m. Yet if there were a primitive civilisation these
things MUST have been forgotten, for tribes can be found in every
degree of ignorance, and every grade of knowledge as to pottery, as to
the metals, as to the means of comfort, as to the instruments of war.
And what is more, these savages have not failed from stupidity; they
are, in various degrees of originality, inventive about these matters.
You cannot trace the roots of an old perfect system variously maimed
and variously dying; you cannot find it, as you find the trace of the
Latin language in the mediaeval dialects. On the contrary, you find it
beginning--as new scientific discoveries and inventions now begin--here
a little and there a little, the same thing half-done in various
half-ways, and so as no one who knew the best way would ever have
begun. An idea used to prevail that bows and arrows were the 'primitive
weapons'--the weapons of universal savages; but modern science has made
a table,[3] and some savages have them and some have not, and some have
substitutes of one sort and some have substitutes of another--several
of these substitutes being like the 'boomerang,' so much more difficult
to hit on or to use than the bow, as well as so much less effectual.
And not only may the miscellaneous races of the world be justly
described as being upon various edges of industrial civilisation,
approaching it by various sides, and falling short of it in various
particulars, but the moment they see the real thing they know how to
use it as well, or better, than civilised man. The South American uses
the horse which the European brought better than the European. Many
races use the rifle--the especial and very complicated weapon of
civilised man--better, upon an average, than he can use it. The savage
with simple tools--tools he appreciates--is like a child, quick to
learn, not like an old man, who has once forgotten and who cannot
acquire again. Again, if there had been an excellent aboriginal
civilisation in Australia and America, where, botanists and zoologists,
ask, are its vestiges? If these savages did care to cultivate wheat,
where is the wild wheat gone which their abandoned culture must have
left? if they did give up using good domestic animals, what has become
of the wild ones which would, according to all natural laws, have
sprung up out of them? This much is certain, that the domestic animals
of Europe have, since what may be called the discovery of the WORLD