Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/196

186 wondrous creatures when foreigners bring them into their country. They listen with wonder to their old men's stories of life in the steppes, of the great herds and the ceaseless wanderings over the vast plains, while they themselves dwell in huts of reeds, and carry their household goods on their backs when they have to move to a new fishing place. The miserable "Digger Indians" of North America are in part Shoshonees or Snake Indians, who were brought down to their present state by their enemies the Blackfeet, who got guns from the Hudson's Bay Company, and thus conquered the Snakes, and took away their hunting grounds. They lead a wandering life, lurking among hills and crags, slinking from the sight of whites and Indians, and subsisting chiefly on wild roots and fish, and such game as so helpless a race is able to get. They are lean and abject-looking creatures, deserving the name of gens de pitié given them by the French trappers, and they have been driven to abandon arts which they possessed in their more fortunate days, such as riding, and apparently even hut-building; but how far their degradation has brought with it decline in other parts of their former culture, it is not easy to say.

Here, then, we have cases of material evidence which, as we happen to have other means of knowing, ought to be treated as recording decline. The sculptures and temples of Central America are the work of the ancestors of the present Indians, though if history, tradition, and transitional work had all perished, it would hardly be thought so. The gardening of the Bakalahari, if the account of their origin is to be received, is a proof, not of an art gained, but of a higher level of civilization for the most part lost.

It thus appears that, in the abstract, when there is found among a low tribe an art or a piece of knowledge which seems above their average level, three ways are open by which its occurrence may be explained. It may have been invented at home, it may have been imported from abroad, or it may be a relic of a higher condition which has mostly suffered degradation,