Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/390

380 savage tribes of modern times. It is useful to work back to this point, at least as a temporary resting-place in the argument, seeing that a state of things really known to exist is generally more convenient to reason upon than a purely theoretical one. But if we may judge that the present condition of savage tribes is the complex result of not only a long but an eventful history, in which development of culture may have been more or less interfered with by degradation caused by war, disease, oppression, and other mishaps, it does not seem likely that any tribe known to modern observers should be anything like a fair re- presentative of primary conditions. Still, positive evidence of anything lower than the known state of savages is scarce in the extreme. That the men whose tools and weapons are found in the Drift Beds, in the Bone Caves, and in the Shell-Heaps of Denmark, were not in the habit of grinding the edges of any of their stone implements, may be instanced as evidence of a singularly low condition of one of the useful arts. The general character of this lowest division of the Stone Age, as exemplified among tribes of remote præ-historic times, seems to place their state of civilization below that recorded among tribes known to travellers or historians.

To turn to a very different department of culture, some of the facts belonging to the history of custom and superstition may for the last time be referred to, as perhaps having their common root in a mental condition underlying anything to be met with now. We have seen prevalent among savages and barbarians a state of mind which helps us to account for the whole business of Magic, including the arts of omen-taking by astrology and other kinds of divination, and of bewitching by means of images and names of persons, with its counter-system of prevention and cure by sympathy, the last including the quaintly instructive custom of the couvade. But it looks as though even savages have but the remains of this magical state of mind inherited from ancestors of yet lower culture, and that they have begun to outgrow it, as the civilized world has more fully done. The early fusion of objective and subjective relations in the mind, of the effects of which in superstitious practices handed down from age to age so much has been said in this book, may perhaps not