We have seen that, closely connected with the main lines of

investigation in archaeology and anthropology, there were other

researches throwing much light on the entire subject.  In a

previous chapter we saw especially that Lafitau and Jussieu were

among the first to collect and compare facts bearing on the

natural history of man, gathered by travellers in various parts

of the earth, thus laying foundations for the science of

comparative ethnology.  It was soon seen that ethnology had most

important bearings upon the question of the material,

intellectual, moral, and religious evolution of the human race;

in every civilized nation, therefore, appeared scholars who began

to study the characteristics of various groups of men as

ascertained from travellers, and to compare the results thus

gained with each other and with those obtained by archaeology.



Thus, more and more clear became the evidences that the tendency

of the race has been upward from low beginnings.  It was found

that groups of men still existed possessing characteristics of

those in the early periods of development to whom the drift and

caves and shell-heaps and pile-dwellings bear witness; groups of

men using many of the same implements and weapons, building their

houses in the same way, seeking their food by the same means,

enjoying the same amusements, and going through the same general

stages of culture; some being in a condition corresponding to

the earlier, some to the later, of those early periods.



From all sides thus came evidence that we have still upon the

earth examples of all the main stages in the development of human

civilization; that from the period when man appears little above

the brutes, and with little if any religion in any accepted sense

of the word, these examples can be arranged in an ascending

series leading to the highest planes which humanity has reached;

that philosophic observers may among these examples study

existing beliefs, usages, and institutions back through earlier

and earlier forms, until, as a rule, the whole evolution can be

easily divined if not fully seen.  Moreover, the basis of the

whole structure became more and more clear:  the fact that "the

lines of intelligence have always been what they are, and have

always operated as they do now; that man has progressed from the

simple to the complex, from the particular to the general."



As this evidence from ethnology became more and more strong, its

significance to theology aroused attention, and naturally most

determined efforts were made to break its force.  On the

Continent the two great champions of the Church in this field

were De Maistre and De Bonald; but the two attempts which may be

especially recalled as the most influential among

English-speaking peoples were those of Whately, Archbishop of

Dublin, and the Duke of Argyll.



First in the combat against these new deductions of science was

Whately.  He was a strong man, whose breadth of thought and

liberality in practice deserve all honour; but these very

qualities drew upon him the distrust of his orthodox brethren;

and, while his writings were powerful in the first half of the

present century to break down many bulwarks of unreason, he seems

to have been constantly in fear of losing touch with the Church,

and therefore to have promptly attacked some scientific

reasonings, which, had he been a layman, not holding a brief for

the Church, he would probably have studied with more care and

less prejudice.  He was not slow to see the deeper significance

of archaeology and ethnology in their relations to the

theological conception of "the Fall," and he set the battle in

array against them.



His contention was, to use his own words, that "no community ever

did or ever can emerge unassisted by external helps from a state

of utter barbarism into anything that can be called

civilization"; and that, in short, all imperfectly civilized,

barbarous, and savage races are but fallen descendants of races

more fully civilized.  This view was urged with his usual

ingenuity and vigour, but the facts proved too strong for him:

they made it clear, first, that many races were without simple

possessions, instruments, and arts which never, probably, could

have been lost if once acquired--as, for example, pottery, the

bow for shooting, various domesticated animals, spinning, the

simplest principles of agriculture, household economy, and the

like; and, secondly, it was shown as a simple matter of fact

that various savage and barbarous tribes HAD raised themselves by

a development of means which no one from outside could have

taught them; as in the cultivation and improvement of various

indigenous plants, such as the potato and Indian corn among the

Indians of North America; in the domestication of various animals

peculiar to their own regions, such as the llama among the

Indians of south America; in the making of sundry fabrics out of

materials and by processes not found among other nations, such as

the bark cloth of the Polynesians; and in the development of

weapons peculiar to sundry localities, but known in no others,

such as the boomerang in Australia.



Most effective in bringing out the truth were such works as those

of Sir John Lubbock and Tylor; and so conclusive were they that

the arguments of Whately were given up as untenable by the other

of the two great champions above referred to, and an attempt was

made by him to form the diminishing number of thinking men

supporting the old theological view on a new line of defence.



This second champion, the Duke of Argyll, was a man of wide

knowledge and strong powers in debate, whose high moral sense was

amply shown in his adhesion to the side of the American Union in

the struggle against disunion and slavery, despite the

overwhelming majority against him in the high aristocracy to

which he belonged.  As an honest man and close thinker, the duke

was obliged to give up completely the theological view of the

antiquity of man.  The whole biblical chronology as held by the

universal Church, "always, everywhere, and by all," he

sacrificed, and gave all his powers in this field to support the

theory of "the Fall."  Noblesse oblige:  the duke and his

ancestors had been for centuries the chief pillars of the Church

of Scotland, and it was too much to expect that he could break

away from a tenet which forms really its "chief cornerstone."



Acknowledging the insufficiency of Archbishop Whately's argument,

the duke took the ground that the lower, barbarous, savage,

brutal races were the remains of civilized races which, in the

struggle for existence, had been pushed and driven off to remote

and inclement parts of the earth, where the conditions necessary

to a continuance in their early civilization were absent; that,

therefore, the descendants of primeval, civilized men degenerated

and sank in the scale of culture.  To use his own words, the

weaker races were "driven by the stronger to the woods and

rocks," so that they became "mere outcasts of the human race."



In answer to this, while it was conceded, first, that there have

been examples of weaker tribes sinking in the scale of culture

after escaping from the stronger into regions unfavourable to

civilization, and, secondly, that many powerful nations have

declined and decayed, it was shown that the men in the most

remote and unfavourable regions have not always been the lowest

in the scale; that men have been frequently found "among the

woods and rocks" in a higher state of civilization than on the

fertile plains, such examples being cited as Mexico, Peru, and

even Scotland; and that, while there were many examples of

special and local decline, overwhelming masses of facts point to

progress as a rule.



The improbability, not to say impossibility, of many of the

conclusions arrived at by the duke appeared more and more

strongly as more became known of the lower tribes of mankind.  It

was necessary on his theory to suppose many things which our

knowledge of the human race absolutely forbids us to believe:

for example, it was necessary to suppose that the Australians or

New Zealanders, having once possessed so simple and convenient an

art as that of the potter, had lost every trace of it; and that

the same tribes, having once had so simple a means of saving

labour as the spindle or small stick weighted at one end for

spinning, had given it up and gone back to twisting threads with

the hand. In fact, it was necessary to suppose that one of the

main occupations of man from "the beginning" had been the

forgetting of simple methods, processes, and implements which all

experience in the actual world teaches us are never entirely

forgotten by peoples who have once acquired them.



Some leading arguments of the duke were overthrown by simple

statements of fact.  Thus, his instance of the Eskimo as pushed

to the verge of habitable America, and therefore living in the

lowest depths of savagery, which, even if it were true, by no

means proved a general rule, was deprived of its force by the

simple fact that the Eskimos are by no means the lowest race on

the American continent, 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

our remote ancestors used pebbles in their arithmetic.



Comparative Literature and Folklore also show among peoples of a

low culture to-day childish modes of viewing nature, and childish

ways of expressing the relations of man to nature, such as

clearly survive from a remote ancestry; noteworthy among these

are the beliefs in witches and fairies, and multitudes of popular

and poetic expressions in the most civilized nations.



So,too, Comparative Ethnography, the basis of Ethnology, shows in

contemporary barbarians and savages a childish love of playthings

and games, of which we have many survivals.



All these facts, which were at first unobserved or observed as

matters of no significance, have been brought into connection

with a fact in biology acknowledged alike by all important

schools; by Agassiz on one hand and by Darwin on the

other--namely, as stated by Agassiz, that "the young states of

each species and group resemble older forms of the same group,"

or, as stated by Darwin, that "in two or more groups of animals,

however much they may at first differ from each other in

structure and habits, if they pass through closely similar

embryonic stages, we may feel almost assured that they have

descended from the same parent form, and are therefore closely

related."[194]



[194] For the stone forms given to early bronze axes, etc., see

Nilsson, Primitive Inhabitants of Scandanavia, London, 1868,

Lubbock's Introduction, p. 31; and for plates, see Lubbock's

Prehistoric Man, chap. ii; also Cartailhac, Les Ages

Prehistoriques de l'Espagne et du Portugal, p. 227. Also Keller,

Lake Dwellings; also Troyon, Habitations Lacustres; also Boyd

Dawkins, Early Man in Great Britain, p. 191; also Lubbock, p. 6;

also Lyell, Antiquity of Man,chap. ii. For the cranogs, etc., in

the north of Europe, see Munro, Ancient Scottish Lake Dwellings,

Edinburgh, 1882. For mounds and greater stone constructions in

the extreme south of Europe, see Cartailhac's work on Spain and

Portugal above cited, part iii, chap. iii. For the source of Mr.

Southall's contention, see Brugsch, Egypt of the Pharoahs. For

the two sides of the question whether in the lower grades of

savagery there is really any recognition of a superior power, or

anything which can be called, in any accepted sense, religion,

compare Quatrefages with Lubbock, in works already cited. For a

striking but rather ad captandum effort to show that there is a

moral and religious sense in the very lowest of Australian

tribes, see one of the discourses of Archbishop Vaughn on Science

and Religion, Baltimore, 1879. For one out of multitiudes of

striking and instructive resemblances in ancient stone implements

and those now in use among sundry savage tribes, see comparison

between old Scandanavian arrowheads and those recently brought

from Tierra del Fuego, in Nilsson, as above, especially in Plate

V. For a brief and admirable statement of the arguments on both

sides, see Sir J. Lubbock's Dundee paper, given in the appendix

to the American edition of his Origin of Civilization, etc. For


the general argument referred to between Whately and the Duke of

Argyll on one side, and Lubbock on the other, see Lubbock's

Dundee paper as above cited; Tylor, Early History of Mankind,

especially p. 193; and the Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, part iv.

For difficulties of savages in arithmetic, see Lubbock, as above,

pp. 459 et seq. For a very temperate and judicial view of the

whole question, see Tylor as above, chaps. vii and xiii. For a

brief summary of the scientific position regarding the stagnation

and deterioration of races, resulting in the statement that such

deterioration "in no way contradicts the theory that civilization

itself is developed from low to high stages," see Tylor,

Anthropology, chap. i. For striking examples of the testimony of

language to upward progress, see Tylor, chap. xii.