Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/387

Rh ing upon the history of civilization and on the history of mankind, evidence which shows that such movements as have introduced guns, axes, hooks, into America in historic times, have also taken place in unhistoric times among tribes whose ancestors have left them no chronicles of past ages. Thus the appearing of the Malay smelting-furnace in Madagascar, and of the outrigger canoe in East Australia and the Andaman Islands, may he appealed to as evidence of historical connexion. It is possible that the Ethnographer may some day feel himself justified in giving to this kind of argument a far wider range. He may not perhaps venture on extreme arguments, such, for instance, as to claim for the bow and arrow a common origin wherever it is found, that is, over the whole world with perhaps no exception but part of Polynesia, and part or the whole of Australia. Yet, noticing that the distribution of the potter's art in North America is not sporadic, as if a tribe here and a tribe there had wanted it and invented it, but that it rises northwards in a compact field from Mexico among the tribes East of the Rocky Mountains, he may more forcibly argue that it spread from a single source, and is at once a result and a proof of the transmission of civilization. Indeed, it seems as though the recurrence of similar groups in the inventories of instruments and works of the lower races, so remarkable both in the presence of like things and the comparative absence of unlike ones, might come to supply, in a more advanced state of Ethnography, the materials for an indefinite series of arguments bearing on the early history of man.

It is not to be denied, however, that there is usually a large element of uncertainty in inferences of this kind taken alone, and it is only in special cases that summary generalizations from such evidence can as yet be admitted. Indeed, its proper place is rather as accompanying the argument from language, mythology, and customs, than as standing by itself. Thus the appearance, just referred to, of the Malay blast-furnace in Madagascar has to be viewed in connexion with the affinity in language between Madagascar and the islands of the Eastern Archipelago. Putting the two things together, we may assume that the connexion with Madagascar dates from a time since