Muller is
right in _his_ remark on language. The Australian blacks have been men
as long as the Prussian nobility. Their language has had time to outgrow
'childish pranks,' but apparently it has not made use of its
opportunities, according to our critic. Does he know why?

One need not reply to the charge that anthropologists, if they are meant,
regard modern savages 'as just evolved from the earth, or the sky,' or
from monkeys (i. 197). 'Savages have a far-stretching unknown history
behind them.' 'The past of savages, I say, must have been a long past.'
{121} So, once more, the Nemesis of De Brosses fails to touch me--and,
of course, to touch more learned anthropologists.

There is yet another Nemesis--the postulate that Aryans and Semites, or
rather their ancestors, must have passed through the savage state. Dr.
Tylor writes:--'So far as history is to be our criterion, progression is
primary and degradation secondary. _Culture must be gained before it can
be lost_.' Now a person who has not gained what Dr. Tylor calls
'culture' (_not_ in Mr. Arnold's sense) is a man without tools,
instruments, or clothes. He is certainly, so far, like a savage; is very
much lower in 'culture' than any race with which we are acquainted. As a
matter of hypothesis, anyone may say that man was born 'with everything
handsome about him.' He has then to account for the savage elements in
Greek myth and rite.

For Us or Against Us?

We now hear that the worst and last penalty paid for De Brosses'
audacious comparison of savage with civilised superstitions is the
postulate that Aryan and Semitic peoples have passed through a stage of
savagery. 'However different the languages, customs and myths, the
colour and the skulls of these modern savages might be from those of
Aryan and Semitic people, the latter must once have passed through the
same stage, must once have been what the negroes of the West Coast of
Africa are to-day. This postulate has not been, and, according to its
very nature, cannot be proved. But the mischief done by acting on such
postulates is still going on, and in several cases it has come to
this--that what in historical religions, such as our own, is known to be
the most modern, the very last outcome, namely, the worship of relics or
a belief in amulets, has been represented as the first necessary step in
the evolution of all religions' (i. 197).

I really do not know who says that the prehistoric a