In looking through the above remarks, written some years since, alteration has seemed hardly needful. The writer thinks, however, that it may be useful to call attention to the increased opportunities of travellers to study and obtain implements of the rudest and most ancient Stone Age. Up to a few years ago they could only have expected to find proof of the recent use among savages of stone hatchets, knives, arrow-heads, etc., such as in Europe are relics of ancient tribes. These, indeed, have been known for more than a generation not to be the oldest relics of the kind, but have been called neolithic or of the New-Stone Age, to distinguish them from the far older and lower types of the mammoth period, called palæolithic or of the Old-Stone Age. Implements of this class, after their discovery in Europe, were soon noticed in India, and are now especially recognised as found over a great part of Africa. Of later years, in the islands of the South Pacific, stone implements of an even lower class have not only been found in the ground, but there is evidence that they had remained in use into modern times. In Tasmania it is on record from European eye-witnesses that tools made from chips of hard stone by trimming to an edge on one side, and which were grasped in the hand without any handle, were the cutting and hacking instruments of the natives into the last century, almost up to the time of their extinction. Thus apparently the oldest known phase of human life endured in this region untouched by civilisation, and travellers have the opportunity of studying its recent relics in Tasmania, while similar traces of rude Stone Age life, though not reaching up to so late a time, are making their appearance both in West Australia and New Zealand. Travellers should be careful to consider whether chipping is really artificial, and not due to natural action of water or wind-blown sand. There is no doubt that many “implements” in our museums are freaks of nature, e.g., those found in such quantities in the desert plateaux above the lower Nile.
Travellers of the present day have still opportunities of observation in the history of culture which will have disappeared in another generation. Inquiry in outlying countries should be made for the vanishing survivals of arts and customs, stories, and even languages. In Europe there is much of this kind to be met with by the inquirer, especially off the beaten track. Thus the dug-out canoe, the monoxyle of Hippokrates, need not be sought on African lakes, for it is still the fisherman’s craft of Hungary and Bosnia; and in the same region the apparatus for producing the ceremonial need-fire by friction of wood, which disappeared from Scotland towards the beginning of last century, and the “whithorn” of coiled bark, the rustic musical instrument just vanishing from English peasant life, are still in ceremonial use. As for savage tribes which come within the traveller’s ken, though their stone implements have been mostly superseded by the white man’s cutlery, many arts of the remote past may still be seen. The yet simpler means of producing fire by drilling a stick with the hands without further mechanical adaptation may still be seen among savages who have not lost their old arts, and the twisting of thread with the hands, which preceded the use of even the spindle, is not everywhere forgotten. Though the study of the religion and folk-lore of the savage and barbaric world must be left to those who are residents rather than visitors, the passer-by who inquires may see primitive rites of religion or magic. Thus in many an Indian house in Arizona or New Mexico the traveller is reminded of his classic recollections when he sees the first morsel of the meal thrown into the fire as an offering to the ancestral spirits.
Note by Professor R. R. Marett.
‘Although Sir Edward Tylor’s summary account of the task of the field anthropologist was written many years ago, and is now reproduced in a substantially unaltered form, one can confidently recommend it as still adequate to the needs of a rapidly progressing science. The general plan of campaign, so brilliantly sketched here, remains much the same. On the other hand, the traveller in these latter days, instead of opening up fresh fields, must for the most part be content to work over old ground more carefully than his predecessors. Unless, therefore, he is prepared to discard superficial modes of observation and devote himself to a critical and intensive study of the available facts, he had much better leave the subject alone. It will help greatly if he has been through a course of special training, such as several of the leading Universities can nowadays provide.’—R. R. Marett.
The following books will be found useful to the traveller, besides those mentioned above:—
‘Handbook of Folk-lore’; published by the Folk-lore Society. Ed. C. S. Burne.
‘Anthropology’: Prof. R. R. Marett. Home University Library. Williams & Norgate.
Queries of Anthropology.
By the late Sir A. W. Franks, K.C.B., F.R.S.