Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/193

Rh his brethren to cast away the flint and steel of the white man, and to return to the fire-sticks of their ancestors, and of the Chinese sage desiring to discard the art of writing, and return to the ancestral method of record by knotted cords, but such things are rather talked of than done.

Cases of savage arts being superseded by a higher state of civilization are common enough. An African guide, or an Australian, will know a man by his footmark, while we hardly know what a footmark is like; at least, nine Englishmen out of ten of the shoe-wearing classes will not know that the footprints in the Mexican picture-writings, as copied in Fig. 16, are true to nature, till they have looked at the print of a wet foot on a board or a flagstone. Captain Burton remarked, on his road to the great Salt Lake, that bones and skulls of cattle were left lying scattered about, though travellers are often put to great straits for fuel. The Gauchos of South America know better, for when they kill a beast on a journey, they use the bones as fuel to cook the flesh, as the Scythians did in the time of Herodotus; living in a country wanting wood, they made a fire of the bones of the beasts sacrificed, and boiled the flesh over it in a kettle, or if that were not forthcoming, in the paunch of the animal itself, "and thus the ox boils himself, and the other victims each the like."

It sometimes happens that degeneration is caused by conquest, when the conquering race is in anything at a lower level than