Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/383

Rh ment of art and science are found among the most unlike races, may be adduced as evidence on the same side, in spite of the constant difficulty in deciding whether any particular development is due to independent invention, or to transmission from some other people to those among whom it is found. For if the similar thing has been produced in two places by independent invention, then, as has just been said, it is direct evidence of similarity of mind. And on the other hand, if it was carried from the one place to the other, or from a third to both, by mere transmission from people to people, then the smallness of the change it has suffered in transplanting is still evidence of the like nature of the soil wherever it is found.

Considered both from this and other points of view, this uniform development of the lower civilization is a matter of great interest. The state of things which is found is not indeed that one race does or knows exactly what another race does or knows, but that similar stages of development recur in different times and places. There is reason to suppose that our ancestors in remote times made fire with a machine much like that of the modern Esquimaux, and at a far later date they used the bow and arrow, as so many savage tribes do still. The foregoing chapters treating of the history of some early arts, of the practice of sorcery, of curious customs and superstitions, are indeed full of instances of the recurrence of like phenomena in the remotest regions of the world. We might reasonably expect that men of like minds, when placed under widely different circumstances of country, climate, vegetable and animal life, and so forth, should develop very various phenomena of civilization, and we even know by evidence that they actually do so; but nevertheless it strikingly illustrates the extent of mental uniformity among mankind to notice that it is really difficult to find, among a list of twenty items of art or knowledge, custom or superstition, taken at random from a description of any uncivilized race, a single one to which something closely analogous may not be found elsewhere among some other race, unlike the first in physical characters, and living thousands of miles off. It is taking a somewhat extreme case to put the Australians to such a test, for they are perhaps the most peculiar of the lower varie-