and that various
tribes far more centrally and advantageously placed, as, for instance,
those in Brazil, are really inferior to them in the scale of culture.
Again, his statement that "in Africa there appear to be no traces of any
time when the natives were not acquainted with the use of iron," is met
by the fact that from the Nile Valley to the Cape of Good Hope we find,
wherever examination has been made, the same early stone implements
which in all other parts of the world precede the use of iron, some of
which would not have been made had their makers possessed iron. The
duke also tried to show that there were no distinctive epochs of stone,
bronze, and iron, by adducing the fact that some stone implements are
found even in some high civilizations. This is indeed a fact. We find
some few European peasants to-day using stone mallet-heads; but
this proves simply that the old stone mallet-heads have survived as
implements cheap and effective.

The argument from Comparative Ethnology in support of the view that the
tendency of mankind is upward has received strength from many sources.
Comparative Philology shows that in the less civilized, barbarous, and
savage races childish forms of speech prevail--frequent reduplications
and the like, of which we have survivals in the later and even in the
most highly developed languages. In various languages, too, we find
relics of ancient modes of thought in the simplest words and expressions
used for arithmetical calculations. Words and phrases for this purpose
are frequently found to be derived from the words for hands, feet,
fingers, and toes, just as clearly as in our own language some of
our simplest measures of length are shown by their names to have been
measures of parts of the human body, as the cubit, the foot, and the
like, and therefore to date from a time when exactness was not required.
To add another out of many examples, it is found to-day that various
rude nations go through the simplest arithmetical processes by means
of pebbles. Into our own language, through the Latin, has come a word
showing that our distant progenitors reckoned in this way: the word
CALCULATE gives us an absolute proof of this. According to the theory
of the Duke of Argyll, men ages ago used pebbles (CALCULI) in performing
the simplest arithmetical calculations because we to-day "CALCULATE." No
reduction to absurdity could be more thorough. The simple fact must be
that we "calculate" because