Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/183

Rh, and to ally the charms and pleasures of a nomade with the advantages of a sedentary life."

Such coincidences as these, when found in distant regions between whose inhabitants no intercourse is known to have taken place, are not to be lightly used as historical evidence of connexion. It is safest to ascribe them to independent invention, unless the coincidence passes the limits of ordinary probability. Ancient as the art of putting in false teeth is in the Old World, it would scarcely be thought to affect the originality of the same practice in Quito, where a skeleton has been found with false teeth secured to the cheek-bone by a gold wire, nor does the discovery in Egypt of mummies with teeth stopped with gold, appear to have any historical connexion with the same contrivance among ourselves. Thus, too, the Australians were in the habit of cooking fish and pieces of meat in hot sand, each tied up in a sheet of bark, and this is called yudarn dookoon, or "tying-up cooking," but it does not follow that they had learnt from Europe the art of dressing fish en papillote.

Perhaps the occurrence of that very civilized instrument, the fork for eating meat with, in the Fiji Islands, is to be accounted for by considering it to have been independently invented there. The Greeks and Romans do not appear to have used forks in eating, and they are said not to have been introduced in England from the South of Europe, till the beginning of the seventeenth century. At any rate, Hakluyt thus translates, in 1598, a remark made by Galeotto Perera, concerning the use of chop- sticks in China;—"they feede with two sticks, refraining from touching their meate with their hands, even as we do with forkes;" but he finds it necessary to put a note in the margin, "We, that is the Italians and Spaniards." How long forks had been used in the South of Europe, and where they originally came from, does not seem clear, but there is a remark to the purpose in William of Ruysbruck's description of the manners