Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/200

190 given me, "the warp consists of strands of un-twisted fibre (hemp?) bound together at intervals of about an inch apart by nearly similar strands 'wattled in' among them." The next specimen (Fig. 18), from Nieder-Wyl, shows a great advance, for "the warp consists of twisted string, and the woof of a finer thread also twisted." The third specimen is a piece of ordinary plain weaving. Now all these things, European, Polynesian, and American, seem to be in their natural and reasonable places in a progress upward, but it is hard to imagine a people, under any combination of circumstances, dropping down from the art of weaving, to adopt a more tedious and less profitable way of working up the fibre which it had cost them so much trouble to prepare; knowing the better art, and deliberately devoting their material and time to practising the worse. So it is a very reasonable and natural thing, that tribes who had been used to twist their thread by hand, should sometimes overcome their dislike to change, and adopt the spindle when they saw it in use; or such a tribe might be supposed capable of inventing it; but the going back from the spindle to hand-twisting is a thing scarcely conceivable. A spindle is made too easily by anyone who has once caught the idea of it; a stick and a bit of something heavy for a whorl is the whole machine. Not many months ago, an old lady was seen in the isle of Islay, comfortably spinning her flax with a spindle, which spindle was simply a bit of stick with a potato stuck on the end of it.

To conclude, the want of evidence leaves us as yet much in the dark as to the share which decline in civilization may have had in bringing the lower races into the state in which we find them. But perhaps this difficulty rather affects the history of particular tribes, than the history of Culture as a whole. To judge from experience, it would seem that the world, when it has once got a firm grasp of new knowledge or a new art, is very loth to lose it altogether, especially when it relates to matters important to man in general, for the conduct of his daily life,