Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/743

Rh economy, and the like; and, secondly, it was shown as a simple matter of fact that various savage and barbarous tribes had raised themselves by a development of means which no one from outside could have taught them; as in the cultivation and improvement of various indigenous plants, such as the potato and Indian corn among the Indians of North America; in the domestication of various animals peculiar to their own regions, such as the llama among the Indians of South America; in the making of sundry fabrics out of materials and by processes not found among other nations, such as the bark cloth of the Polynesians, and in the development of weapons peculiar to sundry localities, but known in no others; such as the boomerang in Australia.

Most effective in bringing out the truth were such works as those of Sir John Lubbock and Tylor; and so conclusive were they, that the arguments of Whately were given up as untenable by the other of the two great champions above referred to, and an attempt was made by him to form the diminishing number of thinking men supporting the old theological view on a new line of defense.

This second champion, the Duke of Argyll, was a man of much knowledge and strong powers in debate, whose high moral sense was amply shown in his adhesion to the side of the American Union in the struggle against disunion and slavery, despite the overwhelming majority against him in the high aristocracy to which he belongs. As an honest man and close thinker, the duke was obliged to give up completely the theological view of the antiquity of man. The whole biblical chronology as held by the universal Church, "always, everywhere, and by all," he sacrificed, and gave all his powers in this field to support the theory of "the fall." Noblesse oblige; the duke and his ancestors had been for centuries the chief pillars of the Church of Scotland, and it was too much to expect that he could break away from a tenet which forms really its "chief corner-stone."

Acknowledging the weakness and insufficiency of Archbishop Whately's argument, the duke took the ground that the lower, barbarous, savage, brutal races were the remains of civilized races which, in the struggle for existence, had been pushed and driven off to remote and inclement parts of the earth where the conditions necessary to a continuance in their early civilization were absent; that, therefore, the descendants of primeval, civilized men degenerated and sank in the scale of culture. To use his own words, the weaker races were "driven by the stronger to the woods and rocks," so that they became "mere outcasts of the human race."

In answer to this, while it was conceded, first, that there have been examples of weaker tribes sinking in the scale of culture