The Evolution of Culture, and Other Essays

by Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers

To the left above, we see the mushroom-headed ‘waddy’, with its projecting ridge flattened, then curved; one side becomes more developed than the other, and this being thrown develops into the waddy boomerang, the ridge of the earlier forms being still represented by a mark on the flat head of the weapon; an intermediate link connects it with the true boomerang.

Many other examples might be given to illustrate the continuity which exists in the development of all savage weapons; but I only ask you to glance at the sequence shown in this diagram and the preceding ones in order to convince you of the truth of the statement which I made at the commencement of this discourse, that although, owing to the complexity of modern contrivances and the larger steps by which we mount the ladder of progress in the material arts, their continuity may be lost sight of, when we come to classify the arts of savages and prehistoric men, the term ‘growth’ is fully as applicable to them as to the development of the forms of speech, and that there are no grounds, upon the score of continuity, history, or the action of free will, to separate these studies generically as distinct classes of science.

But in dealing with evolution we have to speak not only of growth, but, as in all other natural sciences, of the principle of decay. By decay I do not mean the decay of the materials of the arts, but the decomposition of the mental ideas which produced them.

As complex ideas are built up of simple ones, so there is also a further process by which they become disintegrated, and the parts go to form parts of other ideas.

This decay in the arts corresponds to what is called phonetic decay in language; and in both cases it arises either from incapacity, the desire to save trouble, or the necessity of abbreviating when ideas originally evolved for one purpose come to form parts of other ideas to which they are merely accessory and subordinate, as in the well-known dialectic changes of speech. Every sound in language had originally a distinct meaning of its own; gradually these sounds or roots came to form parts of words in which the original meanings of the sounds were lost.

I will now endeavour to draw a parallel to this in the arts, by means of what may be termed realistic degeneration.

I will not say much as to the place of realism in culture. The archaeological world has lately been somewhat startled by the discovery of well-executed designs of elephants and other animals in the French caves in association with the rude stone implements of the palaeolithic age, and by the more recent discovery of Mariette Bey, that the earliest Egyptian sculptures of the third dynasty are the most truthful representations of the human form that are to be found in that country. I see nothing surprising in this, when we consider the power that is developed in many children of eight or nine years old of making drawings of animals and other objects, which, when allowance is made for the feeble hand of childhood, are often as truthful as those of the cave-period men, at a time when their minds have acquired but little power of reasoning or generalizing, or even of taking care of themselves; all which goes to prove that this power of imitation, which is a very different thing from ideal art, is one of the most early developed faculties of the mind of man.

When the power of imitation had once been developed, it would naturally be made use of as a means of intercommunication; thus the drawing of a stag would be made to convey information to people at a distance that there was a herd of deer in the neighbourhood to be hunted; and as the object of the drawing was no longer to depict truthfully the peculiarities of the beast, but merely to convey information, the amount of labour expended upon it would be the least that could be employed for the required purpose. All written characters have originated in this way; and no one now requires to be told how pictographic representations developed into hieroglyphic and subsequently into phonetic characters.

But realistic degeneration would equally take place in all cases in which pictorial representations came to be employed for other purposes than those for which they were originally designed, as in the case of ornamental designs.