After a photograph.
Closely following upon Tylor in this field, and gathering his material with much the same assiduity, and presenting it with similar beliefs, though with enough individuality to mark a distinction, was another Englishman, who probably shares with Tylor the leading position in this department of study. Sir John Lubbock, in his Prehistoric Times as illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of modern savages,[1621] gathered the evidence which exists of the primitive condition of man, embracing some chapters on modern savages so far as they are ignorant of the use of metals, as the best study we can follow, to fill out the picture of races only archæologically known to us. This study of modern savage life, in arts, marriages, and relationships, morals, religion, and laws, is, as he holds, a necessary avenue to the knowledge of a condition of the early man, from which by various influences the race has advanced to what is called civilization. His result in this comparative study—not indeed covering all the phases of savage life—he made known in his Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man.[1622] While referring to Tylor’s Early Hist. of Mankind as more nearly like his own than any existing treatise, but showing, as compared with his own book, “that no two minds would view the subject in the same manner,” he instanced previous treatments of certain phases of the subject, like Müller’s Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen, J. F. M’Lennan’s Primitive Marriage,[1623] and J. J. Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht (Stuttgart, 1861); and even Lord Kames’ History of Man, and Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois, notwithstanding the absence in them of much of the minute knowledge now necessary to the study of the subject. These data, of course, are largely obtained from travellers and missionaries, and Lubbock complains of their unsatisfactory extent and accuracy. “Travellers,” he adds, “find it easier to describe the houses, boats, food, dress, weapons, and implements of savages than to understand their thoughts and feelings.”
SIR JOHN WILLIAM DAWSON.
After a photograph.
The main controversial point arising out of all this study is the one already adverted to,—whether man has advanced from savagery to his present condition, or has preserved, with occasional retrogressions, his original elevated character; and this causes the other question, whether the modern savage is the degenerate descendant of the same civilized first men. “There is no scientific evidence which would justify us,” says Lubbock (Prehist. Times, 417), “in asserting that this kind of degradation applies to savages in general.”[1624] The most distinguished advocate of the affirmative of this proposition is Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, both in his Political Economy and in his lecture on the Origin of Civilization (1855), in which he undertook to affirm that no nation, unaided by a superior race, ever succeeded in raising itself out of savagery, and that nations can become degraded. Lubbock, who, with Tylor, holds the converse of this proposition, answered Whately in an appendix to his Origin of Civilization, which was originally given as a paper at the Dundee meeting of the British Association.[1625] The Duke of Argyle, while not prepared to go to the extent of Whately’s views, attacked, in his Primeval Man, Lubbock’s argument,[1626] and was in turn reviewed adversely by Lubbock, in a paper read at the Exeter meeting of the same association (1869), which is also included in the appendix of his Origin of Civilization. Lubbock seems to show, in some instances at least, that the duke did not possess himself correctly of some of the views of his opponents.
MIGRATIONS.
A sketch map given in Dawson’s Fossil Men, p. 48, showing his view of the probable lines of migration and distribution of the American tribes. Morgan (Ancient Society) makes what he calls three centres of subsistence, whence the migration proceeded which overran America. Cf. Hellwald in Smithsonian Rept., 1866, p. 328. The question is more or less discussed in Latham’s Man and his migrations (London, 1851); Chas. Pickering’s Men and their geog. distribution; and Oscar Peschel’s Races of Man (Eng. transl., London, 1876). On the passage from the valley of the Columbia to that of the Missouri, see Humboldt’s Views of Nature, 35. Morgan (No. Am. Rev., cix.) supposes the valley of the Columbia River to be the original centre where the streams diverged, and (Systems of Consanguinity, 251) says there are reasons for believing that the Shoshone migration was the last which left the Columbia valley, and that it was pending at the epoch of European colonization. Morgan’s papers in the No. Am. Rev., Oct. 1868 and Jan. 1870, are reprinted in Beach’s Indian Miscellany, p. 158. On a general belief in a migration from the north, see Congrès des Amér. (1877), ii. 50, 51. L. Simonin, in “L’homme Américain, notes d’ethnologie et de linguistique sur les indiens des Etats-Unis,” gives a map of the tribes of North America in the Bull. de la Soc. de Géog. Feb. 1870.
In the researches of Tylor and Lubbock, and of all the others cited above, the American Indian is the source of many of their illustrations. Of all writers on this continent, Sir John Wm. Dawson in his Fossil Men, and Southall in his Recent Origin of Man, are probably the most eminent advocates of the views of Whately and Argyle, however modified, and both have declared it an unfounded assumption that the primitive man was a savage.[1627] Morgan, in his Ancient Society (N. Y., 1877), has, on the other hand, sketched the lines of human progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization.