Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/386

376 "Images and Names," which explains the arts of Magic as the effects of an early mental condition petrified into a series of mystic observances carried up into the midst of a higher culture, is indeed in the strongest opposition to the view strongly advocated by degenerationists, that these superstitious practices are mutilated remnants of a high system of belief which prevailed in former times. So far as may be judged from the scanty and defective evidence which has as yet been brought forward, I venture to think the most reasonable opinion to be that the course of development of the lower civilization has been on the whole in a forward direction, though interfered with occasionally and locally by the results of degrading and destroying influences.

Granting the existence of this onward movement in the lower levels of art and science, the question then arises, how any particular piece of skill or knowledge has come into any particular place where it is found. Three ways are open, independent invention, inheritance from ancestors in a distant region, trans- mission from one race to another; but between these three ways the choice is commonly a difficult one. Sometimes, indeed, the first is evidently to be preferred. Thus, though the floating gardens of Mexico and Cashmere are very similar devices, it seems more likely that the Mexican chinampa was invented on the spot than that the idea of it was imported from a distant region. Though the wattled cloth of the Swiss lake-dwellings is so similar in principle to that of New Zealand, it is much easier to suppose it the result of separate invention than of historical connexion. Though both the Egyptians and Chinese came upon the expedient of making the picture of an object stand for the sound which was the name of that object, there is no reason to doubt their having done so independently.

But the more difficult it is to account for observed facts in this way, and the more necessary it becomes to have recourse to theories of inheritance or transmission to explain them, the greater is their value in the eyes of the Ethnologist. Wherever he can judge that the existence of similar phenomena in the culture of distant peoples cannot be fairly accounted for, except by supposing that there has been a connexion by blood or by intercourse between them, then he has before him evidence bear-