The language spoken by any tribe or nation is not of itself absolute evidence as to its race-affinities. This is clearly shown in extreme cases. Thus the Jews in Europe have almost lost the use of Hebrew, but speak as their vernacular the language of their adopted nation, whatever it may be; even the Jewish-German dialect, though consisting so largely of Hebrew words, is philologically German, as any sentence shows: “Ich hab noch hoiom lo geachelt,” “I have not yet eaten to-day.” The mixture of the Israelites in Europe by marriage with other nations is probably much greater than is acknowledged by them; yet, on the whole, the race has been preserved with extraordinary strictness, as its physical characteristics sufficiently show. Language thus here fails conspicuously as a test of race and even of national history. Not much less conclusive is the case of the predominantly Negro populations of the West India Islands, who, nevertheless, speak as their native tongues dialects of English or French, in which the number of intermingled native African words is very scanty: “Dem hitti netti na ini watra bikasi dem de fisiman,” “They cast a net into the water, because they were fishermen.” (Surinam Negro-Eng.) “Bef pas ca jamain lasse poter cônes li,” “Le boeuf n’est jamais las de porter ses cornes.” (Haitian Negro-Fr.) If it be objected that the linguistic conditions of these two races are more artificial than has been usual in the history of the world, less extreme cases may be seen in countries where the ordinary results of conquest-colonization have taken place. The Mestizos, who form so large a fraction of the population of modern Mexico, numbering several millions, afford a convenient test in this respect, inasmuch as their intermediate complexion separates them from both their ancestral races, the Spaniard, and the chocolate-brown indigenous Aztec or other Mexican. The mother-tongue of this mixed race is Spanish, with an infusion of Mexican words; and a large proportion cannot speak any native dialect. In most or all nations of mankind, crossing or intermarriage of races has thus taken place between the conquering invader and the conquered native, so that the language spoken by the nation may represent the results of conquest as much or more than of ancestry. The supersession of the Celtic Cornish by English, and of the Slavonic Old-Prussian by German, are but examples of a process which has for untold ages been supplanting native dialects, whose very names have mostly disappeared. On the other hand, the language of the warlike invader or peaceful immigrant may yield, in a few generations, to the tongue of the mass of the population, as the Northman’s was replaced by French, and modern German gives way to English in the United States. Judging, then, by the extirpation and adoption of languages within the range of history, it is obvious that to classify mankind into, races, Aryan, Semitic, Turanian, Polynesian, Kaffir, &c., on the mere evidence of language, is intrinsically unsound.

VI. Development of Civilization.—The conditions of man at the lowest and highest known levels of culture are separated by a vast interval; but this interval is so nearly filled by known intermediate stages, that the line of continuity between the lowest savagery and the highest civilization is unbroken at any critical point.

An examination of the details of savage life shows not only that there is an immeasurable difference between the rudest man and the highest lower animal, but also that the least cultured savages have themselves advanced far beyond the lowest intellectual and moral state at which human tribes can be conceived as capable of existing, when placed under favourable circumstances of warm climate, abundant food, and security from too severe destructive influences. The Australian black-fellow or the forest Indian of Brazil, who may be taken as examples of the lowest modern savage, had, before contact with whites, attained to rudimentary stages in many of the characteristic functions of civilized life. His language, expressing thoughts by conventional articulate sounds, is the same in essential principle as the most cultivated philosophic dialect, only less exact and copious. His weapons, tools and other appliances such as the hammer, hatchet, spear, knife, awl, thread, net, canoe, &c., are the evident rudimentary analogues of what still remains in use among Europeans. His structures, such as the hut, fence, stockade, earthwork, &c., may be poor and clumsy, but they are of the same nature as our own. In the simple arts of broiling and roasting meat, the use of hides and furs for covering, the plaiting of mats and baskets, the devices of hunting, trapping and fishing, the pleasure taken in personal ornament, the touches of artistic decoration on objects of daily use, the savage differs in degree but not in kind from the civilized man. The domestic and social affections, the kindly care of the young and the old, some acknowledgment of marital and parental obligation, the duty of mutual defence in the tribe, the authority of the elders, and general respect to traditional custom as the regulator of life and duty, are more or less well marked in every savage tribe which is not disorganized and falling to pieces. Lastly, there is usually to be discerned amongst such lower races a belief in unseen powers pervading the universe, this belief shaping itself into an animistic or spiritualistic theology, mostly resulting in some kind of worship. If, again, high savage or low barbaric types be selected, as among the North American Indians, Polynesians, and Kaffirs of South Africa, the same elements of culture appear, but at a more advanced stage, namely, a more full and accurate language, more knowledge of the laws of nature, more serviceable implements, more perfect industrial processes, more definite and fixed social order and frame of government, more systematic and philosophic schemes of religion and a more elaborate and ceremonial worship. At intervals new arts and ideas appear, such as agriculture and pasturage, the manufacture of pottery, the use of metal implements and the device of record and communication by picture writing. Along such stages of improvement and invention the bridge is fairly made between savage and barbaric culture; and this once attained to, the remainder of the series of stages of civilization lies within the range of common knowledge.

The teaching of history, during the three to four thousand years of which contemporary chronicles have been preserved, is that civilization is gradually developed in the course of ages by enlargement and increased precision of knowledge, invention and improvement of arts, and the progression of social and political habits and institutions towards general well-being. That processes of development similar to these were in prehistoric times effective to raise culture from the savage to the barbaric level, two considerations especially tend to prove. First, there are numerous points in the culture even of rude races which are not explicable otherwise than on the theory of development. Thus, though difficult or superfluous arts may easily be lost, it is hard to imagine the abandonment of contrivances of practical daily utility, where little skill is required and materials are easily accessible. Had the Australians or New Zealanders, for instance, ever possessed the potter’s art, they could hardly have forgotten it. The inference that these tribes represent the stage of culture before the invention of pottery is confirmed by the absence of buried fragments of pottery in the districts they inhabit. The same races who were found making thread by the laborious process of twisting with the hand, would hardly have disused, if they had ever possessed, so simple a labour-saving device as the spindle, which consists merely of a small stick weighted at one end; the spindle may, accordingly, be regarded as an instrument invented somewhere between the lowest and highest savage levels (Tylor, Early Hist. of Mankind, p. 193). Again, many devices of civilization bear unmistakable marks of derivation from a lower source; thus the ancient Egyptian and Assyrian harps, which differ from ours in having no front pillar, appear certainly to owe this remarkable defect to having grown up through intermediate forms from the simple strung bow, the still used type of the most primitive stringed instrument. In this way the history of numeral words furnishes actual proof of that independent intellectual progress among savage tribes which some writers have rashly denied. Such words as hand, hands, foot, man, &c., are used as numerals signifying 5, 10, 15, 20, &c., among many savage and barbaric peoples; thus Polynesian lima, i.e. “hand,” means 5; Zulu tatisitupa, i.e. “taking the thumb,” means 6; Greenlandish arfersanek-pingasut, i.e. “on the other foot three,” means 18; Tamanac tevin itoto, i.e. “one man,” means 20, &c., &c. The existence of such expressions demonstrates that the people who use them had originally no spoken names for these numbers, but once merely counted them by gesture on their fingers and toes in low savage fashion, till they obtained higher numerals by the inventive process of describing in words these counting-gestures. Second, the process of “survival in culture” has caused the preservation in each stage of society of phenomena, belonging to an earlier period, but kept up by force of custom into the later, thus supplying evidence of the modern condition being derived from the ancient. Thus the mitre over an English bishop’s coat-of-arms is a survival which indicates him as the successor of bishops who actually wore mitres, while armorial bearings themselves, and the whole craft of heraldry, are survivals bearing record of a state of warfare and social order whence our present state was by vast modification evolved. Evidence of this class, proving the derivation of modern civilization, not only from ancient barbarism, but beyond this, from primeval savagery, is immensely plentiful, especially in rites and ceremonies, where the survival of ancient habits is peculiarly favoured. Thus the modern Hindu, though using civilized means for lighting his household fires, retains the savage “fire-drill” for obtaining fire by friction of wood when what he considers pure or sacred fire has to be produced for sacrificial purposes; while in Europe into modern times the same primitive process has been kept up in producing the sacred and magical “need-fire,” which was lighted to deliver cattle from a murrain. Again, the funeral offerings of food, clothing, weapons, &c., to the dead are absolutely intelligible and purposeful among savage races, who believe that the souls of the departed are ethereal beings capable of consuming food, and of receiving and using the souls or phantoms of any objects sacrificed for their use. The primitive philosophy to which these conceptions belong has to a great degree been discredited by modern science; yet the clear survivals of such ancient and savage rites may still be seen in Europe, where the Bretons leave the remains of the All Souls’ supper on the table for the ghosts of the dead kinsfolk to partake of, and Russian peasants set out cakes for the ancestral manes on the ledge which supports the holy pictures, and make dough ladders to assist the ghosts of the dead to ascend out of their graves and start on their journey for the future world; while other provision for the same spiritual journey is made when the coin is still put in the hand of the corpse at an Irish wake. In like manner magic still exists in the civilized world as a survival from the savage and barbaric times to which it originally belongs, and in which is found the natural source and proper home of utterly savage practices still carried on by ignorant peasants in Great Britain, such as taking omens from the cries of animals, or bewitching an enemy by sticking full of pins and hanging up to shrivel in the smoke an image or other object, that similar destruction may fall on the hated person represented by the symbol (Tylor, Primitive Culture, ch. i., iii., iv., xi., xii.; Early Hist. of Man, ch. vi.).

The comparative science of civilization thus not only generalizes the data of history, but supplements its information by laying down the lines of development along which the lowest prehistoric culture has gradually risen to the highest modern level. Among the most clearly marked of these lines is that which follows the succession of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages (see [Archaeology]). The Stone Age represents the early condition of mankind in general, and has remained in savage districts up to modern times, while the introduction of metals need not at once supersede the use of the old stone hatchets and arrows, which have often long continued in dwindling survival by the side of the new bronze and even iron ones. The Bronze Age had its most important place among ancient nations of Asia and Europe, and among them was only succeeded after many centuries by the Iron Age; while in other districts, such as Polynesia and Central and South Africa, and America (except Mexico and Peru), the native tribes were moved directly from the Stone to the Iron Age without passing through the Bronze Age at all. Although the three divisions of savage, barbaric, and civilized man do not correspond at all perfectly with the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, this classification of civilization has proved of extraordinary value in arranging in their proper order of culture the nations of the Old World.

Another great line of progress has been followed by tribes passing from the primitive state of the wild hunter, fisher and fruit-gatherer to that of the settled tiller of the soil, for to this change of habit may be plainly in great part traced the expansion of industrial arts and the creation of higher social and political institutions. These, again, have followed their proper lines along the course of time. Among such is the immense legal development by which the primitive law of personal vengeance passed gradually away, leaving but a few surviving relics in the modern civilized world, and being replaced by the higher doctrine that crime is an offence against society, to be repressed for the public good. Another vast social change has been that from the patriarchal condition, in which the unit is the family under the despotic rule of its head, to the systems in which individuals make up a society whose government is centralized in a chief or king. In the growth of systematic civilization, the art of writing has had an influence so intense, that of all tests to distinguish the barbaric from the civilized state, none is so generally effective as this, whether they have but the failing link with the past which mere memory furnishes, or can have recourse to written records of past history and written constitutions of present order. Lastly, still following the main lines of human culture, the primitive germs of religious institutions have to be traced in the childish faith and rude rites of savage life, and thence followed in their expansion into the vast systems administered by patriarchs and priests, henceforth taking under their charge the precepts of morality, and enforcing them under divine sanction, while also exercising in political life an authority beside or above the civil law.

The state of culture reached by Quaternary man is evidenced by the stone implements in the drift-gravels, and other relics of human art in the cave deposits. His drawings on bone or tusk found in the caves show no mean artistic power, as appears by the three specimens copied in the Plate. That representing two deer (fig. 6) was found so early as 1852 in the breccia of a limestone cave on the Charente, and its importance recognized in a remarkable letter by Prosper Merimée, as at once historically ancient and geologically modern (Congrès d’anthropologie et d’archéologie préhistoriques, Copenhagen (1869), p. 128). The other two are the famous mammoth from the cave of La Madeleine, on which the woolly mane and huge tusks of Elephas primigenius are boldly drawn (fig. 7); and the group of man and horses (fig. 8). There has been found one other contemporary portrait of man, where a hunter is shown stalking an aurochs.

That the men of the Quaternary period knew the savage art of producing fire by friction, and roasted the flesh on which they mainly subsisted, is proved by the fragments of charcoal found in the cave deposits, where also occur bone awls and needles, which indicate the wearing of skin clothing, like that of the modern Australians and Fuegians. Their bone lance-heads and dart-points were comparable to those of northern and southern savages. Particular attention has to be given to the stone implements used by these earliest known of mankind. The division of tribes in the stone implement stage into two classes, the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age, and the Neolithic or New Stone Age, according to their proficiency in this most important art furnishes in some respects the best means of determining their rank in general culture.

In order to put this argument clearly before the reader, a few selected implements are figured in the Plate. The group in fig. 9 contains tools and weapons of the Neolithic period such as are dug up on European soil; they are evident relics of ancient populations who used them till replaced by metal. The stone hatchets are symmetrically shaped and edged by grinding, while the cutting flakes, scrapers, spear and arrow heads are of high finish. Direct knowledge of the tribes who made them is scanty, but implements so similar in make and design having been in use in North and South America until modern times, it may be assumed for purposes of classification that the Neolithic peoples of the New World were at a similar barbarous level in industrial arts, social organization, moral and religious ideas. Such comparison, though needing caution and reserve, at once proved of great value to anthropology. When, however, there came to light from the drift-gravels and limestone caves of Europe the Palaeolithic implements, of which some types are shown in the group (fig. 10), the difficult problem presented itself, what degree of general culture these rude implements belonged to. On mere inspection, their rudeness, their unsuitability for being hafted, and the absence of shaping and edging by the grindstone, mark their inferiority to the Neolithic implements. Their immensely greater antiquity was proved by their geological position and their association with a long extinct fauna, and they were not, like the Neoliths, recognizable as corresponding closely to the implements used by modern tribes. There was at first a tendency to consider the Palaeoliths as the work of men ruder than savages, if, indeed, their makers were to be accounted human at all. Since then, however, the problem has passed into a more manageable state. Stone implements, more or less approaching the European Palaeolithic type, were found in Africa from Egypt southwards, where in such parts as Somaliland and Cape Colony they lie about on the ground, as though they had been the rough tools and weapons of the rude inhabitants of the land at no very distant period. The group in fig. 11 in the Plate shows the usual Somaliland types. These facts tended to remove the mystery from Palaeolithic man, though too little is known of the ruder ancient tribes of Africa to furnish a definition of the state of culture which might have co-existed with the use of Palaeolithic implements. Information to this purpose, however, can now be furnished from a more outlying region. This is Tasmania, where as in the adjacent continent of Australia, the survival of marsupial animals indicates long isolation from the rest of the world. Here, till far on into the 19th century, the Englishmen could watch the natives striking off flakes of stone, trimming them to convenient shape for grasping them in the hand, and edging them by taking off successive chips on one face only. The group in fig. 12 shows ordinary Tasmanian forms, two of them being finer tools for scraping and grooving. (For further details reference may be made to H. Ling Roth, The Tasmanians, (2nd ed., 1899); R. Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria (1878), vol. ii.; Papers and Proceedings of Royal Society of Tasmania; and papers by the present writer in Journal of the Anthropological Institute.) The Tasmanians, when they came in contact with the European explorers and settlers, were not the broken outcasts they afterwards became. They were a savage people, perhaps the lowest in culture of any known, but leading a normal, self-supporting, and not unhappy life, which had probably changed little during untold ages. The accounts, imperfect as they are, which have been preserved of their arts, beliefs and habits, thus present a picture of the arts, beliefs and habits of tribes whose place in the Stone Age was a grade lower than that of Palaeolithic man of the Quaternary period.

Plate