Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation / A Study in Anthropology. A Paper Read at the Cincinnati Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in August, 1881, under the Title of "A Lawgiver of the Stone Age."

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A Study in Anthropology
A Paper Read at the Cincinnati Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in August, 1881, under the Title of A Lawgiver of the Stone Age.
Salem, Mass.: Printed at the Salem Press. 1881.
A LAWGIVER OF THE STONE AGE. By HORATIO HALE, of Clinton, Ontario, Canada.
What was the intellectual capacity of man when he made his first appearance upon the earth? Or, to speak with more scientific precision (as the question relates to material evidences), what were the mental powers of the people who fashioned the earliest stone implements, which are admitted to be the oldest remaining traces of our kind? As these people were low in the arts of life, were they also low in natural capacity? This is certainly one of the most important questions which the science of anthropology has yet to answer. Of late years the prevalent disposition has apparently been to answer it in the affirmative. Primitive man, we are to believe, had a feeble and narrow intellect, which in the progress of civilization has been gradually strengthened and enlarged. This conclusion is supposed to be in accordance with the development theory; and the distinguished author of that theory has seemed to favor this view. Yet, in fact, the development theory has nothing to do with the question. If we suppose that the existing and—so far as we know—the only species of man appeared upon the earth with the physical conformation and mental capacity which he retains at this day, we make merely the same supposition with regard to him that we make with regard to every other existing species of animal. How it was that this species came to exist is another question altogether.