For tories and for great wolf-dogs,
For drawing hobbies by the tails,
And threshing corn with fiery flails.’[[17]]
Fynes Moryson’s description of the wild or ‘meere’ Irish about 1600, is amazing. The very lords of them, he says, dwelt in poor clay houses, or cabins of boughs covered with turf. In many parts men as well as women had in very winter time but a linen rag about the loins and a woollen mantle on their bodies, so that it would turn a man’s stomach to see an old woman in the morning before breakfast. He notices their habit of burning oats from the straw, and making cakes thereof. They had no tables, but set their meat on a bundle of grass. They feasted on fallen horses, and seethed pieces of beef and pork with the unwashed entrails of beasts in a hollow tree, lapped in a raw cow’s hide, and so set over the fire, and they drank milk warmed with a stone first cast into the fire.[[18]] Another district remarkable for a barbaric simplicity of life is the Hebrides. Till of late years, there were to be found there in actual use earthen vessels, unglazed and made by hand without the potter’s wheel, which might pass in a museum as indifferent specimens of savage manufacture. These ‘craggans’ are still made by an old woman at Barvas for sale as curiosities. Such a modern state of the potter’s art in the Hebrides fits well with George Buchanan’s statement in the 16th century that the islanders used to boil meat in the beast’s own paunch or hide.[[19]] Early in the 18th century Martin mentions as prevalent there the ancient way of dressing corn by burning it dexterously from the ear, which he notices to be a very quick process, thence called ‘graddan’ (Gaelic, grad=quick).[[20]] Thus we see that the habit of burning out the grain, for which the ‘meere Irish’ were reproached, was really the keeping up of an old Keltic art, not without its practical use. So the appearance in modern Keltic districts of other widespread arts of the lower culture—hide-boiling, like that of the Scythians in Herodotus, and stone-boiling, like that of the Assinaboins of North America—seems to fit not so well with degradation from a high as with survival from a low civilization. The Irish and the Hebrideans had been for ages under the influence of comparatively high civilization, which nevertheless may have left unaltered much of the older and ruder habit of the people.
Instances of civilized men taking to a wild life in outlying districts of the world, and ceasing to obtain or want the appliances of civilization, give more distinct evidence of degradation. In connexion with this state of things takes place the nearest known approach to an independent degeneration from a civilized to a savage state. This happens in mixed races, whose standard of civilization may be more or less below that of the higher race. The mutineers of the Bounty, with their Polynesian wives, founded a small but not savage community on Pitcairn’s Island.[[21]] The mixed Portuguese and native races of the East Indies and Africa lead a life below the European standard, but not a savage life.[[22]] The Gauchos of the South American Pampas, a mixed European and Indian race of equestrian herdsmen, are described as sitting about on ox-skulls, making broth in horns with hot cinders heaped round, living on meat without vegetables, and altogether leading a foul, brutal, comfortless, degenerate, but not savage life.[[23]] One step beyond this brings us to the cases of individual civilized men being absorbed in savage tribes and adopting the savage life, on which they exercise little influence for improvement; the children of these men may come distinctly under the category of savages. These cases of mixed breeds, however, do not show a low culture actually produced as the result of degeneration from a high one. Their theory is that, given a higher and a lower civilization existing among two races, a mixed race between the two may take to the lower or an intermediate condition.
Degeneration probably operates even more actively in the lower than in the higher culture. Barbarous nations and savage hordes, with their less knowledge and scantier appliances, would seem peculiarly exposed to degrading influences. In Africa, for instance, there seems to have been in modern centuries a falling off in culture, probably due in a considerable degree to foreign influence. Mr. J. L. Wilson, contrasting the 16th and 17th century accounts of powerful negro kingdoms in West Africa with the present small communities, with little or no tradition of their forefathers’ more extended political organization, looks especially to the slave-trade as the deteriorating cause.[[24]] In South-East Africa, also, a comparatively high barbaric culture, which we especially associate with the old descriptions of the kingdom of Monomotapa, seems to have fallen away, not counting the remarkable ruins of buildings of hewn stone fitted without mortar which indicate the intrusion of more civilized foreigners into the gold region![[25]] In North America, Father Charlevoix remarks of the Iroquois of the last century, that in old times they used to build their cabins better than other nations, and better than they do themselves now; they carved rude figures in relief on them; but since in various expeditions almost all their villages have been burnt, they have not taken the trouble to restore them in their old condition.[[26]] The degradation of the Cheyenne Indians is matter of history. Persecuted by their enemies the Sioux, and dislodged at last even from their fortified village, the heart of the tribe was broken. Their numbers were thinned, they no longer dared to establish themselves in a permanent abode, they gave up the cultivation of the soil, and became a tribe of wandering hunters, with horses for their only valuable possession, which every year they bartered for a supply of corn, beans, pumpkins, and European merchandise, and then returned into the heart of the prairies.[[27]] When in the Rocky Mountains, Lord Milton and Dr. Cheadle came upon an outlying fragment of the Shushwap race, without horses or dogs, sheltering themselves under rude temporary slants of bark or matting, falling year by year into lower misery, and rapidly dying out; this is another example of the degeneration which no doubt has lowered or destroyed many a savage people.[[28]] There are tribes who are the very outcasts of savage life. There is reason to look upon the miserable Digger Indians of North America and the Bushmen of South Africa as the persecuted remnants of tribes who have seen happier days.[[29]] The traditions of the lower races of their ancestors’ better life may sometimes be real recollections of a not far distant past. The Algonquin Indians look back to old days as to a golden age when life was better than now, when they had better laws and leaders, and manners less rude.[[30]] And indeed, knowing what we do of their history, we may admit that they have cause to remember in misery happiness gone by. Well, too, might the rude Kamchadal declare that the world is growing worse and worse, that men are becoming fewer and viler, and food scarcer, for the hunter, and the bear, and the reindeer are hurrying away from here to the happier life in the regions below.[[31]] It would be a valuable contribution to the study of civilization to have the action of decline and fall investigated on a wider and more exact basis of evidence than has yet been attempted. The cases here stated are probably but part of a long series which might be brought forward to prove degeneration in culture to have been, by no means indeed the primary cause of the existence of barbarism and savagery in the world, but a secondary action largely and deeply affecting the general development of civilization. It may perhaps give no unfair idea to compare degeneration of culture, both in its kind of operation and in its immense extent, to denudation in the geological history of the earth.
In judging of the relations between savage and civilized life, something may be learnt by glancing over the divisions of the human race. For this end the classification by families of languages may be conveniently used, if checked by the evidence of bodily characteristics. No doubt speech by itself is an insufficient guide in tracing national descent, as witness the extreme cases of Jews in England, and three-parts negro races in the West Indies, nevertheless speaking English as their mother-tongue. Still, under ordinary circumstances, connexion of speech does indicate more or less connexion of ancestral race. As a guide in tracing the history of civilization, language gives still better evidence, for common language to a great extent involves common culture. The race dominant enough to maintain or impose its language, usually more or less maintains or imposes its civilization also. Thus the common descent of the languages of Hindus, Greeks, and Teutons is no doubt due in great measure to common ancestry, but is still more closely bound up with a common social and intellectual history, with what Professor Max Müller well calls their ‘spiritual relationship.’ The wonderful permanence of language often enables us to detect among remotely ancient and distant tribes the traces of connected civilization. How, on such grounds, do savage and civilized tribes appear to stand related, within the various groups of mankind connected historically by the possession of kindred languages?
The Semitic family, which represents one of the oldest known civilizations of the world, includes Arabs, Jews, Phœnicians, Syrians, &c., and has an earlier as well as a later connexion in North Africa. This family takes in some rude tribes, but none which would be classed as savages. The Aryan family has existed in Asia and Europe certainly for many thousand years, and there are well-known and well-marked traces of its early barbaric condition, which has perhaps survived with least change among secluded tribes in the valleys of the Hindu Kush and Himalaya. There seems, again, no known case of any full Aryan tribe having become savage. The Gypsies and other outcasts are, no doubt, partly Aryan in blood, but their degraded condition is not savagery. In India there are tribes Aryan by language, but whose physique is rather of indigenous type, and whose ancestry is mainly from indigenous stocks with more or less mixture of the dominant Hindu. Some tribes coming under this category, as among the Bhils and Kulis of the Bombay Presidency, speak dialects which are Hindi in vocabulary at least, whether or not in grammatical structure, and yet the people themselves are lower in culture than some Hinduized nations who have retained their original Dravidian speech, the Tamils for instance. But these all appear to stand at higher stages of civilization than any wild forest tribes of the peninsula who can be reckoned as nearly savages; all such are non-Aryan both in blood and speech.[[32]] In Ceylon, however, we have the remarkable phenomenon of men leading a savage life while speaking an Aryan dialect. This is the wild part of the race of Veddas or ‘hunters,’ of whom a remnant still inhabit the forest land. These people are dark-skinned and flat-nosed, slight of frame, and very small of skull, and five feet is an average man’s height. They are a shy, harmless, simple people, living principally by hunting; they lime birds, take fish by poisoning the water, and are skilful in getting wild honey; they have bows with iron-pointed arrows, which, with their hunting-dogs, are their most valuable possessions. They dwell in caves or bark huts, and their very word for a house is Singhalese for a hollow tree (rukula); a patch of bark was formerly their dress, but now a bit of linen hangs to their waist-cords; their planting of patches of ground is said to be recent. They count on their fingers, and produce fire with the simplest kind of fire-drill twirled by hand. They are most truthful and honest. Their monogamy and conjugal fidelity contrast strongly with the opposite habits of the more civilized Singhalese. A remarkable Vedda marriage custom sanctioned a man’s taking his younger (not elder) sister as his wife; sister-marriage existing among the Singhalese, but being confined to the royal family. Mistaken statements have been made as to the Veddas having no religion, no personal names, no language. Their religion, in fact, corresponds with the animism of the ruder tribes of India; some of their names are remarkable as being Hindu, but not in use among the modern Singhalese; their language is a Singhalese dialect. There is no doubt attaching to the usual opinion that the Veddas are in the main descended from the ‘yakkos’ or demons; i.e. from the indigenous tribes of the island. Legend and language concur to make probable an admixture of Aryan blood accompanying the adoption of Aryan speech, but the evidence of bodily characteristics shows the Vedda race to be principally of indigenous pre-Aryan type.[[33]]
The Tatar family of Northern Asia and Europe (Turanian, if the word be used in a restricted sense) displays evidence of quite a different kind. This wide-lying group of tribes and nations has members nearly or quite touching the savage level in ancient and even modern times, such as Ostyaks, Tunguz, Samoyeds, Lapps, while more or less high ranges of culture are represented by Mongols, Turks, and Hungarians. Here, however, it is unquestionable that the rude tribes represent the earlier condition of the Tatar race at large, from which its more mixed and civilized peoples, mostly by adopting the foreign culture of Buddhist, Moslem, and Christian nations, and partly by internal development, are well known to have risen. The ethnology of South-Eastern Asia is somewhat obscure; but if we may classify under one heading the native races of Siam, Burma, &c., the wilder tribes may be considered as representing earlier conditions, for the higher culture of this region is obviously foreign, especially of Buddhist origin. The Malay race is also remarkable for the range of civilization represented by tribes classed as belonging to it. If the wild tribes of the Malayan peninsula and Borneo be compared with the semi-civilized nations of Java and Sumatra, it appears that part of the race survives to represent an early savage state, while part is found in possession of a civilization which the first glance shows to have been mostly borrowed from Hindu and Moslem sources. Some forest tribes of the peninsula seem to be representatives of the Malay race at its lowest level of culture, how far original and how far degraded it is not easy to say. Among them the very rude Orang Sabimba, who have no agriculture and no boats, give a remarkable account of themselves, that they are descendants of shipwrecked Malays from the Bugis country, but were so harassed by pirates that they gave up civilization and cultivation, and vowed not to eat fowls, which betrayed them by their crowing. So they plant nothing, but eat wild fruit and vegetables, and all animals but the fowl. This, if at all founded on fact, is an interesting case of degeneration. But savages usually invent myths to account for peculiar habits, as where, in the same district, the Biduanda Kallang account for their not cultivating the ground by the story that their ancestors vowed not to make plantations. Another rude people of the Malay peninsula are the Jakuns, a simple, kindly race, among whom some trace their pedigree to a pair of white monkeys, while others declare that they are descendants of white men; and indeed there is some ground for supposing these latter to be really of mixed race, for they use a few Portuguese words, and a report exists of some refugees having settled up the country.[[34]] The Melanesians, Papuans, and Australians represent grades of savagery spread each over its own vast area in a comparatively homogeneous way. Lastly, the relations of savagery to higher conditions are remarkable, but obscure, on the American continents. There are several great linguistic families whose members were discovered in a savage state throughout; such are the Esquimaux, Algonquin, and Guarani groups. On the other hand there were three apparently unconnected districts of semi-civilization reaching a high barbaric level, viz., in Mexico and Central America, Bogota, and Peru. Between these higher and lower conditions were races at the level of the Natchez of Louisiana and the Apalaches of Florida. Linguistic connexion is not unknown between the more advanced peoples and the lower races around them.[[35]] But definite evidence showing the higher culture to have arisen from the lower, or the lower to have fallen from the higher, is scarcely forthcoming. Both operations may in degree have happened.
It is apparent, from such general inspection of this ethnological problem, that it would repay a far closer study than it has as yet received. As the evidence stands at present, it appears that when in any race some branches much excel the rest in culture, this more often happens by elevation than by subsidence. But this elevation is much more apt to be produced by foreign than by native action. Civilization is a plant much oftener propagated than developed. As regards the lower races, this accords with the results of European intercourse with savage tribes during the last three or four centuries; so far as these tribes have survived the process, they have assimilated more or less of European Culture and risen towards the European level, as in Polynesia, South Africa, South America. Another important point becomes manifest from this ethnological survey. The fact, that during so many thousand years of known existence, neither the Aryan nor the Semitic race appears to have thrown off any direct savage offshoot, tells, with some force, against the probability of degradation to the savage level ever happening from high-level civilization.