roken off short; it has landed us on the brink of a gulf
which looks impassable. But the case is not so hopeless as it appears.
True, we cannot investigate the beliefs of prehistoric ages directly,
but the comparative method of research may furnish us with the means of
studying them indirectly; it may hold up to us a mirror in which, if we
do not see the originals, we may perhaps contemplate their reflections.
For a comparative study of the various races of mankind demonstrates, or
at least renders it highly probable, that humanity has everywhere
started at an exceedingly low level of culture, a level far beneath that
of the lowest existing savages, and that from this humble beginning all
the various races of men have gradually progressed upward at different
rates, some faster and some slower, till they have attained the
particular stage which each of them occupies at the present time.

[Sidenote: Hence the need of studying the beliefs and customs of
savages, if we are to understand the evolution of culture in general.]

If this conclusion is correct, the various stages of savagery and
barbarism on which many tribes and peoples now stand represent, broadly
speaking, so many degrees of retarded social and intellectual
development, they correspond to similar stages which the ancestors of
the civilised races may be supposed to have passed through at more or
less remote periods of their history. Thus when we arrange all the known
peoples of the world according to the degree of their savagery or
civilisation in a graduated scale of culture, we obtain not merely a
comparative view of their relative positions in the scale, but also in
some measure an historical record of the genetic development of culture
from a very early time down to the present day. Hence a study of the
savage and barbarous races of mankind is of the greatest importance for
a full understanding of the beliefs and practices, whether religious,
social, moral, or political, of the most civilised races, including our
own, since it is practically certain that a large part of these beliefs
and practices originated with our savage ancestors, and has been
inherited by us from them, with more or less of modification, through a
long line of intermediate generations.

[Sidenote: The need is all the more urgent because savages are rapidly
disappearing or being transformed.]

That is why the study of existing savages at the present day engrosses
so much of the attent