[292] Keane, Man, Past and Present, discusses the important evidence obtained by Dr. Dubois from Java, and Dr. Noetling from Upper Burma, pp. 5-8. It is only fair to that brilliant scholar, Dr. Latham, to point out that without the evidence before him to prove the point, he came to the same conclusion that the original home of man was "somewhere in intra-tropical Asia, and that it was the single locality of a single pair."—Latham, Man and his Migrations, 248.
[293] The most recent example of this is Mr. Thomas's extraordinary treatment of the evidence of migration in Australia. It produces in his mind "novel conditions," but has effects which he cannot neglect, but which he strangely misinterprets. N. W. Thomas, Kinship Organisations in Australia, 27-28.
[294] Spencer, Principles of Sociology, i. 18.
[295] Lord Avebury, Prehistoric Times, 586.
[296] Man, Past and Present, pp. 1, 8.
[297] Latham, Man and his Migrations, 155-6.
[298] The ethnographic movement is a very definite fact in anthropological evidence, though it has been little noted. Thus "the Coles are evidently a good pioneering race, fond of new clearings and the luxuriant and easily raised crops of the virgin soil, and have constitutions that thrive on malaria, so it is perhaps in the best interest of humanity and cause of civilisation that they be kept moving by continued Aryan propulsion. Ever armed with bow, arrows, and pole-axe, they are prepared to do battle with the beasts of the forest, holding even the king of the forest, the 'Bun Rajah,' that is, the tiger, in little fear."—Col. Dalton in Journ. Asiatic Soc., Bengal, xxxiv. 9.
[299] Traditions of great migrations exist among most primitive races. Some of these contain unexpected corroboration from actual discoveries. Thus the natives of New Zealand had a tradition that their ancestors, when they arrived in their canoes some four centuries ago, buried some sacred things under a large tree. It is said that the tree was blown down in recent times and that the sacred things were discovered. Taplin records "a good specimen of the kind of migration which has taken place among the aborigines all over the continent" (The Narrinyeri, p. 4); and similar evidence could be produced in almost every direction. Mr. Mathew in Eaglehawk and Crow deals with "the argument from mythology and tradition" as to the origin of the Australians in a very suggestive fashion (pp. 14-22). Stanley has preserved an African native tradition of local groups spreading out from the parent home (Through the Dark Continent, i. 346).
[300] I am aware this is disputed by O. Peschel—Races of Man, 137 et seq.—but I think the evidence is sufficient; and it must be remembered that there is direct evidence of the most backward races not using the fire they possess for cooking, but always eating their animal food raw, as, for instance, the Semang people of the Malay Peninsula. (See Skeat and Blagden, Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula, i. 112.) The Andaman Islanders could not make fire, though they possessed and kept it alive. This shows that they must have borrowed it and did not previously possess it.—Quatrefages, The Pygmies, 108. Tylor, Early History of Mankind, cap. ix., should be consulted.
[301] The term political is, I confess, a little awkward, owing to its specially modern use, but it is the only term which, in its early sense, expresses the stage of social development represented by a polity as distinct from a mere localisation.