16 THE HUMAN KINGDOM. 



the steps of the human ladder, and let us see what we shall 

 find as we do so. 



Examples are not wanting of races placed so low, that 

 they have quite naturally appeared to resemble the ape tribe. 

 These people, much nearer than ourselves to a state of nature, 

 deserve on that account every attention on the part of the 

 anthropologist and the linguist, who may both discover, by 

 their means, problems otherwise difficult or impossible to be 

 solved. It is because we have not studied the psychological 

 characters of these races, that we have fallen into such strange 

 mistakes. What will become of all those superb theories 

 concerning this superior intelligence of man, so entirely in- 

 dependent and disengaged from the world, on which so 

 much praise is conferred ? What will become of the unity of 

 the human species, if we can prove that certain races are not a 

 whit more intelligent than certain animals, and have no more 

 idea of a moral world or of religion than they themselves 

 have ? 



The most commonly quoted example is that of the aborigines 

 of Australia. "They have always shown complete ignorance," 

 say both Lesson and Garnot,* " a sort of moral brutality. . . . 

 A kind of highly developed instinct for discovering the food 

 which is always difficult for them to obtain seems, among them, 

 to have taken the place of most of the moral faculties of man- 

 kind." If the English police did not watch very strictly, they 

 would set at defiance every day, at least in the towns of their 

 colonies, all the laws of public decency without any more 

 thought than the monkeys in a menagerie. 



In the account given of the American Expedition in 1838, 

 Mr. Hale writes that they almost possess the stupidity of the 

 brute, that they can only count up to four, and some tribes 

 only so far as three. " The power of reasoning," he says, 

 "seems but imperfectly developed among them: The argu- 

 ments used by the colonists to convince or persuade them 

 are often such as they would use towards children or persons 



* Memoire sur les Tasmaniens, sur les Alfourous, et sur les Australiens, in the 

 Annales des Sciences Naturelles, 1827, vol. x, p. 155. 



