ifferent Kaffir tribes.

In a similar manner Professor Flint, of Edinburgh, arraigns Sir John
Lubbock and certain other advocates of the atheistic theory concerning
savage tribes, for the partiality of their selection of testimony and
for the superficial evidence which they accept when favorable to their
theories. After reviewing Lubbock's wholesale quotations concerning the
Indian tribes of Brazil, he says, "These are Sir John Lubbock's
instances from South American tribes. But I find that they are all
either erroneous or insufficiently established." And he gives many
counter-proofs. "It will never do," he says, "to believe such sweeping
statements--sweeping negatives--merely because they happen to be
printed." Farther on he adds: "But I think that he (Lubbock) might have
told us that Humboldt, whose travels in South America were so extensive,
whose explorations were so varied, scientific, and successful, and who
certainly was uninfluenced by traditional theological beliefs, _found no
tribes and peoples without a religion_; and that Prince Max von Neuwied
tells us that in all his many and wide wanderings in Brazil he had found
no tribes the members of which did not give manifest signs of religious
feelings."

In the appendix of the book from which these extracts are made,
Professor Flint says: "No one, I think, who has not a theory to maintain
can consider the circumstances in which most of the Brazilian Indian
tribes are placed without coming to the conclusion that they must have
sunk from a higher intellectual and religious level."

I have dwelt at length upon these arraignments of the careless and
biased utterances of supposed scientists, because it is so much the
fashion of our times to support certain theories of anthropology by
massing the supposed evidences of man's degradation found, even now, in
the environments of savage life. Many readers, apparently dazed by the
vast accumulation of indiscriminate and heterogeneous statements which
they have no time to examine, yield an easy and blind assent, based
either on the supposed wisdom of the writer or upon the fact that so
many others believe, and they imagine that no little courage is required
on their part to risk the loss of intellectual caste. A vast amount of
the thinking of our age, although it claims to be scientific, is really
a matter of simple faith--faith in the opinions and dicta of
distinguished leaders. And under such circumstances, is it not our