The Evolution of Culture, and Other Essays

by Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers

Plate VI.

Throughout the entire continent of Australia the weapons and implements are alike, and of the simplest form, and the people are of the lowest grade. The spear, the waddy, and the boomerang, with some stone hatchets, are their only weapons; but amongst these it has been noticed that, like the implements of the drift, there are minute differences, scarcely apparent to Europeans, but which enable a native to determine at a glance to what tribe a weapon belongs.[15] This, whilst it proves a tendency to vary their forms, shows at the same time either an incapacity, or, what answers the same purpose, a retarding power or prejudice, which prevents their effecting more than the smallest appreciable degree of change. In the island of Tahiti, Captain Cook was unable to make the natives (a superior race to the Australians) appreciate the uses of metal, until he had caused his armourer to construct an iron adze (Plate VI, fig. 1 a)[16] of precisely the same form as their own adzes of basalt (Fig. 1 b). After that, metal tools came into general use amongst them, though their old forms are in a great measure preserved to this day. When, during the American War, the English endeavoured to utilize the Indians by arming them, they were compelled to construct for them tomahawks after their own pattern, having a pipe in the handle (Fig. 2). When the Purus Indians of South America receive a knife from Europeans they break off the handle, and fashion the knife according to their own ideas, placing the blade between two pieces of wood, and binding it round tight with a sinew.[17] The natives of Samoa now use iron adzes, constructed after the exact pattern of their ancient stone ones.[18] The Fiji Islanders, though they have now the means of obtaining good blades and chisels from Sheffield, and axes from America, prefer plane irons to any other form of implement, because they are able to fix them by lashing them on to their handles in the same fashion as the ancient stone adzes of their own manufacture, which they resemble.[19] The Andaman Islanders use the European metal that falls into their hands, only to grind it down into spear- and arrow-heads of the same form as their stone ones. The same applies to the whole of the Aborigines of North and South America, which have stood by, for nearly three centuries, passive spectators of the arts of Europeans, without attempting to copy them. Crawfurd, in his History of the Indian Archipelago,[20] comments on the obstinate adherence of the Javanese to ancient customs, in accounting for the kris having been retained by them long after the causes which produced that peculiar weapon had ceased to operate. Tylor, in his account of the Anahuac, observes upon the preservation of old types amongst the present inhabitants of Mexico, which have remained almost unchanged from generation to generation, enabling the historian to distinguish clearly those which are of Aztec from those which are of Spanish origin.[21] Herodotus describes the spears carried by the Ethiopians in the army of Xerxes as being armed with the sharpened horn of the antelope.[22] Consul Petherick found still in use by the Djibba negroes, more than two thousand years after, these identical spears, armed with the straightened and sharpened horn of the antelope, and their other weapons also resembled in character those described by Herodotus, although they had passed from the stone weapons then used, into an age of metal.[23] The Scythian bow (Plate VI, fig. 3) is the bow still used by the whole of the Tartar races (Fig. 4). The celt of the Tartar, and the celt and sword of the Negro (Fig. 5) are still the celt and sword of the European bronze period (Fig. 6), and this resemblance is not confined to the general outline of the weapons, but extends to the style and patterns of ornamentation. The same identity of form exists between the ‘manillas’ (Fig. 7) used as a medium of exchange in the Eboe country of West Africa and the so-called penannular rings or ring money (Fig. 8) of gold and bronze which are found in Ireland, and which, with some modifications, belong also to Germany and the Swiss Lakes. The corrugated iron blade of the Kaffir assegai, a section of which is shown in Fig. 9, and which is used also in Central and West Africa, is identical with those found in the Saxon graves (Fig. 10), and is intended to give a spiral motion to these missiles. Chevalier Folard observes that the Gauls were remarkable for the tenacity with which they clung to their ancient customs, while the Romans, their conquerors, are mentioned by all historians as peculiar in their time for the facility with which they adopted the customs of others, and developed their own.[24] In modern Europe, the Gipsies have also been noticed as being distinguished from the Europeans in all the various localities in which they are found, for their remarkable adherence to especial arts, savouring of an extinct civilization. Amongst the Chinese and Hindoos, the conservatism which has caused them to remain for ages in nearly the same condition is too well known to require comment. It will, however, be remembered (in illustration of the fact that customs of minor importance often survive great political changes, and serve to keep up the continuity that would otherwise be broken), that after the Manchu Tartars had conquered and established themselves in the Chinese territory, they were nearly driven again from the country, on account of their forcing upon the subject people the custom of wearing pigtails, after the fashion of their conquerors; showing how difficult it is to ingraft, upon an alien race, customs that are not indigenous.

These, and many other notices of a similar character that are to be found in the pages of travel, establish it as a maxim, that the existing races, in their respective stages of progression, may be taken as the bona fide representatives of the races of antiquity; and, marvellous as it may appear to us in these days of rapid progress, their habits and arts, even to the form of their rudest weapons, have continued in many cases, with but slight modifications, unchanged throughout countless ages, and from periods long prior to the commencement of history. They thus afford us living illustrations of the social customs, the forms of government, laws, and warlike practices, which belonged to the ancient races from which they remotely sprang, whose implements, resembling, with but little difference, their own, are now found low down in the soil, in situations, and under circumstances in which, alone, they would convey but little evidence to the antiquary, but which, when the investigations of the antiquary are interpreted by those of the ethnologist, are teeming with interesting revelations respecting the past history of our race; and which, in the hands of the anthropologist, in whose science that of antiquity and ethnology are combined with physiology and geology, are no doubt destined to throw a flood of light, if not eventually, in a great measure, to clear up the mystery, which now hangs over everything connected with the origin of mankind.

That such a combination of the sciences should have been brought about so opportunely in our days, appears to me to be one of those many indications of an overruling power directing in the aggregate the minds of men, which must, at all times, strike even the most superficial observer of nature; for there can be little doubt that in a few years all the most barbarous races will have disappeared from the earth, or will have ceased to preserve their native arts.

The law which consigns to destruction all savage races when brought in contact with a civilization much higher than their own, is now operating with unrelenting fury in every part of the world. Of the aborigines of Tasmania, not a single individual remains; those of New Zealand are fast disappearing. The Australian savage dies out before the advancing European. North and South America, and the Polynesian Islands, all tell the same tale. Wherever the generous influences of Christianity have set foot, there they have been accompanied by the scourge. Innumerable and often unseen causes combine in effecting the same purpose; diseases which are but little felt by Europeans, act as plagues when introduced into uncivilized communities, and cause them to fall before their ravages, like wheat before the sickle; and the vices of civilization, taking a firmer hold of the savages than its virtues, aid and abet in the same work. The labours of the missionary, if they have produced no other benefit, have been useful in teaching us the great truth, that notwithstanding the philanthropic efforts of the intruding race, the law of nature must be vindicated. The savage is morally and mentally an unfit instrument for the spread of civilization, except when, like the higher mammalia, he is reduced to a state of slavery; his occupation is gone, and his place is required for an improved race. Allowing for the rapidly increasing ratio in which progress advances, it is not too much to assume, that in half a century from the present time, savage life will have ceased to have a single true representative on the face of the globe, and the evidence which it has been the means of handing down to our generation will have perished with it.

When we find that the condition of the aboriginal man must have been one of such complete inanity as to render him incapable of spontaneously initiating even the most rudimentary arts, it follows as a matter of course that in the earliest stages of his career, he must, like children of our own day, have been subject to compulsory instruction. And in looking to nature for the sources from which such early instruction must have been derived, we need not, I think, be long in coming to the conclusion, that the school of our first parent must be sought for in his struggles for mastery with the brute creation, and that, consequently, his first lessons must have been directed to attaining proficiency in the art of war.

Hence it follows that it is to the lower animals that we must look for the origin of all those branches of primitive warfare which it is the object of this lecture to trace out. Nor indeed shall we fail to find abundant evidence that there is hardly a single branch of human industry which may not reasonably be attributed to the same source.

The province of war extends downward through the animal kingdom, showing unmistakable evidence of its existence in forms, offensive and defensive, differing but little from those of the human era, through the unnumbered ages of the geological periods, long prior to man’s advent; proving, beyond the possibility of doubt, that from the remotest age in which we find evidence of organized beings, war has been ordained to an important function in the creative process.

Judging by results, which I apprehend is the only true method of investigating the phenomena of life, three primary instincts appear to have been implanted in nearly all the higher animals[25]: alimentiveness, for the sustenance of life; amativeness, for the propagation of species; and combativeness, for the protection of species, and the propagation by natural selection of the most energetic breeds; on which latter subject much important information has been given to the world by Mr. Darwin, in his celebrated work on the origin of species.

Much might, I believe, be said on the connexion which subsists between these functions, all of which are, in some form or other, necessary to a healthy condition. Suffice, however, to observe, that as regards the dawn of an Utopia, in which some men who think themselves practical appear to indulge; whether we study the subject by observing the uses to which animals apply the various and ingeniously constructed weapons with which Providence has armed them, or whether we view it in relation to the prodigious armaments of all the most civilized nations of Europe, we find no more evidence in nature, of a state of society in which wars shall cease, than we do of a state of existence in which we shall support life without food, or propagate our species by other means than those which nature has appointed.