Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/138

 destruction or decay, and the study of lifeless relics is more difficult than that of living forms.

As the work which includes Mr. Howitt's monograph is one of the most recent which deals with Australian customs, it is necessary to allude briefly to one or two points on which he dwells. He and his fellow-worker (Mr. Fison) in the "Kamilaroi and Kurnai" have expended much pains in an attempt to prove that the Australian customs confirm the theory that man evolved from a brutal state the differences which now distinguish him from brutes. This is not the place in which to deal with the general question whether the Creator gave to man reason and speech when He placed him upon the earth. On that question elaborate works exist in many languages; and some axioms have been laid down which experience does not confirm. "Speech," said Humboldt, "is the necessary condition of the thought of the individual." Yet a deaf mute Australian was, within the author's own knowledge, expert in all the arts necessary to his condition. If set down wheresoever the want of water would not cause speedy death from thirst, he could wrest ample living from the land in a manner which would have astonished learned linguists. But he had learned wisdom from his tribe. He had caught, in the words of Max Müller, "something of the rational behaviour of his neighbours," by whom he was called "the stupid one." But without passing that Rubicon of language which Max Müller declares no brutes can cross, he was far removed from their sphere. There seems no need, and no justification, for putting forward the Australian as autochthonous, and progressive to the state in which he was found in the eighteenth century.

There are problems in Europe which might better engage the attention of those who think that man evolves his own faculties. Ample literary evidence is at hand, and yet those problems are not solved in the sense demanded by believers in the capability of men to augment their mental powers. None will dare to assert that since the days of