205 



among those settled populations, that had in former ages migrated from 

 the East. Indeed, civilization and savagery appear in contemporary con- 

 trast in every era and in every clime, and the phenomenon of a decivi- 

 lized people, dwarfed alike in mind and body, is not the peculiar cha- 

 racteristic of any one country or dispensation. In Europe, although the 

 Pariah tribes have disappeared, except perhaps in the instance of the 

 Cagots of the Pyrenees, yet their former existence in great numbers is 

 clearly inferred from the vast quantities of stone implements and other 

 rude remains strewn upon the diluvial gravels, or exhumed from ancient 

 shell heaps, pile dwellings, and ossiferous caves, or swallow holes ; and 

 elsewhere throughout the world, especially among the low castes and 

 hill tribes of India, iu the central forests and sundry remote islands of 

 the Pacific Archipelagos, in the Euegian peninsula, and in the interior 

 of Africa, where Strabo* found the descendants of those cave dwellers 

 described by Herodotus 500 years before, remnants of degenerate and 

 outcast races survive to this day ; and traditional myths of their 

 archaic derival and primitive social condition are extant in the litera- 

 ture of the more powerful immigrant tribes, who drove them from their 

 aboriginal seats into forests and solitary places ; but among the lapsed 

 races themselves not a trace of history or tradition has been discovered, 

 on which to base even a proximate conjecture of their origin in circum- 

 stance or in time. 



In Australia at the present period we observe on a continental scale 

 the contemporaneity of an intruded civilization with the phenomena of 

 what archaeologists term the Stone era ; nevertheless the latter possesses 

 no chronological significance whatever ; and scientific theorists may well 

 pause and ponder, ere they construct an imaginaiy series of gradational 

 progress from an un chronicled antiquity, when they contemplate the 

 myriads of these Papuan savages, with flint weapons and prognathous 

 aspect, in contact with an unparticipated civilization, uncheered by the 

 presence and unimpressed by the example (save as to debasing influences) 

 of the superior race ; and these contrasted conditions, too, exhibited in "as- 

 sociation with an indigenous Elora and Eauna, characteristic of an era 

 indefinitely withdrawn in the succession of geologic time. In absence 

 of suflicient proof of extreme antiquity, non-historic or unhistoric would 

 be a more appropriate term for the Cave-men and Lake-dwellers than pre- 

 historic, in reference to the question of chronology. — Mystery ever at- 

 taches to the unknown; and where the darkness of oblivion rests upon 

 the pristine homes and habits of a vanished people, imagination busily 

 fashions into long periods the unrecorded past. It may also be observed, 

 that this negation of the historic elements does not necessarily imply a 

 state of savagery. "We infer the civilization of the Aztecs and Etruscans 

 respectively from elaborate sculptures and mortuary memorials, or domes- 

 tic utensils of elegant design ; 3-et these, like the fossil organisms of the 

 rocks, supply no key of historic interpretation, and the inscriptions are 



* 1. i. and xvi. 



H. I. A. PEOC. VOL. IX. 



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