Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/36

26 necessarily imply barbarism, for even peoples so highly civilized as the Aztecs and the Peruvians under the Incas, although using ornaments of gold and silver, had not yet learned the art of working in iron, but were still in the bronze period, which in Europe preceded the Glacial epoch. It is remarkable that the Negritos, with rare exceptions, have never attained the slightest degree of artistic excellence in shaping the materials at their command. Their stone hatchets are rudely chipped, instead of being ground and polished like those of the Papuans and Polynesians, and they do not know how to bore a hole through a stone for the insertion of a helve or handle. The same lack of skill is shown in making instruments out of various materials, the ugly wooden clubs, the clumsy and ill-proportioned shields, and the baskets roughly woven out of reeds. There is no evidence of taste in the form or of delicate fancy in the ornamentation of their work, and even when their sole aim is to beautify their persons, as in the painful tattoo, they succeed only in dis-disfiguring the back and breast with deep, straight gashes and hideous scars. Their occasional attempts to draw figures of men or animals are worse than the crude and awkward scrawlings of a schoolboy on a slate, and consist merely of straight lines extending in different directions and representing arms and legs. Like the palæeolithic man of Europe, they have no knowledge of pottery, and have never made earthenware vessels in which to cook food, but roast their meat on hot stones. Only in one respect are they in advance of the European cave men, namely, in the possession of a domestic animal, the dingo, whereas the dog does not appear as the companion of man in Europe until the new stone age.

The Australians are nomads, living by the chase and wandering from place to place in search of game; they have neither cattle nor horses, nor any kind of draught or riding animals. The care of flocks and herds, and especially the ownership of land and the cultivation of the soil, not only presuppose but also promote intellectual culture. The man who plants trees and sows seed, and waits for the ripening of the fruit and the reaping of the harvest, watches the change of seasons, observes meteorological conditions, acquires habits of reflection and calculation, looks to the future, forms plans which it often takes years to realize, acts with foresight, becomes prudent in preparing for exigencies, and thrifty in the management of his affairs. Husbandry is therefore one of the earliest and most effective agents of civilization. The first agriculturist was a Prometheus, an inspirer of "forethought," as the name implies, who fired the human forms of clay with higher aims and aspirations, lifted the race out of primitive brutism, and opened to it a new and illimitable career of progress. The Australian tribes have never