Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/639

Rh ETHNOGRAPHY 617 &quot;For the chief information we have on the subject of human food in prehistoric times, we are indebted to Pro fessor Riitinieyer, who examined the fauna of the lake dwellings in Switzerland, and to Steenstrup and Thomsen, who dug up the shell mounds of Denmark. They have displayed in their researches an amount of science and sagacity which is an honour to our century. The quality of food is calculated to exert a great in fluence upon the temperament, the health, the vigour, and the intelligence of men. There is thus some truth in Buckle s statement that the history of the most civilized nations may be explained by the chemical constituents of their food ; but until the action of aliments on bodily and intellectual organisms is better known, the discussion would be premature. Besides, the subject belongs to anthro pology, and if ethnologists mooted it, they would trespass upon their neighbours preserves. Were primitive men a set of cannibals 1 Plausible reasons may be given for and against such a view. As men can feed on men but excep tionally, the question would be better discussed in the chapters relating to religious sacrifices and to the progress of morality and intelligence. i Weapons, Tools, and Implements. Ethnology centres in this study, and by far the greatest number of ethnologists have made it the chief subject of their researches. They go everywhere, beating about all corners, looking for potsherds, bones, teeth, chirts, nephrites, flints, and every where their search is more or less successful. Ex ungue Ifoneni is their motto. As the tool, so the work and so the workman ; as the arrow-point, so the archer. And they are right. Man is a tool-using, or, as Franklin denned him, a tool-making animal. These weapons, these imple ments were subservient to the tyrannic necessity of obtain ing food. The better the weapons, the more regular the supply of nourishment, and as the food changed, the tools had to be changed. Wood, bones, and rough stones were first used, then polished stones, afterwards bronze, and lastly iron, each marking a new era. Strong doubts, however, begin to be entertained in many quarters about the separation in two periods each of the stone and of the inetallurgic ages : it is objected, first, that polished stones were used as articles of luxury, or where flints could not be had, and, secondly, that the finding of bronze imple ments much older than any of iron does riot prove that bronze was invented before iron, because bronze keeps in a tolerable state of preservation when iron, which oxidizes readily, has long disappeared; and, moreover, it is asserted by technologists that iron or steel tools are indispensable in the fabrication of bronze. Be that as it may, every invention was more than a simple addition to the old stock ; it was an advance in quality and variety as much as in quantity ; it marked a new progress in intelligence. Tylor says &quot; The ethnographer s business is to classify such details with a view to making out their distribution in geography and history, and the relations which exist among them. To the ethnographer, the bow and arrow is a species, the habit of flattening children s skulls is a species, the practice of reckoning numbers by ten is a species. The geographical distribution of these things, and their transmission from region to region, have to be studied as the naturalist studies the geography of his botanical and zoological .species. Just as certain plants and animals are peculiar to certain districts, so it is with such instruments as the Australian boome- lang, the Polynesian stick-and-groove for fire-making, the tiny bow and arrow used as a lancet or phleme by tribes about the Isthmus of Panama ; and in like manner with many an art, myth, or custom, found isolated in a peculiar field. Just as the catalogue of all the species of plants and animals of a district represents its flora and fauna, so the list of all the items of the general life of a people represents that whole which we call its culture. And just as dis tant regions so often produce vegetables and animals which are anala-ous, though by no means identical, so it is with the details of the civilization of their inhabitants. How good a working analogy there really is between the diffusion of plants and animals and the diffusion of civilization comes well into view when we notice how far the same causes have produced both at once. In district after district, the same causes which have introduced the cultivated plants and domesticated animals of civilization have brought in with them a corresponding art and knowledge. The course of events which carried horses and wheat to America carried with them the use of the gun and the iron hatchet, while in return the old world received not only maize, potatoes, and turkeys, but the habit of smoking and the sailor s hammock.&quot; House and Shelter. Previous to the recent scientific movement to which we owe ethnology under its present form, architects had already divined and applied to their art ethnological principles. They had understood that the most superb temples and palaces, the most splendid monuments, when they have a national character, repro duce on a large scale the modest abodes of the country people. A greater care is bestowed on the construction of a princely hall, its materials are more costly, the proportions more stately ; but in most cases it is a poor man s cottage magnified. So a church may be but the enlargement of a sepulchre. If the homesteads of the earlier inhabitants were caves or some piled-up slabs, if they were tents or log cabins, the primitive physiognomy will be still detected in the disposition of the magnificent buildings, and even in the costly furniture. For one sees in the Egyptian temples that their columns were imitations of Nile reeds tied in a bundle, that their walls were an imitation of plaited mats. What is called the architectural style is the character of the nation and of the epoch expressed in wood, stone, or brick. Fire. After some discussion, it appears now to be the general belief that there has not been within historical times any race of men ignorant of fire. There is certainly a wide chasm between civilized and uncivilized men, but none so deep as would imply the absence of fire, the use of fire being the great practical distinction between man and brute. We hare to avoid the double danger of supposing uncivilized tribes to be either too intelligent or too stupid. Indeed, if it had not been for fire, mankind could not possibly have become what it is. It is a theory amongst architects, to whose relations towards ethnology we have just adverted, that the first buildings of men, inhabitants of caves, holes, or trees, were not dwellings for themselves, but simple hearth-places protected by reed walls and some thatching against wind and rain. They believe that on this model of a prytaneum, or abode of the firegod, the abode of his priest, and then of the kings and the chiefs of noble families, were successively erected, and that it is only in later times that all families obtained a fire-place of their own. We have spoken of tools and weapons ; their history and that of modern industry are inseparable from the history of fire. Everywhere the stone celts and arrows were alleged imitations of thunderbolts, and are still believed by many villagers to have been once hurled down from the skies. Fire is mixed up with whatever men had to tell about things of the earth, of heaven, or of hell. Fire lore is a science by itself. Commerce and Industry. Slaves have been, perhaps, the first commodity purchased by the pastoral from the hunting and warlike tribes. Lindensclimidt and Peschel have reacted against the current belief that the tools and implements of bronze and steel had been manufactured in the countries where they have been found. They note that commerce already existed in the earliest ages of which we have any notice. It must have been by barter that the cave dwellers of Perigord, in the reindeer period, obtained rock crystals, Atlantic shells, and the horns of the Polish saiga antelope. The Phoenicians, and their descendants the Carthaginians, were attracted to and retained in Spain bv the quarrying of silver ore. Tin has promoted civilization vrn. 78