Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/651

Rh de la Vega, is a unique example of a blend yielding a historian of the races blended.

Whether due to interbreeding or to mere coexistence, the part of the primitive races in contemporary civilization is being daily aggrandized. The so-called Aryan peoples are shown to be a mere prolongation of the neolithic races. A number of specialists adduce evidence from laws of succession, folklore, archaic customs, and archæological remains to prove that existing British institutions strike their roots down through Teutonic invaders and their Celtic forerunners to races that occupied the soil ages before.

The reactions of the lower indigenous peoples on their conquerors have been of a more spiritual sort. They have been phonographed in the vast literature bequeathed by the navigators and travelers, missionaries, military and naval officers, civil officers, and settlers who have visited or been resident among them. How extensive that literature is will appear from the fact that the bibliography of a single colony with less than sixty years of existence, and less than eight hundred thousand of a population, contains over twelve hundred articles. This great quarry is of incommensurable but unequal value: 1. It is often uncritical. The facts have not been accurately reported, as has been shown in detail of the Tasmanians; or they have been misinterpreted, as when a group of obscene songs have been published as Maori myths; or (as Mr. Taylor has proved) missionaries have imported their own theological beliefs into their accounts of the beliefs of savages. 2. Much of it is unsympathetic. Observers have not imported enough. They have failed to see in these peoples men with feelings and thoughts akin to their own. The savage's fetich worship and the barbarian's Nature worship are far from being the wild absurdities they are sometimes represented to be, but are as rational as the Calvinism and Wordsworthism which are their offspring. The more we know of the lower races, as of the lower animals, the more we discover that all organic Nature was made (as Newton put it) "at one cast" 3. It is not always scientific. There are few travelers like Humboldt or Darwin, few missionaries like Taylor or Callaway, few officials like Schoolcraft, nor in the absence of special researches do even these know what to look for or what questions to ask. Hence races perish or institutions disappear before their secret has been wrung from them. Perverse science is as mischievous as none. A foregone conclusion made of Lewis Morgan's ponderous volume on the classificatory system of Indian relationships a monument of misapplied ingenuity. Led astray by the same Will-o'-the-wisp, two instructed inquirers discovered among the Australian blacks the existence of polygamy on a scale that out-Solomons Solomon. Future researches will be better guided. Twenty years ago the British