n beating on our
shoulders, and good to go out and dig yams, and come home wet, and
see the fire burning in the cave, and sit round it." That sort of remark,
to my mind, throws more light on the anthropology of cave-life than
all the bones and stones that I have helped to dig out of our Mousterian
caves in Jersey. As the stock phrase has it, it is, as far as it goes,
a "human document." The individuality, in the sense of the intimate
self-existence, of the speaker and his group--for, characteristically
enough, he uses the first person plural--is disclosed sufficiently
for our souls to get into touch. We are the nearer to appreciating
human history from the inside.

Some of those students of mankind, therefore, who have been privileged
to live amongst the ruder peoples, and to learn their language well,
and really to be friends with some of them (which is hard, since
friendship implies a certain sense of equality on both sides), should
try their hands at anthropological biography. Anthropology, so far
as it relates to savages, can never rise to the height of the most
illuminating kind of history until this is done.

It ought not to be impossible for an intelligent white man to enter
sympathetically into the mental outlook of the native man of affairs,
the more or less practical and hardheaded legislator and statesman,
if only complete confidence could be established between the two. That
there are men of outstanding individuality who help to make political
history even amongst the rudest peoples is, moreover, hardly to be
doubted. Thus Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, in the introductory chapter
of their work on the Central Australians, state that, after observing
the conduct of a great gathering of the natives, they reached the
opinion that the changes which undoubtedly take place from time to
time in aboriginal custom are by no means wholly of the subconscious
and spontaneous sort, but are in part due also to the influence of
individuals of superior ability. "At this gathering, for example, some
of the oldest men were of no account; but, on the other hand, others
not so old as they were, but more learned in ancient lore or more skilled
in matters of magic, were looked up to by the others, and they it was
who settled everything. It must, however, be understood that we have
no definite proof to bring forward of the actual introduction by this
means of any fundamental change of custom. The only thing that we can
say is that,