published at an early date. When 

 the first expeditions to the rescue of Greely were prepared, he 

 strongly advocated that a well-equipped expedition be sent out at 

 once. During this period he wrote his valuable contributions to the 

 history of the American polar expeditions. He died while on a 

 visit to his friends in Germany. His amiability will be remembered 

 by all his friends. His valuable contributions to science will make 

 scientists regret that he was not allowed to complete the numerous 

 works he had begun, which would have secured to him one of the 

 most prominent places among modern scientists. 



THE COURSE OF HUMAN PROGRESS.' 



The course of human events is not an eternal round. In the 

 wisdom of the ancients there are many proverbs to the effect that 

 that which is, has been before and will be again. So far as human 

 experience extends, unaided by reason, days and nights come and 

 go, winter follows summer, and summer follows winter, and all the 

 phenomena of nature seem to constitute an endless succession of 

 recurrent events. But there is a higher knowledge which observes 

 a progress by steps so minute that it was left to modern science to 

 discover it. In the history of humanity the changes which result in 

 progress are more readily perceived ; and the aphorism of the an- 

 cients, that " there is nothing new under the sun," is but a proverb 

 of ignorance. 



Every child is born destitute of things possessed in manhood 

 which distinguish him from the lower animals. Of all industries 

 he is artless, of all institutions he is lawless, of all languages he is 

 speechless, of all philosophies he is opinionless, of all reasoning he is 

 thoughtless ; but arts, institutions, languages, opinions, and menta- 

 tions he acquires as the years go by. In all of these respects the 

 new-born babe is hardly the peer of the new-born beast ; but, as 

 the years pass, ever and ever he exhibits his superiority in all of the 

 great classes of activities, until the distance by which he is sepa- 

 rated from infancy is so great that beseems to live in another realm. 

 These activities that separate the man from the babe are the hu- 

 manities. In like manner the human race has been segregated from 

 the tribes of beasts by the gradual acquisition of these humanities, 

 by the invention of arts, the establishment of institutions, the growth 

 of languages, the formation of opinions, and the evolution of rea- 

 son. 



The road by which man has travelled away from purely animal 

 life is very long ; but this long way has its landmarks, so that it 

 can be divided into parts. There are stages of human culture, 

 and they have been denominated savagery, barbarism, and civiliza- 

 tion. 



All the grand classes of human activity are inter-related in such 

 manner that one presupposes another, and no one can exist without 

 all of the others. Arts are impossible without institutions, lan- 

 guages, opinions, and reasoning ; and in like manner every one is 

 developed by aid of the others. If, then, all of the grand classes of 

 human activities are interdependent, any great change in one must 

 effect corresponding change in the others. The five classes of 

 activities must progress together. Art-stages must have corre- 

 sponding institutional, linguistic, philosophic, and psychic stages. 



Stages of progress common to all the five grand classes of human 

 activities may properly be denominated culture-stages, and such 

 culture-stages should be defined by characterizing all these activi- 

 ties in each stage. This I shall attempt to do, but in a brief way. 

 [The lecturer then described savagery with regard to its arts, institu- 

 tions, language, philosophy, and mind, and summed up his descrip- 

 tion in the following way.] 



The savage has invented rude arts by which he obtains food, 

 clothing, and shelter. He has invented a rude system of kinship 

 society, with descent in the female line. He has spoken language, 

 gesture-speech, and picture-writing, but is without hieroglyphic, 

 syllabic, or alphabetic writing. He has a philosophy which informs 

 conspicuous and important inanimate objects with spirit-life, and 

 which deifies the brute ; and a mind whose perceptions are so 



1 Lecture delivered May 5, by Major J. W. Powell, in the course of free lectures 

 under the auspices of the Philosophical, Biological, and Anthropological Societies of 

 Washington. 



slightly developed that conventional characters do not convey ideas, 

 and his arithmetic is yet counting. Such, in general, are the char- 

 acteristics of all savage people that have been carefully studied by, 

 anthropologists. 



How was this savagery transformed into barbarism, and what is 

 that barbarism ? [The lecturer began his answer to these ques- 

 tions by considering the change in arts.] There are two arts, inti- 

 mately associated, the invention of which causes a radical change 

 in all the departments of humanity ; viz., agriculture and the do- 

 mestication of animals. Agriculture began in savagery. Many 

 savage tribes cultivate little patches of ground, and thereby pro- 

 vide themselves with a part of their subsistence. This petty agri- 

 culture does not of itself result in any radical change ; but when the 

 art has developed to such an extent that the people obtain their chief 

 subsistence therefrom, and especially when it is connected to the 

 domestication of animals, so that these are reared for food and used 

 as beasts of burden, the change for which we seek is wrought. It 

 seems that extensive agriculture was first practised in arid lands 

 by means of artificial irrigation. In more humid lands the supply 

 is more abundant and the incentive to agriculture is less. On the 

 other hand, agriculture is more difficult in humid lands than in arid 

 lands. The savage is provided with rude tools, and with them he 

 can more easily train water upon desert soils than he can repress 

 the growth of valueless plants as they compete for life with those 

 which furnish food. The desert soil has no sod to be destroyed, no 

 cJiapaj-ral to be eradicated, no trees to be cut down with their great 

 stumps to be extracted from the earth. The soil is ready for the seed. 

 Throw upon that soil a handful of seed, and then sprinkle it with a 

 few calabashes of water once or twice through the season, and the 

 crop is raised ; or train upon a larger garden-patch the water of a 

 stream, and let it flood the surface once or twice a year, and a har- 

 vest may be reaped. 



Petty agriculture, such as I have described as belonging properly 

 to savagery, has been widely practised in the four quarters of the 

 globe among savage people, quite as much in humid as in arid re- 

 gions ; but the art seems not to have indigenously extended beyond 

 that stage in any but arid regions. The earliest real agriculture 

 known to man was in the Valley of the Nile, an almost rainless land, 

 but the floods of the Nile were used to fertilize the soil ; again, in 

 the land of Babylon, along the Tigris and the Euphrates, extensive 

 agriculture grew up, but it was dependent upon artificial irrigation ; 

 still farther to the south-east, in the Punjab, another system of in- 

 digenous agriculture was developed by utilizing the waters of the 

 five great rivers ; still farther to the east an indigenous agriculture 

 was developed on an extensive scale, all dependent upon artificial 

 irrigation, as the Chinese use the waters of the Hoang-ho and the 

 Yang-tse-kiang ; in South America the first system of agriculture 

 was developed in Peru, all dependent upon artificial irrigation ; and, 

 finally, to the north of the Isthmus of Panama, in Central America 

 and Mexico, agricultural art was highly developed, and here also 

 they were dependent upon artificial irrigation. From these six ex- 

 amples of high agricultural art, all the agriculture of the world 

 has been developed ; from these centres it has spread. The petty 

 agriculture of humid lands never went beyond the utilization of 

 little patches of ground in the forest glades, until it was borrowed 

 in a higher state from arid lands. Everywhere with the develop- 

 ment of agriculture in the arid lands the art of domesticating ani- 

 mals was associated, and everywhere such animals were raised for 

 food, and to a large extent they were used as beasts of burden. 



[The lecturer, in continuation, showed how changes in the arts 

 wrought changes in institutions, changes in language, changes in 

 philosophy, and psychic changes during the transition period from 

 savagery to barbarism, and summed up this portion of his discourse 

 as follows.] 



From the foregoing brief characterization it will be seen that 

 barbaric culture implies a somewhat high state of agriculture and 

 the domestication of animals, one or both ; it implies that patriarchal 

 institutions have been organized, that descent is in the male line, 

 that ranks in society have been established, and that new laws 

 regulating property have been enacted ; it implies that the people 

 use hieroglyphs ; it implies that domestic worship is ancestral wor- 

 ship, that tribal worship is based on physitheism, and that the phe- 

 nomena of the universe are attributed to nature-gods ; and, finally. 



