INTRODUCTION 
9 
capacity of physical endurance, and a genial and cheerful 
disposition, which won him the confidence and esteem of the 
shy savages, who treated him as one of themselves, recog¬ 
nized him as a full member of the tribe, and revealed to him 
secrets which they would probably have concealed from a 
less sympathetic inquirer. Hence in all his wanderings, 
though they brought him into contact with natives of whom 
some had never seen a European before, while others had 
been engaged in bloody affrays with white men, his relations 
with the aborigines were invariably peaceful and friendly; 
he never had to resort to his weapons in self-defence. 
The openness of a mind unwarped by preconceived 
notions and foregone conclusions, which is one of Spencer’s 
foremost characteristics, is conspicuous in all his writings 
and contributes largely to their scientific value. For the 
most part he was content to record in clear and simple 
language the facts which he had personally observed or 
ascertained directly from his native informants; he did not 
attempt to theorize upon them or to institute comparisons 
between them and those of other peoples in other parts of the 
world. All such theories and comparisons he regularly and 
rightly left to the comparative ethnologist, whose function is 
at once different from and complementary to that of the 
descriptive ethnologist. 
Perhaps the only subject on which Spencer, departing 
for once from his habitual reserve, indulged in speculation 
on origins, was that of the Classificatory System of Relation¬ 
ship. This curious system, which may perhaps be described 
as the hall-mark of savagery, since it appears to be universally 
prevalent among savage tribes and universally absent among 
civilized peoples, arranges all the members of a community 
in classes or groups on the basis of their social rather than 
consanguineous relations to each other. Spencer found it in 
full vogue among the Arunta and the other Australian tribes 
3743 c 
