ilBBsifeSTGRy-GF jffiS^Sgix??^?^ BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF H«nrg M. Sage 1891 H.qnisi rntn^mQ 3777 3 1924 092 538 184 ■ m Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924092538184 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND PriTited "by thfi BibliograjMsclies Institut, leipzig. A BOSJESMAN FAMILY. THE HISTORY OF MANKIND BY PROFESSOR FRIEDRICH RATZEL TRANSLATED FROM THE SECOND GERMAN EDITION BY A. J. BUTLER, M.A. WITH INTRODUCTION BY E. B. TYLOR, D.C.L., F.R.S. WITH COLOURED PLATES, MAPS, AND ILLUSTRATIONS VOLUME I ILontion MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN CO. 1896 ' ' ' '- ^ ' ' t W [: I 'l Y ^.^^^\%l. INTRODUCTION When the first edition of Ratzel's Volkerkunde was published In 1885-88 it at once took its position as a guide-book to the study of Man and Civilization. To those beginning anthropological work it offered the indispensable outline sketches of the races of mankind, especially of the savage and barbaric peoples who display culture in its earlier stages, thus aiding the great modern nations to understand themselves, to weigh in a just balance their own merits and defects, and even in some measure to forecast from their own development the possibilities of the future. So good a judge as Professor Virchow wrote of the work on its first appearance, that since the time of Prichard and Waitz no such extensive attempt had been made to represent our knowledge of the lower races of mankind, immensely augmented as this has been by the researches of travellers, the exhibition of savages in Europe, and the information opened to the public by the great museums. The present English translation is from the second German edition of 1894-95, revised, and condensed from three to two volumes. Special mention must be made of the illustrations, 1 1 60 in number, which in excellence surpass those which had hitherto come within the range of any work on Man intended for general circulation. These, be it observed, are no mere book- decorations, but a most important part of the apparatus for realising civilization in its successive stages. They offer, in a way which no verbal description can attain to, an introduction and guide to the use of the museum collections on which the Science of Man comes more^and more to deperi^d in working out the tlieor}rorhurrian devglopm'ent. "Wbrlcs^ which combine this material presentation of culture wit h the best desc riptions by observant travellers, promote most the great object of di splaying mankind as related together in Nature through^ its very variation. The Rev. J. G. Wood's Natural History of Man and Dr. Robert Brown's Races of Mankind have in this way done much to promote anthropology. The bodily differences between races can only, it is true, be represented by descriptions and well-chosen portraits, minute physical classification belonging to a region on-ly^ accessible to anatomists. The classification of peoples by their languages can only be illustrated by examples chosen from the grammar and dictionary, so as to make plain the conclusions of comparative philology without the elaborate detail of a linguistic treatise. But a fuller though less technical treatment of the culture-side of human life lies more readily open. The material THE HISTORY OF MANKIND arts of war, subsistence, pleasure, the stages of knowledge, morals, religion, may be so brought to view that a compendium of them, as found among the ruder peoples, may serve not only as a lesson-book for the learner, but as a reference- book for the learned. In our time there has come to the front a special study of human life through such object-lessons as are furnished by the specimens in museums. These things used to r be little more than curiosities belonging to the life of barbarous tribes, itself begin- ning to be recognised as curious and never suspected of being instructive. Nowa- days, it is better understood that they are material for the student " looking before and after." In the collections which enshrine them for perpetual knowledge, they fulfil in two different ways their illustration of the course of culture. In the way which is, and probably always must be, the more usual, all the objects which go to furnish the life of a people are grouped together, each group finding its proper level. Thus in the Ethnographic Galleries of the British Museum, the general ' condition or " altogether " (to use the useful old-fashioned term) of Australians, Polynesians, Negroes, Tartars, presents more or less definite groups of objects in which art and habit have fixed themselves at a co nsisten t level. Where the rooting-stick appears among the Bushmen as a savage implement, we find in Africa an iron hoe (vol. i. pp. 88, 89). The South Sea Islander can sketch a rough map, and ingeniously ties together a little framework of sticks (see vol. i. p. 165) to serve as sailing directions on his voyages across the ocean ; this bears no discreditable comparison to the compass and measured chart of civilized navigation. The group-pictures, which show not only the bodies but the conditions of a rude race, illustrate this stratification of culture in a suggestive if rough educational way. Here in the frontispiece of the first volume the Bushman leans against a rock, which also conveniently supports his knobkerry ; in his hand is the pipe of antelope-horn for smoking hemp ; one child is splitting a bone for marrow with a stone implement (which, however, does not belong to modern times), while another child carries a bull-roarer, as the Berlin street-boys did lately till the police stopped the whirling of this mystic toy ; the wife carries ostrich- eggs in a net, and round her neck are teeth strung as charms, while her glass beads, made probably at Murano, show the beginnings of contact with the civilized world ; the small bow with its quiver of poisoned arrows, and the water-skin which makes life possible in the thirsty desert, fills up the foreground of the picture. Among such rude tribes the simplicity of life is such that from a group like this, or the picture of a farm among the Igorotes of the Philippine Islands (Plate at p. 393), which shows these rude negritos engaged in their various occupations, j something like a real representation of their life as a whole is possible. Mbre advanced states of civilization become too complex for this to be any longer possible. ^ Among barbaric and much more among civilized peoples, a mere trophjT^ ordinary weapons and utensils {e.g. Plate at p. 232) is enough to fill the picture, and life has to be divided into many departments to give even an idea of what useful and artistic objects belong to each. In ethnographic collections, where the INTRODUCTION productions of a tribe or nation are grouped locally or nationally together, the student of culture has before him the record of similar human nature and circumstance working so uniformly as to present in each class of objects evident formative principles, developed in various degrees. He finds, or hopes b y further research to find, in every such class courses of gradual_ invention resembling growth. Thus among the implements of different regions, the withe-bound stone hatchet of the Australian takes an early place in the series among whose later members are the bronze hatchet of Egypt and the steel axe of modern Europe. So among means of literary record, the picture-writing of the American Indian presents a lower form than the mingled pictures and phonetic symbols of ancient Egypt, which again lead on to alphabetic writing. At Oxford, the Pitt-Rivers Collection in the University Museum is devoted to the material evidence of the laws of development of art, custom, and belief, to investigate which by means of specimens brought together from all accessible regions and ages, and arranged in series according to their form and purpose, has been one of the lifelong labours of the founder. The working of such a method may in some degree be shown from the illustrations ojjthe^present work. The Damara bow, though no longer carried as a weapon, retains the purpose of a musical instrument which is gripped by the teeth and the tense bowstring struck with a stick ; other tribes improve this primitive stringed instrument by fastening to the wood a hollow gourd or similar resonator to increase the sound, and from some such stage, by making the bow and resonator in one piece and stretching a series of strings across the bow, there arises the African harp, a typical form representing the primitive harp and lute forms of the world (illustrations of this will be given in the next volume). Not indeed that such progressive improvement is t he sole rule, for degeneration is active also, as when low culture leads to inferior adaptation o f a known type . I t has bee n thought that the rude w ooden crossbow of the Fans of th e Gaboon (see vol. i. p. 86) represents an early rude stage in the development of the weapon, bu t it is on the contrary a feeble copy of the arbalest ca rr ied by the Portuguese o f the sixteenth century, and thus interesting as an example of degeneration. In a work whose value depends so largely on its illustrative pictures, decorative art must be conspicuous. It is well that it should be so, opening out, as it does, an important problem which we are obliged in great measure to deal with empiri- cally from imperfect knowledge of its principles. Even practically, the civilized world has no exclusive possession of the secret of decorative art. There abound in our shops costly things made and sold for little other purpose than to be pretty, which are nevertheless unsatisfactory to the educated eye. On the other hand, savages or barbarians, though looked down upon as of low intelligence, produce objects which allmust admit to show artistic taste. The reader will find proof sufficient of this in the pictures of carvings and mats from Papua and Polynesia (pp. 241, 244, 247, 249, 262). Now what is it that makes some lines beautiful, and one more beautiful than another ? It will be said in answer that beauty of out- line dependFon boldness, firmness, and evident intention in^ drawing, which no doubt THE HISTORY OF MANKIND is partly true, but some lines are stiff and ugly, some flowing and elegant, and again much stiff ornament is admirable, and flowing patterns may flow clumsily. We may respect Hogarth for attempting the problem of the line of beauty, for with fuller knowledge the moderns may succeed where he failed. The more types of tasteful ornamentation in varied styles can be stored in our minds the nearer will be the approach to its understanding. It is encouraging to consider what progress has been made of late toward solving not so much indeed the direct problem of decorative beauty, as the intermediate problem of the origin and meaning oT ornament. The researches of General Pitt-Rivers on the gradual transformation of human figures into ornamental designs, and the derivation of coil, wave, and step patterns of cultured art from realistic representations of cords and plaitings, gave an impulse to this interesting study which has continued to be worked out in the museum bearing his name, with added series such as ^Mr. Everar^ im Thurn^ pegals or baskets made by the natives of British Guiana, where the plaited pictures of birds and monkeys dwindle into graceful patterns, unmeaning unless their derivation is known. The Evolution oj Decorative Art by Mr. Henry Balfour, the curator of the Pitt-Rivers MuseUriT; should be known to all students taking up this attractive line of research. Dr. Ratze l, whose feeling for orna- mental design is very definite, has reproduced many instructive objects, among which mention shall only be made here of the Sandwich Island calabash slung in a carrying-net, placed close by two other calabashes without nets, but appropriately decorated with patterns which, according to the island habit, are conventionalised pictures of the absent network (vol. i. p. 243). Such evidence goes far to abolish the old-fashioned idea that the patternswhich have been the pleasure of ages were devised by ingenious artists out of their inner consciousness. Looking at them_as originally derive_d_from real objects, we jee none the less how they develop into variety, so that, notwithstanding unity of principle, eadi tribe or district tends to form patterns of its own, which again being characteristif, are patrioticall y encouraged as local badg es. Thus every Melanesian and Poly- nesian knows which island a mat or carving comes from, just as in Switzerknd outlying villages are still known by their special embroidery. When one of these populati ons, savage or civilized, is destroyed or reformed into uniformity"^ with the general fashion of the country, a local school vanishes, and even~tiie~- example s of its productions disappear. So natural is this that^ it is a pleasant surprise when they come back sometimes^ from a hiding-place. ft~" broughPback to me such a memory when, in this book (vol. i. p. 256), I opened on the cut of the " covered vessel in shape of a bird, from the Pelew Islands." About 1880 I had chanced to go to the county parish of Holcombe Rogus in Devonshire to pay an afternoon visit to the vicar, Mr. Wills. A remark of mine as to a stone ' implement on the mantelpiece led to the unexpected remark that there were' things upstairs from the Pelew Islands. When I protested that nothing from" thence had come to England since the time when Captain Wilson brought over " Prince Lee Boo," whose sad story is told in the once familiar poem, it was INTRODUCTION answered that the late Mrs. Wills was of Captain Wilson's family, and had in- herited his curiosities. Before that, two generations of children had played havoc with them, but in the attic there were still the great bird-bowl and the inlaid wooden sword, and the rupak or bone bracelet, that prized ornament of chiefs, with other familiar objects figured in Keate's book. I represented that they ought to be in the national collection, and not long after, Mr. Wills, on his death-bed, ordered that they should be sent to me. They duly took their deserved places in the ethnographic department of the British Museum, where no doubt they wil l long outl ast the amiable but hopelessly degenerate islanders, the picture of whose social decay has been dra wn with su ch minute faithfulness by Kubary. ^In understanding the likeness which pervades the culture of all mankind, the great difficulty is to disentangle the small part of art and custom which any people may have invented or adapted for themselves, from the large part which has been acquired by adoptirig from foreigners whatever was seen to suit their own circumstances. Original invention and modification of culture must take place somewhere, but to localise it in geography and chronology is so perplexing that anthropologists are fain to fall back, especially as to the more sirnple and primitive developments, on the view that they arose each in some one centre, or possibly more than one, thence propagating jhemselyes over the world. Who shall sa y, for inst ance, where and by whom were begun the use of the club and spear which are found everywhere, and of the bow, which is found almost everywhere ? The problem becomes mqre_ manageable as it passes to special varieties of these simple weapons, and to appliances whkh are more complex and elaborate. For though as yet no definite rule has been ascertained for distinguishing similar in- ventions which may have arisen separately, from the travelling of one invention from place to place, yet at any rate experience and history lead us to judge that the more complex, elaborate, and unfamiliar an art or institution is, the more i right we have tb"c6nsider that it was only devised once, and travelled from this ' its first home to wherever el se it is found. History often helps us to follow t hese _lines of movement which have s pread civilization over the world, while on the othe r han d_lhe tracing of thearts through the regions of the world is among the most important aids_ to early history. Thus in the case of the Bushmen already mentioned, mere inspection suggests that the glass beads which reach them through the traders are to be traced through an art history leading back through Phoenicia to Egypt, while the dakka-pipe is a record not of native African" invenfion, but of the migration of the deleterious habit of hemp-smoking westward and southward probably^ from Central Asia. It is well for the student to cultivate the habit, of which this book will give many opportunities, of endeavouring to separate, in the inventory of life among any people, the pro- ducts of native invention from the borrowed appliances of the foreigner. Thus in the war-dance of the Sioux, the guns and iron-headed tomahawks bartered from the white trader figure beside the more genuine drum and stone-headed club ; and the swords and daggers of the African countries show at a glance THE HISTORY OF MANKIND the influence of Asia which has spread with and beyond the range of the Moslem religion. }/ For the study of eariier^ stages of^ social Hfe, and even of morals and religion, with their liTanifold bearing on the practical' problems of modern life,jherejs no more useful preparation than, familiarity with the modes in which m^to^ Trt^and' r^esentation are developed and propagated. The same underlying hmnan instinct, the same constancj^f hmp_anj-aculty_ through low and high stages, the same pl iabilit y^' life lolhe needs of outward circumstances, which 'precedes 'the~cultured state where circumstances have to yield to the needs oF man, thesame adaptation of artificial means suggested by nature, the same .copying by the whole tribe of the devices^ whkh individuals have started,_and then their wider diffusion by one tribe copying from another — these actions go on \ throughout the human race, and thejrinciples we learn from mere things may guide us in the study of men. The habit of_constant recourse to actual objects is of inestimable use to us in the more abstract investigation of ideas. Its scope is limited j y^t as we have to depehd'briefly on verbal description for our knowledge of the habits of distant and outlandish peoples, their social condition, their rules of right and wrong, their modes of government, and their ideas of religion, the sight of the material things among which such institutions are worked out gives a reality and sharpness of appreciation which add much to the meaning of words. The rude hut of Tierra del Fuego, inhabited by the natives occupied among their scanty appliances, brings the race before us in a framing to which we adjust, almost as travellers among them may do, our ideas of the life, morals, and religion of the isolated savage family. So the models or pictures of the huge village-houses of Malays or the higher American Indians enable the spectator to understand the social condition of the communities of grouped families, patriarchal or matriarchal, to which brotherhood and vengeance, communal agriculture andT tribal war, naturally belong. Thus in ev ery djrection„thfi_ material furniture of life, taken in its largest sense, gives clues to the understanding of institutions as tools do of the arts they belong to. The paraphernalia of birth, marriage, and death among the American Indians, the backboard of the papoose, the whip of the initiation ceremony, the beads and paint of the bride, the weapons and orna- ments sacrificed for the use of the dead man's soul, tell in outline the story of their rude life. The great totem-system, which binds together in bonds of amity the tribes of the barbaric world, takes material shape in the pictured and sculptured animals which decorate the mats and the roof-posts of British Columbia with commemoration of the myths of divine ancestors. In half the countries of the world the concep- tion of the soul and of deity is best to be learnt from the rude human figures or idols in which these spirits take their embodiment (see pp. 301 sqq). To learn what the worshippers say and do to the idols, and what the indwelling spirits of the idols are considered to do to the worshippers, is to obtain a more positive knowledge of the native theology than is to be had from attempts to extract scholastic defini- tions from the vague though not unmeaning language of the savage priest. INTRODUCTION It is especially because the present work comes under the class of popular illustrated books that it is desirable to point out that this does not detract from its educational value, but on the contrary makes it good for providing a sjoHd foundation in ■ anthropological study. To discu ss the theoretical part,, attacking or defending Professor Ratzel's views on the diffusion of the human species over the globe, the classification of mankind by race and language, and tfe geography of civilization, would be to go outside the purpose of this introduction. Still less is it the dul;y of the introduce r to seek ou t errors. He has simply to re comme nd a foreig n book, p ointing out_to what classes of readers, an3 for what purposes, it is likely to be useful. It should, however, be clearly understood that great as the progress of anthropology has been during the last half-century, yet, as in other subjects~modern~aFl:o their scientific form and rank, the collection of the evidence has not yet approached completion, nor has the theory consolidated jnto dogmatic for m^ In the next century, to judge from its advance in the present, it will have largely attained to the realm of positive law , and its full use will then be acknow- ledged not only as interpreting the past history of mankind, but as even laying down the firsf stages of curves _o£ movement which will describe and affect the courses of future opinions and in^kutions. This will be a gain to the systema- tising of human life and the arrangement of conduct on reasonable and scientific "principles. It istrue that such results may be accompanied by some dwindling of the adventurous interest^which belongs tojhe early periods of a science, and possibly the anthropologists of the next century, rich in theoretical and practical knowledge shaped into law and rule, may look back to our days of laborious acquisition of evidence and enjoyment of new results with something of the regret felt by the denizen of a colonial town in looking back to the time when settled occupation was only beginning to encroach on the hunters' life in the wild land. EDWARD B. TYLOR. TRANSLATOR'S NOTE Mr. James Payn has recently compared the translator's functions to those of the typewriter, and in many respects the comparison holds good. Both are expected, like little boys in the nursery code of etiquette, to be '' seen and not heard " ; that is to say, each is expected to reproduce, in his own medium, what is laid before him in another, and say nothing about it. However, the present translator, with some diffidence, craves leave for a moment to depart from this rule. One fault leads to another, and having on a few occasions in the body of the work ventured, as the merest outsider, to append an illustration drawn from his own reading or experience, in confirmation or otherwise of Professor Ratzel's views and statements, he is almost compelled to make himself " heard " once more, if only to deprecate reproof for what, now that he looks back on it, seems to have been an impudent intrusion into other people's domain. It appears to be held in many quarters at the present day that a man cannot know anything about a subject unless he knows nothing about any other ; and the " expert " is perhaps justly intolerant of Margites. On one other point a word of apologia must be said. A fashion has sprung up among the learned of spelling barbarous names according to a system of their own, made it would seem in Germany, but so far as can be judged from the present work, intended chiefly for English use. In this matter a distinction has to be made. In names "transliterated" from a language with old-established written symbols differing from our symbols, it may be necessary on philological grounds to adopt a conventional system of equating letter with letter, even at the risk of suggesting to the English reader a sound quite unlike that of the original word, or of breaking through an old tradition. It may be all right, for instance, to spell the name of a well-known cricketer so as at once to make the ordinary newspaper -reader pronounce his iirst syllable as if it rhymed to " man," and disguise the fact that he is namesake to the Lion of the Punjab. But in the case of names which till Europeans heard them never had occasion to be spelt, surely in a popular work it is best, whenever possible without great violation of custom, to give the form which most nearly conveys the sound from an English eye to an English ear. It would be pleasant indeed to write Otaheite and Owhyhee, stamped as they are with the seal of literature ; but here we have surrendered to France, and it is hopeless to revive the old forms. In some cases, however, we THE HISTORY OF MANKIND are still at liberty to consider our own countrymen. Why, for instance, write Tunguses, which nine Englishmen out of ten will rhyme to " funguses " ; when by following our fathers and writing Tungooses we at least give some approximation to the right sound ? Again, why write ShiUuks for the people whom Gordon reasonably called Shillooks ? Other nations would not hesitate. A German writes Schilluk ; a Frenchman doubtless Chilouques ; an Italian, Scilucchi ; a Spaniard, if he ever needs to mention them, Xiluques. Why are Englishmen alone not to keep within their own " sphere of influence " in this matter ? Forms like tapu and tatu may be all very well in scientific periodicals, but taboo and tattoo are the English words, and should be used in English books. In conclusion, the translator has to express his best thanks to two experts, who have very kindly revised the proofs. Mr. Henry Balfour performed this most neces- sary office for the first two or three parts, and when he was incapacitated by illness for continuing the work, Mr. H. Ling Roth was good enough to come to the rescue. Thanks to his careful superintendence, it may be hoped that few errors remain in the text. He is not responsible for the spelling of names, nor for mistakes in the descriptions of the cuts — about some of which Professor Ratzel appears to have been misinformed. These will mostly be found corrected in the index. CONTENTS BOOK I Principles of Ethnography SECTION PAGE 1. The Task of Ethnography ... ... 3 2. Situation, Aspect, and Numbers of the Human Race . 5 3. The Position of Natural Races among Mankind 14 4. Nature, Rise, and Spread of Civilization . . 20 5. Language . . -30 6. Religion . . ... 38 7. Science and Art . . . 65 8. Invention and Discovery . . .76 9. Agriculture and Cattle-breeding 87 10. Clothing and Ornament . 93 11. Habitations . . . 106 y^2. Family and Social Customs . .114 13. The State . . . . 129 BOOK II The American-Pacific Group of Races A. — The Races of Oceania 1. General Survey of the Group ... . . 145 2. The Races of the Pacific and their Migrations .... 155 • 3. Physical Qualities and Intellectual Life of the Polynesians and Micronesians . 185 4. Dress, Weapons, and Implements of Polynesians and Micronesians . . 195 5. The Negroid Races of the Pacific and Indian Oceans . 214 6. Dress and Weapons of the Melanesians . . 223 7. Labour, Dwellings, and Food in Oceania . 238 8. The Family and the State in Oceania . , 267 9. Religion in Oceania . . 300 B. — The Australians 10. Australia .... . . 333 11. Physical and Mental Character of the Australians . . . . 337 12. Dress, Weapons, and other belongings of the Australians . . 349 13. The Family and Society in Australia . . 365 14. The Tasmanians . ... . 380 15. Religion of the Australians 383 C— Malays and Malagasies 16. The Malay Archipelago . . • ... 391 17. Bodily Conformation and Intellectual Life of the Malays ... 393 18. Dress, Weapons, and other Property of the Malays . . 405 19. The Malay Family, Community, State . . . 437 20. The Malagasies . 45^ 21. The Religion of the Malays 4^7 Note. — In some cases the descriptions of Figures given in the following List will be found to differ from those which occur in the text. Where this is so the List may be taken as embodying corrections which will ultimately be made in the text. ILLUSTRATIONS IN VOLUME I MAP Map of the Races of Oceania and Australasia To face page 145 COLOURED PLATES A BosjESMAN Family . . . . . Weapons, Utensils, and Ornaments of American Indians Polynesian Weapons and Costome ....... Pattern of Polynesian Tapa. (From Cook's Collection in the Ethnographical Museum, Vienna) . . . . ... Weapons and Utensils from Melanesia and Micronesia An Australian Family-Party from New South Wales SowEK ; A Pile-Village on the North Coast of New Guinea. (After Raffray) IGORROTE Farm in Luzon (Philippines). (From a water-colour drawing by Dr. Hans Meyer) Malay Fabrics and Weapons . ..... Frontispiece To face page 65 155 19s 232 294 344 393 427 ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT PAGE Eskimo bow made of bones. (British Museum) ........ 6 Fijian double canoe. (From a model in the Godefifroy Collection, Leipzig) .... 8 Sandili, king of the Gaikas ; showing the Semitic type of the Kaffirs. (From a photograph by G. Fritsch) ............ 13 A Galla monk : Hamitic or Semitic blend. (From a photograph in the collection of Pruner Bey) . 13 Young girl of the Mountain Daniara tribe. (From a photograph belonging to the Barmen Mission) . 16 Steel Axe of European make with old bone handle, from New Zealand. (Christy Collection) . . 18 Ainu beside one of their store-huts. (From a photograph in the pgssession of Freiherr von Siebold, Vienna) ............ 19 Ambuella Drum. (After Serpa Pinto) ......... 21 Igorrote Drum from Luzon. (From the collection of Dr. Hans Meyer) . . . 21 Queensland Aborigines. (From a photograph) ...... .23 Indian Mirror from Texas. (Stockholm Ethnographical Museum) . . . . -29 Owner's marks : the upright column from the Ainu (after Von Siebold) ; the others, rudimentary writing from the Negroes of Lunda (after M. Buchner) . . . . • • 3^ Melanesian sea spirit, from San Christoval. (After Codrington) .... 39 Fetish in Lunda : purpose unknown, perhaps to avert lightning. (After Buchner) . . 42 Entrance to a fetish hut in Lunda. (After Buchner) ...•••• 43 Wooden idol from the Niger. (Museum of the Church Missionary Society) . . . -44 A mummy wrapped in clothing, from Ancon. (After Reiss and Stubel) . . . • 45 Idols from Hermit Island. (Ethnological Museum, Berlin) ...... 46 supposed idols representing souls, from Ubudjwa. (After Cameron) ... .46 3rave of a Zulu chief. (After G. Fritsch) .... ... 48 b THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Fish-headed idols from Easter Island. (Christy Collection) Magicians of the Loango Coast. (From a photograph by Dr. Falkenstein) Dice and amulets of a Bamangwato magician. (Ethnographical Museum at Munich) Masks from New Ireland — one-eighth of real size. (Berlin Museum of Ethnology) Cemetery and sacred tree in Mbinda. (After Stanley) . ... Boat-coffin from Timorlaut. (From a model in the Ethnographical Museum, Dresden) Ornament on coco-nut shell, from Isabel in the Solomon Islands. (After Codrington) . Piece of bamboo with carvings, from the New Hebrides. (After Codrington) . Plaited hat of the Nootka Indians, showing eye-ornament. (Stockholm Ethnographical Museum) Carved clubs from Lunda. (Buchner collection in the Munich Ethnographical Museum) Tobacco-pipe carved out of slate, from Queen Charlotte Islands, British Colombia. (Berlin Museum of Ethnology) ... ... New Zealand tobacco-pipe. (Christy Collection) Ornamental goblet from West Africa. (British Museum) Chains made of walrus-teeth, from Aleutia. (City Museum, Frankfort O. M.) . . . . Kaffir fire-sticks, for producing fire by friction — one-fourth real size. (Museum of the Berlin Mission) Wooden shield with picture-writing, perhaps a chief's breast-plate, from Easter Island. (Christy Col- lection) . ......... Human figure and medusa in walrus-ivory, from (?) Tahiti. (Vienna Ethnographical Museum) . Shell and bone fish-hooks from Oceania. The larger one on the right from the north-west coast of America. (Vienna Ethnographical Museum) ... Weapons set with sharks' teeth, from the Gilbert Islands. (Munich Ethnographical Museum) . Monbuttu tobacco-pipe carved in wood and ornamented with copper wire — one-tenth real size. (Christy Collection) . . ....... Carved and painted figure from Dahomey. (Berlin Ethnographical Museum) Zanza, a musical instrument used over a great part of Central and South Africa . Fan warrior with crossbow. (After Du Chailhi) ........ Stick used by Bushmen in digging roots, and stone weights for the same. (Berlin Museum of Ethnology) Loango negress at field-work. (From a photograph by Dr. Falkenstein) .... Iron hoe from Kordofan. The blade is also used as currency— one-eighth real size. (Christy Collection) Axe of turtle-bone. A label pasted on this, in writing of the time of Captain Cook, describes it as from the Friendly Islands. (British Museum) . . Woman of the Azandeh, or Nyam-Nyams. (From a photograph by Richard Buchta) . Princess of Unyoro, dressed in bark-cloth. From a photograph by Richard Buchta) ^'iIlage chief of the Loango, with wife and dignitary. (From a photograph by Dr. Falkenstein) Cap made of a palm-spathe, from Brazil. (Munich Ethnographical Museum) Bawenda children belonging to a mission school. (From a photograph in the possession of Dr. Wange- niann, Berlin) ..... Fur and bird-skin clothing of the Ainu. (Collection of Baron von Siebold, Vienna) Woman of New South Wales. (From a photograph in the possession of Lieutenant von Bulow, Berlin) Leg ornaments of dogs' teeth, and shell armlet, from Hawaii. (Vienna Ethnographical Museum) Sandal from Unyoro. (After Baker) I, 2, Stone lip-plugs ; 3, 6, necklaces ; 4, armlet, worn by the Jur tribes ; 5, armlet ; "7, head-dress of the Shulis. (Vienna Ethnographical Museum) . . . _ Irenga arm-ring, with sheath-one-fourth real size. (Vienna Ethnographical Museum) I. Paddle-shaped clubs, probably from Fiji ; and carved adzes, as carried by chiefs, from the Hervey Islands (Munich Ethnographical Museum). 2. Dagger for attaching to the upper arm, from Lagos (Christy Collection, London) .... Modes of hairdressing, Lovale. (After Cameron) V,'c5t African body-tattooing. (From a drawing by Pechuel-Loesche) West African mode of filing the teeth. (From a drawing by the same) I. Tortoise-shell combs from Pelew-one-half real size (Kubary Collection, Berlin). 2. Azandeh or Nyam-Nyam shield— one-tenth real size (Vienna Ethnographical Museum) Caves of the Bushmen. (After Fritsch) . . Tree-dwellings in South India. (After Jagor) Fishing village on the Mekong. (From a photograph) ... The so-called '•■ Dwarf's House '" at Chichen-Itza. (After Charnay) House in Central Sumatra. (After Veth) Village on a tongue of land, Lake Tanganyika. (After Cameron) '. A Zulu family. (From a photograph in the possession of Dr. Wangemann) Interior of a house in Korido, New Guinea. (After Raftray) Ashantee drinking cups of human skulls. (British Museum) PAGE 50 54 55 56 60 63 69 70 71 72 73 73 74 75 76 78 83 85 92 94 95 96 97 100 100 lOI 102 102 103 104 104 105 107 108 109 no III 112 116 127 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Human bone in the fork of a branch ; a cannibal memento from Fiji. (Leipzig Museum of Ethnology) 129 Zulu chief in full war-dress. (From a photograph in the possession of Dr. Wangemann) . . 130 The Basuto chief Secocoeni with his court. (From a photograph in the possession of Dr. Wangemann) 132 A Dakota chief (From a photograph) . . ...... 133 Articles belonging to Dyak head-hunters : — i. Shield ornamented with human hair; 2. Sword and knife ; 3. Skull with engraved ornament and metal plate ; 4. Basket to hold a skull, i and 2 probably from Kutei ; 3 and 4 from W. Borneo. (Munich Museum) . . . 135 Kingsmill Islander in full armour. (Berlin Museum of Ethnology) . 137 Lango chief and magician. (From a photograph by Richard Buchta) . . .138 Insignia, ornamental weapons, and drums from the Southern Congo territory . -139 Polynesian clubs and insignia of rank . . facing 145 Araucanian man and woman. (From a photograph) . . 146 Bakairi girl from the Kulishu river. (After Dr. R. von den Steinen) .... 148 Maori girl. (From photograph in the possession of Dr. Max Buchner) . . 149 Men of Ponape in the Carolines. (From a photograph in the Godeffroy Album) 150 Boy of New Ireland. (From a photograph) . ... 151 Man of New South Wales. (From a photograph) . . . . 152 Dyak woman of Borneo. (From a photograph in the Damann Album) . . 153 Bread-fruit true [Artocarpus incisus) : (a) inflorescence, {b) fruit . .156 Ta.ro {Caladht?n esculentatn) — one-half natural size . . . . . • iS7 Sepulchral monument in Ponape, Caroline Islands. (From a photograph in the Godeffroy Album) . 160 Outrigged boat. New Britain. (From a model in the Godeffroy Collection, Leipzig) . . . 161 Boat of the Mortlock Islands, with outrigger and sail of rush-matting. (After a model in the Godeffroy Collection) ....... ... 162 Boat of Nine, Savage. Islands. (After a model in the Godeffroy Collection) 163 Boat of the Hermit Islands. (From the same) . . . 163 Wooden baler, New Zealand — one-sixth real size. (British Museum) 164 Wooden baler. New Zealand — one-fifth real size. (British Museum) . 164 Wooden baler, New Guinea — one-fifth real size. (British Museum) . . 165 Stick chart from the Marshall Islands. (Godeffroy Collection) .... . 165 Boat of the Luzon Tagals. (From a model in Dr. Hans Meyer's Collection, Leipzig) 169 Sumatran /ii-a/iz«. (From a model in the Munich Ethnographical Museum) . . 170 Carved boat from New Zealand ; actual length 8 ft. 2 in. (Berlin Museum of Ethnology) . -175 I. God of dances, in the form of a double paddle, Easter Island ; 2. Toothed club from Tutuila ; 3. Ancient club from Tonga ; 4, 5. Short clubs from Easter Island. (Berlin Museum of Eth- nology) . . . ...... 176 Thakombau, the last king of Fiji. (From a photograph in the possession of Herr Max Buchner) . 177 Rattan cuirass, throwing-sticks of dark wood, and bark belt, from Kaiser Wilhelm's Land. (Berlin Museum) . . . . . . . 181 Axes from the D'Entrecasteaux Islands — one-eighth real size. (Christy Collection) . 182 Carved wooden plaques, used as stamps, from the Fiji Islands. (Godeffroy Collection) . 183 Jade battle-axes and jade hatchet, insignia of chiefs, from New Caledonia. (Christy Collection) 184 Samoan woman. (From a photograph in the Godeffroy Album) . . . 186 Women of the Gilbert Islands and Marshall Islands. (Godeffroy Album) . . . 187 A Tongan. (Godeffroy Album) . . 188 A man of Rotuma. (Godeffroy Album) .... 188 A man of Pelew, and a man of Yap in the Carolines. (Godeffroy Album) . . 189 Dressed skull, from the Marshall Islands. (Godeffroy Collection) . . . 190 Bamboo flutes from Tahiti and Hawaii. (British Museum) . 191 Dancing stilts, from the Marquesas. (Munich Ethnographical Museum) . . 192 I. Paddles used at dances, from Easter Island — one-thirteenth real size (Berlin Museum of Ethnology). 2. Wooden dancing-stilts, from the Marquesas — one-tenth real size (Christy Collection) . . 193 Tattooed Maoris. (From a photograph in the possession of Herr Max Buchner) . . . 196 Tattooing instruments from the Friendly Islands — one-third real size. (British Museum) . 197 A man of Ponape in the Carolines. (From a photograph in the Godeffroy Album) . 198 Breastplate of shell with sling of human hair — one-fourth real size. (Christy Collection) . . 199 I. Woman of Ponape. 2. Woman of the Paumotu Islands. (From photograph in the Godeffroy Album). 3. Women of the Society Islands. (From photograph in the Damann Album) . . 200 Samoan lady with hair dressed high. (From the Godeffroy Album) . . . 201 Man of the Ruk Islands. (From the Godeffroy Album) . . . . 203 Combs from Tonga — one-fourth real size. (British Museum) . . . 203 Bone comb from New Zealand — one-third real size. (British Museum) ..... 203 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND PAGB Man of the Ruk Islands. (From the Godefifroy Album) . . . . 204 Coco and Sago Palms ........ . ■ 205 Obsidian axes from Easter Island— one-third real size. (British Museum) . . . .207 Polynesian implements : i. Axe from Hawaii — one-sixth real size. 2. Adze with carved helve, probably from Hervey Group or Paumotu Islands. 3, 4. Hatchets from the Marquesas and Society Islands — one-sixth real size. 5. Obsidian spear-head from Easter Island — one-third real size. 6. Weapon or implement from Hawaii — one-fourth real size, (i, 3, 4, 6, Christy Collection; 2, S, British Museum) ............ 208 JIaori chiefs staCF and walking-sticks — one-eighth real size. (Christy Collection) . . .209 I. Quiver and arrow, said to be from the Society Islands — one-eighth real size (Christy Collection.) 2. Pin used in weaving, from New Zealand — two-sevenths real size (British Museum). 3. Spear set with sharks' teeth, from the Gilbert Islands — one-fifteenth real size (Munich Ethnographical Museum). 4. Saw, said to be used also as dagger, of ray-spine, from Pelcw— one-third real size (Berlin Museum) . . . . . . . . . .210 I. Wooden swords from Pelew Islands — one-fifth real size (British Museum). 2. Bow and arrow from the Friendly Islands — one-third real size (Christy Collection). 3. Saw of ray-spine, said to be from Pelew — one-third real size (British Museum.) 4. Bone arrow-head — real size (Christy Collection) ....... . ■ 211 Hawaiian wicker-work helmet — one-fourth real size. (Berlin Museum) ..... 212 Small weapons with sharks' teeth from Tonga, dagger and baler from Hawaii, and gourd bottle from New Caledonia. (Vienna Museum.) ...... (1-3) Necklaces of shell and beans, with limpet-shells. (4 and 5) Ear-pendants, with dolphin's teeth, (6 and 7) Ear-buttons of whale's tooth. (8) Necklace of tortoise-shell. (9) Neck ornament (10) Necklace. (11) Wooden fillet for the head. (12) Ear-button made of a ray's vertebra, (13, 14) Armlets of black wood and whale's tooth. (15) Neck ornament. (16) Necklace of shell-disks and whale's tooth. (1-7, Marquesas ; 8 and 15, Friendly Islands ; 9, Hervey Islands 10, II, Society Islands ; 12, Easter Island; 13, 14, Hawaii; 16, Nukuor. ) New Guinea girl. (From a photograph in the possession of Herr W. Joost, Berlin) Man of New Ireland. (From the Godeffroy Album) Fijian lady. (From Godeffroy Album) ... ... Fijian gentleman. (From Godeffroy Album) ... Woman of the Anchorites Islands. (From the Godeffroy Album) Woman of the Anchorites Islands. (From the Godeffroy Album) Musical instrument from New Ireland— one-third real size. (Godeffroy Collection, Leipzig) I. Spatula for betel-lime from New Guinea — one-half real size. 2. Drum from Pigville in New Guinea —one-eighth real size (Christy Collection). 3. Drums from Ambrym in the New Hebrides (after Codrington) ........ Carved coco-nut from New Guinea — one-half real size. (Christy Collection) New Hebridean ornament (enlarged) ..... Bit of etched design on a coco-nut, from Isabel Island in the Solomons. (After Codrino-ton) Wigs of human hair worn in battle, from Vanna Levu. (Frankfort City Museum) Head-dress like an eye-shade from New Guinea— one-fifth real size. (British Museum) Fiji warrior in a wig. (From the Godeffroy Album) Nose-ornament, breastplate, and arm-ring of boar's tusks, from New Guinea— one-eighth real size! (Christy Collection) ••■•.. Shell plaques for adorning the breast and forehead. (Christy Collection) Weapons from the Admiralty Islands. (Christy Collection) New Caledonian clubs and a painted dance club from the New Hebrides. (Vienna Museum) I. Bow from the Solomon Islands (Berlin Museum). 2. Bow and arrows from North-west New Guinea —one-tenth real size (Christy Collection). 3. Arrow-heads from the Solomon Islands (Godeffroy Collection, Leipzig) ■ • . . . Dagger of cassowary bone, from North-west New Guinea— one-fourth real size. " (Christy Collection) ' 234 I. Carved dance-shield from East New Guinea-one-fifth real size. 2. Shield from Teste in New Guinea — one-tenth real size. (Christy Collection) I. Wooden shield, bound with plaited rattan, with black and white pattern, from Friedrich-Wilhelm's Harbour. 2. Carved shield from Hatzfeld Harbour. 3. Wooden battle-shield from Astrolabe Bay. 4. Wooden battle-shield from Trobriand. 5. Motu-motu shield from Freshwater Bay— one-twelfth real size. (Berlin Museum of Ethnology) ... 216 Wooden dish from Hawaii. (British Museum) . ' o Mats from Tongatabu. (Vienna Ethnographical Museum) ■ ■ ■ \a Stone pestles from Hawaii— one-fourth real size. (Cook Collection, Vienna Museum) . 240 Earthenware vessels from the Fiji Islands. (Godeffroy Collection, Leipzig) . . 240 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 221 222 222 223 224 224 225 226 228 230 231 235 LTST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Carved spatulas for betel-lime from Eastern New Guinea— two-sevenths real size. (Christy Collection) Utensils from Hawaii (Arning Collection, Berlin Museum): i. Calabash-carrier of coco-nut fibre. 2, 3. Calabashes with pattern burnt in, stoppered with conus shells. ^. Beaters of kauila wood. 5. Stamping sticks for tapa. 6. Oil lamps of lava. 7. Decoration for chiefs, a sling of human hair with carved cachalot's tooth. 8. Necklace of similar teeth from Fiji. 9-12. Straw plaiting, probably a modern importation. 1-8, one-fifth to one-sixth ; 9-12, one-half real size Wickerwork (basket, pouches, and fly-whisk), from Tongatabu. (Cook Collection, Vienna Ethno graphic Museum) .......... Polynesian fan and fly-whisks, insignia of chiefs, probably from Tongatabu. (Cook Collection) Wicker fans probably from Samoa. (British Museum) ...... Wooden bowl for food, from the Admiralty Islands — one-eighth real size. (Christy Collection) 1. Bamboo water-vessels from New Guinea — one-third real size. 2. Carved gourd used for betel-box from the Trobriand Islands — one-third real size. (Christy Collection) Carved bamboo box from Western New Guinea — three-fourths real size. (Christy Collection) Chisel and shell auger, from New Britain. (Berlin Museum) .... I. Fishing trimmer from the Solomon Islands — one-eighth real size (Christy Collection). 2. Floats. sinkers, baler, and war-spears, from New Caledonia (Vienna Museum) A New Zealand trawl-net. (Munich Ethnographical Museum) Shark-trap with wooden float from Fiji. (Berlin Museum) .... Smoked fish from Massiha in East New Guinea — one-sixth real size. (Berlin Museum) Cuttle-fish baits from the Society Islands — two-fifths real size. (Christy Collection and Berlin Museum) Pots and implements (the two calabashes for betel-lime) from the Admiralty Islands, also a shell horn — one-fifth real size. (Christy Collection) . . .... Covered vessel in shape of a bird, inlaid with shell, from the Pelew Islands. (British Museum) Another vessel of the same material. (British Museum) ..... New Caledonian hut (Qu. sacred) after a model ; doorposts and roof-ornament supplied from originals in the Berlin Museum ......... Roof-ornaments and shoring-props from New Caledonia. (Vienna Museum) Mats from Tongatabu. (Cook Collection, Vienna) .... House in the Arfak village of Memiwa, New Guinea. (After Raffray) . Stool from Dorey in New Guinea — one-seventh real size. (Christy Collection) . New Caledonian head-stools. (Vienna Museum) ...... Carved and painted rafters from common halls {pais) in Ruk. (Godeffroy Collection, Leipzig) . I. Gourd bottle from the D'Entrecasteaux Islands — one-third real size. 2. Head-stool from Yap — one fourth real size. (Finsch Collection, Berlin) ...... Chiefs wife of Puapua, Samoa. (From a photograph in the Godeffroy Album) . Tongan ladies. (From the Godeffroy Album) . . .... Old Tongan woman. (From the Godeffroy Album) ..... Princess Ruth of Hawaii. (From a photograph belonging to Professor Buchner, Munich) Women of Ponape in the Carolines. (From the Godeffroy Album) .... A Tagal village : Luzon in the Philippines. (From a photograph) .... Fly-whisk, from the Society Islands — one-sixth real size. (Christy Collection) . Fly-whisks (chief's insignia), from the Society Islands — one-fifth real size. (Christy Collection) Fly-whisk (insignia of a chief), from Samoa — one-eighth real size. (British Museum) . Toy paddles, from New Zealand — one-sixth real size. (Christy Collection) Chief of Tae in the Mortlocks. (Godeffroy Album) ...... " Kahile" or fly-flap, carried by the attendants of men of rank, from Hawaii. (Christy Collection) King Lunalilo of Hawaii. (From a photograph) ...... Samoan warrior in to/a-clothing. (From the Godeffroy Album) .... Ear-button from the Marquesas and amulet from Tahiti — two-thirds real size. (Christy Collection) Warrior of the Solomon Islands. (From the Godeffroy Album) . .... Fijian warrior. (From the Godeffroy Album) ....... Coco-palm leaf, as a token of peace, from Venus Hook in New Guinea ; and paddle-shaped spoon, eight feet in length, for stirring food at feasts, carved with a Maori design, from the Normanby Islands. (Finsch Collection, Berlin) ....... Sacrificial knife, available also as an instrument of torture, from Easter Island — one-half real size. (Berlin Museum) .......... Human lower jaw set as an arm-ring, from New Guinea. (Christy Collection) . Ancestral image {Korvar) from New Guinea — one-fourth real size. (British Museum) . A Fiji Islander. (From a photograph in the Godeffroy Album) ..... I. Sacred drum with carving from High Island, Austral Group — one-fourth real size (Christy Collection) 2. Stick calendar of the Ngati Ranki tribe in New Zealand (British Museum) PAGE 241 242 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Charms made of human bone, votive bunches of hair, and turtle skull, from a temple in the Admiralty Islands — one-fifth real size. (Christy Collection) .... Ancestral images from Easter Island— one-tenth real size. (Munich Museum) . Carved post from a house from New Zealand. (Christy Collection) . . . • • Idols carved in wood— one-tenth real size. (London Missionary Society's Collection, now British Museum). I. From Rarotonga, Hervey Group. 2. Rurutu, Austral Group. 3. From Aitutaki, Hervey Group Sacred place in Dorey, New Guinea. (After Raffray) . Love charm from New Guinea— one-fifth real size. (Christy Collection) Article employed in Melanesian rites, for holding objects of use in magic— one-half real size. (Berlin Museum) . . ... Human figure of shells and hermit-crabs, used as a temple-ornament in New Ireland— one-eighth real size. (Berlin Museum) • ..... Child-mummy on the bier used for burial, from Torres Straits— one-sixth real size. (Berlin Museum) South Australian native women. (From a photograph) ...... Eucalyptus Forest in South Australia. (From the account of the voyage of the " Novara ") Marsilia Druminondi .... .... Queensland girl. (From a photograph by C. Giinther) . Young Queensland man. (From a photograph by C. Giinther) .... Native of New South Wales. (From a photograph) .... Billy Bull and Emma Dugal, natives of South Australia. (From a photograph) Message-sticks with picture-writing, from West Australia— one-third real size. (Berlin Museum) Woman's apron of emu feathers. (Berlin Museum) . . ... Wooden belt, said to be Australian, but perhaps from the New Hebrides — one-fourth real size. (Berlin Museum) ... . . ... Necklace of kangaroo teeth, probably from West Victoria — one-sixth real size. (Berlin Museum) Womrteras or throwing-sticks of the Australians — one-fifth real size. (Berlin Museum and British Museum) ... ... Wooden spears, mostly from North Australia ; the second and third from the right are fish-spears — one^ fifth real size. (British Museum and Berlin Museum) New South Wales men, showing breast scars. (From a photograph) Bamboo bow, from Torres Straits Islands — one-thirteenth real size. (British Museum) Arrow-head from New Guinea, Torres Straits — fourth -fifths real size. (Dresden Ethnographical Museum) . ..... Stone axes ; the three above from North Australia, the lower from Queensland or Victoria — one-sixth real size. (Berlin Museum) Boomerangs and boomerang-shaped clubs. The stick in the middle is of uncertain use — one-tenth real size. (British Museum and Berlin Museum) ..... Axes of stone or horse-shoe iron from Queensland— one-fifth real size. (British Museum) Stone club, said to be Australian, possibly from New Britain. (British Museum) North Australian with spears, axe, and club. (From a photograph) Queensland canoe. (Godeffroy Collection, Leipzig) ... Striking and throwing clubs— one-eighth real size. (Berlin Museum) New South Wales men, showing breast-scars. (From a photograph) Australian bags of woven grass— one-sixth real size. (British Museum) . Opossum rug ; one-eighth real size. (Berlin Museum) . New South Wales women and child. (From a photograph) Queensland girls, one showing " scar-tattooing." (From a photograph) Young Queensland man with " scar-tattooing." (From a photograph) Melanesian axes, clubs, and hammers. (British Museum) New South Wales woman with " scar-tattooing." (From a photograph) Austrahan magic-sticks. (Vienna Museum) .... \i'illiam Lanney, the last Tasmanian. (From a photograph) Truganina, the last Tasnianian woman. (From a photograph) 7i.ustraliau shields .... Australian " bull-roarers "—one-fourth real size. (Berlin Museum) A Battak of Sumatra. (From a photograph) A Dyak of Borneo. (From a photograph in the Damann Album) Weapon used by watchmen in Java to catch persons running amok. Collection) . A Calinga of Luzon in the Philippines. (From a photograph in the Damann Album) . Tabongs, v/ith Rejang characters, from Sumatra— four-fifths real size. (Munich Museum) 305 306 310 (Stockholm Ethnographical LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Magic staves of the Battaks, used especially for weather-magic, and also borne in war — one-eightli real size. (Leipzig and Dresden Museum) . . • ■ 403 A Calinga woman of Luzon. (From a photograph in the Damann Album) 406 Toangos of Northern Sumatra. (From a photograph) ... . 4^7 Tangoi or South-East Bornean head-dress — one-third and one-seventeenth real size. (Frankfort City Museum) .... ... 408 Hats worn by chiefs of Kutei tribes in Borneo. (Munich Museum) . . 409 Igorrote tattooing : a, b, designs on the calves of the legs ; c, d, on the stomach ; e, front view ; /, back view of a .Swrz'^ ; ^, a woman's arm. (From drawings by Dr. Hans Meyer) . . . 410 Igorrote necklaces, with (a) tweezers for pulling out hair ; (b) pendants of crocodile teeth — one-third real size. (From Dr. Meyer's Collection) ... . . 411 Ring worn by the Igorrotes on the upper arm when dancing — one-third real size. (From the same) . 411 Malay weapons : I, 2. Hat and shield from Mindanao, in the Philippines. 3. Quiver with poisoned arrows from Celebes. 4. A champion's shield from Solor. 5. Sword from Gorontalo in Celebes. 6. Mandaii of the Kahayan River Dyaks. 7. Outfit from Ombai. 8. Spears from Java. (Dresden Collection) .... . . 412 Bows and arrows of the Negritos in Luzon — one-twelfth real size. (Dr. Meyer's Collection) . . 413 Bow from Sulu of Asiatic origin, and Negrito harpoon — one-twelfth real size. (Dresden Collection) 414 Blow-gun, arrows, and quiver, from Borneo — one-fourth real size. (Stockholm Museum) . 414 Blow-gun, small quiver, and spears of the Kahayan Dyaks of South Borneo ; bow, arrows, and quiver from Poggi. (Munich Museum) . . . . 415 Mandaus or swords, krisses, and knives : i , from South Celebes ; 2, from the Batang-lupar Dyaks ; 3, from Java ; 4, from Gilolo ; 5, from Java ; 6, from the Kahayan Dyaks ; 7, from Mentawei ; 8, from the Rejangs of Sumatra — one-sixth real size. (Munich Museum) 416 Krisses : i, from Celebes ; 2, said to be from Bali — one-fourth real size. (Munich Museum) 418 Dagger from Borneo — one-fifth real size. (Royal Museum, Leyden) . . . 419 I, Sling and sheath of, z, Igorrote chopping-knife. 3. Guinan hatchet, from Luzon — one-sixth real size. (From Dr. Hans Meyer's Collection) ..... . 419 Igorrote and Guinan spears and shields — one-tenth real size. (From Dr. Hans Meyer's Collection) . 420 Spears and shields — i and 7, from Nias ; 2, from Mentawei ; 3, 4, 6, from West Borneo ; 5, from Gorontalo; 8, from Borneo. (Munich Museum) . ... . 421 Shield, blow-gun, spear, and swords of the Torabjas in Central Celebes — one-sixth real size. (Frankfort City Museum) . . . . . . 422 Mail-coats worn by the Dyaks of South-East Borneo . . . 423 Malay utensils : i. Comb from Timor. 2. Knife from the Philippines. 3. Sickle from Java. 4. Cow- bells from Sumatra. 5. Brasier and rice-pot from Java. 6. Basket from Celebes. 7. Rice basket from Java, for cooling steamed rice in the cover. 8. Brass pipe of the Battaks. (Dresden Ethnographical Museum) . . .... 424 A house in Sumatra. (From a model in the Dresden Museum) . 425 Plough used by the Triamans of Bencoolen. (Dresden Museum) . 425 Agricultural implements used by the Igorrotes : I. Rice-knife, z. Digging-stick (i, one-half ; 2, one- tenth real size). (From Dr. Meyer's Collection) ...... 426 Hoes from — l, Singapore ; 2, Sumatra — one-fourth real size. (Munich Museum) . . . 428 Battak hoes from Sumatra — one-seventh real size. (Leipzig Museum of Ethnology) 429 Javanese buffalo-cart. (From a photograph) . ... 430 I. Wooden tureen and spoon from Luzon — one-third real size (from Dr. Meyer's Collection), z. Sumatran saddle (Dresden Museum) ..... . . 431 Dish-cover of armadillo scales from Sumatra — one-tenth real size. (Stoclcholm Museum) 432 Dish-cover from South-East Borneo. (Stockholm Museum) .... 432 I. Bamboo betel and tobacco boxes from West Sumatra — one-third real size (Munich Museum). 2. Igorrote spindle — one-third real size (from Dr. Meyer's Collection) . . . 433 Tobacco pipes used by the Igorrotes and Guinansof Luzon — two-thirds real size. (Dr. Meyer's Collection). ........ 434 Carved wooden sirih box from Deli, East Sumatra — one-fourth real size. (From a drawing) . . 434 I. Malay loom (from a photograph). 2. Sack carried by the Igorrotes of Luzon — one-eighth real size. (Dr. Meyer's Collection) ...... . -435 Basket of a Dyak head-hunter, with half a skull hanging on it. (Munich Museum) . . 448 Small head-basket used by Guinans of Luzon— one-third real size. (Dr. Meyer's Collection) 449 Chief and dignitary of Nias. (From a photograph) ... . 450 Malagasy of Negroid type. (From a photograph in Pruner Bey's Collection) . 454 Malagasy of Negroid type. (Same source) .... ■ 455 Sakalava musical instrument— one-third real size. (Berlin Museum) . . 45^ THE HISTORY OP MANKIND Hova guitar and powder-horn. (Dresden Museum) Malagasy necklace of carved horn. (Missionary Society's Museum) House of a Hova chief. (From the Globus) ... Fenced farm-house in Imerina, Madagascar. (After Ellis) .... Rice-mortar and paddle from Madagascar. (Stockholm Ethnographical Collection) Madagascar hubble-bubble, in the African style — one-fifth real size. (Berlin Museum) . Drawing of a herd of cattle, on the bamboo drinking-cup represented on opposite page. (Berlin Museum) Woven pouch from Madagascar — one-half real size. (Berlin Museum) .... Hova drinking-cups of bamboo, used also for tobacco-boxes — one-half real size. (Berlin Museum) Antananarivo, the Hova capital. (From a photograph) ...... Rainitnalavona and Rainilaiarivona, two Prime Miriisters of Radama H. (After Ellis) . Igorrote ancestral image — one-twelfth real size. (From Dr. Meyer's Collection) Sacred jar, probably from Borneo — one-sixth real size. (Leyden Museum) Wax figure of Buffalo ; perhaps an amulet of the Guinans — one-half real size. (From Dr. Meyer Collection) .......... Talisman from North Borneo and ancestral image from Nias. (Dresden Museum) Rosary with amulet from Madagascar — one-half real size. (Berlin Museum) Rainitsontsoraka — a Christian martyr in Madagascar. (After Ellis) .... 457 458 459 460 461 461 462 462 463 464 465 468 470 471 473 479 480 BOOK I PRINCIPLES OF ETHNOGRAPHY § I. THE TASK OF ETHNOGRAPHY Geographical conceptions and historical considerations of which account has to be taken in dealing with our subject — Mankind a whole — The task of ethnography is to demonstrate the cohesion of the human race. Our business in this work is to impart a knowledge of mankind as we find it to-day throughout the earth. Owing to the long-established practice of con- sidering with any attention lio races save the most progressive and most highly civilized, until it is from these almost exclusively that we form our notion of man- kind, and of their doings that make up the history of the world, it becomes the duty of ethnography to apply itself all the more faithfully to the neglected lower strata of humanity. Besides that, its aim must also be to take up this conception of humanity not in a merely superficial way, just so far as the races have grown up in the shade of the dominant civilized peoples, but to trace actually among these lower strata the processes which have rendered possible the transition to the higher developments of to-day. Ethnography must acquaint us not only with what man is, but with the means by which he has become what he is, so far as the process has left any traces of its manifold inner workings. It is only so that we shall get a firm grasp of the unity and com- pleteness of the human race. With regard to the course that our investigation must follow, we have especially to remember that the difference of civilization /v which divides two groups of mankind may bear no kind of relation to the difference of their endowments. This will be the last difference which we shall have to think of; the first points to consider will be differences in development and surroundings. We shall therefore bestow a thorough consideration upon the external surroundings of the various races, and endeavour pari passu to trace the historical development of the circumstances in which we find them to-day. The geographical conception of their surroundings, and the historical consideration of their development, will thus go hand in hand. It is only from >/ the combination of the two that a just estimate can be formed. Our growth in intelligence and culture, all that we call the progress of civilization, may better be compared with the upward shoot of a plant than with the unconfined flight of a bird ; we remain ever bound to the earth, and the twig can only grow on the stem. Human nature may raise its head aloft in the pure ether, but its feet must ever rest on the ground, and the dust must return to the dust. Hence the necessity of attention to the geographical point of view. As for historical considerations, we can point to races which have remained the same for thousands of years, and have changed their place, their speech, their physical appearance, their mode of life not at all, their religion and their knowledge only THE HISTORY OF MANKIND superficially. Herodotus tells us about a race of Troglodytes, who dwelt near trie Garamantes, the inhabitants of the modern Fezzan. They were active and swift- footed, and spoke a language almost unknown beyond their own boundaries. Here we have Nachtigal's Tebus or Tedas, who to this day inhabit the natural caverns in their rocks, are renowned far and wide for activity and fleetness of foot, and speak a language which has hardly extended itself beyond the walls of their rocky fortress. Thus for 2000 years at least, and for all we know much longer, they have lived in just the same way. They are to-day no poorer, no richer, no wiser, no more ignorant, than they have been these thousands of years. They have acquired nothing in addition to what they possessed then. Each generation has repeated the history of the one before it, and that repeated its predecessors ; as we say, they have made no progress. They have always been men with certain gifts — strong, active, having virtues and defects of their own. There they stand, a fragment of bygone ages. In the same space of time we have emerged from the darkness of our forests on to the stage of history ; we have made our name, alike in peace and war, honoured and dreaded by all nations. But have we as individuals undergone any so great change ? Are we in physical or intellectual power, in virtue, in capacity, any further ahead of our generations of ancestors than the Tubus of theirs ? It may be doubted. The main difference lies in the fact that we have laboured more, acquired more, lived more rapidly, and above all, have kept what we have acquired and known how to use it. Our inheritance is larger, fuller of young life ; and therefore a comparison of national positions gives us a higher standing among mankind, and indicates too how and why we have become what we are, and what road we must take in order to advance a stage farther. Throughout all national judgments we find unmistakably as a fundamental fact the feeling of individual self-esteem causing us to take by preference the unfavourable view of our neighbours. We must at least try to be just ; and the study of mankind may aid in that direction, impressing upon us as it does the important principle that in all dealings with men and nations we ought, before forming a judgment, to consider that all their thoughts, feelings, and actions bear an essentially graded character. In one stage or another anything may happen, - and mankind is divided not by gaps, but by steps. The task of ethnography is therefore to indicate, not in the first instances the distinctions, but the points of transition, and the intimate affinities which exist ; for mankind is one whole, though very variously cultured. And if it cannot be too often proclaimed that a nation consists of individuals, which are and remain in all its operations its ultimate elements, there is yet so great a conformity of disposition among these individuals that the thoughts which go forth from one man are as certain to find an echo in others, if they can succeed in reaching them, as the same seed is certain to produce like fruits in like soils. But the tracing of the road above mentioned is of great importance. Elementary ideas have an irresistible power of expansion, and there is no reason in the nature of things why they should come to a stop at the hut of a Kaffir or the fireplace of a Botocudo. But the obstacles which hinder or delay their travels are endless ; and besides, as they arise from life and accompany life, they are like all life, changeable. Herein is a main cause of the differences among races and of a mass of ethnological problems. One may even say that in the geographical dis- tribution of mankind to begin with, and then in the manner in which they have SITUATION, ASPECT, AND NUMBERS OF THE HUMAN RACE 5 acquired culture and the means of culture from the production of fire up to the loftiest ideas of the historical nations, lies the key to the history of primitive man. We can conceive a universal history of civilization, which should assume a point of view commanding the whole earth, in the sense of surveying the history of the extension of civilization throughout mankind ; it would penetrate deep and far into what is usually called ethnography, the study of the human race. For tjie further inquiry reaches into the depths of prehistoric peoples and those that are outside of history, the more will it meet in every sphere and on every level of civilization with essentially the same single form, which long ago, before the conditions existed for the development of numerous separate centres of civilization, was . imparted by one race to another over the earth ; and this it wih regard as in close connection with mankind of to-day, with the race which has raised all ifg great new creations upon that common foundation, of which many a fragment still remains unaltered in its hands. At no distant future, no one will write a history of the world without touching upon those peoples which have not hitherto been regarded as possessing a history because they have left no records written or grav^ in stone. History consists of action ; and how unimportant beside this is TOe question of writing or not writing, how wholly immaterial, beside the facts of doing and making, is the word that describes them. Here also ethno- graphy will show the way to juster notions. § 2. SITUATION, ASPECT, AND NUMBERS OF THE HUMAN RACE The inhabited world — The races of the fringe — East and West — Old and New Worlds — North and South — The Ethiopian region — Mutual influence of Northern and Southern races — Insular character of lands — Importance of seafaring — Water on the face of the globe — Unity of the human race — The number and laws of mankind — Movements of races — Extinction of native races through contact with cultivation, and by themselves — Racial distinctions — Half-breeds. The human race inhabits countries and islands in the temperate and torrid regions of the earth ; some par1?>are found in the frigid zone of the northern hemisphere. Its place of abode forms a zone of varying breadth, lying between the extreme latitudes of 80° north and 55" south. As regards the two great oceans, the northern shores of the Pacific (where Asia and America come within fifty miles of each other) form part of the inhabited region, as also a broad band in the niiddle, remarkable for the abundance of its habitable islands. On the other hand, the Atlantic, until the Scandinavian colonisation of the Faroes and Iceland, formed a broad gap in the belt of human habitation. We can thus distinguish in the inhabited world, the surface of which, not counting seas, may be taken at about fourteen millions of square miles, northern and southern borders formed by the uninhabitable ice-deserts of the polar regions, eastern and western borders, between which lies the Atlantic Ocean. The races dwelling in these confines look out into emptiness, and have not neighbours on every side, but when their settlements have been pushed far forwards, find themselves in an isolated position ; whence a lack in their case of ethnographical interest. On the other hand, some groups of races are so situated as to have enjoyed the important advantages of an intermediate position ; such are some of the races that we meet THE HISTORY OF MANKIND with in the Pacific, especially toward its northern border, in the districts bordering on the Mediterranean, in Central America. From the position and form of the inhabited world, it is clear that the northern hemisphere contains a larger number of persons than the southern ; that it offers wider districts to open up, with more sides of contact, of more various endowments, and therewith richer possibilities ; in short, that in position, form, and dimensions, it has from early time had all the advantages as regards the development of humanity. The distribution of man, and equally that of plants and animals, is based, in the northern hemisphere, on interdependence ; in the southern on separation. If we look at mankind as a whole, we can see that its northern members lie in a widespread mutually operative connection ; its southern in remote separation. If we look at the races, we find the Negroids belonging to the south, the Mongoloids and Whites to the north. Civilization has reached its highest developments north of the equator. We shall find similar contrasts in ethnography ; for example, the bowless races belong to the southern groups, whereas in the north we find bows and arrows, not only all over a broad zone, but on fundamentally the same model, from Lapland to East Greenland and Mexico. ^ Eskimo bow made of bones (British Museum). The wide gap which the Atlantic Ocean opens in the zone of habitation has the effect of producing " fringe "-lands. Although a brisk intercourse from north to south, together with thickly-peopled regions at the back, and more favourable climates, have rendered these far less ethnographically destitute than the regions towards the poles, we still find that in Africa the highest development has been reached on the east coast, in America on the west, that is on the inner sides or those farthest from the Atlantic. The population of Africa has undoubted affini- ties with that of Asia, but shows no trace of any relations with America. But this connection extends farther, beyond the limits of the mainland of Asia to the great Asiatic islands ; it forms a great region of civilization between the northern and southern borders, which may be regarded as the western counterpart of that more easterly region extending across the Pacific into America. The great mark of distinction between the two portions lies in the use or non-use of iron. In the north, indeed, the western region encroaches upon the eastern ; but the contrast between north and south, ever-increasing, remains persistent past the point where it crosses the boundary between East and West. In their intersection we find the ex- pression of a great difference in antiquity between the former classification which is mainly anthropological, and the latter which is ethnographical. In the later develop- ment of races iron has unquestionably played an important part. The boundary between countries which do and do not use iron corresponds with those of other important regions of ethnographic distribution. Where there is no iron cattle- breeding, the staple of which is oxen, buffaloes, sheep, goats, horses, camels and elephants, is also unknown ; pigs and poultry also are seldom bred in lands without iron. The distinction in political and social relations goes far deeper. In SITUATION, ASPECT, AND NUMBERS OF THE HUMAN RACE 7 America, Oceania, and Australia we have a much older stage of development : group -marriage, exogamy, mother- right, and clan -division ; in Europe, Africa, and Asia, the patriarchal system of the family, monogamy, states in the modern sense. Thus among mankind also east and west stand over against each other. America is the extreme east of the human race, and thus we may expect to find there older stages of development than in Africa and Europe, the extreme west. The distribution of races affords a far less simple picture. The Negroid is indeed essentially a southern race. Its northern limit is in Africa formed by the desert ; continued in Asia by lofty mountains ; reaches its only important extension beyond the northern tropic in the angle of the Indus, and retreats in Oceania to the south side of the equator. Thus we have a southern domain, belonging essentially to the geographical eastern hemisphere, of which the largest territories lie compact and altogether between the tropics and in the south temperate zone. In addition to their southern situation they are affected by the peculiar features of outline and surface which here prevail. The geographical opposition between north and south exists of course all the earth over ; but as a factor in ethno- graphical or anthropological distinctions it concerns only the so-called Old World and the parts adjacent, a fact which has a large share in producing the great variety in the appearance and form of men as we find them on this side, embracing every stage of development from the highest to the lowest. In America, on the contrary, we find one race both north and south, and no ethno- graphic distinctions of the magnitude which North and South Africa, North and South Asia, or Australia have to show. Anthropologically throughout, ethno- graphically in many portions, America belongs to the northern regions. On the other hand, in Africa and Asia the most important question bears upon the relations between north and south. A sharp distinction is here made by the different nature of the boundaries towards the north. Between the negroes and North Africa lies the desert, a large and substantial barrier. South Asia consists only of loosely connected parts, not sharply marked off from the north and middle regions. Above all, India has been subject to influences which distinguish it from Africa ; but both in customs and physical characteristics we find in Africa earlier, that is less modified, conditions of a development proceeding from the same origin as in India. Lastly, Malaysia shares with Madagascar and India in the invasion of offsets from northern races. Wherever dark and light races have been in contact, from the north-west point of Africa to Fiji, crossing has taken place between them. Such half-bred races, of most various degrees of intermixture, inhabit the Soudan, the Sahara, Southern and Central East Africa, Southern Arabia, Madagascar, southern India on both sides of the Bay of Bengal, and Australia. In southern Europe and the extreme of Polynesia we find isolated traces of negroid admixture. Only one well-defined race, thanks to its secluded position, has been able fully to develop itself. We refer to the Australians, who with their dark skins, stiff or curly hair, and long (dolichocephalic) heads appear to spring from a cross of Papuan with Malayo- Polynesian ancestors. The peculiarities (of which we do not know the origin) belonging to the Papuan type are also noticeable here ; and we have besides the tendency to degradation in the traces of a low stage of culture and a life of poverty. The water surface of the earth extends in the sea alone to almost three- THE HISTORY OF MANKIND quarters of the whole, so that all the land is an island in a sea nearly three times its size. The most widely separated portion of mankind must, even in the course of their movements in historical times, have been brought to the sea ; and before the invention of seafaring there must have been a time when the sea confined them^ to those regions which had been the cradle of the race. That invention, the earliest indications of which have long disappeared — for in all parts of the earth we find high development of the art side by side with ignorance of it — was the first thing that rendered possible the spread of mankind over almost all the habitable Fijian double canoe. portions of the globe. In the most various parts of the earth we meet with the arts of shipbuilding and navigation in an advanced stage. This is most conspicuous in the Pacific, least so in the Atlantic. This irregular distribution is a sign of the ease with which the art is forgotten ; so that we must not from its absence in places, and the absence even of any memory of it, infer a continued or complete non-activity in regard to the sea. Even if we did not meet, in Hawaii and else- where, with traditions of larger and better vessels in former times, the close connection which subsists between a high social and political organisation and proficiency in seafaring would presume the possibility of a rapid retrogression in the latter. The Northmen sailed to Iceland, Greenland, America, in little boat%: which, perhaps, were not so good as those used by the Polynesians ; afterwards they lost sight of the land which had been their goal, and forgot the way to it. The very extent of the inhabited world at the present day, embracing as it does SITUATION, ASPECT, AND NUMBERS OF THE HUMAN RACE g all habitable lands with the exception of a few remote and small islands, is in itself evidence for the antiquity of man. The broad expanse of waters opened to men a copious source of food, and for that reason caused the maritime regions to be most thickly peopled ; it also facili- tated intercourse between distant countries, which might have been impossible across lands inhabited by hostile races, and accordingly the higher civilization spread inland from the coasts. For this reason it has always exercised the remarkable influence upon men's thoughts which we see in the part played by the sea or lake-horizon in all images of the world that have ever been conceived. Most of these picture the earth as an island in a broad sea, and the future world as lying far off in the sea. Whether this be a land with a stream round it or an island in the evening glow, whether it be in a lake or in a river, or copious springs gush from it, or beardless youths constantly hold the water back from it, or whether, lastly, it is only that the way to it lies over the sea, it is not waterless land. The soul has to take its way across water ; hence the frequent occurrence of boat-formed coffins or even grave-stones, the burial in boats, or the little canoe used by the'Dyaks as a sepulchral monument. Thus wherever the earth is habitable by man, we find peoples who are members of one and the same human race. The unity of the human genus is as it were the work of the planet Earth, stamped on the highest step of creation therein. There is only one species of man ; the variations are numerous, but do not go deep. Man is in the widest sense a citizen of the earth. Even to parts of the earth where he cannot remain he makes his way. He knows nearly the entire globe. Of all the beings attached to the ground he is one of the most locomotive. Individual movements are linked together, and one great movement, the substratum of which is all humanity, goes forward with time. As the linking is necessary and continuous, it raises individual movement to a position of higher significance. The ultimate result is not only a wider distribution, but also the increasing permeation of the portions that dwell within the habitable limits until a general agreement in essentials is attained. This affects the whole ; peculiarities adhere to localities. Thus we are entitled, in a scientific sense, to speak of the unity of the human race, if by unity we understand not uniformity but the community, shown by testimonies from every domain, of the life of different peoples, in a history embracing many thousands of years, as presupposed by the common basis which nature' has given. If there has been in the later historical period so rapid an acceleration in the pace at which culture has progressed, that certain groups seem to have advanced far beyond the remaining mass, there yet remains much of the common inheritance to be found among the highest as well as the lowest strata. And if it be inquired, what is the origin of this common inheritance, we can again point to the fact that restless movement is the stamp of mankind. In comparison with its strength and duration the earth is small ; a thousand generations of our ancestors, from the moment that ships were invented for the crossing of rivers and seas, were enabled, whether voluntarily or not, to wander round it. But that moment lies far behind us. Only a short-sighted conceit can regard the fact that, in the four centuries since the discovery of America, Europeans have spread far and wide over that continent their domestic animals and plants, their weapons and implements, above all their religion, as an unapproached phenomenon in the history of the world. Others besides Northmen discovered THE HISTORY OF MANKIND America before Columbus. The world that we pretentiously style " the New must have been discovered from the westward many a time before the Pale Faces came from the east as the latest and definitive discoverers. If the Malays have spread over the 200° of longitude that separate Madagascar from Easter Island in a period which, as language and else shows, has not been going on for many centuries ; if, since the European discovery of America, individual tribes in that continent have changed their locality by over 2000 miles ; if over half Africa, within a belt 40° of latitude in width, a language is spoken with only differences of dialect equivalent to that between high and low German, we must grant that European civilization was not the first to set a girdle round the earth. The great and only distinction is that to-day that takes place deliberately which in former ages was the result of a dim impulse, such as in historic times acted on Alexander and Columbus, in prehistoric times on thousands of their predecessors, , If we regard mankind as a body ever in movement, we cannot, as once was usual, look upon it as a union of species, sub-species, groups, races, tribes, rigidly separate from each other. As soon as ever a portion of mankind had learnt to plough the dissociating ocean, the mark' was set for ever-progressing fusion. If we assume, with the majority of anthropologists at the present day, a single origin for man, the reunion, into one real whole, of the parts which have diverged after the fashion of " sports," must be regarded as the unconscious ultimate aim of these movements of mankind. This, in the limited space of the habitable world, must lead to permeation, and, as a consequence, to mingling, crossing, levelling. But again, as a similar organisation has spread among men, the possibility has increased of migration to places the most remote from the original abode ; and in the whole world there is hardly a frontier left which has not been crossed. In applying the comprehensive term " Wandering of the Nations," people are apt to overlook the individual, whose movements we must expressly declare are no less important. The numbers of mankind are closely dependent on their territory, since this exercises a great influence on their interior development, their distribution, their relations. The total figure, as now estimated, of 1,500,000,000 must be regarded as the result of a development never attained before. The development of modern conditions is in a higher measure than is usually believed connected with the increased replenishment of the earth. The organisation of races outside of the European and Asiatic sphere of civilization does not permit any density of population to exist. Small communities cultivating their narrow patches of ground are separated from each other by wide empty spaces which either serve for hunring-grounds or lie useless and vacant. These limit the possibilities of intercourse, and render large permanent assemblies of men impossible. Hunting races, among whom agriculture does not exist or tends to vanish, often dwell so thinly scattered that there will be only one man, frequently less, to 24 square miles. Where there is some agriculture, as among many Indian tribes, among Dyaks, in Papua, we find from i o to 40 in the same area ; as it develops further, in Central Africa for instance, or the Malay Archipelago, from 100 to 300. In the north- west of America the fishing-races who live on the coast run to 100 in 20 square miles, and the cattle-keeping nomads to about the same. Where fishing and agriculture are combined, as in Oceania, we find as many as 500. The same figure is reached in the steppes of Western Asia by the partly settled, partly SITUATION, ASPECT, AND NUMBERS OF THE HUMAN RACE ii nomad population. Here we cross the threshold of another form of civilization. Where trade and industry combine to operate there is sustenance for io,000 persons (as in India and East Asia), or 15,000 (as in Europe) to 24 square m.iles. This enumeration shows at the lowest round of the ladder peoples belonging to the most different zones and countries. All races in a state of nature live thinly scattered ; civilized populations are marked by greater density. The former are more dependent on the soil than the latter ; in districts similarly endowed their distribution is as a rule similarly proportioned. The difference which we see between the well-cultivated but thinly-peopled corn-bearing areas and the thickly-inhabited districts of spade-cultivation are results of civilization.. In density of population lies not only steadiness of and security for vigorous growth, but also the immediate means of promoting civilization. The closer men are in contact, the more they can impart to each other, the less does what is acquired by civilization go to waste, the higher does competition raise the activity of all their powers. The increase and maintenance of the numbers are intimately connected with the development of culture ; a population thinly scattered over a large district means low civilization, while in old or new centres of civilization we find the people in dense masses. China and India reckon their inhabitants at 600,000,000, but an equivalent area of the intervening region of Central Asiatic nomads, Mongolia, Tibet, East Turkestan, cannot show a sixtieth of the number. Six-sevenths of the earth's inhabitants belong to civilized countries. While the history of the European nations for centuries past shows the same decided tendency to increase which we observe even in ancient times, the uncivilized races offer examples of shrinkage and retrogression such as we find in the case of the others, if at all, only lasting over a short period, and then as the result of casualties such as war and pestilence. The very thinness of the population is a cause of their decay ; their smaller numbers are more readily brought to the point of dwindling or vanishing. Rapid using-up of the vital powers is a characteristic of all the races in the lower stages of civilization. Their economical basis is narrow and incomplete, frugality only too often verges on poverty, scarcity is a frequent visitor, and all those measures of precaution with which sanitary science surrounds our life are lacking. In the struggle with the too pov/erful forces of nature, as in the Arctic regions or the steppe-districts of the southern hemisphere, on the confines of the inhabited world, they often succumb till they are completely wiped out, and a whole race perishes. It is quite a mistake to refer, as is often done, the extinc- tion of barbarous races, of which we hear so much, solely to contact with superior civilization. But closer consideration enables us to recognise self-destruction as a no less frequent case. The two work as a rule together ; neither would attain its end so quickly without the co-operation of the other. The basis of a healthy increase in population is an approximate balance of the sexes ; this among uncivilized people is generally disturbed, and the number of children small. War, murder, and kidnapping all contribute to reduce the population. Human life is of small value, as human sacrifices and cannibalism sufficiently indicate. Lastly, man in a state of nature is far from possessing that ideal health of which so many have fabled; the negroes of Africa can alone be described as a robust race. Australians, Polynesians, Americans, on the other hand, are far more subject to diseases than civilized men are, and adapt themselves to new climates with difficulty. There is no question but that these peoples were in many districts slowly dying THE HISTORY OF MANKIND out by sickness before the appearance of Europeans. But no doubt the arrival of civilization disturbs society down to its roots. It contracts the available space, thus altering one of the conditions upon which, as we shall hereafter see, the peculiar social and political arrangements of races in a natural state were framed. It introduces wants and enjoyments which are not in harmony with the mode of living usual among these people, or their capacity for labour. It brings upon them diseases previously unknown, which on a new soil commit frightful ravages; and inevitable quarrels and fighting besides. Over the larger territories, such as North America, Australia, New Zealand, the progress of civilization led to the crowding of the aboriginal races into the least favourable districts, and therewith to the diminution of their numbers. In the smaller, such as oceanic islands (but also in Cuba and Haiti), they have nearly died out, in some cases been absorbed by the stronger race, in any case they have disappeared. Where the greater toughness of the inferior race, or more favourable natural conditions, has delayed the process, as in any part of Africa, in North America, in Mexico, an intermixture, which will ultimately end no less in the abolition of the natives as an individual and independent race, is in progress. Great shiftings have already taken place, others are going on, and over wide districts, owing to these passive movements, it is impossible to think of the people as in a state of stability. As far as 95° of west longitude. North America can show only the debris of Indian tribes;^ in Victoria and New South Wales there are hardly a thousand aborigines left ; and it is only a question of time when Northern Asia, North America, Australia, and Oceania will be Europeanised. A thousand examples show that in all this change and movement the races cannot remain unaltered, and that even the most numerous, counting their hundreds of millions, cannot keep their footing in the tumult that surges around them, Inter-breeding is making rapid strides in all parts of the earth. From North and East Africa, Arabs and peoples of the Berber stock are pressing upon the Negroes, of whom the most remote tribes to the southern extremity of the continent show in their Semitic features how long these influences have been at work. In the place of the Hottentots we find the Bastaards, European half-breeds. In Canada nearly all the French settlements show traces of Indian blood ; in Central and South America the Mestizos and Mulattos are already stronger than the full- blooded Indians ; in Oceania, Malays and Polynesians are crossed with the Negro of the Pacific ; throughout Central Asia there is a mixture of Mongol, Chinese, and European blood, reaching far in the direction of Europe and affecting the whole north and east of one quarter of the globe. The greater bulk, quicker growth, and superiority in all conquering arts, which mark the more highly civilized races, give them, wherever climate is not unfavourable, the advantage in this process, and we can speak of an absorption of the lower by the higher even where the latter for the present are not in the majority. If there is any consolation in the universal disappearance of native races, it is the knowledge that a great part of them is being slowly raised by the process of intermixture. No doubt people like to repeat a statement, professedly based on old experience, that in half-breeds the vices of both parents predominate, but a glance at the national life of the present day is enough to show that Mulattos, Mestizos, Negro and Arab half-breeds ' [There is some doubt whether the actual number of North American Indians has much diminished. Rather the natural multiplication of the race has been checked.] SITUATION, ASPECT, AND NUMBERS OF THE HUMAN RACE 13 Sandili, king of the Gaikas ; showing the Semitic type of the Kaffirs. (From a photograph by G. Fritsch. ) stand in America and in Africa at the head of Indians and Negroes. The mixture once begun continues to progress, and each fresh infusion of liigher blood tends to reduce the interval by levelling up. We need only consider how nearly the Indians of Mexico and Peru have risen to the level of the people of European descent, from whom they seemed at the time of the Conquest to be separated by a bottomless chasm. If the history of the world shows a spread, interrupted indeed but ever progressing, of civilization throughout the earth, the natural numerical preponderance existing among civilized folk is an im- portant factor therein. The people who increase the more quickly pour out their surplus upon the others, and thus the influence of the higher culture, which itself was the cause or condition of the more rapid multiplication, gets spontaneously the upper hand. Thus the spread of civilization appears as a self- accelerating outgrowth over the world of civilizing races, ever striv- ing more completely to effect that unity of the human race which forms at once its aim and task, its desire and hope. In conclusion, if we seek to trace backward the road which the most important parts of mankind have followed, we find the starting- point to be the neighbouring exist- ence of several variations, or, as Blumenbach prefers, degenerated forms of the one human species. These were at first confluent at a few points only ; but, as intercourse increased, came more and more into contact, at last penetrating and mingling with each other to such a degree that no one of the original varieties now exists . in the form once peculiar to it. What remains, however, leads us back to two great contrasted divisions which survive in the races of to-day, the Whites and Mongoloids in the northern hemisphere, the Negroes in the southern. These embrace the further A Galla monk : Hamitic or Semitic blend. (From a photo- graph in the collection of Pruner Bey. ) i^ THE HISTORY OF MANKIND contrasts of continental compactness and oceanic disconnection ; of the world which is deeply interlaced with the north polar regions, and that which is cut off by the ocean from polar influences. The Negro races, whether in Africa, Asia, or the Pacific, may once have lived further north than they do now ; but, in any case, they always held the more southerly position under the impulse which has assigned to them this present place of abode. § 3. THE POSITION OF NATURAL RACES AMONG MANKIND The conception of a natural or barbarous race — Progress and retrogression — Bodily differences — Civilized races —The brute in man— Wherein does the possession of culture consist ? — Common property of mankind in reason, language, religion — In the remaining elements of civilization the difference is only one of degree. First a word as to the name of " natural " races which we shall frequently have to use. They are those races who live more in bondage to, or in dependence on, nature than do those whom we call " cultured " or " civilized." What the name expresses is a distinction in mode of life, of mental talent, of historical position ; it assumes nothing and prejudices nothing in those directions, and is therefore doubly suitable for our purpose. For we shall perhaps have to make this neutral name contain what is in many respects so different a conception as that which the reader has b2en wont to attach to the term " savages." We speak of natural races, not because they stand in the most intimate relations with Nature, but because they are in bondage to Nature. The distinction between natural and cultured races is not to be sought in the degree, but in the kind of their association with Nature. Culture is freedom from Nature, not in the sense of entire emancipation, but in that of a more manifold and wider connection. The farmer who stores his corn in a barn is ultimately just as dependent on the soil of his fields as the Indian who reaps in the swamps the rice which he did not sow ; but the former feels the dependence less, since, owing to the provision which he had the wisdom to store up, the chain is longer and its pressure accordingly less severe ; while the latter is touched in the very sinews of life by every tempest which shakes the ears into the water. We do not become any the freer of Nature by our more thorough utilisation and exploration of her ; we only make ourselves less dependent on individual accidents of her being or of her course by multiplying the points of contact. It is just by reason of our civilization that we are actually to-day more dependent on her than any former generation. We must not content ourselves with contrasting natural and civilized races, and noticing the wide gap which seems to yawn between them ; our business is to propound the question : What is the position which the natural races hold among mankind ? For centuries this question has been treated with an indolence which, when its desire for facts, narratives, and descriptions was once appeased, felt no further necessity for establishing the relation of " savages " to the rest of the human race. These black and brown men were very strange, very curious ; it was highly interesting to read of them, and that was quite enough. We have no occasion to laugh at this attitude ; our own delight in descriptions of travel is much of the same sort. The more uncivilized the country, the more fascinating POSITION OF NATURAL RACES AMONG MANKIND 15 the tale. But the researches of Cook, Forster, Barrow, Lichtenstein, and so on, making, as even they did, some effort after a deeper insight into and clearer views of natural life, possessed for their contemporaries chiefly a romantic interest, and gave little subject of consideration to the philosophers. The only deeper emotion aroused by the increasing number, excellence, and popularity of works of travel towards the end of the last century consisted in the shaking of beliefs in that blissful state of nature which beautiful spirits after Rousseau venerated as the most desirable existence, only to be realised in the solitude of primeval forests, or on the shores of fortunate islands. It was sought, but never found. What a disillusion for hearts of sensibility such as were possessed by the readers of The Indian Wigwam, or George Forster's sketch of the paradisal Otaheitans. Slowly did the consideration of savage races make its way from the sphere of the emotions to that of the intellect ; and at the same time the estimate formed of these races sank a good deal lower, proportionately almost to the greater distance by which we are ahead of them rather in intellect than in those amiable dispositions and expressions which had hitherto been regarded with predilection. Then came into the world the idea of evolution, dividing races into strata ; whereby, as must be clearly pointed out, uncivilized races were, on the basis less of considered facts than of general sentiment, lumped together as a kind of heterogeneous foundation. One can understand the almost passionate need which was felt of providing supports in the world of actual fact for the bold edifice of the theory of evolution, and if we cannot ally ourselves at all points with this feeling, it would be unjust not to recognise that it has called forth, no less in the study of the life of races than in that of all life, a movement which is bringing fruitful truths to light. In every field the most difficult research is that into origins ; but it is just this once- neglected but most profound problem which the evolutionists have handled in ethnology as well as elsewhere with an admirable unity of purpose. Whether negative or positive, their results deserve our gratitude. To them is due the merit of having placed a rich array of facts at the disposal of science ; from the day when they took it in hand must we date the thorough research into what has been somewhat too hastily called the original conditions of the human race. While we are duly thankful for these pioneering achievements, we cannot reconcile ourselves to their conclusions. They look for origin and " development " everywhere. Are we not entitled, on scientific territory, to meet with a certain mistrust such a search, which knows so well beforehand what it i^ going to find ? Experience teaches us how near to this lies the danger of premature assumption. A man whose head is full of one possibility holds others very cheap. If the inquirer, steeped in the idea of evolution, finds a race which in several or even many respects is behind its neighbours, the " behind " is involuntarily converted into " below " ; it is regarded as on a lower round of the ladder by which mankind have ascended from their original state to the heights of civilization. That is the counterpart of the one-sided, nay, extravagant notion that man came into the world a civilized being, but that a retrogressive degeneration has made him what we find to-day among " natural " races. Just as the idea of evolution found its chief adherents among physical students, so, for reasons which we can easily divine, did this notion of retrogression appeal to students of religion and language. Meanwhile it has at the present day been pushed far, in our view too far, into the background. Inquiry has far less to dread from it than from the opinion most i6 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND decidedly opposed to it, of which the fundamental conception expressed in its basest and most abstract form would be somewhat as follows : " In mankind there exists only upward effort, progress, development ; no retreat, no decay, no dying out." Put in this way, do we not at once see how one-sided is such a way of looking at things ? It is true that only extremists go so far in this direction, and Darwin, who, as a great creator of ideas, held his views with the fullest sense of propor- tion, admits that many nations may undoubt- edly have gone back in their civilization, some even fallen into utter barbarism ; although, he cautiously adds, he has found no evidence for the latter case. But even he, in his Descent of Man, has not always. been able to escape the temptation to imagine mankind more various in itself and reaching' in its supposed lowest members more nearly down to the brute world than on cooler reflection appears possible. I Here we see the two extreme conceptions of natural races. We can understand how funda- mentally different must be the resulting modesi of considering every side of their existence, or fiitiTrP T?^,- ,„t,o^ A-cc , estimating their past and IssSns ther^ thif 1 T K ,"" ^" ^''^'^' *^^" ^^^^^^ ^ conception which ofthe lonTand diffi'lt JT "' "'"' ^" *'^ ^^P^'^^^^^^ ^^-^ have matured on the long and difficult road between their position and ours are as yet unde- ' Young girl of the Mountain Damara tribe. (From a photograph belonging to the Barmen Mission, j '^ ^ ^^ POSITION OF NATURAL RACES AMONG MANKIND 17 veloped, and one which regards them as it were on the same line with us, at an equal or similar stage of evolution, but robbed by ill-luck of a large part of their share of culture, and thus impoverished, miserable, and in arrear ? May we be permitted to examine the facts at first hand, and to approach a little nearer to the mean where the truth lies than it has been granted these hypotheses to do. The question which first occurs is that of innate physical distinctions, since these must enable us to form the most trustworthy conclusions as to the nature and magnitude of the general difference to be observed among mankind. But that is a matter of anatomy and physiology, and as such concerns the anthropologist rather than us. For separate facts and all wider excursions in the field our readers must be referred to books on the subject. From our ethnographical point of view, from which the great distinctions in human civilization, with their important results, are most clearly to be recognised, the first thing we wish is that the notion of culture -races, in respect of mankind, might be somewhat more thoroughly tested than has yet been done. It would, we may safely predict, be found first of all that qualities appear in the bodily frame of civilizgd races due to the fact of their civilization, just as on the other hand the bodies of natural 1 races have certain features clearly indicating the operation of a mode of life marked by the lack of all that we are used to call culture. Gustav Fritsch, an anatomist who has studied the natural races in their natural state, asserts that the shapely development of the human body is only possible under the influence of civilization ; and readers of his descriptions of Hottentots, Bushmen, and even Kaffirs, will feel convinced that well-developed bodies, such as a sculptor would call beautiful, are rarer among them than among us, the " played-out " children of civilization. He states plainly in one place that the healthy, normally-developed German, both as to proportions and as to strength and completeness of form, surpasses in fact the average Bantu man.^ The Bantus, we may add, are, in the Kaffir branch of which he is here speaking, one of the toughest and most powerful races of Africa. In recent times we have often heard similar judgments ; and the saying of an American ethnographer, that the Indians are the best model of the Apollo Belvedere, cannot pass even as a flower of speech. Deeper investiga- tions have shown differences in the skeleton referable in the one case to the influences of civilized, in the other to those of uncivilized, life. Virchow has plainly noted Lapps and Bushmen as " pathological " races, that is, impoverished and degraded by hunger and want. But the most important experiment for settling the value of racial distinctions — one for which the resources of science are too small, and only the history of the world suffices — is now for the first time in progress. The introduction of the so-called lower races into the circle of the higher civilization, and the overthrow of the barriers which once were raised high against such introduction, is not only a brilliant feat of humanity, but at the same time an event of the deepest scientific interest. For the first time m.illions of what was considered the lowest race — the blacks — have had all the advantages, all the rights and duties of the highest civilization thrown open to them ; nothing prevents them from employing all the means of self-formation which — and herein lies the anthropological interest of the process — will necessarily be transformation. ' [One would be curious to see the result of a fight between equal forces of normally-developed Germans and average Zulus or Matabeles, firearms being barred. The question of relative beauty is one which each race will answer differently.] C THE HISTORY OF MANKIND If we could say to-day with approximate certainty, what will become in the course of generations of the 12,000,000 of negrd slaves who have within the last thirty years been freed in America, and who will, in the enjoyment of freedom and the most modern acquisitions of culture, have multiplied to 100,000,000, we could with certainty answer the question as to the effect of culture upon race- distinctions. But as it is, we must be content with hints and conjectures. It may be safely asserted that the study of comparative ethnology in recent years has tended to diminish the weight of the traditionally-accepted views of anthropologists as to racial distinctions, and that in any case they afford no support to the view which sees in the so-called lower races of mankind a transition-stage from beast to man. The general similarity of man to the brutes in bodily structure cannot indeed be con- tested ; what we demur to is the assumption that individual portions of mankind are so much more like the beasts than others. In our study of people of whatever race we come upon traits that may be called bestial ; but this is only what was to be expected. Since man has retained in his bodily structure so close a resemblance to the apes that even the most recent classifiers have attached importance to this only, and might, without fear of blame for illogicality, recur to the old Linnaean grouping of the genus homo with the Apes in an order of Primates, a reduction of the spiritual element in human nature is quite enough to allow the bestial part of the material foundation to emerge in a pretty glaring form. We all, alas ! are familiar with the idea that a beast lies hidden in every man, and " brutality," " brutalisation," and other only too familiar terms, prove how frequently our fancy is called upon for corresponding images. When a starving family of Australian aborigines retrieves from the vulture a piece of carrion, which by all natural rights has long been his property, and flings itself like a pack of greedy, jackals on its prey, gorging until repletion compels slumber, this testifies to a brutality in their mode of life which suppresses all movements of the soul. Nor are we surprised when African travellers can compare a startled swarm of Bushmen, who see an enemy in every stranger, black or white, with nothing else than a troop of chimp,anzees or orangs in flight. We must not, however, let all our blows fall on these poor "natural" races who have on the whole no greater naturally-implanted tendency towards the bestial than we ourselves. There exist Europeans who are morally degraded below the level of the Australians. This sad faculty of being or becoming like the brutes is unhappily present in all men, in some a little more, in others a little less. Whether it manifests itself with more or less frequency and plainness depends merely upon the degree of acquired capacity for dissimulation, which often corresponds to that of civilization. But it is civilization alone which can draw any boundary between us and the " natural " races. We may declare in the most decided manner that the conception of "natural" races involves nothing anthropological or physiological, but is purely one of ethnography and civiliza- Steel Axe of European make with old bone handle, from New Zealand. (Christy Collection.) POSITION OF NATURAL RACES AMONG MANKIND 19 tion. Natural races are nations poor in culture. There may be peoples belonging to every race, endowed by nature in every degree, who either have not yet pro- gressed to civilization, or have retrograded in respect of it. The old Germans and Gauls appeared no less uncivilized beside Roman civilization than do Kaffirs or Polynesians beside ours ; and many a people which to-day is reckoned as a portion of civilized Russia was at the time of Peter the Great still in a state of nature. Ainu beside one of their store-huts. (From a photograph in the possession of Freiherr von Siebold, Vienna. ) The gap which differences of civilization create between two groups of human beings is in truth quite independent, whether in its depth or in its breadth, of the differences in their mental endowments. We need only observe what a mass of accidents has operated in all that determines the height of the stage of civilization reached by a people, or in the total sum of their civilization, to guard ourselves with the utmost care from drawing hasty conclusions as to their equipment either in body, intellect, or soul. Highly-gifted races can be poorly equipped with all that makes for civilization, and so may produce the impression of holding a low position 20 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND in among mankind. Chinese and Mongols belong to the same stock ; but what a difference in their civilization. This is even more apparent if, instead of the Mongols, we take any of the barbarian tribes which, in the frontier provinces of China stand out like islands from a sea of more highly-civilized people, who lap them round' and will soon overwhelm them. Or again, the latest researches make it probable that many of the Ainu, the aborigines of the northern island of Japan, stand nearer to the Caucasian than to the Mongolian stock. Yet they are a " natural " race even in the eyes of Mongolic Japanese. Race as such has nothing to do with the 'possession of civilization. It would be silly to deny that in our own times the highest civilization has been in the hands of the Caucasian, or white, races ; but, on the other hand, it is an equally important fact that for thousands of years in all civilizing movements there has been a dominant tendency to raise all races to the level of their burdens and duties, and therewith to make real earnest of the great conception of humanity — a conception which has been proclaimed as a specially distinguishing attribute of the modern world, but of which many still do not believe in the realisation. But let us only look outside the border of the brief and narrow course of events which we arrogantly call the history of the world, and we shall have to recognise that members of every race have borne their part i" the history which lies beyond, the history of primeval and pre-historic times. § 4. NATURE, RISE, AND SPREAD OF CIVILIZATION Natural and civilized races — Language and religion universal possessions — Races with and without history- Reasons why many races are in a backward state — The development of civilization is a matter of hoarding — So-called semi-civilization — Material and spiritual elements in hoarded civilization — The material basis and the spiritual nucleus — Natural conditions required for development — The part of agriculture and pasture in the development of civilized politics — Zones of civilization — Loss of civilization. What is then the essential distinction which separates natural and civilized races ? Upon this question the evolutionist faces us with alacrity, and declares that it was done with long ago ; for who can doubt that the natural or savage races are the oldest strata of mankind now existing? They are survivors from the uncultured ages out of which other portions of mankind, who have in the struggle for existence forced their way to higher endowments and have acquired a richer possession of culture, have long ago emerged. This assumption we meet with the question : Wherein then does this possession of culture consist? Is not reason, the basis, nay, the source of it all, the common property of the human race ? To language and religion, as in some measure the noblest forms of expression, we must give the precedence over all others, and connect them closely with reason. In the fine expression of Hamann : " Without speech we could have had no reason, without reason no religion, and without these three essential components of our nature neither intelligence nor the bond of society." It is certain that language has exercised an influence reaching beyond our sight upon the education of the human spirit. As Herder says : " We must regard the organ of speech as the rudder of our reason, and see in talk the heavenly spark which gradually kindled into flame our senses and thoughts." No less certainly does the religion of the less civilized races contain in itself all the germs which are hereafter to form the noble flowery NATURE, RISE, AND SPREAD OF CIVILIZATION forest of the spiritual life among civilized races. It is at once art and science, theology and philosophy, so that that civilized life which strives from however great a distance to reach the ideal contains nothing which is not embraced by it. Of the priests of these races the saying holds good in the truest sense that they are the guardians of the divine mysteries. But the subsequent dissemination of these mysteries among the people, the popularising of them in the largest sense, is the clearest and deepest-reaching indication of progress in culture. Now while no man doubts of the general possession of reason by his fellow-men of every race and degree, while the equally general existence of language is a fact, and it is not, as was formerly believed, the case that the more simply constructed languages belong to the lower races, the richest to those who stand high- est ; the existence of religion among savage races has been frequently doubted. It will be one of our tasks in the following pages to prove the unfounded- ness of this assumption in the light of many facts. For the present we , will venture to as- sume the universality of at least some degree of religion. In matters connected with political and economical insti- tutions we notice among the natural races very great differ- ences in the sum of their civilization. Accordingly we have to look among them not only for the beginnings of civilization, but for a very great part of its evolution, and it is ■equally certain that these differences are to be referred less to variations in endow- ment than to great differences in the conditions of their development. Exchange has also played its part, and unprejudiced observers have often been more struck in the presence of facts by agreement than by difference. " It is astonishing," exclaims Chapman, when considering the customs of the Damaras, "what a similarity there is in the manners and practices of the human family throughout the world. Even here, the two different classes of Damaras practise rites in •common with the New Zealanders, such as that of chipping out the front teeth and cutting off the little finger." It is less astonishing if, as the same traveller remarks, their agreement with the Bechuanas goes even further. Now since the essence of civilization lies first in the amassing of experiences, then in the fixity with which these are retained, and lastly in the capacity to carry them further or to increase them, our first question must be, how is it possible to realise the first Ambuella Drum. (After Serpa Pinto.) Igorrote Drum from Luzon. (From the collection of Dr. Hans Meyer. ) 22 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND fundamental condition of civilization, namely, the amassing a stock of culture in the form of handiness, knowledge, power, capital ? It has long been agreed that the first step thereto is the transition from complete dependence upon what Nature freely offers to a conscious exploitation, through man's own labour, especially in agriculture or cattle-breeding, of such of her fruits as are most important to him. This transition opens at one stroke all the most remote pos- sibilities of Nature, but we must always remember, at the same time, that it is still a long way from the first step to the height which has now been attained. The intellect of man and also the intellect of whole races shows a wide dis- crepancy in regard to differences of endowment as well as in regard to the different effects which external circumstances produce upon it. Especially are there varia- tions in the degree of inward coherence and therewith of the fixity or duration of the stock of intellect. The want of coherence, the breaking-up of this stock, characterises the lower stages of civilization no less than its coherence, its inalien- ability, and its power of growth do the higher. We find in low stages a poverty of tradition which allows these races neither to maintain a consciousness of their earlier fortunes for any appreciable period nor to fortify and increase their stock > of intelligence either through the acquisitions of individual prominent minds or through the adoption and fostering of any stimulus. Here, if we are not entirely mistaken, is the basis of the deepest-seated differences between races. The opposition of historic and non-historic races seems to border closely upon it. But are historical facts therefore lost to history when their memory has not been preserved in writing ? The essence of history consists in the very fact of happening, not in the recollecting and recording what has happened. We shoqld prefer to carry this distinction back to the opposition between national life in its atoms and national life organised, since the deepest distinction seems to be indicated by internal coherence which occurs in the domain of historical fact, and therefore mainly in the domain of intellect. The intellectual history of mankind no less than the social and political is in the first place a progression fi-omf individual to united action. And in truth it is in the first place external nature^ upon which the intellect of man educates itself, seeing that he strives to put himself towards it in an attitude of recognition, the ultimate aim of which is the construction within himself of an orderly representation of Nature, that is the*' creation of art, poetry, and science. Showing as they do every possible variety of racial affinity, the " natural 'f ' races cannot be said to form a definite group in the anatomical or anthropological sense. Since in the matter of language and religion they share in the highest good that culture can offer, we must not assign them a place at the root of the human family-tree, nor regard their condition as that of a primitive race, or of childhood. There is a distinction between the quickly ripening immaturity of the child and the limited maturity of the adult who has come to a stop in many respects. What we mean by " natural " races is something much more like the latter than the former. We call them races deficient in civilization, because internal and external conditions have hindered them from attaining to such permanent developments in the domain of culture as form the mark of the true civilized races and the guarantees of progress. Yet we should not venture to call any of them cultureless, so long as none of them is devoid of the primitive means by which the ascent to higher stages can be made — language, religion, fire NATURE, RISE, AND SPREAD OF CIVILIZATION 23 weapons implements ; while the very possession of these means, and many others such as domestic animals and cultivated plants, testifies to varied and numerous deahngs with those races which are completely civilized. Queensland Abongines (From a photograph. ) The reasons why they do not make use of these gifts are of many kinds Lower intellectual endowment is often placed in the first rank. That is a convenient, but not quite fair explanation. Among the savage races of to-day we find great diiiferences in endowments. We need not dispute that in the course 24 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND of development races of even slightly higher endowments have got possession of more and more means of culture.iand gained steadiness and security for their progress, while the less-endowed remained behind. But external conditions, in respect to their furthering or hindering effects, can be more clearly recognised and estimated ; and it is juster and more logical to name them first. We can conceive why the habitations of the savage races are principally to be found on the extreme borders of the inhabited world, in the cold and hot regions, in remote islands, in secluded mountains, in deserts. We understand their backward condition in parts of the earth which offer so few facilities for agriculture and cattle-breeding as Australia, the Arctic regions, or the extreme north and south of America. In the insecurity of incompletely developed resources, we can see the chain which hangs heavily on their feet, and confines their movements within a narrow space. As a consequence, their numbers are small, and from this again results the small total amount of intellectual and physical accomplishment, the rarity of eminent men. the absence of the salutary pressure exercised by surrounding masses on the activity and forethought of the individual, which operates in the division of society into classes, and the promotion of a wholesome division of labour. A partial consequence of this insecurity of resources is the instability of natural races. A nomadic strain runs through them all, rendering easier to them the utter incompleteness of their unstable political and economical institutions, even when an indolent agriculture seems to tie them to the soil. Thus it often comes about that in spite of abundantly-provided and well-tended means of culture, their life is desultory, wasteful of power, unfruitful. This life has no inward consistency, no secure growth ; it is not the life in which the germs of civilization first grew up to the grandeur in which we frequently find them at the beginnings of what we call history. It is full rather of fallings-away from civilization, and dim memories from civilized spheres which in many cases must have existed long before the commencement of history as we have it. If, in conclusion, we are to indicate concisely how we conceive the position of these races as, compared with those to which we belong, we should say, from the point of view of civilization these races form a stratum below us, while in natural parts and dispositions they stand in some respects, so far as can be seen, on a level with us, in others not much lower. But this idea of a stratum must not be understood in the sense of forming the next lower stage of development through which we ourselves had to pass, but as combined and built up of elements which have remained persistent, mingled with others which have been pushed aside or dropped into the rear. There is thus a strong nucleus of positive attributes in the " natural " races ; and therein lies the value and advantage of studying them. The negative conception which sees only what they lack in comparison with us is a short-sighted under-estimate. By the word " civilization " or " culture '' we denote usually the sum of all the acquirements at a given time of the human intelligence. When we speak of stages, of higher and lower, of semi-civilization, of civilized and " natural " races, we apply to the various civilizations of the earth a standard which we take from the degree that we have ourselves attained. Civilization means our civilization. Let us assume that the highest and richest display of what we conceive by the term is to be found among ourselves, and it must appear of the highest importance for the understanding of the thing itself to trace back the unfolding of this flower to its germ. We shall only attain our aim of getting an insight into the nature and NATURE, RISE, AND SPREAD OF CIVILIZATION 25 essence of civilisation when we understand the impelling force which has evolved it from its first beginning. Every people has intellectual gifts, and develops them in its daily life. Each can claim a certain sum of knowledge and power which represents its civilization. But the difference between the various " sums of acquirement of the intelligence " resides not only in their magnitude, but in their power of growth. To use an image, a civilized race is like a mighty tree which in the growth of centuries has raised itself to a bulk and permanency far above the lowly and transitory condition of races deficient in civilization. There are plants which die off every year, and others that from herbs become mighty trees. The distinction lies in the power of retaining, piling up, and securing the results of each individual year's growth. So would even this transitory growth of savage races — which have in fact been jCalled the undergrowth of peoples — beget something permanent, draw every new generation higher towards the light, and afford it firmer supports in the achieve- ments of predecessors, if the impulse to retain and secure were operative in it. But this is lacking ; and so it befalls that all these plants destined for a larger growth remain on the ground and perish in misery, striving for the air and light which above they might have enjoyed to the full. Civilization is the product of many generations of men. The confinement, in space as in time, which isolates huts, villages, races, no less than successive generations, involves the negation of culture ; in its opposite, the intercourse of contemporaries and the interdependence of ancestors and successors, lies the possibility of development. The union of contemporaries secures the retention of culture, the linking of generations its unfolding. The development of civilization is a process of hoarding. The hoards grow of them- selves so soon as a retaining power watches over them. In all domains of human creation and operation we shall see the basis of all higher development in intercourse. Only through co-operation and mutual help, whether between contemporaries, whether from one generation to another, has mankind succeeded in climbing to the stage of civilization on which its highest members now stand. On the nature and extent of this intercourse the growth depends. Thus the numerous small assemblages of equal importance, formed by the family stocks, in which the individual had no freedom, were less favourable to it than the larger communi- ties and states of the modern world, with their encouragement to individual competition. As the essential feature in the highest development of culture, we note the largest and most intimate interdependence among themselves and with past generations of all fellow-strivers after it ; and as a result of it, the largest possible sum of achievement and acquisition. Between this and the opposite extreme lie all the intermediate stages which we comprise under the name " semi-civilization." This notion of a " half-way house " deserves a few words. When we see energetic- ally at work in the highest civilization the forces which retain, as well as those concerned with extending and reshaping, the building, in semi-civilization it is essentially the former which are called into most activity, while the latter remain behind and thereby bring about the inferiority of that state of things. The one- sidedness and incompleteness of semi-civilization lie on the side of intellectual progress, while on the material side development sets in sooner. Two hundred years ago, when Europe and North America had not yet taken the giant's stride 26 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND which steam, iron, and electricity have rendered possible, China and Japan caused the greatest astonishment to European travellers by their achievements in agriculture, manufactures, and trade, and even by their canals and roads, which have now fallen far towards dilapidation. But Europeans, and the daughter races in America and Australia, have in the last two hundred years not only caught up this start, but gone far ahead. Here we may perceive the solution of the riddle presented by Chinese civilization, both in the height it has reached and its stationary character, and indeed by all semi-civilization. What but the light in free intellectual creation has made the west so far outrun the east ? Voltaire hits the point when he says that Nature has given the Chinese the organs for I discovering all that is useful to them but not for going any further. They have become great in the useful, in the arts of practical life ; while we are indebted to them for no one deeper insight into the connection and causes of phenomena, for no single theory. Does this lack arise from a deficiency in their endowments, or does it lie in the rigidity of their social and political organisation, which favours mediocrity and suppresses genius ? Since it is maintained through all changes of their organisa- tion, we must decide for the defect in their endowments, which also is the sole cause of the rigidity in their social system. No doubt the future alone can give a decisive answer, for it will in the first place have to be shown whether and how far these races will progress on the ways of civilization which Europe and North America vie in pointing out to them ; for there has long been no doubt that they will or must set foot on them. But we shall not come to the solution of this question if we approach it from the point of view of complete civilization, which sees in the incompleteness of China and Japan the signs of a thoroughly lower stage of the whole of life, and frequently at the same time signs of an entire absence of hope in all attempts at a higher flight. If they possess in themselves only the capacities for semi-civilization, the need of progress will bring more powerful organs to their head and gradually modify the mass of the people by immigration from Europe and North America. This process may have first raised to its present height many a civilized race of to-day; we may refer to the Russians and Hungarians, and to the fact that millions of German, and other immigrants have stimulated in many ways the progress of these semi-Mongols in Europe. The sum of the acquirements of civilization in every stage and in every race is composed of material and intellectual possessions. It is important to keep ' them apart, since they are of very different significance for the intrinsic value of the total civilization, and above all for its capacity of development. They are not acquired with like means nor with equal ease, nor simultaneously. The material lies at the base of the intellectual. Intellectual creations come as the luxury after bodily needs are satisfied. Every question, therefore, as to the origin of civilization resolves itself into the question : what favours the development of its material foundations ? Now here we must in the first place proclaim that when the way to this development is once opened by the utilisation of natural means for the aims of man, it is not Nature's wealth in material but in force or rather, to put it better, in stimulus to force, — which must be most highly estimated. The gifts of Nature most valuable for man are those through which his latent sources of force are thrown open in permanent activity. Obviously this can least be brought about by that wealth or so-called bounty of Nature which spares NATURE, RISE, AND SPREAD OF CIVILIZATION 27 him certain labours that under other circumstances would be necessary. The warmth of the tropics makes the task of housing and clothing himself much lighter than in the temperate zone. If we compare the possibilities which Nature can afford with those that dwell in the spirit of man, the distinction is very- forcible, and lies mainly in the following directions. The gifts of Nature in them- selves are in the long run unchangeable in kind and quantity, but the supply of the most necessary varies from year to year and cannot be reckoned on. They are bound up with certain external circumstances, confined to certain zones, particular elevations, various kinds of soil. Man's power over them is originally limited by narrow barriers which he can widen but never break down by develop- ing the forces of his intellect and will. His own forces, on the contrary, belong entirely to him. He cannot only dispose of their application but can also multiply and strengthen them without any limit that has, at least up to the present, been drawn. Nothing gives a more striking lesson of the way in which the utilisation of Nature depends upon the will of man than the likeness of the conditions in which all savage races live in all parts of the earth, in all climates, in all altitudes. It is due to no accident that the word " culture " also denotes the tillage of the ground. Here is its etymological root ; here, too, the root of all that we under- stand by it in its widest sense.^ The storage by means of labour of a sum of force in a clod of earth is the best and most promising beginning of that non- dependence upon Nature which finds its mark in the domination of her by the intellect. It is thus that link is most easily added to link in the chain of develop- ment, for in the yearly repetition of labour on the same soil creative force is concentrated and tradition secured ; and thus the fundamental conditions of civilization come to birth. The natural conditions which permit the amassing of wealth from the fertility of the soil and the labour bestowed thereon, are thus undoubtedly of the greatest importance in the development of civilization. But it is unsafe to say with Buckle that there is no example in history of a country that has become civilized by its own exertions without possessing some one of those conditions in a highly favourable form. For the first existence of mankind, warm moist regions blessed with abundance of fruits were unquestionably most desirable, and it is easiest to conceive of the original man as a dweller in the tropics. But, on the other hand, if we are to conceive of civilization as a development of human forces upon Nature and by means of Nature, this can only have come about through some compulsion setting man amid less favourable conditions where he had to look after himself with more care than in the soft cradle of the tropics. This points to the temperate zones, in which we may no less surely see the cradle of civilization than in the tropics that of the race. In the high plateaux of Mexico and Upper Peru we have land less fruitful than the surrounding lowlands, and accordingly in these plateaux we find the highest development in all America. Even now, with cultivation carried to a high pitch, they look as dry and barren as steppes compared with the luxuriant natural beauties of many places in the lowlands, or on the terraces not a day's journey distant. In tropical and sub-tropical ^ [Of course its employment to denote the cultivation or refinement of the mind and manners (which though found in classical Latin seems comparatively recent in English) is a mere metaphor, without any suggestion of the fact noticed in this paragraph.] 28 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND •countries the fertility of the soil generally diminishes at high elevations, and in whatever climatic conditions, high plateaux are never so fruitful as lowland, hilly countries, and mountain slopes. Now these civilizations were both situated on high plateaux ; of that in Mexico, the centre and capital, Tenochtitlan — the modern city of Mexico — lay at a height of 7560 feet, while Cuzco, in Peru, is no less than 11,500. In both these regions temperature and rainfall are considerably lower than in the greater part of Central and South America. This brings us to the recognition of the fact that, though civilization in its first growth is intimately connected with the cultivation of the soil, as it develops farther there is no necessary relation between the two. As a nation grows its civilization sets itself free from the soil, and, in proportion as it develops, creates for itself ever fresh organs which serve for other purposes than enabling it to take root. One might say that in agriculture there resides a natural weakness, which may be explained not only through want of familiarity with weapons, but through the desire of possession and a settled life enfeebling to courage and enterprise. We find, on the contrary, the highest expression of political force among the hunter and shepherd races, who are in many respects the natural antipodes of the agriculturists — the shepherds especially, who unite agility with the faculty of moving in masses, and discipline with force. The very faculties which are a hindrance to the agriculturist in developing that power, can here be turned to advantageous account, — the absence of settled abode, mobility, the exercise of strength, courage, and skill with weapons. And, as we look over the earth, we find that in fact the firmest organisations among the so-called semi-civilized races result from a blend of these elements. The distinctly agricultural Chinese have been ruled first by the Mongols, then by the Mantchus ; the Persians by sovereigns from Turkestan ; the Egyptians successively by Hyksos, or shepherd kings, Arabs, and Turks — all nomadic races. In Central Africa the nomadic Wahuma founded and maintained the stable states of Uganda and Unyoro, while in the countries that surround the Soudan every single state was founded by invaders from the desert. In Mexico the rougher Aztecs subdued the more refined agricultural Toltecs. In the history of places in the borderland between the steppe and cultivated lands a series of cases will be found establishing this rule, which may be recognised as a historical law. Thus the reason why the less fertile high plateaux and the districts nearest to them have been so favourable to the develop- ment of higher civilization and the formation of civilized states, is not because they offered a cooler climate and consequent inducement to agriculture, but because they brought about the union of the conquering and combining powers of the nomads -with the industry and labour of the agriculturists who crowded into the oases of cultivation but could not form states. That lakes have played a certain part 2.% points (Tappui and centres of crystallisation for such states, as seen in the cases of Lake Titicaca in Peru, the lagoons of Tezcoco and Chalco in Mexico, Lakes Ukerewe and Tchad in the interior of Africa, is an interesting but less essential phenomenon. Beyond the historic operation of climatic peculiarities in favouring or checking civilization, diff-erences of climate interfere most eff-ectually by producing large regions where similar conditions prevail— regions of civilization which are disposed hke a belt round the globe. These may be called civilized zones. The real zone of civilization, according to all the experience which history up to the present day puts at the disposal of mankind, is the temperate. More than one group of facts NATURE, RISE, AND SPREAD OF CIVILIZATION 29 corroborates this. The most important historical developments, most organically connected, most steadily progressing in and by means of this connection, and externally most exciting, belong to this zone. That it was no accident which made the heart of ancient history beat in this zone on the Mediterranean Sea, we may learn from the persistency of the most effective historical development in the temperate zone even after the circle of history had been widened beyond Europe, ay, even after the transplantation of European culture to those new worlds which sprang up in America, Africa, and Australia. No doubt an infinite number of threads are plaited into this great web , but since all that races do rests ultimately upon the deeds of individuals, the one which has been most fruitful in results is undoubtedly the crowding together in the temperate zone of the greatest possible number of individuals most capable of achievement, and the arrangement in succession and compre hension of the individual civilized districts in one civilized belt, where the conditions were most favourable to inter- course, exchange, the increasing and securing of the store of culture ; where, in other words, the maintenance and develop ment of culture could display its activity on the largest geographical foundation. Old semi -civilizations, whose relics we meet with in tropical countries, belong to a period when civilization did not make such mighty demands upon the labours of indi viduals, and when for that very reason its blossom sooner faded. A study of the geographical extension of old and new civilization seems to show that as the tastes of civiliza tion grew, the belt comprising it shrank into the regions where the great capacity for achievement co-existed with the temperate climates. This observation is important for the history of the primitive human race and of its extension, and for the interpretation of the relics of civilization in tropical countries. Another mode in which civilization may perish is through the absorption of higher races by lower, who profit by the advantage of better adaptation to conditions of hard- ship. The despised Skraelings have merged themselves in the Northmen of Greenland. And has not every group of Europeans that has penetrated the Arctic ice-wastes, during the period of its stay in those dreary fields, been obliged to accustom itself to Eskimo habits, and to learn the arts and dexterities of the Arctic people in order successfully to maintain the fight with Nature's powers in the Polar zone ? But so has many a bit of colonisation on tropical and polar soil ended in falling to the level of the wants of the natives. The colonising power of the Portuguese in Africa, the Russians in Asia, lies in their ability to do this more effectually than their competitors. Yet a civilization, self-contained and complete, even with imperfect means, is morally and aesthetically a higher phenomenon than one which is. decomposing in the process of upward effort and growth. For this reason the first results of the contact between a higher and a lower civilization are not delightful where the Indian Mirror from Texas, (Stoclcholm Ethnograph- ical Museum. ) 30 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND higher is represented by the scum of a world, the lower by people complete in a narrow space and contented with the filling up of their own narrow circle. Think of the first settlements of whalers and runaway sailors in countries rich in art and tradition like New Zealand and Hawaii, and of the effects produced by the first brandy-shop and brothel. In the case of North America, Schoolcraft first pointed out the rapid decay which befell all native industrial activity as a result of the introduction by the white men of more suitable tools, vessels, clothing, and so forth. European trade provided easily everything which hitherto had had to be produced by dint of long-protracted, wearisome labour ; ^ and native activity not only fell off in the field where it had achieved important results, but saw itself weakened, and lost the sense of necessity and self-reliance, and so in course of time art itself perished. As we know, the same is going on to-day in Polynesia, in Africa, and among the poorest Eskimo. In Africa it is a declared rule that on the coast you have a region of decomposition, behind that a higher civilization, and the best of all in the untouched far interior. Even the art of Japan, independent as it was, deteriorated after a glimpse of artistically inferior European patterns. § s. LANGUAGE Language is a universal faculty of modern mankind — Power of natural races to learn languages — Changes in languages — Is there a relation between racial and linguistic peculiarities ? — Origin, growth, and decay of language— Fossil words : dialect and language— Relation between language and degree of civilization- Poor and rich languages — Modes of expressing number and colour — Gesture — Speech — Writing. " Man is so endowed, so circumstanced, and such is his history, that speech is everywhere and without exception his possession. And as speech is the property of all men, so is it the privilege of humanity ; only man possesses speech." Thus Herder; and we may add that mankind possesses it in no materially different measure. Every people can learn the language of every other. We see daily examples of the complete mastery of foreign languages, and therein the civilized races have no absolute superiority over the savage. Many of the persons in high position in Uganda speak Swahili, some Arabic ; many of the Nyamwesi have learnt the same language. In the trading centres of the West African coast there are Negroes enough who know two or three languages ; and in the Indian schools in Canada nothing astonishes the missionaries so much as the ease with which the youthful Redskin picks up French and English. The media of language, sounds no less than the accompanying gestures, are very similar all the earth over; and the inner structure of language not very discrepant. It may be said that human language is one at the root, which strikes deep into the human mind ; but it has parted into many very various branches and twigs. Innumerable languages, diverging from each other in every degree, dialects, sister and daughter languages, independent families of languages, fill the homes and homesteads of mankind with varied tones. Some races can still pretty well understand each other ; in some languages, a little farther removed, even a 1 [Cf. Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, vol. i. p. 187, " He created the white man to make tools for the poor Indians," said the Winnibagoes to a white inquirer.] LANGUAGE 31 superficial observer detects similarities ; in others these lie so deep that only- science can find them. Lastly, a great number are to all appearance quite different — not only in the words but in their structure, in the relations they express, the parts of speech which they distinguish. But these distinctions are by no means associated with mental differences in the speakers. Individuals of every variety of endowment use the same language, while minds equally endowed and working on the same lines cannot make themselves understood to each other. Nor does language go with geographical, often not with racial, distinctions. How much wider is the gap between the Englishman and the English-speaking Negro than that between the Chinese and the Micronesian who linguistically is so far from him ! The importance of language to ethnology must be sought elsewhere than in proof of racial affinity based on affinity of speech. Language must always appear as the preliminary condition to all the work of civilization among mankind. It may be called the first and most important, even the characteristic, implement of man. But, like every other tool, it is liable to alteration. In the course of centuries a word can assume very various meanings, can disappear altogether, can be replaced by some expressly-invented word, or one taken from another language. Like a tool, it is laid aside and taken up again. Not only do individuals lose their mother-tongue, like Narcisse Pelletier who, after twelve years in the Australian bush, became himself a savage, or the Akka Mianis who, brought as boys to Italy, had in a few years wholly forgotten their native speech ; but whole races abandon one language and take to another, as if it were a suit of clothes. Some of the acquirements of civilization are more permanent than language, as the science of cattle-breeding. If the comparative study of religion teaches us that the names change while the thing remains, we may find here good evidence for the higher degree of changeableness shown by language in comparison with other ethnographic characteristics. We should not think it necessary to linger over a point so obvious to all who know anything about the life of races, were it not that linguistic classification is still apt to be mixed up with anthropology and ethnography. Even so great an authority on philology as Lepsius has found it necessary to protest against the notion that races and languages correspond in origin and affinities, as is still far too largely supposed. " The diffusion and mingling of races goes its way : that of languages, though constantly affected by the other, its own — often very different. Languages are the most individual creation of races, often the most immediate expression of their minds ; but they often escape from their creators, and overspread great foreign peoples and races, or die out, while those ' who formerly used them live on, speaking quite other tongues." It is clear that in the light of such deeper considerations, conceptions like that of an Indo-Germanic race, a Semitic race, a Bantu race, are not only valueless, but to be wholly rejected as misleading ; and that, incalculably great as may have been the value and influence of languages as a support and staff in the mental development of mankind, their importance as an indication of distinctions within mankind is uncommonly small. While hunting-savages like the Bushmen speak a finely-constructed and copious language, we find among the race which has developed the highest and most permanent civilization of Asia what, according to evolutionary views, must be a most simple language, — the uninflected Chinese with its 450 root words, which may be put together like pieces in a puzzle and taken apart again, remaining all the time unaltered. Under these circumstances THE HISTORY OF MANKIND it is no doubt possible to make a pedigree of languages, but we cannot be expected to believe that anything is thereby gained towards the pedigree of mankind, when we iind a poorly organised language spoken by one of the highest races, and a highly organised one by one of the lowest. The newer philology appears indeed to promise less than formerly in the way of a universal pedigree of languages. Monosyllabic speech, which once grew at the root of the tree of language, is now thought to owe its poverty and stiffness rather to retrogression than to undevelop- ment, while the South African clicks, once compared with the chatter of birds and other animals, are now regarded less as survivals from the brute than as the characteristic expression of linguistic indolence and decay. We hear no more about remains of the primitive speech, but see in this domain only development and retrogression. The universality of language is the simple result of the fact that all portions of mankind have existed long enough to develop the germs of their capacity for speech to the point at which we can apply the term language. Not only Haeckel's Alali has long passed into oblivion ; all his successors with their imperfect or childish speech are no more. But here the universalness extends farther ; modern languages are organised to a very similar pitch. Herein language is like certain universal arts or implements, which are just as good among savage as among civilized folk. Does not the like hold good with the universal spread of the religious idea, the artistic impulse, the simpler utensil ? At the basis of speech lies the desire to impart ; it is thus the product not of the single man but of Man in society and history. For the sake of and by means of imparting we acquire our earliest knowledge : it develops and enriches the language ; it creates its unity by limiting the exuberance of dialectic variations. We speak, to be understood ; we hear and learn, to understand ; we speak as is intelligible, as others do, not as we ourselves want to do. So far speech is the dearest and most universal sign of the important effect of social life in limiting individualism. All languages now existing are old in themselves or descended from old families ; all bear the traces of historic development ; all are far from their first origin, and for their interpretation philology has now laid aside the " bow-wow " theory. Itself drawn from the mobile mouth of the living man, and remaining close to the mind, the starting-point of living expression, language bears the stamp of life, constant change. Even if it survives the generations of those who spoke it, yet it lives with them and undergoes changes ; dying at last itself The old Egyptian died even before the Egyptian civilization ; old Greek did not long survive the independent existence of the Greek race ; Latin fell with Rome.' These three languages did not die childless ; they survive in Coptic, Modern Greek, and the Romance languages respectively. More rarely do languages perish without successors as Gothic has done. Yet even this has been survived by languages nearly akin to it, which represent the family. Basque, standing solitary 1 [This statement seems to need qualification. Muller and Donaldson give several pages of names of "old" Greek authors subsequent to B. c. 146, including Meleager, Dionysius, Strabo, Philo Judaeus, Epictetus, Plutarch, Appian, Galen, Lucian, Clement, Eusebius, Chrysostom, Longus, Anna Comnena, Demetrius Chalcondyles. ■ As to Latin, if we knew when the " fall of Rome " occurred we could better test the accuracy of the illustration. . Certainly the language continued to thrive for nearly 1000 years after the removal of the Emperor's residence to Byzantium. But to say that a language dies is a misleading metaphor. No one generation notices any material change.] LANGUAGE 33 as it does with no near kinship to any contemporary tongue, will die, and with it a primeval family will become extinct. It is only the mutability of languages that prevents us from seeing in them the characteristic marks of an old connection, the support of that uniformity which we find in myths and material objects. Yet we venture to predict that success will one day attend the effort to ascertain the elements of speech in their world-wide distribution. Meantime in the life of every language a gradual dying off and renewal is taking place in many forms. Words become obsolete, pass out of use, or survive only in religion and poetry. It has been pointed out that since i6i i, 388 words have become obsolete in English. There are besides innumerable changes in pronunciation, spelling, and meaning. Old forms of speech still in use, but long become unintelligible, are frequent in the unthinking life of the natural races. Thus a Fijian in battle challenging his opponent, shouts Sai tava 1 Sat tava ! Ka yau mat ka yavia a bure, that is " Cut up ! Cut up ! the temple receives." But no man knows what the words mean, though they are held to be very ancient. How with new things, new words and terms of speech are imported, or rather import themselves, into language, the age of railways and steamers has shown ; by their means the language of all civilized races has been enriched with hundreds of new words. The Azandeh or Nyam-Nyams assert that many v/ords which were in use among their ancestors are at present no longer employed. Junker believes in a rapid transformation of the African languages ; while Lepsius attaches little value to their store of words, and describes even their syntactical usage as remarkably unstable. Alteration is naturally more frequent in- unwritten languages than where writing has produced a certain petrifying effect on speech ; and if we must admit the assertion of philologists that the life-blood of a language is to be found not in its written form but in dialects, we can understand that we have to regard languages as organisms no less variable than plants or animals. While writing tends to fix a language in a given form, the more fruitful and wider intercourse of races that have writing has at the same time a tendency to widen the area over which a dialect or a language is distributed. We may put it that races without writing speak only dialects, while languages are possessed by those alone who write. But where is the boundary between dialect and language ? At the present day we understand by a language a dialect which has become fixed by writing and widely spread by dint of intercourse. Especially is the literary language rather an artificial than a natural form of speech. Dialects we conceive as languages less copious, less definitely settled and brought under rule, and hence more exposed to change, even of an arbitrary kind. But this is only so long as we compare them with written languages. Of the 300 tribes of the many- languaged Colchis, to do business with whom the Romans, as Pliny tells us, required 130 interpreters, which spoke a language, which a dialect ? At this stage only dialects are spoken, every tribe having its own ; and we need not be so much surprised at the Colchians when seventy dialects are reckoned in modern Greek. What produces language and what preserves dialects we can see by comparing the wide diffusion of Burmese in the thickly-peopled countries of Burma, Pegu, and Arakan with their brisk commerce, and the far more limited area of languages in the hill countries of the Upper Irawaddy, where Gordon collected twelve dialects in the neighbourhood of Manipur alone, and where often thirty or forty families speak a dialect of their own, unintelligible to others. This is the scale by which D 34 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND we have to measure the frequent statements as to the immoderate number of languages among small nations. The multiplicity of the dialects spoken by the Bushmen which show differences even between groups separated only by a range of hills or a river, is referred by Moffat exclusively to the fact of their stage of culture allowing of no common centre, no common interests, in short neither possessing nor producing anything which might contribute to the fixing of a standard language. It is interesting to notice that the language of the Bechuana Bushmen, the Balala, who live as a race of pariahs with and among the Bechuanas, is a much-altered idiom showing many peculiarities in different groups, while fheir masters the Bechuanas maintain and propagate their language, the Sechuana, in a pure form by means of public discussions and frequent meetings for conversation, singing, and the like. Yet we must beware of under-estimating the effect of" customary speech, which also is a conservative force, and assuming a too easy fluidity in linguistic forms. We learn from Schweinfurth that the Djurs and Bellandas, though far apart, have preserved the Shillook language almost unaltered. The latter are divided from the Djurs by the whole breadth of the Bongos, and these again are separated from the Shillooks. Consider too the slight differences in the most distant Bantu dialects. We can only assume some great error of observation when S. F, Waldeck, writing to Jomard in 1833 from the neighbourhood of Palenque, says that he could no longer use a vocabulary which had only been prepared since 1820. We have good cause to know how carelessly vocabularies often are compiled. Even in the best of those made by English or Americans for savage languages a large number of words are, owing to arbitrary transliteration, quite useless for a Frenchman or German in intercourse with " natives." In any case, however, it may be taken as a rule that the larger a race is, the more intimate its intercourse, the more firmly articulated its society, the more uniform its usages and opinions ; so much more stable will its language be. Public speaking, popular songs, national laws, oracles, exercise in a lesser degree the same influence as writing. They set obstacles in the way of the natural tendency of language to flow into the countless streams of dialect, and give permanence to speech-formation which, without these external influences, would have enjoyed but a transitory existence. These facts show clearly where we have to look for the real and essential distinctions in the degrees of linguistic development. Permanent growth enhances the value of language as of civilization. The language which has means to express anything without becoming obscure through redundancy, which offers the most complete, most intelligible, and shortest methods of expressing ideas, whether abstract or concrete, will have reached the highest stage of develop- ment. And hence it would follow that a thorough parallelism rules between the development of language and that of culture, since the highest culture requires and creates the most copious means of spoken expression. Without prejudice to the varieties in the structure of language, the possessors of the highest culture will thus speak a language which deserves the name of a first-class implement. But by this term we do not understand merely that which best fulfils the end for which it is designed, since the Australian languages in all their poverty perfectly subserve the simple wants of those who speak them. We rather look upon languages as special organisms with a development of their own. Just as in the LANGUAGE 35 class of mechanical tools, we should give the plough a higher rank than the axe, although the latter fulfils simple needs just as well as the former meets greater requirements ; so must we hold the supple yet firmly -articulated, clear though copious languages of the Indo-Germanic family of more account than the poorer idioms of the Bantu. But if the language of a race be the measure of the stage of civilization it has reached, we must be cautious in drawing conclusions from one to the other ; for language is only one among modes of expression, and has its own life. Least of all should the mode in which it deals with particular conceptions be taken as such a measure. Counting and reckoning are doubtless very important 'things, upon the perfection of which a great deal of the mental development, and consequently the culture, of a race depends. But in view of the alleged inability of many savage races to think higher numbers than 3 or 5, attention must generally be drawn to the fact that the inefficiency of a tool does not always imply a corresponding inability in the hand using it. In reply to the constant repetition of the statement that as the languages of these races contain jio numerals above 3, the people cannot count beyond 3, Bleek has very properly pointed out that this conclusion is as much justified as would be the conclusion that, as the French say dix-sept and quatre-vingts, they cannot count beyond 10 or 20. Greek had a word for 10,000; Hindustanee has words for 100,000 ijac), and 10,000,000 {crore); we have none. The Nubians, who can only count to 20 in their own language, employ Arabic words for higher numbers ; at thq same time calling 100 by their own word, imil. Just the same holds good in colour- names, the deficiency of which among many savage races and many peoples of antiquity was unhesitatingly ascribed to a corresponding deficiency of perception. Here they started from the unproved assumption that expression corresponds exactly to perception — in this instance that the number of colour-terms corre- sponded to that of the various degrees of colour which pass through the retina to be reproduced in consciousness. Erroneous as is this supposition, it is no less instructive for the recognition of .the true nature of language, to observe that many races, otherwise uncultivated, can show an unusually copious list of colour-terms. Both copiousness and deficiency alike spring from immaturity. We just as often find the same name used to denote different colours, as the most different names applied to the same colour. This is merely the copiousness of confusion, and no token of hio-h development. After testing a native of Queensland, Alfred Kirchhoff wrote : " It is asserted that the Hottentots have thirty-two words to express colours ; if so, they are exceeded more than two-fold by these Australians of Queensland, a list of whose colour-names yielded as many as seventy." A light is thrown on the way in which this excessive wealth of terms arises by the fact that the greatest cattle-breeders among the African Negroes, the Hereros, Dinkas and their kin, who are passionately devoted to that occupation, possess the greatest conceivable choice of words for all colours — brown, dun, white, dapple, and so on. The Herero has no scruple about using the same word to denote the colour of the meadows and of the sky ; but he would regard it as a sign of gross mental incapacity if any one were to comprise in one word the various gradations of brown in diff"erent cows. So among the Samoyedes there are eleven or twelve designations for the various greys and browns of reindeer. The nautical vocabulary of Malays and Polynesians shows similar development ; but not far off we find great barrenness, the result of 35 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND J] indolence. Nor is it only " natural " races who are content with one word for different colours ; the same want of fertility in the formation of language holds good in higher stages. The peasant of central Germany frequently includes violet under brown, and the Japanese as a rule calls blue and green indifferently ao. r\ Requirements decide what the wealth of language shall be. y^Xj l^O^ For the most civilised among modern European nations the rule \ I seems to hold that a man of average education actually uses only Lj a very small part of the words which his language contains. The English language claims to possess 100,000 words, yet an English field-labourer gets along as a rule with about 300. Where races of a higher civilization come in contact with a lower, the language of the latter easily lapses into impoverishment, since it takes over a number of words from the former. But then its impoverishment allows no conclusion as to the degree of civilization, but can only b2 looked upon as a historical fact in the life of that language. A good example is the freedom with which Nubian has been sup- plemented by Arabic. The Nubians have their own special words for sun, moon, and stars ; but the indications of time, year, month, day, hour, they borrow from the Arabs. With them essi serves for water, sea, river ; but the Nile is called Tosst. For all native ..^ animals, domestic or wild, they have names of their own ; Arabic ^ j for all relating to building and navigation. Spirit, God, slave, the Vj ideas of relationship, the parts of the body, weapons, the fruits of the earth, and everything connected with breadmaking, have Nubian names ; on the other hand servant, friend, enemy, temple, to pray, to believe, to read, are Arabic. All metals have Arabic names, except iron. " They are rich in Berber, poor in Arabic." How much the very mixture of tongues does to enrich a language, and above all to adapt it to its purpose, is shown among European languages by English, which includes just about as many words of Teutonic as of Romanic origin. Many of the despised . . foreign words are really in- X r r n \y ^ N^ Y X ^ G ^ dispensable. We need only think of the planting and engrafting that has had to be undertaken in the garden of every African, Polynesian, _,,.,.., , , and American tongue in order Owner s marks : the upright column from the Ainu (after Von Siebold) ; , . -ui r i. the others, rudimentary writing from the Negroes of Lunda (after ^^ make it poSSlble for the M. Buchner). missionaries to interpret the simplest facts of Scripture history and the writings which form the foundation of Christianity. In every mission the rendering of " God " especially has a history rich in difficulties and errors. Glancing at the heavy burden laid upon those who are naturally without speech, we will only call to mind the interesting fact that in Kazembe's kingdom Living- stone met with a deaf and dumb man, who used just the same signs as un- educated persons of his kind in Europe. It is obvious that the language of signs and grimaces is all the more tempting to use in proportion as language proper is LANGUAGE 37 defective and simple, and the less varied and abstract the ideas to which it can lend expression. By frequent use this kind of language can be brought to a perfection of which we, who always have thousands of words at command, can form no conception. Races deficient in culture can put far more into the simplest winks and gestures than we are in the habit of doing. Livingstone tells us that when Africans beckon to any one they hold the palm of the hand downwards, as though to combine the idea of laying it on the person and drawing him towards them. If the person wanted is close by, the beckoner reaches out his right hand in a line with the breast, and makes a movement as if he wanted to catch the other by closing his fingers and drawing him towards himself; if the other is farther off, the movement is emphasised by holding the hand as high as possible and then bringing it downwards and rubbing it on the ground. But gesture language has not been developed to a real system of signals among the Africans, who for that purpose use the drum language (drum signalling, it may be said, extends from the Cameroons through Central Africa to New Guinea, thence to the Jivaros in South America). Its highest cultivation seems to be reserved for the inventive, and at the same time taciturn, Indians of North America. Mallery, in his great work on the sign and gesture language of the Indians, has given a list of principal signs, by combining which the most various sentences can be formed. Here belong also fire and smoke signals ; the whistling language of Gomera, in which shepherds converse over great distances, make appointments, and so forth ; and the like. Lichtenstein gives a pretty instance of the expression of numerical conceptions by means of signs. He relates that a Hottentot, who was disputing with his Dutch master about the length of time that he had yet to serve, contrived to explain the difference of their respective views to the magistrate. " My Baas," he said, " will have it I have got so long to serve " Here he stretched out his left arm and hand, and laid the little finger of the right hand on the middle of his forearm ; " but I say that I have only got so long " And therewith he moved his finger to the wrist. American Indians often carry a complete measure with various subdivisions tattooed on one arm ; this brings us to the rudiments of writing. Among all races of the earth we find simple methods of fixing a conception, which present themselves either in picture-writing or in sign -writing as allied inventions. Yet both are familiar to the youth of all races in later times. Our boys use a form of picture-writing when they draw an unpopular schoolfellow on the door of his house with a donkey's head. But adults who possess no higher form of writing are able, by means of pictures placed in a row, to express a good deal more than isolated notions. As soon as by mutual consent a conventional character has been stamped on these representations, making them intelligible to wide circles, they attain the stage of picture-writing. Signs can only serve a purpose defined by mutual agreement, as, for instance, marks of ownership simply express the fact that the article upon which they are painted or cut has such and such a definite man for its owner. Many signs which are hardly recognisable under the ornamental character which they often assume, and which brings them nearer to art, may have sprung from ownership marks of this kind, or be directed to make a notion plainer, as when the road is indicated by a foot going or a hand pointing in a certain direction. But then they have already reached the boundary at which their arrangement in succession brings us to a higher stage of develop- 38 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND ment. The " Wabino song of the Ojibbeway Indians," represented on our coloured plate entitled " Indian picture-writing," gives an illustration of the way in which not only one idea but a whole series of statements can be expressed by simple means to which a definite sense is attached ; all the higher kinds of writing have sprung from picture-writing. > This descent is recognisable in the Mexican and Egyptian hieroglyphics, but is obliterated in the Chinese ; but traces may still be noticed everywhere ; even in the cuneiform writing we may find echoes of the picture-writing from which it sprang. In the Egyptian hieroglyphics an ox or a star indicate the things themselves, but besides this, even in the very oldest inscriptions going back to B.C. 3000, they also denote certain definite sounds. In the Mexican picture-writing signs of things and signs of sounds were similarly blended. A monosyllabic language like Chinese, which denotes different words by means of one and the same syllable, makes use of signs of things which indeed are now hardly recognisable in order to define phonetic signs for syllables. The Japanese, on the other hand, for the purposes of their language, which, being polysyllabic, is more adapted to phonetic writing, arranged a really phonetic script out of the Chinese letters. In a more decided fashion the Phoenicians did the same when they dropped the superfluous signs used by the Egyptians to denote things, and only adopted such hieroglyphs as were most necessary for writing down the sounds. The Phcenician names for the letters made their way into Greece, and passed into all western " alphabets." Thus, from obviously manifold beginnings of picture- writing, grew up, in one spot of the earth only, one of the finest implements of human thought — the art of writing by means of letters of the highest pliancy, adapted to all languages, and in its development into telegraphy and shorthand attaining the highest possibilities of compressed expression of thought. Therewith mankind achieved an extraordinarily important step in the progress of its develop- ment, for in fixing and securing tradition, writing fixed and secured civilization itself, in the essence of which we have found the connection of generations based upon tradition to be the living, we may say the inspiring nucleus. § 6. RELIGION Difficulty of the subject — Have "natural" races religion? — Are their ideas survivals from a higher sphere of thought, or germs to be developed later ? — Hawaiian Hades-legend — .The origin of all religion lies in the search for causes — Phenomena which stimulate this search : great natural phenomena — Superstitions con- nected with animals — Sickness, dreams, death, have an even more powerful effect than natural phenomena — Ascription of souls to all objects — Fetishes — Idols — Temples — Modes of burial — The idea of a future life — Morality in religion — Classification and propagation of religions — Missionary activity. The inquiry into the religious life and thought of natural races is difficult. They give information about their conception of the Supreme Being only with reluctance, often incompletely, or with the intention of deceiving. Very often it may really not be easy to them to give such information, for the reason that they have no clear ideas on the subject. When Merensky asked some Christian Basutos' what they had thought about God while they were still heathens, they said : " We did not think about God at all, we only dreamt." Religious ideas as clear and simple as monotheism are not found among savages. Not only does the entire RELIGION 39 thought-life of these people move in pictures of dreamy indefiniteness, in many cases without sequence or connection ; they lack the secure progress and develop- ment of thought from one generation to another which brings about the organic growth of the thought of a former age into that of the present. Such religious ideas as do exist are often known only to a few elders who guard them jealously. Even where this does not occur, the dislike to giving away the secrets of religion often makes it possible to get at most a mutilated fragment. We must therefore be on our guard against too narrow a notion of the religious surmises and imaginings of " natural " races. In one respect they are always comprehensive. All mental stirrings and strivings which are not directed to the immediate practical aims of life find in them their expression. Reli- gion is at once philosophy, science, historic tradition, poetry. Cranz says of the Greenland angekoks'' They may be called the Green- landers' physical - science teachers, philosophers, doc- tors, and moralists, as well as soothsayers I" In reli- gion there is under all circumstances much room for conjecture and inquiry. But we must not start with the view that everything wTiich exists deep down must equally show itself on the surface. The most unfair judgments, full of intrinsic contradictions, arise from this prejudice. How shallow is the view of Klemm that among the Arctic races every one believes as he likes ! " No common religion exists 1 " Klemm has quite misunderstood a remark of Cranz. One who knew the Namaqua Hottentots well, Tindall the missionary, has also made the statement that " in regard to religion their minds seem to have been almost a tabula rasa'.' This has no doubt been understood to mean that they had scarcely any inkling of religious matters. Certainly in the soul of a Namaqua there is no intelligible writing to be read, clearly proclaiming any religious message ; but survivals of an intelligible writing, in many places obliterated, are not lacking. And so indeed Tindall presently qualifies his own statement by saying that the fact of their language containing appellations for God, spirits, the evil one, seems to indicate that they were not wholly ignorant of these matters ; even though nothing further appears in the terms of the language or in ceremonial usages and superstitions to give evidence of anything more than a crude conception of a spiritual world. He believes that the superstitious tales which travellers have picked up from them and narrated as religious reminiscences, were regarded by the natives themselves as mere fables, related only with a view to entertain, or in order to give some insight into the habits and peculiarities of wild beasts. This expresses far too Melanesian sea deity, from San Christoval. (After Codrington. ) 40 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND narrow an apprehension of the idea of religion ; if these usages and tales are not religion, at least they are of the elements from which, as civilization progresses to development, the crystal of a purified belief is built up. When we find ourselves in the course of our description in presence of the question : Is religion to be seen in usages, views, legends ? we shall put the counter-question : Is religion to be apprehended only as a cut-and-dried conception, or is not the truer and fairer way of looking at it to hold that the elements of religion are to be recognised in every department of human thought and feeling which can rise above the affairs of daily life, and above this corporeal existence, into the realm of unknown causes ? Rarely, no doubt, among " natural " races shall we meet with religion in that narrow sense ; but, on the other hand, we shall not analyse a single race on its spiritual side without laying bare the germs and root-fibres of religious feeling. Nay, we shall arrive at recognising that the spiritual side of a race nowhere finds more copious utterance than in religious matters. Beside the material destitu- tion of the Bushmen, are not their myths_ suggestive of a treasure ? From scientific conviction we must unhesitatingly endorse the verdict which was pronounced by the religious feeling of V. von Strauss in opposition to this tendency to degrade : " Complete absence of religion, true atheism, may be the result of an undermining, soul-deadening over-culture ; but never the effect of crude barbarism. This, in its deepest degradation, always retains the craving for religion, with a corresponding faculty for religion, however faultily and confusedly this may operate." Ethnography knows no race devoid of religion, but only differences in the degree to which religious ideas are developed. Among some, these lie small and inconspicuous as in the germ, or rather as in the chrysalis ; while among others they have expanded in a splendid wealth of myths and legends. But we must not always want to see primitive conditions in their imperfections. Let us remember how in Abyssinian Christianity, Mongolian Buddhism, Soudanese Mahommedanism, great religious thoughts have dwindled away beyond recogni- tion. The propagative force of religious ideas is as great as the certainty that they will dwindle where they are cast forth into the wilderness of the materialistic savage life, isolated and cut adrift from any organic connection with a great living mythology, or a system of teaching imbued with spirituality. Already we find debased fragments of Christian or Mussulman ideas in Indian and Polynesian, Malay and African myths ; and if we had no inkling as to the history of their introduction, they would appear as evidences of an underlying germ of monotheism. The poetry of " natural " races again in any case arouses a suspicion that some twig from the tree of European story and fable has there dropped into the soil, and with the power of reproduction which is peculiar to these creations of fancy, has straightway thrown up scions in foreign ground. In a notice of Callaway's Nursery Tales of the Zulus (1866), Max Miiller has connected with this the deeper thought that like our folk-lore stories and so forth, at least so far as they deal with ghosts, fairies, and giants, these point to a remote civilization, or at least to a long-protracted process of growth. " Like the anomalies of language, they show by their peculiar character that there was an epoch when what is now devoid of rule or sense formed itself with a definite object and according to laws." We venture even to predict that in the religion of the most remote African and Australian peoples, just as in the rest of the culture possessed RELIGION 41 by them, will be found germs or survivals of Indian or Egyptian tradition. The Indian elements in the Malay religion belong now to the domain of proved facts, and perhaps reach as far as Hawaii and beyond, even to America. The profundity of the thought must not be measured by the imperfection of the expression. In considering a mythology like the Polynesian, it must not be overlooked that this multiform weft of legend is often less like clear speech than like the prattle of a child, and that one has more often to attend to the What ? than to the How ? Often a similarity of sound, an echo, suffices the sportive fancy of these people as an attachment for far-reaching threads. The same aspect of a supra-sensual relation looks far more impressive on the parchment of some manuscript of a Greek poet than in the oral tradition of a Polynesian or African priest or sorcerer. But if we try to extract the more intelligible sentences in the prattle of the savage we get a picture which is in its essence not far inferior to the more adorned poetical expression. Let us compare a Hawaiian legend of the under-world with its parallels in Greek mythology. A certain chief, inconsolable for the loss of his wife, obtained from his priest, in answer to his prayers, the company of the chieftain's god as his guide into the kingdom of Milu. They journeyed to the end of the world, where they found a tree which was split ; on this they slid down to the lower regions. The god hid himself behind a rock, and after smearing the chief with an ill-smelling oil, sent him forward by himself. On reaching Milu's palace, he found the court filled with a crowd of spirits (Akua), who were so engrossed in their game that he was able to join them unobserved. When they did notice him they took him for a newly-arrived soul, and jeered at him for a stinking ghost who had stayed too long by his putrefying body. After all kinds of games had been played, they had to think of another, and the chief suggested that they should all pluck out their eyes and throw them together in a heap. No sooner said than done ; but the chief took care to observe which way Milu's eyes went. He caught them in the air and hid them in his coco-nut cup. As they were now all blind, he succeeded in escaping to the kingdom of Wakea, where Milu's hosts might not set foot. After long negotia- tions with the chief, now under the protection of Wakea, Milu got his eyes back, on condition of releasing the soul of the chief's wife. It returned to earth and was reunited to its body. Religion is everywhere connected with man's craving for causality, which will ever be looking out for the cause or the causer of everything that comes to pass. Thus its ^dee pest roots co me i_nto_CLontact_ wiih science, and are profoundly, entwined with the s ense _o f Natur e. Agathias tells us that the Alemanni venerated trees and streams, hills and dales ; and we may boldly assume for all mankind the universal " animation " which lay at the base of this veneration. This craving is very suitably met by the tendency to vivify or even incarnate all the higher phenomena of Nature, by attributing to them a soul which guides in the first place their own motions and changes, but afterwards also their relation to their surroundings nearer or more distant. The Dyaks ascribe a soul to plants no less than to men : if the rice rots, its soul is clean gone ; but it can, when strewn on a body, follow the human soul to the other world, and there again be incorporated and serve it for food. A false application of the law of cause and effect leads to the assumption that there are relations between this soul and the human soul, which at last weave around this latter a close network of 42 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND causation. The story of the Kosa chief has often been told. He died shortly after causing a piece to be broken off an anchor which was cast up on shore, and from that time forward the anchor was treated with reverence. So a thousand threads are knotted together, and none of them is forgotten ; and in this net of tradition the simple child of nature flutters like a fly in the spider's web, and ever entangles himself more with every attempt to find the right clue. The soul is literally caught. A cord with several open nooses fastened to it is hidden in the leaves. If the man for whom it is meant catches sight of it, he fancies his soul is caught in it, and frets himself to death. There you have a method of sending a person out of the world which in the Banks Islands has been tested by Fetish in Lunda ; purpose unknown, perhaps to avert lightning. (After Buchner. ) Cf. p. 48, experience. Hence the terror of phantoms due to his own power of imagination, which is one of the distinctive traits of the savage, and has more influence than it should over his doings. When Melanesians are asked, says Codrington, who they are, they answer " Men," in order to let it be known that they are not ghosts or spectres. Of night the savage is more afraid than a badly brought-up child. Felkin, writing from the Upper Nile, says that at night the natives will never march, for fear of wild beasts and the evil influence of the moon. At the same time, for full half the year they feel far from comfortable in the daytime, and try at least in some measure to secure themselves under the constant feeling of being threatened by invisible powers, by extending the idea of unlucky days, common to all mankind, to the point of absurdity. Monday, Thursday, and Saturday are good days for travelling in these parts ; Wednesday is neither specially good nor bad ; but Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday are unlucky days. In Java, have not even the thieves their silver dial, like a watch, showing, after the fashion of a calendar, RELIGION 43 the best time for burglaries or robberies, to assist them in their choice of lucky- days ? White men, like everything new and unusual, have almost inevitably been mixed up with these superstitions. Many a sad episode in the history of the explora- tion of the dark continent is explained by this connection, which is natural enough in the negro's spectre-teeming brain. Livingstone, in his Missionary Travels, forcibly depicts the terror which he, as the first white man, inspired in the negroes ; he, the best friend they ever had among the whites : " The women peer from behind the walls till I come near, and then hastily dash into the house. When a little child, unconscious of danger, meets me in the street, he screams." No less are the Entrance to a fetish hut in Lunda. (After Buchner. ) Cf. p, 45, things owned or used by the white man instantly raised into the sphere of the miraculous, the fetishic. Paper with writing on it especially is a fetish for the West Africans, who regard it as sheer witchcraft. Buchholz was bandaging a severe wound for a man when a scrap of paper fell unnoticed from his pocket. On his next visit to his patient he found him flitted, because the house was bewitched. The bit of paper was restored him with the utmost solemnity. On the occasion of the funeral of a Bakwiri woman he was urgently entreated in a special speech by an envoy from the negroes, kindly not to throw bits of paper about in his walks, as otherwise they would have to avoid those roads and spots. When Chapman visited Lechulatebe's town on Lake Ngami, the mortality from fever was very high. The chief was in great alarm and excitement about " the death that was roaming all around." He scarcely showed himself outside his hut, made his wives and children undergo frequent ablutions, and kept his doctors constantly at work by having his threshold incessantly sprinkled with decoctions of herbs. The relations of those who had died were subjected to tedious processes of purification before they were allowed to rejoin the community. 44 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Thus an animating breath blows not through Nature only, but all things ; and there is in all dealings, even in the decoration of men and the ornament of things, much more spiritual value and purpose than we fancy. Therefore the word polytheism applies to all religions of the lower grades. A tendency to multiply conceptions shows itself throughout ; in the course of time the process of god- making has become pleasant and easy to the troubled spirit to which all this is due. Where the mass of the chiefs were looked upon with awe as demi or entire gods ; where souls did not only survive, but remained in intimate contact with this world ; where every family possessed its own tutelary spirit in the shape of a beast or something else, gods and idols must have sprouted and flourished and entangled the whole mind in a thicket of fantastic fictions. We do not wish to see therein only the base creations of terror. In the act of animating is something beautifying, such as on their higher levels poetry and philosophy strive after. Where lie the sources whence ghosts and spectres rise incessantly in their millions ? The most striking change in a man himself or his closest associations is wrought by sickness, sleep, and death. It is not the fear of Nature which meets us as the first basis of superstition, but that of death and the dead. The business of Shamans, medicine-men, Koraji, and whatever else these wizards are called, is everywhere in the first place to seek out the causes of death and sickness, and then to communicate with the spirits of the dead ; who are regarded by their relatives with deep aversion, often with fear and pain. Directly from this springs fetishism, setting up in all manner of complicated ways relations between the countless tribe of souls and all pos- sible articles in which these take up their abode. Here it is clearly seen that no straight road from objects of external nature to the soul of man is offered by the fundamental lines of primitive religious systems — for we shall seek in vain for any direct relations between their teaching and the measure of extent and activity which the fetish-system has reached, — but rather that the fancy, timidly searching around in the whimsical way in which the emotions of alarm are apt to express themselves ; for any support that may be at hand attaches itself to objects often in the highest degree unworthy of its confidence. But interrupted experiments, so to say, are tried with regard to supernatural agencies. Not only is search made after new spirits, as when curiously-shaped stones are laid by a tree to try if they will improve its bearing ; but old acquaintances are tested, as for e^^^=^-^^^^ Wooden idol from the Niger (Museum of the Church Missionary Society). RELIGION 45 instance, by giving them bad or putrid meat. Why have all the African negroes such a predilection for horns, hanging them in quantities on the persons of their magic-men, while the high priests, who are the kings, keep their dreaded medicines in them ? Whence comes the almost comic veneration for pots, displayed by Dyaks and Alfurs ? Anything striking finds a place in the wilderness of curi- osities which hang about the neck and waist of a Kaffir magician ; indeed it was in the leather pouch hung round the neck of such a person that the first great find of diamonds at the Cape, by an extraordinary coincidence, was made. Stone-worship is widely spread, but as a rule is connected with large upright pieces of rock ; though in Africa any stone may become a fetish, and be decorated with rags of many colours wound round its neck. Among the Mus- gus, long poles serve for idols ; the Azandeh prefer shapeless blocks stuck with nails, while in the Cameroons pillars of basalt are used. It would be hard to find an African who has not a fetish hung on him, and since many wishes, actions, and so on, have their special fetishes, many a man is heavily laden with these salu- tary objects. There are amulets too, which taste the water before you drink, and give warning of anything noxious therein ; for evil spirits are partial to this flickering, foaming, ever-changing fluid. An Eskimo's weapon bears a little tutelary god on the band. This is only one stage from the so- called idols, figures of dead persons, which are cut in wood or cast in metal, or moulded in the huts out of clay, and set up about the graves. Both are animated ; only the soul of the ancestral image is a definite one, which used to possess a well-known body, and now has passed into this doll, and often for years to come takes its accustomed place ; as in the case of the Shaman of the Goldi, who stands in his old place in the yaourt until he is broken up with memorial services. With the making of such visible images of souls comes also the founding of special places for venerating them, in the form of the African fetish huts, the tabooed places of Malays and Polynesians, and so on up to the temple. As these are frequently contiguous to the places of burial, the abodes of the souls of the departed, they often look much like our church- yards, which are laid out round the churches without any consciousness of the close connection which prevails between care for the souls of the dead and the worship of God. The only difference is that the primitive temple more often grew out of the churchyard than the churchyard was appended to it. The Shaman of northern Asia surrounds himself with a whole series of wooden idols, with whom he converses during his conjurations, and from whom he gets advice. A mummy wrapped in clothing, from Ancon. and Stubel. ) (After Reiss 46 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Figures of animals, especially bears, come in, and his yaourt is a very home of souls. It must remain un- decided whether we have a higher stage in the fetish-huts where there are no images or other embodiments. In Africa we find them as genuine huts, in Oceania as little shrines. Funeral ceremonies are a department of religion among all races. The thought underlying them all is that the soul does not leave the body immediately, or at least maintains a certain alliance with it. The Poly- nesians state clearly that the soul after death haunts the neighbourhood of the grave for a while, until it finally descends to the realms of Milu or Wakea. Among Malays and Indians of north-east America this action is equally clear, and among the races of east Asia we find a glimmering of it. For this reason the corpse is often left for some time unburied— a whole year among the Chiriquis. The widely -spread custom of burying gifts with the dead, and the mummy-like arrangement of the corpse ; the marking of the grave, which among the Bongos assumes the character of a monumental edifice ; the founding and maintaining of regular mausoleums in the caise of chiefs show how little the inanimate body is regarded as a mere thing. Among many races provision is made for the temporary return of the soul to its Idols from Hermit Island. (Ethnological Museum, Berlin.) Supposed idols representing souls, from Ubudjwa. (After Cameron.) RELIGION 47 decayed tabernacle, and to this end an opening is left in the vault, and from time to time meat and drink are put by the corpse or poured into the grave. The soul in its wanderings may travel to any other persons, bewitch them, ruin them, or raise them to unexpected honour. In Uganda every sorcerer is tenanted by the soul of a king ; but the ordinary soul, Musimu, can enter into any one. That the soul does not rest when it has reached the grave is indicated by the boat which is set up on the mound. In the North the sledge on which the corpse was drawn to its last home is used in the same way. From this boat is derived the shape of the stone slab used by North Germans. The forcible recall of the soul into the corpse by means of witchcraft was regarded as no less possible than its extraction by the same means from the living body, and transference to that of some beast ; this last is a speciality much in favour with African magicians. But with the assumption of universal animation, the fancy need see no bar to any transmigrations on the part of the soul, though beasts naturally occur first. With the grounds for reverent treatment of the corpse fear is associated as a powerful motive. The rapid swathing, the carrying on a pole, the avoidance of the door, the hasty interment at a distance from the hut, are all operations if not prompted by fear, at any rate imbued with it. Curiously enough in this respect the strongest contradictions occur ; for while the Kaffirs often simply drag their dead into the forest and leave them to the hyaenas, they bury others in stone graves, or on their own premises. In the Cameroons a man is buried in his hut, a woman by the roadside. If the hut of the deceased is deserted or destroyed his household furniture is broken up, his slaves and flocks often put to death, and his very name devoted to oblivion, so effective is the dread of spectres. The brief and fragmentary thought of savage races allows of a profound belief, expressing itself in as many forms as we have seen, in the animation of the human body, without a perception in all cases of the consequent necessity of accounting for the place in which the souls abide. Still that belief doubtless renders their acceptance of the idea of a future state more i-eady ; and if this shows a remarkable similarity among ancient Europeans, Polynesians, and American Indians, we may look upon this as a fact of geographical distribution, remarkable rather in its relation to the geography of mankind than to the psychology of races. The myth already given of the soul-snatching Hawaiian chief shows clearly how far the resemblances go. In the fundamental features of a descent, a trick practised on the lord of the nether world, the jealousy of the remaining souls, we find agreement among many races. Conceptions which, as immediately reflected images of the reality, involve a certain element of necessity, stand in a different relation to each other from ideas which are attached to them only in the second or some more distant degree. These latter must always be tested with especial thoroughness in respect of their origin in higher and more remote spheres of thought. What is called an idol is originally nothing but a memorial of a deceased person — an ancestral statue. It is more rare to find the soul embodied in a symbol, as when, at a memorial service for the dead among the Goldi, a wooden bird bearing the soul away is swung over the head of the Shaman. Usually the man is given as he was, often highly conventionalised. The connection between these images and what is commonly called idolatry, naturally depending on the affection bestowed upon the dead, is never more than a part of religion. This explains 48 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND the otherwise inexplicable variety which in this matter prevails among close- allied tribes, as for instance in New Guinea, where the Nufurese have a long list of idols ikaroivar), while there are none whatever among the Arfaks. Now we can understand also the intimate connection between skull and idol worship, for the skull is a» memorial of the dead. The farther the idea of memory retreats, the more impersonal is the image. In Tahiti, where the personal family idols, or tii, are distinguished from the national idols, tu, it is chiefly the latter who are rendered invisible by wrappings. The theft of them often gives rise to wars between tribes. Besides death we find life, with generation and birth as its more enigmatic and significant processes, woven into relations with the supernatural. The moment of generation is by predilection represented in carvings and images, and very commonly that of birth also. In the case of this the presentation of the feet signifies a special relation to the myths. There lies an affirmation in the new life which is opposed to the power of destruction. The phallus as a symbol of protection against evil powers is in use among the most various races ; and therefore we do not think it necessary, with Schmeltz, to bring the appearance of phallic emblems among the Maoris into relation with the obscure question of the composition of the race, on the ground of the special prominence of the same among the Melanesians. Any- how it is the case that among most dif- ferent races, birth, the attainment of maturity (this very particularly), and mar- riage, are surrounded by ceremonies intended to render in a perceptible form the importance of these events. To the notion of a future life there has now accrued, in a higher stage of development, a more advanced and higher element in the shape of a doctrine of future rewards and punishments. Of this, however, many races show no trace. The " natural " races, no doubt, imagine divisions ' in the future life, but these are social, not moral. Thus the Polynesians distinguish the realms of Milu and Wakea. The former is the rowdy place where lower-class souls dwell, and amuse themselves with games and shouting ; in the latter, on the contrary, quiet and dignity prevail, suited to the chiefs of whose souls it is the abode. Walhalla is only for brave warriors who have fallen in fight ; and so, too, the Indian warrior has his select heaven. It is essential to point out that ethics do not necessarily form a primitive ingredient of religion, but are an admixture occurring first in the higher stages. Two classes of natural phenomena exercise the most profound effect upon the innate sense of insecurity ; and man must find out how he stands with regard to them. In presence of the mighty activity of natural forces he compares himself with the power and majesty of nature and acquires the consciousness of his own inferiority. On all sides innumerable obstacles offer barriers and hinder his will. His spirit trembles before the infinite and unfathomable, and hardly troubles itself Grave of a Zulu chief. (After G. Fritsch. ' RELIGION 49 further about the particulars of which that exahed grandeur consists. Legends are sure to be woven about a mountain in the plain ; the dark forest harbours ghosts ; storms, earthquake, volcanic eruptions, impress by the unexpected and stunning manner of their outbreak. The fantastic idols with which forest and field in the Negroes' part of Africa swarm are in, fact frequently memorials of lightning-strokes and the like. The deepest impression is left by the phenomena of the starry heavens, by reason of the majestic calm and regularity of their motions. The existence of these strange appearances so remote from earthly things, their brightness, their great number, naturally exercised an influence on the mind even of primitive men. All, even Bushmen and Australians, have names for the constellations. The warming power of the sun must have been felt with gratitude, more perhaps in cooler regions than in the tropics. Moon and stars, lighting the darkness, are doubly welcome to savage races with their fear of ghosts. The trouble they took to exorcise the obscuring spirit in eclipses of the moon, the high place allotted to the moon in the religious ideas and legends of all races, are evidence of this. It is too much to say that the sun as giver of light has been revered by all nations as a divine being and the universal benefactor. But sun-worship is widely spread, especially among agriculturists, and where ideas are more developed. Even on the magic drum of the Lapland Shaman a radiant sun is represented. Legends connected with the various positions of the sun in respect of the earth, and with the changes of the seasons, are widespread. In common with mother-earth the fertilising sun creates all living things, and the stars also. The souls of departed heroes make their way to the setting sun. With the sun is connected the worship of the fire which must not be put out and is kindled under the bond of an oath. The Japanese solemnly brings into his house at the new year fire which has been lighted in the temple by rubbing wood on an appointed day. Even the Russian in the district of Tamboff carries all the ashes he can and some stones from his old hearth into a new house, to bring luck ; a survival of the transference of the fire itself. Weather phenomena impress by their immediate effects, and the degree to which they enter into economic prosperity. The part which they play in the beliefs or superstitions of mankind is thus easily comprehensible, and shows itself in the frequent occurrence of rain- or sunshine-makers, the purveyors of fertility. Somewhat beyond lies the domain of those phenomena which never or seldom come into immediate relation with man, and therefore are noticed by him only when they force themselves on his attention. Even the savage, the most prejudiced creature in human shape, the man with the least field of vision, receives an impression from the rainbow " the bridge to the sky," from the roar of the sea, from the rustle of the woods, the bubbling of the spring. These phenomena are, drawn into the range of superstitious conceptions, which in their turn are called forth by nearer causes. Are they images of souls, which the Ainu place on promontories where an awkward current prevails in order to pray for a good passage or a lucky haul ? Savages know how meteoric stones fall, and have retained experiences of them in their traditions ; the stone-hatchets found in the soil they call thunderbolts. The boat with the corpse is launched on the waves ; the dark forest is overlaid with taboo ; in every brook a spirit is imagined. Poetry here entwines its roots with religion ; it appears a highly superfluous •question to ask if these races have a sense of Nature. E 5° THE HISTORY OF MANKIND But social observances are also mixed up in this. We know the part played by beasts as symbols of the social groups, as totems that is. The Shaman goes about with beasts as with his fellows, puts on a pair of artificial stag-horns, drinks the blood of dogs out of the hollow figure of an animal, has a hollow wooden bird swung over him, sacrifices to the river god out of fish-shaped shells. The Giljaks employ bears, hedgehogs, and tortoises for magic purposes, especially in sickness. Every year they have a solemn feast of fat bear out of their own wooden dishes. Legends about beasts and plants form a chief, not to say typical, part of the literature of primitive races. Beasts ever find a place at the base of the genealogies of tribes and chiefs. Wherever the world of Indian thought has spread, the belief in the trans- migration of souls ex- tends, especially in their transition from apes ; even Japan once had its sacred apes. Besides this, beasts impressed themselves irresistibly by means of the good and harm they did. Man-eating savages felt themselves akin to the man-eating beasts. The custom of sparing these animals — indeed among the Malays and the Joloffs of Senegambia, crocodiles were kept in sacred ponds — may perhaps have another interpretation, as when Lobengula, king of the Matabele, made it a capital offence to kill a crocodile because mischievous magic could be practised with a dead crocodile. Even so, however, the beast religion may be assuming an indirect form. The inquiry about the One, the Lord of heaven, the All Creator— God in short, is not one of the first results that emerges from the mass of religious ideas. It is only incidentally that a glimpse at Him opens, and that only through chinks in the thicket of idols. The conception of His existence which we gain is all the less clear from the fact that the streams in which He is mirrored flow from different sources. Undoubtedly ancestor-worship leads to a gradual exalting of prominent figures above the common herd, and even to heaven. We can point to such apotheoses in Africa, as well as in Oceania ; among the Incas they even began while the subjects of them were living. By the transference to heaven, the con- dition of far-reaching dominating influence is fulfilled. The millions of departed souls must have chiefs to lead them, and for this purpose those who were chiefs below are also the best adapted in the next world. Further, if it pertains to the essence of a god to accomplish the most various results from one point, without Fish-headed idols from Easter Island. (Christy Collection. ; RELIGION 51 being tied to thing and place of action, he must be raised on high. The weak- ness of remembrance accounts for his appearing to forget his roots in earthly affairs and to soar above. Thus the mass of souls become spirits ; in their images they become fetishes ; a few become tribal gods, and from these perhaps, by dissemination, may proceed gods recognised to a distance. Jehovah is received as the God of the world. Creation requires at least a first man, and beyond him a God capable of creating him. Usually the sky or the sun is called to this dignity ; there live the sacred primeval ancestors who now coalesce with the creating God. Lastly, consideration of Nature demands great ruling spirits for the great things, and innumerable small ones for the small things. One Spirit in heaven, who is at the same time Creator, will of course be the First. Thus from different points there is a striving after one high Being, one God ; everywhere we hear the name of a highest spoken, but only faintly and indistinctly. Frequently he is literally to be regarded as the eldest, the spiritual Lord of the tribe, the Sovereign over the souls of the departed, the Creator. It is dangerous for our missionaries to assign his name to their and our God, or the adherent of ancestor worship will be led of himself to put a mytho- logic form upon a first man, the ancestral lord of the whole race. Unkulunkulu is the original ancestor ; he is himself the creator of men, a mysterious figure, but mysterious simply because the Kaffir has abstained from figuring him precisely either in fact or fancy. Thus Unkulunkulu resembles the supreme heaven-god of most negro religions ; a being unaffected by earthly doings, and therefore dis- regarded ; and corresponds to Molimo among the Bechuanas and Basutos, and Nyambi or Nyame elsewhere. The origin of all may be the same ; but here it is important to notice, whether memory has grown so faint that the image of the first parent has been spiritualised, or this image is still so recent that our conception of God is degraded by the use of His name. The missionaries to the Hereros took Mukuru and Kalunga (for which they had at first put " fortune ") as the expression for " God " ; Nyambi was not adopted till later. In pre-Christian days the Hereros actually lived in a state of pure ancestor-worship. On the Gold Coast, and in parts of East Africa, we shall see that more pronounced developments in the direction of monotheism appear ; and with^ these Christianity need have less scruple in linking itself. In some cases, the name of evil spirits (where they appear as destroyers and renewers of creation), has been adopted to render " God." In the New Hebrides, Suque, the name of a secret society, has been used for this purpose ; and in the Torres Islands, Augud, which means " totem.'' The familiar Manitu of the Indians of North America is not " the Great Spirit," but "spirit" generally, even a bad one. The Polynesian Atua, which the missionaries took for " God," may have originated in some similar idea ; but it is so universal in the sense of ghost, soul, or breath, that too close a contact is prevented with notions which the heathen would seize upon. The fact, referable to ancestor- worship, that within one race different spirits are assigned to different groups, which conduct their worship in secret societies, and often use this secrecy for purposes of outrage, naturally hinders the growth of the monotheistic idea, so long as no one of them is in the majority. Regulations of rank in veneration is no sure guide, for the name of the god venerated as supreme changes from one country to another. In the small area of the Society Islands, we find the following gods holding the supreme place : — Rua in Tahiti, Eimeo in Raiatea, Tane in Huaheine, Tao in Bolabola, Tu in Maurua, Tangaroa or Taaroa in Tabueamanu, Oro in Tahaa. In 52 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND New Zealand, Rangi (Heaven), takes the highest place at the head of all other gods. In Hawaii, Tane comes to the front, as Kane ; with him Wakea and Maui, who are only of importance in mythology, and the war-god. But as we shall see, all these supreme beings can lose nearly all their worship in favour of simply local ancestral deities. Nothing has contributed to this so much as the formation of sectarian groups, who struggled to keep their own god or spirit strictly to them- selves. As they grew powerful, they imposed their own divine service on weaker brethren. On the other hand, we are told in regard to the Shillooks, that the Niekam owned in every village a temple or a house, often the whole village, which was inhabited by a privileged and much -respected caste — a kind of lords spiritual. These claimed a share of all the booty taken ; no man ventured to touch their cows, even to milk them. The chief's wealth was kept concealed in the Niekam's territory. In Abbeokuta, bundles of straw indicated the property of the thunder- god Shango ; this is inviolable, and whosoever lays his hand upon it, incurs the vengeance of Shango's priests. Indeed Shango is an instructive phenomenon. Some hold him for a king who in his life was very cruel. Others say he was a late-born scion of deity, only recently admitted to immortality ; sometimes he is the thunder-god's ancestor, sometimes his companion, and then thunderer himself All points to the soul of a chief lately raised to Olympus. The shiftings and exchangings of names, especially among non-writing races, owing to the recurrence of the same deities and divine functions, form a constant source of confusion even in the fundamental threads of mythology. It is therefore only possible to disentangle them by keeping fast hold of the underlying reality, setting aside all questions of hierarchy. To see in some isolated fact, like the survival of the first parent of the human race, a special and higher characteristic feature of the American form of the deluge-myth, is only to fail to recognise the multiform varying nature of the myth generally. An effort after selection and elevation lies deep down in the human mind. Nothing but rapid extension over wide areas, and the keeping of all decomposing influences at a distance, is needed to raise one idea of the deity above local limitations and waverings, as we see in the diffusion of Christianity and, Islam. But the acquisition of power, that is, alliance with the secular arm, is also necessary. The notion of man's position towards a personal Supreme Being, the highest disposer of things, to whom man stands in personal relations, has nowhere grown up in a pure form, but always only in fragments, inadequately, and in a shape full of misconceptions. Nor has religion, in the course of its development, remained alone, but has passed into more and more intimate alliance with other efforts of the human mind, above all with the stirrings and cravings of his conscience. Thus it received its most important adjunct, the moral element, and thereby acquired a higher influence upon general civilization. While in the cruder stages of religious development, man appears almost entirely as the demanding party who approaches spirits, fetishes, and so on, with his wishes or even orders, the execution of which is paid for in sacrifices ; the spiritual side now comes to power, and, equipped with £eward and penalty, rules him, not by guidance only, but also by constraint. This |harper differentiation of the moral element in religion, which may be followed ■rough many stages, is accompanied by the clearance from it of a mass of elements Khich without any deeper inward affinity are apt to be bound up with it ; as, for Sample, in the lower stages, not only the service of the superhuman spirit,' but RELIGION 53 also the care of the spirit in man, as in all beginnings of science, art, and poetry, matters connected with the sorcerer, the priest, and the like. Thus we have a point which we might compare to that where a number of vague winding tracks meet to form a few clear and straight roads. The alliance of religion with the civil law, which, though involving many humiliations, has in the end an elevating effect, frees it at the same time in an increasing degree from the alliance with all the activities of the mind which are to develop independently with art and science. The separa- tion takes the line of a distribution among a number of persons of the priestly functions, as magicians, healers, rain-makers, image-carvers, court- minstrels, and so forth ; but only arrives at completion on the threshold of the age of art and science. History first shows us poetry, the arts, and the sciences in independent activity when we come to ancient Greece ; in Egypt they were all attached to the priestly caste. The alliance of the temporal and spiritual powers is to be found in all stages of mankind at the present day. The power of a chief is incomplete without that of witchcraft, exercised by himself or in the closest union with the priests ; only fighting chiefs may form exceptions. Even here the bard has to go with the prince. A failure in rain-making may totally destroy all respect for a prince ; and Africa affords many instances of dethronement and murder owing to ill-success in witchcraft. On the other side, one can hardly conceive a more powerful support for the tradition of a sovereign house than ancestor-worship, such as made a saint of each of the Cuzco Incas. Oceania shows, by a multitude of examples, that princes or warrior-heroes stepped into the first rank of the gods. The succession of power was thereby materially fortified. In this connection we recall a remark of M^rim^e's to the effect that the preference shown by the Romans for the Etruscan above other Italian races, may have been partly due to the knowledge of the oldest religious traditions and the interpretation of omens which distinguished the Etruscan aristocracy. What is good for society and the state is indicated as pleasing to God ; spirits who have to do with the welfare of families, societies, states, cannot but be beneficent. With the immutability of the divine requirements, the variable demands of morality, the profound and in part noble requirements of society, are content to be allied where they enjoin respect for age, the safeguarding of marriage, of children, and also of property — this last in the form of the highly selfish laws of "taboo." This gives the blending of temporal and spiritual interests. The cunning priest whom enlightenment sees at work, under one cover with the prince, to keep the people stupid is, especially at this stage, no mere fiction. Secular and spiritual law are fused. If the chief is a sacred person, any revolt against the order at the head of which he stands is sin ; and now religion serves for the more easy taming of the agitator and subverter. The distinction between good and evil, which the profound sentiment of the Mosaic story places at the very beginning of the process of the Incarnation, must, in any case, have grown up early and spontaneously in another way. In Nature we find the harmful and the beneficial, and in the universal animation their counter- parts pass from her into the spirit-world. The feeling of thankfulness toward the Good is constantly being called forth anew. Man needs it, and must be able to pray to it. Then if all good is to be ascribed to the soul of an ancestor, we have a mythic embodiment of the Good. But at this point the Good long remains as the benefactor of the individual, not of the whole community. There is an 54 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND approach to this notion when, as in New Britain, the creation of all good things, whether lands, institutions, or only traps for fish, is ascribed to one single being — ■ To Kabinana (" the wise ") ; other harmful things to another — To Kovuvuru (per- haps " the clumsy "). But when the t^yo halves of the race, who bear the names of these creators, show no recognition of rank -distinctions, but those called Kovuvuru are found \i^^^^\ .™=^ throughout on the same level as the Ka- binana, it looks as if only a very weak con- trast were felt. The deep gap between an unmoral religion and one full of morality is attested by the human frailty of the dwellers in heaven. Why are the mytho- logical figures of the gods often so aban- doned from a moral point of view — worse even than the men who adore them ? A perverse conception of the force and power whereby they have to raise themselves above the masses produces a false ideal of divine greatness. We have, too, the fable-making element, which exer- cises itself agreeably in mythology, and has spread over the whole world that other false Magicians of the Loango Coast. (From a photograph by Dr. Falkenstein. ) ideal of the cunning divinity, outwitting others in adventures of love, war, even business. The priest is the embodiment of the world of spirits with whom he has to hold intercourse, whom he bans and exorcises. He is fitted for his duties by the expulsion of the ordinary soul and the entrance of a new one ; he best adapts himself to them when he differs mentally from the ordinary mass with a tendency to mental derangement, epilepsy, hallucinations, and vivid dreams. The tradi- tions of the fetish priesthood are propagated by instruction, which is imparted to suitable youths. As a transformation from the normal man to a controller of spirits with magic powers, the training assumes the character of the miraculous, even a form of transmigration. Those whom the fetish loves are taken away by him into the RELIGION 55 bush and buried in the fetish house, often for a long period. When the person thus carried off awakes again to Hfe he begins to eat and drink as before, but his understanding is gone and the fetish man must instruct him and teach him to perform every movement hke a httle child. At first this can only be done by blows, but gradually his senses return, so that it is possible to speak to him, and after his education is completed the priest takes him back to his parents. Often they would not recognise him did he not recall past events to their memory. The nucleus of his art lies in his intercourse with the spirits of the departed, but as sorcerer he is the receptacle of all knowledge, all memories, and all fore- bodings. Many Europeans have been in a position to appreciate the operation of his medicaments of herbs and roots. The position of the sorcerer is that of the doctor on a higher stage ; some doctors understand certain disorders — for example, worms, — better than others, and to these patients are sent by the sorcerers. Bleek asserts that among the Kaffirs of Natal their doctors, as a rule, dissect beasts, but that in time of war some have secretly dissected men ; this is a solitary statement. In any case they, no more than their patients, content them- selves with natural remedies derived from the animal and vegetable kingdom, but they ob- tain, as they think, the deepest and most secure effects by the intervention of super- natural powers, whereby also troubles other than sickness, such as those of love, hatred, envy, may find a cure. The production of hallucinations was familiar to the priests. When they brought these about they were merely creating fresh supports to faith. Long Dice and amulets of a Bamangwato magician. ■' => '^'^ . , (Ethnographical Museum at Munich.) before science they were m possession ot the secrets of suggestion, hypnotism, and the like. The people themselves knew a good deal, but the sorcerer always kept the best a secret. Consider the power that resides in the mere fact of tradition. Often, indeed, the only kind of knowledge of history possessed by these races is the tradition of important events which is handed down secretly among the priests, and astounds those who seek for counsel by the appearance of a supernatural knowledge. Naturally, this knowledge can also be put at the service of the sovereign and of politics. The sanctity of tradition had also the object of making it secure, and in this sense we can say that it replaces writing. Writing and printing have damaged the position of the priest. The art of tradition had also been specially cultivated ; to it belongs the knowledge of tradi- tional signs and pictures in higher stages, the art of writing and reading, if possible, in a special script, as with the Egyptian priests. Special priests' languages recur among the most different races of the earth ; the fundamental ideas of Shamanism are accompanied everywhere by details similar or agreeing even in the smallest points, of a kind which, in some respects, is not everywhere intelligible. Arrows to be shot off at the completion of a conjuration in order to lay the evil spirit form part of the sorcerer's equipment on the Lower Amoor as well as m Africa, America, and Oceania. S6 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND The employment of masks in religious ceremonies is widely spread in all countries where the form of religion is polytheistic. Beast masks and human masks, monsters and complicated head-dresses, all find a use in religious perform- ances. They recur in China, Thibet, India, Ceylon, among the old Mexicans and Peruvians, as also among Eskinios, Melanesians, and African Negroes. The Aleutians put masks along with the bodies in the graves, with such comically dis- figured features that one is inclined to' take them for dancing masks, which at one time served a profane end, and now are connected with serious conceptions of life and return after death. Prognostications alone involve a complete science. Their number is so great that they teem through everything and hamper life on all sides. To give only a few examples from the Kaffirs. Eating milk products in a thunderstorm attracts the lightning. If you eat milk in a strange kraal you will commit a transgression there. You must not do field work the day after a hailstorm or you will bring Masks from New Ireland — one-eighth of real size. (Berlin Museum of Ethnology. ) down more hail. He who kills a hawk must be put to death. If a bird of this kind settles on a kraal it is a sign of bad luck for the owner. If a cock crows before midnight it betokens death for man or cattle. The same evil significance is attached to the springing of a dog or a calf on a hut, and to the appearance of a rabbit in a kraal. The whisker of a leopard brings sickness and death upon any one who eats it unaware in his food, but if any one eats it with some of the flesh of that animal he becomes brave, and has luck in the chase. Dogs who eat the beak and claws of birds become strong and courageous. He who steps upon a thorn must eat it in order to protect himself from it next time. The horrible and widespread belief that no fatal accident which is in any way unusual can be natural, gives rise to a mass of magic practices, which pre-suppose a great know- ledge of personalities and their influence. Ordeals which in Africa are intensified by means of strong poisons are surrounded with a strict ritual, as are sorceries connected with rain, the renewal of fire, and the most important periodical incidents in the field, the cattle-stall, and the chase. The spiritual elements of a civilization are constantly exposed to the most rapid decay. As it is just these which are the motive forces in its forward development, this fact alone explains the great tendency to stagnation with inevitable retrogression. The history of religions is specially instructive here. If we ask in which elements Christianity has undergone the greatest modifications RELIGION 57 among the Abyssinians, or Buddhism among the Mongols, the answer must be in the most spiritual. All founders of religions have borne higher ideals than their successors, and the history of all religions begins with a declension from the height reached by pure enthusiasm, to which later reformers at long intervals endeavour again to raise themselves and their fellow-professors. In monotheism we taste the bitterness of the sharp experiences of life known to advanced age. Who can wonder that young and naive races do not esteem it in all it3 pure worth ? Abstractions are not fit for the masses. The same holds good in matters of dogma. It is not purity of dogma for which the fanaticism of the multitude cares, but for having the religion to which it is accustomed left undisturbed. How easily, in the extension of races, the deeply -differing principles at the base of religion tend to disappear behind forms is shown by nothing better than by the simultaneous Buddhist and Brahmin worship that takes place in many temples in Burmah and Ceylon. The magnificent ruins of Angkor Bat, in Cambodia, are a unique surviving testimony to this state of degradation of religions into a blend. Outwardly decay shows itself in the split between form and essence, and it is here that the first rifts are formed. Then the work of destruction is carried farther by external decomposing influences, impaired strength, impoverishment, loss of independence, dwindling numbers. Artistic facility does not keep pace with spiritual creative power ; as we may see by comparing the spiritual imaginings of Polynesian mythology with their representations in stone or wood. The spirit evaporates without leaving any creations behind fully corresponding to its ' own power and grandeur ; but the forms remain. That is why among the so-called " natural " races the forms, even the most rudimentary, often hold a higher place than the essence ; and this alone marks a stage in degradation. In almost all religions we meet with blurred traces of higher conceptions, and not only in spiritual but in purely material affairs, like those articles used in Buddhist worship, which have passed into the paraphernalia of Shamanism, brought thither by the active traffic between the more opulent Shamans and the Chinese, or the Christian crosses which in Tuckey's time were carried as fetishes on the lower Congo. Some isolated Christian notions had anticipated the missionaries. When Dobriz- hofifer was trying to convert the Guaranis on the Empalado, an old cacique said to him : " Father priest, you need not have come ; we need no priests. St. Thomas long ago gave his blessing to our land." The idea of a Devil, the most conspicuous evil spirit, was spread long before Christianity by uneducated Europeans, and has led to the assumption of " devil-worshippers," and a dualism of good and evil spirits. On the other hand, with regard to the legends of creation and the flood, often no less suspicious, and their curious accordance with Genesis, they are too universal and too deeply entwined with the whole mythology to allow us to assign them so recent and so casual an origin ; part of them, at least, belong to the world-myth, whose origins date from pre-Christian times. Have we in religion isolated developments or a network with closer meshes here, looser there ? The answer involves more than any classification can offer ; indeed, we shall not be in a position to classify aright until we have made it clear to ourselves how much is the common property of mankind, how much the separate possession of a race. What we have to say on this point is connected with and supplements what has been said above about the common possession of mankind. 58 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND " Animism " and ancestor-worship are common to all human nature : Bastian calls them elementary thoughts. As we may learn from funeral customs, their mani- festations often agree even in details. From them we could reconstruct a universal doctrine of souls as held by savages. Fragments from China and North America, Germany and Australia, fit with wonderful precision, and form a united body of doctrine consistent in its fundamental features. We have seen how the " universal animation " of Nature connects itself with this. No doubt the objects which it animates are different in Greenland and in Fiji ; but from like sources it draws, with like bounty, superstitious usages absolutely alike. For this reason the men who have power over these things agree so extraordinarily in disposition and character. The Shaman of northern Asia and the African rain-maker, the American medicine-man and the Australian sorcerer are alike in their nature, their aims, and to some extent in their expedients. All mythology has outgrown the small local influences which once must have been powerful in it. We do not mean that in the mythological reflection in the popular mind of regular natural phenomena, it is not often some slight abnormality which is felt as such far beyond the measure of its magnitude, as when the sun is distorted on the horizon ; we do not overlook the fact that the extent to which sun-worship flourished in Peru rested upon the certainty in that land of little rain or cloud, that the brightest of the heavenly bodies would at all times be seen uncovered ; nor do we forget the influence of historical facts such as meet us in the legend of the primitive abode of Iroquois and Algonquins, in which they saw not only their home, but also the places whence kind white men with beards came to them. Here one element may preponderate over another ; the main fact remains that they were bound together by like fundamental thoughts from which what we call the world-myth was constructed. The chief trait in the world-myth is the opposition between heaven and earth. Heaven appears sometimes as itself, sometimes as the sun, i.e. the sun is the eye of heaven. They are interchangeable ; thus among the South Americans a belief in heaven replaces the very marked belief in the sun, as the future home of the soul, which exists among the North Americans. In the work of creation the sun is the assistant of heaven. The earth is always opposed to both ; its creatures are subordinate ; it is always regarded as the female upon whom heaven begot all existing things, man in particular. With sun, lightning (or the god of thunder), fire, volcano, earthquake, is associated also the idea of an assistant creator who approaches the earth in the revolution of the sun, in the lightning-flash, in volcanic eruptions, just in proportion as heaven remains remote from him. Hephaestus and Prometheus, Demiurge and chastised fire-bringer, life -giver and destroyer, he stands at the centre of many a religious system, and heaven, the All-father, comes far behind him. The Maui-myths are common to all mankind, not specially Polynesian. They might just as well be called after Loki, who is also a crippled god of the under-world, or after Daramoolun, the thunder-god of the South Australian races, whose name Ridley translates by " leg on one side,'' or " lame," or again after the Hottentot Tsuigoab, " wounded knee." No myths, and so not these, can be made, in proportion to their wider or narrower, denser or looser, distribution, the bases for conclusions which have reference only to limited race- relationships ; it is quite enough if the characteristic features turn up elsewhere. Maui, like Hephsstus, is crippled in a limb, and dwells in the earth ; if the South RELIGION 59 Africans believe in a lame god dwelling in the ground, it is the same. He even meets us in a multiplied form in one-legged gnomes who dance round the cave-dwelling fire -god of the Araucanians. The cloud -serpent with the lightning is to the Nahuas the creator of man, just as the thunder-god is to the Tarascos, or Ndengei to the Fijians ; and he again is a serpent who grew with the foundations of the earth, and whose movements produce earthquakes. And this serpent is, again, the sacred dragon of China and Japan with its endless variations.^ In connection with the opinion of many races that the god of heaven and the light who dwells in the east is their creator and benefactor, they place their original abode in the east, as the Mexicans sung of Aztlan, the land of brightness. Still more often the place of departed souls is placed in the western sky, where the Islands of the Blessed rise in the golden glow of sunset. In the description of the ways which the soul has to travel, its dangers and escapes, lies a mass of simi- larities, which is far greater than the missionary, with all his energy, can have carried from one people to another. Readers may remember the Hawaiian tale of the soul brought back from the under-world.^ There is scarcely a single legend of creation in which a tree does not occur — the tree of the Hesperides, the ash Yggdrasil, the tree of Paradise. It stands between heaven and earth, the gods descend upon it, the souls find the road to heaven by it, or it becomes a rough beam for them to totter across ; in short all creation has come out of it. The region in which men are conceived as sprung from trees embraces Hereros, Kaffirs, West Africans (cf cut on the next page) ; the kindred idea of an origin from plants occurs among Polynesians and South Americans. As a geographical fable it has preserved its connection with that of the home of souls : one of the Canary Islands, held to be of iron, and therefore waterless, is said to be watered by means of a tree " always covered by a dense cloud ; thence the leaves of the tree received water which constantly dripped, so that men and beasts got drink enough." This was believed down to the 17th century, as may be read in Schreyer's Neue Ostindianische Reisebeschreibung (1680). The men of the present day are in many accounts only a second later-created race, separate from an earlier one which was destroyed by some great catastrophe, the falling of the heaven or the flooding of the earth. Cameron heard at the lake of Dilolo that in the depth of the lake men were living, moving, and acting, as if in daylight, their entire village having been submerged for their cruelty in sending away an old beggar man. A single one received him kindly, and so saved himself and his house. It may be thought that is a version of the story of Noah, through Arabic or Abyssinian tradition. But we find the story elsewhere also with local alterations. The water especially is regarded as inhabited ; the negroes on the Nile can tell of splendid herds which the river-spirits drive at night to pasture. This whole mythology, put together fragmentarily and only half-understood, has as it stands before us the interest of an ancient building constructed of strange stones, in which the very gods of modern men, the returning restless spirits of the departed, roam about in a thousand forms, to which nevertheless it is only in a few places that they assume a relation of intimate kinship. The fundamental ideas of animism and all that is twined round it, spread over the earth at another date and from other sources than the cosmogonic legends, the myths of gods, and the ^ [Dragons also live in mountain-countries, especially on mountain-tops. Compare Salimbene's account of the ascent of the Canigou by Peter III. of Aragon.] - Supra, p. 41. 6o THE HISTORY OF MANKIND portraitures of the next world ; and the former were certainly much earlier than the latter. Both show the most striking similarities in the remotest regions ; but in every region they are two independent worlds of ideas, which come into intimate contact at a few points only, while even then there intervenes a peculiarity which we may call " free invention," or at least " free variation." We do not share the view that every custom, every usage, of these races with no traditions must be deeply rooted in some historical association. Much comes into existence in sport ; the Nyambe worship of the Balubas is not the only case in which the suggestion of a whim has had consequences. Beside the great similarities, finally, we find Cemetery and sacred tree in Mbinda. (After Stanley. ) the smaller ones. These help to explain the others, of which they are often survivals, roots, or offshoots. As we find in all parts of the earth, where Europeans have built houses and ploughed the soil, the same plants growing in rubbish or springing from seed ; so isolated superstitious usages, of little importance in themselves, sprout up as survivals and traces of thoughts which are universally diffused. The belief not only in the evil eye, but in hands and horseshoes as counter-charms to it, is found in India, Arabia, North Africa, and Europe. In Morocco the women, when in mourning or after illnesses, hang little balls made of their hair on certain trees, a custom which, as the hair-offering, we meet with in the most various forms in all parts of the earth. It is only one portion of a complex mass of usages the aim of which is respect towards,^ concealment or offering up of, whatever is taken from the body. Here also belongs circumcision, a custom most irregular in its RELIGION 6 1 distribution. Zulus practise it, Bechuanas do not ; it is found in New Caledonia, but not in the Loyalty Isles. In its special ritual form again it runs through the most various and distant countries. In conclusion, we may refer to one of those usages which seem to have something playful about them, and of which for that very reason the wide dissemination strikes us. In Ancon and Flores, frames made of reeds, and having many-coloured threads wound over them in the fashion of a flag, or a star, are put into the grave with the corpse (Figs. 7, 8 in the coloured plate " American Antiquities). Among the Pimas a religious significance is attached to them, and we find them in Vancouver and Chittagong without any nearer definition of their purpose. In Egypt they form ornaments for horses ; in Bolivia they are stuck in the rafters. In order to take a general view of the extension of the various religions, it is customary to divide them into a few large groups, to the statistics of which, if we only demand estimated figures, an approximation can be obtained. If the grouping is to be based on the deepest-seated differences, in order not to break up mankind into casual fragments, but to distinguish them according to the true height and depth of their religious development, we must not always take into consideration the traditional, superficial forces, Christianity, Paganism, Polytheism, Monotheism. If we survey the religious development of mankind in connection with their total development, we recognise that its great landmarks lie elsewhere. Monotheism arises even in the midst of polytheism as a natural effort to provide one Supreme Being ; while the monotheistic creeds are invaded by the impulse to distribute the one who is distant into several, or many more accessible. At the base of the religious development of existing men we find : I. Religions wherein the divine is not exalted far above the human, and without any strong moral element. These rest in all cases on belief in souls or ghosts ; allied with this are sooth -saying, medicine, rain -magic, and other superstitions. In one group we find the association of natural phenomena to be only slight, and the tendency to fetishism accordingly strong, as with many Negro races and the Northern Asiatics ; in the other a higher development of cosmogonic and mythological conceptions to entire systems, as with Polynesians and Americans. II. Religions which exalt the divine far above the human sphere, and progressively detach themselves from any mixture with other efforts of the mind in the direction of science, poetry, and the like, cultivating proportionately the moral element. The belief in souls recurs in a purified form in the assumption of a future life with rewards and punishments. (a.) Polytheism, which allows a position of sovereignty to several locally varying gods without always recognising any moral superiority in them, as the Brahmins and Buddhists, pre-Christian Europeans, the ancient Americans. (iJ.) Monotheism in different grades 01 development, according to the number and importance of the beings akin to gods, saints, and so on, who intervene between the one God and man. The single God appearing in the highest moral perfection — Mussulmans, Jews, Christians. Christianity, at the beginning of its intimate and manifold contact with non- European races, soon laid aside the prejudice that their souls were not destined to 62 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND salvation, and from the beginning of the sixteenth century the missionary formed the inevitable accompaniment of trade and conquest — even of the slave trade. Not only as an institution with religious aims, but generally as an effect produced by strangers among a race of whose nature they often know very little, but into which they try most forcibly to penetrate, the entrance of the missionary is important from an ethnographic point of view. The monotheistic religions could not well attach themselves to such a wavering uncertain conception as that of Nyambe or Manitu. In most cases they could not even use the name of the supreme being whom they found in possession to denote their one God ; misunderstandings would have been too great. But the possibility of forming a connection, even of fruitfully cultivating the already prepared soil, is doubtless presented in other religious ideas of the " natural " races. Theoretically for the understanding of the much-despised condition of religion among the " natural " races, no less than practically for estimating the prospects of Christianity, it is worth while to emphasise these. The idea of the continued life of departed spirits, on which that of a future world also rests, is fundamentally akin to the Christian doctrines of the soul and immortality. To cherish the memory of ancestral souls is in no way in contradiction with Christianity, but it must pause before the deification of ancestors with which idolatry begins. In the cosmogonic myths of natural races Christianity finds traits of its own doctrine of creation reproduced, often in striking agreement ; lastly, the Christian doctrine of God as Father and Son may be attached to the ideas of a Demiurge. The gap opens as soon as we set foot upon the moral law, that essential con- stituent of Christian doctrine. In spite of Abraham's sacrifice the missionaries must set their faces firmly against human sacrifices and the low value attached to human life. What is more difficult, they must extend their influence upon the morals of their scholars much farther into the domain of the purely secular than did the heathen priests. Their Christianity must have a social and economic side, and therewith be revolutionary in its effects. Polygamy and slavery form two great stumbling-blocks. Missionaries seek to reach their aim by reforming the economic existence of their disciples, but may easily go too far in that direction. Certain philanthropists who sent a missionary with Captain Fitzroy to that forgotten spot of earth, Tierra del Fuego, wrote in his instructions : " In your intercourse with the Fuegians you will bear in mind that it is the temporal advan- tages which you may be capable of communicating to them that they will be most easily and immediately sensible of. Among these may be reckoned the acquisition of better dwellings, and better and more plentiful food and clothing. Consequently you will consider it a primary duty to instruct them in cultivating the potato, cabbage, and other vegetables, and to rear pigs, poultry, etc., and to construct a commodious habitation. You will probably find in this as in more important things that example is the most influential instructor. You must there- fore take care to have a comfortable habitation yourself, furnished with all necessary articles, and kept clean and orderly. You will also fence in a piece of ground for a garden and get it well stocked with the most useful vegetables, and also surround yourself as quickly as possible with a plentiful supply of pigs, goats, and fowls." This is a beautiful plan ; why were its results so meagre ? Such an attempt to bring men over from a poor but easy state of existence to one which, though better. RELIGION 63 demands more of them, can be nothing but an economic revolution which is not only capable of bringing blessings, but also certain to cause mischief, and the latter sooner than the former. The existence of the Fuegians may very well appear dreadful to European eyes and pleasant enough to their own. The missionary must in all cases start with a notion that the higher civilization is certain to have a decomposing effect upon the conditions of heathen life, and that he should soften the transition by the practical schooling of his disciples ; but he should not play the part of artisan or tradesman. This contradicts the mystic element which resides together with a mass of superstitions in the priesthood of natural races. This must not be undervalued, but we must recollect the vows of self-denial so frequent in Africa, which are taken with special ceremonies and Boat-coffin from Timorlaut. (From a model in the Ethnographical Museum, Dresden. Strictly kept ; or the bodily and spiritual acts of self-injury performed by the Shaman when he is sending out his soul in convulsions. It is in the healthy alliance of self-denial with practical work that the success of the missionary monastic orders lies. The aim which the German missionaries to the Hereros set before them has for its basis an economic and social development such as Christianity might entertain ; deeds are more effective than spoken doctrine as they are shown in the demeanour of the missionary, and above all in the calm security with which he regards and treats the things of the world. Finally the priest can only make a breach in the chaos of superstition if he is at the same time capable of acting as physician. The universally-recurring combination of chiefhood and priesthood leaves no doubt that the success of missions depends upon a right estimate of political conditions. Not till the missionary can obtain the backing of a powerful chief will the discharge of his task as a rule be possible. The Austrian mission in Gondokoro, started with such sanguine hopes, collapsed without leaving any traces worth mentioning of its devoted activity (Speke, with some exaggeration, says without having accomplished a single conversion), chiefly because it took a perfectly independent attitude. In fact, instead of any government which could 64 *THE HISTORY OF MANKIND keep in check the Bari population, in their state of utter political decay, and protect their property against themselves, there was nothing but a society opposed in its very essence and aims to all missionary activity, that of the slave-traders. Results have shaped themselves quite otherwise where the missionaries have been able to develop their operations under cover of even such toleration from a chief as Moffat got from Mosilikatse ; or when they have enjoyed the protection of powerful chieftains, as Livingstone among the Basutos and Makololos under Sechele and Sebituane, or the missionaries of different denominations under Mtesa and Mwanga in Uganda — though in this instance they have unfortunately not been able to keep clear of parties. From all this it should be clear that missions can only go to work with a prospect of success after thorough study of the religious notions and secular institutions of the " natural " races. Ethnology owes most valuable contributions to many missionaries who have realised this. Very frequently it has been the inevitable study of the languages which has led to a deeper understanding of the life of a race. But he who would teach savages what is deepest and most essential in Christianity must also understand it himself The least successful missionaries have always been uneducated men, incapable of a right conception of their own faith, such as have been sent out in numbers by England and America : men without love, who have often been rather traders or political agents than Christian ministers. In conclusion we may again point out that the implanting of a new faith always implies a simultaneous transformation in civilization, and must be the work of more than one generation. A mission allows of no hurry, it must shirk no trouble to heap up grain upon grain, it must not allow itself to be seduced into snatching at opportunities which seem to afford a chance of more rapid progress, and thereby, even were it only temporarily, diverted from its true aim. Next to Christianity, Islam is the chief proselytising monotheistic religion. In many respects it seems better to meet the comprehension of the more backward races. In Africa and Asia it makes progress. Its extension may be merely superficial, as in the negro countries of Africa, where we find among the Furs, under a Mussulman varnish, the belief in a god called Mola and sky-worship in full vigour, while in West Africa the transition from the Mussulman mollah to the fetish priest is imperceptible ; but still it strikes its roots deeper than Christianity. It offers no logical difficulties, and its practical commands may be lived up to with a certain laxity. The permission of polygamy and slavery gives it an incomparable advantage compared with Christianity. The prohibition of the former indeed excludes from Christianity, at all events until a profound moral renovation takes place, all those persons of property whose higher social position is above all things indicated by the ability to keep several wives, and for whom this is the chief satisfaction derived from their wealth. Upon this institution, to which even missionaries do not always venture to offer stubborn opposition, and which quite recently in the southern Ural has caused hundreds of Tartars to renounce Christianity under the eyes of Russian officials, a great part of the influence of Islam depends. The general upshot is that Islam is usually better suited to the society and polity of the least advanced races, and is allied with a civilization all the closer to theirs for the reason that the place of its origin is nearer their own both in locality and in climate. Printed Tjv the Baiiogxaplusches Inslitut. Leipzig. WEAPONS, UTENSILS, AND ORNAMENTS OF AMERICAN INDIANS. WEAPONS, UTENSILS, AND ORNAMENTS OF AMERICAN INDIANS. 1. Wooden club : Haida, Queen Char- lotte's Island. 2. War-dance flute, Sioux. 3. Pipe: Blackfoot Indian. 4. Arrow : Apache (New Mexico). 5. Racquet: Choctaw. 6. Blunt Arrow : Apache. 7. Stone Tomahawk : North-west America. 8. Bow : Apache. 9. Wooden Club. ID- Post erected in front of house : 11. Dancing rattle : (?) Apache. 12. Tobacco pipe. 13. Shield : Pueblo (Cochiti). 14. Quiver and bow-case : (?) Apache. 15. Scalping knife in sheath : Blackfoot. 16. Medicine bag of otter skin. 17. Hunting pouch : Cherokee. ^ 18. Bowl : Pueblo (Acomo, Arizona). 19. Spear ornamented with feathers (Uaup^) : Brazil. 20. Bow : Conibo. 21. Arrow: Cashibo. 22. Arrow : Conibo. 23. Arrow : Shakaya. 24. Fishing-arrow : Shakaya (Orinoco). 25. Fishing-fork : Pano. 26. Harpoon : Pano. 27. Arrow : Cashibo. 28. Feather - sceptre used in dancing : Mundrucu. 29. Feather-crown : Makusi. 30. Breast belt : Conibo. 31. Necklace : Lengua. 32. Ornament for the back : Rio Pastaza. 33. Carved spoon : Pemba. 34. Bowl : Cocama. Haida^ One-tenth natural size. All from Ethnographical Museum, Berlin. (When no place of origin is given, it is lacking also in the Museum Catologue. They are good old pieces from the former Royal Cabinet of Art). SCIENCE AND ART 65 Not a third of mankind has yet been won to Christendom. Out of 570,000,000 estimated of monotheists 440 confess Christianity. Of the remain- ing 900,000,000 of the earth's inhabitants, the Buddhists with 600 occupy the largest area, and the most inaccessible to Christian teaching. It is practically from the residuum of the lowest heathendom that the missions, which now control 3000 ordained men, have gained their converts. The most conspicuous successes have been in Oceania, where a whole list of island groups have been won for Christendom, and are now sending out from among themselves missionaries to the neighbouring islands. In Africa, Madagascar is almost wholly under Christiain influence. The Hottentots and Hereros, the people of Siberia and Sierra Leone, and numerous tribes in Angola, on the Gold Coast, on the lower Niger, have become Christians. In Asia perhaps i -400th part of the population of India has been baptized. In China the tale is yet less in proportion to the mass of the population — 65,000 in all. On the other hand the Indian Archipelago shows a larger list of Christian districts. In America nearly all the Eskimo of Greenland and Labrador, many Indians in North America, and the greater part both of them and the Negroes in the West Indies, have been gained. In South and Central America the Spaniards, both in Church and State, have been working at the conversion of the Indians ever since the beginning of the sixteenth century, with rnuch success in accessible localities. It is obvious that no one can have a thorough knowledge of missions who thinks that these few figures express their successes. We must always think of them in alliance with other civilizing forces, to which they act as a stimulus or a check. As a spiritual power they effect much which in its essence is spiritual. As Warneck says, " the Gospel puts new religious views and moral conceptions into gradual circulation, and these surround even the heathen part of the race with a new spiritual atmosphere. Wherever a mission has taken a firm footing, paganism is no longer what it was ; a leavening process begins which ends with its decomposition and the victory of the Gospel." And besides that, the emitted light of faith radiates back warmth. § 7. SCIENCE AND ART The condition of scientific development— The slow expanding of the sense of Truth— Religion and Science- Age of fear and of mythology — Friendship with Nature — Science under semi-civilization — Systems of science among "natural" races — Religion as the common ancestor of art and science — Poetry of "natural" races — Lyric and musical art — Images of souls and gods — Priests and Artists — Origin of ornament— Ornaments of men and heasts— Plastic art— Arts and crafts— Sense of colour— Modifications of style — Materials — Popular sports. The fundamental labour is that of agriculture. All other forms of economic activity pursued their course, hand in hand with this, ever more rapidly towards perfection, till they attained in all points what would be achieved by industrious and skilled hands — patience, devotion, and lastly, a fine taste, so high a mark that later generations, working with improved tools and clearer insight, have in many cases not been able to surpass it. They remained, however, stationary at manual and individual labour, and, under the restraint of caste, stiffened in tradi- F 66 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND tional methods. Inventions, machines, production on a large scale, were not reached till much later, when a creative impulse brought into all these activities the mighty element of advance which we now call science. If manual labour provides the basis of civilization, the training of the mind in the maintenance and renewal of mental possessions gives the force of life and increase. In the opening of this second source lies the cause of the great advance from what we vaguely call semi-civilization, to what is called by us Europeans, and is, the civilization of the nineteenth century. In the year 1847 the following question was propounded at some meetings of the Paris Ethnological Society. Wherein really lies the more profound distinction between white men and negroes ? Gustav von Eichthal answered it at that time : " In the possession by the white man of science, which, owing to writing, the elements of calculation, and so on, penetrates ever deeper and gives permanence to itself ; while the negro is characterised, and his stationary condition explained, by the total lack of it.'' Of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and fixed measurements of time and space they are completely destitute, and therewith of what on that occasion was named initiative civilisatrice. Meanwhile we must ascend high in order to find what is in the highest sense science. We claim to live in the age of science, and if perhaps yet more scientific ages are in store in the future, yet we more than any of our predecessors enjoy a science that has of itself achieved great things. A few centuries ago science was still in a dependent position as handmaid of the Church ; we can trace her entire deliver- ance, not without great conflicts, from that bondage. But that was only the con- clusion of a long conflict fought out within the human race. The " natural " races show us science in its lowest stage. They are not wholly without it ; but their science is symbolic, poetic, still hidden within the bud of religion. They are two flowers which cannot expand rightly until they are no longer in so close contact, but each allows the other space to unfold freely. In the lower stage religion includes all science ; and the poetry which forms myths is her most powerful tool. There is no question of truth ; only of getting an image. The sense of truth is uncommonly little developed among " natural " races. The kindly Livingstone wrote in his last diary in Unyamwesi : " In this country you can believe nothing that is not in black and white, and not much even of that ; the most circumstantial report is often pure imagination. One half of what you hear may safely be called false, the other doubtful or not authenticated." The sense of truth must have been developed slowly. The most highly developed races seek it most eagerly ; and we could even undertake to grade the present ^holders of civilization according to their love for truth. With every higher stage of humanity the sense for truth increases, and in every higher race the number of truthful men. There is a period at which the universal animation of nature forms a principle universally valid. Fear or attraction, truthfulness or usefulness, divide all nature between them_. That is the highest form of the subjective conception. The next is mythological explanation, which clothes correct interpretation in an intentionally distorting figurative language. Above the dreary terror which for- bids the Nyassa negroes to mention earthquakes — how long may the myth- breeding effect of such a phenomenon, from which science at last issues, lie quietly under the terror which enjoins a superstitious silence ! — soars the loving dealing of poetry with Nature. One can speak of the age of belief in ghosts^ SCIENCE AND ART . 67 and that of mythology as successive. In the former the bases of natural science are laid in the affinity and acquaintance with Nature, which is a great peculiarity of " natural " races. The mingling of men and other creatures in art is no mere external feature. The feeling of an absolute spiritual distinction between man and beast, so widespread in the civilized world, is almost entirely lacking among savage races. Men to whom the cry of beast and bird appears like human speech, and their actions seem as if guided by human thought, are quite logical in ascribing a soul to beast no less than to man. This feeling of kifiship shows especially in histories of creation, and as a deduction from these in the beast-legend. An enumeration of the animals to which beliefs and super- stitions have attached themselves, however copious, would give a defective picture. In some parts of Africa the chameleon would be prominent, in others the jackal, in north-west America the otter, in the eastern parts the beaver. Nahualism {nahual=z. beast in Quiche), the belief in a familiar spirit in animal shape who is friendly to man, suffers and dies with him, is one way of bringing oneself into alliance v/ith the animal world ; totemism, which makes the tribe descend from an animal, is another. As a rule the myth-forming powers of the mind are concentrated on certain selected points ; while many others, which to all appear- ance recommend themselves equally well to the myth-forming spirit, are neglected. The predominance of traditions over new creations is nowhere shown so clearly as in this limitation, which indeed has a touch of the whimsical. The fettering of the intellectual powers by giving the priest a free hand, and the special direction which is therein given to them through the preponderance of mystical tendencies in the service of superstition, explain much of the backward condition of many races, and produce a hampering, one may say even petrifying, effect not only upon the so-called natural races, but also among those who enjoy semi-civilization. In order to understand this effect we must form a clear view of the position held by priests. Shamans, medicine men, or whatever they may be called. In ancient Mexico they received a special training and attained knowledge and power in the following subjects : hymns and prayers, national traditions, religious doctrine, medicine, exorcism, music and dancing, mixing of colours, painting, drawing the ideographic signs, and phonetic hieroglyphs. This science and ability might be shared with others in its practical employment, but as a whole it remained a privilege of their caste. The superstitious dread of their magic power, of their alliance with the supernatural, their innate or acquired capacity for states of ecstasy, increased by fasting and vows of chastity, raised them in the eyes of the people at large to unattainable heights. The artificially unintelligible priest-language contributed yet more to mark them off, but since the aim of all these preparations and labours was the service of God, or rather of spirits in the widest sense, the elements of progress in culture and science remained unaltered in the germ. This religious torpidity among races whose intellectual life is not yet supported by a more developed division of labour between classes and callings, and for whom religion is the entire intellectual life, means a fettering of the intellect. Science which, when left to itself, is naturally capable of progress, in this alliance is crippled. The Lushais call their witch doctors the " great ones who know " ; it would be better to designate them those who can, for from their knowledge proceeds only skill, not science. In certain directions the intellect of man can progress in straight lines. 68 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND which for us are practically unlimited. In other matters it must necessarily revolve about certain points without going very far from them. To the former belong scientific, to the latter religious concerns. The creation of science therefore forms one of the greatest epochs in the life of humanity, and among civilized nations the deepest cleavages result from the lack or possession of it. The orientals as a whole do not understand how to value the sciences for their own sake. Bare interest in truth characterises them but imperfectly. They esteem knowledge, but on grounds which are alien to science. When we find in Chinese tradition one and the same prince inventing or regulating the calendar, music, and the system of weights and measures, while his wife is regarded as the inventress of silk-worm breeding and silk working, one of his ministers gives the order to invent writing, and another carries out the order at once with great success ; when we find in the same age astronomical observations held in such importance by the State that two statesmen are punished for neglecting to calculate an eclipse of the sun properly ; we see in this close connection of science with State power a proof of the purely practical estimate of science, or, one would rather say, of knowledge and skill. For this very reason the most modern scientific works of the Chinese look to us like a survival from the Middle Ages ; we see the greatest intellects of that race proceeding upon an old road from which a sounder new road branched off centuries ago. It takes centuries for a people to disentangle itself from such errors. The Chinese have had thousands of years, but they stifled all originality in their hierarchic examination system. Good observation and false conclusion are by no means irreconcilable. The Chinese who, as indeed their art testifies, have good eyes for what is characteristic in Nature, are above all no bad describers. Their books of medicine, in which 2000 to 3000 remedies are described, are rich in definitions full of knowledge and apt if often prolix, and still richer in excellent pictorial illustrations. Their classifications too may often claim to formulate carefully correct principles of thought, but it is not pure truth which stands as the aim of all these efforts, it is rather the case that a philosophy full of preconceived opinions leads them astray. The fact that this Physique Mensongere, as Rdmusat calls it, excludes all encroach- ments of the supernatural, and fancies that it interprets all phenomena in the simplest possible way, lends a double vitality to the errors. Explaining as it does everything by extension and compression, Chinese physics finds it easy to account for every phenomenon, — it is triumphantly enthroned upon empty words. All civilized races are also writing races ; without writing is no secure tradition. The firm historical ground, upon which a step in advance may be tried, is lacking. There is no chronicle, no monument of renown or mighty events intended to immortalise the history of the past, which may spur to emulation and brave deeds. What lies outside of the sacred tradition passes into oblivion. Human memory being limited, it is impossible but that when the poems intended to glorify a recently deceased Inca are learnt, those which were fashioned in praise of his predecessor should be forgotten. In the schools of the Indian Brahmins we learn the import- ance which was attached to getting by rote, and the trouble which it cost : in them the Vedas have, in spite of writing and printing, been orally propagated up to the present day. Every scholar has, in the traditional method, had to learn the nine hundred thousand syllables. Yet writing could never be replaced by these means. It is impossible to give a general view of all the germs of science among SCIENCE AND ART 69 natural races. Much' is no longer to be known, more has disappeared and fallen to ruin, the amount possessed is very unequal. Hitherto too low an estimate has prevailed. The reckoning of time and astronomy, both of which come into close relation to men's needs, are indeed the most widely extended, just as they also stand far up in the pedigree of our science. We may point to the star legends of the Bushmen, or the observations of the sailors of Oceania, of which we shall have to speak later. A primitive astrology runs through the religion of the natural races. Their attempts to drive away eclipses and comets with all sorts of noises point to a feeling of discomfort from the disturbance of order in the firmament. Falling stars denote the death of some great man, close conjunctions portend war. All " natural " races distinguish the seasons, not only according to the terres- trial processes of flowering, ripening, and the like, but also by the position of the constellations. But the year is an ab- straction foreign to many, and even if the months are distinguished, their cycle does not tally with the year. The step to science is made when sections of the year, field labour and such like, are associated with the apparition of particular con- stellations, for this assumes observations. Naturally these are carried out most extensively and most acutely among the sea-faring races. We find the Banks Islanders using a special name, inasoi, for the planets on account of their rounder appearance. Civilized races see in poetic literature the highest achievement ot their great intellects, and it is precisely in this direction that the natural races have risen highest. Hamann has called lyric poetry the mother-tongue of humanity. Among the natural races we scarcely find any but lyric poems, and these express love, sorrow, admiration, and religious sentiments. Wherever the poetry of the natural races has been put into words it is also sung, and thus poetry is closely allied with music. As in the case of our own poets, we find here also words and phrases which have only been preserved in poetry, and unusual lengthenings and shorten- ings for the sake of metre. In the dancing songs of the Banks Islanders obsolete words borrowed from neighbouring islands form a regular poetic language to themselves. There is no lack of bold imagery, and a whole list of artifices such as repetition, climax, abbreviation, and artistic obscurity come into play. The alliance with religion is always preserved. In Santa Maria the following song is sung in honour of a person away at sea : — " Leale ale ! I am an eagle, I have soared to the furthest dim horizon. I am an eagle, I have flown and landed on Mota. With whirring noise have I sailed round the mountain. Ornament on coco-nut shell, from Isabel in the Solomon Islands. (After Codrington. ) 70 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND I have gone down island after island in the West to the base of Heaven. I have sailed, I have seen the lands, I have sailed in circles. An ill wind has drifted me away, has drawn me away from you two. How shall I make my way round to you two .' The sounding sea stretches empty to keep me away from you. You are ciying, mother, for me, how shall I see thy face ? You are crying, father, for me, " — and so on. The last words of the poem are : — " Ask and hear ! who wrote i the song of Marcs .' It was the poet who sits by the road to Lakona." In the form of this lyric, as given by Codrington, we see the alliance with music. Choric and religious songs were accompanied by music, and there are sacred drums and trumpets which may only be sounded by the initiated. The Tucanos of Brazil use long flutes to invoke the spirit Yurupari. Women may not look upon him and conceal themselves at the sound of these instru- ments, which at other times are kept under water. But there is more than this in poetry. It embraces legends which are not merely fiction but contain in them the whole intel- lectual possession of the race, history, customs, law, and religion, and thereby are an important aid to the preservation of know- ledge from one generation to another. Many legends are mythological fragments differing outwardly from myth by their fragmentary character and lack of point. Many myths are nothing but picturesque descriptions of natural events and per- sonifications of natural forces. These bridge over the interval to science, for in them mythology becomes, like science, the way and the method towards the knowledge of the causes of pheno- mena. The original object falls into the background, the images become independent figures whose quarrels and tricks have an interest of their own. Therewith we have the fable, especially the widespread beast fable. Here the immediate operations of Nature are indulged with a wider play. Just as the sacred mountains and forests, the sacred sea and its cliffs, protest against any denial of the sentiment of Nature among the races Piece of bamboo with that have HO literature, so do their myths and hymns testify to New"He'bHdeT ^^ '^'^ deep impression made by Nature. The connection of many (After Codrington. ) a little poem with the song of birds is obvious. Light and dark- ness, day and night, arouse feelings of pleasure and discomfort ; white, red, and green, embody benevolent natural forces and daemons ; black those that are dreaded. Sunrise and sunset, storm, rainbow, the glow of evening, are most adapted to find a lyric echo where sun and fire are objects of adoration. What light and darkness are for the eye, sound and silence are for the ear. The rumble of thunder, the muffled roar of beasts of prey, contrasted with the clear ripple of the spring, the plash of the waves, and the song of birds. In a series of pictures, copious though limited by the constraint of customary expression, the poetry and pictorial art of the natural races contrives ^ Literally measured. SCIENCE AND ART 7i to express this. On one side of the mysterious Papuan bull-roarer, the object of religious devotion, is depicted the resting moth, on the other the whirring moth : what a simple and impressive picture language ! Pictorial art has also, even where it seems to have passed entirely into a trade, its connection with religion. The execution of carvings was among the tasks of holy men, who imported mythological ideas into all the detail. If we look at the instruments used by a priest on the Amoor or the Oregon we see the connection between art and religion as plainly as if we entered a village chapel or a Buddhist temple. Polynesia presents an astounding abundance of carved work which unhappily with its enigmatic fajicy is to us a seven times sealed book. But we know that at one time the axes of Mangaia in the Hervey Islands might only be carved with sharks' teeth, that the openings were called " eel- borings," the projections cliffs, and that the whole ornamentation was one mass of symbols. The clay Plaited hat of the Nootka Indians showing eye-ornament. (Stockholm Ethnographical Museum. ) ^ bowls of the Pueblo Indians have step-shaped edges, to denote the steps by which the spirit may get into the vessel. The perpetual repetitions of the same little figures are just like the 555 images of Buddha in the temple of Burubudor in Java, the expression of inarticulateness in religion and rigidity in art. The art of " natural " races much prefers its elements to be of small bulk, but from these it puts together the largest works. In the squeezed or twisted figures of men or animals piled one on another in the door-posts of the New Zealanders or New Caledonians, or the family pillars of the Indians of North-West America, no single detail has a chance of being fairly represented. No freedom is shown except in their decorative combination. For this reason out of all the many magnificent works executed in America, sculpture never succeeded in attaining to freedom. Tradition was just as depressing here as in the much cruder work of the West African carvers of fetishes, who inhabit a regular industrial village in the neighbourhood of Beh the sacred village of Togo. Even under the patterns of the tapa of Oceania, as shown on our coloured plate, symbols are concealed. Thus, as Bastian puts it, all decorative art appears to be a system of symbols, preliminary to writing, and is intended to convey a definite meaning. Art, in its efforts after expression, develops but slowly, and does not emerge into full freedom until the moment when for its own sake it has forgotten that purpose. From the symbols, THE HISTORY OF MANKIND JLL simple masses and lines are composed, which are coloured, shaped, and arranged so as to correspond with the sense of beauty. But even then the ornament is only an idealised copy from Nature, most often from a human face or figure. From almost every Persian carpet there looks at us at least the one widely- opened eye, which averts the evil eye. The decorative treatment of the face turns up in such abundance and in so many forms that it practically recurs in all ornament above the most elementary. The occurrence of " ocellate " patterns testifies to its presence where it would be least suspected. In the objects dis- covered at Ancon the most magnificent ornament is grouped about large faces or figures with very prominent faces as centres. On the monolithic gate of Tiahuanuco are human figures, arbitrarily conventionalised, and composed of similar but smaller figures. Attentive comparison seems at last to justify us in rediscovering the human form in almost every orna- ment and every grotesque of ancient America. But it is striking to see how much the subjects of primitive art differ. Australians rarely make any representa- tions of the human figure ; and they are very rare in East and South Africa. Livingstone makes his reflections on the fact that idols do not become frequent until north of the Makololo ; while on the Upper Nile, in West Africa on the Congo, in Guinea, they occur in great number. These images were also used for secular purposes. May not the Kioko clubs, carved with human heads, have been originally idols, carried in the hand instead of being stuck in the ground ? What we regard as the work of a sportive whim, those gnarled birch-roots often of very curious forms, which the Chinese convert into human figures with one or two cuts and dots, carry us back to the widespread tendency to see in such freaks of Nature more than chance, something indeed which may be of mysterious service in magic or medicine. In art we find once more the bias of religion towards universal animation. An element at the base of all primitive art is the close alliance of men and animals in the ornament. This corresponds to the religious view which dreads or reveres a human soul in every beast. Accordingly in the richest store of conventional sculpture which we possess, that of the ancient Americans, human faces and figures, most frequently eyes, occur in the greatest abundance. Next Carved clubs from Lunda. (Buchner collection in the Munich Ethnographical Museum.) SCIENCE AND ART 73 to them come animal figures, feathers, ribbons ; parts of plants very seldom. W. Reiss draws special attention to a Peruvian robe of state exhibited some years ago in Madrid, for the very reason that its ornament, contrary to the usual rule, is taken from plant forms. Feathers, tortoises, lizards, crocodiles, frogs, snakes are represented with remarkable fidelity. The sun-bird with outspread wings is »a favourite symbol and theme for ornament from Egypt to Japan and Peru ; the portal of Ocosingo shows a typical development of it. Grotesques of men and beasts, dis- torted and involved out of all knowledge, such as even the Maya writing displays, are often drawn with great skill and boldness of caricature. The often-quoted ele- phants' trunks on monuments at Uxmal, and on golden figures of men, may be explained either by the tapir's snout, or a comic elongation of the human feature. Death's heads are among the most widespread subjects ; hewn in stone they form long friezes, and adorn the approach to temples at Copan and elsewhere. A corre- sponding case is when the temple gapes upon the beholder with a door shaped like a serpent's jaws, or, as in a house at Palenque, the whole front forms a horrible monster, whose mouth is the wide doorway, and the bars of the sculptured lintel his teeth. If amid this abundance of images there comes to light so little of any importance that, in countries where the Tobacco-pipe carved out of slate, from Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia. (Berlin Museum of Ethnology. ) New Zealand tobacco- pipe. (Christy Col- lection. ) climate made it much easier to go without clothes than in Greece, the representa- tion of the naked human body was scarcely attempted, this can only be explained by the religious fetters in which art was bound. Almost everything is clothed, the faces tattooed or covered with a ceremonial mask. In these external points, so unimportant for us, the Mexican or Peruvian artist put his whole strength. He represented beautifully the feather robes, the ribbon ornament ; his death's head or his frog is true to nature, but almost every human figure, on the contrary, childishly crude and disproportioned. The exceptions to this are rare. When do we find even a living nose or a speaking mouth? The wide distinction between the highest point reached by barbaric art and the Egyptian art from which the Greek and all faithful imitation of Nature started, lies in the 74 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND fact that the former made no effort to represent the human form as such, but smothered it in wrappings and Symbols. When we consider the stiffly designed figures of the Egyptians, we get the impression that they were on the road to become great sculptors ; indeed, in some works they already came near to it. The Mexicans, Peruvians, Indians, were upon quite another road, which led them far from this ideal. While the highest aim of sculpture is to be sought in the representation of the human body, the essence of their carved work consists in neglect of the body and disproportionate em- phasis on accessories. Only in the technique of arabesques could they attain to anything of importance, but that led them into a blind alley, craftsmanship instead of art. In what are nowadays called the industrial arts, the restraint was far less ; here we do find faultless performances. A Peruvian vase of red earthenware ; a beautifully polished, perfectly symmetrical, bow from Guiana ; a steel axe inlaid with copper or brass from Kassai- land ; a spoon carved by Kaffirs in the shape of a giraffe ; a club or feather helmet from Oceania, are creations perfect in themselves. These are things upon which the highest art of the west could not improve. In plaiting, the industry of the natural races produces better work, both technically and artistic- ally, than the civilized races could show. With the support of its close ally, embroidery, the applique^ method prevails in the ornamenta- tion of work in leather and cotton stuffs throughout North and West Africa, and to some extent also in North America. The scale of colour is frequently not great, but the sense for colour is well cultivated. West Africans, especially Houssas, often show more taste in choosing the colours of their clothing. They pre-eminently avoid calicoes of many colours, the evidences of machine industry which art has deserted. It is precisely in the matter of colour that the characteristic of a geographical region often lies. The hard red, white, and. black, is typical of New Britain and the surrounding parts. One of the districts richest in colour is North- West America, which makes the contrast all the more striking as we pass from the Alaskan region to the Magemuts and Kuskwogmuts, whose flat round masks, with their crowns Ornamental goblet from West Africa. ( British Museum. ) SCIENCE AND ART of leathers, are coloured white, gray, and dingy brown. One seems to have come back from a spnng meadow of many colours into winter. The pegs of green stone m their lips, the dark brown wooden dishes inlaid with white bone, the thin strings of pearls twined round ears and lips, do not give a very strong colouring to the snowy landscape. Many as are the directions in which style varies, the degrees of development are yet more various. In originality, fineness, and richness, nothing can touch the work of some of the Pacific races, especially the North-West Americans and their neighbours farther north. Also some groups in Oceania, especially the Maoris • we say nothing here about the still higher Peruvians. The richness of Polynesian work IS astonishing, in spite of their limited materials— shells, coco-nut shells, a little wood and stone. In these laborious combinations of small things, there is far more labour than in most of the African objects, which betray more talent than industry. The Africans and Malays, who are provided with iron and other things from Asia, achieve less in proportion than the isolated Eskimo. The position of Japan, with its wealth of most successful imita- tions from Nature, seems less strange when we consider the num- ber and the careful execution of human and animal figures among the tribes of the Pacific. Whereas the Moorish Arabic style runs throughout Africa, the Indian style through Malaysia, all the inhabitants of the North Pacific are allied by similarity of style with Japan. Australia and South America, excepting Peru, stand apart as less fertile but original territories. Materials, too, are unequally apportioned and used. The African works in iron and ivory, and leather or hide ; the Australian in wood or stone ; the man of the far north in walrus tusk. The Polynesian produces his best results working in stone and shells ; some American tribes surpass all others in pottery. The reaction of the material upon the art, however, is often over-estimated. The patient hand of the ancient Mexican shaped the most artistic works in the most refractory stone, such as obsidian. The material is of only small importance in regard to the degree to which arts and crafts are developed among the natural races. Australia, with its wealth of timber, produces less in the way of woodwork than some small island which possesses nothing but coco -nut. The material often gives its direction to the technique, but does not determine it. Similarly it imparts faint shades of colour, but the human intellect and will is at the root of the matter. The achievements of the Africans in iron, to some extent combined with copper and brass, are pre-eminent. They avail themselves with naive acuteness and taste of the special properties of the material. But none of their performances excels the perfection of a beautifully polished and perforated stone hammer. Everything which they produce lacks the fine beauty of perfect finish, and more especially proportion. A nation's sports are a valuable evidence of its mode of Chains made of walrus-teeth, from Aleutia. (City Museum,- Frankfort O. M. ) 76 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND life and view of life. Many gain a special interest from the fact of their having spread with scarcely perceptible variations over very wide regions. Any one who knows the multitude of the games in which, among simple races, children and adults take part with ever fresh pleasure, and considers the simplicity of many of them, cannot but remark that in the life of these races there is an element reminis- cent of childhood in the careless squandering of time, and the limited demands made on life. In the small area of the Solomon Islands and Northern New Hebrides, including the Banks Islands, we find hide and seek, prisoner's base, foot- ball, stump and ball, games akin to morra, hoops, exercises in spear-throwing and archery. When the harvest has been reaped, they fly kites ; and in connection with the yam harvest the game of tika is eagerly played between contending villages. On moonlight nights, the villagers go round the circle of gossips, hidden behind a screen, and making their friends guess at their identity. § 8. INVENTION AND DISCOVERY Essential characters of invention — Primitive science — Finding and retaining — Difficulty of a tradition in the lower stages — How inventions get forgotten — Pottery in Polynesia — Importance of individual inventions in primitive conditions — 7a/a^Obscure derivation of such culture as is possessed by "natural" races — Examples of imitation and other correspondences — No race is whoU)' without external relations — Ethno- graphic poverty and impoverishment — Distinctions of degree in evolution — Monbuttus — Curious cases of special development — Kingsmill Islands — Difficulty of determining relative degrees of culture. The material progress of mankind rests upon an ever-ideepening and widening study of natural phenomena, from which results a corresponding increase in the Kaffir fire-sticks, for producing fire by friction. One-fourth real size. (Museum of the Berlin Mission.) wealth of means at a man's disposal /or his own emancipation, and for the improvement and embellishment of his life. The discovery how to make fire by friction was an act of the intellect which in its own degree demanded as much thinking power as the invention of the steam-engine. The inventor of the bow or the harpoon must have been a genius, whether his contemporaries thought him one or not. And then as now, whatever intellectual gains were due to natural sugges- tions must have grown up in the individual intellect, in order, when circumstances were favourable, to make its way to the minds of several or riiany persons. Only suggestions of a lower, less developed kind, such as we may call quite Generally tones of mind, appear like epidemics in many simultaneously, and are capable as it were of giving their tone to the mental physiognomy of a race. Intellectual INVENTION AND DISCOVERY 77 games are individual achievements, and the history of even the simplest discovery is a fragment of the intellectual history of mankind. When primitive man was brought naked into the world, Nature came to meet him in two ways. She gave him the materials of food, clothing, weapons, and so forth, and offered him suggestions as to the most suitable methods of turning them to account. It is with these suggestions that we have now to concern ourselves. In invention, as in all that is spiritual in man, the external world, mirrored in his soul, plays a part. We cannot doubt that much has been taken from it. The agreement between type and copy seems very close when we find the tail of a gnu or eland used by the Bushmen of South Africa, just as it was by its first owner, to keep off the flies of that fly-abounding region ; or when Peter Kolb relates how the Hottentots look only for such roots and tubers as are eaten by the baboons and other animals. When we come to consider the evolution of agriculture, we shall discover many other cases of similar suggestions ; justifying us in the reflection that in the lower stages of culture man is nearer to the beast, learns from it more easily, and, similarly, has a larger share of brute -instinct. Other discoveries go back to the earliest observations of the sequence of cause and effect ; and with the course of discovery the beginnings of science also reach back to the earliest ages of mankind. Some natural occurrence strikes a man ; he wishes to see it repeated, and is thus compelled to put his own hand to it. Thus he is led to inquire into the particulars of the occurrence and its causes. But it is the individual alone who, in the first instance, makes the discovery and profits by it. More is required if it is to become an addition to the store of culture such as the history of culture can take into account. For the mode in which the acquisitions of the intellect are amassed is twofold. First, we have the concentrated creative force of the individual genius, which brings one possession after another into the treasury of mankind ; and secondly, the diffusion of these among the masses, which is a preliminary condition of their preservation. The discovery which the individual keeps to himself dies with him ; it can survive only if handed down. The degree of vitality possessed by discoveries depends, therefore, upon the force of tradition ; and this again upon the internal organic interdependence of the generations. Since this is strongest in those classes who either have leisure or are led by their calling to attend to intellectual matters, even in their most primitive form, the force which tends to preserve what the intellect has won is also dependent on the social organisation. And lastly, since a store of intellectual possession has a stimulating effect upon creative minds, which would otherwise be condemned to be always beginning anew, everything which strengthens the force of tradition in a race will have a favourable effect upon the further development of its store of ideas, discoveries, inventions. Those natural conditions, therefore, may be regarded as indirectly most especially favourable to intellectual development, which affect the density of the whole population, the productive activity of individuals, and therewith the enrichment of the community. But the wide extension of a race and abundant possibilities of commerce are also operative in this direction. If we consider, not finding only, but the preservation of what has been found — by diffusion through a wide sphere and incorporation with the permanent stock of culture, — is essential to invention, we shall comprehend that this element of invention, so important for progress, will not attain an equally effective character in all stages of civilization. Every- 78 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND thing tends to limit its effectiveness in the lower stages, for the lower we go in civilization, the less is the interdependence of men kept up ; and for this reason the progress of culture in the other direction acquires an ac- celerated pace. How many inventions of men may have been lost in the long ages be- fore great communities were formed ! Even to- day how many do we see fallen with their inventors into oblivion, or, in the most favourable case, laboriously dug up again and so preserved ? And who can measure the inertia of the stubborn opposition which stands in the way of the birth of new ideas ? We may remember Cook's descrip- tion of the New Zealanders in the report of his second voyage : " The New Zea- landers seem perfectly content with the scraps of knowledge which they possess, without showing the least impulse to im- prove upon them. Nor do they show any parti- cular curiosity either in their questions or their remarks. Novelties do not surprise them as much as one would expect ; nay, they do not hold their attention for an instant." We know now that on the remote Easter Island writing, the most important of inventions, was generally known, have died out there without leaving any offspring. It seems to INVENTION AND DISCOVERY T) What a vista of eternally futile starts opens when we think of this mental immobility and this lack of quickening interdependence ! We get a feeling that all the sweat which the struggle after new improvements has cost our age of inventions is. but a drop in the ocean of labours wherein the inventors of primitive times were submerged. The germ of civilization will not grow in every soil. The bulk of civilized methods which a race is capable of assimilating is in direct proportion to its, average of civilization. Anything that is offered to it beyond this is only received externally, and remains of no importance to the life of the race, passing as time goes on into oblivion or rigidity. To this must be referred the ethnographical poverty found in the lower strata of ethnographically richer races. If we draw conclusions from certain acquisitions of culture which may be found among a people, such as garden plants, domestic animals, implements, and the like, to its contact with some other people, we may easily forget this simple but important circumstance. Many institutions among the inhabitants of our mountains fail to betray the fact that they have lived for ages in the neighbourhood of a high civilization; the Bushmen have appropriated astonishingly little of the more copious store of weapons, implements, dexterity, possessed by the Bechuanas. On the one side the stock of culture progresses, on the other it retrogrades or stands still, a condition into which a movement, evidently in its nature not strong, easily passes. This is an instructive phenomenon, and a comparison of various degrees of this stationariness is specially attractive. Any one who starts with the view that pottery is a very primitive invention, less remote than almost any other from the natural man, will note with astonishment, not . in Australia only but in Polynesia, how a talented race, in the face of needs by no means inconsiderable, manages to get along without that art. And when he finds it in existence only in Tonga and the small Easter Island at the extreme eastern limit of Polynesia, he will be apt to think how much more the intercourse between lands and islands has contributed to the enrichment of men's stock of culture than has independent invention. But that even here again intercourse is very capricious, we learn from the absence of this art among the Assiniboines of North America, next door to the Mandans, who excel in it. Here we learn that inventions do not spread like a prairie-fire, but that human will takes a hand in the game which, not without caprice, indolently declines some things and all the more readily accepts others. The tendency to stand still at a stage that has been once reached is greater in proportion as the average of civilization is lower. You do just what is enough and no more. Just because the Polynesians were able to heat water by putting red' hot stones into it, they would never have proceeded to pottery without foreign aid. We must beware of thinking even simple inventions necessary. It seems far more correct to credit the intellect of " natural " races with great sterility in all that does not touch the most immediate objects of life. Migrations may also have given occasion for sundry losses, since the raw material often occurs only in limited quantity, and every great migration causes a rift in tradition. Tapa plays an im- portant part among the Polynesians, but the Maoris lost the art of its manufacture. In these lower stages of civilization the whole social life is much more dependent upon the rise than upon the loss of some simple invention than is the case in the higher. The nearer life stands to Nature, the thinner the layer of culture in which it is rooted, the shorter the fibres which it strikes down to the natural soil, the 8o THE HISTORY OF MANKIND more comprehensive, the further-reaching every change in that soil naturally is. The invention of the way to manufacture clothing, whether in the form of woven stuffs or of beaten bark, is surely natural and yet rich in results. The entire refinement of existence among the natural races of Polynesia, resting upon clean- liness and modesty, and sufficient by itself to give them a high place, is inconceivable without the inconspicuous material known as tapa. Bark is con- verted into a stuff for clothing, which provides not only a plentiful covering for the body but also a certain luxury in the frequent change it allows, a certain taste in wearing and in the selection of colours and patterns, and, lastly, a means of amassing capital by preserving stores of this material which are always convertible. Think, on the other hand, of an Eskimo's skin coat or a Negress's leather apron, which are worn through successive generations and laden with the dirt of them. Tapa, a material which can be provided in quantities without much trouble, naturally represses the weaver's art, which can only have proceeded by a long and toilsome road from plaiting. In the lake-dwellings there are products which, with equal justice, are referred to both one and the other form of work. This suggests the relations between basket-weaving and pottery ; large earthen- ware vessels were made by covering baskets with clay. There is no need on this account, with William H. Holmes, to call the whole art of pottery, as contrasted with plaiting, a " servile art," but this outgrowth is instructive. The fact that the most necessary kinds of knowledge and dexterity are spread throughout mankind, so that the total impression of the stock of culture possessed by the " natural " races is one of a fundamental uniformity, gives rise to a further feeling that this scanty stock is only the remains of a larger total of possessions from which all that was not absolutely necessary has gradually dropped out. Or can we suppose that the art of producing fire by friction made its way all alone through the world, or the art of making bows and arrows ? To discuss these questions is important, not only in order to estimate the measure of the inventive talent possessed by natural races, but also to obtain the right perspective for the history of primitive humanity, for it must be possible to read in the stock of culture, if anywhere, from what elements and by what ways mankind of to-day has become what it is. Now if we pass in review what is possessed by the natural races in artifices, implements, weapons, and so on, and deduct what is and has been imported, in some cases already to a large extent, by means of trade with modern civilized races, we are inclined to form a high conception of their inventive talent. But what guarantee have we of the independent discovery of all these things ? Undoubtedly before there were any relations with Europeans, relations existed with other races which reached down to these lower strata, and thus many a crumb must have fallen here from the richly spread tables of the old civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and Japan, and has continued here in a mutilated shape perhaps quite alien to the original uses served by it. The ethnographer knows cases enough of such borrowings ; every single race shows examples of them. Nor is the examination of their nature and significance anything new. We may specially recall an original remark of Livingstone's which, though made with another intention, is fairly applicable here : " The existence of various implements which are in use among the Africans and other partially civilized races, points to the communication of an instruction which must have proceeded at some time or another from a superhuman being." Think INVENTION AND DISCOVERY as we may about the conclusion of this remark, its main point is fully justified as a contradiction of the widespread assumption that everything which natural races have to show of their own came into existence in the place where it is now seen, and was invented by those races themselves. When we find all races in Africa, from Moors to Hottentots, producing and working iron ^fter one and the same method, it is far more probable that this art reached them all from a common source than that it was independently discovered in all parts alike. At one time people pointed triumphantly to the turkey as an animal which had been inde- pendently domesticated by barbarous races, until Spencer Baird discovered in Mexico the ancestor of this ill-tempered sovereign of the poultry-yard. In the matter of utensils, borrowing from civilization is naturally more difficult to prove, since these do not, like plants and animals, bear about them, however obliterated, the marks of their origin. But may not the Indian, who got his maize from Mexico, have learnt from the same quarter the art of his delicate stone-work ? Such introduction, together with its consequence of the widest possible propagation, must seem to us more natural than the independent invention of one and the same utensil, or one and the same touch of art in a dozen different places. Atten- tion has been quite recently called to the fact that the Solomon Islanders have bows and arrows, while the inhabitants of New Ireland and others in the neigh- bourhood have not, and people were quite ready to credit the former with the invention of this ingenious weapon. As has been already pointed out, people are, in this matter, wonderfully inconsistent. On the one hand the natural races are put down to the level of the brute, on the other hand inventions are ascribed to them which are, at least, not of an easy kind. One is always too apt to think of invention as easy, considering only the difficulties of finding out, which for a brain of genius are small ; but it is otherwise with the retaining of what has been found out. In some cases it has been possible to penetrate down to the more remote origin of apparently quite spontaneous productions of " natural " races. Bastian has compiled a list of cases in which certain elements of European civilization have been formally imitated ; a good instance being the characteristic Fijian form of club copied from a musket of the last century. The savages thought they would have the dreaded weapon at least in wood, and produced a club remarkably ill- adapted to its proper purpose. A, head-dress used in the New Hebrides is a colossal exaggeration of an admiral's cocked -hat. The remarkable cross-bow used by the Fans is more to the purpose. It reached the Fans of the interior from the Portuguese discoverers on the west coast, and they retained the pattern, while on the coast firearms came into use, as in Europe. Now, after four hundred years, the cross-bow turns up again ; but as the Fans have neither the patience nor the tools to fashion a lock, they slit the stock, and use the cross-bow to shoot little poisoned arrows which might just as well be shot from a light long-bow. If it were less difficult to seize the manifestations of intellectual life among the lower races, we should be able to gather a much richer harvest among them. Indian traces run through the religion of the Malays, and extend perhaps to Melanesia and Polynesia. We find such striking similarities, especially in the cosmogonic legends of Bushmen and Australians, Polynesians, and North Americans, that nothing but tradition is left to explain them. So in the domain of politics we find points of accord. The institutions of. Kazembe's country, as described by Lacerda and Livingstone, or Muata Jamvo's, as reported by Pogge and Buchner, G 82 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND remind us partly of India, partly of ancient Egypt. In the domain of social and political conceptions and institutions, the coincidences are striking. The deeper we search into these matters, the more convinced we are of the correctness of an expression used by Bastian at a date when the sharp division of races was a gospel, and the unity of mankind was scouted. In his Journey to San Salvador he says : " Even to the islands slumbering on the bosom of the Pacific, ocean- currents seem to have driven the message of the more abstract triumphs of civilization ; perhaps even to the shores of the American continent." We may be permitted to add the conclusion that no one understands the natural races who does not make due allowance for their intercourse and connection, often dis- guised as it is, with each other, and with civilized peoples. There is, and always has been, more intercourse between them than one would suppose from a super- ficial observation. Thus, long before the Nile route was opened to traffic, wares of European origin, especially pearls, made their way from Darfour by Hofrat el Nahas, even to the Azandeh. Where strong resemblances occur, the question of intercourse, of communication from abroad, should always be raised in the first instance ; in many cases possibly that of very direct intercourse. We think that we are quite justified in asking whether it is not by fugitive slaves that so many elements of African civilization have been spread through South America. For centuries the Japanese have had very little intercourse with the races of the North Pacific ; yet it may be that we ought to refer to some such intercourse as this (which, in truth, not only enlarges, but, as time goes on, always tends to decompose) the wicker armour worn by the Chukchis, so like Japanese armour. Thus, however, races formerly depended on each other ; and no more than at present was there ever on this earth, so far as our historical know- ledge shows, a group of men who could be said to be devoid of relations with others. Everywhere we see agreements, similarities, affinities, radiating out till they form a close network over the earth ; even the most remote islanders can only be understood when we take into account their neighbours, far and near. These most remote islands, too, show how indigenous industries always dwindle where European or American manufactures come. When Hamilton visited Car Nicobar in 1790, the women wore a kind of short petticoat, made of tufts of grass or rushes strung in a row, which simply hung down ; now they universally cover up their bodies with stuff cloths. Thus a century's progress has resulted in the replacing of the grass petticoat by woven materials. Meanwhile, the domestic industry perishes, and no new dexterity arises in its stead. On the lower Congo we no longer find the bark-stuffs and fine webs which Lopez and other travellers of the sixteenth century prized so highly. Where, too, is the art of grinding amber and obsidian, , which produced such conspicuous results in ancient Mexico ? or the goldsmith's work and tapestry of the old Peruvians ? For estimating the importance of external suggestion, nothing is more instruc- tive than the consideration of races which are poorest in an ethnographical sense. Of them we can say that they are invariably also those whose intercourse with others is scantiest. Why are the most remote races at the extremities of the Human figure and jnedusa in walrus- ivory, from (?) Tahiti. (Vienna Ethnograpiiical Museum. ) INVENTION AND DISCOVERY 83 continents or on the less accessible islands the most destitute ? Ethnographic poverty is only in part a consequence of the penury, the general poverty, which presses on a people. This has been readily recognised in the case of many races, as, for instance, the Australians, whose life on the arid steppes of their continent, almost destitute of useful plants and animals, is one of the poorest and most depressed that has been allotted to any race on the earth. But even in the most favoured northern tracts within the tropics, they are almost totally devoid of that tendency to the artistic adornment of existence which flourishes so profusely among their Papuan neighbours, and forms the luxury of barbarous races. In this case we need not seek far for the causes of their ethnographical poverty. Every glance at the conditions and mode of these people's life shows how sharp is their struggle to maintain bare existence, but it also shows the impoverishing Shell and bone fish-hooks from Oceania, The larger one on the right probably of North American origin. (Vienna Ethnographical Museum.) effects of remoteness from the great streams of traffic. The out-of-the-way situation of Australia, southern South America, the interior of South Africa, and eastern Polynesia, exercises the same impoverishing influence everywhere upon the indigenous races. If any one is inclined to see in this a sort of contagion of poverty, referable to the smaller number of suggestions offered under these conditions by Nature to the mind, and especially to the fancy, he must beware of hasty conclusions. Easter Island, though small, and by nature poor, is ethno- graphically rich ; and hardly any barbarous race is superior in artistic develop- ment to the Eskimo. We know how the utensils and weapons of civilized races have spread as it were by stages and continue to spread to races which previously possessed no notion of them. When Stanley crossed the Dark Continent, on his first remark- able journey along the Congo, the last point where firearms were seen in native hands was left on the east at the famous market-town of Nyangwe. He came upon them again to the westward at Nbenga, 6° north of Nyangwe, in the shape of those four old Portuguese muskets, ever to be historical as the first sign from which the party learned, at the most critical moment of their journey, " that we had not missed the way, and that the great stream really reached the sea." Nyangwe and Nbenga are on the borders of an area of 200,000 to 250,000 square miles wherein firearms, with which the coasts of Africa have roared these four hundred years, were a few years ago unknown. It is true that other things have been 84 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND I if t more quickly diffused, as for instance those American products \yhich were not brought here till the sixteenth century — tobacco, maize, and potatoes. But they too have travelled by stages ; the Damaras have only come to know tobacco within the last few dozen years. To this fact of the importance of intercourse we must ascribe the striking uni- formity of motive seen in productions of ethno- graphical interest even in rich districts ; as when the island-world of Melanesia and Poly- nesia, so far as concerns the distribution of uten- sils and weapons, pre- sents the picture of a meadow in which the same main elements spring up everywhere in the vegetation, thinner in one place, thicker in another, here showing better, here less good condition, and only rarely mingled with such peculiar growths as wonderfully animate the picture. And just as amid the monotonous herbage on the barren soil of a steppe, we often suddenly see one plant above the rest un- fold itself in luxuriance, so is it here. The in- tellect of races, torpid as it is in the matter of following up what it has got, suddenly receives from some side or other an impulse towards freer unfolding. It is well worth while to study first these isolated developments, even in the grotesque. It is interesting too to see at what manifold forms the people of small islands in Polynesia have arrived in a set of fish-hooks, through their devotion to fishing ; or how others, by dint of a consistent progress in a definite direction, have appro- priated some remarkable style of weapon, demanding much industry and ingenuity. The art of fitting-up weapons with sharks' teeth, to such an extent that one might suppose one I. •« Weapons set with shark's teeth, from the Gilbert Islands. (Munich Ethnographical Museum.) INVENTION AND DISCOVERY 85 constant an area weapons had to do with a people of no small numbers and strength, living in war, reached its highest point in the Gilbert or Kingsmill Islands with of 185 square miles and a population of not more than 35,000. These surpass in gruesomeness those of any other race in Polynesia, and the equipment which corresponds to them is brought to a finish that we find nowhere else but in Japan and New Guinea. Thus under uniformity of fundamental idea almost every island- group conceals its own more or less perfected special features ; even if it be only that invariable little human figure, easily overlooked, found on all Tongan carved-work. Among con- tinental races such features naturally are more limited in their appearance. But even here, every circle of culture, however narrow, has its own little peculiarities, which establish them- selves with a certain consistency in the niost various domains. Just as among the West Africans we can point to the predilection for representing what is ugly, as a characteristic of this kind, so Carved and painted figure from Dahomey. Ethnographical Museum. ) Zanza, a musical instrument used over a great part of Central and South Africa. among the forest-negroes we have the frequent employment of banana-leaves in the place of leather, hide, or stuff — a theme upon which the Monbuttus play endless variations. This race offers at the same time an interesting example of a general high-development of industry under favourable conditions. When the storms of the period passed harmless round a peaceful oasis, as was once the 86 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND case with Monbuttuland, the rich soil of wealth in material and natural ability- allowed a fine flower to expand ; destined however to a short existence. Its fame spread far and wide in Africa. The actual discovery of the Monbuttus by Schweinfurth was preceded by rumours, reaching even to Europe, not only of their brown colour, but of their high degree of civilization ; and that traveller himself reports that even in the district of the Bahr-el-Ghazal he gathered from the conversation of the ivory-traders how they were looked upon as a peculiar and distinguished people. But, above all, the cleverness of the people in the repair of warlike weapons and peaceful utensils is highly esteemed. The high position which the negroes of Africa hold in the manu- facture of the most varied musical instruments is quite a unique phenomenon, and has provided endless ma- terial for eulogistic descrip- tions. Yet with all this the industry of the Monbottus always remains a negro- in- dustry, often applied to the same themes as we find among the Nile negroes and the Kaffirs. One of the most difficult tasks we can undertake is when, as here, we have to define a gradation in the degree of perfection reached by any branch of human activity, and yet at the same time such tasks are among those that can best be justified if any genealogical conclusion difference in the develop- Fan warrior with crossbow. (After Dii Chaillu. ) is to be drawn from this gradation. We notice ment of shipbuilding between two races dwelling so near each other as the Fijians and Tongans ; the latter, of Polynesian descent, in this matter surpassing to a noteworthy extent the Fijians, who are to be reckoned among Melanesians. The difference is not great, but very important, since it contributes to the confirma- tion of our view that the Melanesians, who have been longer established, received the high development of their shipbuilding and navigation from the later arrived Polynesians, and not vke-versd. Yet it is obviously always difficult to judge with certainty in such a case, all the more so that a race superior in general culture may in the matter of individual points of knowledge and knack be behind some who on the whole belong to a lower stage. The superiority in smith's work of the Djurs over the Nubians, or the manifest advantage which the Musgus possess as agriculturists over their Soudanese masters, appears an anomaly. The clever- AGRICULTURE AND CATTLE-BREEDING 87 ness of the negroes in both thefee directions has astonished even Europeans. If the facts were not so clear, any one would be predisposed to ascribe to people like the Arabs or Borneans, who in many other respects possess so superior a civilization, the education of the negroes to the excellence which they have attained in these arts. But the very fact that the Arabs had something to learn from the negroes in agriculture and house-building testifies to the antiquity in Africa of an indigenous semi-civilization based upon agriculture. It is quite wrong to believe that we do not meet with division of labour before reaching a somewhat advanced stage of economic development : Central Africa has its villages of blacksmiths, nay, of smiths who only make throwing-knives ; New Guinea its potter villages ; North America its finishers of arrowheads. Hence arise those remarkable social and political groins which from guilds become castes, and from castes privileged classes in a race. Hunting-races, who stand towards the agriculturist in a mutual relation of traffic in products, are scattered with special frequency about Africa. Besides these specialised activities there are others distributed among those people who practise their art only occasionally as need requires. The form and fashion of their work therefore often appears in the shape of a busy idleness. A man who has just then nothing better to do polishes a great trochus for an arm band, or files some other kind of shell for a finger ring, or prefers to do the engraved work on a club to which he has for years past devoted his leisure. This habit of working with the most liberal expenditure of time, and quite at ease, goes far to explain the perfection of the things produced. No doubt they are for the most part articles for immediate use and not for traffic, and trade profits little by this limited though persevering labour ; whereas an active trade is closely connected with the industries mentioned above. § 9. AGRICULTURE AND CATTLE-BREEDING Origin of agriculture — First stages — Limitation of nature — Breeding animals — Taming animals — Influence of cattle-breeding upon national destiny — Nomadism — Influence of agriculture — Low place taken by agriculture among "natural" races — Food and feeding. In view of man's profound dependence on Nature, none of the suggestions which she ofi'ers to him will sooner prove beneficial than those which tend to modify that dependence by so far as possible placing under his own control the bonds which link him to the rest of the animated world. The way to this lies inthe permanent appropriation by means of tillage and breeding of useful plants and animals. Doubtless there never was a time when man could, without trouble, acquire food, shelter, livelihood, by drawing upon Nature. Nature nowhere brings the food to his mouth, nor roofs his hut adequately over his head. Even the Australian who, in order to get his victuals, does no more than prepare a sharp or spade-ended stick to grub roots, or chop nicks in the trees with his axe to support his feet in climbing, or make weapons, fish-spear, net, or hook, or traps for smaller animals, pitfalls for larger — even he must take some trouble, and that not entirely bodily, to help himself. Even in his case the various artifices by which he manages to exploit what Nature freely gives indicate a certain develop- 88 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND ment of the faculties. Nor does this go on regardless of rights and laws. The Australians, like all other hunting races, even the Eskimo, are bound to definite districts. It is only within their own hunting-grounds that they shift their habitation according to the time of year and the supply of game. It is, however, but a poorly productive capital that is invested in all these dexterities and contrivances, which have only a momentary use, and from which no permanent gains in the way of culture can accrue. From this situation, dependent as it is, and for that very reason easy, man raises himself to a higher stage by engaging Nature in certain directions to more durable performance. To - this shaking-up and awakening, want is more favourable than abundance. In many respects Nature comes to his aid, having supplied various countries very variously with crops which can be made available for agriculture. We may. regard as especially favourable those regions where there is a marked difference in the seasons. Nature at one time emerging in the fullest creative vigour, at another lying dead and be- numbed, as in the steppes. Some steppe regions con- tain by no means a small supply of food crops ; for in the effort to hoard nutri- ment and moisture for the future germ during the dry season. Nature has stored in grains, tubers, bulbs, and fruits exactly what man can best use. These countries >. then offer him not only the inducement to store up and put in barns, but, at the same time the most suit- Our varieties of crops must come in great measure Stick used by Bushmen in digging roots, and stone weights for the same. ( Berlin Museum of Ethnology. ) able growths for the purpose, from these regions. When man sets to work to add something from his own resources to what Nature does for him, a simple solution of the problem lies in an attempt to bottle up as it were the sources of his food supply. Even now many of those Australian races whom we regard as standing on the lowest step of civilization, •strictly prohibit the pulling-up of plants which have edible fruit, and the destruc- tion of birds' nests. They are content simply to let Nature work for them only taking thought not to disturb her. Wild bees' nests are often emptied with' such regularity that a kind of primitive bee-keeping grows up. So with other animals ■ man allows them to lay up the provision which he subsequently takes away, and thus IS led in another direction to the verge of cultivation. Drege instances the case of Arthratherum brevifolium, a grain-bearing grass in Namaqua-land, the seed of which the Bushmen take from the ants. Here Nature frames a check for man, and teaches him thrift. On the other side, the tendency to settlement is encouraged. Where large provision of fruits IS found whole tribes come at the gathering time from all sides, and remain as long as the food lasts. Thus to this day the Zanderillos of Mexico come to the AGRICULTURE AND CATTLE-BREEDING sandy lowlands of the Coatzacoalco when the melons are ripe ; or the Ojibbeways assemble round the marshes where the Zizania, or water-rice, grows ; or the Australians hold a kind of harvest festivity in the neighbourhood of the marsiliaceous plants which serve them for grain. Thus on two sides the barriers of savage nature are broken down. The son of the desert is beginning to look ahead, and is on the way , to become settled. From this stage to the great epoch - making discovery that he must commit the seed to the earth in order to stimulate Nature to richer performance, may in point of time have been far, but as we think of it the step does not seem long. The beginnings of cattle - breeding show yet further how man succeeded in knitting an important part of Nature with his own fortunes. The roam- ing barbarian, who for cer- tain periods is quite away from mankind, tries to get from Nature either what is most like himself, or what seems less likely to make him conscious of his own weakness and smallness. Now the animal world, though separated by a deep gulf from man of to-day, includes, in its gentler and more docile members, the natural qualities with which he likes best to associate himself. The delight which Indians, or Dyaks, or Nile-negroes take in taming wild animals is well known. Their huts are full of monkeys, parrots, and other playmates. It may be that the strong impulse to companionship which exists in man may have had more to do with the first effective step towards acquiring domestic animals than any eye to the use to be made of them. Thus we find, no less among the lowest races of existing mankind than in the remains of civilization anterior to the intro- duction of domestic animals and cultivated plants, the dog as the sole permanent companion ; and his usefulness is limited enough.^ Generally, indeed, it is difficult ■" [May not his use in hunting, which is considerable, have been discovered by men in the hunting-stage of development ?] Loango negress at field-work. (From a photograph by Dr. Falkenstein. ) 9° THE HISTORY OF MANKIND to draw any certain conclusion from the purpose which an animal serves in our civilization, as to that for which man first associated him with himself. In Africa and Oceania the dog is used for food. We may suppose that the horse and the camel were in the first instance tamed, not so much for the sake of their speed as for the milk of their females. A certain friendship, even in more civilized countries, attaches the shepherd to the members of his flock. Thus cattle-farming is a pursuit which arouses more enthusiasm than agriculture. It is more often the men's work, and exercises a far deeper influence on all private and public relations. Nowhere in Africa do the fruits of the field form to the same extent as the herds the basis of life, the source of pleasure, the measure of wealth, the means of acquiring all other desirable articles, especially women ; lastly even currency, as when pecus gave its name to pecunia. Many a race has carried this identification of its existence with its favourite animal to a dangerous excess. Even when their stage of culture is well advanced these cattle-farming peoples suffer from the narrow basis in which their livelihood rests. The Basutos are, all things considered, the best branch of the great Bechuana stock, but the theft of their cattle alone was enough to reduce them to impotence. Similarly the rinderpest of recent years has ruined the Masai and Wagogo. But the great influence which cattle-breeding produces upon a race is to make it restless. Pastoral life and nomad life are practically synonymous. Even our own alp-system, with its changes from valley to mountain pastures, is a fragment of nomadism. Pastoral life requires wide spaces, and agrees with the restless' tendencies of the more forcible races. The desert is preferred to the fertile country, as more spacious. The Rhenish missionaries had specially to undertake the task of inducing some of the Namaqua tribes to settle on fertile oases. How little nomads care to utilise Nature more thoroughly we may learn from the fact that as a rule they hoard no provision for the winter. In the country about Gobabis on the Nosob River, Chapman found the grass growing a yard high, and so thick that it would have been easy to make hay in abundance ; but as a rule the Namaquas allowed it to be burnt without attempting to use it. This sort of indifference tends to increase the contrast between nomadism and agriculture, and assumes the character of a great obstacle to civilization. Prjewalski, in his account of his first journey, has described this boundary, the boundary of both Nature and culture, between steppe and farm land, between " the cold desert plateau and the warm, fertile, and well-watered plain of China, intersected by mountain-chains," as marked with wonderful sharpness. He agrees with Ritter that this question of situation L is what decides the historic fortunes of races which inhabit countries closely bordering on each other. When he enters the Ordos country — that steppe region, so important in history, which lies in the bend of the upper Hoangho, — he says of the races in those parts : " Dissimilar as they are, both in mode of life and in char- ^ acter, they were destined by Nature to remain alien to each other, and in a state of mutual hatred. To the Chinese, a restless nomad life, full of privation, was inconceivable and despicable ; the nomad looked with contempt at the life of his agri- cultural neighbour with all its cares and toils, and esteemed his own savage freedom the greatest happiness on earth. This is the actual source of the distinction in character between the races : the laborious Chinese, who from time immemorial has attained to a comparatively high and very peculiar civilization, always avoided war, and looked on it as the greatest misfortune ; while on the other hand the AGRICULTURE AND CATTLE-BREEDING 91 active and savage inhabitant of the Mongolian desert, hardened against all physical consequences, was ever ready for raiding and reiving. If he failed he lost but little, while in the event of success he secured the wealth accumulated by the labour of several generations.'' Here we have the contrast between the most characteristically nomad race and the most sedentary agriculturists, — a contrast with whose historical results in many gradations we shall meet as we go along, in the chapters , of this book which describe races. Only we must not forget that sedentary life in this degree is found in a race of ancient civilization. It is otherwise with the " natural " races. When we consider the position of agricultural barbarians, we shall often no doubt attach less weight to the difference, in other respects of so much ethnographic importance, between nomadic and settled races ; for what is the significance of a sedentary mode of life if its great civilizing advantage, continuity, and security of life, and if possible of progress, is taken out of it? As a matter of fact even the best cultivators among the African races are astonishingly movable ; and the majority of villages, even of the smaller races, seldom re- main for many generations in the same spot. Thus the distinction be--' tween pastoral and agricultural life becomes much smaller. The African Negro is the finest agriculturist of all ' " natural " races, except perhaps some Malayan tribes, as, say, the Battaks of Sumatra. He contends with a luxuriant nature, fells trees, and burns the coppice, to make room for the plough. Round the hut of a Bongo or a Musgu you will find a greater varietjf of garden plants than in the fields and gardens of a German village. He grows more than he requires, and preserves the surplus in granaries above or under the ground. But the force of the soil and the man is not' utilised to the full. It is a small cultivation, a kind of gardening. Codrington's expression, " horticultural people," used by him of the Melanesians, may be applied to many other " natural " races. Apart from the fact that the man does not in many cases devote himself wholly to agriculture, imperfect tools tend to per- petuate the lower stage. The women and children, with the unpractical hoes shown in our illustrations, do no more than scratch the surface. The plough, not to mention the harrow, has nowhere become customary among genuinely bar- barous peoples ; manuring, except for the ashes of the burnt brushwood, just as little. One much more often comes across terracing and artificial irrigation. Agriculture, limited in the tropics by the hostility of the forces of Nature, is equally so in the temperate zones by the lesser fertility of the soil, and the less favourable climate. It was never carried on here to the same extent as in the tropics, but rather formed a subsidiary branch of economy ; it fell mainly into the hands of the women, and was a provision only for the utmost need. In con- trast to the wide diffusion which newly-imported plants obtained among the Africans, it is significant that the New Zealanders, though they were from the Iron hoe from Kordofan. The blade is also used as cur- rency — one-eighth real size. (Christy Collection.) 92 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND first very fond of potatoes, never planted any of their own free will, but, on the contrary, grubbed up almost the whole of the ground which Captain Furneaux had tilled for their benefit. Still, it is just here that, with persistence, agriculture renders possible higher developments than cattle-farming can do. It is steadier, and forces on a man the wholesome habit of labour. In Mexico and Peru it is ^ followed by the accumulation of capital, and the development of industry and trade ; and therewith by the occasion for a fuller organisation of social ranks. European cultivation is an entirely new system ; apart ' from its more effective implements and methods, it pro- ceeds on broader lines. It has abandoned the gardening style possessed by the agriculture of Negroes and Poly- nesians, even by that of the industrious peoples of east and south Asia. This kind of agriculture does not make the daily bread secure. Even the most active cultivators in Africa have to go without security against changes of luck. The behaviour of the elements cannot be reckoned upon. Drought especially does not spare these tropical Paradises; and famine often forms a scourge of the population in the most fertile regions. This alone is sufficient to prevent - these races from passing a certain line, beyond which their development to a higher civilization is alone possible. AlK the good of a good year is trodden out by a famine year with its results of cannibalism and the sale of children. In the tropics, too, damp makes the storage of provisions difficult. In Africa, again, the devastation of ants and weevils makes it hard to keep the chief crop, millet, till the next harvest. However much they plant, and how-- ever plentiful the harvest turns out, everything must be consumed in the year. This again is one reason why the negroes brew so much beer. Herein, however, whatever ^ may be the fault of the climate, undoubtedly lies one of the imperfections whereby agriculture will necessarily be beset among a race in whose customs foresight and en- durance are hardly developed, and are incapable of linking the activities of individual persons and individual days with a strong thread of necessary interdependence. And here, too, human foes, those " communists of - nature " who equalise all property, take good care that the steady prosperity of agriculture shall not create too deep a gulf between it and nomadism. In the matter of food, " natural " races, even when they carry on agriculture, ^'■ strive with avidity to get animal adjuncts. Contrary to our physiological notions, fat and blood are consumed in quantities even by purely tropical races, like the Polynesians ; and it is just in these things that gluttony is practised. The nearest approach to vegetarianism is made by the rice-planting peoples of east Asia and the banana-planting negroes of the forest, as formerly by the civilized races of America. The races of the far north eat, no doubt, more than we suppose of wild plants ; but they rely especially on the fat and flesh of sea-mammals. Some nomad groups support themselves with superstitious exclusiveness on meat "^ Hoe or gnibbing-axe of turtle- bone, from the Mortlock Islands. (British Museum.) CLOTHING AND ORNAMENT 93 and milk. Roots are eagerly sought. Salt is liked in all parts of the earth, and the fondness for meat and blood is based in some measure on the craving for it. By rapid and thorough roasting the salts of the meat-juices are rendered more highly serviceable. Every race in all parts of the earth has hit upon some means of enjoying caffein compounds and alcohol. Tobacco is not the only narcotic herb that is smoked. The methods of chewing betel and coca are strikingly alike. The knowledge of many poisons has come to civilized races from barbarians. § lo. CLOTHING AND ORNAMENT Complete nudity nowhere found as a regular custom — Caprice in the matter of clothing and non-clothing — Better clothing is no absolute indication of higher culture — Fashion — Clothing begins as ornament — Natural clothing materials — Climate has little influence on clothing — Example of the Fuegians — Eskimos — Ornament found everywhere — Similarity of principle in ornament — Ornament and weapons — Mutilations — Difference of ornament according to sex — Material of ornament — Ornament and trade — Precious metals — Imitation pearls — Cleanliness. We have heard tell of races to whom clothing is unknown ; but it must be said that the few cases of this for which there is good evidence are exceptions that have arisen under such special conditions as only to establish the rule. If, however, we are to discover the principles which underlie the usage generally, the first thing required is to come to an understanding as to what we mean by clothing. It is surely impossible to designate mere ornament as clothing ; among tribes in tropical countries the motive of protection against cold entirely disappears, and of all the superfluity of our northern apparel, nothing remains save what is required by decency. One need hardly discuss the question whether there is any thought of simply protecting the parts concealed. If it were a question of protection, the feet and ankles would surely be sooner covered. What is most decisive is the observed fact that clothing stands in unmistakable relation to the sexual life, and that the first to wear complete clothes is not the man who has to dash through the bush in hunting, but the married woman. This gives us the primary cause of wrappings, which must have arisen when the family was evolved from the unregulated intercourse of the horde, — when the man began to assert a claim to individual and definite women. He it was who compelled the woman to have no dealings with other men, and to cover herself as a means of diminishing her attractions. As a further step in this direction may be noted the veiling of the bosom. From this root, the separation of the sexes, sprang the feeling of modesty ; this developed powerfully, and clothing with it. It was a great stride ; since the more confined and more destitute the life of a tribe is, the less induce- ment is given to a rigid separation of the sexes with its attendant jealousy ; and the more readily do they dispense with the troublesome covering, of which scanty fragments alone remain. Thus it is always the smallest, most degraded, most out-of-the-way tribes among whom we more especially find no mention of customary clothing ; such as some Australian races, the extinct Tasmanians, some forest tribes of Brazil, and here or there a negro horde. Even with them survivals of dress are not wanting. When clothing was more complete, the woman gained 94 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND immensely in charm, esteem, and social position, so that she had every reason to keep up her wardrobe. It is quite otherwise with the portion of the dress intended directly to protect the body. In all places we find the shoulder-covering in the shape of a cloak. Tropical tribes use it primarily to keep off the rain, while in colder climates it serves for warmth and also as a sleeping -cover. These cloak-like articles of clothing are far less v/idely diffused than those which serve for decency ; which also proves that the latter were the first clothing worn by men. Another circum- stance undoubtedly has contributed to develop the sense of modesty, as Karl von den Steinen has pointed out. As the wild beast drags his prey into the thicket, in order to devour it un- disturbed, so some tribes think it highly inde- corous to look at any one eating ; and the same may have held good in regard to other functions. Still this can only have been sub- sidiary, and does not account for the original concealment. Finally we must not overlook the superstitious dread Woman of the Azandeh, or Nyam-Nyams. Richard Buchta. ) (From a photograph by of the possible effects of the evil eye, though here again this cannot be rightly assigned as the root-idea of modesty. Curiously enough, in New Guinea no more than in ancient Greece do the representations of ancestors, with their free exhibition of what in the living is carefully concealed, seem to give any offence But a these various causes tend to react upon and supplement each other mutually. Further, no relation can be traced between the amount of clothine worn and the degree of culture attained. The lady of Uganda or Unyoro who drapes herself with elaborate care in her robes of bark, stands in gerieral CLOTHING AND ORNAMENT 95 no higher than the Nj^am-Nyam negress, whose sole garment is a leaf. Nor do the former race, who treat it as a capital offence to strip in public, hold any higher position than the Duallas, \\'ho take off every rag for their work in the sea. Nor, lastly, do we find any marked national distinctions in these matters. All things considered, we may say that in mankind of to-day modesty is universal ; and where it seems to be lacking, this is due to some accidental or transitory conditions. But this is not the only feeling which the simple man is endeavouring to satisfy when he clothes his body. Next to it stands the gratification of vanity. The former motive, as a mere injunction of custom, is quickly done with ; the other is sought to be attained at any cost. One may say with- out exaggeration that many races spend the greater part of their thought and their labour on the adornment of their persons. These are in their own sphere greater fops than can be found in the highest civilization. The traders who deal with these simple folk know how quickly the fashions change among them, as soon as a plentiful importation of varied stuffs and articles of ornament takes place. The natural man will undergo any trouble, any discomfort, in order to beautify himself to the best of his power. Thus it would obviously be unjust to form any judgment as to the absence or deficiency of clothing without regard to the other attentions which the " natural " races pay to the body. If we look at all together we get an impression of predominant frivolity. Necessaries have to gi\'e way to luxuries. The poorest Bushman makes himself an arm-ring out of a strip of hide, and never forgets to wear it, though it may well happen that his leather apron is in a scandalously tattered state. The man of low culture demands much more luxury compared with his small means than one in a higher stage. Ornament holds such a foremost place that some ethnologists have declared it impossible to decide where clothing ends and ornament begins. All clothing seems to them to have proceeded by way of modification from ornament ; and they hold that modesty played no part in the earliest evolution of dress. The facts no doubt show that the delight in ornament preponderates over the sense of decency ; but it does not follow that it was anterior. Modesty in the woman is especially apt to take on a touch of coquetry, for an example of which we need look no further than the low-necked dresses of our own ball-rooms. In this way what was once an article essential to decency imper- ceptibly approximates more and more to ornament by the addition of fringes, or. Princess of Unyoro, dressed in baric-cloth, a photograph by Richard Buchta. ) (From 96 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND as among the Fans and some of the Congo tribes, by the attachment of strings of jingling bells. Even more grotesque combinations of concealment and parade may be observed ; especially where there is a religious motive for the former. The style and completeness of the clothing naturally depends in great measure upon the extent to which Nature or labour has provided material. All countries are not so benevolently furnished in this respect as tropical Brazil, where the \''illage chief of the Loango coast, with wife and dignitary. (From a photograph by Dr. Fallcenstein. ) "shirt-tree," a kind of Lecythis, grows with its pliant and easily-stripped bark. The Indians cut up the stem into lengths of 4 or 5 feet, strip the bark off, soak and beat it soft, cut two armholes, and the shirt is ready. In the same forests grows a palm, the spathe of which provides a convenient cap without further preparation. The fig-leaf of Paradise recurs in a thousand variations, and celebrates its revival by appearing in manifold forms, even to the universal rush-cloak. The use of bark as a clothing material is, or was, widely spread from Polynesia to the west coast of Africa. It recurs in America, and thus is found in all lands CLOTHING AND ORNAMENT 97 within the tropics ; and besides this, the bast or inner bark of the lime was used for a similar purpose in old days by Germanic tribes. The laws of Manu prescribe to the Brahman who purposes to end his days in religious meditation amid the primeval forests, that he shall wear a garment of bark or skin. Here probably, as in Africa, the bark of a species of Ficus was used for the purpose. But in Polynesia the manufacture of a material called tapa from the bark of the paper- mulberry was carried to great perfection. Races who no longer make use of this material procure it for special occasions. Thus the more settled Kayans of Borneo, when they go into mourning, throw off their cotton sarongs to wrap themselves in bark -cloth ; and on the west coast of Africa, at certain festivities connected with fetish-worship, it is usual to wear skins instead of clothes. In this there lies a perfectly right sentiment, that these home - invented garments, borrowed directly from Nature, have a higher intrinsic value than the rubbishy Euro- pean fripperies, the invasion of which has made clothing arbitrary and un- dignified. How little the great schoolmistress Want can impress upon the " natural " races that seriousness which behaves appropriately at the bidding of hardship, is shown by comparing the dwellers in a severe climate with those who live under more genial skies. The South Australians and Tasmanians hardly ^\ore more clothes than the Papuas. Considering the abundance of animals, we can only refer the scantiness of their attire to laziness. The Fuegians who are best situated, those of the east coast, wear guanaco cloaks like the Patagonians, and those of the west coast, have at least seal-skins ; but among the tribes near Wollaston Island a piece of otter- skin, hardly as large as a pocket-handkerchief, often forms the only protection against the rude climate. Fastened across the breast with strings, it is pushed to one side or another, according as the wind blows. But many, says Darwin, go without even this minimum of protection. Only the Arctic races, always in- ventive and sensible, have in this, as in other matters, better adapted themselves to the demands of their surroundings and their climate ; and their clothing of furs and bird-skins is in any case among the most rational and practical inventions in this class. They are, however, the only " natural " races of the temperate or frigid zones whose clothing is completely adapted to its purpose. The outliers of them in the North Pacific, such as the inhabitants of King William's Sound and others, may be recognised at once beside their Indian neighbours by their Cap made of a palm-spathe, from Brazil. (Munich Ethnographical Museum. ) clothing. The Eskimo dress, which covers the whole body, obviously limits the H 98 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND use of ornament. Hence we never find arm or leg-rings, and only rarely necklaces of animal's teeth or European beads ; but, on the other hand, buttons, like sleeve- Bawenda children belonging to a mission school. (From a photograph in the possession of Dr. Wangemann, Berlin). Vur and bird skin clothmg of the Amu. (Collection of Baron von Siebold, Vienna na. ) buttons, of stone or bone, not uncommonly decorate lips and ears. The fact that they tattoo the body, however, indicates a former residence in a warmer climate. CLOTHING AND ORNAMENT 99 Footgear is universally worn on the march ; it is generally made of hide, less often of wood or bark. Curiously enough the method of fastening sandals is essentially the same all the world over. Among " natural " races no one goes without ornament ; the contrary to what we find among civilized people, many of whom, rich and poor alike, avoid any ornamentation, either of their person or of their clothing. But the universal Woman of New South Wales. (From a photograph in the possession of Lieutenant von Biilow, BerUn. ) distribution of ornament seems easier when we consider its by -aims. In the first place the amulets, which are hardly ever missing, assume the shape of decorations. Hildebrandt, in his admirable work on the Wakamba, says : " Amulets are regarded as defensive weapons, and so, in a treatise on ethnography, deserve a place between weapons and ornaments." But they have more affinity with the latter than with the former. The fan is used not only to flirt, nor only even for purposes of coolness, but is an indispensable implement in kindling and maintaining the charcoal fire. The massive iron arm-rings, with which the negro bedecks himself, are adapted for both parrying and striking. The Irengas of the THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Upper Nile wear these sharpened to a knife-like edge. In peace they are covered with a leather sheath, in battle they serve as fighting-rings. Of. a similar kind are the arm-rings of the neighbouring Jurs, fitted with a pair of spikes. The smart dagger attached to the upper arm or hung from the neck is half weapon, half ornament. But we must reckon among genuinely de- corative weapons the beau- tifully-carved clubs of the Melanesians and negroes, the batons of command, the decorated paddles. The savage warrior can no more do without ornament than without his weapon. Are we to suppose that this connection has so deep a psychological basis in the stimulus to self-esteem and courage given by external splendour, that it has reached even to the heights of our own military civiliza- tion ? Ornament and distinc- tion again go hand in hand, though for this brilliancy and costliness are not always necessary. In East and Central Africa the chiefs wear arm and leg-rings made from the hair of the Leg ornaments of dogs' teeth, and shell armlet, from Hawaii. ( Vienna Ethnographical Museum. ) Sandal from Unyoro. (After Baker. ) giraffe's tail ; in West Africa, caps from the hide of a particular antelope • while m Tonga, necklaces of the cachalot or sperm-whale's teeth serve at once for ornament, distinction, and money— perhaps also for amulets. It is quite intel- ligible that in the lower grades of civilization, where even great capitalists can carry their property on their persons, ornament and currency should be inter- changeable. There is no safer place— none where the distinction conferred by wealth can be more effectively displayed— than the owner's person. Hence the frequency with which we find forms of currency which may at the same time serve 2. Stone lip-plugs ; 3, 6, necklaces ; 4, armlet, worn by the Jur tribes ; of the Shulisi (Vienna Ethnographical Museum. armlet ; 7 head-dress THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Irenga arm - ring, with sheath. One- fourth real size. (Vienna Ethnographical Museum. ) Paddle-shaped clubs, probably from Fiji ; and carved adzes, as carried by chiefs from the Hervey Islands. ( Munich Ethnographical Museum. ) 2. Dagger for attachmg to the upper arm, from Lagos. (Christy Collection, London ) for ornament — cowries, dentaliutn, and other shells, cachalots' teeth, iron and copper rings, coins with a hole through them. Silver and gold currencies have grown up in the same way ; but among the barbarous races of the older world, only the Americans seem to have appreciated the value of gold. It was left for Europeans to discover the great stores of this metal in Australia, California, and Africa. To this day, in the districts of Famaka and Fadasi, although almost every torrent brings down gold, it plays no part in native ornament or trade. Lastly, we may reflect how eloquent for a savage is the silent language of bodily mutilation and disfigurement. As Th^ophile Gautier says : " Having no clothes to embroider, they embroider their skiii.'^." Tattooing serves for a tribal or famih' mark ; it often indicates victorious campaigns, or announces a lad's arrival at manhood, and so also do various mutila- tions of teeth and artificial scars. Radiating or parallel lines of scars on cheek or breast, SLiclt as the Australians produce with no other apparent ob- ject save that of ornament, denote among the Shillooks, Tibboos, and other Africans, the loss of near kindred. Even if we cannot see in circumcision, or the amputation of a finger, any attempt at personal embel- lishment, in these and similar practices it is diflficult to separate with a hard- and - fast line the motives of decora- tion, distinction, and fulfilment of a reli- ^^gious or social pre- cept. Doubtless much of the ornamentation which is applied to the body is a mode CLOTHING AND ORNAMENT 103 of expressing the primitive artistic impulse upon which special attention is bestowed ; and thus the tattooings of the New Zealanders, often the work of years to execute, and that at the cost of much labour and pain, must be reckoned among the most conspicuous achievements of the artistic sense and dexterity of that race. The Indians are less distinguished in this respect, while among the Negroes few devote so much attention to this branch of art as to the arrangement of their hair — a point in which they certainly surpass all races, being materially aided in this task by the stiff character of their wigs. As in all primitive industries, we meet here, as a characteristic phenomenon, with endless variations on a limited theme. Thus some races take to painting, some to tattooing, some again to hairdressing. Customs affecting the same region Modes of hairdi'essing, LovaM. (After Cameron. ) of the body may often indicate relationships. Thus the Batokas knock out their upper front teeth, causing the lower to project and push out the under lip. Their neighbours to the eastward, the Manganyas, wear a plug in their upper lip, often in the lower, and thereby arrive at a similar disfigurement. These luxuriant developments of the impulse for ornament exhibit the innate artistic sense of a race often in an astonishing phase, and it is not without interest to trace it from its crudest beginnings. The articles which savages use for ornament are calculated to show up against their dark skins. White shells, teeth, and such like, produce a veiy different effect on that background to what they offer on our pale hands or in dark cabinets. Hence we find far and wide painting with red and white — cosmetics were among the objects buried with their dead by the old Egyptians — dressing of the dark hair with white lime and similar artifices. But the highest summit of the art has been attained by the Monbuttus, who, in the great variety of patterns with which they paint their bodies, avoid harsh colours and elementary stripes and dots. The old people alone leave off adorning themselves and let the painting wear out ; but it is at this age that the indelible tattooing begins to be valuable. 104 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Among one and the same race, special decorative themes are generally adhered to most rigidly, and varied only within narrow limits. We must, however, beware of the temptation to read too much conscious intention into these manifold ornaments. In face of the tendency of prehistoric research to treat particular themes as the signatures, so to say, of the respective races, it is necessary specially to emphasise the space to be allowed for the play of caprice. It is true that you can always tell a Tongan club by the little human figures which stand out in the mosaic-like carved pattern ; but here we have to deal with a limited area of culture, within which a great persistency of tradition can easily be aimed at. But would any one take the cross, which is so natural a motive in matted work, as it appears on the beautifully woven shields of the Nyam- Nyams, for an imitation of the Christian symbol, or ascribe the crescent on Polynesian carved work to the influ- ence of Islam ? Among the other advantages en- joyed by the male sex is that of cul- tivating every kind of adornment to a greater extent, and devoting more time to it. In the lowest groups of savages ornament follows the rule which is almost universal among the higher animals ; the male is the more richly adorned. As is well known, civilization has pretty well reversed this relation, and the degree of progress to which a race has attained may to some extent be measured by the amount of the sacrifice which the men are prepared to make for the adornment of their women. Otherwise, in the most civilized communities, men only revert to the custom of ^^--- adorning themselves when they happen to be soldiers or ^"^^7^^ attendants at court. X^^^^amijjj.^^ A practical result of the tendency to luxury in the midst West African :node of filing ot destitution is the confinement of trade with the " natural " - - races to a small list of articles, the number of which is West African body-tattooing. (From a drawing by P^chuel-Loesche. ) the teeth. (From a draw- ing by the same. ) almost entirely limited by the purposes of ornament or pastime and sensual enjoyment. Of trade in the great necessaries of food and clothing there is hardly any. The objects exchanged, things of value and taste, are primarily luxuries. Setting aside the partly civilized inhabitants of the coast, and the European colonies, the important articles of the African trade are beads brass wire, brass and iron rings, spirits, tobacco. The only articles in a different category which have attained to any importance are cotton goods and firearms. Finally we may find a place in this section for those implements of the toilet wherewith all those works of art are performed upon which primitive man, in this CLOTHING AND ORNAMENT 105 respect nowise behind his civilized brother, bases his hope of quering. Let us hear how Schweinfurth describes the dressing lady : " For pulling out eyelashes and eyebrows they make use Peculiar to the women of the Bongos are the curious little elliptical knives fitted into a handle at both ends, sharpened on both edges and decorated with tooling in many patterns. These knives the women use for all their domestic opera tions, especially for peeling tubers, slicing cucumbers and pleasing case of of little and con- a Bongo tweezers. I. r_rt'_! hJ.l combs from Pelew. One half real size. (Kubary Collection, Berlin.' a. Azandeh or Nyam-Nyam shield. One-tenth real size. (Vienna Ethnographical Museum. ) gourds, and the like. Rings, bells of different kinds, clasps, and buttons, which are stuck into holes bored in their lips and ear lobes ; with lancet-shaped hairpins, which seem necessary for parting and dividing their plaits, complete the Bongo lady's dressing-case." A pair of tweezers for thorns, in a case attached to the dagger-sheath, forms part of the outfit in almost all parts of Africa. Many carry a porcupine's bristle or an ivory pin stuck into the hair to keep it smooth. Combs are well known to the Polynesians, the Arctic races, and the Negroes. While the civilized European regards cleanliness as the best adornment, even the Oriental is very far from giving it a high place. Barbarous races practise it THE HISTORY OF MANKIND when it does not cost too much trouble. In certain directions, however, it can become a custom ; for example, the negro pays much more attention to keepmg his teeth clean than the average European. The horror of ordure is often in truth superstitious, and in that case contributes to keep the neighbourhood of the huts cleanly. Furneaux was astonished to see latrines among the Maoris. But what especially promotes cleanliness is the absence or scantiness of clothing. Dirt as a general rule is principally met with among such races as are compelled by uncertainty of climate or by custom to keep their bodies always covered. A daily change will involve rapid wearing out, and for this reason they usually wear their clothes, as Jenghis Khan prescribed, until they drop off in tatters. In the most intimate family life, however, a reserve prevails among natural races which puts their civilized brethren to shame. Among Negroes, Malays, and Indians, it is a widespread custom that parents and children should not sleep in the same room. § II. HABITATIONS The first huts — Germs of buildings in wood and stone — Temporary character of most hut architecture — His- torical value of permanent building — Classification of the natural races according to their style of building — Shelter as a motive — Pile buildings — Assemblage of habitations — The ethnographic importance of towns — Various descriptions of towns — Ruins of towns and of civilizations. The germ of architecture, the first hut, was called into existence by a need which is primitive and universal. No race lives for a continuance in hollow trees, as certain of the Tasmanians did in Cook's time, or as the scattered Bechuanas in the Matabele kingdom. That first hut was no doubt very simple and perish- able. Architecture in the real sense, that is building made to last, and sub- sequently decorated edifices, lie nearer to the present time. In the somewhat vague statement of Laprade, " the birth of architecture, the building of the first temple, marks the beginning of the historical period," the ethnographer will find a somewhat narrow notion of a temple in view of the fetish huts of the Central Africans or the Melanesians ; for him the step beyond the most primitive hut- building begins much earlier. The first germ from which, in later times, the inspiring grandeur of architecture was to unfold itself, lay in the need of shelter. We may mention first the ways in which this need drives men to rely on Nature. We shall have to speak of the almost brute-like habit of living in trees found among many races. The use of pendent branches, which are hastily plaited together and strengthened, as among the half nomad Bushmen, is nearly akin to it. By cutting down branches or saplings, sticking them in the ground in a circle, binding together the upper ends, and roofing this hasty edifice with boughs or skins, is the next step towards simple hut-building as we find it among Fuegians and Hottentots, Gallas and Somali. Hence we are brought by a long series of more permanent and gradually more decorated buildings to the richly ornamented wooden houses of the Papuas and Malays, or the Pelew Islanders, and the stoneless palaces of the Monbuttu or Waganda kings. The kindred germ of stone architecture was given by the habit of dwelling in caves, widely spread in primitive times, and not yet obsolete. It has an advantage in the durability of the material, counterbalanced HABIT A TIONS 107 by its lesser adaptability to decoration and ornament. But the advantage out- weighs the disadvantage, for as soon as an effort is made in the direction of taste, it was easier to satisfy in the matter of symmetry, which is the fundamental condition of all architectural beauty. How little the hard pressure of necessity can do to call forth a greater activity in satisfying those demands for shelter and food, which are most imperious where the climate is most harsh and the plant and animal world most scanty, is shown by the case of the Fuegians who, incredible as it may sound, build not more, but Caves of the Bushmen. (After Fritsch. ) less, than more favourably situated races. So, too, the Tasmanians must be indi- cated as having been the most backward of all Australasians in hut-building. In Australia itself it is surprising to see how it is just in the warmest regions that hut-building has made most progress ; while it is most wretched in the coldest parts, where the hut is in fact a protection rather for the fire than for the people. When we find a similar fact recurring elsewhere, as we do in South America and South Africa, it establishes with all the force of an experiment that it is not the schoolmistress need that has most power to compel a progress towards culture, but that it is only in a tranquil development guaranteed by peace and plenty that the higher stages, even in the matter of hut and housebuilding, can be reached. What is required ■ above all is continuity. Nomadism strikes deeper than we realise into the lives of even agricultural races. The famous art of constructing dwellings rapidly in bee-hive style, that form of hut used by Hottentots and Bechuanas, which pre-supposes access to the flexible half-grown stems of the io8 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND mimosa, only shows that the distinction between the hut and the tent is as yet not fully appreciated. These edifices disappear as quickly as they spring up. The most symmetrical and most elegant huts used by Negroes, even though, as on the Upper Nile, their ground-plan, form of roof, proportions, vary from one tribe to another, are often hastily run up "of reeds and grass. Nothing but their temporary character prevents the development of a style of art relying on types and creating new works on the basis of the old. The destructive force of Nature comes as additional to the perishable character of the structure. Everywhere in tropical latitudes the flimsy dwellings are subject to speedy decay by reason of boring beetles, devouring ants, tropical storms. Nor do the human inhabitants in any way cleave to the soil ; on the contrary, they regulate their mode of life quite in the sense of Nature, with whom " all things are in flux," and, instead of restoring their dwellings, they desert them in order without trouble to get virgin soil for cultivation. Junker found in the Bahr- el-Ghazal country hardly any of the zeribas which Schweinfurth had so precisely indicated. After a very few years what was once a well-ordered settlement displays at most a few posts standing in circles, and weeds sprouting ever afresh from the seeds of what once were cultivated plants. There is nothing monumental about negro architecture, and for that very reason anything durable is all the more conspicuously significant in that land of nomadic building. The granite of Syene, the black limestone of Persepolis, which have retained even to our days Tree-dwellings in South India. (After Jagor. ) the most delicate sculpture and the smoothest polish, are of high historical significance as trustworthy props and bearers of tradition. They witness to the truth of a remark of Herder's : " No work of art has died in the history of mankind." How great an influence has been produced on us by the fact that those remains, so far removed both in place and time from the modern civilization of the Nile valley, have been handed down to us uninjured ? But how much greater was the value of these stony witnesses of the greatness, the deeds, the religion, the knowledge of their nation, for the people who walked beneath them ? This hard stone gave as it were a skeleton to tradition, to guard it from premature collapse. In any case the fact of settlement in stone houses, vying in firmness with the solid earth, had a significance very different from that of settle- ment in huts of bamboo and brushwood. HABITA TIONS 109 In any classification of races according to their method of building, the lowest grade will be held by nomadic hunting and fishing peoples of the type of the Fuegians, the Bushmen, the Tasmanians, and many Australians, who inhabit no huts built on a fixed plan or placed regularly together in villages, but put up temporary shelters of brushwood and reeds. The tent-dwelling nomads, whether their tents be of leather like those of the Arabs, or of felt, the Mongol or Sifan yaourts, so far as plan goes, are not much superior to those above-mentioned ; but the necessity of guarding their herds has made it a characteristic of them all Fishing village on the Melcong. (From a photograph to be arranged in a circle ; and thus has grown up the more regular disposition inside of a fence or boundary wall, with gates. These again suggest those partly agricultural, partly nomadic Negroes who build huts of beehive or conical shape, in the most various stages of perfection. The Negroes of Central Africa who, from Ugogo all across to the Fan and Dualla countries, build rectangular houses with several rooms and ornamented doors, form the transition to the Malays of Madagascar and the Indian Archipelago, and to the, races of the Pacific, whose richly-ornamented and often large houses, very various in design, offer the most perfect work found in the way of timber-building among " natural " races. Among them, however, we find at the same time (as on Easter Island) the beginnings of masonry in connection with monumental sculpture. The Polar races live in stone buildings or in huts in which snow takes the place of wood. A zone of stone houses with several stories passes through India, Arabia, and the Berber regions of Africa. Contiguous stone houses for hundreds of families occur among the THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Indians of New Mexico and Arizona ; and these bring us to the great monumentaj buildings of the races who were outside the sphere of Old-world culture, as the Mexicans, Central Americans, and inhabitants of the South American plateaux. ^iy.^rh^§:i The so caUed Dwarf s House at Chichen Itza (After Charnaj ) ndependently of all these variations, special kinds of habitation and building develop themselves from the fundamental idea of shelter. Men were led to found permanent abodes in the water— not that of the insecure and violent sea but always only m calm inland lakes or rivers with gentle current— at first obviously by the wish to protect themselves from beasts of prey and enemies of their own HABITATIONS species ; but later, and on higher planes of civilization, with the view of avoiding the crush and pressure of great assemblages of human beings in a limited space, as in China with its excessive population, and some parts of Further India. In the former case the favourite method of surrounding oneself with the protecting water was to build on piles and platforms ; in the other, large rafts or condemned barges served for dwellings, whence again pile buildings were evolved, but on a larger scale than in the former stage, which is marked rather by isolation, than by crowding. Even in our own days pile-dwellings are numerous ; they are built by most of the races of the Indian Archipelago, by Melanesians, most of the Americans of the North-west, certain tribes in Africa and Central and South America. We can easily convince our- selves, if we please, that the phenomenon is no less natural than frequent. Thus our European pile-dwel- lings call for no arti- ficial hypotheses as to specific pile-build- ing races, Etruscan warehouses for trade goods, or the like. In later times the idea of protection may often have be- come superfluous and passed into oblivion, while the custom remained. Nor were piles always necessary for the cpnstruc- tion of such dwellings ; many other means were employed to isolate and protect dwellings and stores. We may recall the old Irish a-annoges, or fenced villages, or our modern cities built on piles — -Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, Venice., From the effort to gain the greatest possible security, together with the desire for a more healthy position, arises the practice in vogue among traders, fettled on foreign shores to take up their abode on ships or. hulks, which are rnoored out in rivers or harbours, and contain at the same time their warehouses. In a smaller measure the same end is served by the post-supported dwellings on dry land, very common among the Malays, and to be found in Africa, especially in universal application to storehouses. Livingstone relates that the Batokas on the Lower Zambesi build their huts on a high framework in the middle of their gardens, in order to protect themselves from wild beasts, especially the spotted hyenas. Tree-dwellings, as of the Battaks in Sumatra, of many Melanesians, of South Indian tribes, come under this head. They are not really a primitive stage ot dwelling, comparable to the arboreal residences of the orang-outang, but arise simply from the employment of trees as posts. ^.Us.'-'^jsS^ House in Central Sumatra. (After Veth. ) THE HISTORY OF MANKIND The huts which the trees support often belong to the best -made things of their kind. The effects of the craving for protection reach neither far nor deep, when the essence of it is only isolation ; but when it tends to pack men together it gives rise to developments which have a wide and mighty bearing. The great cities which belong to the most marvellous results of civilization stand at the further end of the effects produced by this tendency to unite men and their dwellings about a single point. Nothing will enable us so well to recognise the power of the motive of defence as a glance at the situation of cities. We find fortified villages crowded together on the tops of mountains or on islands, in the bights Village on a tongue of land, Lake Tanganyika. (After Cameron.) of rivers or on tongues of land. Since most centres of habitation have been laid out at a time when a thin population was beginning to spread, and the danger of hostile invasions was vividly before their eyes, considerations of defence are often strongly stamped on their situation. We need only set before our minds the way in which nearly all the older towns of Greece and Italy stand on the tops or sides of hills, or remember that nearly all the oldest maritime trading cities are placed on islands. The tendency to pack together may' pass into an extreme, as in the case of the Indian dwellings in Colorado, combining the character of caves and castles, which shelter numbers of persons in the narrowest possible space, and often are only accessible by steps in the rock or by ladders. A third cause to be considered is common interests in labour. These of course increase with the progress of economic division of labour, until they form the principal cause which decides the situation of an inhabited place. Even at primitive stages of culture large populations assemble temporarily in spots where useful things occur in quantity. The Indians of a great part of North America make pilgrimages to the beds of pipestone ; and we have mentioned the crowds who go yearly to gather the harvest of the zizania swamps in the north-western lakes, and the assemblage from all parts of widely-scattered Australian tribes on HABITATIONS ii3 the Barcoo river for the seed-time of the grain-bearing Marsiliacese. These are transitory assemblies. But when once the step is taken from a roaming life to a settled one, places of just this kind will be among the first selected ; and if, when life has become settled, the population increases and division of labour comes in, larger habitations will spring up until such spots of the earth as are furnished by- Nature with any special wealth will, as the highest stages of civilization are reached, show those unwontedly dense populations — 400 and upwards to the square mile — which we meet with in the fertile lowlands of the Nile and Ganges, in the coal and iron districts of Central and Western Europe, or in the goldfields of Australia and California. The larger isolated aggregations, on the contrary, come into existence at definite points, which have become points where the streams of traffic meet or intersect. The wish for exchange of goods first causes the need for drawing as near as possible ; traffic creates towns. Everywhere that Nature simplifies or intensifies traffic great assemblages of men spring up, whether as cities of the world like London, or market-towns like Nyangwe. We assume by a kind of instinct a certain connection between cities and higher culture, and not without reason, since it is in the cities that the highest flower of our culture declares itself. But the fact that just this development of cities is so important in China, shows that a certain material culture is independent of the highest intellectual culture, and gives an impressive lesson of the real extent to which cities help to serve that life of trade which is less dependent on culture, nay, even for the most part spring from it. If cities are an organic product' of national life, they are not always the result of that race's own force to which they belong. There are towns of international trade, like Singapore, or, in a lesser degree, the Arab and Swahili stations on the coast of Madagascar ; or colonial towns, which are closely akin to these, such as Batavia, Zanzibar, or Mombasa. So mighty is traffic that it bears with it the organisation necessary to it into the midst of an alien nationality ; so that again whole races which have become organs of traffic bear the stamp of town life on their brow. Most of all, indeed, are the desert-dwellers urban races ; for the nature of their place of abode crowds them together around the springs, and also for defence, and forces them to more durable building than would be possible with timber and brushwood. The fact, too, that the oases are widely scattered renders it almost impossible for any assemblage of habitations to become a centre of traffic in the wide-meshed net of the desert roads. The first conquerors of an inhabited country, again, are often com- pelled to live in towns, independently of traffic ; feeling themselves secure only in close settlements. Then in later times these compulsory towns follow the natural requirements of trade, and change their situation. Premature foundation of towns is a symptom of young colonisations ; in North and Central America we may find ruined cities of quite modern date. In the Chinese region of colonisation on the frontier of nomads and Chinese, along the upper Hoang-ho, numerous ruined cities are characteristic of the zone where semi-civilization comes into contact with semi-savagery. 114 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND § 12. FAMILY AND SOCIAL CUSTOMS Head and family— Polygamy— Position of women— Female rule— " Mother-right " — Exogamy— Capture of women — Parents and children — Morality — Society — Social inequalities — Slavery — Races in bondage — Distinctive character of property — Extent of the distinction in tropical countries — Property in land — Examples of various conceptions of private property — Civilizing power of ownership — Poverty and labour in uncivilized peoples. Every step towards higher development involves grouping in societies. The Animal sociale of Linnseus ^ is justified by history, and the most natural form of society is the Family. It is the only source from which all social and political life can be developed. If there was any union before the family, it was a herd, but not a state. The stability which every political organisation capable of development must needs possess, first comes into existence with the family. With its development the security for economic advantages, which forms the foundation of all higher civilization, goes hand in hand. The fundamental basis of the family is the union of the sexes in a common home in which the children are brought up. Within the wide limits of this definition we find marriage universal. Where marriage has been supposed to be absent, even among the most promiscuous nomads of the forest and desert, its existence has sooner or later been in every case established. Extraordinary as has been the spread of polygamy, extending even to the possession of thousands of wives, as a rule the establishment of the family begins in the union of one man with one woman. Even elsewhere, one wife remains the first in rank, and her children have, as a rule, the rights of primogeniture. Marriage is an endeavour to bridle the strongest natural impulse — one which advance in civilization has as yet hardly diminished. The restriction is at all stages and under all circumstances constantly being loosened or broken, and then reimposed in new forms. Thus an enormous variety of shiftings lies between the modern forms of monogamy and those survivals of old forms which are referred to group-marriage. But all are variations of the same problem, how to bind man and woman to a lasting union. In every great community we find smaller groups of persons who are dis- qualified or withheld from marriage. Continence as a religious duty holds no very important place, though in all parts of the earth we find celibacy regarded as the highest perfection in military and sacerdotal organisations. But in a far higher degree is the natural development of the family hindered by the unequal number of the sexes. The capture of women often connected with slavery, infanticide, war, and the emigration of the men, bring about an excess of women. From the point of view of the relations prevailing among ourselves, which are based upon an equality of numbers in the two sexes, it is hard to conceive a state of things in which the women are two or three times as many as the men. Yet not only do we find in Uganda, according to Felkin, seven women to every three men, but in the half-civilized Paraguay it was reckoned in 1883, after some years of war, that out of 345,000 inhabitants, two -thirds were women. The consequence is an excess of the female element in the family, which is the most immediate cause of ' [And of Aristotle long before him. ] FAMILY AND SOCIAL CUSTOMS 115 polygamy. A superfluity of men, such as civilization brings with it in new countries peopled by immigrants, is less frequent in the lower grades ; we find it where there are slaves, and in great centres of commerce. Plurality of husbands, or polyandry, which was formerly regarded as a specially deep-rooted and ancient form of the family, has by closer observation been shown to be a development from altered or abnormal conditions. The small number of women among the imported labourers in Fiji has caused a true polyandry to grow up, and it has arisen, under similar conditions, among a slave colony of Dinka slaves in Lega land. In Tibet, and among the Nairs in India, one man may belong to several married groups. Independently of these outgrowths of marriage, in which nevertheless the woman follows the man — while he is her lord, and the lord of her children and her earnings, — we find that form of marriage, equally possible with monogamic or polygamic institutions, in which the man enters the woman's community, and the children belong to her. Here comes in what in one word is called " Mother- right." This takes, as the corner stone of the family and of society, the one certain fact in all relationships — the kinship of children to their mother. When Herodotus found among the Lycians the custom whereby the children took the mother's name, and pedigrees were reckoned in the female line, he thought that that people differed from all others. But we now know that this custom, either practised consciously and completely, or only as a survival, recurs among many races. The child may be so closely attached to the kindred of the mother that in tribal feuds father and son may fight on opposite sides. In all races we find nations among whom the chiefship descends through the mother. It is tempting to see in this a survival from an older form of marriage, perhaps a transition to group- marriage ; since this too looks for the only unquestionable certainty of a child's origin in his kinship to his mother, and thus equally ignores the father. It is also certain that where mother-right prevails, so far from any promiscuity of intercourse arising, women who, owing to their kinship to their own group, may only mate with- a man belonging to another, stand to him in a much closer relation than do those with whom he is forbidden ever to mate. The husband enters the tribe, even the household, of his wife, and a whole series of customs, in many cases very extraordinary, points to the fact that in spite of the bond of wedlock he is regarded as a stranger there. Tylor has collected statistics indicating that the curious practice whereby the husband avoids and refuses to know the wife's parents, and especially his mother-in-law, appears almost exclusively in the cases where he enters the wife's family. These onerous ordinances, too, are among the most strictly enforced. An Australian indignantly repels a suggestion to utter the name of his mother-in-law. When John Tanner, the naturalized Ojibbeway, was introduced by an Assiniboine friend into his wigwam, he noticed that two old people — his friend's father and mother-in-law — veiled their faces while their son- in-law went by. Each will even avoid the footprints which the other may have made in the sand. The custom of naming the father after the child, as Moffat was called " Mary's father," is also found where the husband has migrated into the family of the wife. It may be explained as an indication that the non-acquaint- ance continues until such time as the birth of a child has established a connection between himself and the family. The small attention, too, which the father pays to the bringing-up of his offspring, is probably due to a like cause ; the children ii6 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND do not belong to him, but to the mother and her tribe. A survival of the privileged position of the female side appears also in the etiquette prevailing among the Kurnai of Australia, by which the husband has to assign certain special portions of game taken by him to his parents-in-law. We must not, however, look for traces of mother -right in every insignificant custom, such, for example, as the provision of the wedding-breakfast by the bride's family. A Zulu family. (From a photograph in the possession of Dr. Wangemann. ) The transition from this system to that in which the father is the head of the house, or as it may be called, " father-right," appears to come about spontaneously, in cases where the father acquires property by his own exertions ; which then naturally belongs to him. Again, local separation furnishes a point of origin for the extension of the new family. Powell relates that an Indian tribe in which mother-right prevailed, being compelled in a time of dearth to migrate with its women, became in its new situation the originator of a tribe with father-right. In view of the tendency to exempt from the mother's right of bequest land which has been cleared by the father with or without the aid of the children, it must happen that, for example, settlements in a new country must be at the disposal of the father ; and besides this, movable property shows the sarne tendency. Tending the herds especially demands hard labour, and as a natural consequence FAMILY AND SOCIAL CUSTOMS "7 the patriarchal system has reached its highest development among pastoral races ; so that the introduction of cattle-breeding into the industrial life of mankind may well have played an important part in the extension of this system. Closely connected with marriage under the influence of mother-right is the remarkable custom, which has lasted to our own time, known as " exogamy." Many tribes forbid their young men to take a wife from among their own body, thus compelling them to marry one of another tribe. This custom assumes so rigid a legal form that many tribes in Africa, Australia, Melanesia, America, have their regular " wife -tribes " out of which they always choose their partners. Exogamy even reaches so high as to the Brahmins of India, and we find it as a superstition among the Chinese ; it penetrates so deeply that the very language of a race may be divisible according to male and female descent. Thus L. Adam reports of the Carib language that it is a mixed speech, that of the men being deducible from the Galibi or true Carib, that of the women from the Arawak. Its twofold nature consists in the use by men or women of certain forms and words only when speaking to persons of their own sex ; while on the neutral ground the influence of the women's Arawak speech predominates. The division takes a local shape where a village is divided into two exogamous halves, or where two exogamous villages or tribes dwell side by side, which, as they multiply, similarly form a dual society. Over large districts, even in the Malay Archipelago, where foreign influences have made themselves much felt, the tribal organisation comes under this law, the rigour of which extends even beyond marriage, for all intercourse within the prohibited limits is treated as incestuous and punished with death. This holds among the Dieyerie of Australia. The often -quoted exogamous group-marriage of the Mount Gambler tribe, where all intercourse within the two half- tribes, Krokis and Kumites, is strictly forbidden, but allowed so freely between them that the two groups may almost be said to be married to each other, appears to us to be a mere procreative hugger-mugger. Remarkable traces of a state of things which has either vaijished or is preserved only in fragments, are visible in the kinship-systems of the most various races. These all occur under monogamic or polygamic forms, but give clear evidence of the previous existence of other forms of marriage ; and that not as rare curiosities, but widely extended. Morgan first recognised in the Iroquois a people who by that time had reached the mark of marriage by couples, but showed in their names for the degrees of relationship the traces of an earlier system. The Iroquois at that time called his brothers' children " son " or " daughter," while they called him " father '' ; but his sisters' children were to him " nephew " and " niece," and he " uncle " to them. This observation led Morgan to establish the rule that the family proceeds from a lower to a higher form in proportion as society develops to a higher stage ; but the system of kinship only registers progress after long intervals, and only undergoes fundamental changes when the idea of the family has fundamentally altered. Thus it seemed possible to find in the names traces of an older mode of reckoning kinship of which it might be that nothing else had actually survived. It has been suggested that the kin-names of Hawaii may be referred to a system like that of the Iroquois, but even wider in its employment of the names for child, brother, and sister ; since there all children of brothers and sisters are spoken of as the common children of these, and call each other " brother " and " sister." But we are in no way justified in ii8 THE HISTORY OF 2rANKIND seeing in this a survival of what Morgan, and after him — not without an ulterior purpose — Marx, Engels, and the rest, have called the "consanguine family," — that is, a family in which the only bar to intercourse was as between relatives belonging to different generations — grandparent, parent, child, etc. The notion of incest is bound up with the very lowest forms of marriage of which we have any knowledge, and the bar has been fixed far further back than in our conception of marriage. Still less does the so-called Punalua family — in which brothers and sisters, and, as a probable further consequence, their children, were excluded from marriage — result from this Iroquois kinship -system. In Hawaii this form of marriage existed even in the present century, whereby sisters were the common wives of several husbands (^Punalua), or brothers the common husbands of several wives. The ancient Britons may well have had a similar form of marriage ; but on this subject we have no information to carry us farther. All attempts to prove the existence of absolute promiscuity may be regarded as unsuccessful ; Bachofen's researches take us back to group-marriage at farthest. The traces of a community of women, such as surrender taking the form of a religious rite ; that curious feast held by the Congo natives at the conclusion of the three days' mourning for the dead, at which the widow yields herself to the mourners, and many similar customs, can indeed be explained as survivals from such a state of things ; but it seems more natural to regard them as relapses from the monopoly of women in single or polygamous marriages which is constantly being attempted, but always meets with opposition, especially in regions where the sexual instinct is less restrained. Similar relapses, though in other forms and more concealed from view, are not unknown even under our own code of morals. Questions concerning property and society will make us recur to this subject. Primogeniture is no more universal than the tracing of descent in the male line. No doubt we find it strongly marked among most races, even to the point of the parents, when old, yielding obedience to the eldest son, while the brothers have to work for him like slaves ; but we also find privileges conceded to the youngest, as in the custom of " borough-English," still not wholly extinct in this country. In this we may see a regard for the interests of the mother and the family, who will gain most by the supremacy of the son who is likely to remain longest under their tutelage. " Patria potestas " is, if only as a case of. the right of the strongest, very considerable wherever the family tie is not extremely lax. In Africa children allow their fathers to sell them without a murmur. On the other hand, among Negroes the love of parents for children is developed in a beautiful degree, and these races, considered low in the scale, often enjoy a most closely-welded and charming family life under the influence of paternal authority and children's affection. The modes of contracting marriage offer many traces, persisting to the present day, of a former state of things. A present given in many cases by the founder of a new household to his father-in-law, stamps the contract as a form of purchase, while not excluding the traces of capture. The purchase of a wife is often concluded while she is still a child, nay, occasionally, while she is still unborn. It happens not uncommonly that the lady's inclinations are also considered but as a rule, parental dispositions are absolute. The wooer usually expresses his wishes by the presentation of a gift to the parents of the girl he has chosen • and its acceptance or rejection is taken as their decision. Intermediary suitors are FAMILY. AND SOCIAL CUSTOMS 119 often employed. Marriages " on approval " are also frequently found ; in cases where things turn out satisfactorily, the course is, first the offering of presents to the girl, then the building and furnishing of the hut, then the gift to the bride's parents. The nuptials are then performed either by priests, or by the parents, or the grandmothers of the young people ; or, in their absence, by any older relations. The ceremony includes symbols of the bride's loss of her freedom, of her regret at leaving her parental home, of the expected joy of motherhood, and so forth ; but consists mainly of merriment. In many cases the religious element does not enter, but where it does appear, it is in the form of an invocation of the souls of ancestors, whose abiding interest in the family concerns is everywhere presumed. Blood-relationship is among most races regarded as a bar to marriage ; yet the heir often takes over his father's wives. Divorce is in these cases wont to be as easily concluded as marriage, the chief difficulty being the recovery of the purchase- money. Wherever polygamy is most widely extended, the marriage relation is most lax ; until we meet with conditions such as the most advanced corruption of civilization does not attain to. It has been said, not unjustly, of the Polynesians, that the great laxity of their family-ties has played an important part in their migration. What Cook said of the father of a New Zealand boy who was about to leave him without hope of return, is true of many : " He would have parted with more emotion from his dog." The slave-trade again has increased the ease with which the bond between husband and wife, parent and child, has so often been loosed ; while adoption rends the natural dependence in favour of an unnatural tyrannical law. The capture of women is no longer practised as the sole means of acquiring wives and founding families ; though in the wars of savage races often only the younger women are spared, and these are taken as booty, like Andromache, to the homes of the victors. But stories like that of the Rape of the Sabines, or of the daughters of Shiloh by the Benjamites, declare plainly that a different state of things once existed ; and a whole series of curious customs can only be ex- plained by a traditional objection to seeing daughters, sisters, women of the tribe, carried off. So, too, when we find at the present day, whether among Arabs, South Slaves, or others, the bride making a show of yielding to compulsion, against her own desire, or the marriage procession embellished by a fight between the bride's people and those of the 'bridegroom, culminating in the carrying off of the bride, we have obvious traces of what was once conducted in a different spirit. The less reality there is in the custom, the more capriciously does the symbolism work. In a district of East Melanesia the boys of the village await the bride's relations and shoot harmlessly at them with arrows. Or the sham fight between the bride's and bridegroom's people does not take place till after the wedding feast. Not only has the bridegroom to buy his bride, but she must pay for permission to go in peace. To the same class perhaps belongs the custom prevalent in the Loyalty Islands, whereby the newly-married pair may not see each other in public, nor dwell in the same house, but have to meet secretly. Contrary to the notion that a comparison of the various forms of marriage' will reveal a great development, resembling as it were a pedigree, showing a pro- gressive contraction of the area within which intercourse was permitted, from its original identity with the whole tribe, by the exclusion of first nearer, then more THE HISTORY OF MANKIND distant kindred, until monogamy at last was reached ; we see in all the forms various attempts to do justice to the hardest of all social problems, one of which, indeed, no perfect solution is practically possible. The breeder's motive for selection, viz. the repression of the weakening effects of in-and-in breeding, by encouraging an invigorating cross-breeding, has unduly influenced this theory of development ; races which did not breed cattle must have been far from recognising anything of the kind. We should rather say that we are here in presence of one of those cases of a consistent and refined development of a limited group of ideas, of which we find so many examples in the ethnology of the natural races. Such development as we can perceive with undoubted clear- ness in marriage is in the growth of sentiment with the growing cultivation of the individual, and the closer union resulting from the multiplication of points of contact between the sexes, which comes with increasing civilization. In primitive society woman holds a position quite as full of anomalies as her position among the most highly-civilized races, the only difference being that in the former case injustice and ill-treatment appear with less disguise as the natural consequences of her physically weaker powers. Polygamy alone hardly explains her lower position. Even where monogamy is the general rule, as is the case, though not without exceptions, and still less as an ordinance, among Negroes, Malays, Indians, and the northern races, it is usual for the woman to live in a separate part of the house, seldom to eat out of the same dish as the men, and in any case, only after they have finished. Higher civilization, while it has improved woman's position by softening the man's rude instincts, and especially his violence and injustice, has at the same time, by depriving her of the dignity of labour, removed the basis of a possible firmer position in society. Has it not, indeed, by making such a division of labour as to give the more limited, easier, and less honourable forms of it to the woman, and exclude her from warfare, public or private, and sport, put her in an even less favourable position than Nature intended ? If we descend the stages of civilization we shall find, as we come to the lower, that woman is physically and intellectually more on a par with man. Might not the question of power, or rather strength, once have stood somewhat differently ? At the stages of civilization with which we are here concerned, it was not found difificult to allot a position of authority to the woman. We may recall the influence of the priestesses' among the Malays, the frequency with which female sovereigns are found in Africa and America, the female troops of Dahomey, who are stronger than the men and handier with their weapons. Despots have often, like the present king of Siam, formed a bodyguard of women, believing the fidelity of female slaves to be more trustworthy. Nature has no doubt implanted elements of weakness in the physical organisa- tion of women, which perhaps civilization only tends to develop further ; but there can be no question that the fact of her bearing and bringing up the children is a great source of strength which can never fail her. If the children belong to the mother, or if, according to the custom of exogamy, the husband enters the wife's family, the greater influence, based upon present possession and the future hope of the stock, lies on the female side. That does not prevent the hardships of life weighing upon her more than upon the stronger man ; but even so it must often happen that, as Arthur Wright says of the Seneca Iroquois, the women are a great power in the clans and elsewhere. On occasions, he adds, they can FAMILY AND SOCIAL CUSTOMS even depose a chief, and reduce him to a mere ordinary brave. The manifold forms of female rule, or the double chieftainship, male or female, such as we find in Lunda, and traces of it in Unyoro, point to a higher position of woman at one time. In regard to sexual morality, comparative observation shows that in all grades of civilization very different conceptions of it obtain, but that these are by no means most relaxed among the poorest and most wretched of natural races ; rather in places where there is constant intercourse with the lower classes of civilized nations. Apart from this, however, we find great differences, such as are hardly to be explained by primitive conditions, but are rather bound up with the very various circumstances of national life. In some regions the utmost freedom is allowed between unmarried persons, to the point of its being held creditable to a girl to bear children to her lovers ; elsewhere wives are surrendered, freely or for payment, to guests ; while some tribes kill a girl who has borne a child out of wedlock. There is no sharper contrast than the rigid jealousy wherewith the Masai guard the purity of their maidens, who go clothed in skins, and the laxity which their easy-going neighbours, the Wakamba, display in regard to their girls, who stroll about without a rag on ; but the former are a proud race with strict laws and aristocratic organisation ; the latter a complaisant, lazy, scattered subject-race. We often meet with the same contrast ; a strong nation keeps its laws on this subject at as high a level as on others, a weak one tends to license. On the other hand, the Masai attach no importance to chastity in married women. The fact is that the influence of moral ideas upon races at this stage is very small, and that such morality as there is exists less in compliance with any moral feeling, than as an obstacle to the infringement of private rights. Adultery is universally regarded as an attack upon rights acquired by the purchase of the wife ; and thus the action of the man who makes a temporary surrender of his wife to a guest, does not necessarily shock morality. It remains to inquire how the growth of this custom bears upon the position of women in a community with " mother-right." No doubt the influence of the women would be thrown against it, as to this influence is due the disfavour with which public opinion among the North American Indians views facility of divorce. In general the less civilized societies allow freer play to the sexual instinct than do the higher ; and accord- ingly among them we find less violence done to ideas of law or morality. As the bonds which unite man and wife are drawn closer a change takes place. It is at this point that professional harlotry appears, as a means of averting forms of profligacy which might endanger family ties. In the form in which we find it among the Nyam-Nyams, it may no doubt be regarded as an indication of higher social development ; but at the same time it lowers that society materially in moral worth. Indeed, in disregard of moral obligation, the most cultivated society is on a level with the natural races. The conditions which lead to national decay often present a striking parallel. Society in Tahiti, as Cook and Forster found it, was thoroughly corrupt and on the high road to decay ; it was doomed to perish neither more nor less than that of Rome under Heliogabalus, or that of Paris before the Revolution. Conversely the condition of the Zulu nation under Dingaan and Chaka was one of rude and youthful health. Certain features of family life which we are apt to consider as restricted to the richer growth of the affections in civilized life may be specially noticed. The mourning THE HISTORY OF MANKIND of a widow for her husband, or of parents for children, is expressed with a vehe- mence which must partly suggest superstitious ideas, but in any case is a great act of sacrifice on the part of the living for the sake of the dead. We may recall how Australian women carry about the corpse, or some bones, of their dead children on all their marches, or how Melanesian women wear the mummied skull of their departed husbands ; not to mention the widespread custom under which widows and slaves follow their husband, or lord to the grave. Motherly love is so natural a sentiment that the modes of expressing it need no authentication ; but we often come across instances of tenderness on the father's part towards his offspring. No doubt there are many cases of cruelty, but these are exceptions. All who have gone deeply into the question agree in praising the peaceful and kindly way in which those of one household live together among uncorrupted natural races, doubly striking by contrast with the dark practices and disregard of human life with which it often co- exists. Solomon's maxim that he who loves his child chastens him betimes, finds no observance among natural races ; rather is it the children who tyrannise over the adult. But even they seldom quarrel or fight among themselves. Nansen has depicted the great good-nature which prevails among the Eskimos, and is inclined to refer the repose and peacefulness of family life mainly to the intimate associa- tion customary between mother and children. The educational effect of this closely-knit fellowship upon its members has often been under-estimated. But among many natural races life moves more securely in fixed lines than it does among the most highly-cultured. The respect for elders, the obedience to those in authority, the willing subordination, the apathetic calm, which preserves its supremacy by force not of intellect but of habit, in face of the most unexpected occurrences, often impress Europeans. The cool self-contained Redskin of the Indian tales is a product of this closely-knitted society. The word Family had, even in its original Latin use, the meaning of house- hold, the slaves being included in it ; and thus signified a society. It has a yet wider import among races in very various stages of civilization. By the compre- hension of kinsfolk of several generations and inclusion of strangers in the position of slaves, it broadens out into an important element of society. Among the Slavonic peoples we find house-comradeship, Zadruga or Bradstro, " brother- hood," embracing several generations of descendants from one progenitor, and' their wives, in a community of goods and labour under one head, who need not always be the eldest. Traces of the same appear among the old Germans and the Celts ; we find them in India, in the Caucasus, among the Kabyles, and many other races of Africa and Oceania. Where we know nothing of their internal organisation, the great house with its numerous apartments for single groups — particularly the "long-house" (see woodcut on p. 1 27) indicates their existence. Here then we are in sight of the family and of society. The family holds its members together with a bond closer than that of marriage, and forms with them an organisation which is one of the great and permanent elements of society. This effort is most conspicuous in the societies where mother-right and exogamy obtain ; in which the sharp division on the basis of blood-relationship divides the whole stock into two halves, which are at once family and society. They divide the property, individual property being unknown ; and this, apart from kinship holds the society together. For political purposes some family stocks unite in FAMILY AND SOCIAL CUSTOMS 123 groups, which may be compared with the old Greek Phratrise ; several of such groups form the highest political unit, which we call simply the tribe. Slavery and serfdom soon bring about a further gradation. The oldest occasion for slavery was the compulsory entry into the society of foreigners, who in most cases would be prisoners of war. The custom of enslaving such prisoners when the captors do not wish to kill them is to this day very widespread, and indeed has been abandoned only by the most highly civilized nations. The Masai in East Africa, a shepherd tribe, who subsist upon herds of a fixed size, and have neither labour nor provisions to spare for slaves, kill their prisoners ; their neighbours, the agricultural and trading Wakamba, being able to find a use for slaves, do not kill them ; while the Wanyamwesi, a third people of that region, having, through their close connection with the Arabs of the coast, a good market for slaves, wage wars on purpose to acquire them. Here are three situations of typical significance. The impulse to level downwards which exists in primitive societies shows nowhere more strongly than in the position of relative freedom which the slaves enjoy. If there is no work for male slaves, females are always wanted, and their issue forms a yet lower social grade. Slaves are also bought for human sacrifices, and in Central Africa the death of a chief creates a brisk demand. Wherever the status of slave is recognised, as it is among all pagan nations, it offers a welcome means of expiation ; the last sacrifice which the creditor can claim from his debtor, the plaintiff from the defendant, is the surrender of personal freedom. A curious exception is found among the Ewe people, where the insolvent debtor incurs the penalty of death. But between the positions of slavery for debt and freedom as enjoyed by the masters, lies the dependent position of those whom poverty has reduced to the verge of slavery though nominally free. To these applies the maxim that the final abolition of slavery is owing to the creation, by means of labour, of movable value, that is, capital, and thus that capital and freedom are sisters. There is a great distinction between slavery as a national institution and as a means of preparing goods for trade. If Arabs and other slave-holders treat their slaves well, the reason is to be found in the participation of both slave and master in the general indolence. So long as no great differences of rank from the point of view of culture exist, not much demand will be made upon the slave's labour ; but as society progresses and wants increase his lot becomes harder, and it is in no w.ay ameliorated by humanising progress generally. The interval which separates master and slave increases in proportion to the desire of gain ; so that, as Livingstone says, no improvement in the slave's position can be expected, even if the slave-holder does not return to or remain in barbarism. If we look at Africa, we see that among all merchandise slaves and women stand in the closest relation to the requirements of the negro. Their sphere is a large one ; for all that does not concern trade, fighting, or hunting, is the business of the women and slaves. These form the favourite merchandise, the most important standard of property, the best investment for capital. Above all they are the articles easiest to provide in exchange for goods in request — at one time, indeed, the only medium of exchange beside ivory that Africa possessed. When men are a form of capital, their tendency" is, like other capital, to accumu- late ; for the desire of owning slaves is just as insatiable as the craving for property and wealth in any other form. Therein lies the greatest danger of this institution. 124 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Excessive slavery is one of the causes which destroy states ; it was so in Rome of old, it is so in Africa and parts of America to-day. It splits up the nation, of which an ever-increasing proportion falls into slavery ; it brings on war, devasta- tion, tyranny, human sacrifices, cannibalism. It has been alleged as an advantage possessed by the powerful conquering nation of the Fans in West Africa, that they keep no slaves to weaken their warlike force. The last result is the depopulating and enfeebling of wide areas. If we may assume, with Father Bauer, that before the conclusion of Sir Bartle Frere's treaty in 1873, 65,000 slaves were annually imported into Zanzibar, this means, allowing for those who escaped or were left behind on the way, that some 100,000 were torn from their homes in the same period. Nearly allied to slaves are those despised and degraded portions of the popula- tion, who live as a sharply-separated and deep-lying stratum, under a conquering race. Almost every race of Asia or Africa which has made any progress towards higher development embraces some such, not always differing ethnologically. For that very reason, however, the social difference is all the more strictly maintained, and often enough leads to further divisions among the lower classes themselves. Thus in some parts of Southern Arabia four, in others two, classes of Pariahs are dis- tinguished ; some of them degraded by birth, others through following unclean trades. The caste divisions of India show the same distinctions, for in the lowest castes we equally find some degraded by birth, some by occupation. Both causes meet in our gipsies, in the Yetas of Japan, and others ; and it is at once interesting and melancholy to see how in North America numerous remains of the Indian population have sunk to a like level. Here the cause of the degradation was the invasion by a foreign race. A particular form of this inequality is the subjection of whole races to a conquering plundering horde. In some parts of the Sahara the Arabs and Tibboos look upon certain oases and their inhabitants as their private property. They turn up at harvest time to take their tribute, that is to plunder and rob ; and in the interval leave their subjects to misery and the task of planting for their benefit. In course of time an assimilation may result from this gradation, though the family regarded as a kin-group seeks to maintain an attitude of reserve and opposition to this, by objection to misalliances. But it may also, by the introduction of economical causes, and local dispersion, lead to a sharp and permanent separation, till we find the hunters of the Central African forests, the so-called Pygmies, appearing as a peculiar social race beside their agricultural masters and protectors. The tribal membership becomes connected with the realm of the unseen by means of special stock-symbols— known as Totems among the American Indians, Atuas among the Polynesians — which have been promoted to the position of tutelary spirits. Among the Samoan stocks we find Atuas using the shovel, Aanas the lance, Latuamasangas the whisk, Mononos the fishing-net, as imparted by the god Pili. More especially are animals, preferably reptiles, fish, and birds sacred to the gods ; and each member of a stock bears the emblem tattooed on his person not only with a view to his recognition and classification, but as an amulet and an object of reverence. Among Indians and Australians we also find the influence of the totems in proper names.' G. Forster called attention long ago to the fact that among the Polynesians personal names are often taken from animals and compared this with a similar custom among the North American Indians A FAMILY AND SOCIAL CUSTOMS 125 Tahitian chief was called Otu, the heron ; a Marquesan, Honu, the tortoise. These are almost certainly clan-names, such as we find also among African tribes, Bechuanas, Ashantees, etc. The attitude adopted towards the stock-symbol is very various ; sometimes it is an object of dread, sometimes of honour and protection. Among some stocks it is a capital offence to injure the original of the symbol ; while in Aurora (Banks Island) a member of the Veve, whose cog- nisance is the cuttle-fish, so far from objecting to eat it, thinks the capture of it particularly lucky. Similar totem-stocks in different tribes lend each other mutual assistance, and thus the system affords a ground for close alliances between distant tribes. Secret societies also ramify through the community, creating a division into adepts and uninitiated. They have a natural tendency to appear in communities which lack any great public motive for a hierarchy of ranks. They draw artificial boundaries, wear masks of which they alone understand the meaning, surround themselves with religious forms, take control of important functions, such as the initiation of young persons arriving at maturity, or the exaction of penalties for law-breaking, reminding us (and in this latter respect both in their nature and their operations) of the German Vehmegericht. Part of the duty of these secret societies and other bodies consists in the maintenance of traditions. If there is no other organisation for this purpose, their members are systematically instructed in the subject. No race is actually communistic ; but there is so much communism in the institutions of savage races, that it has often appeared more important to combat this than to introduce Christianity. Missionaries have, no doubt, been too ready to find in communism, which does not require a man to put all his strength into his work, the ground of various undesirable characteristics, as in Samoa of the tendency to intrigue which enlivens the native indolence. We shall come across institutions which are deliberately designed to prevent the undue amassing of capital. In Polynesia the effect of these has been decidedly good in rendering difficult the admission, with mischievous rapidity, of European goods. Property shows in its relations a natural analogy with family no less than with social institutions ; thus as we find remains of group-marriage beside monogamy, so we find traces of common ownership side by side with individual ownership. When a member of a family community, which unites its forces to till the common land and shares the produce, brings a piece of ground under cultivation, this becomes his own private property with right of bequest. A boat is common property, tackle or fish-hooks personal and private. Especially among nomad, and there- fore thinly-scattered, races the notion of private property is unequally developed in different directions. The first thing that makes a European, among the pastoral races of Africa or the hunting tribes of North America, feel that he has left the constraints of civilization behind him, is the way in which rights of property are in some cases neglected. They stick to their herds to the point of miserliness, but insist upon property in land only so far as they want it for pasture. Many peoples respect property in locked chests, but hold what is lying about to be as free as air. If my team is tired, I unyoke where I will ; I let my cattle graze wherever I think I have found grass for them. I cook my meal with the nearest wood, asking no man's leave ; and no man looks upon it as an infringement of his rights, or an injury to his property. If I like the place where 126 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND I have halted, or find anything to attract me, such as a copious spring, good pasture-land, or a bit of fertile garden-ground, I can stay there as long as I please, and build myself as big a house as I like. But in any case, if I settle in a particular spot, I must allow others to find the spring copious and the pasturage abundant, and to come there with their herds ; and I must come to an under- standing with them about the use of it. The Hereros of Damaraland, according to Buttner, have a way, in spite of their communism, of making an unpopular newcomer dislike his quarters by the simple artifice of driving all their flocks and herds into the neighbourhood of his residence. As soon as he has had enough of the damage and devastation which is thus caused, he clears out. The exact contrary is seen in the thickly-peopled region of the Upper Nile, where lakes and ponds, which yield fish and lotus-seeds (almost the sole sustenance of these fishing- people) in profusion, are respected as valuable property, just as are cornfields and vineyards in Europe. The Indian buffalo-hunters of the prairies confine them- selves to settled natural boundaries. To the present day the Bechuanas pay toll to the Bushmen on the game which they take, under the plea that the latter were the original owners of the hunting-grounds. The. Hereros, of whose half- developed proprietary instinct we have just given an example, carefully avoid any formal surrender of their property to strangers ; a full renunciation of the use of their land is inconceivable to them. From the idea of tribal possession arises the notion common in Africa that the tribal chief is the sole owner of the soil, and accordingly the members of the tribe pay such a tax to him for the use of it as may be agreed upon. The Spaniards of the sixteenth century tell us that no Indian had any free disposal of land, but only with the assent of his tribe. In Oceania the transition from one form of ownership to the other seems to be taking place under our eyes, and, just as happened with the advance of white settlers on Indian soil, uppn the basis of labour done in clearing and cultivation. Hunting leads to tribal owner- ship only ; and even the Australians and Eskimo, distributed in the proportion of one to 2000 square miles or so, lay claim to certain tracts of land on behalf of the family or tribe, and regard as an enemy any one who enters or uses these terri- tories without leave. The thinness of population usually found when we come down to the lower stages, will for the most part allow of abundant elbow-room ; but it is obvious that a family subsisting by the chase wants more soil than one of agricul- turists, and equally so that pastoral nomads demand broader areas than settled cattle-breeders. These contrasts have prevailed at all times and in all countries ; and when we come to the races of the steppe, we shall see that important historical consequences follow upon this demand for land. The hereditary dislike of the Indians towards the partitioning of their lands into individual properties, as well as towards the sale of superfluous territory, has contributed much to the difficulties of their position in regard to the white man. The effect of labour in creating property does not stop with the fencing-in of a forest clearing. According as labour attaches itself to the soil, or only passes lightly over it, its results differ fundamentally. Hunting, fishing, nomad pastoral life, create for the most part a mere transitory possession, which takes no pains to store or spare the source whence it draws. In agriculture, on the contrary, there is a constant strengthening and deepening, which acts not least powerfully through the other branches of human activity which it keeps steadily going. All higher FAMILY AND SOCIAL CUSTOMS 127 development of human powers rests upon this steady labour and the storage of its fruits. It is just in the lowest stages of civilization that the amassing of wealth is a matter of the greatest importance, for without wealth there is no leisure, and without leisure no ennobling of the form of life, no intellectual progress. It is not till production materially and permanently outstrips consumption that there can be any superabundance of property. This, according to the laws of political economy, tends to increase, and allow an intelligent class to come into existence. An absolutely poor race develops no culture. But under the protection of civilization Interior of a house in Korido, New Guinea. (After Raffray. ) more men will be born and grow up than the soil affords room for. The faster this disproportion increases, the greater will be the gap between Haves and Havenots, rich and poor. In hot countries, where man requires less nourishment, and production is at the same time easier than in cold regions, the population will multiply more quickly. Men become many, work scarce, therefore wages will be abnormally small, life poverty-stricken, misery great. In the cooler zones men want stronger food, while the land produces less of it, and thus maintains fewer persons ; the individual has to work harder, with the result that more is done and wages are higher. The relations between harder labour and higher wages is calculated to narrow the distinction between labourers and owners ; while, on the contrary, the indolence of the dweller in the tropics increases this distinction, when it is once established, to an enormous degree. In European countries we see advantages of soil and climate fully compensated by the excellent disposition of men who have to work, whose activity guarantees the progress of civilization more securely than natural wealth could do. Natural forces, with all their THE HISTORY OF MANKIND grandeur, are essentially limited and stationary ; the intellectual force of man is inexhaustible. The best soil is worked out at last, but into the place of an exhausted generation of mankind there is always a new one ready to step, full of youthful vigour. Resting on this basis, civilization is always most capable of development among the dwellers in the temperate zones. But this force had to be developed in slow, steady labour ; and the development of civilization is before all things a progressive training of every man to work. Undoubtedly every man must labour in order to live ; but if he likes to live in misery, he need not labour much. The total sum of labour performed by the savage is often not less than that performed by the civilized man ; but he does it by fits and starts as the humour takes him, and not in a regular fashion. The life of the Bushman is an alternation of hunting expeditions, on which he often pursues the herds of wild animals for days together with extreme toil, and of gorging on the game he has taken, ending in slothful repletion, until hunger Ashantee drinking cups of human slcuUs. (British Museum. ) forces him to new exertions. Regular work at high pressure is what the savage abhors ; hence comes that trait of obstinate apathy in his countenance which is an infallible means of distinguishing the spurious from the genuine Indian. For the same reason he hates to learn a handicraft. The Negro's passion for trade, well illustrated by the fact that in Sierra Leone almost every fifth person is a shopkeeper, springs to a great extent from this distaste. Cannibalism, which is found in every quarter of the earth, and was once more widely spread than now — for even Europe contains prehistoric remains and traditions pointing to its prevalence — is not peculiar to the lowest stages of civiliza- tion, nor yet a phenomenon due to a single cause. Peoples like the Monbuttus, the Battaks, the Maoris are among the highest of the races to which they belong. But they are well off for men, and have not risen high enough to make a good use of their superfluous population by increasing their economic production. Human life is held cheap among them. Now cannibalism presumes men for eating ; and therefore we find it either where the population is dense, or where a people has the power to get plenty of slaves. Among the Bangalas there are more slaves than are wanted for the labour, so that meat is abundant. Another cause is the sharp separation between one race and another, which causes strangers to be regarded as enemies, and allows any use to be made of them, even that of supplying nourishment. Within an exclusive family-stock or in a group consisting of such stocks, cannibalism would have seemed as inconceivable THE STATE 129 as incest ; so that if the practice has in recent years infected islands of the Solomon group, it is a fact of the same class as the relaxation of social order which has spread over the same region from a similar direction. Since the introducers of both innovations are the Polynesians, we can hardly doubt that there is a deep-lying connection between them ; and similarly we may account for the uneven, disconnected spread of cannibalism, which was found to exist even before the rapidly increased opposition to it caused by Christian and Mussulman influence. Further motives are revenge, which delights to eat its foe ; and envy, which hopes by so doing to acquire his more desirable characteristics. To people whose loose style of building makes prisons untrustworthy, the idea of imprisonment for life does not readily occur, so that capital punishment flourishes. Besides these reasons, cannibalism is closely involved in the whole net- work of cannibal customs ; embracing first human sacrifice, then the employment of portions of the human frame in the ritual of consecrations and witchcraft, and lastly the preservation and use of human remains, skulls for drinking-cups, bones for daggers, teeth for necklaces. This playing with human flesh and bones would be the first step to overcoming a natural disgust. When a chief in the Society Islands swallowed a human eye on a festive occasion, cannibalism was not entirely at an end in those regions. We cannot always safely infer cannibalism from the names of races, as these were frequently given by way of insult. The indulgence in the practice from necessity, which is not unknown among Europeans, is quite intelligible among races which, like many Australian and Arctic tribes, suffer every year or two, or continuously, from famine ; and need only be noticed as contributing to its maintenance and extension. For where it has once got a footing, its attraction increases, till we find races among whom human flesh is an article of trade, and funerals are almost unknown. Human bone m the fork of a branch ; a cannibal memento from Fiji. (Leip- zig Museum of Ethnology. ) § 13. THE STATE All races live in some kind of civil union — Development of states — Farmers and shepherds as founders of states — Distinctive marks of the prhnitive foundations-^Cause of arbitrary power — Power of the chiefs — War — Causes of its frequency — Ruinous effects of a permanent state of war — Universal mistrust — Rarity of alliances — Sham wars — Frontiers — Loose cohesion of primitive states. No race is without political organisation, even though it be so lax as among the Bushmen, whose little bands united for hunting or plunder are occasionally without leaders ; or as we find among other degraded or scattered tribes, who are often held together only by superstition and want. What sociologists call individualism has never been found anywhere in the world as a feature in any race. When ancient races fall to pieces new ones quickly form themselves out of the fragments. K 13° THE HISTORY OF MANKIND This process is constantly going on. " Each individual stock," says Lichtenstein, " is in some measure only a transitory phenomenon. It will in course of time be swallowed up by one more powerful, or if more fortunate will split up into several smaller hordes which go off in different directions, and, after a few generations, know no more of each other." These political mutations have always the character of a re-crystallisation, not of a shapeless breaking up. It is only seldom that the organ- ism is of long duration. One of the marks of the civilized man is that he accustoms himself to the pressure of the laws in the fulfilling of which he is himself practically in- terested. But if a compara- tively well-ordered constitu- tion has been founded among negroes, another community is sure soon to make its ap- pearance on the frontier com- posed of persons belonging to the same stock who are subject to no ordinances, and these lawless outcasts often obtain through their freedom from every legal restraint and every regard for tribal rela- tions, even through the con- sideration which attracts to them all the boldest and neediest men from neigh- bouring tribes, a force which is capable of converting the robber tribe into a conquer- ing, state-founding, and ruling people. Plunder and conquest pass easily into one another. In all countries of which we know the history, predatory tribes have played an important part. Most of what we know of the history of the natural races is the history of their wars. The first importation of firearms, which permitted unimportant powers to rise rapidly, marks the most sharply-defined epoch in the history of all negro states. What Wissmann says about the Kioko, "with them came firearms and therewith the formation of powerful kingdoms," is true of all. Is not this constant fighting the primitive condition of man in its lowest manifestation ? To this it may be answered that hitherto our own peace has never been anything Zulu chief in full war-dress. (From a photograph in the possession of Dr. Wangemann. ) THE STATE 131 but armed, but among us serious outbreaks of the warlike impulse are interrup- tions in longer intervals of rest which are enjoined by the conditions of civiliza- tion, while among the races of which we are speaking, a condition like our mediaeval " club law " is very often permanent. Yet even so it must be pointed out that among barbarians also there are peaceful races and peace-loving rulers. Let us not forget that the bloodiest and most ruinous wars waged by the natural races have been those which they have carried on not among themselves but with Europeans, and that nothing has kindled violence and cruelty among them in such a high degree as has the slave trade, instigated by the avarice of more highly civilized strangers, with its horrible consequence of slave -hunting. When the most charitably just of all men who have criticised the natural races, the peaceable David Livingstone, could write in his last journal these words : " The principle of Peace at any Price leads to loss of dignity and injustice ; the fighting spirit is one of the necessities of life. When men have little or none of it they are exposed to unworthy treatment and injuries," — we can see that the inevitableness of fighting between men is a great and obtrusive fact. But this state of war does not exclude civil ordinances, rather it evokes them. It is no longer war of all against all, but it rather represents a phase in the evolution of the national life when it has already been long in process of forming a state. The most important step from savagery to culture is the emancipation of the individual man from complete or temporary segregation or isolation. All that co-operates in the creation of societies as distinct from families was of the very greatest importance in the earliest stages of the evolution of culture, and here the struggle with Nature, in the widest sense, afforded the most important incitements. The acquisition of food might in the first instance give rise to association in joint hunting and still more in joint fishing. Not the least advantage of the latter is the disciplining of the crews. In the larger fishing boats a leader has to be selected who must be implicitly obeyed, since all success depends upon obedience. Governing the ship paves the way to ruling the state. In the life of a race like that of- the Solomon Islanders, usually reckoned complete savages, sea-faring is undoubtedly the only element which can concentrate their forces. The agriculturist living isolated will certainly never feel an impulse making so strongly for union ; yet he too has motives for combination, he owns property, and in this property inheres a capital for his labour. Since this labour does not need to be again executed by the inheritors of this property, there follows of itself the continuity of ownership and therewith the importance of blood relationship. Secondly, we find bound up with agriculture the tendency to dense population. Next, as this popula- tion draws closer and marks its boundaries, it, like every multitude of men who live on the same spot of earth, acquires common interests, and diminutive agricultural states spring up. Among shepherds and nomads the formation of states progresses more quickly, just in proportion as the need for combination is more active and includes wider spaces. This indeed lies in the nature of their occupation. Thus while the family is in this case of greater importance than in that first mentioned, the possibility of denser population is, on the other hand, excluded. But here the property requires stronger defence, and this is guaranteed by concentration, in the first place of the family. From an economic point of view it is more reasonable for many to live by one great herd than for the herd to be much subdivided. A herd is easily scattered, and requires strength to keep 132 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND it together. It is therefore no chance result that the family nowhere attains to such political importance as among nomad races. Here the patriarchal element in the formation of tribes and states is most decidedly marked ; in a hunter-state the strongest is the centre of power, in a shepherd-state the eldest. We are apt to regard despotism as a lower form of development in comparison with the constitutional state, and attribute to it accordingly a high antiquity. It used formerly to be thought that beginnings of political life might be seen shaping The Basuto chief Secocoeni with his court. (From a photograph in the possession of Dr. Wangemann.) themselves in the forms of it. But this is contradicted at the very outset by the fact that despotism stands in opposition to the tribal or patriarchal origin from which these states have grown. The family stock has of course a leader, usually the eldest ; but apart from warfare his power is almost nil, and to over-estimate it is one of the most frequent sources of political mistakes made by white men. The chief's nearest relations in point of fact do not stand far enough below him to be mingled indiscriminately in the mass of the population over which he rules. Thus we find them already striving to give a more oligarchical character to the government. The so-called court of African or ancient American. princes is doubt- less the council which surrounds them on public occasions. Arbitrary rule, though we find no doubt traces of it everywhere in the lower grades, even when the form of government is republican, has its basis not in the strength of the state or the THE STATE 133. chief, but in the moral weakness of the individual, who submits almost without resistance to the domineering power. In spite of individual tyranny there is a vein of democracy running through all the political institutions of the " natural " races. Nor could it well be otherwise in a society which was built up upon the gens, kindred in blood, communistic, under the system of " mother-right." But herein lay no doubt an obstacle to progress. The power of the sovereign is greatly strengthened by alli- ance with the priest- hood. A tendency to theocracy is incidental to all constitutions, and very often the import- ance of the priest sur- passes that of the ruler in the person of the chief. The weak chiefs of Melanesia, in order not to be quite power- less, apply the mystic Duk-Duk system to their own purposes ; while 'vs\ Africa it is among the functions of the chief to make atonement for his people by magic arts, when they have in- curred' the wrath of higher Powers, and to obtain for them by prayers or charms ad- vantages of all kinds. This, however, does not prevent the influ- ence of the chief from being overshadowed by that of a priest who happens to be in possession of some great fetish. Conversion to Christianity has almost always destroyed the power of the native chiefs, unless they have contrived to take the people with them. But the religious sentiment is the one thing that has maintained respect for a chief's children, even when they have become slaves. The power of the chief is further heightened when the monopoly of trade is combined with his magic powers. Since he is the intermediary of trade, he- gets into his own hands everything coveted by his subjects, and becomes the bestower of good gifts, the fulfiller of the most cherished wishes. This system finds its A Dakota chief. (From a photograph. ) 134 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND highest development in Africa, where the most wealthy and liberal chief is reckoned the best. In it lies the secure source of great power and often of beneficial results. For at this point we must not overlook the fact that one of the most conspicuous incitements to progress, or, let us say more cautiously, to changes in the amount of culture which a race possesses, is to be sought in the will of prominent individuals. We also find chiefs, however, whose power is firmly based upon superior knowledge or skill. The Manyema chief Moenekuss, so attractively depicted by Livingstone, was keen about having his son taught blacksmithing, and the Namaqua chief, Lamert, was the most efficient smith among his tribe. But of course it is in the art of war that accomplishment is most valued in a chief In giving judgment, he needs no great abundance of Solomonian wisdom, since in all more serious accusations the culprit is ascertained by means of magic, and in this duty too the popular council generally co-operates. Mean- while whatever the chief's position may be, it is never comparable with the power conferred by the wealth of culture existing in a European people ; and it were to hz wished that descriptive travellers would employ such terms as " king," " palace," and the like with more discretion. It is only among the war-chiefs that regal parade is customary ; the others are often scarcely distinguished from tiieir people. Every race has some kind of legal system ; among most of the " natural " races, indeed, this fluctuates between that under which the injured person takes the law into his own hands, and that of money-atonement for the offence. There is no question of the majesty of the law ; all that is thought of is the indemnifica- tion of the person who has suffered damage. In Malayan law, for example, the former course may be taken with a culprit caught in flagrante delicto even to the point of killing a thief ; but in any other case redemption, that is a money penalty, is enjoined ; and similarly among the negro races. Among lower as well as higher races violence has a very free play, and tends to limit its sphere as among individuals according to the resistance with which it meets. Blood-feuds in various degrees are to be found among all barbarous races. In the case of Polynesians and Melanesians they reach a fearful pitch. Cook tells us that the New Zealanders appeared to him to live in constant mutual dread of attack, and that there were very few tribes who did not conceive themselves to have suffered some injury at the hands of another tribe and meditate revenge for it. The wars of " natural " races are often far less bloody than those waged among ourselves, frequently degenerating into mere caricatures of warlike opera- tions. Still the loss of life caused by them must not be under-estimated, since they last for a long time, and the countries inhabited by " natural " races can in any case show only small population. In the case of Fiji, Mr. Williams estimates the yearly loss of human lives in the period of barbarism at 1500 to 2000, "not including the widows who were strangled as soon as the death of their husbands was reported." These figures are quite sufficient to have contributed materially to the decrease of the population. Firearms have diminished war, while increas- ing the losses. But with this continual war, guerilla war as it might be termed, are associated those catastrophes resulting from raids, in which great destruction of human life accompanies the outbreaks of warlike passion. The final aim of a serious war among the natural races is not the defeat, but the extermination of the adversary ; if the men cannot be reached, the attack is made upon women THE STATE 135 and children, especially where there is a superstitious passion for the collection of human skulls, as among the head-hunting Dyaks of Borneo. Of south-east Africa, Harris says : " Whole tribes have been drawn root and branch from their dwelling-places, to disappear from the earth, or to wander with varying fortunes over illimitable tracts, driven by the inexorable arm of hunger. Therefore for hun- dreds of miles no trace of native industry meets our eyes, nor does any human habita- tion ; never-ending wars pre- sent the picture of one unin- habited wilderness." Rapine is associated with murder to produce a misery which civil- ized races can hardly realise. But the culmination of this devastating power is reached when more highly endowed, or at least better organised hordes of warriors and plunderers, well practised in slaughter and cruelty, appear on the scene. Amputation of hands and feet, cutting off of noses and ears, are usual. This ill-treat- ment often has the secondary object of marking a prisoner, and to this must be referred the tattooing of prisoners of war. Lichtenstein saw a Nama whom the Damaras had taken prisoner. They had circumcised him and ex- tracted his middle upper front teeth : " He showed us this, and added that if he had been caught by them a second time, these very recognisable marks would inevitably have entailed the loss of his life." Losses of life and health may be repaired by a few generations of peace, but what remains is the profound moral effect. This is the shattering of all trust in fellow-men and in the operation of moral forces, of the love of peace and the sanctity of the pledged word. If the politics of civilized races are not distin- guished by fidelity and confidence, those of the natural races are the expression of the lowest qualities of mistrust, treachery, and recklessness. The only means employed to attain an object are trickery or intimidation. In the dealings of Europeans with natural races they have, owing to this, had the great advantage Articles belonging to Dyak Iiead-hunters : — i. Shield ornamented with human hair ; 2. Sword and knife ; 3. Skull with engraved ornament and metal plate ; 4. Basket to hold a skull, (i and 2 probably from Kutei ; 3 and 4 from W. Borneo. Munich Museum. ) 136 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND of very rarely having to face a strong combination of native powers. The single example of any great note is the alliance of the " six nations " of North American Indians belonging to the Iroquois stock, which was dangerous to Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An attempt at an alliance, which might have been very serious, was made after the so-called Sand River treaty of 1852 by Griquas, Basutos, Bakwenas, and other Bechuana tribes, but never came to completion, and recent years have again shown abundantly how little the South African tribes can do in spite of their numbers and their often con- spicuous valour, for want of the mutual confidence which might unite them and give a firm ground for their efforts. Constant fear and insecurity on the part of native races is a necessary result of frequent treachery on that of their foes. It is significant that the great majority of barbarous peoples are so fond of weapons and never go unarmed ; and nothing better indicates the higher state of civic life in Uganda than that walking sticks there take the place of weapons. It is noted as a striking feature when no weapons are carried, as Finsch points out with regard to the people of Parsee Point in New Guinea. The custom of treating strangers as enemies, under a superstitious fear of misfortune and sickness, or of knocking on the head persons thrown on shore by shipwreck like " washed up cocoa-nuts," was certainly a great hindrance to expan- sion. But we hear that among the Melanesians the question was discussed whether this was lawful, and that even strangers used to link themselves by marriage with a new place. If they belonged to a neighbouring island or group of islands they were not treated altogether as strangers, since they were not regarded as uncanny. Polynesians, who were frequently driven upon the Banks Islands, were received there in a friendly manner. If scarcely one of the innumer- able exploring expeditions in Australia made its way without being threatened or attacked by the aborigines, we must not overlook involuntary violations of the frontiers of native districts, for even to this day in Central Australia unlicensed entry upon foreign territory reckons as a serious trespass. Thus, as in the family and in society, we meet also in the political domain with a tendency to the sharpest separation. Who does not recognise in this latent state of war a great cause of the backward condition of the " natural " races ? The greatness of civilized states, which have worked themselves up to the clear heights of development, lies in the fact that they act upon each other by means of mutual incitement, and so are ever bringing forth more perfect results. But this mutual incitement is just what is missing in a state of continuous war. The forces which make for culture both from within and without are alike weakened, and the consequence is stagnation if not retrogression. Want of defined frontiers is in the essence of the formation of barbarous states. The line is intentionally not drawn, but kept open as a clear space of varying breadth. Even when we reach the semi-civilized states the frontiers are liable to be uncertain. The entire state is not closely dependent upon the area which it covers, especially not upon the parts near the borders. Only the political centre, the most essential point of the whole structure, is fixed. From it the power which holds the state together causes its strength to be felt through the outlying regions in varying measure. We have examples of frontier points and frontier spaces at every stage. The frontier spaces are kept clear, and even THE STATE 137 serve as common hunt- ing-grounds, but they serve also as habitations for forces hostile to civil authority, forv desper- adoes of every shade of villainy. Not infrequently the formation of new states starts from these spaces. The cases in which sharp frontiers are soonest formed is where the two fundamentally different modes of civilization and life, nomadism and agri- culture, come in contact. Here of necessity fron- tiers are sharply drawn against races of the steppes, and art endea- vours to contribute its aid by building earth- works and even walls. The region of the steppes is the country of the great wall of China, and of the ramparts thrown up by Turks and Cos- sacks. Leopold von Ranke has stated as a maxim of experience that when we study universal his- tory it is not as a rule great monarchies that first present themselves, but small tribal districts or confederacies of the nature of states. This is shown in the history of all great empires ; even the Chinese can be carried back to small beginnings. No doubt they have been of short duration with the single exception of the Roman Kingsmill Islander in full armour. (Berlin Museum of Ethnology.) THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Empire. Even that of China has passed through its periods of breaking up. From the Roman Empire the nations have learnt how great territories must be ruled in order to keep them great in extent, for since its time history has seen many empires, even surpassing the Roman in magnitude, arise and maintain themselves for centuries. Apart from the way in which the teaching of history __ has been taken to heart, the increase of population and the consequent ac- cession of import- ance to the ma- terial interests of the people has un- questionably con- tributed to this. But there are deeper- lying rea- sons for the small- ness of primitive states. Among most " natural " races the family and the society form unions so large, so frequently coinciding, so ex- clusive, that little remains to spare for the state. The rapid break-up of empires is counter- balanced by the sturdy tribal life. When the empires fall to pieces new ones form them- selves from the old tribes. The family of blood -relations, u 1 MI '" their common barrack or village, represents at the same time a political unit, which can from time to time enter into combination with others of the kind ; to which oerhaos It IS bound by more distant relationship. But it is quite content to remain by Itself so ong as no external power operates to shake its narrow contentment Negro Africa with all its wealth of population, contains no single really large state. In that _ country, the greater an empire the less its duration and the looser Its cohesion. It requires greater organising and consolidating power such as we meet with among the Fulbes or Wahuma, not merely to found' Lango chief and magician. (From a photograph by Richard Buchta. ) 1. Difuma dia Di- kongo. Iron sceptre, borne by the Bashi- lang chief, Mana Kat- embe. 2. Baluba wooden shield with cross-weav- ing. 3. Basonge chief's staff of iron ; the figure overlaid with sheet- copper. 4. Basonge orna- mental spear (Zappu Zapp) inlaid with copper. 5. Ornamental spear from the Ruiki. 6. Basonge spear. 7. Baluba spear. 8. Samba spear. 9. Baluba double drum. I o. Baluba woven bark mat. II. Baluba big drum, used at festivals. (i-io from the Wissmann Collection ; 1 1 from the Pogge Collection. ) Insignia, ornamental weapons, and drums from the Southern Congo territory. I40 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND but also, even if with difficulty, to maintain kingdoms like Sokoto or Uganda. Even the Zulus, high as they stand in warlike organisation, have never been able to spread permanently beyond their natural boundaries, and at the same time maintain cohesion with their own country. They have not the capacity for planning a peaceable organisation. Even in the Mussulman states of the Soudan we meet with this want of firm internal cohesion ; which is equally at the bottom of the weakness which brought down the native states of Central and South America. The more closely we look at the actual facts about Old Mexico, the less inclined shall we be to apply terms like empire and emperor to the loose confederation of chiefs on the plateau of Anahuac. The greatness of the Inca realm was exaggerated to the point of fable. When we hear of the renowned and redoubtable tribe of the Mandan Indians, we are astonished to learn that it numbered only from 900 to lood souls. In the Malay Archipelago it seems not to have been until the arrival of Islam that the formation of states rose above disjointed village communities. Even in our own day the great powers of South and East Asia lacked the clearness and definition in the matter of political allegiance, which are a privilege of the higher civilizations. Instead of the extension of single states, what takes place is the foundation of new ones by migration and conquest. It is the multiplication of cells by fission instead of the growth of the organism. It is striking how often the same legend or tradition recurs in Africa or elsewhere. A monarch sends out a band of warriors to conquer a country or a town ; if the enterprise fails they settle down quietly and marry the daughters of the people whom they came to overthrow. Such was the origin of the Matabele ; such, it is said, that of the kindred Masitu. Thus too are explained the Fulbe settlements on the Lower Niger, and the Chinese oases in the Shan States. Without crediting all these traditions, we may see in them a proof at once of the great part played by war in blending races in ancient times, and of the difficulty of founding coherent states. Instead of these we find colonies which cut themselves loose either peaceably or after a war. The Alfurs of the eastern islands in the Malay Archipelago have definite rules for the government of their colonies ; and in Polynesia of old, colonisation must have been as necessary in the life of a state as formerly in Greece. Among races in a low stage the cementing force of contests waged against natural dangers, threatening the entire community and binding them together for common defence, is naturally but little felt. A strongly uniting power, by pro- moting the value of common interests, has a favourable effect on the general culture. In the low-lying tracts on the coast of the North Sea, in Germany and Holland, the common danger from broken dykes and inundation by reason of furious storms and high tides has evoked a feeling of union which has had important results. There is a deep meaning in the myths which intimately connect the fight against these forces of Nature, these hundred-headed hydras, or sea-monsters crawling on to the land, with the extortion of the highest benefits for races in the foundation of states and the acquisition of culture. No race shows this more than the Chinese, whose land, abounding in streams and marshes, was able to offer more than sufficient work to its embanking and draining heroes — Schem, Schun, Jao, and their like. In Egypt a similar effect of the anxiety for the yearly watering and marking out of the land is obvious from history. THE STATE Hi Generally all common needs which draw men out of barren isolation must have the effect of promoting culture. Above all, too, they strengthen the con- stitution which organises the work done to satisfy those needs. States are created by common sovereignty and common requirements. But the sovereignty must come first. Outside the sphere of European civilization almost all states are ruled by intruding conquerors ; that is by foreigners. The consciousness of national dentity does not come into existence until later, and then makes its way as a state-forming force if the intellectual interests of the race add their weight on the same side. In almost all countries representing greater political units, we find for this reason various nationalities. At first one: is superior to another, then they are co-ordinate ; it is only in small states that the entire people has all along been formed of a single stock. BOOK II THE AMERICAN-PACIFIC GROUP OF RACES A. ^ 1-9, Races of Oceania — B. §§ 10-15, Races of Australia — C. §§ 16-21, Malays and Mala- gasies — D i. §§ 22-30, Americans and Hyperboreans — D. ii. §§ 31-32, Civilized races of early America — E. § 33, The Arctic races. MAP OF THE RACES OF OCEANIA and AUSTRALASIA EXJrom 90 Greernvich. Stpai^hihaired , ligllt-brorwTi Race (Jfalqvs.purRor jnix-edwith Chinese, Japanese and Indicm-s ) ^^^^ CrispKaired , (lark-l)roTVil Race {Melancsians , Papuas, Neffritos j W'-v,^- "k-^-^^J "K^«,*™. "R^--!. / separate. or mixed witli the two aljove iLamed \ KVj hatred . l>rawiiBace {EastFalajs.so-calUdAmLrs,Foljnesians &AusiraUzt7is > S ub d iv i s i o 11 s : A £astMalajs (with, curled, hair) B Mieranesiaas C Tohmesians D Ausiralians E Malofjasies ' "'" Limits of the districts ivhere the adiur^ ontice^, Sago, Bread-fruit, Taro and Yam prevails. 4.4 + -f ++ Souffiem Umit of tetterJwuse-bmldinff , associated- oceasionalij -with, aqrieidJiire: Fo^Tutsiaiv coloTiies in. Melanesia, and. MicroTiesia . •Distrift- of preraSijig Chinese i and formerly Japane.se- > ijifhtence.. - District of prevailing Indian, inflizence. Bibliographisch.es Institul Leipzig- 3 4 1 7 Polynesian clubs and insignia of rank, i, ^. State-paddles from the Hervey Islands. 3-5. State-clubs from the Marquesas. 6-11. Clul\s from Tonga. A. THE RACES OF OCEANIA § I. GENERAL SURVEY OF THE GROUP The position of the Pacific Ocean in history — The Indians of Columbus — Situation of America in the inhabited world — Racial resemblances of the people of Oceania to Malays and Indians — Ethnographic relation- ships—Position of Japan and North-west America — The great groups ; Oceanians, Malays with Mala- gasies, Australians, Americans — The Malayo-Polynesian family of languages — To what period are the relations of America, Oceania, and Asia to be referred — The vacant space between Easter Island and Peru, and the relations of America with Polynesia. Since the Pacific ocean lies between the eastern and western portions of the inhabited earth, the inhabitants of its islands appear in a general survey as the instruments of an important ethnographical connection. From its western border we can follow Asiatic traces far towards the east in a gradual transition across the islands. They grow fainter as we go east, but some remain even in the most eastern islets of Polynesia, and some are found again on the opposite shore, especially in those districts of North-west America which are distinguished by points of agreement with Polynesia. It has been pointed out in the first section of our introduction how closely the inhabitants of the Pacific islands are connected with the Americans by the stone-period civilization, which is common and fundamental to the eastern half of mankind, as well as by that inclusion in the Mongolian race, which applies to by far the greater part of them. This connection is one of the most important facts in the ethnographical distribution of the human race as it now exists. It has been said that the key to the greatest problems of ethnography is to be found in America. If we can succeed in bringing the inhabitants of this the largest and most isolated island of the world into connection with the rest of man- kind, then in any case the unity of the human race is established. But the con- nection can only be sought by way of the Pacific, for ancient America looks westward. From this side America must have been discovered long before the Northmen found their way to its shores from the east. Among the peculiarities of the inhabitants ■of Guanahani which most astonished Columbus, was their lack of iron, as he noted in his log-book as long ago as 13th October 1492. No subsequent discovery has succeeded in putting this significant fact of old American, and at the same time of Oceanian, ethnography in another light. With the exception of a strip in the north-west, which became acquainted with iron from Asia, America was, when discovered, still in the stone age. Even its more civilized races, while producing highly artistic work in gold, silver, copper, and bronze, use weapons and imple- ments of stone. When Africa was discovered by the Europeans it was manufac- turing iron right away to the Hottentot country. The races of the Malay Archipelago wrought artistically in iron. In Northern Asia only one strip on the coast where their traffic was small was without iron. Thus the domain of the ironless races lies on the eastern border of the inhabited earth ; it embraces L 146 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Australia, the Pacific Islands, the Arctic region, and America. Absence of iron implies limitation to the use of stone, bone, or wood, for imperfect weapons and utensils implies, too, exclusion from the possibility of such industrial progress as is based upon iron and steel. Within the line which includes the ironless races there is to be observed also the want of the most valuable domestic animals ; oxen, buffaloes, sheep, goats, elephants, camels, are here unknown, and consequently there is no cattle-breeding. The racial affinities of the Americans also point, not across the Atlantic, but Araucanian man and woman. (From a photograph ) across the Pacific. When Columbus said of the natives of the West Indies, " they are neither white nor black,'' he means that he can compare them neither with Europeans nor negroes. In later times the difference of the Americans from negroes, and their resemblance to the races on the western border of the Pacific, has often been more clearly indicated. Whatever isolated characteristics we may yet be able to adduce among all races at a similar level of civilisation,, the Americans stand nearest to those who live to the westward of them. If we unroll a map on Mercator's projection, and cast our eyes upon the earth and its races, the Americans find their place on the east wing contrasted with, and furthest separated from those who have their dwelling on the eastern borders of the dividing gulf of the Atlantic ocean. As the most easterly part of the Pacific-American region of the stone-using countries, America is at the same time the true Orient of the inhabited earth. The whole of America shares with Polynesia, and did once share with Northern GENERAL SURVEY OF THE GROUP 147 Asia, all the distinctive marks of stone-age countries, which have sometimes a more Polynesian, sometimes a more Northern Asiatic character. It is, however, in many respects poorer than either, since it possesses neither the pig nor the taro of the Polynesians, nor the reindeer herds of Northern Asia. This poverty, due to remoteness, confirms us in the notion that in America we have the final link in a chain of distribution of which the beginning is to be sought on the eastern shore of the Atlantic. With the ordinary idea that American evolution exhibits an isolated, almost insulated, independence, our view is only apparently in contra- diction. Within the lines of its affinity with the eastern lands of the inhabited world, America is, in any case, a region of extreme independence, firmly based on the geographical fact of its situation between the two largest oceans. But this finds expression far less in individual ethnographical peculiarities than in points of conformity which mark it off as a whole. The .specialty is not of kind but of degree. If we look at bodily characteristics, the conformity of all Red Indians among themselves is very great, so long as we consider skin, hair, and physiognomy ; but if we include the skull, it breaks down. Here we are in presence of the same contradiction that meets us as an internal point of difference among the islanders of the Pacific. With A. von Humboldt, with the Prince of Wied, and with Morton, we can only hold fast to the external unity of the race. The results of investigating the -skulls will, to all appearance, only prove that a more ancient variety of racial elements is concealed under the insular uniformity of to-day. But there can be no doubt as to the affinity of the American tribes with the great Mongoloid race, and, moreover, with that branch of it to which the dwellers in Eastern Oceania belong. Of both the similarity is shown in a comparison of colour, hair, and skeleton. What in a racial point of view-severs the people of Oceania most profoundly from their neighbours to the eastward, is the unmistakable extension of the Indo-African group of races into the midst of their island-region. Individual small groups of these negroids are undoubtedly scattered over all the archipelagos, and have here and there imparted to the original Malay colouring a deeper Polynesian tint ; but neither are traces of them lacking in America. The species of mankind that occur in the South Sea Islands were long ago brought by Forster into two main divisions. One was lighter coloured, better shaped, of strong muscular build, handsome stature, and gentle, good-natured character ; the other blacker, with hair becoming crisp and wavy, leaner, smaller, almost more lively than the other, but at the same time more suspicious. These are the " Poly- nesians " and " Melanesians " of more recent ethnographers. They cannot always be distinguished. Where it was supposed that only members of the latter group existed, scattered examples, nay, sometimes whole tribes of the lighter-skinned straight-haired race have turned up ; while even among the Samoans, Virchow is decided in assuming a certain negroid strain. Finsch describes the natives of Port Moresby as follows : " We find here every variety, from perfectly smooth hair to the twisted wig of the Papua ; curiy heads, some of a red blonde, are frequent ; Japanese or Jewish physiognomies, even men with eagle noses, remind- ing one of Redskins, are not rare. So too with the colour of the skin." The least we can do is to leave the possibility of mixed descent an open question, as Wilkes did with the Paumotu Islanders. The question of origin becomes more complicated ; but it is surely better, in place of assuming a pure Polynesian origin 148 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND from the north-east, to draw also a line of affinity towards the north-west, than with Crozet and others to drag up again the worn-out hypothesis of a dark-skinned " primeval population." If two races dwell in the Pacific, two races may have migrated thither, especially if they were used to sea and ships. The race-relationship with the inhabitants of the Malay Archipelago is apt to be asserted with all the more emphasis because the language-relationship so clearly points to it. But we must keep these two relationships quite distinct. Those races of the Malay Archipelago which show Asiatic affinities in lighter skin or Bakairi girl from the Kulishu river. (After Dr. R. von den Steinen. ) Chinese eyes, are perhaps more strongly represented in some islands of Micronesia. The real Polynesians are more closely linked to the races with negroid elements in them dwelling eastward from Java and the Philippines. Physically the Poly- nesians are less like the inhabitants of the Malay Archipelago than are the Hovas of Madagascar. Since the time of the elder Lesson it has been usual to trace the descent of the Polynesians from Dyaks, Battaks, Maoris, Alfurs, owing to their obviously small resemblance to the Malays proper. Topinard even refers the mass of the Polynesians to North America ; holding that conquerors, in no great number, may have come from Buru in Celebes ; but we do not yet possess the fuller anthropological evidence, based on a multiplication of measurements, required to prove this view. Suffice it to say that it replaces the artificial theory, insuf- ficiently grounded on either philology or ethnology, of a single immigration and simple branching-off, by a permeation and cleavage of races. In the next section, on the migration of the Polynesians, we shall adduce a series of facts in support of it. GENERAL SURVEY OF THE GROUP 149 Given the existence of a group of sea-faring races, who, gradually by dint of uninterrupted voluntary and involuntary migration, occupied various coast and island-districts of the Pacific Ocean, there follows necessarily, if we allow for long periods, a wide distribution over this large district ; and therewith arises that ethnographic agreement which connects the lands on the eastern and western borders of the Pacific Ocean. Zuniga's meteorological basis of belief for asserting the South American origin of the Tagals, namely, the impossibility of bearing up against the south-east trades, can as little be maintained as the likeness asserted by him to exist between Tagalese and Chilian. Since his day the knowledge of the ethnography of the American races has pro- gressed. We see how both east and west of the Pacific religious beliefs and usages are based upon the same animistic belief and upon an ancestor-worship which not only stands on a similar footing, but often assumes precisely concordant forms ; just as the treatment of corpses and the procedure of the priests embrace a whole host of similar practices. The principles of cosmogony, the high importance at- tached to the tribal symbols, even less prominent legends like that of the foun- tain of life — Boas has briefly indicated the remarkable conformity of north-west American legends with those of the Ainus and of Micronesia — and inconspicuous ex- pedients of daily life, such as the employ- ment of narcotics in the capture of fish, or the shape of the fish-hooks, the dressing of fish by steaming, the preparation of fer- mented liquors, are alike in both regions. Valuable evidence is given by conform- ities in tattooing, in painting the body, in > details of decorative mutilation ; more especially in the style of the necklaces made of little polished disks of red, white, and black shells. Even the metallic wealth of America could not oust the use of stone, bones, and shells. In connec- tion with this important feature, we have already pointed out the common prevalence of a definite type of economic life. We may refer once more to the weapons ; the encroachment of the Asiatic bow upon North and Central America or the similarity of the same weapon in South America and Melanesia. On Nissan, in the Solomon Islands, a stone axe has lately been discovered with a chamfer running almost round, just like the American, and like them fastened into a piece of wood split into a fork. Probably many more finds of this sort will occur. Wicker armour and cuirasses, with protection for the neck, are most widely spread on the Asiatic and American borders of the Pacific ; but extend far into the island world of the tropics. Throwing-sticks were at one time thought to exist only among Australians and Eskimos ; now specimens are known also from Mexico and Brazil. In North-west America, as in many parts of Maori girl. (From photograph in the possession of Dr. Max Buchner. ) I50 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Oceania, especially in the Bismarck Archipelago, dancing-masks are used, with curious ornamentation based upon the conventionalised figures of animals. In one region we find otter and frog, beaver and hawk, arranged together ; in the other snake, lizard, fish, beetle, bird. The masks of New Ireland remind us to a striking degree of those used by the Haidas. Less importance is to be assigned to the fact that in both these cases the eyes, and the ornaments in the shape of eyes, are made with inlaid shell, than to the striking agreement in the connection formed by the tongue dependent between the upper part, representing Men of Ponap^ in the Carolines. {From a photograph in the Godeffroy Album.) a broad animal's head, and a second animal. This arrangement of animals' heads in a row along the middle line reminds us of North America, no less than the eye-ornament, which is an essential element of the Pacific and American styles. We must indeed note that it is not always between races lying nearest to each other that the closest relations prevail. On the other we meet agreements not merely at single points, but running all through the groups. Thus not merely does the Dyak loom resemble that used by the Indians of North-west America ; the practice of head-hunting, the cult of skulls, the use of human hair for orna- ment, are common to both. The ornament of Malay fabrics is remarkably like that of the early Americans. Among the Calchaquis of Northern Argentina we find pottery painted with line drawings of birds, reptiles, and human faces, which remind us of Peruvian, and no less, in selection and conventional treatment of the themes, of Malay work. In customs too several features recur in a marked way. Particular forms of greeting, the declaration of an agreement by the transfer of GENERAL SURVEY OF THE GROUP 151 a piece of stick, the method of communicating by means of wooden drums, and so on. But over all arises, like a great edifice common to all, the social order based on " mother-right " and exogamy. We find it most distinctly in Australia and Melanesia ; then again in America, while between the two, in Polynesia, lies a region in which it has broken down and become obsolete. In South and North America we meet with the same system, often repeated even in small details. The impoverishment which we find becoming more and more conspicuous in the animal and vegetable world of Oceania, as we proceed eastwards, in no way holds good of mankind. In the Pacific the most recent development holds the eastern parts ; the west and south are backward. The Melanesians occupy as it were a depression in the level of culture between Malays on the one hand and Polynesians on the other. But on the South American shores we find in Peru a region of yet higher cul- ture. If to the works of art we add what is from an ethnographic point of view a more important intellectual pos- session, namely religious conceptions, together with social and political insti- tutions, we find the east standing higher than the west ; and that is true not only for Melanesia, but for Micronesia ■as well. No mistake on this point need arise from the fact that more objects in our museums come from islands which have been ransacked later, or which have fallen less into decay by reason of white influence. In the general position held by the two great Pacific groups of races towards each other we can recognise a great difference of level. The Melanesians are on the whole inferior to the Polynesians ; they represent an earlier development, retaining much which among the latter has already become obsolete. We cannot, however, at the present day decide whether the proximity of America or independent evolution has been the cause of this_ superiority in the eastern parts of Oceania. Still not only the points of agree- ment, but also the far shorter distance, are in favour of America. If we group the races of this wide region into the Americans dwelling on the eastern shores of the Pacific, and the inhabitants of the islands on its western border, on the south, and far out in the ocean, we may denote the second group by the name of Oceanians, seeing that the Pacific is the only ocean that possesses so widespread a population having a character peculiar to itself The possession (or lack) of a host of important articles links the oceanic races together in contra- distinction to the Malays on the west and the Australians on the south. From the Australians they are sharply divided ; but on the other hand they are connected with the Malays by transitions which point partly to a closer connection of origin, partly to influences of long standing. But as they have many points, notably the use of stone, in common with the Americans, while the Malays Boy of New Ireland (From a photograph ) is: THE HISTORY OF MANKIND are within the domain of iron, they hold a very different position towards these latter from that held for example by the most westerly outliers of that race, the Malagasies. While the Oceanic and Australian races have, together with the Americans, remained in the stone period of civilization, the Aus- tralians indeed degen- erating in their isola- tion, Malays and Mala- gasies have gained by means of influences from Asia and Africa. The importance of the Malays lies to a great extent in the fact that they have been instru- mental in the diffusion of these influences eastward. But the connection of the Oceanians with them reaches back to an early period. When the regions of Oceania were first unveiled to Europeans in the six- teenth century, iron was found to have advanced as far as New Guinea, and the influence of India, as shown by details of language and artistic style, had extended to the same point. This influence was spread by those active traders and expert seamen, the Malays, and with the support of Eastern Asia, which had not then elevated exclu- siveness to a principle of state, but had kept up an active traffic with the south, it would have spread further. According to the statement of George Spilberg, the crews of the fleet, which was equipped in 1 6 1 6 against the Dutch in Manilla, Man of Xe«- South Wales. (From a photograph.) GENERAL SURVEY OF THE GROUP 153 were composed of Indians, Chinese, and Japanese. An Indian bronze bell, with an inscription in Tamil, has been found in the interior of New Zealand ; it was the ship's bell of some Mussulman Tamil, and dates from the fourteenth century at latest. The place of these weak and irregularly-acting influences has now been taken by the weighty advance of the Europeans, under whose hands in the course of 300 years almost all that was peculiar has died out, together with a great part of the population. The Malayo-Polynesians are at this day the most pronouncedly insular people on the earth ; their only remaining hold on the mainland is by the penin- sula of Malacca. iBut we may main- tain a continental origin for individual tribes now living on islands, like the Malays and Acheenese of Sumatra, without any inducement from the desire of finding an origin, or so-called cradle of mankind, for all the races of the earth, on the continent of Asia. H. Kern assumes, on philological grounds that the home of the Malayo-Poly- nesians, including the Malagasies, was situated in a tropical country, where sugar-cane, coco-nut, rice, banana, rattan, and iaro grew, and where they were acquainted with dogs, pigs, poultry, various kind of monkeys, turtles, pro- bably also buffaloes and crocodiles, and possibly even elephants and horses, and that it was at no great distance from the sea. He is most inclined to look for the district of their origin in the countries which are now called Cam- bodia, Annam, and Siam. The Ma- layan starting-point for the Polynesian migration has been connected with the word bolotu, used by Polynesians for the next world, the abode of the gods ; in which a reminiscence of Buru has been imagined. In spite of various indi- cations in that direction, we can hardly reconcile ourselves to the notion that a single insignificant island of the great Archipelago can have given rise to the widely-scattered peoples of the Central Pacific — all the less when we find Malayo- Polynesian affinities extending to the Melanesian Islands and Madagascar. The continental origin of the Malayo-Polynesians is of special import for the right understanding of them, since it reveals to us the possibility of their wider exten- sion in former times in the western coast districts of the Pacific. Their presence in Formosa, the traces of them in Japan, lead in that direction to a point where the chain of relations with North-west America becomes more clearly visible. The question whether these races had once a wide extension on the Dyak woman of Borneo. (From a photograph in the Damann Album. ) 154 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND continent may here be passed over. Between Japan, where north-west American influences are recognisable, and Formosa, to which the Malayo-Polynesians extend at the present day, so narrow a gap is left that transference is almost certain. But a more important fact is that with so much larger an extension either on the coast or on islands towards the north, the possibility of direct connection by means of migration, voluntary and involuntary, is increased. The coast northward from the mouth of the Columbia river with its numerous islands, more especially the part between Puget Sound and Cape Spencer, the Beehive as Dall calls it, where continuous swarms of men are reared and sent forth, is some four thousand miles in a straight h'ne from the Japanese archipelago. On this side also, and from hence northward to the Behring Straits, there stretches a region where the art of navigation is highly developed. The points of agreement with America of which we get glimpses even under the peculiar and high civilization of Japan grow thicker as we go north, until on the Behring Sea we arrive at identity between the races dwelling on the Asiatic and American shores. That very more recent extension of Asiatic characteristics over North America, from which it results that South American races show in details points of conformity with those of the south-west Pacific, while the North American are more clearly traceable to the north-west Pacific, testifies to the advantages of the northern road. The Pacific islands are in the tropical zone separated from the American shore by a space of forty to sixty degrees of longitude in which there are neither islands nor inhabitants. The single group of any size, namely the Galapagos, which can be reached in three days from the South American coast, seems never to have been seen by any man before the first visit of Europeans. If we consider that this empty space is only one-third as broad as that between Easter Island and the most easterly islands of the Malay Archipelago, and that the Easter Islanders, in order to reach their island from the Samoa group — generally considered the common centre of dispersion for the Polynesians, — had to traverse a much longer road than that space would involve, the gap will appear to us of much less importance. In proportion to the inhabited part of the Pacific with its many islands, this rift is not wide enough to prevent us from regarding the Pacific like the Indian Ocean, and in contrast to the Atlantic, as an inhabited sea. We have no historical record of voyages, voluntary or involuntary, in the region east from Eastsr Island. Peruvian annals mention coasting voyages and more distant naval expeditions for conquest or discovery. Pizarro met with trading ships, and the Chinchas as well as the Chimus had traditions of a distant home across the sea. But there is no historical indication of any immediate traffic between Polynesia and South America. It is far more probable that the agreements and resemblances are all contained within the four corners of a common inclusion of both parts in the great Pacific group of races. The Chinese imagination again of a great land in the east can only be interpreted as meaning North-west America, and the gold-bearing islands which the Japanese placed in the east — Tasman was sent to discover them and found the Bonin Islands, — belonged to legend. As to the derivation of the old American civilizations from Asia, we shall have to speak of it in the American division of our work. Printed Try- fhi? Bibliograjhisches Institut. Leipzig POLYNESIAN WEAPONS AND COSTUME. POLYIfESIAN WEAPONS AND COSTUME. t. Lance : Viti. 2. Feather-scepttB : Sandwich Islands. 3. " Partisan, "with shark's teeth : Kings- mill Island. S. Sacred staff : Cook Islands. 9. Feather head-ring : Sandwich Is- lands. 10. Ornamental gorget : Tahiti. 11. Idol: Tahiti. 12. Dance Club : Vanikoro, Santa Cruz. All one-tenth of natural size. Nos> i, x, 4, 9 12, 13, i8, from the Ethnographical Museum, Berlin. The rest from British Museum and Christy collection. 4. Fan : Sandwich Islands. 5. Dancing-cap: Cook or Society Islands, 6, 7. Feather helmets : Hawaii. 13. Tapa-c\otii : Tonga. 14. Feather cloak : Hawaii. ■5) 161 17. Feather masks : Hawaii. 18. Waier-bottle: Fiji. 19. Spear with shark's teeth : Kings- mill Islands. Club. THE RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND THEIR MIGRATIONS 155 § 2. THE RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND THEIR MIGRATIONS The island groups, their climate and their cultivated plants — Number of the population, its decrease and shifting — Traces of denser population and of civilization — Ruins — Migrations — Involuntary migrations in the Pacific — Navigation and shipbuilding — Orientation — Trading journeys — Famine, war, and other grounds of emigration and immigration — Legends of migrations — Migrations in mythology — Community of speech and agreement of customs in Polynesia — Legend of Hawaiki — Polynesians in Melanesia and Micronesia — Uninhabited islands — Date of the migrations — Ethnographical groups in the Pacific — Genea- logy of the Australians. Throughout the western and central part of the Pacific are many thousands of islands scattered about in numerous groups. On the west they are connected by larger islands with Australia and the Malayan Archipelago. There is first of all New Guinea with the inner chain of the Melanesian islands ending on the east with the Fiji group ; the New Zealand group lies isolated to the south-east. East- ward beyond Fiji and northward beyond New Ireland lie countless smaller islands forming Polynesia. They stretch away from the Carolines to Easter Island, which is separated by a space of nearly 2500 miles from the South American coast, and they stretch from the South Island of New Zealand to Hawaii. Within the angle formed by a line running through the Mariannes towards Japan and another running through the Pelew Islands towards the Philippines, there lies a second group of still smaller islands called Micronesia. The separation between the three groups does not penetrate far ; smaller groups within them may much more naturally be excluded. Individual countries, larger and smaller, have plenty of common peculiarities both in natural character and in the mode of their origin. Long ago a natural division into high and low islands was recognised, the latter including the coralline, the former the volcanic islands. This simple classifica- tion does not indeed wholly correspond with the domain of phenomena, surface phenomena, volcanic phenomena, and violent earthquakes occurring over the whole length and breadth of the region ; while the coral formation has been developed to an extent such as is nowhere else found in that tropical belt of the Pacific which is richest in islands. Only certain islands, the chief of them being New Guinea and the two larger islands of New Zealand, afford space 'for development on a large scale, and sufficient to permit, more especially in Melanesia with its larger islands, the growth of differences between up-country and coast tribes. New Guinea does not indeed hold a position in Melanesia proportionate to its size, being more sparsely inhabited than most of the islands lying in front of it, an evidence for the indolence and unproductiveness of true Papuan labour and its development. On the other side the distance of New Zealand from Polynesia prevented it from exercising those more penetrating effects which might have been expected to emanate from the largest among the islands. Thus we have before us, almost universally, only the population of small and numerous areas, very unevenly endowed, and widely separated from each other. Of all people the ethnographer must bear that well in mind. Further, the denser population is confined to the coast spaces, while the interior is thinly inhabited. Rapid changes from habitation to non-habitation are frequent under these conditions ; nor is the list of islands now uninhabited, but showing traces of former habitation, a short one. The iS6 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND majority of the Pacific islands lie in a region where the prevailing currents and winds move in a westerly direction, north and south of the equator, between the annual isothermals of 68°. It has often been pointed out how the prevailing east to west direction of the trade-winds would facilitate immigration from the New Bread-fruit tree [Artocarpus incisus) : (a) inflorescence, (b) fruit. World. In small districts the influence of the winds and currents is no doubt great ; but the facts of migrations and castings-away show that, thougfl it may often determine the lines of distribution of mankind, it does not always do so. In more recent times, meteorology has no less shown us the existence of westerly currents of air, than a study of the ocean has taught us that there is an equatorial counter-current in the same direction. In their regular traffic the Polynesians wait for a west wind to sail eastwards, and they have a corresponding tradition that their domestic animals were brought from the west. By the time we reach THE RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND THEIR MIGRATIONS 157 the Hervey or Cook's, and Tubuai or Austral groups, the west winds, which in the southern hemisphere prevail south of 20°, begin to make themselves felt. The flora and fauna of this region, the pronounced Asiatic character of which Chamisso was the first to refer to the eastward migration of the Oceanians, have little to offer for human use. Some of the most important cultivated plants and domesticated animals have been imported ; such as pigs, dogs, poultry, faro, and perhaps bananas too. But the tree which is most closely connected with the island world, and which does most to give a character to its landscape, the coco-nut, renders existence possible even to the inhabitants of the remote and low -lying islands. While green, the nut contains a liquid which is cool- ing when fresh and intoxicating when fermented. The olea- ginous kernel, when older, is nutritious and gives oil in abundance. The shell of the nut provides vessels ; the fibres of its outer side furnish a durable fabric ; the leaves are used for thatching houses, plaiting mats, sails, or baskets ; the stem serves for building huts and boats. Lastly, the coco-nuts with their spreading roots contribute to hold the coral islands together and to extend their area ; being, as they are, among their earliest and most frequent inhabitants of the islands. Next to the coco-palm the bread-fruit tree is the most profitable of all things grown and cultivated in Polynesia. Cook's saying, that six bread-fruit trees would keep a family, is well known. In the third place comes the chief article of real agriculture, the taro plant. It and the bread-fruit together have made life almost too easy in those parts. The sago-palm extends from the west as far as Melanesia ; a great part of the popu- lation of New Guinea is dependent on it. Thus, in spite of their wide distribution, almost all the inhabitants of the central Pacific have the more important conditions of life in common. If to this we add the common possession of a mass of ethnographic characteristics we shall see that, in spite of significant racial differences, Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia form a single ethnographical domain. Islands of their nature make their inhabitants seamen and wanderers. Accordingly we have here a region of extensive colonisation, and we find settlements from one group of races in the district of another ; though, by a curious contrast, in countries like New Guinea or New Zealand, where there is such ample room for extension in the interior, the ^^'S-'^^^^^J^'^'jB^ Taro [Caladium esciilenUini) — one-half natural size. THE HISTORY OF MANKIND people stick, in the great majority of cases, to the coast. Implements and customs connected with seafaring and fishing show a general agreement. They must all do without iron, and consequently have much skill in the working of stone, wood, and shells. In weaving, they have attained a high level ; the loom has spread from the west, while in the east and south they manufacture bark and bast. The few domestic animals, the usual fruits of the field, and the intoxicating kava or ava, are found throughout all three districts. In the social life the preponderance of the tribe or commune over the family is more pronounced than perhaps anywhere else ; while in the realm of religious conceptions there has arisen, out of a large number of ideas common to all Polynesia, one of the most complete mythological systems owned by any primitive race, which, with its luxuriance of legend, has. overspread this vast area, and parts yet more remote. The present population of the Pacific in the space between the western promontory of New Guinea and Easter Island, and between the Hawaiian Archipelago and New Zealand, is reckoned at not more than a million and a half, not including whites. Yet even to-day on some of the Polynesian islands we find such a density as borders on over-population. The Kingsmill, or Gilbert, group counts 35,000 in less than 200 square miles, the Marshall Islands 12,000 in 170. But these are all cases in which the inhabitants of small islands have the run of the coco plantations and fishing-grounds belonging to an entire archipelago. Tonga too — for one of the less bountifully endowed groups, — the Solomon Islands, the Bismarck Archipelago, show a population that is relatively not at all thin. Generally the smaller areas of land tend to a closer packing of the population. But the great majority of the Pacific islands hold far fewer persons to-day belong- ing to the original native races than they did before the arrival of European influences. We must look not only at the figures, but at the geographical aspect. The South Island of New Zealand and the Chatham Islands have no longer any but a small and vanishing aboriginal population, and these crowded back into the furthest corner ; while all the natural advantages have passed into the hands of the more numerous and more active white inhabitants. The number of the Maoris between 1835 and 1840 was reckoned with good reason at 100,000; to-day there are 42,000, including numerous half-breeds, who will soon be the sole survivors. So it is with Hawaii, and so even with the small islands. If we inquire the causes of this phenomenon, which has already given occasion for great dislocations in the regions of races and peoples, we find them everywhere the same. After the remarks made in the Introduction (pp. 1 1, 12), we can sum up the causes in the words used by Pennefather in 1888 as applied to the case of the Maoris : drunkenness ; diseases ; clothing in bad European materials instead of in their own close-woven mats ; a state of peace, which has allowed them to fall into indolence, and to exchange healthy dwellings on fortified hills for damp sites in the neighbourhood of their potato-fields ; ^ prosperity, which has introduced leisure and pernicious modes of enjoying it. Progress on the lines of European custom is opposed by their hereditary usages, especially their political subdivision and the absence of private property in land. But the cannibalism of the Maoris has played a special part in the destruction of the Maoraris of the Chatham Islands. The importation of European diseases has in many districts accelerated the ' [Yet, says the late Mr. Stevenson, the Marquesans are dying out in the same houses where their fathers multiplied.] THE RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND THEIR MIGRATIONS 159 rate of decrease. Kubary's inquiry into the astonishing disappearance of the Pelew Islanders, the most complete and comprehensive inquiry that we have for any portion of Oceania, reveals a whole string of internal causes. Important pheno- mena in the social life of the island races, such as adoption in its various forms, the descent of titles to sons, the ruined state of large houses, point to a long previous period of this lamentable decrease. The natives wrongly ascribe it to the climatic disorder, influenza ; but the main cause must be sought in their dissolute way of life, particularly in the case of the women. The deficiency of births is so great that total extinction is anticipated in the near future. Early licentiousness in both sexes ; special features in married life of a kind to deter the younger women, so far as possible, from entering into bonds, and to inflict upon the others the heavy labour of ta7'o cultivation, keeping couples apart and placing considerations of utility before everything ; lastly, the practice of head- hunting, which is not yet obsolete. Kubary stated in 1883 that in the last ten years only thirty-four heads had been cut off; these causes offer a sufficient ex- planation. In the light of the description given by the writer just quoted, the entire population would seem to be in a morbid state, what with a tendency to dysentery, induced by living exclusively on taro, the prevalence of intestinal parasites, the liability of all the older people to chronic rheumatism as a result of the climate and the exposure of the naked body, and the lack of endurance of the man under circumstances of bodily exertion. This decrease is in close connection with a decadence from levels of develop- ment formerly attained in political and social matters, and even in arts and crafts. In Micronesia they have ceased to build the large club or assembly houses of former days ; and therewith a source of endless encouragement to fancy and skill has been dried up. The people make fewer things than they used to do — their originality has died out ; they are in a way to become poor ethno- graphically. A glance into the past of these races reveals remains of bygone generations, telling of another state of things, of a larger population, of more considerable results from labour, of more enduring works. In the small Louisiade group there is a network of roads far closer than is wanted by the present popu- lation. On Pitcairn's Island, now deserted, there are the stone foundations of morais, stone-axes, and in the caves skeletons lying near drawings of the moon, stars, birds, and so on ; ancient fortifications crown the hills of Rapa, while in Huahine in the Windward Islands a dolmen, built on to a morai in terraces, is found beside a road of cyclopean stones. The ruins of Nanmatal in Ponap^ consist of square chambers, fenced with pillars of basalt and separated from each other by channels. There are eighty of these stone islets ; some of them having undoubtedly once served as sepulchral monuments. Among these ruins the tomb of the kings of Matalanim rises, on a base 6 feet high and 290 feet long by 230 broad, to a height of about 30 feet, with walls 10 feet thick, formed of basalt columns. The most classical instances of this wealth of relics left by a more numerous and more active generation are preserved in Easter Island. There the gigantic stone images are something wonderful. Their great number is no less astonishing than their size and the comparative high level of their workmanship. Even now they are reckoned at several hundreds ; their height is nearly 50 feet, while in one case the breadth across the shoulders is not less than i o feet. Many of them have i6o THE HISTORY OF MANKIND been thrown down and half-buried in rubbish ; but others stand on broad plat- forms built of hewn stone. Originally many are said to have had head-covermgs of reddish stone ; cylinders, according to Cook's description, of 5 feet diameter. Some have hieroglyphics carved on their backs. These images,^ weighing many tons, must at one time have been lowered down the mountain with hawsers, and prepared, that is, engraved, in pits below. Naturally these images, whose number, size, and clever workmanship contrast so strangely with the smallness of the island, and the state of extreme simplicity in which the first Europeans found the islanders, have given rise to many speculations as to their origin. Even so Sepulchral monument in Ponap^, Caroline Islands. (From a photograph in the Godeffroy Album.) sober a judge as Beechey declares it to be simply impossible that the Easter Islanders can have executed these works ; both the sculpturing and the erection of them, he thinks, far exceeded any capacity of theirs. What makes it yet more difficult to answer these questions is the ignorance in which we are as to their age, as to the reason why so many have been thrown down, and, lastly, as to their object. Earthquakes of course may have thrown them down ; but no observer, old or recent, has been able to divine the purpose they served. The impression of decadence which one receives from the sight of such mighty works among a race now so scanty, feeble, and impoverished, is strengthened when we find that Easter Island shows masonry adapted to various purposes in the shape sometimes of staged platforms, sometimes of huts, above or j below ground, and with or without interior ornament in colour. Oceania, as being, of all regions which men inhabit, the richest in islands, the poorest in land, seems at the first glance a most favourable soil on which to study isolated evolutions of civilization. It is, however, a region of constant intercourse, and nowhere offers a wide or fertile soil for permanently independent evolution. THE RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND THEIR MIGRATIONS i6i It furnishes interesting evidence of the special directions in which individual elements in the fund of civilization possessed by a " natural " race can develop, but it shows us no persistency of a single racial type and a special civilization. Instead of the deep gradations which divide the Fuegian, a kind of Bushman or Hottentot, from the Inca of Peru, expert in many arts, rich; devoted to sun- worship ; Oceania displays, in the domain of culture, only slight variations on the same ground-theme. Its great problem is not the tranquil development of local peculiarities, but the equalising effect of migration from one archipelago to another, and ultimately from quarter to quarter of the earth. The distribution of Malayo-Polynesian races over an area covering 210 degrees of longitude and 80 of latitude, is an astounding fact. It gains in signiiicance Outrigged boat, New Britain. (From a model in the Godeffroy collection, Leipzig. ) when we renlember that wide tracts of very deep ocean divide these islands, while the islands are so small that even exploring navigators did not discover them till late, and then with difficulty. No cause appeared too vast to explain such a phenomenon, and we cannot be surprised that not only older inquirers like Quiros, or seafaring men like Crozet and Dumont d'Urville, but even a man like Broca ^ could admit the idea that in this island-world we have the remains of a submerged continent. Even the hypothesis of a separate creation of races so isolated has been brought into play here. But migrations of the islanders are mentioned even by Forster and Cook ; and have been more and more recognised as the great fact in the ethnography of the Pacific. Numerous indeed are the records of accidental involuntary migrations. When Cook came to Watiu in 1777, his Tahitian companion Mai found there three fellow-countrymen, all that were left of twenty, from Tahiti, 750 miles distant, who had been cast away twelve years before. In 1825 Beechey found on Byam Martin Island forty men, women, and children, the survivors of 150 from Matia, who some years before had been caught in an unwontedly early monsoon, and driven 625 miles to Barrow Island ; subsequently leaving this on account of its barrenness, and settling on Byam ,^ ^ [Not to mention Darwin and Lyell.] M l62 THE HISTORY OF MAXKI^D Martin. A remarkable point in this is that the course from Matia to Barrow Island is against the trades. In 1816 Kotzebue found on Aur, one of the Radack Islands, a native of Ulie, who had been cast away with three others while fishing, and covered a distance of 1850 miles against the trades. Inhabit- ants of Ulie were carried to the Marshall Islands also in 1857; Ralick islanders to the Gilberts, Gilbert islanders to the Marshalls, and westward to the Carolines ; and Finsch reports a more recent case of castaways from Jaluit or Bonham Island to Faraulep in the western Carolines, a distance of 1500 nautical miles. During his short stay on Yap, and then in Pelew, Miklouho-Maclay often met Boat of the Mortlock Islands, with outrigger and sail of rush-matting. (After a model in the Godeffroy collection. ) people who had been cast away on other islands and had returned. , Kubary, in his account of the Pelew Islands, mentions as a well-known fact that the inhabit- ants of the Carolines are often driven to the Philippine Islands. In every case they make the island of Samar or the most southerly point of Luzon, just where the northern equatorial current breaks on the island wall of the Philippines. On the other hand, inhabitants of the Philippines seem never to have come to Pelew, though plenty come from Celebes and the islands in the Celebes Straits. Another region where people are often cast away is in and about the Fiji Archipelago, its boundaries being indicated by Tikopia, Lifu, Savaii and Vavao. Active as the regular intercourse may be between Tonga and Fiji, the presence of numerous Tongan and Fijian half-breeds exactly on the windward side of the Fiji Archipelago would suggest that people had been driven westwards, even had THE RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND THEIR MIGRATIONS 163 we not clear evidence that they have been driven from Tonga and Savaii to the still more westerly islands of the Banks group, to the New Hebrides, and the Loyalty Islands. They appear even to have got to the central Solomon Islands. It is when we come within the Melanesian groups that these movements gain in interest, owing to the large number of Polynesians to be found there, or the traces, often so clear, of Polynesian influence. Boat of Niue, Savage Islands. (After a model in the Godeffroy collection.) A third region is even more important by reason of its local connection with the Polynesian legends of migrations. It embraces the Hervey or Cook Islands, the Tubuai or Austral Islands, the Paumotu or Low Islands, and the Society Boat of the Hermit Islands. (From the same). Islands. To supplement the instances already given we may mention the involuntary journey of Williams in a boat from Rarotonga to Tongatabu, and that of several natives from Aitutaki to Niue ; in both, cases distances of a thousand miles were traversed in a westerly direction. Those natives of Manihiki who were driven by a storm to the Ellice group in 1861, and there spread the first Christian teaching, accomplished a still longer course. Between the Society Islands, especially Tahiti, and the Paumotu group, a particularly close connection has been established by frequent castings-away both with and against the trades. Cases have been known here also in which persons have been driven southward. 1 54 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND but never beyond the tropic, so that no connection has been formed with New Zealand. Finally, we have evidence in involuntary journeys made from Tahiti to Byam Martin and Bow Islands that, especially during the summer, it is possible for vessels to be driven against trade winds and currents in an easterly direction, that is to say in the direction in which the Easter Islanders must have reached their remote land. Reports about castaways in this direction from the continent of Asia or from Wooden baler, New Zealand — one-sixth real size. (British Museum.) Japan are more rare. Apart from some established historical cases we may here refer to the repeated instances of persons being driven from Japan northward and eastward to Lopatka, Kadjak, and Vancouver Islands, which are equally confirmed by history. Even ' „ ~ ' ' " from China ships are said to have been cast away on the north-west coast of America. Evidence of journeys in the opposite direction is afforded by articles of undoubted north- west American origin which come ashore on the coasts of the Hawaiian Islands. With the South American continent there are no manifest relations, although in higher latitudes westerly winds and currents lead towards South America, while in equatorial regions they are easterly and lead away irom it. The only conclusions that are possible here, and will be later investigated, are based upon the data of ethnography. Even if we regard only the involuntary journeys, the Pacific Ocean appears no longer as a watery desert where islanders live in seclusion ; but mutual relations of the most varied kind, both between the islands, and between them and the continents, become manifest. Castings-away are no exception but the rule and take people in every direction. Ethnography has to take account of these casual relations which in the long vista of years have stretched a dense network from ^/-7 Wooden baler, New Zealand — one-fifth real size. (British Museum.) from THE RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND THEIR MIGRATIONS i6s Wooden baler, New Guinea — one-fifth real size. (British Museum.) one land to another. She must give up the idea of any sharp separation between the races of Oceania, and allowing all consideration to disunion and peculiarity, must give its due to every cause which makes for union. But this view is met also by the life and ways of the Oceanians, their mode of thought, and their tradition. There is in them a pronounced migratory sense. Journeys of many hundreds of miles are not seldom undertaken by them, either for the purpose of falling upon the inhabitants of neighbouring islands and getting heads for their canoe houses, or in order to meet on some appointed day of the year for a general exchange of goods. The inhabitants of Yap, and Simbo, and the Tongans are specially renowned for voyages of this kind. The piratical inhabitants of Biak also traverse hun- dreds of miles in their canoes. Trade is naturally a chief cause of roaming. The fact that in the Polynesian islands it is mainly carried on by the chiefs or on their account can only be favourable to the enterprises, since none but they have either authority or knowledge to lead the greater expeditions. The Tongans, who monopolised the trade between Fiji and Samoa, with the inhabitants of Sikiyana, of Peleliu, and some others, are noted as genuine trading races. Division of labour in trades leads of necessity to exchange. It is specially to be observed that the higher development of any industry, as of pottery in Bilibili, Teste, or Moresby, all of them islands off New Guinea, is always found to im- prove all the appliances of travel and transport, and thus especially to raise navigation to a higher level. Political disturbances again have created numer- ous motives for migration. Attacks of one island upon another, flight to remote islands, are common occur- rences. At the time of the Spanish conquest the inhabitants of the Marianne Islands took refuge in the Carolines. Tongans fleeing from a cannibal chief peopled the island of Pylstart or Ata ; Kaumualii, when threatened by attack from Kamehameha, had a ship made ready in Kauai, in order that he might fly with his family in time of danger to one of the ocean islands. Lastly, too, hunger was a spur to migration, famines being frequent. Constant contact with the sea has given birth to a spirit of adventure for which the aristocratic constitution of society provides nourishment and tools. The Tongans may well reckon as the Phoenicians of South Poly- nesia ; Samoans and P"ijians never ventured upon the journey to Tonga except in boats manned by Tongan seamen. Nor, moreover, are real wandering tribes lacking. Lastly, we must not forget the low value placed upon human life in all island countries with a tendency to over-population. Infanticide, human sacrifices, cannibalism, a permanent state of war, are sufficient explanations of this, and from the same root springs also the love of emigration. Stick chart from the Marshall Islands. Collection). (Godeffroy 1 66 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Among no " natural " races has the science of seafaring reached so high an average development as among the Polynesians and Melanesians. Most of the tribes are genuine seamen. If we regard their remoteness from the great civilized races of the Asiatic continent, the shipbuilding art stands as high among them as among the Malays ; and we must further reflect that they were without iron. Naturally here also local limitations produce inequalities in shipbuilding, as well as in the extent of the voyages, and also in the migrations of the different races. It is a fact that at the present day the Fijians seldom go beyond the bouijdaries of their own group, while the Tongans, favoured by the wind, often come to them. But the art of navigation, no less than that of shipbuilding, may undergo alterations in the course of time. Fortunate voyages raise the spirit of enterprise, bad luck depresses it. The Samoa group got its former name of the Navigator Islands from the seafaring skill of its inhabitants ; this has now greatly decreased. Many of the low islands are so poorly wooded that shipbuilding is rendered difficult, and dependent on drift timber ; while at Port Moresby on the New Guinea coast the Motus, having little wood, build as a rule no vessels. They do not, however (like the Caribs in a well-known couplet), content them- selves with " wishing they could," but draw upon their more expert neighbours for them. Yet, on the other hand, the islanders of the Paumotu group, where wood is also scarce, build larger and better vessels than the Marquesans. The small area and poverty of their islands force them both to peaceable migrations and to warlike expeditions of conquest, and this can only be done by sea. Vessels of every description, from the simple raft and the sailing vessel with outrigger, or the double canoe, are found in this region. We do not need to notice the rafts of bamboo made by the Pelew Islanders for the navigation of an inland lake, since opportunities for inland navigation are not usual throughout the region ; but rafts are actually in use for coasting purposes. Among the families whom Cook found in Dusky Bay there were no boats, only a single raft made of tree-stems for putting people across. Next we come to boats made simply of stems, which, being fastened together and planked over, become raft-like vessels. Such boat-rafts have led to the erroneous idea that the New Caledonians, for example, sailed the seas on rafts. As a matter of fact these people have only a kind of rough raft, resting on two hollowed tree-stems, and carrying a mast with a triangular mat-sail. The Kunai people have double canoes, and those of very pretty work. The Loyalty Islands' canoes are inferior to these, but are also double, with a platform, two triangular mat-sails, and oars 6 feet long, passing through holes in the platform. A long oar serves for steering, and so they sail to New Caledonia. At Hood Bay in New Guinea rafts are used resting on five trunks ; on a single platform these carry as many as a hundred men and quantities of goods. They carry one or two masts, a stone anchor, and a mat-sail. It is not usual for single trunks to be used exclusively for seafaring ; but in coast navigation and fishing they meet local requirements, even where large regularly built vessels exist. We find them in Tahiti, under the name of huhu or shells, usually sharp at one end and seldom holding more than two men. But such is the development of boat-building, that the smallest boats are, where necessary, built with great care in several pieces. On Waituhi the Paumotu Islanders have a great number of small boats, put together of coco-palm wood, 1 6 feet long at most, capable of being carried by two persons and of carrying two THE RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND THEIR MIGRATIONS 167 or three ; they have pointed pieces specially fixed on fore and aft, an outrigger and two recurved paddles. The Tahitians build their boats of several pieces, for the very good reason that large timber, such as the Maoris obtain from the Kauri pine, does not grow in their island. In the Society Islands, elegant double canoes, known as " twins," are made by patting together two single stems, which must exactly match. The kabekel of the Pelew Islands is a vessel between 60 and 70 feet long, usually hewn out of one large tree-stem, and pulling as many as forty paddles. Its beam and depth are very small for its great length. The entire Vessel is merely a hollowed-out keel, supported in the water by the outrigger attached to one side. A kind of deck made of bamboo is arranged amidships, on which the leader takes his place, and the baggage is packed. These single-tree craft afford the basis also for the larger built ships. The keel of these consists of a stem hollowed out by means of fire, or, in the bigger vessels, of several. Large ships are found chiefly in Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, and New Zealand ; and the number of boats is correspondingly large. In Tahiti, Forster saw a fleet of 159 large double canoes and 70 smaller craft. The small Ones in many cases travel very fast, and serve as despatch-boats to the larger. The tree or trees intended for a ship will be felled to the recital of religious sentences, and then hollowed by means of fire. While many of the natives are qualified for this task, the actual building is in the hands of a privileged class ; so closely were the interests of state and society once bound up with this art and mystery. Even to the present day in Fiji the carpenters, whose chief work is shipbuilding, form a special caste. They bear the high-sounding title of " the king's craftsmen " and have the privileges of real chiefs. These highly-honoured artisans carry on their trade of shipbuilding with particular care. Planks are attached to the keel, stern and bow provided with carved ornaments, sails and ropes are all finished and fitted by special workmen, and the outriggers prepared by others. Everything is done according to old tradition ; the laying of the keel, the finishing of the whole, the launching, all take place with religious ceremonies and festivities. Tangaroa was the patron of shipmen, and they bore his worship all over the Ocean. Even the gods themselves like to build ships, and undertake daring voyages. The Fijian ships long held the first place among the craft of the Pacific islands. When Cook first visited Tonga in 1772, he found Fijians there who had brought a Tongan of high rank to his own island in their ship. The Tongan vessels at that time were clumsy compared with those of Fiji, and for that reason they accepted this with its sails as a gift. They have only altered the Fijian model to the extent of cleverly improving the accuracy and fineness with which various portions are executed. These Fijian vessels with Tongan improvements belong to a type spread throughout Micronesia, in which, by reversing the sail, bow and stern are convertible. Thus Fijian chiefs took to employing by prefer- ence carpenters from Tonga; which gave rise to the belief that the Tongans built their vessels in Fiji for the sake of the better wood. The New Caledonian ships are like the Samoan, but less well built and slower. The vessels of the Loyalty Islands are also clumsy ; a fact the more remarkable since both these groups contain admirable material in their great pines. In the Solomon Islands shipbuilding has attained a high level, but here too there are gradations. The 1 68 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND most elegant and the lightest craft in that archipelago are built in Ulakua. In the more westerly islands the war-vessels are extraordinarily rich with fantastic ornaments, festoons of feathers and bast, coloured red and yellow, shells, and so forth. In New Ireland the boats differ materially from those of New Hanover; they are equally made of a single tree stem, but are not so long and not curved in the gunwale. The boat of New Britain is mostly made from one stem, but has often a low strake on each side. It is on the average larger than that of New Ireland, and has a high narrow beak at each end. The larger boats of New Guinea are from i6 to 20 feet long, and from 2 to 2\ wide. The hull, made in one piece, is hollowed out from a trunk which must have no flaw. It is not more than half an inch thick, and has cross-ties to keep it from warping. Both ends curve upwards and are strengthened with wooden posts, of which that in the stem rises high and is adorned with arabesques or painted. To raise the gunwale above the water line they employ the ribs of sago-palm leaves after the fashion of the Alfurs. These are by preference inter' laced, and then being attached like tiles to the cross-ties, form a water-tight ''v^ surface. Over the gunwale are fastened two light cross-pieces, which project about 5 feet, and at the end of which is another piece of wood, bent at right angles, just touching the surface of the water, and sticking into a strong boom, which is as light as cork and serves as a float. Amidships on the cross-tinibers a square cabin of bamboo is erected, sheltered against injury from weather by a small roof ■ ■ of coco-palm leaves. All other kinds of craft, from the raft upward, are found in New Guinea. The ornamentation is rich, especially of the war-canoes. In Micronesia, where the vessels stand next in quality to those of Fiji and Tonga, we do not find the double canoes common among the Polynesians. Even the great vta^r-amlais, holding sixty to eighty persons, have only an outrigger. Differences can be noticed between one island and another. The Pelew canoes differ from all those in use in the South Seas by being very low in proportion to their length and sail-area. For this reason they are not adapted for such long voyages as the inhabitants of Yap, or those of Mackenzie and the Ralick Islands, undertake, but for short journeys they are extraordinarily effective. The light and sharp kaep, driven by a large three-cornered sail, slips over the water like lightning in the most gentle breeze. Heavy seas find no resistance in these canoes, they lift them and divide on the sharp angle of their stems, and do not check their way. The Micronesian fashion of adorning boats with bundles of the split feathers of the frigate-bird, and avoiding carved work, comes from Polynesia. An important element of the Polynesian or Melanesian vessel is the outrigger. This is shaped and fitted on in various ways, and is of various sizes. Light durable woods are used for this purpose ; in the eastern districts mostly Pisonia, which, even in the Paumotu Group, reaches a height of 65 feet, while in the west .;. it is generally Hibiscus, as light as cork, or an Erythrina. As a rule the outrigger is fastened to the vessel by two booms 5 to 6 feet in length, the forward one straight and stiff, the after one bent and elastic. Among the Fijians many kinds of craft are distinguished solely according to their outriggers. The sail — there is never more than one — is three-cornered, composed of plaited mats, or woven from the bast of the leaf-stem of the coco-palm, bent on a frame of bamboos, and attached to the mast by a rope passing over or around j; the mast-head. It cannot be reefed. As an article of trade it is in demancl THE RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND THEIR MIGRATIONS 169 proportioned to its importance. In large vessels the steering oar is 20 feet long, the blade over 6 feet, requiring two or three men to handle it in a heavy sea. The ordinary paddles are frequently the least practical part of t^ie gear. The blade is lancet-shaped, often decorated at the pointed end, carved about the handle with figures of animals or other ornaments. Fancy paddles are inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Where they are as strong as in the Solomon Islands, they can be used on occasion for clubs. Even the balers, with their often elegantly carved forms, show the value which is attached to the humblest nautical imple- ments. The balers of the Admiralty Islands, with their single horizontal bar for a handle, were placed by Rear-Admiral Strauch, from a practical point of view, above those made in Europe. Pre- serves, capable of keeping for a long time, are prepared for voyages from pandanpsAnd bread- fruit ; cocoa - nuts also serve as pro- vision, and their shells can be filled with water. In the large war boats the number of rowers far exceeds 1 00. Forster speaks of 144 oarsmen, Wil- son of 300 men in a single boat. The time of the paddles is given by singing. When a number of boats are sailing to- gether, one man stands in the stern of the leading vessel and signals the course with a bunch of dry grass. The taking of proper bearings is of double importance in this ocean, in which the individual islands are often so far apart and so low-lying that one is astonished that they were ever found. Many islands in the Pacific were discovered for the first time in the present century. The islanders are keen observers of the stars, and have names for a good list of them. They distinguish eight quarters of the heaven and winds to match. In their conception of the world the ocean is imagined as being everywhere full of islands, which helps to explain their daring voyages. They even inscribe their geographical knowledge upon maps, but while on. these the bearings are to some extent correct, the distances are given very inaccurately. In the Ralick group the preparation of maps from small straight and bent sticks, representing routes, currents, and islands, is a secret art among the chiefs. The Marshall Islanders also possess a map of their own, made Boat of the Luzon 1 agals. (From a model m Dr. Hans Meyer s Collection, Leipzig. ) lyo THE HISTORY OF MANKIND up of little sticks and stones, showing the whole group (p. 165). On their greater enterprises they go to sea in a thoroughly systematic way ; the longer voyages of from 500 to 1000 nautical miles are undertaken only in squadrons comprising at least fifteen canoes, commanded by a chief who has one or more pilots to advise him. Without compass, chart, or lead, and with but limited knowledge of the stars, these men contrived to make their distant point. On their voyages they steadily observe the angle made by the canoe with the run of the sea caused by the trade wind, which, north of the equator, blows steadily from the north-east. The use of this run, which remains constant even with shifting winds, has been brought by the native pilots to great refinement. The ocean currents are also no less well known to them by experience, so that they are able to take this also into con- sideration in lay- ing their course. As a general rule, in order to get the largest pos- sible field of view, the squadron pro- ceeds in line in which the indi- vidual canoes are so widely separ- ated that they can only com- municate by signal. By this progress on a wide front they avoid the danger of sailing past the island they are looking for. During the night the squadron closes in. This whole style of navigation contradicts the supposition that before the invention of the compass only coasting voyages were undertaken. Polynesians and Micronesians often ship on board European vessels, where they prove themselves, apart from their limited physical strength, excellent sea- men. The Hawaiians or Kanakas, who are often tried in the whale fishery, are, according to Wilkes, skilful men, but not suited for service on board a man-of- war. They are more serviceable in small than in large parties, being very fond of putting their work upon some one else. They are timid about going aloft. Their best place is at the oar, but even so, when going through the surf, they prefer to jump overboard and swim. On board a man-of-war they find difficulty in accustoming themselves to. the word of command, but, on the other hand, in whaling ships they show themselves willing, hard-working, and fearless. In the eastern districts the navigation of the Malays connects itself with that of the Micronesians. Their distant expeditions for purposes of trade or piracy, which ultimately became racial migrations, were carried on in outrigo-ed or double boats with triangular reed or mat sails, and to this very day many of the Malayan Sumatran /raAa. (From model in the Munich Ethnographical Museum.) THE RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND THEIR MIGRATIONS 171 prahus of recognised excellence have not an ounce of iron about them. Inland races in Malacca, in Borneo, Luzon, and other islands, have no vessels at all, and there are some fishing tribes who get along with bamboo rafts (so-called cata- marans) after the Chinese model, and dug-out canoes. The races who have been most operative in the history of this widespread group, whether they be genuine Malays or Alfurs, Tagals or Goramese, are distinguished by their intimate acquaintance with the sea, to which in great measure they owe their conspicuous position. These are the races of whom it has been said that they would never build a house on dry land if they could find a place in the water. Their skill in navigation is sufficient to meet even European requirements. The prahus belonging to the once piratical village of Sounsang in Sumatra on the Palcmbang coast, carried the post between Palembang and Muntok for years, across the tempestuous Banca Straits ; and never within the memory of man were these light vessels seriously behind time. The Government of the Dutch Indies employ none but natives, mostly pure Malays, on board their large fleet of /;'«^M-cruisers ; though there are many Chinese and Arabs among the freighters. The Malayan prahu was originally a somewhat shallow boat with one sail, and having a keel. The most renowned shipbuilders are the Ke islanders, whose boats, built of wood fastened with wooden bolts and rattan, sail through the whole New Guinea Archipelago to Singapore ; and next to them the Badjos and Bugises of South Celebes, and the Malays of Billiton, Palembang, and Acheen. The Malagasies must have lost much of the art of shipbuilding, though they once suffered it to reach their island. Their usual boat is a " dug-out " with round bottom and no keel, provided with outriggers when at sea — the Hova boats have no outriggers — carrying large square or lateen sails made of mats of palm-straw, or of cloth. In another kind of boat the floor consists of one hewn tree-stem, upon which the slim craft, most elegant in form, is built up with strakes hardly more than an inch wide. The sharp beak runs out in a kind of neck, raised high, and adorned with peculiar carvings ; while the vessel tapers aft to a narrow stern, also elevated and similarly ornamented. These boats also have outriggers, are 20 to 30 feet long, and hardly 3 feet wide. Their active sea-trafiic is one of the most interesting features in the life of the Malays. It is no mere coasting-trade that is carried on by some expert navigators among the races of the Archipelago, notably the true Malays of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, and the colonists from thence in Borneo and other islands. They are not afraid of competition with the Chinese, whom they have obviously taken for their model, formidable as these are in trade ; they act mostly as clever middlemen to them, pushing into the interior of the islands, where they are preferred by the native authorities, and also reaching farther eastward than the Chinese. They make use, moreover, of European communications. Piracy has never succeeded in paralysing this native traffic, whichr indeed has known how to come to terms with it ; nor, although not a year passes without some prahu from Goram being fallen upon by the inhospitable Papuans of New Guinea, does this injure it either, any more than it hinders the people of Tidor from visiting those coasts, abounding in slaves and trepang, with whole fleets. Entire populations have been, as it were, rendered fluid by means of trade — above all the Malays of Sumatran origin, proverbially clever, keen, omnipresent ; and the equally smart but treacherous Bugises of Celebes, who are 172 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND to be found in every spot from Singapore to New Guinea, and have recently immigrated in large numbers into Borneo at the instance of local chiefs, bo great is their influence that they are allowed to govern themselves according to their own laws ; and they are so conscious of their own strength that there has been no lack of attempts to make themselves independent. The Acheenese once held a similar position. After the decline of Malacca, which the Sumatran Malays had made an emporium, there were, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, several decades during the turning period of the world's history when Acheen was the busiest roadstead of the far east. All things being taken together, the capabilities of the Malayo-Polynesians as navigators are pre-eminent. It is only because this estimate of them has not always been taken that their distribution assumed the look of a riddle, though in fact it was no riddle whatsoever. With the dispersion of the Polynesian races over the islands of the ocean, first through storms and currents, then by voluntary migration, was associated in later times the traffic in men, called into existence by the growing demand for labour in regions of economic progress, like Hawaii, Samoa, or Queensland. In its beginnings it was indistinguishable from kidnapping. Men and boys were dragged from their homes by force, or decoyed by false representations, and carried to districts where they had never wanted to be. The regulations framed later by various governments remained for the most part ineffective for want of officials to look after them. Even when the planters were compelled to send their Kanakas back at the end of three years, captains often landed them, for their own convenience, on some island where the poor creatures had never lived, and where they were ill-treated and often killed by the inhabitants. Since the arrival of Europeans, too, the decrease of the population has caused shiftings in most islands. Immigrants from a wide area, extending from New Zealand to the Marquesas, have come to Hawaii. On the other hand Hawaii is one of the groups whence native missionaries have propagated' Christianity far into the Melanesian region. In the world of Polynesian mythology and legend we constantly come across migrations undertaken from the most various motives. Everything important or peculiar has been brought over sea ; the wide horizon of the ocean, no less than the narrow one of the island-world, gleams with a divine light upon these migration-legends ; remoter islands are half-way stations between this world and the next. To quote Bastian : " Once upon a time, after a long voyage, a ship was cast away upon a strange coast. It looked very strange to the new-comers, offering the appearance of an uncanny spectre-land : for they walked through trees and houses without feeling them. A figure met them and told them that they were in the realm of spirits. They followed his injunction to return home at once, and were driven along quickly by a favouring wind. But they had only time to relate how they had gone astray before they departed this life. 'Since then that deadly coast has been avoided." On Raiatea it was told of Tangaroa that after peopling the world he changed himself into a canoe, which, after bringing men along, and preparing the red of the sky from their blood, furnished the model for the temple. Assistance in the erection of the islands was rendered by casual comers, which would give them an additional ground for a title to it. When Savage Island was raised out of the sea, two men who swam over from THE RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND THEIR MIGRATIONS 173 Tonga put it in order ; and the steepness of its coast on one side is ascribed to the carelessness of the one who worked there. Others think that these helpers stamped the islands out of the sea. The Hawaiian account is simpler : When Hawaii had been hatched from the sea-bird's egg, some people came from Tahiti, a man and his wife, with a dog, a pig, and a hen in their canoe. Ulu introduced the bread-fruit which is named after him, and his brother the cloth made from the bast of the mulberry tree. The gods, who were originally the sole inhabitants of these islands, were approached to obtain leave to settle. The mother-country, " Hawaiki," soon came to be regarded as a land of the other world — a spirit-land ; what descended from it was hallowed. Tamatekapua, the son of the Clouds, brought Rongomai to New Zealand as its tutelary god from the spirit-land ; and there, too, was preserved the stone idol brought from Hawaiki, Matua-Tonga, the son of the south, as the Kumaras' god. If we find tradition bringing white priests and their gods to Hawaii, we are led to see other relations, namely with the west, the direction of them being indicated by the casting away on these shores of people from Eastern Asia. Traditions are not kept alive by memory only. Political and social relations follow to this day the lines of old connections which link together island groups far distant from each other. Legends of migration survive in individual villages and families, where the old home is still remembered, and the connection with it often bound closer by special reverence. The Tongans were long in the habit of respectfully greeting the people of Tokelau, as being their ancestors. Men from Ulie in the Carolines, who visited the island of Guam in the Mariannes in 1788, followed the roads from old descriptions preserved in songs ; since then the intercourse has become brisker, and at the present day the Caroline islanders collect coco-nuts in the Mariannes on behalf of foreign traders. Political connection, again, is often bound up with objects that have been either left behind or brought along. The Uluthi Islands are subject to Yap, because a great destruction, by means of an inundation of the sea, would take place if an axe belonging to one of the gods, which is buried in the latter island, were to be dug up. When these lines of attraction or attachment intersect, quarrels cannot be far off. Thus the Samoans relate that one of their chiefs fished up Rotuma and planted coco-palm on it. But in a later migration the chief Tukunua came that way with a canoe full of men and quarrelled with him about the prior right of possession. The Maoris found another ground for quarrelling : having come from little islands where land was scarce, every man laid claim to estates in New Zealand that were too large. The scantiness of migration legends in Melanesia has been regarded as only a part of the general dearth of tradition which is a Melanesian characteristic. Fiji offers us unwonted examples of legends of inland migrations, directed from the north-west towards the south-east, which in still later times was uninhabited. No doubt this bears upon the fact that the home of souls lies across the sea, and that all the spots whence souls go, that is swim, to the next world, face north-west. If, out of all these innumerable wanderings to and fro to which various causes have given rise, one group stands out by reason of the great extent of its ethnographic operation — that, namely, which has occupied the region between New Zealand and Hawaii, Fiji and Easter Island, with a strikingly homogeneous population — that is but part of the result of the great migratory movement in 174 THE HISTORY OF MANKLXD the Pacific. It is quite wrong to regard this as a single event, or as an exception. It is rather one case of the rule ; for none of these races was ever at rest. They wandered far and near, colonising consciously and intentionally, like any Greeks or Phoenicians. In any case this last series of great migrations and settlements is a single existing fact belonging to that stage in the development of culture which we call the stone age. For that reason it is not easy to understand ; we have no means of comparison with similar achievements. The area which this colonising activity has rendered productive far exceeds the empire of Alexander or of Rome. In the domain of annexation it was the greatest performance previous to the discovery of America. It was with astonishment that the close connection of the languages of Oceania was first recognised. Just as little could the general ethnographical similarity be overlooked ; the only difficulty was to find therein a scale of affinity, still more of remoteness, in point of time. There can be no doubt that from New Guinea to Easter Island we are in presence of essentially one civilization. A special branch of it has developed in the narrower region of Polynesia. The elements of this civilization are distributed over the islands with little uniformity. We cannot ignore the possibility that closer affinities are indicated . by . the distribution of particular articles, but hitherto the right way to identify them has hardly been taken, least of all by those who imagine they see in New. Zealand the point whence Polynesian migrations had set out. For the distribution of certain weapons upon which this hypothesis rests in the first instance is everywhere so uneven and capricious that conclusions of very wide import cannot be based upon it. That the home of the Maui myth appears to be in New Zealand ; that the title Ariki is here applied to priests, but in the rest of Polynesia to temporal chiefs ; and that New Zealand alone can be the home of the articles made of jade which are scattered throughout Polynesia, none of these are facts from which we can draw the important conclusion that New Zealand was the point of dispersion. It is solely upon the basis of the traditions that the view of the great majority of students is at present to the effect that not only the New Zealanders but also other Polynesians migrated to their present abodes from some southerly point in equatorial Polynesia. The Maori tradition is that they came to their island from a place called Hawaiki ; they seem to distinguish a larger and smaller, or a nearer and further Hawaiki. " The seed of our coming is from Hawaiki, the seed of our nourishing, the seed of mankind." This name, Hawaiki, is cognate with a whole number of Polynesian place names : Savaii in the Samoa group, Hawaii in the group of that name, Apai in the Tonga Islands, Evava in the Marquesas and others. Savaii, one of the Samoa or Navigator Islands, has the greatest pro- bability on its side. As Hawaii it forms also the starting-point for emigration to Raiatea and Tahiti, while the legends of the Marquesas and Hawaii refer back to Tahiti. There is a song in which Rarotonga, Waerota, Waeroti, Parima, and Manono are mentioned as neighbouring islands to Tahiti. The Rarotongans themselves have the tradition that they come from Awaiki. Waerota and Waeroti are now unknown, but Parima and Manono are small islets of the Samoan group, the inhabitants of which say they came from Savaii. Wild dogs like those of New Zealand, the same kind of rats, the sweet potato, the taro, the same kind of gourd, are found in the Navigator Islands. Maori traditions again which call THE RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND THEIR MIGRATIONS 175 Rarotonga the way to Hawaiki, and say that some of the New Zealand boats were built in Rarotonga, are equally in favour of the journey having been made first from the somewhat mythical Hawaiki to that island which no doubt is the " nearer Hawaiki " of tradition. It is possible that the larger part of the Maoris are of Rarotongan origin. The songs of the New Zealanders tell us even now the reason for their emigration and their farther wandering. A chief by the name of Ngahue was driven to flight by a civil war which devastated Hawaiki. After a long journey he reached New Zealand and returned to Hawaiki with pieces of greenstone and the bones of a giant-bird. Other legends give him the name Kup6 — the weaker party in the war that was still going on among the islanders tnigrated to New Zealand with him. The tradition still preserves the names of the double canoes in which the voyage was accomplished. The legend still recalls how the seeds of sweet potatoes, taro, gourds, karaka berries, dogs, parrots, and rats, and sacred Carved boat from New Zealand ; actual length 8 ft. s in. (Berlin Museum of Ethnology. ) red paint were put on board the canoes, and how, as the emigrant's fleet departed, an old chief exhorted to peace. Nor is the storm forgotten which got up in the night and scattered the fleet, nor the doubt whether they should steer east or west, nor the little quarrels which arose among the crews of individual canoes chiefly on account of the women. The canoes were repaired on islands as they went along. Finally, what was left of the wanderers reached New Zealand in the summer time, and even before the chiefs had decided on the place to land, certain families landed where pleasant bays smiled upon them, all in the North Island. It was not till later that the Middle and South Islands received their population. Even to this day the north is called the Lower and the south the Upper Island. The various tribal groups trace their origin to their canoes, the names of which they have preserved, and equally the names of the chiefs and the exact spot where the canoe landed. One canoe sailed round the North Cape, another made its way through Cook's Straits ; these two brought the first settlers to the west coast. Wharekauri or Chatham Island, some sixty nautical miles distant from New Zealand, must have been peopled at the same time. A second starting-point is indicated by tradition in the Tonga or Friendly Islands. The inhabitants of Nukahiva in the Marquesas make their forefathers come with bread-fruit and sugar-cane from Vavau in the Tonga Archipelago. But among the inhabitants of the southern part of that archipelago the Hawaiki legend appears again, although language and customs rather point to Tahiti. In this connection we may remember that in Raiatea also there was once a locality 176 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND (i) God of dances in the form of a double paddle, Easter Island; (2) toothed club from Tutuila ; (3) ancient club from Tonga ; (4, 5) short clubs from Easter Island. {Berlin Museum of Ethnology.) designated Hawaii. The Hawaii or Sandwich' Islands offer the same difficulty. Language and customs connect their inhabitants with Tahiti to which, as also to the Marquesas, Hawaiian travel myths point. On the other hand, place names show a lively re- collection of the Samoa group. Tahiti seems to have sent forth emigrants to Hawaii, Nukahiva, Rarotonga ; yet the ex- plicit tradition of the Rarotongans makes their island to have been settled almost simultan- eously from Samoa and Tahiti. But then from Rarotonga again came the colonists for the Gambler and Austral Islands, with Rapa, and also a part of those who made the great journey to New Zealand. We feel some scruple about making the name Hawaiki indicate one single island of a small archipelago. Strearns of emigration are supposed to have poured forth from it, at the most vari- ous epochs, to Hawaii as well as to New Zealand, to Tahiti no less than to Tonga. Why just that one and that only? No doubt the name pos- sesses a general, and like other place - names, a mythical significance, wherewith many of the attributes of the legend THE RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND THEIR MIGRATIONS 177 can more easily be combined than with that somewhat forced geographical inter- pretation. We are from the first warned to be cautious by the fact that this legend of Hawaiki is one of the few legends related by a race about its own origin, which science has nevertheless thoroughly accepted. At all tiipes we are strongly averse to such traditions, since they are never free from mythical elements. The geographical position of Hawaiki is not absolutely certain in all traditions ; but rather shows a considerable fluctuation. It even turns up as a spirit land, as the land of the West, where the souls go with the sun into the under world, as the land of souls, and so as the land of forefathers, the ancestral land. We can now understand the belief of the Marquesans that their entire country once lay in this Hawaiki, and came up from it. Simi- larly it is the land where man- kind once lost their immortality, and from spirits became men. Numerous place - names show that a name may recur widely without actual transmission. Lastly, the fluctuations in in- dividual traditions must not be overlooked. If a Tahitian ori- gin is universally assumed by the Hawaiians, traditions also point to the Marquesas and Samoa, and from the Marquesas the threads lead back to Tahiti, Samoa, and even Tonga. The old Hawaiians seem by " Tahiti " to have understood strangers in general. The Maori ^ legends also testify that not one immigration only, but several, took place from the north- ward. A much later arrival is emphasised in all the legends. We know therefore why those wanderers are alleged to have found in these islands aboriginal inhabitants, of whom the geological record of New Zealand, and its fossils, have so far revealed no trace. At any rate, the fact, still contested, that the dog occurs not as the companion of man, but as a beast of prey, points to another civilization than that which met the first Europeans who visited the Maoris. The legend of the various immigrations also takes various forms. In New Zealand the new comers find footmarks, which they recognise as those of one of their companions who had been thrown out of his boat. One legend speaks of fair natives, and of the rise ^ Maori "native " in opposition to Pakeha " stranger " occurs in the same sense in other parts of Polynesia, in the forms Maoi and Maoli, N Thakombau, the last king of Fiji. (From a photograph in the possession of Herr Max Buchner. ) 1/8 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND of a darker stock through mixture with older inhabitants ; Hkewise of men who lived on these islands " after the great monster," and who left great shell heaps behind them. We reach quite mythical ground with the Pua-Reingas, who lived underground and could not be conquered till a chief made a hole in the earth by which the sunbeams entered. Less frequently, for instance in Rarotonga, Mangarewa, the Kingsmill or Austral groups, the legend is decided as to their being uninhabited. The epochs of the Polynesian migrations must have been very various. They took place so long as there were any Polynesians in the Pacific. In the case of the colonisation of Rarotonga, tradition demands thirty generations, in that of the Maoris fifteen to twenty. On Nukahiva indeed we hear of eighty-eight generations ; and there are sixty-seven ancestors of Kamehameha ; but to these figures no credit can be given. We are entitled, however, to assign no great antiquity to Polynesian colonisation. The people have not had time to develop any marked peculiarities in culture. The date of their arrival in New Zealand and the other places of immigration can only be a matter of some centuries back. The settlement of Tahiti no doubt falls earlier. Many isolated casual migrations may have preceded the greater deliberate movements. But in any case we must clearly grasp the fact that there was a period during which the sending forth of colonies was enjoined by the increase in population, and was rendered possible by the political organisation. In the newly occupied territories too, the development of the new populations began upon a higher level, and then fell off ; upon the remoter islands like New Zealand, Hawaii, Easter Island, where disturbing influence pressed upon them less, they retained the most traces of a past higher condition. The decadence of the Maoris affords a conspicuous instance of a rapid impoverishment in the advantages of culture. The larger states split up into small communities, on a mutual footing of feud and extermination, having lost the consciousness of a stronger cohesion, with its power to maintain culture. The character of the people lost in demeanour and discipline, becoming ever more savage and cruel. Hand in hand with this went belief in their old native gods, and the transforma- tion of these into demons of the forest and the sea, cruel spectral caricatures, distorted at pleasure. A superstitious cult of the individual took the place of the state or national religion. They went back even in the arts ; even in Cook's time works of former generations were preserved as sacred objects, which they had lost the knowledge and the capacity to produce. These migrations were not confined within the limits of Polynesia. Colonies went forth into all the Melanesian groups ; where we obtain a general impression of a permeation with Polynesian elements from the eastward. On the small islands they hold their ground ; on the larger they were merged in the mass of the resident population, but not without leaving their traces. Ethnographical varieties become clear, if we remember that one or the other element has been the bearer of them. Thus in the territory of the New Hebrides and Solomon Islands, where " mother -right " prevails, Polynesian colonists have brought in " father- right " ; in this case a revolutionary institution. Echoes of New Zealand meet us in the visible speech of New Caledonian architecture, in the clubs of Eastern New Guinea, and in other cases. In Micronesia, Polynesian affinities are yet more frequent. There many customs remind us with especial force of the western Polynesians and at the same time of the Fijians. Not only, however, have THE RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND THEIR MIGRATIONS 179 Polynesians made their way to Melanesia, but we have historical proof of Melanesian colonies in Polynesia. Nothing indicates more clearly the frequency and extent of these migrations than the very small number of totally uninhabited islands. These vikings of the Pacific contrived to discover even small and remote islets. In the whole of the Pacific there is not one island of any size of which it was left to Europeans to demonstrate the habitability. Many of them were only visited periodically for their palms or the fishing ; but these were in all cases certain to be less well suited than the others for habitation. Of the little islets which rise from a common base in a reef, and lie almost flush with the sea, forming an atoll, often only one in a group, the largest or most productive, is inhabited. Indubitable traces of former habitation show that the uninhabited regions did not extend beyond their present boundaries. These are proved to lie in those central Pacific Sporades which hold so important a place between the groups of Eastern Polynesia and Hawaii, such as the Guano Islands of the Central Pacific, the Penrhyn group, the most south- easterly islets of the Paumotu group, and others. Norfolk Island is the only one in the Southern Pacific which can be pointed out as having from its natural conditions and endowments deserved to be permanently settled ; but in the angle it makes with Australia and Polynesia, it lies far from all migrations, and it has an area of not more than 1 8 square miles. Local arrangement breaks up the wide district into geographical groups distinguished by ethnographic characteristics : Melanesia is contiguous to New Guinea ; north of it, separated by a band poor in islands, we find Micronesia over against the Moluccas and Philippines to the eastward. Polynesia joins on in the form of a great triangular space outflanking the eastern side of the two districts already named both to south and to north, and is divided by a tract of sea with few islands into a western group of Tonga, Samoa, and Tokelau with Fiji, and a more extended eastern group reaching from Hawaii to New Zealand.^ In view of the many internal differences in the populations, and considering the distinction, great but difficult, of accurate demarcation between Polynesians and Melanesians, there is little purpose in dividing off smaller groups by physical characteristics. These can at most be suggested. It is just possible that a sharper racial distinction between west and east Polynesians may be emphasised. According to Finsch, among all the Polynesians the Hawaiians have the greatest similarity with the Samoans. The Maoris are next most closely connected ; this nearer relationship is confirmed by the language. This seems to be a similar phenomenon to that of the deepening of the lighter skin tint of the Malays into a darker as we go eastward. Confining ourselves to tangible objects, we will now make an attempt to divide the area of Polynesian culture into smaller districts. In this, as might be expected, the large influential groups of Samoa and Tonga show an affinity with the neighbouring Fiji. This strikes us most clearly in our ethnographical museums by the abundance and variety of the wonderfully carved clubs. Tonga shows linguistic peculiarities, shares with Fiji in respect of bows and pottery, and builds its vessels differently from Samoa. In the Harvey Islands to the eastward, the art of carving has been absorbed in the preparation of hatchets with pretty handles rich in symbolic forms. The Society Isles show ' [I leave this as in the original, though it appears from the map that a line drawn from Hawaii to New Zealand passes through the Tonga group.] i8o THE HISTORY OF MANKIND agreement with Hawaii in their feather work and axes. In the Marquesas, oars as well as axes and dancing stilts are carved with conventional ornaments, each of which has its name and its significance, reminding us somewhat of the Easter Islanders' writing. The Hawaii or Sandwich Islands are distinguished by fine feather masks and helmets, and have weapons with wooden handles, set with sharks' teeth like knives. These, however, find their richest development in the Gilbert or Kingsmill Island. New Zealand, which has the most peculiar climate of any region inhabited by Polynesians, is the culminating point and the horn of plenty in regard to art development in Oceania. Its favourite manufacture is small hand clubs, called mere, made like many ornamental objects from jade. Also richly carved sticks, objects in greenstone, symbols of rank in the shape of oars, ships, pillars for houses. But on the whole it preserves agreement with the rest of Polynesia. One might conclude that its settlement did not take place till late, but that from the remoteness of these islands a tranquil development resulted with the maintenance of many old notions of form. If the Maori dialect is in many respects richer and more primitive than other Polynesian dialects, this may be ascribed to the more plentiful contact of the tribes over wider spaces. The most unique existence is that of Easter Island. It represents among the islands what the naturalist would call a " sport." No part of the earth shows the power of isolation with more impressive clearness than this little spot of some 50 square miles. The most trustworthy descriptions draw attention to the departure of the Easter Islanders from the pure Polynesian type. Darker coloured skin and small eyes point perhaps to an admixture of Melanesian blood. In a population which by the highest estimate reached 3000, and before the days of small-pox and kidnapping were reckoned by the first French missionary at not more than 1500, even small admixtures would be of importance. But these peculiarities, not very significant under any circumstances, disappear when we look at the special ethno- graphical points, positive as well as negative. Above all other Polynesians the Easter Islanders possess the art of pottery ; also an obsolete writing, the power of executing human figures in wood-carving, and of making gigantic stone images ; they also build stone huts. But on the other hand they have not the more artistic forms of axe, bow, and spear. " Locally and ethnographically the Micronesians stand next to the Malay Archipelago and East Asia ; from a physical point of view they display many of the Mongoloid marks with especial clearness. In their ethnographic relations they seem to be a race which has come down from a higher stage. In social and political institutions — in their money, their looms, their navigation — they show traces of a richer development of the external life. But a further motive must be sought in the less secluded character of the entire Micronesian development, upon which the neighbourhood of Asia has worked both advantageously and disturbingly. Many objects are indistinguishably like those of particular Malayan localities ; thus the spears of the Carolines resemble those of central Celebes. Polynesian influences predominate especially in the Gilbert Islands ; tattooing instruments agree exactly. The agreements between Melanesia and Micronesia lie in a mass of small details ; the young people of Astrolabe Bay wear, besides the comb in their hair, little sticks bound with grass and adorned with cock's feathers, repeating the curious head ornament of the Ruk Islanders. The loom of Santa Cruz, unique in the Melanesian region, is closely akin to that of the Carolines. THE RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND THEIR MIGRATIONS Within the region of the darker races the contrasts are naturally sharper. In every archipelago, and in New Guinea, lighter and darker groups may be distinguished. The Papuas of New Guinea west of Humboldt Bay, are on the average darker than those to the eastward ; in the western portion we no longer meet with light - skinned, straight - haired people, who might be taken for Polynesians. Ethno- graphical character- istics point partly to the more easterly islands of the Sunda group ; the short bows of bamboo strung with fibres, or the stone clubs and the armour. Of smaller, quite spe- cial characteristics, we may note the arrows, exactly like those of Ceram. The more warlike and enterpris- ing tribes dwell in East New Guinea ; they are far superior to the natives of the interior, the stupid Dorese, and the good- tempered, cunning Papuas of the south- west coast. This character extends to the inhabitants of the neighbouring islands to east and north. Between the Bis- marck and Solomon Islanders, too, there is a great agreement in character ; they are strong, coarse, warlike, but at the same time capable of work and receptive of education. In some distinctive details, such as the use of coloured bast and grass for ornament, the Solomon Islanders agree with New Guinea. The Trobriand, D'Entrecasteaux, and other islands southward to Teste form, with eastermost New Guinea, one ethnographical province. Here we begin to find a higher proportion than in New Guinea of population partly straight-haired and fair-skinned, with such specific features as the loin-cloth made from the pandanus-\&a.i, the working of small disks of red spondylus-sheW for ornament, the peculiar mode of inserting the axe-head, navigation highly advanced, and cannibalism. Some of these characteristics Rattan cuirass, throvving-sticks of dark wood, and bark belt, from Kaiser Wilhelm's Land. ( Berlin Museum. ) l82 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND mark the transition from East New Guinea to the more westerly regions. Ahke in New Guinea and the next islands to the eastward there has been developed a style in which the human countenance is rendered by means of two straight lines, one at right angles to the other, to indicate the nose and lower nm of the forehead, a corresponding line giving the mouth. The effect of boredom pro- duced by this physiognomy has been noted as being the effort to portray the Axes from the D'Entrecasteaux Islands — one-eighth real size. (Christy Collection.) bored Englishman ; but it also reminds us of the " tortoise-shell style " of the Torres Islands, where it is made necessary by the material. In the case of the Admiralty Islanders, holding as they do an intermediate position among the rest of the Melanesians, it is interesting to note that their peculiarities are negative. Except the spear they have no weapons ; lacking bow and arrow, throwing-stick, sling, and axe. Bow and arrow are wanting also among other Melanesians, and the Australians ; but the latter have other weapons, in some cases in remarkable abundance and variety. In the poverty of the islanders of whom we are speaking one might be inclined to see an effect of their isolation, an evidence of limited intercourse. But many other characteristics point to closer affinities, in one or another direction, with the inhabitants of Humboldt Bay, the Solomon Islands, or New Hanover. THE RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND THEIR MIGRATIONS 183 The more easterly islands of Melanesia show, as in Fiji and the New Hebrides, the largest proportion of Polynesian inflilences. Fiji indeed cannot be understood apart from Tonga ; Fiji is " upper," Tonga " lower." The relations between these two groups are most intimate. Physically the Fijians must be regarded as hybrids between the Mongoloid and the Negroid ; etymologically the Tongan is of all Polynesian dialects the nearest to the Fijian. In style the productions of Fiji bear the closest resemblance to those of Samoa. But the broad paddles of New Hanover, with strong middle rib, also remind us vividly of this group. New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands form a district by themselves. The inhabit- ants of the former island are more pronounced negroids than those of the latter, where, indeed, Mare contains a Polynesian colony, self-founded ; but in both Polynesian influences are clearly apparent. Deduct- ing the effects of the soil and the unfavourable cli- mate, there still remain many peculiarities corre- sponding to the secluded position. Among these are the circular huts, the pecu- liar shape of spears and clubs, the absence of the bow, the use of the pretty brown bat's fur for all kinds of adornments. Special to New Caledonia are the binding of the grip of a weapon with string, or cloth, the attachment of woollen tassels, and the like ; also the broad jade blades, the beak-shaped clubs, the absence or rudeness of sculpture. The closest affinities to New Caledonia are shown by the northern New Hebrides. While Polynesian influences have flowed so copiously over the eastern boundary of Melanesia that they got possession of whole islands, Malay influences have been far less active on the west side. Only in western New Guinea are they decidedly predominant. On its eastern shores, till you come towards Tagai, the people of New Guinea were ten years ago still completely in the stone age ; while in the west the working of iron had long been known. Spear-heads, short swords, and knives soon became common in the palaces on the coast of Geelvink Bay. The colonies coming from the east, who settled in the coast districts of eastern New Guinea, appear to have made more impression than the conquerors and rulers from the west. But that, in spite of that, an old connection must be assumed, is quite clearly seen both from the negroid elements which, scattered as they are throughout the Malay Archipelago, are represented with especial strength in its eastern half, and also from ethnographic characteristics. In the district bounded to the westward by a line drawn through Halmahera and Flores, both elements appear so strongly that the region appears to be one of transition from Malay to Melanesian. Here we find forms of bows and arrows showing a remarkable similarity with the Melanesian ; so, too, older forms of spear, filing of teeth, and tattooing, have maintained a wide extension. Carred wooden plaques, used as stamps, from the Fiji Islands. (Godeffroy Collection. ) i84 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND It can hardly be doubted that, from the stream of migration which entered, the Pacific from the westward, rills were diverted to the continent of Australia. Here, too, we have a mingled strain, whose main constituents are a fairer straight- haired, and a darker crisp -haired race. Relations with an older world may unquestionably be pre- sumed. The funda- mental ideas, and many details in the initiatory rites for boys and girls, are thoroughly Ocean- ian, and connect at least Northern Australia with the neighbouring New Guinea and its adjacent islands. Traces of taboo also appear ; and if their usage is less sharply marked than in Poly- nesia, the cause may be found in the coarser life and more indigent con- dition of the Australians. In former times more consistent and more highly -finished customs may have prevailed. For the racial dualism, which the rapid progress of crossing has done its best to obliterate, we can look, so far as our- present knowledge al- lows, only to Papuas and Malays. It is a fact that Malays live, temporarily or perman- ently, among North Australian tribes, and exercise no small influence upon them ; while on the other hand there can be no doubt as to the temporary intercourse of the Torres Islanders with both Papuas and Australians. On the north-west coasts of Australia we can prove Malayan influence more certainly than any other. The extension of the bamboo in Arnhemland, the existence of small-pox before the arrival of Europeans, the objection to eat pig-meat, testify to this. Perhaps also we may trace to the same cause the absence of the boomerang in North Australia. Without doubt these races must have begun to permeate long before the historical period. The Malay fisheries on the North Australian coast are, says Campbell, a settled insti- tution, pointing to a long duration. The evidence of Tasmania would lead us to assume a crisp-haired race as originally inhabiting Australia ; for the Jade battle-axes and jade hatchet, insignia of chiefs, from New Caledonia. (Christy Collection. ) THE POLYNESIANS AND MICRONESIANS 185 Tasmanian hair was decidedly more woolly than the Australian. The apparently uniform conditions of Australia are complicated by what Bastian calls " the shadow which the great continent of Asia casts over these oceanic groups of islands." We cannot disprove that Malayo-Polynesian elements may have reached Australia from the eastward also, just as easily as they got to New Guinea ; but no evidence for it is forthcoming. Norfolk Island was uninhabited when dis- covered by Europeans. Nor is the connection with New Guinea in any way intimate. Whether remains of the dingo are really found in the Australian Post-pliocene or not, probability is strongly in favour of his having been introduced by human immigrants ; and the New Guinea dog is different. Ethnographical objects, too, are not alike on the two sides of Torres Straits. § 3. PHYSICAL QUALITIES AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF THE POLYNESIANS AND MICRONESIANS Bodily peculiarities — Racial marks — Colour — Head — Hair — Albinism — Muscular strength — Spiritual Disposi- tion — A race of contradictions — Optimistic critics — Stupidity — Frivolity — Lies and Dissimulation — Comedy of King Finn — Licentiousness — Human sacrifices, cannibalism, and infanticide — Intellectual capacity — Influence of Christianity — Creative power of the Polynesian mind — Invention — Mythology — Cosmogony — Knowledge of geography — Medicine — Reckoning of time — Counting — Music and dancing — Wrestling and boxing — Games of children. Among the Polynesian tribes, distributed as they are over a wide area broken up into numerous islands, varying greatly in natural resources, and permeated by a deeply-rooted social organisation, racial distinctions emerge very clearly. It is almost superfluous specially to emphasise the fact that in this race too we can find no absolute unity. Crossings have taken place, of which we can no longer determine the individual elements, though doubtless negroid constituents turned up among them. But whatever may be the history of the Polynesians, they form a special group of mankind. In close affinity with the Malay race they have a brown skin, with a prevailing tendency to light gradations, such as might on the average be designated as olive-brown ; though among the Micronesians we find the Chinese yellow, and among the Samoans the light-brown tint of Southern Europeans. The hair is black, smooth to curly. Finsch considers that within these limits the Micronesians do not vary more from the actual Polynesians than Swabians from North Germans. There are Polynesian colonies in the Micronesian region, but many Micronesians come nearer to the Melanesian type. Among the more important bodily characteristics we may mention the pre- dominance of short skulls, often exaggerated by artificial deformation ; low, but generally well-shaped foreheads, often causing the facial angle to be equal to that of Europeans ; noses more often snub than curved ; eyes small, lively, usually placed horizontally, with remarkably wide opening and eloquent expression ; cheek bones projecting forward rather than sideways ; and, lastly, mouths well shaped in spite of thick lips. In general the lighter Polynesians, more especially Maoris and Tongans, resemble most the European type even in expression ; while the some- what darker Micronesians, as has been said, approach the Melanesian. The 1 86 THE HISTORY OF ^fAI\'K'I^'D general character is soft features and pleasing demeanour. The expression " nobly-formed races," is so commonly used of the Polynesians that it may be worth while to point out that it is only their stature which can be judged by a European standard. The handsomest woman of Samoa," says Hugo Zoller, " cannot be com- pared with any- thing more than a pretty German peasant girl." The hair in its finer texture and tendency to form waves or even ringlets, departs from the coarse straight Mongol- ian form. The best term for it is " crisp " hair. Occasionally wigs are met with, sticking up and towzled after the Papuan fashion. The colour of the hair ranges from black to chestnut brown. A lighter tinge, particu- larly rusty-brown wisps running through dark hair, and reddish or yellowish col- oration of the tips, proceeds from frequent bathing and pow- dering with lime. Albinism seems to be rare. The development of hair on the face and body is less in straight-haired than in curly-haired persons. The bodily strength of the Polynesians is not very great ; the small amount of labour which many of them perform hardly tends to a thorough development of the body. Even the most stalwart-looking Maoris possess, on the average only a fraction of an Englishman's lifting power ; nor do they excel in speed of foot. Arms and legs run rather to fat than to muscle. A notable corpulence Samoan woman. (From a photograph in the Godeffroy Album). THE POLYNESIANS AND MICRONESIANS 187 is frequent as a result of indolence. The average weight of the men in the Gilbert Islands is, according to Finsch, about 1 2 stone, the maximum a little over 15. In stature the Polynesians hold a medium position. Finsch's measure- ments give 5 feet 1 1 inches as the highest figure for a man of the Gilbert Islands, and 5 feet 3^ inches for a woman of Upolu, one of the most powerful and stoutest of Polynesian women. The minima fall just below 5 feet. Long ago G. Forster said of the Easter Islanders, who live under conditions calculated to stunt them : " We did not find among them a single man who could be called tall." In the Marshall Archipelago the natives of the more northerly islands, which are less visited by strangers, and produce food in greater abundance, are men of a taller and stronger stamp ; while the great majority of those in the Women of the Gilbert Islands and Marshall Islands. (Godeffroy Album. ) southern islands are slender men who grow old prematurely. The more weakly type tends to prevail ; possibly the indolence which shrinks from the exertion of fishing, and limits itself to a vegetable diet, may have something to do with this. According to Finsch the Gilbert Islanders may be indicated as the strongest. They are distinguished by the rapidity with which they multiply, supplying an abundant emigration. Racial differences are to some extent involved in the social organisation. The lighter people of the upper classes are descended from Japanese, Chinese, and Spaniards ; and tanning by the sun assuredly does not alone account for the darker tint of the lower classes. Ellis heard it said when a swarthy man passed : " How d^rk he is, he must have good bones." Still the darker complexions are not found exclusively in the lower classes, while the lighter skin of the aristocracy admits of exceptions here and there. The acuteness of their senses is considerable ; and this holds good not merely of their cleverness in finding lost objects, or seeing small birds in covert. An inventive intelligence is native to them. The Polynesian has not the childish naivete of the negro; but at the, same time he is not so reserved as the Malay nor so calculating as the Chinese. If in surrender to the impulses of their nature THE HISTORY OF MANKIND these are genuine " natural " races, on the other hand the barriers of tradition are rigid and social ordin- ances manifold ; and although they attack Nature and each other with primitive implements and weapons, they have in other directions given proof of no narrow intellectual en- dowment. If all " natural " races display something contradictory in the proportion which their cultiva- tion bears to their endowment, the Polynesians are in truth a race of contradictions. To Cook and his companions the Tahitians and So- ciety Islanders appeared as gentle and agreeable people, in many respects to be envied, fortunate, like children of an extremely happy disposition. Yet a century ago the Tongans were still cannibals. And if we turn over the record of the dealings of the Tahitians with white men, we shall find mention of their meeting with Wallis's expedition ; which they met in quite a different manner, and experienced a bloody repulse. By that time the white men had made themselves feared. In cases where they had not re- ceived any lesson of this kind, the natives appeared as regular savages. Cook was himself partly to blame, by his over- confidence, for his murder on Hawaii. A whole series of treacherous attacks are known to have occurred in the small exterior islands, such as the Paumotu, Savage, and Penrhyn groups ; and the history of New Zealand records still more. Without being savages after the fashion of the Bushmen or Australians, the Polynesians are of an untrustworthy changeable character. The Micronesians for the most part maintain a timid attitude; but they are A man of Rotuma. (Godeffroy Album.) A Tongan. (Godeffroy Album. ) THE POLYNESIANS AND MICRONESIANS 189 frequently few in number confined to a solitary island, and almost defenceless against strangers. Under great outward vivacity lies the dulness of the uncultured nature. Even among Christian Polynesians one is struck by the indifference with which they meet a disgraceful death at the hand of the executioner ; and the tranquillity of children at the death of their parents, particularly in blood-steeped New Zealand, has been remarked. Human sacrifices and cannibalism must have left their traces in the disposition. These evil qualities are cloaked by a childish levity. The task of the criminal law is materially lightened by their garrulity ; they cannot keep a s.ecret, even to save themselves from the scaffold. Throughout Polynesia A man of Pelew, and a man of Yap in the Carolines. (Godeffroy Album. ) one hears plenty of quarrelsome talk and sees very little fighting. Even in serious warfare words play an important part. Many words are accompanied by many falsehoods. An entertaining proof of the art of the Polynesians in fiction is afforded by the appearance of the sham king Finn on Cook's second visit to the Friendly Islands in 1777. In order to carry through the part, many others had to take as much share in the farce as he himself; and yet Cook was taken in for some days, and only began to suspect when he saw the impostor do obeisance to the real king. The Polynesians show themselves quite open to the requirements of an industrial life in the European sense. The sugar-plantations which form the chief wealth of Hawaii are no doubt at present chiefly in the hands of whites or half-breeds ; but King Kamehameha III. rendered essential service in promoting the cultivation of the sugar-cane. The first Christians on Maui performed a wonderful feat when they built a church 1 00 feet in length ; carrying stone, lime, and sand on their backs, and hauling timber with their hands. Twice the principal I go THE HISTORY OF MANKIND rafter gave way, and for the third time they put it up again, nothing loth. It is, to be sure, just the vaHant, laborious, progressive Polynesians who are decried by Europeans as avaricious and stubborn. The Samoans and Tahitians are reckoned more serviceable. The profound difference between the dissolute, idle, light- skinned inhabitants of fertile Tahiti, and the industrious, clever, sober, muscular native of the poorer Tonga Islands is instructive. Is it not significant that the Tongans escaped the corrupt aristocratic rule of Tahiti ? In order to form a fair judgment as to the licentiousness ascribed to the Polynesians, we must consider that their excesses were described with much exaggeration by visitors who only learned to know the people superficially. Much of it no doubt arises from their general level of culture. Levity and idleness have in some places allowed sexual irregularity to reach an incredible pitch of corruption among the upper classes ; while in New Zealand, in Samoa, and especially in Tonga, women hold, on the contrary, a high position. Human sacrifices, cannibalism and traces of it, also infanticide, will be dealt with in the section on society. With the first ray of light which falls upon the life of Polynesia, together with the opening-up of the central regions of the Pacific, we get a glimpse of a strong movement of great value in the history of civilization. If indeed it be too much to assume that a development in the direc- tion of a pure monotheism was making its way in their religion before the arrival of Christian influ- ences, we can, at any rate, recognise therein a powerful impulse towards the creation of a pantheon. With a little more space and a little more stability, we should have found an Indian mythology in Polynesia. Morally the Polynesians did not and do not stand high ; and yet their abandonment of cannibalism and human sacrifice speaks a great deal for their self-education. It is a progress towards humanity to which full justice has not been done by all critics. Generally too the Polynesians have shown a rare capacity for education ; quite apart from their faculty of imitating European dress-customs. Nowhere else have missions so soon attained to the point of sending out native teachers. For many years whole groups, such as Tonga, Samoa, Hervey, have possessed a church and a school in every village, with clergy and teachers of whom by far the greater part are natives. At the same time these communities soon became self-supporting. The London Missionary Society has for years no longer had occasion to send pecuniary aid to Samoa ; on the contrary, that Mission has itself forwarded material contributions for missionary purposes to other districts. Among the most curious phenomena are the independent offshoots from Christianity. Thus in Upolu, Siovedi, a native of Savaii, founded the " gimblet-religion." Professing to converse with God and to work miracles, he enjoined a mutual confession of sins in cases of sickness ; and his divine service was rendered specially impressive by the discharge of firearms. Also in Samoa, a native, who taught the invocation of the God of Heaven, brought with him on his return from the whale-fishery an old woman who used Dressed skull, from the Marshall Islands. (Godeffroy Collection). THE POLYNESIANS AND MICRONESIANS IQI to '' touch " for diseases from behind a curtain, alleging that Christ resided within her. In all variations of Polynesian mythology an element of philosophising appears in astonishing luxuriance. Nowhere do we find better confirmation of the fact that at this stage mythology includes all science. When, as in the Society Islands, we find the creation of spiritual forces following immediately upon the emerging of Ru from the side of his mother Papa, we are in the region of abstractions. Not till then is the material world created by the union of Tangaroa with the various forces of Nature. We get the impression of natural science in embryo when Tangaroa produces, with the goddess of the external world, clouds and rain ; with the goddess of the inner world, the germs of movement ; with the air, the rainbow, the light, the moon ; and with a goddess dwelling in the earth, volcanic fire. This structure of ideas, the creation of ' thoughtful minds, was not adapted for wider extension, and therefore the universal myth- ology of Polynesia could not accommodate itself to the analysis of its simple cosmogony, which made the world result from the embrace of heaven and earth, into these abstract conceptions. But in the great simple images of the sea, the islands, the earth as a fixed island or floating in the sea, in their need of orienta- tion by the aid of sun, moon, and stars, the Polynesians found an inducement to observe the heavenly phenomena more keenly, and to form cosmogonic imaginations. Their conception of the world, to the formation of which fancy has contributed more than understanding, is yet based upon a mass of observations. The moon is a woman, with an indwelling capacity for renewal. The man in the moon is Rona, who stumbled as he went about at night and was taken up by the moon with the branch of the tree to which he tried to hold. Both sun and moon renew their youth in the spring of the water of life. While the moon and stars are in a heaven nearer the earth, namely the third, the sun shines only from the fifth ; else he would burn up everything. Sun and moon once lived together and produced the dry land Bamboo flutes from of the earth. And while the sun is on one side made fast to Hawaii. (British . .... , , . Museum. ) the moon by Maui, on the other it is bound to the earth by its own beams. From this twofold attachment also eclipses arise. The stars were created by the ancestors of the present Polynesian race. As the population of heaven they are divided into two parts, between which the Milky Way, or " great shark," forms the boundary. The shooting-stars are the means by which they send messages to their former creators. Among the constellations Orion with the Southern Cross and the neighbouring stars as " Tamarereti's Canoe,'' and the Pleiads, under the name of " the bowsprit of the canoe," enjoy special consideration. In the rainbow they see also the bow, or the gleaming bowstring, or the ladder whereby the souls of chiefs ascend to heaven. The frequent migrations of the Polynesians from one island to another led in course of time to the acquirement of a certain stock of knowledge. The talented Tupaia drew for Cook a kind of map on which numerous islands of rs? 192 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Polynesia were marked. The names were found to be pretty correct, but not the position and size. Intelligent people were fairly well informed about neigh- bouring islands ; they distinguished the low or coral islands from the ofty or volcanic, and knew whether they were permanently or only occasionally inhabited, and the like. The brother of the chief of Raraka drew with chalk on the deck of Wilkes's vessel all the islands of Paumotu that he knew, and named three, which were actually discovered later. What the Polynesians knew rested on a great persistency of tradition. iheir stock of culture shows of how much a talented race, without writing, and we may add, in its stone age, is capable. Mythology, historical tradition, and star-lore, are taught together by special persons, and a little medicine besides. Part of this is kept secret. Genealogies are taught at night to promising boys. On the memorial tablets they find the important names in the notches, dis- : tinguished by special ornamentation. When they become priests they recog- nise each other by secret passwords. The traditional hymns which are re- cited at purificatory festivals are in the keeping of the priests. Besides the sacred, there is also a profane tradition, the depositaries of which are often curiously enough in the lowest ranks of society. To them are entrusted his- torical memories, the lays of the heroes, the myths which have become old wives' fables. Among the priests a kind of medical science had developed itself, the sound principles of which were smothered under the hocus-pocus of The Tahitian places the seat of life and natural dis- the belly, and uses the term " bowels " to denote what we express On the other hand the head is as with us the seat of the human Dancing stilts, from the Marquesas. Ethnographical Museum. ) Munich supernatural commerce. position in by " heart." thinking faculty, and for this reason receives special veneration, which to be sure has a cannibal tinge. Among the more rational modes of treating the sick, " massage " has the fifst place. Among medical apparatus we find bottle-gourds for administering injections, and the claws of a Squilla for puncturing pustules. The Polynesian language possesses numerals to denominate the thousands. Lehu, •' ashes," indicates the limit of the numerable. As a rule the system is naturally that of division into fives and tens ; but Tou-Fa, that is " four-reckoning " forms in the Marquesas and Hawaii a scale with forty as its peculiar unit. In Hawaii, Ule, Pelew, and elsewhere, they used, to facilitate counting, a system which was also highly elaborated in Peru, of tying knots in string. The Tahitians tied strips of coco-palm leaf in bundles ; the New Zealanders used notched sticks. THE POLYNESIANS AND MICRONESIANS 193 Time is reckoned by lunar months. In Tahiti there were fourteen of these, two of which Forster regarded as intercalary. The names of the m.onths in many cases are referable to agricul- ture and the phenomena of vegetable life. In New Zealand we find thirteen months, and the tenth reckoned twice over. The names of the months and the first day of the year vary from one island to another, and besides I. Paddles used at dances, from Easter Island — one-thirteenth real size (Berlin Museum of Ethnology), ii. Bamboo dancing-stilts, from the Marquesas — one-tenth real size (Christy Collection). O 194 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND that, traces remain of another system of chronology dividing the year mto two parts with the disappearance and reappearance of the Pleiads, thus reckoning six months only. Thus in a number of islands New Year's day falls at the southern winter solstice. Besides this, they reckon by generations ; and this reckoning goes back twenty-nine generations in Rarotonga, twenty-seven in Mangareva, amounting to a handsome tale of centuries, but of course starting from mythical times. Song and dance occupy a large part of the life of the dwellers in the fortunate isles of the tropic zone. The Maoris, too, sing on every occasion ; at work, in dancing, in rowing, at their sports, or when marching to war. They especially like amoebean songs, in which choruses alternate with individual chants. But the character of their songs is not cheerful, however cheerful may be the mood which inspires them ; rather are they solemn. The Polynesians have a decided sense for rhythm and even for rhyme. At the more important performances, monologues, dialogues, even the rudiment of a drama, often consisting in the mimic representation of a quarrel, ending in blows, are put on the stage between pas seuls. On these occasions dancing-wands or dancing-stilts, often finely carved, are in use. Cook's companion, Anderson, describes a musical entertainment in Tonga as follows : " Eighteen men sat in the ring of spectators, four or five having bamboo-tubes closed at the lower end. These they steadily struck almost vertically on the ground in slow time ; muffled notes, varying according to the length of the tube, being given out. Another musician produced clear tones by striking with two sticks a long split bamboo which lay on the ground in front of him. The rest sang a soft air, so much mellowed by the rougher tones of the simple instruments that no one could help recognising the power and pleasing melodious- ness of the music." On other occasions hollow tree-stems are beaten like drums with two sticks. Of all the manifold European instruments the drum was the only instrument of which the Tongans would take any notice ; and this they thought inferior to their own. Micronesian drums are distinguished for their marked hour-glass shape. Particular drums are used in divine service, and are regarded as sacred. Bamboo flutes and shell trumpets are everywhere common. Among the dances are also included the war and weapon games, and the favourite wrestling and boxing contests. In Hawaii, when Cook was there, even the girls took part in these. The Polynesians have a great liking for games.^ One of their games is very like our draughts, but appears to be more complicated, since the board has 238 squares, divided into rows of fourteen. Another consists in hiding a stone in a piece of cloth, and trying to find it by hitting with a stick ; in this game the betting is the important point. Ball-games are very popular. In the Hawaiian game called Lala, a wheel-shaped stone {Maika), is thrown as far as possible ; and players stake all their property, their wives and children, their arm and leg bones (after their death), and at last even their own persons on one throw. Another pastime is racing between boys and girls. Swimming in the surf with the help of a board or spar is also in some measure a game of chance ; it is played, especially in Hawaii, by ' [Mr. Stevenson mentions somewhere that cricket-matches in Samoa used to be played by whole villages, some hundreds on a side, and to last for weeks. At length the waste of time and cost of entertaining the " visitors" reached such a pitch that the chiefs had to interfere.] Printed "by the BibliograpMsches InsUtut. leijzig-. PATTERN OF POLYNESIAN TAPA. (From Cook's coUECtioiL ia the ethnograpliical Museum, "Vleima.,) THE POLYNESIANS AND MICRONESIANS i95 both sexes with much dexterity and pluck. Little boats are a frequent toy of children ; who also, like their elders, are fond of ball -play. The young New Zealanders have a special predilection for flying kites. Another game of theirs is to throw up a ball made of leaves bound together, and catch it on a stick sharpened at both ends. Besides these, games with the fingers, like the Italian morra, are very common ; and the players are extremely clever at them. § 4. DRESS, WEAPONS, AND IMPLEMENTS OF POLYNESIANS AND MICRONESIANS Dress and ornament — Tattooing — Deformations of the body — Feather ornaments — Modes of wearing the hair — Objects used for ornament — Bark cloth — Tapa — Mats — Weapons and implements — Lack of iron — Working in stone — Manufacture of weapons from wood — Spears — Clubs — Limits of diffusion of bow and arrow — Slings — Industrial activity. The stage of culture which the Polynesians have reached is very clearly expressed in their external appearance ; that is, in their dress, their ornaments, their equipment. Living under a fortunate sky, and surrounded with water, both Polynesians and Micronesians bathe often, and are, therefore, a cleanly race. Unluckily they frequently destroy the effect of this virtue by excessive anointing of themselves with coco-palm oil or chewed coco -nut. They prefer fresh water to salt for bathing, and regard both as a good remedy against illness. Women with their newly -born infants, and even people in mortal sickness, will bathe. Artificial mutilations and embellishments of the person are widely spread. Deformation of the skull, both by flattening it behind and elongating it towards the vertex, is found in isolated instances in Tahiti, Samoa, Hawaii, and the Paumotu group, but occurs nowhere with such frequency as on Mallicollo in the New Hebrides, where the skull is squeezed extraordinarily flat. Flattening of the nose is practised in Tahiti and among the Yap Islanders ; and the nasal septum is often bored to allow of the insertion of flowers or feathers. The ears are bored, and bits of greenstone, teeth of men and sharks, feathers and flowers, stuck in for ornament. On Easter Island, as in Micronesia, the ear-lobes are dragged into flaps by heavy wooden plugs. The Micronesians also bore the rim of the ear in various ways. Tattooing nowhere reaches such perfection as in these regions. In Polynesia the men are in general more tattooed than the women ; but in some places both sexes are alike, and on Nukuor the women only are thus adorned. The custom of tattooing the face was not in use among all Polynesians, particularly not in Rarotonga ; though universal among the Maoris, with whom the Rarotongans were brought into the closest contact. The special forms of tattooing intended to excite fear seem to have left off since the introduction of European modes of fighting. Another advantage claimed for tattooing is that it obliterates differences of age. Lastly the embellishment resulting from it must not be forgotten ; as the tattooer's song says : 196 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND . . . Every line be duly drawn. On the man who's rich and great Shape your figures fair and straight ; On the man who cannot pay Make them crooked, coarse, and spla)'. Here, as with other Polynesians, tattooing is no doubt founded upon, and proceeds from, some religious idea. It is regarded as a sacred profession, which / -^1 f}^^ TV ^^1 /^' ' "^ ^^^ E y "^ ^"^^^^^^^ m i ' ^ \ \lyiK™|^||J ! -^ ""^^^ffij^n ' ,1 -" ^^■|^Kr ~^ "^ 1 Jk i^^^Sm / ^ Y M ^fjMttfr^jJjt ^ m ^^»i l^'i^H ^^V n,^^^ Vv^^^^^fflS^^ 1 ^'^ \ ^ hUmh^ fcfej^^v, ^mH^HF -^ ' '/l^Bimi ^^^mHv X it^^HKk ^^Sl- J ^X^^^MH ^H f^B. ^-I '^f^M^ ~ -^^ ''mK^B Ife^jy^^^^S-^ ,^5S;S> " ^^IKKSt ■^^■■hII^^^^^ ^'"^ ^' — -^ 1 -.S^TT^S^^^ '^^^^^r ^- ' — j^ ,.^^; x> ■-- ^^^^.~_^ , ^, ^ Tattooed Maoris. (From a photograph in the possession of Herr Max Buchner. ) is exercised by the priest to the accompaniment of prayers and hymns. The figures depicted are often those of sacred animals like snakes and lizards. In Samoa it is based on the doctrine of the Aiua or tutelary spirit in beast shape ; which was why the missionaries found it so hard to put an end to the practice. In the Micronesian region tattooing has become to a great extent a pure matter of decoration, but not everywhere. On Nukuor the women live for three months secluded in the sacred house, and bathe in the sea before undergoing the operation,, which extends only to a small portion of the lower part of the body. In the Radack group the patient spends the previous night in the house of the chief,. who prays for favourable tokens. In the Society and Paumotu Islands, the Marquesas, the Carolines, differences are made according to rank ; the common people being tattooed on the loins only, whilst the Ern or Art'h' are distinguished by large circular markings over the whole body. In the Gilbert Islands a poor man who is tattooed enjoys more influence in the general council than a rich man whose surface is blank. On Rotuma caste-distinctions are indicated by tattooing.. THE POLYNESIANS AND MICRONESIANS 197 Yet the chief's rank is not always thus expressed ; many chiefs are but slightly tattooed, while ordinary citizens show this ornament all over their persons. In the Marshall Islands the right of tattooing the cheeks is reserved to the chiefs, while on Mortlock Island differences of rank are shown in the decoration of the legs. The two sides of the body are often unsymmetrical, and in this case the right side receives the more elaborate treatment. The Samoans select for tattooing exactly the region which we cover with bathing-drawers ; the effect produced being that of a striped and spotted cloth wrapped about them. Among the Maoris it took years before the body was ornamented up to the design conceived in ^;he artist's fancy ; but with them the traits of the face are literally dissolved in arabesques. The operation, as applied to lips, eyelids, and nose, was painful, especially before the introduction of iron ; in the Hervey Islands, Forster saw even tenderer portions of the frame sedu- lously tattooed. The method is in this wise. The figure is drawn where required ; then a little stick, pointed with stone, bone (human bone for choice), or iron, is tapped with a wooden mallet so as to form a series of punctures along the lines. The tattooing tools consist of an instrument something like a little hoe, made of hard wood — four shapes occur in Samoa — the flat blade of which terminates in a number of sharp teeth, and a little mallet made of the same wood and shaped like a paddle, which serves to drive it in. For colouring, the Maoris use the soot of kaiiri-'^me. wood. Besides this, in time of mourning the skin of the face, arms, and legs has to undergo cutting with sharp shells, while at festivities it was usual to colour it with red and black paint. Thus when Cook visited Easter Island the women had painted their faces with ruddle, some also with the yellow dye of the turmeric ; others whitening them with cross-streaks of lime. Herewith we may reckon the fact that in accordance with the proverb " No wife for a hairy man," every vestige of hair is removed from the face ; though it is otherwise in Micronesia. In other parts of the body the hair is extracted with tweezers made of mussel-shell. Circumcision in a modified form is very common ; though over large regions such as Hawaii and New Zealand it is not practised, and elsewhere, as in the Marquesas, is not universal. This operation also is of a religious character, and is performed by the priests. The mode of wearing the hair is suited to its stiff growth, and is simple accordingly. It is either worn unfastened and falling, or is cut off. The latter course seems, in the Society Islands and their neighbourhood, to have been enjoined upon all women except those of the royal family. In the Friendly Islands men and women wear the hair cut short and combed upwards in bristles. By powdering with lime the tips are reddened, while turmeric gives a golden gloss. The fashion of wearing the hair tied in a top-knot may perhaps be an imitation : on the very first day of Cook's visit a Tahitian chief copied his bag-wig. With the imperfect cutting-tools at their disposal, the shaving of the head was no light Tattooing instruments from the Friendly Islands — one - third real size. (British Museum). igS THE HISTORY OF MANKIND matter ; and there were few among the achievements of civilization which the Polynesians had cause to prize so highly as scissors and razors. In Micronesia the head-ornament consists almost everywhere of a long narrow wooden comb, with ten or twelve teeth, decorated about the handle, and at times furnished with a rich feather-ornament. The long hairpins serve also to allay the irritation of frequent insect-bites. The curly hair of the Gilbert Islanders is frizzed up with a stick till it stands out in a crown. On Mortlock Island the head -ring is covered with iibres after the manner of a brush ; while on Nukuor the head- dress is formed of a long plate of wood, broadening towards the top. This sort of thing, however, must no doubt be regarded as a dance -ornament or a reli- gious emblem. The ances- tral statues often carry a similar adornment. Actual head-coverings are not usual, or are permitted only at night, or out of the country. In the Carolines, as formerly in Hawaii, European hats are directly imitated. On Fakaafo in the Tokelau Islands, Hale saw boat- men wearing eye -shades of closely- plaited material bound on to their foreheads, just as weak-sighted people A man of Ponap^ in the Carolines. (From a photograph in the Godeffroy ^^^^ ^'^ .^'^ "^- . Album.) As With tattoomg, SO , , feather ornaments extend back from the domain of secular fashion to that of religion. Birds are among the sacred animals, and this is especially the case with that bird which in its red tai -feathers affords the article most sought for ornamental purposes among the Polynesians, the Tropic-bird {Phaethon). At one time no article of commerce was in such demand in the Society Islands. The feathers were stuck on to banana- leaves, which were bound on the forehead ; and even on the coco-nut fibre aprons of the dancing-girls. The most valuable head-dresses were made of feathers. Other objects of wide distribution were the supple necklaces of twisted string, in which coloured feathers were twined. In the Marquesas and on Easter Island feather-diadems were also worn. But it was in Hawaii that feather- THE POLYNESIANS AND MICRONESIANS 199 ornament reached its greatest development and its highest value. The feathers of Melithreptes Pacifica were luxuries which forty years ago were permitted only to the most distinguished people. Helmet-shaped head-dresses were decorated with yellow feathers, quite reminding one in their shape and colour of the head- gear worn by Buddhist priests. Trifles of the most various kind find employment for decorative purposes. In its shells of many colours the sea provides copious material. Flowers and tendrils are worn in tasteful style round the neck, in the hair, in the ears, even in the nose. Knotted strings oi pandanus-\e.z.i or coco-nut fibre serve not only for purposes of divination, but, as on Ule, for the reckoning of time ; and many chiefs wear them for that purpose round their necks. Or are we to see in this a kind of record of memoranda {Dui) such as the chiefs carry in Pelew ? To these superstition adds shells and bones of particular shape, human bones, human teeth ; even millipedes are strung together for necklaces. Pendants of birds' bones and ear-ornaments of albatross-skin were favourite modes of adornment with the New Zealanders. On Tongatabu the natives used as ornaments the iron nails which Cook had brought for trade-purposes ; one nail was the price of a hen. In Tonga chains were made of long thin leg -bones, alternating with small brown snail-shells, and from them hung a large mother-of-pearl shell. Single teeth, birds carved from sperm-whales' teeth, black and white beads Breastplate of mother-of-pearl set in iron. . and with sling of human hair — one-fourth made from shells, are also hung round the neck. real size. (Christy Collection. ) Combs made of the stalks of plants, bound close and evenly round the upper end with finely-plaited fibres are among the most beautiful productions of Tongan art. In Hawaii the ornaments are either for the feet, thickly set with dogs' teeth, snail-shells, or beans, or else armlets made of carved pieces of bone or tortoise-shell, all of one size, fastened into a flexible whole by doubled threads passed through them. Similar strings with closely- ranged disks of shell, divided by smaller disks of a black nutshell, are used as money and also occur as foot and arm ornaments. In Micronesia also garlands of fresh flowers, red and yellow, play an important part in feminine adornment. A shell, a circular piece of mother-of-pearl or tortoiseshell, little polished disks of Conus shell, all strung on a thread of human hair, form the favourite gaud of the Gilbert and Marshall Islanders. On Pingelap bits of red Spondylus shell are liked for necklaces ; elbow-rings of Conus and Nautilus shells are worn on Yap. A Polynesian with all his jewellery upon him gives the impression of being overlaid with varied hues. But the taste for colour, in the absence of staring mineral pigments, was formerly much better developed than it is now that European traders have taken to dressing these people in their stuffs at so much a yard. Both sexes among the Polynesians are graceful ; nor is coquetry unknown. On Sundays the Samoan women put on a long and ample chemise- like garment, always of a bright colour, which suits them charmingly. When THE HISTORY OF MANKIND they go to church they add a tiny straw-hat, decked with flowers and ribbons of many colours, stuck as much as possible on the side of the head. For dancing, i. Woman of Ponap^. 2. Woman of the Paumotu Islands (From photograph in the Godeffroy Album). 3. Women of the Society Islands (From photograph in the Dammara Album). masks are worn ; also a peculiar ear-ornament, and skirts of leaves so dry that as they move to the tune a rustling sound arises. Red paint is also freely THE POLYNESIANS AND MICRONESIANS employed, and they carry paddle-shaped dancing-wands. The Polynesians belong to the better-clad I'aces ; they have advanced far beyond the point of mere covering and gone in the direction of luxury. For this reason their bark stuffs, tapa 3ir\d gnaiu, and their mats form the largest and most valuable part of their property ; in some districts mats are a recognised form of currency. In many cases a skirt is worn girt about the waist and falling to the feet ; the Tahitian women used to wear a cloth over their shoulders with an opening for the head in the middle, and, in addition, a skirt made of finer stuff. Both sexes wore another cloth wound turban fashion round the head. In the Friendly Islands the dress was simpler ; the skirt of the men was twisted up in a great bunch behind often very short ; that of the women tied below the breast, and as a rule not ac- companied by the cape. Simi- larly in Samoa and the neigh- bouring islands the dress of men and women consists of a piece of cotton cloth wound round the hips and reaching to the knee ; leaves are frequently employed for the same purpose. In wet weather the bark cloth is often replaced by a mantle of long broad leaves which hang down in a fringe ; on solemn and festive occasions the natives put on a fine mat of plaited fibre. The inhabit- ants of the eastward islands are scantily clothed. The Easter Islanders, when first seen by Forster, were either quite naked or with an inade- quate apron hanging from the girdle. In the Society Islands, on the contrary, the luxury of Samoan lady with hair dressed high. (From the Godeffroy Album. ) clothing acquires a symbolical significance. The war-clothes there consist of three poncho-like garments put on one over another : the undermost a long white one, over that a red, and outside all a short brown one. A dense envelopment of the whole body in as many cloths as possible stands for a sign of a peaceful reception. In the time of Cook and Forster the Tahitian dancing-girls wore a piece of brown stuff closely wrapped round the breast. About the hips was a pad of four layers of cloth, one upon another, alternately red and white, bound close with a cord whence a mass of white cloth hung to the feet. The dress of the New Zealanders consisted of skirt and mats ; these were fastened on the right shoulder in men, on the left in women, the men wearing in' addition a flax belt from which hung the mere and battle-axe. Head and feet remained a? a rule uncovered, though some tribes on the middle island had flax sandals. What the axe of greenstone is as a THE HISTORY OF MANKIND production of male industry, the mat is in the case of the women. From flax alone they prepared twelve different mats. Besides this, rugs were made of, or trimmed with, the skins of dogs and birds. The only distinction of rank, other than tattooing, was shown by the mats. Every tribe had at one time some Man of the Ruk Islands. (From the Godeffroy Album. ) special pattern of these, the differences consisting in the preparation of the fibre and in the ornamentation. The clothing of the Micronesians is less copious. In the northern Pelew Islands we find men going quite naked. On Nukuor any clothing beyond the absolute requirements of decency is allowed only at night and outside the reef. THE POLYNESIANS AND MICRONESIANS 203 The Mortlock and Ruk Islanders are at the other end of the scale with their poncho-like mantles woven of musa and hibiscus fibres and having the hole for the head bordered with shell ornament. On the other hand, on Ruk the boys do not obtain the mantle and therewith the privileges of male society until a later age than that at which the girls are clothed with the apron. Here the list of a chiefs wardrobe consists of mantle, belt, ear-ornaments, and rings of nutshell, two necklaces, armlets, and breast- ornament. A Caroline Islander of the old style wears in the first place a shirt made out of narrow strips of coco-palm leaves reaching almost to the knee, over which the men on festive occasions put a second of a pretty yellow colour, broad in the fibre and longer. Sometimes Caro- line Islanders who have become Europeanised, continue to wear the skirt under their shirts. Besides this it was formerly the custom with both sexes to wear a belt supporting a band made of banana fibres gaily coloured which passed between the legs. Among the inhabitants of Kushai this formed the only clothing. This product of Caroline industry was woven on a machine in which the weft was contrived by a laborious knotting together of various coloured threads, while partly the same threads, partly also red woollen yarn, were employed for the warp. On the Mortlock and Ruk Islands broader girdles of i 5 to 25 strings were worn, with little disks of nutshell arranged on them. According to Kubary's reckoning, not less than 12,500 of these were required for a girdle of twenty strings, so that among these islanders the girdle is among the most highly-prized articles of clothing. Combs from Tonga — one-fourth real size. (British Museum.) Bone comb from New Zealand — one-third real size. (British Museum.) Equally valuable used to be the girdles made only to order by the people of Pelew, from opercula of a rare tridacna shell, and the chains known as klilt, made of sixty-four tortoiseshell plates. While the men have often remained faithful to tradition, the dress of the women has been altered much more owing to the intercourse with white people. They wear coloured cotton pocket-handkerchiefs both round the waist and also poncho-wise over breast and shoulders. The stuffs made of strips of palm leaf and bast have almost disappeared. 204 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND The weapons and utensils of the Polynesians are remarkably varied and abundant ; but among the Melanesians we meet with a still more copious display of inventiveness and artistic ingenuity. The absence of iron is especially noticeable. When Europeans first came into contact with Polynesians, they found them compelled to make up for the want of metals by using stones, bones, and shells. Few of the Polynesian islands possess metallic ores. On the coral islands this might be expected, but it is also true in most cases of the volcanic formations. Man of the Ruk Islands. (From the Godeffroy Album. ) But the level of culture among these races is such as to make us believe that if they had discovered the raw material they would have advanced to the use of the metals. With stone, bones, teeth, wood, they have achieved all that was possible. The implements of navigation and fishery, the boats and hooks, are perfect of their kind, and show evidence not only of cleverness but of the inventive faculty. Unlike the Australians and Bushmen, as soon as they get iron they know what to do with it. Naturally, iron was also converted to purposes of ornament ; and as the value of glass beads had already dropped considerably, iron ware of all kinds Coco and Sago Palms. THE POLYNESIANS AND MICRONESIANS 207 remained the leading article of European trade. They made it available at first in the forms to which they had long been accustomed, putting pieces of iron hoop into their axes in place of Tridacna shells, as shown in the cut on p. 208, but retaining in other respects the customary form of the implement. On Ponapd, where we can date the end of the Stone Age about the beginning of the twenties of the present century, iron blades were still always fixed in the lemon-wood handles as the stone had been ; but the old stone ones were kept, as sacred relics, in the most secret corners of the house. For all heavy implements, especially hammers, adzes, and axes, stone was the most valuable material. It was less so for spears, and stone arrowheads were never in Obsidian axes from E^ter Island — one-third real size. (British Museum. ) use. In Polynesian and Melanesian stone-axes we are struck at once by the fact of their not being perforated, and by the rudimentary workmanship of the outline, though careful rounding and polishing are not unknown. Even with the choicest material and the most careful workmanship these axes do not go far beyond the simple wedge ; and thus we seldom find them ground either hollow in the neck for attachment, or to a curve in the sides. The simplest on the whole are the New Zealand axes or adzes ; often plain rectangles, with the edge ground not in a curve, but angular. Even in the very large and handsome axes from Hawaii the cutting is rough so far as the rows of string which fasten the head to the handle extend. But the rudest of all are the hatchets of the Easter Islanders, resembling rather knives, " knapped " from obsidian or lava, very broad in the blade and short in the handle. The axes of New Guinea and the neighbouring islands are often not inferior to these in size, but are more rounded ; being fastened not on but into the handle. The Hawaiian axes, 8 to 16 inches long in the blade, are in size and shape more like those of New Zealand, but are flattened off where they are laid against the helve. Long, narrow, chisel-like stone blades are also found in this region ; while the large ornamental axes of the Hervey Islands have thin blades of basalt of a spade-shape, often somewhat curved. The fitting of the axe was everywhere essentially similar. Those which Cook brought from Tahiti 2o8 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND consisted of a wooden handle with an appendage like a heel projecting behind ; the stone-axe, flat above and two-edged underneath, is attached to the front part, which ^New 7r,lH '-T^fw"". Hawan-one-sixth real size. .. Adze with carved helve, probably from ^Zr^lTLj'^'^\ f, i' °'^ the Marquesas and Society Islai>ds-one-sixth real size. 5. Obsidian fo,mh re,1 str f I='and-oi>e-third real size. 6. Pair of compasses from the Society Islands-one- fourth real size, (i, 3, 4, 6, Christy Collection ; .., 5, British Museum. ) falls away at a slant, by means of a string which is first wound round the handle, then crosswise over the blade and the projection. Much care is devoted to the THE POLYNESIANS AND MICRONESIANS 209 winding of this string, notably by the Hervey Islanders ; though, except in the case of ornamental axes, the handle is not much smoothed. Of Micro- nesian axes the greater number have blades of shell, chiefly from Terebra maadata and Tridacna gigas ■ the broad back-bones of tortoises are also used. Curiously enough the Micro- nesians, as on Ponap6, overlooked their admirably adapted stone, never getting beyond shells. In the Marshall Islands the adze with semicircular shell-blade was preferred to the iron adze for hollowing out canoes. The polishing of the blade with sand or pumice is the task of the old men. Thrusting-spears seem to have been formerly regarded by the Poly- nesians as their chief weapon. They were sometimes made of wood with the point hardened in the fire ; som,e- times strengthened with stone blades, the tail-spine of the sting-ray, splin- ters of bone, or sharks' teeth. For a long time they were twice the height of a man ; where casuarina wood was lacking coco-palm was used. Spears were given away with great reluctance ; they were wrought and adorned and ornamented with special care. Spears were equally the chief weapons of the Micronesians ; they were armed with barbs made of sting -ray spines, human bones, the snout of the garfish, or sharks' teeth, but they are never so artistic as in Melanesia. These weapons serve for thrusting at close quarters : shorter spears sharpened at both ends were used for throwing ; a spear thrower of bamboo is recorded from Pelew. Purely wood weapons include the sword of the Pelew Islanders, and the pahu, or dagger of hard wood, in Yap of reed, 20 inches or rather more in length, spatula-shaped in the handle, and gradually tapering, thence Maori chiefs insignia and sceptres — one-eighth real size. (Christy Collection. ) P THE HISTORY OF MANKIND carried in a sheath of vegetable fibres ; angular stone blades from 8 to 1 6 inches long afforded ponderous hand weapons. Next to the spear the chief weapon is the club, generally made from heavy iron -wood ^f^ Its ornamentation makes it an interesting produc- tion of Polynesian art. It formed the main strength of the Tongans, the most beautifully exe- cuted type being the paddle shape, which ap- pears to have become obsolete even in Cook's time, round in the handle, flattened above, often brought into a four- cornered shape by the strong accentuation of the middle rib, and either cut off square at the end or running out in an elliptical point. The whole club from the handle to the point is covered with carving, which either passes round in one spiral band, or forms a series of chequers divided by the side edges and the middle ribs, or else laid over and over each other in simple cross bands. The ornaments consist of straight or zig-zag lines drawn close to- gether, a roughly indi- cated human form being nearly always present. ' li^aiiy diWctya piCSCilL. '■■ '^f^^'^. ^"^^ ^"°*' ^^''i '° '°^ ^''°'" 'he Society Islands— one-eighth real size Stars and CrescentS often (Christy Collection.) 2. W^ooden djurirpi- fmm m«,., v„„i j ...._ (Christy Collection^) 2 Wooden dagger from New 'zealand^'two- aooear aq wpIi" pTfimVrpq sevenths real size (British Museum). 3. Spear set with sharks' teeth from ^PP^^'^' ^^ ^Cll aS tlgUrCS the Gilbert Islands — one - fifteenth real size (Munich Ethnographical of fisheS and tOrtoiseS. Museum). 4. Saw, said to be used also as dagger, of ray-spine from TU 1 11.. Pelew— one-third real size (Berlin Museum). ^ "^7 ^^Ve a shauk tO ,, ... , , , hang them up by. Beside these richly carved clubs smooth ones are also found quite flat, paddle-shaped with a ring below the blade, and others of a simple mallet-shape with short handle. -Paddles of honour" is a name given to paddle-shaped objects 6 feet long and THE POLYNESIANS AND MICRONESIANS 211 more, either carved in cross bands like the clubs, or sculptured in a fashion which reminds one of elegantly chipped flint instruments. The Marquesas Islanders I I. Wooden swords from Pelew and Hawaii— one-fifth real size (British Museum). 2. Bow and arrow from the Friendly Islands— one-third real size (Christy Collection). 3. Saw of ray-spine, said to be from Pelew— one-third real size (British Museum.) 4. Bone spear-head— real size (Christy Collection). are distinguished in the manufacture of these beautiful clubs ; the blade of their paddle-shaped clubs, like almost every production of their artistic dexterity, con- tains a fantastically executed human countenance. But the most beautiful THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Hawaiian wicker-w ork helmet — one fourth real size. (Berlin Museum. ) paddle -shaped clubs were certainly made by the Hervey Islanders, who ex- aggerated the delicate cell-carving of the Tongans to the verge of the finikin. The Tahitians and the most closely allied tribes devoted much trouble to the polishing of their weapons. The axes of the Hervey Islanders with perforated handles, or the over- elegant clubs of the Tongans, were obviously designed in the first in- stance as insignia of rank, and can only exceptionally have been used in fighting. The ceremonial axes of Rarotonga and Tahiti may also have been originally to some extent in use, and have been, with their symbolically worked handles, preserved after the owner's death as a memorial. Spears also were converted into tokens of rank ; among these the New Zealand sceptres of honour were conspicuous for length and decoration. They vary in shape between staff and paddle, the simplest being cylindrical staves with jagged longi- tudinal lines. They end in a more or less compli- cated knob, in the spirals and twists of which may always be detected eyes, or even a human figure. Axes, pipes, daggers, flutes, are often in no way inferior in ornament- ation to these decorative objects, and yet they must have been in use. They show how the whole life and action of Polynesia was imbued in a dignified manner with religious images, symbols, and ceremonies. In the way of tools we find sharks' teeth set in a J u J 1 • Small weapons with sharks' teeth from Tonga, dagger and baler from Hawaii, WOOaen nanale servmg and gourd bottle from New Caledonia. {Vienna Museum. ) THE POLYNESIANS AND MICRONESIANS 313 for graving tools, also wooden bows with similar teeth at both ends for use in drawing circles. Small weapons of sharks' teeth, intended for the cutting up of prisoners, served to gratify the horrible passion for torture ; and were also employed in the self-lacerations practised by mourners in token of their grief. Perhaps we should reckon among these the implement made of the sting of a ray, shown in the illustration on p. 210, equally available as file or dagger. Weapons of sharks' teeth reached a fine development in the Society Islands and in Hawaii. The kind of forked sword made from a three-or-four-forked bough of casuarina, and set with these teeth, was regarded as the most terrible weapon. The Berlin Museum possesses a club from Yap, made of the bones of the whale, and set with rays' spines. The population of the Gilbert or Kingsmill Islands, by con- sistent progress in this particular direction, acquired a peculiar style in the manufacture of weapons, demanding both industry and dexterity. One might suppose they were a powerful race living in a constant state of war. The fitting of their weapons with sharks' teeth, which were fastened on with strings of coco-nut fibre twisted with human hair, appears like a further development of the weapon found among the Malays, consisting of the saw of the saw-fish. The necessary counterpart to this weapon-making skill is the armour. Closely plaited of string, coarse and thick, this must have been painfully heavy to wear, but was necessary if only to weaken the moral effect of the sharks' teeth. A helmet made from the prickly skin of the Diodon or porcupine fish completed this original equipment. Bows and arrows were in Cook's time used only for hunting or in sport ; and now they hardly exist in Micronesia and Polynesia. The bow of the Friendly Islands, which was only used to shoot rats, is yet a very fine weapon. It is as high as a man, beautifully made of polished firm wood, and fitted with a strong twisted string ; but its companion the quiver has quite disappeared, and the number of arrows is reduced to one. The Pelew natives use, for pigeon-shooting, bows of mangrove wood with a string of fibre. In New Zealand, language indicates a former acquaintance with the weapon. In the Gilbert Islands, Paumotu, and Easter Island, bows are entirely absent ; and in the Hawaiian group they appear to have been re-introduced only in the course of the present century. It is, however, incorrect to say that, owing to the gradual cessation of hunting in these islands with few animals, weapons of long range held no place in Polynesian strategy. Next t>o the spear and the javelin the sling is the most frequent Micronesian weapon ; slings of plaited twine, like those of Melanesia, are known in the Mortlock and Caroline Islands. Next to them come short thro wing-clubs. In the Marquesas the sling made of coco-nut fibre, throwing stones, polished or angular, as big as hen's eggs, is among the most dreaded weapons. Clever slingers were in high esteem, and formed a special troop in the Tahitian army. At favourable moments they would advance beyond the mass of the host, and let fly at the enemy with loud shouts. In many parts of Polynesia the variety of offensive weapons diverted attention from any care for defensive armour and other means of protection ; battles had a ceremonial character, and the object of weapons was to make a warrior seem prouder and more terrible. Unfortunately we have no accurate description of the Tahitian equipment. The greatest value was attached to the head-dress. Among the Hawaiians this was an elegant helmet of feather -work ; among 214 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND the tribes of the Austral Islands, of a fantastic shape. To attack the wearer of a conspicuous head adornment was reckoned a heroic action ; his fall often decided the engagement. Another article of Tahitian uniform was a collar, decked with feathers and shells, which served as a breastplate. Parkinson saw Gilbert Islanders ready for fight, with the hard dried skin of a ray wrapped round breast and belly under their coco-fibre armour, and on the top of all as much cordage as could be got on. They themselves, with their ray-spined spear 20 feet long, did not advance, but only stimulated the fighters. In Tongatabu, Forster found a large flat breastplate made of a round bone, probably that of some kind of whale ; it was 20 inches in diameter and beautifully polished. The Marquesan adornment of the same kind consists of pieces of a light cork-like wood, tied into a half-ring, fastened with resin, and set with red a&rus-heans. Among poorer races this breastplate seems to be replaced by a shell. In the flat shell, often ground to a tooth-shape, which many Polynesians wear hanging on their breasts, we may perhaps recognise a reduced form of this. § s. THE NEGROID RACES OF TPIE PACIFIC AND INDIAN OCEANS Distribution — Traces of an earlier more extensive distribution in tlie Indian Ocean^Colour ; Skull ; Hair ; Bodily build ; Resemblance to Negroes— Alleged race of Dwarfs— Relation of Papuas and Negritos- Misunderstanding of the name Alfurs — Character and mental qualities of the Melanesian population. Crossing the eastern boundary of Melanesia, we at once come in the Fiji Islands across a plainly negroid race, the traces of which to the eastv/ard we have already mentioned (see p. 147 sqq.). Beyond the region defined as Melanesia, it is found in the interior of India and Ceylon. In the Malay Archipelago it extends westward as far as Timor ; when we get to Lombok we find Malays. To one particular group, the Negritos, may be with much probability assigned an extension to east and north formerly much wider. The inhabitants of the interior of the Philippines, who live in a state of warfare with the Malays who invade the coast districts, belong to this group. The Aborigines of the Andamans are nearly akin, and some profess to point to traces of the race in the Mariannes and in Micronesia. Qurtrefages found his so-called "Mincopie-Type "even in the Japanese skull, though in an attenuated form. Remains of negroid tribes are also said to be known in the interior of Malacca and in India. This dispersed and fragmentary occurrence of the dark element has suggested to many observers the view that we should see therein an earlier population of these and neighbouring regions, for which the continent of Southern Asia formed a bridge between the Indo-Pacific • and the African domains of the Negro. Upon this the lighter men were superimposed in a broad layer, leading on the mainland to every possible degree of crossing. Here also we must guard against any cut-and-dried notions with respect to the relations of ever-shifting races. The Papuas made forays against Asia, and came in great numbers as slaves to Ceram and the Eastern part of the Malay Archipelago. In this way we may explain in some measure those races not woolly-haired, but crisp or curly-haired, which, starting from Ceram, have made their way among the straight- haired population. The name Alfuros or Alfurs has nothing to do with these (i-3) Necklaces of shell and beans, with limpet-shells. (4 and 5) Ear-pendants, with dolphin's teeth. (6 and 7) Ear-buttons of whale's tooth. (8) Necklace of tortoise-shell. (9) Neck ornament. (10) Necklace. (11) Wooden fillet for the head. (12) Ear-button made of a ray's vertebra. (13, 14) Armlets of black wood and whale's tooth. (15) Neck ornament. (16) Necklace of shell-disks and whale's tooth. (1-7, Marquesas ; 8 and 15, Friendly Islands; 9, Hervey Islands; 10, 11, Society Islands; 12, Easter Island; 13, 14, Hawaii; 16, Nukuor.) THE NEGROID RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND INDIAN OCEANS 215 Papua-like and Negrito-like elements. Thus, without speaking of the dark races everywhere as a primitive population, we may at least denote them as probably the older. In the colour of the skin dark tints prevail without quite reaching the depth of much Negro colouring. The nearest to this, perhaps, is the colour of many Solomon Islanders ; manifold admixtures of lighter elements are the cause of the frequency of various shading. In Western Fiji, in the New Hebrides, Malicollo, and New Britain, the dolichocephalic form of skull prevails. The dark crisp-haired population of negroid exterior in the Malayan Archipelago and New Guinea are said to be brachycephalic, as are the so-called Mincopies of the Andamans. According to Krauser the Fijian skull is highly prognathous. At one time it was alleged that their hair grew in tufts, in which it was sought to find a distinction from the African Negro ; now it has been discovered that the hair is distributed pretty evenly over the scalp, and only assumes the tufted appearance when it New Guinea girl. (From a Photograph in the possession of Herr W. Joost, Berlin.) becomes long. Individual hairs are coarse, wiry, and of elliptical section ; on the face and body the hair seems to be stronger than in Negroes. The frequent occurrence of small individuals is a curious feature in the negroid population of the Indo-Malayan region. In many tribes they form a decided majority, and are clearly distinguished from the others. The average height of the Papuas of New Guinea and the neighbouring islands is between 5 feet 5 inches and 5 feet 8 inches. The Fijians even, especially in the upper classes, are often taller than the whites ; on the other hand, for the Andaman Islanders the standard is from 4 feet 6 inches to 5 feet ; for the Negritos the average is 5 feet. The measurement among the Kanjhars of South India is for men 5 feet i inch to S feet 3 inches ; the Veddahs of Ceylon 4 feet 9 inches to 4 feet 1 1 inches ; the Paliars of Travancore about S feet 3 inches ; the Kardars of the Anamalai mountains from $ feet i inch to 5 feet 5 inches. The resemblance to Negroes which predominates in the total of the phenomena :i6 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND is constanth- being insisted on ; 260 years ago Tasman expressed it by sajing that they only differed from Kciffirs in having less woolly hair. Observers like Finsch and D'Albertis take every opportunitj- of rejecting the notion of a special Papuan race ; the prevailing type of the Melanesiaiis is only a slight variation, recognisable by the greater abundance of hair on the face and body, and by peculiarities in the features. In the larger archipelagos the natives displaj- various departures from the tj-pe which may be referred partly to ]\Ialayo-Polynesian crossing, partly to the influence of their surroundings. Not to mention Fiji, with its patchwork of races, the New Hebrides unfold before us a real book of patterns. On the Southern Islands the inhabitants are better developed than in the north ; on Tanna they are handsomer, bolder, and of finer character than elsewhere ; on Api they are lean, ugly, and very tall ; on Erromango they are very short. Even in maps of the sixteenth century there appear off the coast of New Guinea Islas de Mala Gente side by side with Islas de Honibres Blancos. Thus it is impossible to speak of a geographical division of these dark races into one group of eastern dolichocephalic Papuas and one of western brachycephalic Xeg^tos, for the conditions under which the latter dwell are even less favourable to the production of unalloyed characteristics. With their widespread distribution we shall expect to find them dividing up into sub-races. Here we are justified in inquiring into the relation which they hold towards the Australians. Certain points of agreement are obvious — dark skins, pronounced hairiness, beards ; besides this we have relationship of language. We maj- admit the variet}- of the Australian race, and that Australia has probabl}' been invaded by elements from New Guinea and Polynesia. It is not the case that the woolly-haired Australians are confined to the north or north-east ; there are many Austra- lians who come nearer than the Papuas to the mi.xed Polynesian breed. Independently of the differences and transitions called into existence by Polynesian immigration, leanness of the arms and legs, bad proportions, an ill-nourished condition, are noticed as approximations to the Australian t}-pe. Besides this we find also physiognomies reminding us of Indians, Jews, or Europeans. Great confusion has arisen from the application of the name Negritos, especially to the inhabitants of the Philippines, a mixed dark race with straight hair. One view with regard to these ^ -__ Negritos may be summarised in the statement Man of N>«- TrPi=.nH /p .u ^ J ^ '^^^^ ^'^^y ^""^ ^^'^ the most part brown men, with Man ot .New Ireland. (From the Godefiroy „, 1 / u ,, , Album.) curly (seldom woolly) or even straight hair — a race of the mountains, the forests, and the chase and departing from the Malayan race-type in respect more of their social and geographical position than of any anthropological marks.i When the Spaniards came to the Philippines they found Malays on the coast, Tagals more inland; and in the mountains, the Aetas, ^\ ho were driven back and decaying. Con- THE NEGROID RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND INDIAN OCEANS 217 sidering the wide diffusion of Negroid elements, it is not astonishing if they have mingled in this socially inferior group of races ; they arc found also in other regions in which both Malayoid and Negroid elements are included. The darker population in the cast of the Malay Archipelago at least reminds us, in a certain hybrid character, of the Negritos, as found in Hahnaliera or Gilolo, and the interior of Great Nicobar. In the Malay Peninsula the Negroid element reappears more clearly. On other islands of this region, too, we meet with a race, swarthier than the other inhabitants, slim and tall, with woolly or crisp hair, living in the mountain districts of the interior. They were known as Harafara or Alfurs. But if the distinctions between the tribes who have been driven back into the interior and those who live on the coast are often, even in small islands, as great as those between Bushmen and Hottentots, the effects of social and political distinctions take precedence of distinction of race. The Orang Panggang and Orang Scmang in the interior of Malacca are de- scribed as little men, mostly dark, with crisp hair. Maclay compares them with the Negritos of the Philii)pines, and speaks of " men of pure Melanesian blood among them." A claim to form a group by themselves is made also by the small races diverging in many respects from the Papuan type, who live in the western part of this area of diffusion. The Andamanese may pass as their typical form. The face has a bene- volent, gentle expression ; the forehead is arched ; the eyes are round, and set horizontally ; the nose is small and straight ; the lips not strikingly prominent. In India dark men are numerous, extending far to the north. The assumption that we have here to do with a great racial struggle in former times has been strengthened by the poetical exaggerations of tradition, which draws a sharp contrast between the combatant races, as black and white ; deriding the flat and nose- less countenances of the dark foe ; and even depicting them as apes. But thorough research has always tended to lighten the dark colour of this race, and raise their level of culture. Indeed, the important and talented race called Tamils belong to this group. Some have thought fit to reckon the blended little race known as the Veddahs of Ceylon among the most degraded of the earth ; but the more evidence comes to hand, the clearer it becomes that they are not even so dark as many Tamils ; that, as regards the face, the distinction is small between them Fijian lady. ( From Godeffroy Album. ) 2l8 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND and the highly-civilized Cingalese ; that their hair is not at all the woolly hair of the Negro ; and that their language is an Indian dialect full of Sanscrit words, and alloyed with Dra vidian elements. Must we then perhaps look for the real negro element in the small crisp- haired men or black dwarfs who are said to live in trees in the Athrumalli mountains of South India? Jagor has drawn these tree dwellings (see p. 1 08), but they only serve as places of refuge, otherwise these ill - famed people live in regular villages. If in the descriptions of them it has been again and again pointed out that they live on products of the jungle, eat mice, dwell among the branches, worship demons ; nevertheless social debase- ment and anthropological degradation remain quite distinct things, and if the Kaders, the Nairs, and other mountain tribes of South India are depicted as thick- lipped dwarfs, the example of the Veddahs shows us how much these random descrip- tions can be depended on. Even the fact that some of these tribes file their teeth to a point, while others live in polyandry, and observe the Tamil custom of inheritance through the mother, or that men and youths live separately in one great house, need not give them any lower a place in our eyes. Traces of these customs run through all mankind, even the traces of cannibalism in the mountain tribes of Assam are not astonishing. A more important fact is that some of them have used stone weapons and utensils even to our own time, and in connection with this we remember that traces of the Stone Age, probably recent, are found in the whole region of the eastern Indian ocean, where iron now has the upper hand. Some of the dark races of India have quite recently made advances which are still compatible with relics of their former savage forest life. The Santals of Lower Bengal have not only learnt to till the ground, but have adopted the plough, and in the course of a century have from hunters and brigands become a peaceful people of more than a million souls. The Khonds, who dwell farther to the south, no doubt carry on their agriculture still in a semi-nomadic fashion, some communities migrating every fourteen years ; but they have become peaceable and have abandoned their human sacrifices. The 46 million Dravidians of South India include, beside some poor nomadic tribes, a great majority of races Fijian gentleman. (From Godeffroy Album. ) THE NEGROID RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND INDIAN OCEANS 219 who may bo reckoned as props of Indian civilization in the same sense as the Aryans. The difference between the Melanesian character and the Polynesian has often been noted. It lies essentially on the Negro side. Their bodily resemblance is paralleled by a mental one. The Melanesian is more impulsive, more frank, noisier, and more violent than the Polynesian. In cases where he appears in less favourable light, the key to many contradictions is to be found in a pride which at one moment is elated, and at the next has a keen scent for anything like injury. Those who know the Fijians best depict them as the vainest of all men. A casual utterance will cause a woman to sit down in the public place of a village, shed tears without end, and fill the air with lamentations and a flood of scolding and threatening language. The cry will be heard from the top of a hill, " War, war ! will no man kill me that I may go to the shade of my father?" All rush to the spot and find a man in the depths of grief because his friend has cut off a yard or two from a piece of bark cloth belonging to them in common. Suicide is not uncom- mon. Closely connected with pride is swagger, often shown in the compilation of fantastic pedigrees. The arts of diplomacy thrive in this soil ; these hot-blooded natures have a capacity, which one would hardly suspect, for clothing themselves in an im- penetrable etiquette. The forms of good manners are strictly observed. The frequency of theft is well known, but it is chiefly directed against strangers. Native plantations are to natives inviolable ; yet so powerful a motive is covetousness, that the plundering of a grave is no uncom- mon event, even when nothing more than a few rags is to be got by it. It sometimes happens, however, that a person caught in the act of committing this crime gets burnt or buried alive. Revenge may form the most important duty in lifeTor a Melanesian. If a man is injured he puts up a stick or a stone where he can see it, to keep him constantly in mind of the duty of revenge. If a man abstains from food or keeps away from the dance it is a bad sign for his enemies. The man who goes about with his head half- shaved, or, in addition to this, allows a long twisted bunch of hair to hang down his back, is thinking of revenge. Sometimes a bundle of tobacco hangs from the gable, which is only to be smoked over the corpse of an enemy, or the bloody clothes of a slain relation preserves the memory of an unatoned deed. Nor is there any lack of friends to keep a man in mind of his duty with songs either lamenting or censuring. Open violence is not the only means of appeasing revenge. Hired assassins are employed, or Woman of the Anchorite's Islands. (From the Godeffroy Album. ) 220 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND magical devices with sticks, leaves, or reeds, are adopted. A dead man often takes a whole generation with him ; his wives are throttled, and his mother often shares the same fate. Treacherous and bloodthirsty acts, such as have earned a bad reputation for the Solomon Islanders in particular, may. often be referred only to expiation for some injustice suffered. There is no abstract word corre- sponding to our " Thanks," it is even regarded as good manners for the person who receives a present not to betray any feeling. People when they meet greet each other with words like, " You are staying," " Go on " ; rubbing of noses is only found among the Polynesians, kissing was originally unknown. The Banks Islanders use as a familiar greeting a sounding smack with the hand. Woman of the Anchorite's Islands. (From the Godeffroy Album.) The degrees of activity and prosperity are numerous. In Mallicollo and New Caledonia the people are poor and lazy. On the other hand those of Fiji and New Britain are proud of possession and greedy for gain ; quite ready to beg of strangers, but clever in trade. Our ethnographical museums possess an astounding wealth of works of art from certain favoured spots ; of which we need only name Astrolabe Bay and the little D'Entrecasteaux Islands. Though out- ward appearance is indistinguishable, there are poor people, well-to-do people, rich, very rich, just as with us. The saying is, as Finsch tells us, " He is worth ten or more rings of diwarra." We have already contradicted the unfounded assumption that the Melanesians are an altogether weak, backward-driven group of races ; and need here only recall a remark of D'Albertis concerning the inhabitants of Hall Sound in New Guinea, who have come but little into contact with civilization : " We may have many reasons for calling them savages ; but they live in a state of relative comfort and good fortune which one might almost denote as culture." Dull and barren stupidity does not characterise the mental endowment of the THE NEGROID RACES OF THE PACIFIC AND INDIAN OCEANS 221 Musical instrument from New Ireland — one-third real size. (Godeffroy Collection, Leipzig. ) Melanesians. German observers have drawn special attention to the capacity of the Bismarck Islanders for education. In judging of their intellectual nature we must overlook neither the acuteness of their senses nor their inventive faculty. These " savages " find tools, twine, packing materials, where the white man is at a helpless standstill. To their keen prac- tical eye Nature seems a storehouse of useful articles, where what they require at the moment is constantly at hand. Figurative language is everywhere in use ; and by means of obsolete or borrowed words it has attained the position of a regular poetic dialect. In the Banks Islands almost every village has its poet or poetess, whose performances do not remain unrewarded. Death is often referred to as " sleep," and fluids that have become set as " sleeping " ; they speak of dying as a sunset, and denote ignorance by " the night of the spirit." For modesty they employ the term by which they indicate the gentle half-tones of evening light. To reef the sail is to fold the wing. If their feeling for Nature is less than might be expected when we look at their noble landscapes and their beautiful flowing seas, their poetry and their art make free use of these in description and picture. Apart from its didactic, pro- verbial, brief terms of phrase which betray keen observa- tion and wit rather than fancy, Fijian poetry finds its most character- istic expression in the so-called Meke, a name which implies both song and dance. To only a few elect is it given to invent these ; and those allege that they are carried in their sleep to the spirit-world, where divine Spatula for betel-lime from New Guinea — one-half real size, in New Guinea — one-eighth real size (Christy Collection), in the New Hebrides (after Codrington). ■2. Drum from Pigville 3. Drums from Amboyna THE HISTORY OF MANKIND beings teach them a song with the appropriate dance. The ideal of the Fijian poet is regular measure and every verse ending with the same vowel. This he seeks to obtain by arbitrary abbreviations and lengthenings, by the use of expletives, omission of Cafved coco-nut from New Guinea — one-half real size. (Christy Collection. general articles, and other poetical licenses. Seldom, however, is a poem achieved like that recorded by Mr. Williams, consisting of eighteen verses all ending in au. In the historical and legendary ballads the disposition to- wards exaggeration often takes a grotesque form ; nor are interpolations often lacking, to bring in some quite irrelevant bit of coarseness which for the public constitutes the main attraction of the poem. The ballads are chiefly sung at night, with the inevitable dances ; but so great is the love of the Melanesians for song that they sing at their field-work or when rowing or walking about. As a rule one sings a verse and the chorus repeats it. Melanesian music on the whole resembles Polynesian. Musical instruments are absent only from the smallest islands. The prevalence of the drum in all forms reminds us of Africa. A small drum, made from a bamboo with a slit in it, and beaten with a stick. is carried especially by the women, in order to announce their ap- proach on occasions at which they are excluded. From New Ire- land we have a peculiar wooden instrument from which a vibrat- ing tone is extracted by drawing the flat hand along it. The people of New Britain had pan-pipes varying in size and number of pipes ; Jews' harps of bamboo are also found in the Solomon Isles. There, too, on festive occasions, bands composed of twenty men perform, more than half of whom play wind instruments, reeds fastened twenty-three in a row, and straight flutes of bamboo some 3 feet long by 2\ inches thick, from which they extract two or three tones with chords of thirds or fifths. The others beat large bamboo drums with a stick. The principle of the Melanesian drum is a bamboo cane or a hollow stem with a narrow slit on the thin edges of which it is beaten. Each of these drums is one size smaller than the next, and gives a note different by an octave from that of the next. The flute is forbidden to women, —indeed superstition says that they die if they see it, and the same with the bull-roarer. Among the Tugeri a signal whistle is found, made from a small coco-nut, with several holes bored in it. New Hebridean ornament (enlarged). DRESS AND WEAPONS OF THE MELANESIANS ■zi'i The dances often agree even in details with those of the Polynesians. At funeral festivities they dance round a drum with a human countenance to represent the departed. Sometimes the dancers consider themselves to be ghosts ; dancing is also a diversion of ghosts. The indi- vidual movements consist of bowings and swayings, or jumping up and down ; but they also have mimic war- dances, executed by two ranks of men armed with spear and shield. Masks are worn at these, and if they are beast masks we get an idea very like that of the Dance of Death. The Melanesians are often spoken of as among the races who cannot count beyond three or five, but numerals for ten are found everywhere, and in New Britain the money reckonings extend to sums which would make us look for numbers higher than a hundred. A kind of knotted cord-writing and similar aids to notation are also not absent here. In the calculation of time and the observation of the heavens, some groups of the Melanesians have much the same knowledge at their command as the Poly- nesians have. In New Guinea the year is divided by the changes of the monsoon ; months and longer periods are distinguished according to the labours of the field ; but we find also a division according to the position of the Pleiads, the reappearance of which in the northern heaven betokens the return of spring. A large number of constellations denoted as the Boat with its Outrigger, the Bow- bender, the Bird, the Hunting Brothers, serve to obtain bearings in navigation, and to indicate the time of night. We have already spoken of the navigation of these races on p. i66. Of writing we know only traces, in the picture-writing as scratched by the New Caledonians on bamboo, or engraved by the Fijians as well as the Tongans in the shape of little figures among the ornamentation of their clubs. Bit of etched design on a coco-nut, from Babel in the Solomons. (After Codrington. ) § 6. DRESS AND WEAPONS OF THE MELANESIANS Clothing— Tattooing and painting— Dressing of the hair— Ornament— Great number and variety of weapons — Spears— Clubs — Stone clubs— Axes— Bow and arrow— Smaller weapons— Defensive armour. The clothing of the Melanesians seems to justify Peschel's law that clothing varies among men inversely as the darkness of their colour. The darker Melanesians 224 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND are in general less clad than the lighter Polynesians. Their ornament is all the richer and more various, and the woolly hair especially brings with it a greater variety of hairdressing. We find men in Melanesia very scantily clad, and there are not lacking trustworthy reports of some who are completely naked. The Adamic costume of the men in the Banks Islands, however, standing in sharp contrast to their skill in weaving mats, places them very low in the estimation of their neighbours, though among these also, so far as they are Melanesians, limited clothing is the rule. Where clothing is more complete we are sure to find traces of Polynesian and Malayan influence. The foundation of the Melanesian man's dress is a belt, either platted or made of bark, passing from the hips between the legs ; while the women wear one or two aprons of fibre from grass, palm, or pandanus leaves. These elements recur everywhere, and the idea of what is becoming and respectable in cloth- ing is essentially concen- trated upon them. But the notions of modesty are extremely various. The people of Massilia on the Finsch coast wear a broad bark girdle pass- ing twice round the body Wigs of human hair worn in battle, from Vanna Levu. Museum. ) (Frankfort City Of Head-dress lilce an eye-shade from New Guinea- real size. (British Museum.) a higher kind of dress, which may be called that of the Polynesian colonies, Fiji affords the best examples. Here the tapa material renders a richer style of clothing possible. The wrapping which passes be- tween the thighs is of such breadth and length that it ex- tends to a couple of hundred feet. The usual measure is of 12 to 20 feet ; it is wound several times round the loins in such a way that the ends hang down to -one-fifth the knee in front, and lower behind. In West Melanesia, also, tapa is indeed DRESS AND WEAPONS OF THE MELANESIANS 225 made in the Southern Solomon Isles from the paper mulberry ; in the New Hebrides and New Guinea from the sacred fig-tree. Instead of the printed pattern, as shown in the cut on p. 183, we here iind the stuff streaked with colour and moistened with the tongue or teeth. The tattooing in Melanesia is only in isolated instances of the artistic character Fiji warrior in a wig. (From the Godeffroy Album. ) found among the Polynesians. It has more affinity with the Australian type of cicatrised wounds than with the Polynesian punctures, and it is often not applied until the age of maturity. Among the light-skinned Motus of New Guinea we find tattooing in patterns recalling those of Micronesia. On the south coast of New Guinea Miklouho-Maclay found even the shaven scalps of the women covered with tattooing. Where there are indications of a mixture of Melanesians with Polynesians, it has been thought that the races may be distinguished according to their respective methods of tattooing. For example, in the islands off the eastern point of New Guinea, in the Solomon Islands (where the cicatrised Q 226 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND tattooing has been observed only in Bougainville, Isabel, and the Southern Islands), and in New Ireland. Men and women are often differently tattooed : in girls tattooing indicates that they have reached nubility ; in men, the slaying of a child is one of the things announced by the tattooing of the breast on one side. In tattooing, also, East and West Melanesia represent the extremes which in the central parts are mingled. In Fiji the puncturing with the four or five-toothed instrument is limited to women, and in them to par- ticular parts — the lower part of the body and the thigh, the corner of the mouth, and the finger. It has a religious sugges- tion, and is enjoined by Ndengei. But here, too, cicatrices appear in conjunction with it, produced as a rule by means of shells. In cer- tain localities of West Melanesia the other kinds of tattooing are almost excluded, or at all events reduced to a minimum. Among other mutilations of the body, we get distinct reports of circumcision only from New Caledonia, the southern New Hebrides, and Fiji, which appears to have been the starting - point in comparatively recent times of its extension west- V/ard. In Finsch Harbour it is performed with much festivity, the women being banished into the forest until their boys' wounds are healed ; afterwards the patients go to live there. The custom of cutting off joints of the finger in times of mourning or sickness is almost universal. To go with the whole or half of the face and the breast painted with red clay is a Nose-ornament, breastplate, and arm-ring of boar's tusks from P''^^'-^'^^ Usually Confined tO men, New Gmnea-one-eighth real size. (Christy Collection.) as also is that of blacking the crU,^. o 1 .. iM , , , , ^°^^ ^^'^'^ ^ kind of earth which fmon. th. M ; .^^ '""t ^^^ "°"'" "'^° "■'' occasionally seen blacked; W fnd K ^ ■" J^ '° ^' " "^" ""^ '"°"'-"'"^- I" ^-lil<- enterprises , ace and body are pamted in stripes of ^vhite, yellow, red, and black; in Fiji this custom has been brought to a high point of art ; the not very cleanly Maclure i'apuas are reported to smear their bodies with clay. In Melanesia all hair is sedulously plucked out from the body while the treatment of the hair of the head with caustic lime is quite as ge^e^al as in DUESS AND WEAPONS OF THE MELANESIANS 227 Polynesia, at times carried even further. In Fiji the crisp black hair is towzled up, and great pains are expended upon colouring it with charcoal or lime ; then it sometimes surrounds the head in a strong turban-like pad, or else reminds the observer of a full-bottomed wig, as also in New Guinea ; while at times it hangs down in the form of numerous thin strands or wisps. On the other hand, in the Anchorite and Solomon Islands the hair is in some cases shaven, in others plaited into top-knots stuck together with gum, and often coloured red, black, yellow, or white, but constantly adorned with feathers, flowers, shells, or tastefully ornamented cones of bamboo. White parrot's feathers stuck on the top of the head are signs of rank ; in Malicollo the hair is dressed in porcupine fashion, wisps as thick as the quill of a pigeon's feather being wound round with the bast of a kind of creeper ; artificial wigs are also prepared from the coloured fibres of plants. In Fiji, persons of eminence have private hair-curlers, who are occupied for hours every day in the preparation of the wigs. The geometrical accuracy of the individual details, the rounded softness of the outlines, the symmetrical dyeing with shiny black, dark blue, grey, white, red, yellow, have often been mentioned with eulogy. Beside hairdressing, head-dresses of various descriptions occur ; the Hattams of New Guinea wear a little cowl with coloured feathers woven in, and Cook found among the naked New Hebrideans small caps of woven mat. In Fiji a turban of white masi, from which a piece of cloth falls down at the back, or two lappets over the ears, is indispensable for a man of rank. Open-work caps made of a piece of matting adorned with strips of dark bast are customary in New Ireland and New Hanover ; woven eye-shades are found in New Guinea. A great part of the wealth of these races consists of ornaments, and since these find extensive employment as a medium of exchange, trade tends to increase the production of them. The greatest amount of ornament falls to the share of the men ; the younger women wear little, the elder go almost unadorned. For instance, the eye teeth of the dog are held in special esteem among the Melanesians ; but, while the man covers his entire breastplate with them, the wife wears at most one or two in her ear. Ears, nose, and lips are bored to receive ornaments. The Papuas of Hood Bay wear a band of pearls at either end of a thread which is passed round the head. In Makira, Rietmann saw a young flying-fox used as a lady's ear-ornament, with one foot attached to the lobe of the ear. Among the Tugeri, pigs' bones some 8 inches long are worn in the nose. Polynesian influence is probably to be seen in Sikayana, if, as alleged, nose and ear ornaments are not in use there. In general, the employment of shells in ornament diminishes as we proceed eastward. In Fiji, as to some extent even in New Britain, whales' or cachalots' teeth turn up as the article of ornament or value that is most in demand. They occur often in entire necklaces. Corre- sponding to these is the employment in New Britain and elsewhere of shell-money in the form of gigantic ear-pendants. Melanesians wear white arm-rings, some 4 inches thick, of Trochus shell ; in New Guinea these serve the further purpose of receptacles for the cassowary-bone daggers. They are laboriously ground out on sharp splinters of coral-rock. The Solomon Islanders wear spiral bands of a liana which comes from Buka, on the left arm, as a protection against the recoil of the bowstring, and also as insignia of a chief ; they wear, too, combs made of the stiff reddish-brown stalks of a grass, woven together with fibre in elegant patterns. Feather -ornament 228 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND displays great luxuriance in New Hanover, and much taste is shown in the combination of forms and colours with vegetable fibres and beads on sticks. For example, a delicately-formed face in feather-mosaic will be seen forming the head of a hairpin. In New Guinea the work is on a larger scale, and loses in elegance, even when it consists of an entire bird of paradise on a stick, as is found at Astrolabe Bay. In Tagai, pouches of varnished palm-leaf are made to preserve these costly adornments. Favourite gauds in Simbo, Ulakua, Choiseul, and Guadalcanar are plaited frontlets with large white shells, or chains similarly worn of porpoise's or dog's teeth. A rosette of yellow and red cockatoo or parrot- Shell plaques for adorning the breast and forehead i From the Solomon Islands — one-third real size the Admiralty Islands — one-fourth real size. (Christy Collection. ) From feathers, frequently smartened with shells, is bound on the forehead, and serves at once for ornament and for defence ; it often consists of a thin polished piece of Tridacna gigas, on which is laid a piece of open work in tortoise-shell. Among the Admiralty Islanders disks of shell appear in great numbers as breastplates, hung from the neck. Both in form and material these ornaments testify to great assiduity, to which the high esteem in which they are held corresponds. They extend from Madagascar to Hawaii, and have found their way into the heart of Africa. From them taste evolves every sort of combination. Simple necklaces, plaited , from variegated straw or bast-fibres, or made from teeth, even human teeth, berries, fruits, and so forth, are found, as well as more costly kinds. Among New Guinea ornaments boar's teeth play the most prominent part ; in DRESS AND WEAPONS OF THE MELANESIANS 229 the northern parts of the island the naturally-curved tusks being the decorative objects most in demand. Compared vi^ith these the neck-threads of plaited grass, even with small shells or seeds strung on them, are inconspicuous ; but the chains of human teeth, dogs' incisors, or cut shells often produce quite an elegant effect. In the Solomons, chains consisting of twenty to twenty -five pieces of various coloured shells, mingled with human teeth, or of little shells strung at regular distances on coco-nut fibre, are highly esteemed. In these instances the transi- tion from ornament to currency is not remote. On Florida, in the Solomons, a string of red, white, and black shells seven yards long or so is the price of a wife. At Finsch Harbour beads of small polished snail-shells are worn round the neck, in New Britain round the hips, in the Admiralty Islands as aprons. Finger-rings of silver, pinchbeck, or gilt brass have been introduced by traders. The Solomon Islanders carry tobacco and other small articles in their plaited arm -bands; while in Nissan the people invariably carry their betel -lime in a small coco-nut or gourd fastened by a short string to the left little finger. Men are seldom seen in Melanesia without weapons. Every group of islands has its own patterns, though the actual weapons — spear, bow, and club — are everywhere the same. They are, however, unequally distributed, or else other weapons of more limited distribution occur. The weapons of Melanesia unquestionably are some of the choicest productions of dexterity and taste found among the lower races, as our plate of Melanesian and Micronesian weapons and utensils will show. Their neatness, variety of form, and actual number are wonderful. It is an unexplained departure from the rule that, on the single island of Api or Tasika in the New Hebrides, no weapons are carried. In Melanesia, again, the most esteemed and most generally-used weapon is the spear, the forms of which, as Strauch says when speaking of the Admiralty Islands, are as various as the faces of the inhabitants. Plain but carefully-worked javelins, as found in New Caledonia, may be regarded as the simplest representa- tives of this weapon ; thongs of plaited tapa are used in the manipulation of them. But the most finished productions of the New Caledonian armourers belong equally to the spear-class. Curiously enough it is not the " business end " of the weapon, but the shaft, to which the greatest attention is devoted. The fundamental type remains a staff, reaching sometimes a length of 10 feet, and pointed at both ends. The modifications consist merely in the addition of a carved human head, repeated as often as four times, below the point ; or in wrapping the shaft in the same region with whitish tapa or bat's hair ; a stick wound with string, and with a long string attached to it, is bound into this ; while, in addition to the wooden point, a ray's spine is let in to form a secondary point. In New Britain they wind simple bast round it, and attach a tassel of vegetable fibre, ornamented with feathers. The butt is sometimes provided with a hexagonal knob, or terminated with the bone of a cassowary or a man. Of these spears there are two of larger size intended for throwing. In New Ireland the brown polished carved kind are more frequent than in New Hanover, and near Port Sulphur we meet with spears decked with feathers and human bones like those of New Britain. As a rule the spears are slim and pliant ; but a broadening of the head, accompanied with perforation, occurs, especially in Fiji, under various patterns. On the whole, however, where the spear is ornamented the head remains simple. Here, again, the Solomon Islands show the most advanced development. Besides spears 230 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Weapons from the Admiralty Islands : ., 2. Spears with obsidian heads. 3. Javehn with the same. 4-8. Spear heads, g-n Obsidian knives. 12. Knife of mother-of-pearl shell tenth, 4-12, one-sixth of real size. (Christy Collection. -3, one- ornamented with pieces of mother-of-pearl fixed in mastic, the islanders have their spear- heads artistically carved from human arm-bones or the lower jaw of the toucan. New Guinea possesses both spears pointed with cassowary bone and simple sharpened shafts. The former are heavy war- weapons, for thrusting, lo feet long or more ; the latter light, and intended chiefly for fishing. Unornamented spears with points toothed like saws, either two or four-edged, repre- sent hunting or fishing imple- ments rather than . warlike weapons, and form the transi- tion to the fish-spears with four or five barbs, attached to a heavy, roughly -worked shaft by means of plaited palm- fibres. Spears with opposite rows of barbs occur only in Fiji and the New Hebrides. There the heads are perforated, forked, jagged, wavy, lami- nated — in a word, wrought into every sort of shape. Fre- quently they consist from end to end of fine wood, which exactly in the heaviest places is carved into a piece barely attached. Spears of this kind are intended more as orna- mental weapons, to gratify the bearer's pride, than for the foe. In the Admiralty Islands the abundance of obsidian and bitumen affords the means for a development in the manu- facture of stone weapons, which in one direction supple- ments the general level at which the inhabitants of New Guinea and the neighbouring islands stand in respect of this DRESS AND WEAPONS OF THE MELANESIANS 231 art. Here, too, spears have reached an extraordinary perfection. The head consists always of the choicest pieces of a granular striped basalt, and is attached to the shaft by means of a copious layer, of bitumen and string wound close with great care. The bitumen bed which gradually thins off towards the handle is either decorated in simple geometrical lines with the spaces coloured black, red, and white, and set with little shells, or perforated with a diamond - shaped opening. The shaft is always rough, just as it grew on the tree, and frequently weak also. From New Caledonia to the New Hebrides, the Fiji Islands, and from New Guinea, we get missile spears with long points of hard wood or bone. On the shaft we may often notice appendages which may be of use in hurling it. In some parts of New Guinea, as Venus Point, Hatzfeld Harbour, and up the Empress Augusta river, we find throwing - sticks. The throwing-thong of New Caledonia arises from the same idea. Clubs are among the most popular weapons in Melanesia ; like the spears, they find their greatest development in the east- ward islands, particularly in Fiji and the Solomons. Certain parts of New Guinea, as Maclure Gulf, possess no clubs. These weapons serve for striking or for guarding arrows and javelins, and in general they form the accompaniment of every expedition. Hence their double position as insignia of rank and weapons. They are often so heavy and shape- less, and yet wrought with such an expenditure of labour, patience, and ingenuity, that they must be intended for some purposes other than fighting only. The clubs of celebrated warriors in Fiji used to have names of honour or pet names ; in their shapes some seem to be connected with the four-edged Tongan type, others with the paddle-shaped weapons of Tonga and Samoa. A peculiar form is the imitation of a flint musket, lock and all ; another is a point projecting from a New Caledonian clubs, and a painted dance club (a) from the New Hebrides. (Vienna Museum. ) 232 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND prickly fruit. In New Caledonia the most frequent form of club is the simplest, namely a bludgeon merely taken from a kn9tty branch. The first stage towards finishing lies in the making of a sharp edge round the knob, the next in childish striped ornaments ; or a favourite plan is to jag the end in a star shape. A peculiar club is one in the shape of a bird's head, which here replaces that used in Mota to open bread-fruit. But in all an easily recognisable difference from those of Fiji and Tonga is formed by the grip which thickens abruptly at the handle end. Together with this goes the splicing of the handle with string, ribbon, palm fibres, even dry fern. In the case of the richest or most distinguished persons the throwing-cords are fitted with reddish brown knots. This ulti- mately led to the reddish brown shaggy ornament as found also on spears. In recent times it has been imitated by means of imported red wool, even by miserable shreds of cotton, a melancholy symbol of the decay of the old glory of the Kanakas. The clubs in the Solomon Islands depart very little from the paddle form ; they have a projecting middle line resembling the rib of a leaf, and a handle with a shoulder. Further decorations, such as ears at the sides of the paddle blade, or a sharper shoulder where this passes into the shaft, are of a modest character. Another type has arisen through the bending of the blade whereby either the middle rib is thrown into strong prominence, or an opportunity is given for more delicate ornamentation by means of zig-zag lines, or a spike-like angle juts out from the vertex of the curve. The handles are decorated with ornaments of every kind, carvings of squatting idols, pretty woven work of coloured bast in tasteful patterns; while in the flat straight clubs the blade is polished, smooth and sharpened at both edges, and the handle bound. Clubs from the New Hebrides have a plaited sling, so that they can be carried over the shoulder ; while in New Britain we find rings of fibre or plaiting which are said to be mementos of slain enemies. In New Guinea and New Britain we meet with a weapon like a " morning star," half club, half axe ; upon a sharpened staff, a yard long, a disk- shaped stone is fitted near the upper end, and above this a bunch of red and yellow feathers. This reminds us of the star-shaped stones with a hole through them found in Peru ; besides these, clubs occur without a stone ; others have a three- cornered sharp-cut head. There are also round ones of black heavy polished wood, with engraved ornamentation about the head ; and flat ones made of an equally heavy browner wood cut into the shape of a spoon handle. The Melanesian axes are not perforated, and remind us also in their shape of the Polynesian stone blades. They are often beautifully ground. They are often fastened upon or into the helve by regular crossed layers of rush or string, but sometimes, especially ia West Melanesia, the helve itself is perforated and so a new form arises with the blade as a rule narrower and rounder. Besides stone, shell also occurs in a similar shape as a material for the blade in Santa Cruz and New Guinea, in the Torres and Banks Islands. Iron was no doubt occasionally imported before the European epoch ; and in western New Guinea intercourse with the Malays has made it common. How quickly it takes hold we may learn from the fact that from New Guinea to Fiji, up to the present day, no article of trade is in such demand. It is interesting also to notice that even the natives who have only been for a few years in frequent contact with Europeans, imitate the iron axe in wood, even to the trade mark, while their stone axes have lost the handle, and have been degraded to the rank of pestles. In a similar WEAPONS AND UTENSILS FROM MELANESIA AND MICRONESIA. 3- J. 7,8. 9- lO, n. 12, 13. Obsidian jAvelin : Admiralty Is- lands. Paddle : Solomon Islands. Chief's spear: New Caledonia. Mancatcner : New Guinea. Lances : New Britain^ (The handle of S is made of bone, probably that of the cassowary.) Arrows : Humboldt Bay. _ War mask : New Caledonia. Arrows : Humboldt Bay. Lances : New Hanover, (iz of bamboo.) 14. Spear with j>oint of cassowary bone: New Guinea. 15. Mace used in dances : Bougatn' ville. 16. Sword-club : New Britain. 17. Club, handle covered with grass matting : Solomon Islandsv 18. Obsidian javelin : Admiralty Is- lands. 19. Jade axe : New Caledonia. 20. Breast ornament : New Caledonia. 2X. Necklace of cachalot's teeth: Fiji. 22. Breast ornament : Humboldt Bay. 23. Prickly helmet : Kingsmill Is- lands. 1 ' Carved bamboo box from Western New Guinea — three-fourths real size. (Christy Collection. ) great gusto, a fresh-water mollusc called ebe, the shells of which they use for the most various purposes, and therefore always carry about with them. Both Polynesians and Melanesians display an artistic tendency in their simplest articles of daily use. In reference to New Guinea, Hugo Zoller says : " You will be guilty of no exaggeration if you speak of a real art industry among the Papuas " ; both peoples have attained a similar point, but the ornament of the Melanesians is richer and fuller of fancy. It is attractive to trace out how and in what their produc- tions show the typical differences that have their roots in the spirit of the people, or rather in the spirit of the race. In Papuan ornament the predominant element is the curved line, and that either in parallels or freely interlacing. It runs especially into spirals, but also into waves, crescents, ellipses ; individual groups of ornament are separated by zig-zags and straight lines. The concentric curve is always recur- ring in the fantastic beaks of their ships, or in the carved shields, paddles, and mallets ; it has a decided advantage over any attempts at copying Nature. In this New Zealand resembles New Guinea most ; now and again efforts towards geometrical arrangement are seen in paddles, the blades of which are divided by two straight lines into four equal portions, variously coloured. It appears still more in the wooden moulds for the decoration of earthenware vessels. But it is in the east of the island world that it may claim the highest development, especially in the Tonga and Samoa groups, which herein also show affinity. The tools with which artistic work was done were, before the introduction of iron, exceedingly simple. The stone axe was the only implement for shaping posts and planks, or for felling trees, and together with sharp shells it served for the execution of the larger ornament, figures, wooden dishes, etc. Carved and engraved work was done with shells and rats' teeth fixed in hard wood ; shells, again, and the spines of sea-urchins or rays, served for boring, while smoothing was done with files from the skin of a ray and pieces of coral or pumice-stone. The shell-axe was as a rule more frequent in the west, the stone axe in the east ; but iron has created an equal revolution everywhere. Skilled workmen as they were, the islanders recognised at once the advantage of iron tools ; but at first they preferred sheet iron in the form of plain hoop iron to all other, since it could be LABOUR, DWELLINGS, AND FOOD IN OCEANIA 251 Chisel and shell auger, from New Britain. (Berlin Museum.) set and fixed just like their old stone axes. It was only in the environs of Geelvink Bay, which were visited by the Malays from Ternate, and by Dutchmen, that the smith's art found a footing in pre -European times; otherwise throughout the length and breadth of the district, as far as Hawaii and Rapanui, iron and the other metals had either never been known or had disappeared ; Schouten and Tasman never mention them. Owing to the larger number of land animals in Melanesia, increasing as it does westward, hunting still plays an important part. In New Guinea many villages subsist mainly upon it, and in districts where certain birds of paradise are found, the right of hunting them is reserved for the chiefs. Meanwhile, in the Polynesians we have a branch of mankind to whom not only all the influences of pastoral life, but also the bracing effects of the chase, have remained unknown. In Hilo, indeed, ducks are cap- tured by means of floating sticks, fitted with baits, and weighted with stones, and small birds are caught in Tahiti ; otherwise there is no hunting of any importance. Who can say whether the total impossibility of finding game to provide an outlet for the desire to slay and torture, for ambition and active impulses, has been as responsible for the incessant wars and the cruelty of man towards man as the lack of larger animals' flesh has been an incentive to cannibalism ? The decay of projectile weapons must in any case be connected with this. Fishing, on the other hand, is all over the region pursued with energy and diligence ; it takes a distinct place in the weekly division of labour. In New Guinea the custom is to fish by detachments on fixed days, and to distribute the catch equally among all members of the tribe. The appearance of a shark puts whole villages into commotion ; in time of peace distinguished persons take the command of fishing expeditions just as in time of war they lead troops. The most perfect implements that the Polynesians generally possess are employed in this work. The New Zealanders used to make nets 500 yards long, requiring hundreds of hands to handle them. Hooks of every size are manufactured from birds' bones, tortoiseshell, sea-shells, and hard wood, and fitted with artificial baits made of feathers or bright pieces of shell. Those used in the capture of sharks, a popular article of diet, are as much as 20 inches long. It is only in New Caledonia and some parts of Western Melanesia that the fishing is limited to what can be done with arrows, spears, and nets. In general the fish-hooks of the Melanesian isles are excellent ; even white men prefer them to the European steel hooks. Boat-builders, as we have mentioned, were sacred ; but the manufacturers of ropes, fishing-lines, and fish-hooks were reckoned at least as important persons. Property in these articles was so abundant that in the early times they were frequently a medium of exchange against European goods. The strongest hooks were composed of three pieces : the body consisting of a semicircular finger-shaped piece of the bone of the cachalot or sperm-whale, the flat under side of which was 252 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND inlaid with mother-of-pearl. On its upper side the tortoiseshell hook was fastened with string — the point in the larger specimens being pierced for a string to hold the bait. When these tortoiseshell hooks became blunt or broken they were able to do further service in necklaces. We may mention here the simple but ingenious Tahitian arrange- ment for carrying fish — a strong cord with a boar's tooth at each end. For the shark-fishing, large lumps of bait are used ; for the flying fish, an obtuse-angled, sharp-pointed piece of bone. In New Britain they employ s^ j; also standing fish-traps made of plaited work, and hand-nets which are held from a moving boat with the hilt - like end dropped into the water. For the same purpose the F'ijians make a kind of floating bow- net from the long stems of climbing plants, plaited through with coco - palm leaves. In Trobriand a kind of rattle of coco-nut shells half cut through serves to entice the sharks. Vegetable poisons, especially one from a climbing glycine, are used for stupefying the fish ; sleepy fishes, such as sharks, are said to be taken in Fiji with nooses. A great number of ceremonies and festivities are connected with the turtle-fishery. This is carried on by means of weighted nets, which are thrown into deep water close outside the reef, in such a way as to form a semicircular fence and block the way of the turtles returning from the land. The animals are driven into these nets by shouts, but the main work is to get them on board. For this purpose people are required of conspicuous dex- , „. . . ^ , , terity and strength to dive at I. J?ishing float from the Solomon Islands— one-eiehth real size *.u„ •^- \ , i i • (Christy Collection). 2. Floats, sinkers, baler, and war^pears *^^ ^'"t''^^' moment and driVC from New Caledonia (Vienna Museum.) ' the animal tO the Surface j whcH , , it is fairly on its back in the boat, loud blasts of the shell trumpet announce the joyful intelligence. D'Albertis saw skulls of turtles hung up in the temple of Tawan as offerings. In stormy LABOUR, DWELLINGS, AND FOOD IN OCEANIA 253 weather the Hawaiians put out in their little fishing boats to catch dolphins, and many a fisherman going too far in pursuit of the school — the position of which is indicated by the birds in the air — has been cast away and lost. In the matter of breeding animals, the first mention must be made of pigs. Wherever these occur they take a prominent position. They are pampered : in Tahiti and New Britain the little ones are suckled by women, and fed by old women ; or, after the fashion of capons, literally stuffed with bread-fruit dough. They are slaughtered at high festivals, and reserved exclusively for the upper classes. Next to the pig, the dog is the only domestic animal of any size. The A«ti%'4^f^ A New Zealand trawl-net. (Munich Ethnographical Museum. ) breed is a small one resembling the breed of the Negroes, with no bark. In New Guinea, New Zealand, Samoa, and the Society Islands they were bred for meat, being quite useless for hunting. The common fowl is the most widely distributed of all : in Tonga they ran about wild in flocks ; while in Easter Island they were the only domestic animal. None of the native birds have been regularly domesticated, though in Easter Island the sea-swallows, sierna, were found so far tamed as to sit on men's shoulders. In Tongatabu the islanders carried pigeons or parrots on sticks, and on the south coast of New Guinea cockatoos were kept in almost every village. But these have naturally no economic importance. Agriculture is almost everywhere indigenous ; even on the most barren coral island at least a few coco-palms are cultivated. It is most highly developed on islands like Tonga, where soil and climate are not too favourable, but at the same time not niggardly, so that labour is repaid but not allowed to flag. The 254 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Society Islands and Samoa, more prodigally endowed by Nature, stand some- what lower, and the inhabitants are more indolent. Lowest of all are poor islands like Easter Island or the smaller Paumotus, with little area and a scanty rocky soil. Yet even ,si!n^- Shark-trap with wooden float, from Fiji. ( Berlin Museum. there plantains, sugar- cane, sweet potatoes, ■;;;;■■ yams, taro, and sola- i'l num, were found in cultivation ; unpro- ductiveness is the exception, the more favoured regions the rule. Here we find fenced fields, terraces with earth artificially banked up on steep slopes, and arrangements for irrigation, especially in the cultivation of taro, trees for giving shade, and garden flowers, even beds laid out ; all which is a sign that the cultivation of the soil has advanced far. Even on Easter Island, G. Forster Smoked fish from Massilia in East New Guinea — one-sixth real size. (BerUn Museum) found an irrigation trench a foot deep around every plantain, while in Tonga he walked in an avenue of four rows of coco-palms 2000 paces in length, diligently weeded and manured. Cultivation is correspondingly dense; one of the special advantages of Samoa to which Pritchard draws attention is that you come every mile or two upon a grove of coco-palms or bread-fruit; and the first visitors to Tongatabu depicted it as one great garden. In this way their descriptions excited among their contemporaries the liveliest longing for these fortunate islands. In Micronesia, where fishing prevails, agriculture for the production of the chief article of food, taro, is carried on only in the larger islands, such as the Pelews. The men cultivate betel, tobacco, and turmeric, while the women of all classes, from the lowest to the highest, even kings' wives, make it a point of honour to keep their ifaw- patches in the finest condition. The task of the men is only to attend to the artificial irrigation of the plantations, which are in low marshy places, and to set out the young plants ; the women have to keep the ground weeded, and take the plants up as required. Besides taro, the New Zealanders cultivate, among crops originally introduced from the north, the sweet potato— this with religious ceremonies— and the bottle- LABOUR, DWELLINGS, AND FOOD IN OCEANIA 255 gourd ; and of native plants a fern with edible rhizomes, and the New Zealand flax {phormium tenax). In western Melanesia agriculture is on the whole less advanced. Great part of New Guinea is uncultivated. Yet even here in individual cases it stands high. Cuttle-fish baits from the Society Islands, two-fifths real size. (Christy Collection, Berlin Museum. ) In the south-east among the Kerepunus, and on Astrolabe Bay in the north, the fields are kept like gardens ; the soil being turned by men in a long row armed with pointed sticks, and then levelled by the women and planted with bananas, sugar-cane, yams, etc., in long strips. Clearing and fencing is done by all in Polynesian pots and implements (the two calabashes for betel-lime, from the Admiralty Islands) ; also a shell horn— one-fifth real size. (Christy Collection.) common, in exemplary style. If the arable lands are far off, little huts are put UP for temporary occupation. Among the western islands, New Britain and the New Hebrides deserve the highest praise. There, as well as in the Solomons the extensive plantations lie always in the neighbourhood of the habitations, and frequently are arranged, for the sake of irrigation, on terraces one above another. 256 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND On the steep slopes of Meralava, in Aurora, and in other islands, field rises above field, and every patch gets the full benefit of the irrigation. As in Newr Guinea, so in Nevir Caledonia, the nutritious bread-fruit of the east is unknovs^n, which implies a serious deficiency in the food-supply of the people. In little Mota (Banks Islands), on the other hand, Codrington found sixty names for varieties of bread-fruit, and eighty for yams. But the agriculture of the Fiji Islands takes a higher rank than even that of Polynesia. Here more than anyw^here the taro or dalo, unquestionably the most nutritious of all Melanesian food-plants, is the staff of life. One kind is grown on dry ground, but the normal sort is the Polynesian ; for which the soil is worked into a mortar-like consistency, and Covered vessel in shape of a bird, inlaid with shell, from the Pelew Islands. (British Museum.) deeply trenched, before receiving the young plants. After the yam, which stands second, the next root-crop to be ' mentioned is the anai or masave, the sweet root of the ii-iree. {Draccsna terminalis or cordyline ti). In a few districts only, as Leper Island, is the banana the chief fruit ; though the Fijians have thirty varieties of it. Sugar-cane, and the yakona plant, from the chewed roots of which the intoxicating drink kava is prepared, are planted in great quantity. We find, too, whole nurseries of the paper-mulberry, masi or malo, from the bark of which the material called tapa is made. In the New Hebrides and Banks Islands no single village is without its flowers and aromatic herbs. In all the archipelagos of the equatorial Pacific, the coco-palm is one of the most important plants. Even on uninhabited islands it is sedulously tended ; and it forms, with the fruit of the pandanus, the chief food of the low islands, as the Paumotus, which are poor in vegetables. LABOUR, DWELLINGS, AND FOOD IN OCEANIA 257 On how insecure a basis, however, the life of these islanders rests is shown by the only too frequent times of dearth. Among articles of diet the chief place is taken by vegetable products and the spoils of fishing, and great groups of these races are wholly vegetarian. Dietary laws forbid the eating of beasts or plants which are atuas of the tribe. Where pigs and dogs exist, these delicacies are reserved for the upper classes or for festive occasions. Contrary to our usual ideas of the diet of these tribes, the fat and blood of the pig are among the dainties served at the banquets of the chiefs. " No Greenlander was ever so sharp set upon train-oil as our friends here," says Cook, of the Maoris ; " they greedily swallowed the stinking droppings when we were boiling down the fat of dog-fish." Rats are eaten as a rule only by the common people, in Tahiti only by women. Most birds are reckoned sacred. Among vegetable articles of food the chief is bread-fruit ; .then taro, yams, and sweet potatoes. Bread-fruit is sometimes eaten fresh-baked, sometimes leavened ; Fiji being the only part of Melanesia where the latter is usual. The taro is washed to remove the acrid part, and the flour that remains as a sediment is kneaded. By letting the dough ferment the Poly- nesians obtain poi, their favourite food, resembling slightly sour porridge. It will keep for a long time ; and baked yam will keep : for a year. In Tahiti the sweet potato is eaten only so long as there is no ripe bread-fruit. We have already mentioned the coco -nut, and its great value as a food supply. In the smaller Polynesian Islands the entire stock of vegetable food . is provided by coco and pandanus - palms, with taro. Kababo, or pandanus -meal, dried and roasted, forms, when pressed together, a valuable preserve. Here we may men- tion the famous earth-eating habit of the people of New Guinea and New Caledonia. Another vessel of the same material. Museum. ) (British The truth of it is that the former eat great quantities of a greenish steatite, the latter of a clay containing iron and magnesia, which is kept in dry cakes with a hole through them. They do not do it for hunger, but for pleasure, and after copious meals. In regard to the manner of preparing all these food-materials, it is a significant fact that most of the Polynesians and many of the Melanesians possess no earthenware vessels, and still less any of metal. They boil their water in wooden vessels by dropping in red hot stones ; but they do not use this for cooking, only to make shells open more easily. Cooking with hot stones was formerly more frequent, but has become unusual ; coco-nut milk is boiled in the fresh shells over the fire. The most common method is to lay the food between hot stones. It indicates a certain progress when we find the stones, after heating, sprinkled with water, the whole covered with leaves and earth and so left to itself. Since the days of Cook and Forster many Europeans have extolled meat steamed in Simple roasting or broiling at an open fire is s this way far above our roasts. THE HISTORY UF MANKIND pronounced a method of dressing fit only for persons in a hurry or for slaves, -Cooking is the duty of the men in Pelew, of the women in the Mortlocks.* European travellers in Hawfaii have been amazed to see a fowl tied up in a bundle with a hot stone, to be produced cooked at the next halt. They eat in the open air, sitting on the ground, which is strewn with fresh leaves ; hot food being carried wrapped in banana leaves. The Polynesians use no salt, but season their complicated fish and meat dishes with sea-water. The art of salting pig-meat is said to be known in Hawaii. In many parts of Melanesia salt is only known as a delicacy. To carve and distribute the meat is not held un- worthy of the highest chiefs. Special formalities are observed in eating; yet within the limits of these there is room for an unseemly degree of avidity. In most places men and women must not eat together, nor either partake of what the other has prepared. With almost equal anxiety they avoid eating out of the same vessel with another. In ordinary times they take two meals in the day ; but if a great quantity of food has been provided, they sit at it, with occasional interruptions for dancing, play, and so on, till it is all devoured. Among agricultural implements the chief place is taken by the primitive stick, cut slanting at one end like a pen, and of about the length of a hay-fork. The men who break up the ground with these are followed by boys carrying sticks to break the loosened clods still smaller, and at last the earth is, if neces- sary, rubbed fine with the hands, and piled up in little mounds, in which the seeds or cuttings are placed. Among the Motus of New Guinea six or seven men stand one behind another with a light pointed beam, which they run into the ground, heaving up at the word of command a huge clod of earth. Weeds and brushwood have in many places previously been removed by means of a narrow paddle-shaped sharp-edged tool of hard wood, about 2 feet long. Some weeks later the roots are grubbed up with a kind of hoe, which the workman uses in a stooping attitude, almost level with the ground. The only original stimulant used in the eastern islands is the kava or ava, the fermented juice from the chewed roots of Piper methysticum. The first Europeans considered that the use of it had increased rapidly. Even at that time it was productive of great mischief, causing dimness of sight and weakness of memory. Yet there are islands where temperance prevails, and even in Melanesia it is partaken of in very varying amounts. Some drink it like coffee, others carouse from gigantic bowls inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The mode of preparing kava is as follows : a shallow bowl of hard wood resting on three short feet is placed on the ground, girls and women lie in a circle round it, break off small pieces of the dried kava root, put them in their mouths, and, when thoroughly chewed, spit them into the bowl ; water is added, the drink is stirred, and the beverage is ready. In Fiji it is said that this method of preparation comes from Polynesia, and that formerly the pieces were cut. Coco-nut shells, or, as in Tonga, four-cornered cups made of plantain leaf, serve as drinking-vessels, and are drained with much enjoyment. The drink is a dark grey dirty-looking brew of a by no means pleasant bitter taste. In the kava carouses of the Arii in the Society Islands, all the excesses of intoxication were to be observed up to the point of homicide and murder. The mode of calling together those who were to chew and those who were to enjoy the drink ; the songs which accompany the pressing out of the chewed root ; the prayers when the water was poured on ; LABOUR, DWELLINGS, AND FOOD IN OCEANIA 259 and, finally, the song which celebrates the chiefs first draught, all point to an idea of sanctity as connected with this indulgence. Thus in Vatd kava is drunk- only in the worship of the spirits who dispense health ; in Tanna it is drunk as in Polynesia, women being excluded, and a special place allotted to it. Kava drink- ing becomes less as we go westward, and therefore is perhaps of Polynesian origin. At any rate this kind of pepper was probably introduced into some Melanesian Islands from the east. The people of New Guinea also drink kava or kau, but the practice is not universal, and takes place only on festive occasions. The drink is not unknown in Micronesia ; it is, however, obtained, not by chewing, but by crushing the roots. The mass, after damping, is packed in strips of hibiscus and wrung out. In Ponapd ava, which once was sacred, is now drunk like water. In Melanesia also the preparation by crushing is found. Among many Polynesian races kava afforded the basis for poisonous drinks ; a popular poison among the Hawaiians was made by mixing with it the leaves of Tephrosia piscatoria. Daphne indica, and the common gourd Lagenaria. That the consump- tion of spirituous drinks was originally almost or quite unknown, is distinctly asserted in regard to New Zealand, New Caledonia, the Loyalty Islands, Waigiu, and Humboldt Bay. In a few places, as Guadalcanar and New Georgia, a kind of palm wine is made, the juice being drawn off by incisions in the unopened flower. We find the same in Micronesia, where the people of Ponap6 even distilled a kind of brandy from palm wine. The plague of brandy imported from Europe has, under the influence of the missions, happily been less diffused in the smaller islands than in Australia and New Zealand. Coco-nut juice serves as the ordinary drink, the nut is held high, and the juice allowed to flow into the mouth, and the same mode of drinking is customary from other vessels ; to touch the nut with the mouth is considered unmannerly. As kava came in from the eastward, so did tobacco and betel from the west. We can indicate New Guinea and its neighbourhood as the central point of both. Both travel in close conjunction, tobacco having spread with extraordinary rapidity ; for instance, in a few years it has overrun the Admiralty Islands and New Ireland. Towards the end of the eighties the limit of tobacco passed exactly through Normanby, now it is cultivated on all the larger groups of the Pacific Islands, and in many places it already grows wild. In east and south-east New Guinea it is smoked with a piece of bamboo, through the small opening of which the smoke is drawn from the bowl and swallowed ; this intoxicating practice is known as bau-bau. In the Woodlark, Trobriand, and Laughlan groups, the natives pro- fess to have smoked through a reed before the arrival of the Europeans. This was filled with the smoke from the leaves of a certain bush, and then passed round the circle till it was emptied. This reed has been mistakenly regarded as a weapon. The Papuas are great smokers, and A. B. Meyer mentions as a peculiarity of theirs that, after puffing out the smoke through nose or mouth, they form their mouths to a point, and draw in the air with a noise, so that he could always hear when a Papua was smoking in his neighbourhood. Clay pipes have long been manufactured at various spots among the islands, and the Maoris understood how to carve them of stone in the same artistic fashion as is shown in their most original utensils. Betel extends as far as Tikopia, further east if has been diffused in quite recent times by means of labourers who have emigrated •or been exported as far as Fiji, but is not yet found in the New Hebrides or 26o THE HISTORY OF MANKIND ^-Ms^ UsmA . '0% \ New Caledonian hut (Qu. sacred) after a model ; doorposts and roof-ornament supplied from originals in the Berlin Museum. the Banks and Torres Islands. Where it cannot be got, as, for instance, in Isabel, they use an aromatic bark. The western Melanesians all chew betel. Wherever it occurs the teeth are black, and the traces of red saliva speak of the existence of natives even in the desolate Finisterre mountains. Betel nuts are given as pre- sents to guests ; areca nut, pepper leaves, and lime are used just as among the Malays, and betel pepper is carried in long ornamented gourds with a small opening through which to introduce the long narrow spoon. Betel boxes and spoons are among the most sedulously wrought utensils in New Guinea and its neighbourhood. It is curious that the words for these requisites in the Admiralty Islands are very unlike the Malay names, while those of the Yap Islanders who belong to the west Micronesians, among whom betel chewing is rare, remind us of those used in the Admiralty Islands. The houses of Oceania show Malay affinities. They are four-cornered and most frequently rectangular, long and low. The long roof of palm-leaves, rushes, or boughs, often resembles an inverted boat or an elongated bee -hive. The ridge is car- ried by lofty poles, and the eaves rest upon shorter posts, the walls consisting of reeds or mats fixed between them. In carefully built houses the roof is formed of rafters and sound timbers, covered with mats of banana - leaf.. The larger houses stand on stone foundations in the shape of raised plat- forms. In Polynesia, and the extreme east of Melanesia, especially Fiji, the houses fre- quently stand on mounds. LABOUR, DWELLINGS, AND FOOD IN OCEANIA 26r of earth 3 to 6 feet high, the height being proportioned to the owner's claims to importance. In Samoan huts, the roof, made of round bent timbers thatched with sugar-cane or maize -leaves, rests upon a number of shorter posts, the intervals between them being filled up with blinds of plaited palm -leaf. In the Friendly Islands the plan departs curiously from the rectangular, the section below the boat-shaped roof being pentagonal ; and the same in Easter Island. In Hawaii the different character of the material has led to a variation in style. The boat -form is maintained for the roof, and the frame -work is the same ; but the roof itself, made of thick layers of grass, is carried down to the ground, creating real grass huts. In the Melanesian Islands this form is retained with few exceptions. We find it in New Guinea, where the huts are on posts forming an oblong of 1 3 to 3 3 feet by 13 to 22 feet ; and in the Solomons, where the average length of the family dwellings is 45 to 70 feet, with a breadth of nearly 40. Here the roof, projecting and supported on posts, is thatched with sago and coco-palm leaves, and the side walls, about 3 feet high, are woven in pretty patterns of dark and light bamboo. Often a veranda is built on to the narrow side where the entrance is, and gives a touch of elegance to the whole edifice ; while the roof, made of leaves laid close together, evinces even more careful work. The Fijian buildings also to some ex- tent fall under this rectangular Roof ornaments and shoring-props from New Caledonia. (Vienna Museum.) style. Besides those which are characterised by the long roof-tree we find a second class, of which the ground-plan is a circle or an oval, and its external mark the conical or even bee-hive roof. This is indigenous especially to New Guinea, to some of the groups in the Torres Straits, to New Caledonia and the Admiralty Islands ; also to Fiji and the Solomons. The whole thing often looks just like a hay-rick. The temples differ from the huts only in size and internal fittings. An advance towards embellishment is seen in the fashion of planting a fiery-red dracaena near the huts. . The Polynesian house shows no tendency to soar on high, but grows only in length, even when it is already some hundreds of feet long. Thus, however elegant 262 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND the general appearance may be, nothing of architectural importance is arrived at ; and the building, even though erected with care and amid special rites, is light and not durable. Ruins of habitations are seen only where a stone foundation has been laid. The Hawaiians were the last to give up their grass-huts — long after they had adopted Christianity together with European clothes and utensils ; but even seventy years ago their chiefs were having stone houses built. The per- sistence of the Polynesian house in less elevated forms explains the value attached to the roof When a Samoan village in time of war is fearing an attack, the people take off their precious roofs and carry them to a place of safety. The roof of a New Caledonian house is richly adorned with bunches of leaves and shells. Under the peculiar conditions of the Maoris the Polynesian style under- went the greatest variation among them. The ground-plan was the same, but the house had firm wooden walls, with only a small door and narrow window in the front, which faced east- wards. The roof-tree was carried over a porch, and the roof thatched with rushes or coarse grass. This simple type can be materially enriched by carvings. These adorn in the first , place . the main pillar, which is in human shape ; also the supporters of the porch, the gable, and often each individual piece In the less genial districts they have winter., houses Mats from Tongatabu. (Cook Collection, Vienna. of wood inside and out half underground. In winter a fire is lighted inside, and when the coals have ceased to glow every opening is closed air-tight, till with an external- tempera- ture of 15° or so the interior is up to 80° or 90°. This no doubt is one of the causes of their disorders, for besides the exhalations of humanity there are also tobacco -smoke and the odours of drying fish, the New Zealanders' "national perfume." On the other hand, the neighbourhood of the huts is kept clean, and in the palmy days of the Maoris a village would always give the impression of tidiness and comfort. Here and there in Polynesia stone buildings have been found which have been taken to be habitations. The caves in heaps of stones which are among the curiosities of Easter Island were perhaps places of refuge in case of war. They exist also on other islands. In Isabel, villages defended by palisades for the reception of fugitives have been laid out in the heights of mountains difficult of access. They are called Teitaihi, and from the sea look like little forts. In Hawaii the boundaries enclosing the villages were marked by walls a yard high. Although as regards the form of the house it is immaterial in itself whether it stands on the ground or on piles, on dry land or in the water, yet pile-building in Melanesian dwellings has been carried to an extent found nowhere else ; and even where it is not, as it often is, seen in its extreme development, it forms a charac- teristic feature of life and scenery. Whether on dry ground or in the water, the house is built on piles. Speaking of the village of Sowek on Geelvink Bay (of LABOUR, DWELLINGS, AND FOOD IN OCEANIA 263 which we give a coloured illustration), where some thirty houses stand on piles, at- tached by tree stems to each other, but not to the shore, Raffray says : " We have in fact a perfect pile-village, just like those which science has reconstructed from the prehistoric period." The yet neater huts in Humboldt Bay similarly rest on piles a yard out of the water, but are connected by bridges. The roof rises to a height of nearly 40 feet, and forms a steep six or eight-sided pyramid. The houses more in the interior of New Guinea are likewise built on a similar plan ; and although on dry land, stand upon lofty piles which, with their sloping stays, present a highly original type of architecture as shown in the cut. They hang like eagles' nests, House in the Arfak village of Memiwa, New Guinea. (After Raffray. ) some 50 feet in the air, on their thin swaying trestle-work, looking as if every puff of wind must sweep them away. These airy dwellings are entered by means of slanting tree-stems with steps nicked in them. Constant hostilities have given rise to a special architecture in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Huts, known as bako, adapted to hold some twelve people, are attached to the branches of huge trees at a height of 80 to 100 feet. The stem below is stripped of all unnecessary branches, and perfectly smooth. Ladders made from liana or bamboo, which can be drawn up, serve to climb into these tree-huts, in which stones and spears are stored. At the foot of each tree a second hut is built, to live in during the day. The size of the buildings is the expression of social conditions. Where one family inhabits the house, as in Polynesia, they are small, becoming larger in :64 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND proportion as the family groups adhere to the old custom of a common dwelling. Large houses belonging to individuals are rare. In Fiji, where the houses are very fine, the old customs had been much weakened by the prosperity of the aristocracy of chiefs even before the English annexation. As regards size, and in other respects, the architecture of the Solomon Islands comes nearest to that of Fiji, the New Hebrides standing a stage lower. The chiefs' houses, the capacious assembly and guest - houses, the boat- houses, are carefully built and adorned with carved work, painting, and skulls ; while large pots, orna- mental bowls, plaited work, and here and there fire- arms form the most highly- valued decorations. In New Guinea the village halls, called marea, are specially notable. Even in the pile-villages they are found in a reduced form. In New Hanover and New Ireland they are buildings of moderate size, 12 feet by 25 or 30 feet ; so, too, in New Britain, where the roof of palm -leaves, pro- jecting a little beyond the outer walls, has on either side a kind of turret, on the top of which is a bundle of reeds. It is in Micronesia that the assembly or club-houses are most conspicuous. In Yap, Pelew, and Mancape in the Gilberts, two kinds of houses are universally distinguished — the family houses, blais, and the great houses or bats. The building of the great houses is a political matter, and as such entrusted to consecrated artificers. They are rectangular buildings, standing alone : in the Carolines on a stone foundation ; in Pelew on a platform of beams, upon which the polished floor immediately rests. Here the principle of pile-building is employed on dry land. In contrast to the care with which foundation, floor, and walls are treated, the high steep roof seems neglected, no doubt because violent storms frequently take it off The common hall has generally six similar openings the entire height of the wall, from a yard to a yard and a half in width. These, like the doors and windows, can be closed with light screens of reed or bamboo. Verandahs contribute to the comfortable Stool from Dorey in New Guinea — one-seventh real size. (Christy Collection. ) New Caledonian head-stools. (Vienna Museum. ) LABOUR, DWELLINGS, AND FOOD IN OCEANIA 265 character of the houses. In the case of the club-houses of New Guinea they are often covered with hangings of leaf fibre. The low door has often a porch of its own. In the interior of the Polynesian huts apartments are arranged by means of woven work and matting stretched from wall to wall ; in the smaller houses at least a sleeping place is divided off. The carving on timbers and pillars, the reed panelling or mat tapestry on the walls, the cords of various colours with which ' the rafters are bound, hanging down from the roof, lend a cheer- ful and pleasant char- acter to the interior of the better houses. The floor is carpeted with mats ; near the central pillar is a hollow where the domestic fire burns. This central pillar is the place of honour where the master of the house and his head wives sleep, and where weapons Carved and painted rafters from common ^alls [bais] in Ruk. (Godeffroy Collection, Leipzig. ) I Goiu-d bottle from the D'Entrecasteaux Islands— one-third real size ; Yap— one-fourth real size. (Finsch Collection, Berlm. Head-stool from and utensils hang in tasteful arrangement. Less comfortable is the fitting up of Melanesian houses, in particular of the pile- buildings, the floor of which is formed by cross timbers hardly as thick as the arm and often half a yard apart, rendering a certain amount of dexterity necessary to step over the gaps In the actual living rooms on either side of the corridor, bamboo rods more closely laid form the floor. There are no windows, since it is thought that ghosts 266 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND do not come in through the doors but through openings in the roof. Boards covered with a mat form the bed, the hearth is of basket-work with a thick layer of earth on it ; long thick pieces of bamboo with the joints perforated for holding water, sacks of matting, javelins, bows, arrows, spears, have their appointed places. In Tahiti there used to be regular stands for utensils, also shelves, and a long boat-shaped framework on which the dishes were placed at meals. In Samoan huts at the present day a chest stands on the floor in which clothes and small objects are kept. Chiefs even had a chest of drawers, and similar articles of furniture have been introduced elsewhere in the course of Europeanising. Among the house furniture of the Tongans, the headstool of hard lancewood is never absent ; the Samoans use as a support for their heads a piece of bamboo half a yard long, as thick as the arm, and with short legs. In Yap, the Marshall and Solomon Islands, and no doubt elsewhere, a billet serves. In Fiji, as in Tonga, Samoa, and Tahiti, this has become a regular stool. In Yap these stools have faces carved at either end. Seats are of European introduction, and have estab- lished themselves only in the huts of the chiefs. Even in the Christian churches men and women sit upon large mats with their legs doubled under them. The artistic tendency shows itself also in house architecture by the picturesque forms given to the gables, often as much as 40 feet high, of the roofs, which reach far down, often saddle-shaped and woven with carefully-worked thatch. The reed walls, often entirely concealed on the outside by the roof, display on the inside pretty patterns. Where there are three layers of reeds the inner one lies horizontally, and the crossings of the others are utilised to produce these patterns. A master of difficult patterns is a man in great demand. Much trouble is expended in Micronesia in the adornment of the club-houses : the exterior is painted and inlaid with shells ; in the interior red ochre is used on the walls, and the floor is varnished with vegetable lacquer. The principal decoration consists in winding the reeds with string ; also in the carving of the timbers and walls with hieroglyphics of mythical signification. The relation between houses and ships exercises a remarkable influence upon the nature of the carved and painted ornaments, perhaps upon the whole style. The walls of the house are made by preference from the planks of old vessels, and bowed outwards. The roof is shaped like a ship, and the whole house is like a boat turned over and placed on props. Images of ancestors on the gable or at the side of a house call to mind how the whole house «was consecrated from the foundation upwards. Small monuments in the neighbourhood take the form of miniature houses. If one considers that a large house is fastened together only by cords ; that the boards, some 6 inches wide, and the massive beams were hewn with shell axes and finely smoothed ; that the planks of the floor are even polished ; that the holes were made with sharks' teeth gimlets, we may get an idea of the amount of labour expended upon such a building. These works are eloquent witnesses of the height which craftsmanship, art, and comfort have attained where the age of stone still prevails. A small number of houses — some twenty or thirty — form a village at a favourable spot on the shore, by preference at the mouth of a river, where fresh and salt water are at hand. Villages are rare further in the interior, and then only on heights ; on the shore they are apt to be hidden behind a belt of forest. The mode of life points, indeed, to the sea ; in former times it may have been THE FAMILY AND THE STATE IN OCEANIA 267 otherwise. Everywhere in the hills we find traces of deserted villages, but the present inhabitants know nothing about them. Perhaps the assemblages were once larger; now a village of more than 500 inhabitants is a rare exception. Life in these villages is very varied, often idyllic ; each dwelling stands separate, surrounded by gardens and fields, or under the shade of lofty trees. Paved roads are frequent : in Yap they are a yard or two wide and paved with slabs of stone, broadening out in the neighbourhood of the club-houses into a paved place of assembly. Here, and by every old house, flat stones are sunk into the ground as seats. It is in Fiji especially that we hear of well-laid roads and other public works. There a canal called Kelimoosu has been cut through the delta from Bau to the river Wainiki in order to shorten the passage for strategic purposes. New Caledonia shows remains of ancient aqueducts, and in Espiritu Santo the village streets are to this day laid with flints and provided with conduits. A light breath of historic life sweeps with a gentle melancholy round these villages, and round the solitude of the superfluous fortific'ations on the hills and the stone pyramids which stand man-high in the stone circles of the Nangas. § 8. THE FAMILY AND THE STATE IN OCEANIA The family — Birth — Dedication — Education — Courtship and weddings — Position of women — Marriage — Mother-right — Tribal organisation — The state — Classes and ranks — Aristocratic type of public life — The prince and the nobles — Limitations of sovereign power — Court ceremonial — Warlike character — Casus belli — Military organisation — Modes of fighting — Sieges — Sea-fights — Treaties — The Malo — Respect for law — Laws of taboo — Punishment of those who violate taboo — Removal of taboo. Among the Polynesian races, the birth of a child is accompanied by an invocation of the gods on the part of the husband or father ; while the woman's mother, or one of her near relations, performs the duties of midwife. First, the family deity is called to aid ; but if labour is protracted, the husband's or mother's own private god. Dedicatory rites have already taken place during pregnancy. At the moment of parturition the names of all the gods are recited in succession, and the one whose name is uttered as the child comes into the world is regarded as his tutelary deity. Similarly the Tohungas of New Zealand, after aspersion, watch the movements of the child, and select as its secret name that word of their invocation which coincides with them. After the birth, the chief ceremony is the cutting of the cord. This is performed in Samoa, in the case of boys, upon a club, to make them brave ; while for girls, one of the boards is used upon which the tapa is beaten, that she may be an industrious housewife. In Fiji the cord is solemnly buried. As in New Zealand, where children are purified and named eight days after birth, with invocation of the tutelary god, and sprinkling with water, the Morioris of Chatham Island give the name amid hymns from the priests, water being poured on at the same time ; and they further plant a maheu-tree, in order that the child may grow like it and flourish. Among the Melanesians, simpler customs prevail. A hut is built for the lying-in woman, and some female relation suckles the infant. Continence and purification are enjoined upon the husband also. In Fiji and the New Hebrides neither of the couple eats flesh-meat or fish after the birth, for fear of making the baby ill ; nor must the father, for 268 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND a month after the birth of his first child, do any hard work. The couvade occurs distinctly in San Christoval, where " father-right " is the custom. Infanticide is widespread, and abortion is extensively practised, often merely on account of pique, Chief's wife of Papua, Samoa. (From a photograph in the Godeffroy Album.) but often also from vanity — the woman not caring to have children until the third year of her marriage. In some parts of the Solomons and the New Hebrides all children even are killed at birth, and substitutes purchased. If the child is a girl, it has generally more prospect of being kept alive where inheritance goes in the female line, and where it will carry on the family succession. The birth of twins THE FAMILY AND THE STATE IN OCEANIA 269 is not regarded as actually injurious, though there is a disposition to look upon them as uncanny. If the children are once allowed to live, everything is done for them with due care. Not only the parents but the relations make them presents. Little children who are living after their parents' death are adopted by others ; if they are older, natural ties, as well as the laws of inheritance, are honestly observed in the traditional way. The most important epochs in life have their own religious consecration. Tongan ladies. (From the Godeffroy Album. ) God is closer to man than is always the case with us Christians. In Saa, and on the Leper's Island, toy bows are offered, a week or ten days after birth, on behalf of the boy, that he may be strong ; mat-fibres for the girl, that she may be industrious. The participation in this of relations on the father's side is a significant infraction of mother-right, which in other respects is jealously guarded. In Hawaii, the child at weaning is brought from the mother-house, Noa, to the father-house, Mua, and thereby falls under the taboo to be presently mentioned. 2 70 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Thereupon the mother sacrifices a pig to her family god, while the father offers ava and implores health for the new scion. At the entrance upon manhood their consecration is repeated in more severe forms, and attended by customs of a hardening nature. A general fast is held in the family. The grandfather, between whose soul and that of the next generation but one a closer affinity is deemed to exist, rouses the iirst-born grandson from his sleep, and initiates him, in a hut set apart for the purpose, into the mysteries handed down from past times ; or the Tohungas of the tribe teach the rudiments of the traditions to such as show themselves of capacity, especially to the sons of Ariki or chiefs, dwelling meantime in the forest, in a house of leaves. The fasts are terminated by eating the pith of the toia-toia, in order " to cork up the secrets " ; followed by a second aspersion. After this the youth is fit for marriage. Yet another consecration takes place later, when the youth, now ripe for his first campaign, stands naked by the river- side, and is sprinkled with water by the priests, calling upon Tu. Women and boys are not admitted. In education the influence of the family is less than that of the village community or the tribe, as we may see if we consider the frightful extension of infanticide in pre-Christian times, at the bidding of these authorities. It was favoured by the ease with which marriages could be dissolved, and the exagger- ated view taken of the devolution of the father's position upon the son. Immedi- ately after birth the first-born boy is invested with his father's name and dignity and henceforth takes precedence of him. While the boy is in his minority, this produces no practical results, the father exercising all authority in his son's name. But the child must sometimes be felt to be a burden ; for which reason those freest of free people, \!as.Ariis or Ehris of Tahiti, recognise no children. Connec- tions cutting into and cutting up families contribute still more to cause estrange- ment between parents and children — adoption especially. In the Gilbert Islands the parents select the adoptive father or mother, who, when these are people of means, intrude themselves even before the child is born. It is the adoptive father who arranges the marriage of his fictitious offspring, and in whose house the young couple live. In this way complete transpositions take place within the family. It must, however, be said that in communities of lax morality adoption makes the descent of children more secure than the recognition of the true children, born under corrupt conjugal relations, can do. The inequality of the sexes has a profound effect upon family life and the increase of the race. The reasons that have been assigned for the smaller number of women are the murder of female infants, and the greater mortality of the adult women by reason of too early child-bearing, overwork, and privation, the violence of the men, and licentiousness. The proportion is often quite abnormal : in Hawaii it reaches one woman to four or five men. In Melanesia circumcision usually takes place on the appearance of the beard. On attaining puberty, or sooner, the youth leaves the parental hut and avoids his mother and sisters, sleeping in the common hall, which, except at marriage festivities, no woman may enter. The ceremonies at the initiation of the nubile girls are simple, in Samoa no more than a feast with presents. The whole course of life is different where girls are betrothed from their birth, and are brought up from childhood in the house of their intended. In Isabel it is even the custom for a girl to live in the bridegroom's family till she is full-grown. THE FAMILY AND THE STATE IN OCEANIA 271 In Fiji, when that time has arrived, the bridegroom comes to the house of the parents, offers some whales' teeth as a present, and takes the long-engaged bride to be his wife. Here, as in the Banks Islands, any anticipation of his marital rights is jealously guarded against. If the girl goes wrong she is severely punished, even put to death ; and her seducer, if he is caught, shares the same fate. A custom hard to explain is found in the Solomon Islands, in New Britain, and New Ireland — that girls on reaching puberty are locked up for some months in little huts of their own, entrance being allowed only to old women. The ceremonies of courtship are conducted on the familiar lines. The courting is done on the young man's behalf by relations or friends, who bring the symbolic presents to the house of the girl. These are in Samoa food, in New Britain heavy strings of money, carried on spears. The acceptance of these signifies a favourable disposition ; but as this form of courtship is addressed not to the family but to the tribe, the final decision rests with the tribal chief. At the wedding an exchange of gifts takes place, the settlement of which often gives rise to some hard bargaining. The bridegroom gives a boat, weapons, pigs ; the bride mats and bark-cloth. In Samoa both tribes used to assemble for the wedding festivities in the public place of the village. The bride, followed by her friends and playmates, well oiled, carrying flowers and dressed in their best , ,u v, •A^^.r.r.rr. mats, walked along a mat-strewn path to the middle, where sat A^ b„d^g-°- awaiting her. She took her place facing him, on a snow-white mat while the young women brought the wedding presents, singing as they went. In the days when the lefs still took a pride in the virtue of their daughters, inquiry mto this followed ; and great was the applause which greeted chief and tribe ^f "o ^^am cou d be shown on her character. The bridegroom's friends then escorted the bride to her future home where she passed some days in seclusion. This ^^^\f^-^-^'y J'^^l'^^^Z have ^een only provisional, and the next five or six months a period of P-ba^K," since at the end of that period a second festive gathering was held, and the jnarnage s aed by a renewed exchange of presents. In Melanesia too this exchgeb^ thinly concealed thepurchase of wives. The price -1-"-^.'^^ f f ^^f^^^ ^^ ^^^^^^ by the son ; and in the Solomons a widow is at the absolute disposal of her deceased husband's relatives, in the event of her marriage-pnce not bemg refunded. The Old Tongan woman. (From the Godeffroy Album. ) 272 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND necessity of refunding this is often the only ground of abstention from hasty divorces. Among the better-to-do classes of the more advanced stocks, like the Fiiians, cases occur, though exceptionally, of marriage of inclination The acquisi- tion of wives by capture still occurs, and the capture can be made good by the payment of an indemnity to the relations, in case the woman is content with her husband Fights of a "pretence" kind, however, take place between the brides and the bridegroom's friends, even where there is no trace of compulsion ; and a slight resistance on the bride s part is regarded as good manners. In various parts of West Melanesia marriage is celebrated with ceremonies of a religious character. Thus at Dorey, on Geelvink Bay, the couple join hands sitting before an ancestral image, and eat sago together under the exhortations and con- gratulations of their friends ; she offers him tobacco, he presents her with betel. During the first night the newly -married pair must sit up together while the relations partake of a copious and solemn meal ; after which the young husband takes his wife home. In New Britain the couple are sprinkled with coco- nut milk, the nut being broken above their heads. The wedding revel with music and dancing is seldom forgotten. A man frequently takes two wives, or more, if his establish- ment allows. Among poor tribes like the Motus, on the other hand, monogamy is universal ; but divorce is so easy that a kind of " successive polygamy " arises. When the wife is dgne with she is laid aside or bartered away. In the Gilberts a man can deiriand the sisters of his wife in marriage, and is expected to marry his brother's widows. The overplus of women among the Naiabeis of New Guinea decides the point, no less than does in other cases the more usual overplus of men. Peculiar family or- ganisations not uncommonly show traces of polyandry. In the New Hebrides, for example, there is a kind of convention in cases of widowhood, that two widowers shall live with one widow ; the children belonging to both. Dearth of women has lately given rise to something similar in the villages of labourers in Fiji, reminding us of the limitations of permitted marriages caused by the veve or veita system to Princess Ruth of Hawaii. (From a photograph belonging to Professor Buchner, Munich. )• THE FAMILY AND THE STATE IN OCEANIA 273 be mentioned presently. In New Ireland and New Britain widows are claimed as common property by all the men. But the re-marriage of the widower is opposed by all the female relations of the deceased wife : at first sportively, by using every possible form of annoyance to make the man keep at a distance, and then in earnest, if he does marry again, by destroying his house, goods, and crops. Generally speaking, in the simpler conditions of Melanesia, morality stands in many respects higher than in Micronesia. Finsch says of New Britain : " The exemplary modesty and respectable demeanour of women and girls strikes the traveller coming from Micronesia in a specially pleasing way ; and seems hardly compatible with the universal nudity." In some islands, as Florida, the chief maintains public women, whose earnings go to him ; but elsewhere nothing of the kind is known. Adultery is in many islands punished with death, or (in more recent times) with a fine. Jealousy is a great cause of contention, both public and private. But at cer- tain seasons an ancient custom relaxes every tie. At the Nanga festival in Fiji the women are the willing prizes of whoever can catch them in a race ; and at the same time all taboos of articles of food are taken off. So far as it turns upon the distribution of labour, the position of the women, especially in the Polynesian region, is higher than among many other races. Where labour itself is more highly valued its distribution between the sexes is fairer. In Tonga almost all work, even that of cooking, fell to the men ; the women only preparing tapa by way of entertainment among a circle of neigh- bours, accompanied by the men beating time. In Hawaii it was the same Both work together in the fields, but fishing is the men's aff^air ; though women take part in diving for shells. Among the more needy tribes more is laid upon the woman, and with nomads she is the beast of burden. In New Zealand the women held formerly a higher position. They were not excluded from the discussion of public affairs, not even from councils of war ; they even went with the men to battle. T Women of Ponap6 in the Carolines. (From the Godeffroy Album. ) Husband and wife ate together, and the mother 274 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND got as much obedience from her children as the father. Only in certain tribes destitution produced exceptions. Nothing in all this is altered where " mother- right " is valid ; for though the children follow the mother, the father is still the head of the family, and his wedded wife does not belong to " his side of the house," but remains " at the door." As in affairs of daily life, so even in higher matters two views of the woman's position are in dispute ; and here too we find that the higher view is taken in some Polynesian groups. But even in the Melanesian Islands we meet with both not far apart. In the northern New Hebrides women seem freer than in the southern, and in some parts of New Guinea her position in the family is described as one of high esteem. But in Polynesia the notion that contact with her is defiling, excludes her from closer association with men at meals, at public worship, and at festivals. In Tahiti men and women have their separate priests ; in other islands the women have none, and even a life in the next world is not allowed to them on the part of the men. In Melanesia the women may not enter the common houses of the men, nor the boat-houses, which are of the nature of temples. Yet again the Maoris ascribed prophetic gifts to the oldest woman of the tribe, while in Tonga there were priestesses who, after drinking ava, were possessed and prophesied. In Micronesia their social position has unmistakably risen. Here it is quite contrary to good manners for a hus- band to beat his wife or use insulting words to her in public. In Pelew, if the woman insulted belongs to the Ajdit stock, the fine imposed is equal to that for homicide, and if it cannot be paid the culprit must fly the country. The greatest , insult that can be offered to a married man is any ill word of his wife ; and no one must mention the name of another man's wife in public. A social organisa- tion exists here for women corresponding to that of the men, and running almost parallel with it. Just as the chief of the men in Pelew must belong to the family whose seat is Ajdit, so the eldest woman of this family is the queen of the women. Beside her stand a number of female chiefs, with whom she keeps an eye upon the good behaviour of the women, holds her tribunal, and gives judgment without any man being allowed to interfere. So too the women are divided into leagues, called Klobbergoll. If these lack the important attribute of the male unions, — community of labour, participation in the wars, common dwelling in the bais, — they have the right to levy taxes at festivals and on the death of the military king. Among their duties are the management of the decorations at festivals, including the dances, of which the men openly admit that only the women understand the meaning. The men are strictly warned • off the women's bathing-places ; exactly for which reason these spots are selected for lovers' rendezvous. In this case the man is under the protection of the lady and her friends. A great auxiliary to these tendencies, which prevail in so many districts, towards giving a higher position to women, nay, even to the widespread " mother-right," is that loosening of the marriage-tie which has progressed to the point of decomposing society. No tie in the whole life of the Polynesians appears to be weaker than that of marriage. Small reasons are enough to undo it, and its undoing is taken very easily on both sides. This goes so far as to make the wife's position one of simple thraldom, where she is regarded as the man's property and no more. When Europeans in Polynesia wish to secure the favour of native women they have first to make a present to the husbands, who will hand over their wives, compulsorily if need be. In Hawaii a kind of incipient polyandry arises by the addition to the THE FAMILY AND THE STATE IN OCEANIA 277 establishment of a " cicisbeo," known as Punali'ia. Thus in Tahiti women of easy- virtue could call themselves Tedna, which was also the name of ladies of the royal family. Very often the main object of matrimony appears to be not at all the procreation of children, but the husband's comfort ; or, at best, the guardianship of the wife, or some question of money. Besides this, not only the constraint of exogamy, but — at all events in the higher classes — political objects have to be considered. One thing detrimental to marriage is the view that it is not seemly to display the wife to the world as being in confidential relations with her husband. Men never allow themselves to be seen on the highway with their lawful wives, though with a paramour they have no objection. If a stranger stays in the house the wife keeps out of the way. Even the number of children, which is kept as low as possible, is affected by this corrupting influence. It arises in great part from the tribal organisation with its union of men, involving necessarily the exclusion of the family ; and even if the family exists beside it, it becomes corroded at the base. The more the system of men's clubs develops, the weaker are family ties. If a girl at ten or twelve years old has not found a husband, she goes as an armengol, or doxy, to a bai, and becomes the paramour of a man who keeps her. Until she can find some one to marry her — a matter of simple agreement — she can go from one bai to another. Often the opposed interests of the wives and the irregular partners lead to quarrels ; and for this reason the paramour has a hut of her own built for her in the neighbourhood. Nothing, however, shows more clearly the way in which the superior force of social organisation breaks through the barriers of Nature than the fact that the married women do not object to maintain the girls of the bat, — another proof of the subordination of family to tribal interests which the mode of courtship has already exemplified. External life, too, is not family but village or tribe life. The Polynesians are sociable, but it is pre-eminently a masculine society ; and domestic happiness is not unaffected by this. In this matter the Negroes are much better. Owing to the twofold organisation of exogamic society in hapus or veves a whole list of restrictions, prohibitions, menaces, ramifies through families, and produces a deep influence on the life of these races. The tie by which all men and all women of two different " sides " are connected, is closer than the marriage-tie. Breaches of it are rarely committed and then severely punished. Alliances between people who are '' of us " are as bad as incest. The stern law extends even to newly-born children, and twins of opposite sexes fall victims to it. The relation to the parents-in-law has peculiar limitations. The man never utters the name of his father-in-law, and avoids taking down objects that may happen to hang above his head or stepping over his legs. The mother-in-law is avoided as much as possible, and herself avoids looking at her son-in-law ; intercourse is only permitted at a distance and with mutually averted faces. If they meet casually, they keep out of each other's way. Mother and son-in-law, and often brother and sister, are careful not to tread in each other's footsteps. If one has walked on the shore, the other does not go there till the tide has obliterated the prints. Towards a brother-in-law the relation is as in the case of a father-in-law ; neither his name nor that of son- or daughter-in-law is ever uttered, but mutual intercourse is not forbidden. In Leper Island and in Fiji brother and sister may not talk to each other. What wonder if the domestic life of a Melanesian family is governed by mistrust, jealousy, and aversion ? Other things, too, tend to sap family life. Women during preg- 278 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND nancy remain separate from their husbands ; infanticide, polygamy, adoption, have a ruinous effect. The popular philosophy of P""iji says that it is usual for a wife to hate her husband, rarer for a husband to hate his wife, rarest of all for a woman to hate the man by whom she has had a child before marriage. Superficial friendliness is common, but few are conscious of any deeper feeling. There is only one natural feeling which lives here as else- where, and often enough breaks down all barriers, and that is maternal love. Even this is flawed very soon in Fiji by the bad bringing-up of the boys ; the father teaches them to beat their mother, and not be cowards enough to do what a woman tells them. The practice of shutting off a tribal group by the exclusion or subordination of marriages out of the tribe has no doubt political importance, but has never had a favourable effect on the family. Where the societies connected through the mother are able to keep themselves clearly distinct, they are based on a cleavage in the tribe, as in the case of exogamy. Typical cases are the Maori Iiapu-sysY^ra., and the East Melanesian veve. Hapu signifies the womb, in the sense of that which bears the family within it. Every Iiapu has its tutelary god, who is figured as a bundle of reeds ; it cultivates the land in common, intermarries, and inherits by " mother- right." The oldest member represents its rights, especially in the event of a partition or division of land. Not- withstanding that the hapu is subdivided into wtianau or families, all the members claim relationship with their chief, and bear a common name, which they profess to derive from the most remote ancestor. Owing to intermarriage within the hapus, together with " mother -right," the /««/«(! -organisation does not run parallel with the village -divisions ; as a rule, several hapus are found co- existing in one village or pah^ while the same hapu will be distri- Fly-whisk, from the Society Islands — one- , , . .,, a i t • • sixth real size. (Christy Collection.) buted among various Villages. Another division, iwi, exists among the Maoris, embracing all who came over in the same boat. The name signifies " bone," and thus a deeper foundation, similar to that of the hapu is not excluded. In Melanesia the term " one side of the house " signifies the same thing as hapu, or the two veve (mothers) into which the whole tribe is divided. In Fiji it is veita " root." The children always belong to the mother's family ; the husband's nearest relations, by whom his own family is carried on, are his sister's children. A man must always marry a wife from the other group. The two families again branch off into four, and these again into several subdivisions. All who bear a common name regard themselves as blood-relations, and marriages between them are incestuous. This tie is often the only one that holds, and thus it acquires political importance. Here, as everywhere, the exogamic groups possess cognisances, or, as we might say, family arms ; most often animals or plants, to which they believe themselves to be in some way related. Among the THE FAMILY AND THE STATE IN OCEANIA 279 Melanesians this symbol is called tamanin or ponto, " resemblance " ; among the Polynesians atua. They wear it both in their tattooing and in the ornamentation of their weapons. Inanimate objects also, paddles, nets, whisks, are among these signs, said to have been granted by the gods ; and their protective power is honoured by solemn dances. Prohibitions in respect of what may be hunted or eaten are connected with them. That similar relations may at any time come into existence is shown by the sudden cessation of all banana- planting in Ulawu, after an influ- ential man had announced on his death -bed that he was going to turn into a banana. The sacrifice of the family, as if it were a transitory appearance on the surface of the unchangeable tribe, comes most clearly to view in the regulations as to property and inheritance. The husband can take nothing of his wife's property, while when he dies she only keeps what he has given to her. The brother of the deceased is the rightful heir, while in marrying she loses nothing but her name. The right of the female line is valid in the succession ; but the right of the male line has already tried here and there to acquire validity, or has even achieved it to a large extent. Property and rank are conferred by the mother ; the king's successors are the male offspring of his sister. Thus in Tonga, in the chiefs' families a high rank was assigned to the elder sister or aunt, in the reigning family indeed higher than that taken by the Tuitonga. In Fiji the brothers first succeeded, and failing these, the sons. No married princess could attain to this rank. Thus, in Pelew the king's wife is never the women's queen, for it is forbidden to marry in the same family ; but the women's titles are like those of the men attached to seniority. Thus, in order to avoid any interlacing of the two spheres of sovereignty, the chief may not marry any chief's daughter. The children inherit their mother's home, which often leads to chaotic com- plications. Relationships by the female side, on which the pedigrees rest, fuses with the (2/'«^«-system ; the alleged sons of the same mother may not injure each Fly-whisks (chiefs insignia), from the Society Islands- one-fifth real size. (Christy Collection. ) THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Other, but also must not marry into each other's families. It is indeed a gift of the gods. Kubary gives the following extraordinary account of the relations existing in the Palau or Pelew Islands: "The King of Molegojok, with which Korror is at hereditary feud, is a native of Aremolunguj, while the King of Korror comes from a Molegojok family ; both have to fight against their own homes. Rgogor, the most powerful chief of Korror, is the son of a native of Ngiwal ; while Karaj, the first minister of Angarard, and Iraklaj, the King of Molegojok, are sisters' children, and yet in opposite political camps." Class-divisions among the Polynesians are, by reason of taboo, as sharp as in the most thorough system of caste. They fall into those which participate in the divine, and those which are wholly excluded from it. The aristocratic principle is seldom carried to such an extreme as here, where a stern psychology remains inexorable even beyond the grave. In Tonga the native people, in contradistinction to the immigrant nobles, are regarded as having no immortal souls ; while the souls of nobles return from the next world and inspire those of their own order for the priesthood, so that the connection of the tabooed class with the gods is never interrupted. The boundary between these two classes is not everywhere alike, though the divisions into chiefs, freemen, or slaves runs through all Polynesia. In the Marquesas the untabooed class comprises all women with their male attendants, as well as singers and dancers ; in Rapa indeed all men were sacred, and had to be fed by the women. Of the men of rank the greater number are connected by ties of relationship, the memory of which is preserved by professed genealogists, with the aid of pedigree- sticks. The remembrance goes far back. When the palace in Hawaii was dedicated none were admitted save those who were connected with the sovereign in the tenth or some less degree. Nobility carries practical advantages in the shape of high posts of state. There are oligarchies, where the smaller chiefs take their part in the government by performing inferior Fly whisk (insignia of a serviccs as diplomatic envoys, intermediaries in secret matters chief), from Pelew Is- of council, and such like. The child of a chief belonging to lands — one-eighth real , ^-r • i r i i o a size. (British Museum.) the t-liri, born of a low-class mother, is put to death. But in some cases a man can overstep these boundaries, as in Tonga, where clever craftsmen from among the people are raised to the tabooed class as Tubunas. Outwardly, social intercourse displays itself in pleasing forms. In Micronesia the division of classes is equally into nobles, freemen, and slaves. The first, with the priests, are the most influential, the freemen the most numerous ; the two often coincide or break up again into definite classes. Since, however, in many cases property gives higher rank than birth, there are nobles who, as owners of a district, rise to the position of little kings. Where, as in the Mortlocks, a population of 3500 is divided into ten tribes and sixteen states, the road from the chief to the noble is naturally as short as that from despotism to oligarchy. In East Melanesia the classes correspond with the Polynesian divisions. In THE FAMILY AND THE STATE IN OCEANIA Fiji we find the distribution by businesses, as in Tonga. Here there are individual tribes who carry on a distinct trade — sailors, fishermen, or carpenters. There are even special villages of fighting-men, fishermen, carpenters, physicians, artists in hair, potters. The most despised of all classes are the coolies. Even in New Guinea every Motu village is distinguished for some one industry, one for its women's dressmaking, another for its shell orna- ments, others for pottery or coco-palm planting. In regard to the certain existence of slavery in these districts there is room for doubt. It has always been lightly assumed. In the west, where the feeble political structure does not allow of warfare on a large scale, slavery is often absent ; but in the Solomons we meet with it, accompany- ing a more vigorous development of chief's authority. It used to prevail even more exten- sively in Fiji where successful risings of slaves even took place. An essential part, it not the very nucleus of the state, must be sought in societies, embracing the greatest number of the freemen in the bond of common interests or the practice of a kind of freemasonry. With their secret influence and their public festive gatherings, they are one of the most significant features in the life of these races, especially the Melanesians. Their objects are of a partly political, partly economic kind, and the religious pretext is often solid, but often also threadbare. In the Banks Islands and New Hebrides members of the leagues called supwe or suque hold quite the place of the chiefs. Their importance is in inverse ratio to the strength of the constitution ; and at the same time the influ- ence which each one exercises is measured by his rank or class. Those at the top decide who shall, after due payment, rise into another class ; who shall be excluded, and so on ; the essential distinc- tion between them and the chiefs being all the less from the fact that in other islands the chiefship is often elective and limited by a council of elders. Paddles (chiefs insignia), from New Zea- land — one -sixth real size. (Christy In the popular tales, the poor orphan boy, favoured collection.) by fortune, who elsewhere would marry the king's daughter, here attains the highest rank in the suque. Thus in different ways a powerful bias to aristocracy makes itself felt. The best-known society of this kind was the Ehri ox Areoi of Tahiti, who formed a league traced back to the foundation of a god. A grand master presided over each of the twelve classes, the seven grades of which were distinguished by their tattooing ; and all were bound in a close comradeship. Being warriors, they must remain celibate ; and if they should have children, these must be killed. Their lands are tended by slaves. Even the first THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Europeans found the league degenerated ; it went about like a dramatic troupe, an example of low immorality. Every race of Micronesia is broken up into closely united societies. Among the nobles this takes the character of a retinue ; and one may occasionally recognise in it some connection with inheritance in the female line. Thus in the Ralick Islands the ruling chiefs belong to one clan, their sons to another ; the chief must marry into the clan of his sons, and descent is reckoned by the mother. The Micronesian bais, both of freemen and bondmen, appear at the same time as phalansteries, with the object of organising labour. These have been compared with regiments, and the obligation to enter them with compulsory service. All boys must be entered in their fifth or sixth year. One union, however, never comprises more than from thirty-five to forty individuals prac- tically of the same age, so that an older man belongs to three or four bais. If an);- one gets a rise in rank, he must pay a sum of money to each person belonging to the same. There is also a women's union; but they have no house of their own. This arrangement recurs in a similar form in Melanesia. We find its earliest forms in the West : New Britain has its Duk-duk ; New Guinea and New Caledonia something akin. Everywhere some kind of ghost business comes in ; it is even implied in the names. The masquerades are said to represent ghosts; and the strange noises that proceed from the strictly unapproachable holy places The suque became at last a social and public institution, but formerly it was said to secure for its members a life in a beautiful place, while the souls of non-members remained hanging to the trees like flying-foxes. The initiated learn nothing beyond dances and songs, and how to mask them- selves and how to behave. Less indecency than rumour whispered seems to have prevailed in these conventicles. Women and children are excluded ; only in the nangas of Fiji are women admitted, as is natural. In the tamata of the Banks Islands what we may call a lively club-life has been developed. Formerly hard tests involving physical pain were attached to admission ; but now every- thing seems to have become much gentler and more cheerful. In the Duk-duk of New Britain a secret society assumed the character of a " Vehme," and at last exercised a real reign of terror with its extortions and executions. Chief among the institutions which are independent of, and work counter to, the systems known as hapu, veve, kema, etc., stands the family. In Micronesia it recognises one head as the common centre of all the widely-scattered members, each of whom is named after his place of abode. This is managed by the eldest like an entailed property, attached to his name and title, and inherited by the next eldest. The chiefs tutelary god is conceived to be attached to this house, so Chief of Tae in the Morllocks. (Godeffroy Album. ) have a terrifying effect. THE FAMILY AND THE STATE IN OCEANIA 283 %Mn that it often receives more veneration than the chief himself. While he is alive he has another house built for his wife and children, since after his death they have to make way for his eldest brother, or the eldest son of some former head of the family. ^ As regards the distribution of property, the Pacific Islands offer a picture of great variety. Between common possession and private ownership lies the curious apportionment of real property, which under " mother-right " devolves jointly, even to the crude form existing among the Kemas of Florida, who on the death of a member devour all his goods. In general, here as elsewhere, Melanesia offers the simplest conditions ; in Polynesia the transforming forces of the political develop- ment in the direction of monarchy, and the husband's power of independent acquisition, have had their effect, and that again more in the east and north than in the south. Even before the inroads of Europeans the feeling for ownership had brought about distinctions ; thus in small districts like the Gilbert Islands, the laws of individual property and inheritance are not very different from ours, allowing for the encroachment of adoption, while social position is essentially determined by property in land. But there are a number of institutions which tend to level the differences, as admission by purchase into the higher grades of the secret societies, the yearly suspension of all rights of property during the great festivals, or, in Samoa, the parties of pleasure among friends and relations, at which the sucking-pig plays an important part, and which resulted in so much extra- vagance, leading to insolvency, that in 1888 King Tamasese found it necessary to put a stop to them.^ Ownership in the soil is respected within the close community of the village, but not always beyond its limits. The soil is everywhere divided into village- lands, fields, or gardens, and waste. The former are accurately known, parcel by parcel, while to the last there is no clear title ; though in Fiji its alienation by the chiefs seems to have been felt as an infringement of the common rights of property. The sale of land was not at all usual in pre-European times. In view of the facts that the land of the " two sides " often lies mixed up in small plots of ground, so that land which the father has reclaimed is to be found all among the mother's hereditary domains, and that the rights to fruit trees and to the soil may be vested in different persons, Feather Sceptre from Hawaii. (Christy Collection. ) ' [For an account of these malanga, see Stevenson, A Footnote to History, p. 2. He says nothing about any prohibition on Tamasese's part. Perhaps it extended only to the districts owning that puppet-monarch's authority.] 284 THE HISTOKY OF MANKIND the problems of conveyance are often insoluble. There is no private property in land, only a usufruct through the family which cultivates its piece. Only what a man has cleared and tilled with his own hand and the help of his children remains his own and passes to them. Claims to rent on the part of the chiefs do not seem primitive. But at the present day, if in the Solomon Islands a subject omits to hand over to the chief a portion of his profits from the harvest, or the fishery, or of booty taken, he commits a delinquency. In Fiji, military services, which took precedence of all others, led in the event of a success to new grants of land, with all the inhabitants as slaves ; entailing fresh obligations on the recipients. In many cases the entire relation of subjects to a prince became one of gifts on the side of the former only. The conditions of property among the Maoris perhaps correspond most nearly to a primitive state of things. We may suppose that no individual possession was valid here, each regarding the common land as his own. In other places a wounded man could claim a title to ground on which drops of his blood had fallen. Hunting and fishing grounds remained common property. In Melanesia sons could enter as heirs upon property left by their father on condition of in- demnifying his nephews by gifts of pigs, teeth, or shells. If he left only daughters, the nephews of the male side inherited in preference ; and under this law the children's property was several, while in the case of nephews and others inheriting under mother-right it remained collective. Among the Maoris the strict rule seems to have been broken in this respect, that tribal property was inalienable. According as the husband lived with the wife's tribe, or the wife with the hus- band's, the children followed. But the maternal tribe always claims the child of those who pertain to it, even when they have married into another. The loss which a tribe undergoes by the transference of children born within it, and their property, to the mother's tribe, the latter endeavours to supply by gifts of land. But since the children generally marry in the same tribe, the land never passes out of the tribe's ownership. Class and tribal organisation with the Polynesians forbids a distribution of the soil among families, but it could not, in the event of the great development of a chiefs power, prevent the tribal right from being administered by an individual. Thus in Hawaii tribal rights of ownership have become transferred to the chief, and his subjects either cultivate a portion of the land for him, or else have to offer him the first-fruits of every harvest, or render compulsory service two days out of seven. Till quite recently he even received a quarter of all wages earned by his subjects. They belonged to the land ; and the lower classes were treated as serfs, bound to the soil. A proof that this depend- ence was patriarchal, and not felt as oppressive, is furnished by the fact that the sudden abolition of it through Christianity has been indicated as one cause of the decrease of the population. In Tonga also a similar system has grown up, while in the Gilberts the population is divided into Tokker, landowners ; Torro, people who are allowed to enjoy the usufruct of the land ; and Bei, landless varlets, whom the lord can make into Torro by a grant of land. The owners govern almost exclusively, even where there are nominal kings. Almost everywhere in Polynesia, indeed, the larger landowners generally exercise influence on the government. The Bei, though distinguished neither by clothing nor way of life, seldom marry into the higher classes. The laws of taboo {tapu, in Melanesia tambu) have developed, especially in Polynesia, in so partial a fashion, that they have passed beyond the limits of a THE FAMILY AND THE STATE IN OCEANIA 28s religious ban, and hamper all free n:iovement as much as does caste among the Indian races. Only the law of taboo does not merely divide mankind by im- passable gaps, it simply cuts the entire world in two, and that so sharply that the whole excluded portion of mankind was constantly in danger of missing the sacred boundary. Everything on earth, with the exception of men, falls into the two classes of moa or sacred, and noa or common. Everything upon which the power of the taboo is conceived as ipso facto resting belongs to the first, since it is the property of the gods and of privileged men, or always reserved for these. To the second belongs whatever is taboo-free, and so allowed to be used by all men. But in addition to this, taboo can be transferred by mere external contact. It is nevertheless possible to enfranchise by certain ceremonies that which has been tabooed, and thus also to set men free from it. If, in consequence of this, the political and social im- portance of the notion of taboo disguises its religious nucleus, this exists none the less. Wc have here before us a conception which has grown out from the religious sphere, the use of which in the art of government early secured it an extension into the political domain, which is no less subtle than unscrupulous. Besides the gods, the forces of taboo are also at the disposal of men who are possessed of the god- like spirit, though, as it appears, not in the same degree. Every one else and almost all women were excluded from it. We may easily see that among these races who bring the divine and the human into extremely close relations, the operations of taboo, originally a divine force, must penetrate intimately all earthly conditions ; so intimately, indeed, that in unhistoric minds the idea might easily become established that taboo was in reality invented only for social and political objects. In any case it is very easy to be misled. By means of taboo personal property is secured ; at one time that which belongs to a noble, and therefore tabooed, person cannot be used by others ; at another time he, as the conveyer of taboo, is in a position to taboo the property of others. It works beneficently if, under fear of a bad harvest, the crop is tabooed with a view of preventing famine, until such time as the chief removes the taboo from the fields. In Tonga, as well as in Hawaii, it was the custom, when great festivities were celebrated with immoderate extravagance, to lay a taboo on certain produce ; every landowner can in this way protect his own piece of ground from persons lower in rank ; or even such fishing -places as are reckoned private property. The fact that taboo is so frequently laid upon articles of food, is due to the further reason that everything connected with the tutelary deity of a tribe in animal form — the atua — must not be touched by those that belonged to the tribe. The soul-eating of the gods, a religious method of expressing wonder at the enigmatic process of digestion, plays equally a part in this, and, lastly, selfishness is not without its effect. Thus, in King Lunalilo of Hawaii, graph.) (From a photo- 286 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND the western islands, there were forests, roads, beaches, which were tambu. Un- doubtedly, in the later times of religious corruption, taboo was shamelessly misused for the selfish objects of priests and chiefs. Thus once upon a time Samoan warrior in ta/a-clothing. (From the Godeffroy Album). King Kamehameha I., who more than anyone else profited by this power to serve his political ends, laid a taboo on a mountain near Honolulu, because he took the quartz crystals found there for diamonds. When Hawaii in 1840 THE FAMILY AND THE STATE IN OCEANIA 287 tabooed for the space of five years all the herds of oxen which were being unmercifully decimated, taboo became a measure of government. The old sacred taboo becomes a police regulation. Formerly its influence cannot have been so extensive, since divinity was limited to'the kings ; now it has been spread over all the business of life. Even where the custom itself has become remote from its religious origin, the penalties for breach of taboo have retained a religious character. Thus, too, the strongest trespasses against taboo obviously lay in the religious direction. Desecra- tions of temples were the greatest sins. The penalties, indeed, fall mostly upon the lower classes and the women ; for persons of rank there are means of averting ill consequences. The old faith is falling to pieces ; while it still stood unbroken Polynesian religion often demanded what was impossible. In Tahiti nobody Ear-button and war-amulet of whale tooth, from the Marquesas — two-thirds real size. (Christy Collection.) might sleep with his feet turned towards the mawai ; in New Zealand the mere looking at a corpse involved taboo. Sick people were tabooed because the illness was caused by an atua, new-born children because they belonged to the gods, women in child-bed on account of the child, and corpses because the soul hovered round them. Whoever had taken up a dead man might not touch food before the priests had made atonement for him by reciting the hymn of creation. Thus breaches of taboo could easily be committed by inexperienced Europeans, and therein lay a main cause of serious conflicts. Let us just imagine how, from the spiritual and secular centres of these races, taboo spread as a burdensome and threatening epidemic. In New Zealand it could even be incurred by the naming of any article belonging to a person of rank. If in any village a strong taboo prevailed, owing to the tattooing of some lads, the whole village was tabooed. In Tahiti, when a man of rank fell ill, the whole district of which he was the head was declared taboo by the priests. Universal silence must reign, no boat might sail, no food be cooked, no fire lighted. Taboo enters into the life of the lower classes in so burdensome a fashion as to produce a universal oppression, which the priests and chiefs well understood how to turn to political account. 288 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Variations of detail indicate that here and there the inconvenience was mitigated by a tacit understanding. Taboo-free persons were required to feed those under taboo, and ^Vfe=£,\vi^ ~linWI''ll^B s^s^== ^^= ^^ ^^s ^=^ ;z:zi^ for this purpose slaves ■* ^^^^ captured in war were very useful, since hav- ing passed out of the authority of their own tribal tutelary spirit, and not come under the new one, they were incapable of vio- lating a taboo. There must also be some means of removing a taboo, since otherwise it would spread by contagion until all the free-will and uncon- strained action of a people was stifled. The removal involves various ceremonies. Many of its effects, indeed, are indelible, and are interwoven with the life of genera- tions to come, even when they are no longer understood. Thus the names of dead chiefs, the spots where they have died, large burial- places, are tabooed ; which explains why in even the more thicklyr peopled islands many uninhabited tracts are found. Christianity, too, has been willing to make use of taboo to enforce its requirement of humble and obedient hearts. In the society of the small islands, cloven as it is by reason of mother-right, caste, and secret societies, and with a powerful priestly class, we seldom meet with kings, in the European sense, such as Kamehameha I. Europeans found them because they looked for them ; and many first rose to greatness by means of the presents received from Europeans and the respect paid by them. In New Zealand the ariki, or divine chief, instructed by his father or grandfather in the sacred traditions, stood high above secular chiefs and priests. He comprised in himself Warrior of the Solomon Islands. (From the Godeffroy Album.) THE FAMILY AND THE STATE IN OCEANIA 289 the power of both, could put on and take off taboo, or decide the time for field- operations, and the places for burials. On the other hand, the spiritual power or mana of the chief, if he were not ariki as well, depended on his personal authority ; and the mana of the priest, if he again were not also ariki, was only obeyed in respect of his relation to the gods. Thus, too, hereditary chiefship is only recognised where it is believed that there has been a transmission of the mana. The mystical Fijian warrior. (From the Godeffroy Album. ) element in this conception exercises a great power over people's minds. When a powerful chief in the New Hebrides has his son brought up as a Christian, it is taken for granted that the spiritual force which would qualify him for the succes- sion vanishes. So again in the Solomon Islands the dignity of a chief is in general not hereditary ; but the bravest man is elected to the post by the elders. In some other islands, too, the elders have the paramount influence, while the chiefs dignity is merely nominal. Similarly the elders are the priests, the mediators between the living and the dead, and what is tabooed by them is sacred. Practical experience has taught white men that in New Britain and New Ireland U 290 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND even the greatness of power which they wish to see the chiefs possess in the interests of order is hardly to be artificially created ; and the same in New Guinea. On the other hand, wherever warlike conditions prevailed, the dignity of the chief grew in importance. It was especially so in Fiji, where we have a completely military organisation, under which the villages tributary to one chief, and governed by chiefs of lower rank, were divided into official districts. The appellations of the chiefs also point to their military character. Often they appear merely as doughty warriors who, if they do not spring from a family of the rank of chiefs, have been adopted into one on account of their courage. Saturated as this life ■ is with religion, and military as is its character, a splitting of the kingship between a peace-king with shadowy power and a war-king was sure to follow. Thus beside the head of the state another figure often towers up, whether the war-chief or, as in Radack, the commander of the great ship. In Samoa the chiefship has undergone a development in the direction of aristocracy ; in Hawaii, in that of monarchy. In the Samoan party-fights, which since 1876 have come into contact with European politics, the electoral chiefs always came to the front, while the king appeared dependent on them. In the neighbouring Gilberts the preponder- ance of landowners has created a sort of plutocracy. They recur in Hawaii as Alii, and in Kamehameha's monarchical constitution they held a modest position as the " assembly of chiefs," with different ranks of taboo. A representative intermediary between king and people appears in some form everywhere ; the fono of Samoa, the aha-alii of Hawaii, show it in various stages of development.'*; It has a strong tendency to assume the character of a secret society. Special assemblies are called together by the chief or his representative on important occasions, especially when war threatens. They deliberate often for days together with many ceremonies and lengthy speeches. From this the transition to modern constitutionalism or its imitation was not difficult. The constitution of Kame- hameha III. ordained that the heir to the crown should be nominated by king and chiefs acting together. Failing this the chiefs were to do what was necessary in conjunction with the representatives of the people. Here again the aristocratic principle corrects the patriarchal, and thus the high pitch which despotism has reached rests more upon the pressure of class and caste than upon the over- powering will of a single man. Its profound effects can only be explained in this way ; only in this way could it permeate all conditions of life. In any case the effects were far less upon the privileged than upon those who had no rights — the oppressed ; and thence also came the sadly rapid decay of this society. An element which is often overlooked among the state institutions of the Oceanians is the small size of their territories. On the lowest stage of the formation of states, we find little communes, or little groups of communes, allied in blood, which vegetate under their own village chiefs or elders. In the largest part of New Guinea, even these dignitaries are lacking ; social and family relations embracing also political, and every village on the whole forming a state of itself. In the Ruk group, they speak of thirty-nine tribes and seventy-three states. Since there is no room for the development of a power founded upon extensive posses- sion in land and people, it is less the actual conditions of power than traditions, personal relations, and political intrigues, which decide matters in the island groups. A certain order of the lands, in point of rank, is traditional from old times ; only one larger archipelago formed a single state, and how often did that fall to pieces ? THE FAMILY AND THE STATE IN OCEANIA 291 ■a The very largest islands, New Guinea and New Zealand, never possessed a single state of any importance. As in the case of class organisation, so also in the govern- ment, there is a patriarchal air. The people are very sensitive on the point whether the king takes trouble, or utilises the advantages of his office to his own profit. Thus in Kubary's time, the King of Korror was deposed for his avarice. In Tahiti, strangers might see the king putting his hand to the paddle in his own canoe, and the meanest man could speak freely with him. These are the humanising effects of nature which bestows her gifts with equal freedom on rich and poor, and of the small scale on which everything was constructed. But traces of an anarchical time emerge even more strongly than those of the patriarchal. Before the nomination of a successor, an interregnum as a change from the preceding and subsequent hard times of compulsion is wont to loosen all political restraints ; it is a legalised anarchy. The high position of the prince is expressed in a number of ceremonies, putting him on a level with the gods. External insignia are reserved for him in the first place. In Hawaii feather- mantles arid necklaces of whales' teeth ; in the Admiralty Islands double chains of shells ; in the Solomons arm-rings of shell, shell trumpets, fly-whisks, and other things. Passers-by had to throw themselves in the dust, to bare their shoulders or strip altogether ; the king could only be addressed when sitting, and replied through a special orator. He was greeted by having his hands and feet smelt ; in Hawaii, a special court-language was used around the prince, which had to remain unknown to the people, otherwise the chiefs changed it. Samoa also had its court language.^ In Micronesia, since the name of a chief may not be uttered, he takes when entering upon his dignities a name by way of title. In Kasaie, this name denotes nothing else than god ; anything recalling former names is sedulously avoided. A chief cannot eat or drink out of the dish of another, nor may his vessels be used by others, or his house be entered by any one uninvited. Not only have the commons to observe all this in regard to the chiefs, but the chiefs also in regard to their superiors. In the Solomon Islands, any one who steps on a chiefs shadow incurs death, or at least a severe pecuniary penalty, the parallel to the Polynesian exaggeration of taboo. From Polynesia, too, comes the practice among Fijian chiefs, of keeping court barbers, who by reason of their right of touching the sacred hair, come within taboo, so that others have to feed them. The heralds of princes are inviolable even in war. T3 ^ .-S O (/I O (U '' [" For the real noble a whole private dialect is set apart. The common names for an axe, for blood, for bamboo, a bamboo knife, a pig, food, entrails, and an oven are taboo in his presence." — Stevenson, A Footnote to History^ 292 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Many obscure practices are no doubt connected with the chiefs position as priests, Why does the first chief in Erromango receive a stone with a round hole in it? Why does the consecration of the chief in Anaiteum consist in being drawn round a newly felled tree with his crown on ? The whole existence of nobles and princes on this earth is often regarded as something only transitory, an earthly episode in the lives of these sons of the gods. They come from heaven, and destiny holds them fast ; they return only as souls to Bolotu ; the threads of their existence are attached on high. What wonder then if the same grade of holiness was ascribed to the kings as to gods, and to the other nobles in a ratio diminishing according to their rank ? The king, as the bearer of taboo, attains an altitude which is dangerous to himself. Originally, he could not enter any house belonging to a subject; since otherwise it would be forfeited to him. In Tahiti he had himself carried over land which he was too sacred to touch. The South Sea races have, however, discovered means of averting, at least in some measure, the evil consequences which must have resulted from this system. Of all those around the king, his brothers stand nearest to him. Occa- sionally, when he entrusts a commission to a son, he gives him his staff and whisk as credentials ; otherwise, the king's messenger carries a green bough. A prime minister, who, where things are on a small scale, will probably be the commander- in-chief, forms a necessary supplement to the sacred sovereign. This post is also held by a priest, as in Hawaii. There, without any definite intention to that effect, royalty assumed a character with two aspects, which found expression also in court ceremonies. Thus it occurred that even when European political ideas began to make their way into Hawaii, the constitutional notion of a leading and responsible minister was not wholly strange. To the king's suite belong also the keepers of the regalia. In Tahiti, the feather girdle and fillet are guarded by officials. In Nukahiva the chief is accompanied by his fire-lighter. Kamehameha compelled the chiefs of the subject islands to live near his palace, and go about with him. The value attached to genealogy made the custodians of tradition an important element of the court. In New Zealand, this office was entrusted to hump-backed men, in order that if both chiefs, father and son, should fall together in battle, the custody of the legends might be safe in the hands of those who were compelled to stay at home. The exuberant development of trade and finance, especially in East Melanesia and Micronesia, was all the more closely allied with politics, from the fact that the king used to have a monopoly of the only two sources of wealth — the manufacture of coin and trade. Here, as on the west coast of Africa, trade enriched the chief, and raised him to a far higher power than he would otherwise have acquired. Breaches of law are rare. In their fundamental character they were formerly breaches of divine ordinances. For this reason, the penalties are extraordinarily severe, and ordeals of every kind play the chief part in judicial proceedings. In later times, the opposite came about ; money penalties became universal, and formed the chief sources of revenue for the king and the chiefs. But besides this, an offence against the laws involved a certain dishonour ; boys and old men were not punished, as being foolish people. New laws are announced to the people^;;: with a flourish of the war trumpet ; a prohibition to enter upon land, or to pluck * fruit, is signified by spears stuck in the ground, or bundles of leaves tied to branches. For private injuries in the Solomon Islands, every man exacts the best THE FAMILY AND THE STATE IN OCEANIA 293 penalty he can with his own fist ; but if the relatives intervene, the strife is in many cases appeased, after long speeches and ferocious gestures, by the payment of a fine. In New Caledonia, an adulteress is strangled by one of her own and one of her husband's relations. Persons convicted of magic are painted black, adorned with flowers, and made to jump into the sea. Intercourse between one tribe and another is conducted through inviolable heralds, old women for choice. These also act as trade intermediaries on 'Change. On these occasions the chief gives knotted cords of rattan and reeds, — as many as the articles included in the commission, while the length of the reeds indicates their importance. White and green, in streamers or boughs, are signs of peace; black and red, in colours or feathers, signify war and death. In New Guinea, the leaflets of a coco-palm leaf are partly taken off, then the stem is halved, and the halves handed to the parties in token of peace. Individual tribes form alliances for other objects ; those of the Fijians are very expensive, for the allies have not only to be fed, but they have a full right to give their orders as lords throughout the territory of their friends. The intercourse of daily life is strictly formal ; in Pelew, the word mugul, that is, " bad form," is so all-powerful, that only the equivalent for taboo can dispute supremacy with it. As with the Malays and other races, it is mugul to ask anybody " what is your name ? " though a greeting may quite well take the form " who are you ? " The standing question by way of opening a conversation is,," no news? " or " give your news." At parting they say simply, " I'm off." In general, these customs are very like those of the Polynesians, and in former times perhaps were still more so. Thus the ancient form of greeting among the Pelew Islanders, of rubbing your face with the hand or foot of the person to be greeted, recurs in the Hervey Islands, together with the Polynesian rubbing of noses. So again does the reception of friends, with words recited sing-song fashion in chorus. In all circumstances, custom is more powerful than morality. It is optimism to take for morality the indignation shown by Micronesian girls at trifling violations of custom. The number of weapons in use is difiicult to harmonise with the gentle character belonging to most Polynesian tribes. Yet the predominance of militarism is not everywhere merely apparent. The Fijian cannot be described as funda- mentally warlike by nature, yet the entire archipelago is seldom free from war. It lies in their circumstances and usages, and is the simple consequence of their numerous independent lordships. A phenomenon no more unusual than the cack- ling of hens by night, is regarded as a warlike prognostic, whereas in Europe we at least allow ourselves the time which elapses between one comet and another. In Polynesia some races are more warlike than others ; the Maoris might be called the Zulus or Apaches of Polynesia. War, as a necessity, passes like a red, very red thread, through the whole life of Marquesans, Tahitians, and Gilbert Islanders. The military renown of the small Paumotu Islands was such that Tahitian chiefs fetched mercenaries thence. The very narrowness of the space contributed to de- velop such conditions ; the smaller the states the more embittered and unconciH- atory their politics. An inexhaustible source of hostilities is an accusation on the part of one family group that another has done despite or injury to their dead ; breach of promise of marriage is another. Therewith naturally the general pros- perity suffers, not only that of natives but also of foreign settlers, so that it has always been the effort of the missionaries to bring about a union of the different 294 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND districts. But it has been in vain ; the tendency to small states had sealed the ruin of Polynesia long before the people had thought about European culture and the excess of it. Herein lies one of the impediments which has compelled the roots of Polynesian culture to spread laterally instead of vertically ; we need only think of the way in which the New Zealanders have split up. To the frequency of wars conduced also the standing organisations of the military character. Kamehameha I. founded a special army the name of which was "eating on foot"; that \s, always ready for battle. In the Society Islands and elsewhere, a warrior caste existed as a permanent suite to the chiefs. In every district may be found a village whose inhabitants possess the right in war time of opening the battle. The post in the vanguard is highly esteemed as a post of honour, since it secures a special authority in times of peace and a conspicuous share in all festive enjoyments. On all the great islands there are specially war- like tribes, — on the north coast of New Guinea the Mansuari, in Fiji men who adopt a celibate life. The very frequency of naval wars gives rise to a certain organisation, since the guidance of the war-canoes can only be entrusted to practised hands. In sea encounters, boats which belong together are indicated by some common sign- — a bundle of palm leaves, a strip of tapa, or a picture of an animal on the same material. In just the same way people fighting on land wear some sign by which they may be recognised, and these are changed every two or three days in order to avoid ruses on the part of the enemy. They paint particular figures upon their bodies in black, white, or red, wear a shell round the neck or the arm, or dress their hair in some peculiar way. But in their opinion every war has sufficient ground ; battle is to them the best solution of a mass of contested questions, and their final arbiter is the god of war. Violations of the rights of property, annexation of land, fishing and hunting in disputed districts lead to wars, still more do violations of taboo, marriages between persons belonging to hostile tribes, murder, adultery, witchcraft, and, most frequently of all, personal insults and blood feuds. Whole generations labour to wash away spots on the honour of their forefathers, while to nourish the sentiment of revenge is one of a chiefs first duties. The Navigator's Islands testify that envy of the success of a peacefully working tribe may contribute its fair share to the kindling of ever new wars. That among the causes of war women have their place can be all the more understood from the fact that a fundamental rule is " Once a chief's wife always his wife." Wars of succession are also recorded. Lastly, a further ground of quarrels is to be found in the complicated feudal relations. Connected with this is the fact that in kingdoms so small as these all personal relations are thought more of than would be the case in larger states, to which further importance is given by the manner in which social ties are indebted for their vitality to the half monarchical, half oligocratic constitution, so that the dissolution of personal relations must also, as observed by Semper, relax the political relation of states to each other. It is in the nature of these people neither to break wholly with each other nor to unite with each other frankly. What prevails is neither open war nor undoubted peace ; small causes are sufficient to evoke a tendency in one or the other direction. In Polynesia war is conducted with formalities no less strict than those which govern peaceful intercourse, and within their limits it often proceeds in a fairly harmless manner. As a chronic evil it became converted into a settled institution. Printed hy Hie Bibliographisthes Iniflttul, Leipzig. AN AUSTRALIAN FAMILY-PARTY FROM NEW SOUTH WALES. THE FAMILY AND THE STATE IN OCEANIA 295 Head-stealing is partly the object, partly the symbol of warfare. It can never degenerate into aimless murder ; and it is rarely that more than one man is killed. Both sides know quite well what is taking place, and cunning on one side is met by precaution and indefatigable vigilance on the other. This kind of warfare is recognised by the Micronesians as a chief institution of their political life, for the further reason that it is essential to the provision of means for meeting state- expenditure. The head chief pays with his own money. He has considerable outgoings at his accession, and must defray those of all the muis, ruks, and other festivities. But the country pays no taxes, and the expenses must be met somehow. That is the use of the war-dance. The head chief travels through friendly districts with a head which his warriors have secured, executes the war-dance, and receives for the performance a fee proportionate to the size of the country. But, in order to prevent too great a drain of money in any one direction, the rule is that when one village has finished with the head, another has a turn with it. Thus, though by a somewhat unusual method, the very usual object of keeping money in circula- tion is attained. Head-hunting is common in New Guinea, as, for example, among the Tugeris, who cut off the head with a bamboo knife ; and so too in the Malay Archipelago. Among the Motus he only who has killed a man may wear the half-skull of a horn-bill in his hair. A woman will do ; and there is no objection to the employment of treachery. Unluckily, where things are on a smaller scale, as in the Marshalls, war degenerates into an incessant devastation of fields and plantations. It is therefore easy to understand why bullet-proof houses of stone are supplanting huts of wood and straw. There is nothing about which the gods are so keen as war : nor is anything an occasion of larger sacrifices. Before coming to blows with men, it is necessary to come to an understanding with the gods. Temples half buried in weeds are tidied up or rebuilt. The greater the sacrifice, the firmer is the confidence. Among the Maoris the priests had to decide whether or not the war will be victorious. Sticks were stuck in the earth, and if they remained upright it denoted a loss, and the war was deferred. In other cases food was cooked for the gods and the fighting-men ; then the troops started, followed by slaves and women, who had to attend to transport and commissariat. All warriors were " taboo." The command was allotted to the boldest fighter, who was also expected to be adept in the kind of eloquence calculated to rouse the courage of the warriors immediately before the fight, He would spring forward in the front of the line, and with glowing words extol the greatness and the fame of the tribe, the favour of the gods, the valour of their forefathers ; but while enumerating the injuries which had yet to be avenged, he would avoid bringing into prominence the dangers of the moment. The excitement rose to the point of fury. The warriors, kindled by the discourse, would fling off their mats, smear their bodies with charcoal and the sacred red-ochre, adorn their hair with feathers, and dash into the war-dance. In this they would expend a good deal of bodily strength, with the view of kindling the passion of battle in their hearts ; they crouched down in rows one behind another, leapt up suddenly at the word of command, jumped on one leg to one side, then on the other leg to the other side, with their meres raised aloft, and then leaping off both feet into the air, brandish their weapons, shouting their songs in quick time. Old women, smeared with ochre, danced in front of the lines. Then the most renowned warriors advanced, and challenged the foe 296 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND with opprobrious language, such as Pritchard heard in Samoa. " You banana- eaters of Manono, let Moso twist your necks ! " — " You coco-nut eaters of Aana, may your tongues be torn out and burnt." — " Here is my club, to knock down those Savaii pigs. Where is the Savaii pig who wants to be killed ? " — " Fry that Atua-king, who shall die by my spear ! " — " Here is the man-eating gun ! " — " Where are they, that dirty herd who pretend to be men ? " Finally the two sides would dash furiously upon each other, and a series of single combats would ensue. The event would be decided by the fall or the victory of sottie one great warrior and the consequent retreat or advance of his side. It was seldom possible to rally the fugitives ; his back once turned, every man ran for his life. The victors returned from the pursuit to the field of battle, and marked with their spears the spots where warriors had fallen. The Maoris used to examine especi- ally if they had had their fists clenched ; if so, they had fallen in the moment of victory. Their own wounded they carried away. Then they placed one of the Sacrificial litiife, available also as an instrument of torture, from Easter Island — one-half real size. (Berlin Museum. ) ' enemy's dead aside as an offering to the gods, and laid the heads of the others at the chief's feet. The wounded were tortured and clubbed to death. Gunpowder has changed the style of fighting. The islanders, with their dislike of danger and preference for attacking only when they have a manifest advantage, took very readily to fighting at a distance and promiscuous shooting from ambushes all day long. The art of taking cover developed more rapidly than that of attack- ing. In Fiji they fought around fortresses made of wooden palisades : the women and children having been removed, before the siege began, to a place of safety. Spears were thrown and stones slung from side to side, even red hot stones to set fire to the woodwork, but the besieging party seldom arrived at assaults in the open. Treachery, stratagem, hunger, intimidation, were the principal means to which they resorted. Clever utilisation of natural advantages in the ground, palisades, ramparts faced with stone and loop-holed, and, in the case of fortified villages or pahs in the plain, muddy ditches as well, added strength to the defence. The chief entrance was flanked by walls in the form of bastions and the gate formed of sliding timbers. For naked aborigines a thorn hedge makes an almost impenetrable rampart. Within the fortress a sentry was posted in an elevated position ; the sign of danger or of a threatening attack was given by drums. When the wind was favourable they challenged the enemy by flying banners and dragon-like things of many colours in his direction, but a war of this kind often ends without bloodshed. Traces of an international law, which has in view the THE FAMILY AND THE STATE IN OCEANIA 297 mitigation of even this kind of war, may be recognised in the fact tliat so long as their patience holds out both sides spare the adversaries' fruit trees. On the other hand, we find no trace of any idea that it is more honourable to win in open fight than by means of cunning and ruse, and accordingly^ there are no limits to the artifices which may be employed in war. The rage of the victors often spares neither women nor children, and in this respect the greatest atrocities have been committed. Even Fiji has its legend of the chief's leap, — a fugitive chief is said to have thrown himself in desperation from a rock in the island of Wakaia. The objection of the Polynesians to action in the open is marked also in the little use which they make of their boats in actual sea fighting. The famous war canoes served mainly for transporting the warriors, and aquatic engagements only took place when hostile war-canoes met accidentally. The method was to upset the opponents' canoe, which rendered it easy to club to death the helpless swimming crew. As soon as the lust of battle is appeased on either side, and the accurately kept debit and credit account shows that winnings and losses are balanced, the armies take steps towards peace. The intelligence that peace is desired is conveyed by neutrals, and either side sends as herald some old man related to both and gifted with eloquence. The periods of hostilities are con- cluded by carouses, though deep down in all hearts a secret wish of beginning again at a seasonable moment is still active. Treaties of peace are in reality only armistices. The Samoan system, known as malo, which went so far as to slay thevanquished when he approached Human lower jaw set as an arm- .., . r i_ • • i cr \-- T J ring, from New Guinea. (Christy With Signs of submission, to carry off his wite and collection.) children, and ravage his fields and houses, or else to a gradual ruining of him by extortion, not unfrequently compelled the flames of revolt to break out afresh. Whole tribes have been known to migrate in order to escape oppression of this kind. In 1 848 the whole population of Western Upolu removed to the eastern part of the island. Many features in the existence of the Oceanians can only be understood when we realize the small value attached to human life. This hangs together with the over-population of island areas, and has contributed powerfully to the formation of colonies, but it leads also to depopulation, and throws a sanguinary gleam over all their social life. Human sacrifices were universal in Polynesia before the time of Europeans, and cannibalism was extensively practised. Both are closely bound up with religion and war, while human sacrifice is intimately connected with the festivals of the dead. In certain sacred functions the priest required it. Thus men or portions of men — for example eyes, which were regarded as pleasing to the gods — were buried in the foundations of temples ; while at the building of war-canoes human sacrifices were absolutely necessary. The gods to whom men were sacrificed were various, but the principal were Tangaroa and Oro ; the killing was done in Oro's temple, and the victim deposited in Tanga- roa's. As everywhere, the largest number of human victims was furnished by prisoners of war and slaves. The selection of the victim depended in some places upon the priests, who, after some time passed in the temple, came to the people 296 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND with opprobrious language, such as Pritchard heard in Samoa. " You banana- eaters of Manono, let Moso twist your necks ! " — " You coco-nut eaters of Aana, may your tongues be torn out and burnt." — " Here is my club, to knock down those Savaii pigs. Where is the Savaii pig who wants to be killed ? " — •' Fry that Atua-king, who shall die by my spear ! " — " Here is the man-eating gun ! " — " Where are they, that dirty herd who pretend to be men ? " Finally the two sides would dash furiously upon each other, and a series of single combats would ensue. The event would be decided by the fall or the victory of sotne one great warrior and the consequent retreat or advance of his side. It was seldom possible to rally the fugitives ; his back once turned, every man ran for his life. The victors returned from the pursuit to the field of battle, and marked with their spears the spots where warriors had fallen. The Maoris used to examine especi- ally if they had had their fists clenched ; if so, they had fallen in the moment of victory. Their own wounded they carried away. Then they placed one of the Sacrificial knife, available also as an instrument of torture, from Easter Island— one-half real size. (Berlin IVtuseum. ) ' enemy's dead aside as an offering to the gods, and laid the heads of the others at the chief's feet. The wounded were tortured and clubbed to death. Gunpowder has changed the style of fighting. The islanders, with their dislike of danger and preference for attacking only when they have a manifest advantage, took very readily to fighting at a distance and promiscuous shooting from ambushes all day long. The art of taking cover developed more rapidly than that of attack- ing. In Fiji they fought around fortresses made of wooden palisades : the women and children having been removed, before the siege began, to a place of safety. Spears were thrown and stones slung from side to side, even red hot stones to set fire to the woodwork, but the besieging party seldom arrived at assaults in the open. Treachery, stratagem, hunger, intimidation, were the principal means to which they resorted. Clever utilisation of natural advantages in the ground, palisades, ramparts faced with stone and loop-holed, and, in the case of fortified villages or pahs in the plain, muddy ditches as well, added strength to the defence. The chief entrance was flanked by walls in the form of bastions and the gate formed of sliding timbers. For naked aborigines a thorn hedge makes an almost impenetrable rampart. Within the fortress a sentry was posted in an elevated position ; the sign of danger or of a threatening attack was given by drums. When the wind was favourable they challenged the enemy by flying banners and dragon-like things of many colours in his direction, but a war of this kind often ends without bloodshed. Traces of an international law, which has in view the THE FAMILY AND THE STATE IN OCEANIA 297 mitigation of even this kind of war, may be recognised in the fact that so long as their patience holds out both sides spare the adversaries' fruit trees. On the other hand, we find no trace of any idea that it is more honourable to win in open fight than by means of cunning and ruse, and accordingly there are no limits to the artifices which may be employed in war. The rage of the victors often spares neither women nor children, and in this respect the greatest atrocities have been committed. Even Fiji has its legend of the chief's leap, — a fugitive chief is said to have thrown himself in desperation from a rock in the island of Wakaia. The objection of the Polynesians to action in the open is marked also in the little use which they make of their boats in actual sea fighting. The famous war canoes served mainly for transporting the warriors, and aquatic engagements only took place when hostile war-canoes met accidentally. The method was to upset the opponents' canoe, which rendered it easy to club to death the helpless swimming crew. As soon as the lust of battle is appeased on either side, and the accurately kept debit and credit account shows that winnings and losses are balanced, the armies take steps towards peace. The intelligence that peace is desired is conveyed by neutrals, and either side sends as herald some old man related to both and gifted with eloquence. The periods of hostilities are con- cluded by carouses, though deep down in all hearts a secret wish of beginning again at a seasonable moment is still active. Treaties of peace are in reality only armistices. The Samoan system, known as malo, which went so far as to slay the vanquished when he approached Human lower jaw set as an arm- ■ ,1. ■ c ■\^ • • i. cc X.- T J ring, from New Guinea. (Christy With signs of submission, to carry oft his wife and collection ) children, and ravage his fields and houses, or else to a gradual ruining of him by extortion, not unfrequently compelled the flames of revolt to break out afresh. Whole tribes have been known to migrate in order to escape oppression of this kind. In 1848 the whole population of Western Upolu removed to the eastern part of the island. Many features in the existence of the Oceanians can only be understood when we realize the small value attached to human life. This hangs together with the over-population of island areas, and has contributed powerfully to the formation of colonies, but it leads also to depopulation, and throws a sanguinary gleam over all their social life. Human sacrifices were universal in Polynesia before the time of Europeans, and cannibalism was extensively practised. Both are closely bound up with religion and war, while human sacrifice is intimately connected with the festivals of the dead. In certain sacred functions the priest required it. Thus men or portions of men — for example eyes, which were regarded as pleasing to the gods — were buried in the foundations of temples ; while at the building of war-canoes human sacrifices were absolutely necessary. The gods to whom men were sacrificed were various, but the principal were Tangaroa and Oro ; the killing was done in Oi'o's temple, and the victim deposited in Tanga- roa's. As everywhere, the largest number of human victims was furnished by prisoners of war and slaves. The selection of the victim depended in some places upon the priests, who, after some time passed in the temple, came to the people 298 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND and indicated the victim whom the deity desired. The Maoris used after a battle to collect the bodies of the foe, cut off scalp and right ear for the gods, and dig two rows of cooking pits, in one of which the cooking was done for the gods only. When the meal was dressed the chief first swallowed the brain and eyes of one of the fallen, raw ; then followed his sons or nearest relatives, and after them the whole company fell to upon the hideous meal. On these occasions gluttony was the rule. What remained over was packed in hampers and sent to neighbouring tribes who, by the fact of accepting and consuming the present, declared themselves friends of the victors. Returning home, the troop bore the heads of its slain chiefs as sacred relics, while those of the enemy were fixed on spears. For every chief who had fallen the life of one of his slaves was required, while the heads of the enemy were stuck on the palisades surrounding the village, and derided. Then followed the ceremony of taking off the taboo from the victorious force. Scalp locks were fastened to reeds, and with these the warriors executed a dance to the chanting of the priest. The business was concluded by the tedious task of mummifying the chiefs' heads. These were boiled, smoked, and dried in the air ; brain, tongue, and eyes were removed, tattooing and hair preserved. The very form of the lineaments was often still recognisable. Some tribes in the neighbourhood of the East Cape are said to have mummified even entire bodies. Others fixed eyes of bright stones in the skulls ; and in New Britain these were on great occasions worn as masks by the younger men, that they might acquire the spirit of their former owners. Among the Maoris cannibalism was undoubtedly always con- nected with revenge, and their wars were always wars of revenge. This trait deserves to be remarked as distinguishing their cannibalism from that which has assumed either a more everyday character, or one distinctively religious. When we find the traditions unanimously affirming that cannibalism was not practised among the earlier generations of immigrants, we may no doubt imagine it to be one of those phenomena which correspond with a certain retrogression in the public life of the community, brought about by internal quarrels ; but further, that it came in with the increase of the population, which in many islands led undoubtedly to overcrowding. It disappeared and came up again, showing that there was always a favourable soil for it somewhere. We are led to the same conclusion by considering its geographical distribution. Well-ascertained centres of undisguised cannibalism are noticed in places so far apart as New Zealand, the Marquesas, the Palliser Islands, and the Paumotus. The Hawaiian and Tahitian groups, the Society Islands, and, for a period, Tonga, were free from it during the time of the more frequent visits of Europeans towards the end of the last century. But throughout Polynesia there exist both objects and legends in which traces survive of a time when it extended more widely. When we find that in the Marquesas cannibal feasts were preceded by the cutting off of the victim's hair, to make arm -rings and necklets of magical potency, we cannot fail to see a cannibal significance in the frequent use of human hair to adorn spears and helmets, or of human bones and skulls as drinking -vessels ; or in the Hawaiian custom of putting the eye of a human victim in the oil used to anoint the king. Strong men's bones are available as talismans. In New Zealand, fish-hooks were, according to Forster, furnished with a jagged bit of human bone. The people also had necklaces of human teeth ; and in THE FAMILY AND THE STATE IN OCEANIA 299 Hawaii a bone hung round the neck by a string of human hair counted as a high distinction. The notion of the gods eating souls runs all through Polynesian mythology. In Aitulaki a god was called Terongo, the man-eater. Tangaroa caught souls with a net or a noose and ate them up. Souls of people who died suddenly were devoured by the god. This conception might easily pass into that of eating the body with the soul ; and therewith human sacrifices, and, in the uncertainty of the boundary between divine and human, cannibalism received a divine justification. Among most Melanesian tribes cannibalism is a settled institution, often in a very extensive degree. In many places it has, for various reasons, disappeared, as in Teste between the visits of Moresby in 1872 and Finsch in 1885. Else- where human flesh is in such request that even the remains of a relative who has died a natural death will serve for a repast. We find also examples of a recent extension of the bad habit by a sort of infection. Thus Saa caught it from San Christoval, Florida from somewhere to the westward, perhaps Savo. The Torres Islanders bake the heads which they have captured, and eat the eyes and pieces from the cheeks. The Fijians used long wooden forks, to eat not only prisoners of war, but members of certain particular tribes who were condemned to deliver one of their number for a cannibal feast. In the Solomons prisoners were even sold for cannibal purposes. Brown the missionary was told in New Britain that they retained the custom with the view of intimidating their enemies. When we find a human skull with the back smashed in, the brains having been swallowed through the opening, we may safely infer cannibalism ; and such are found in quantities on D'Entrecasteaux. Cannibalism often merely expresses hatred and rage against a slain enemy, just as when a captured foe is burnt alive. A craving for flesh meat can seldom be assigned as a cause ; most readily perhaps among the indigent natives of New Caledonia. Yet even these go back to mythology and declare that men are fishes and therefore eatable. Human sacrifices, with subse- quent consumption of the corpse or portions of it, form in Oceania also a main- stay of cannibalism. One receives the impression that life in those parts is always passed under the foreboding of being sacrificed. Cannibalism has also been maintained where it would otherwise have disappeared, owing to its associa- tion with skull worship. The Hattams, among whom it is a custom to decorate their dwelling-houses with the heads of dead persons, desecrate the graves of their neighbours in a shameful way, and at every feast in honour of a newly-captured head cannibalism blazes up afresh. Infanticide was a recognised institution in Polynesia in pre-Christian times. The language has formed special terms for burying alive, stabbing with a splinter of bamboo, and strangling. In Tahiti some mothers had killed ten children ; the only gleam of light in the blackness of this crime was the strict adherence to the law that a child had escaped death if it had lived for even a short interval of time. Fortunately there were cases enough where natural maternal feeling got the better of convention. Williams the missionary asserts that every time a mother murdered a child sprung from a misalliance, she advanced a step in rank, until she at length reached a point, corresponding to the number of her infanticides, at which she was permitted to let her children live in future. In not a few districts of this favoured region necessity was the motive for infanticide, but indolence still more so. The natives in justifying the practice frequently approximated to 300 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Malthusian principles. The dislike of bringing up more girls than necessary was an equally prevailing cause. War, the priesthood, fishery, and sailing, were regarded as forms of activity to which it paid t5 bring up boys, and thus the disproportion of the sexes was so great that one woman was often wife to four or five men. § 9. RELIGION IN OCEANIA Universal animallon ; the conception oiAtiia, Mana, Ani, Kalit, and the like — Creation of gods — Hero-worship — Atua, Oromattca — Gods of the sea, the air, the land, daily occupations — Animation of beasts, plants, and stones — Cosmogany and mythology ; views of Nature — Beginnings of metaphysics — Legend of Papa and Kaka — Separation of Heaven and Earth — Rangi- Ru and Maui — Maui as deity and animating principle of earthquake, fire, and sun — Hawaiian and Maori Mauis — Wakea — Tangaroa the Polynesian Zeus, god of the sun, the firmament, the horizon — Tii as a variation of time — Tane, god of the sky — Hina, goddess of the moon — Gods of Olympus and Hades, Hikuleo, Milu, Pele — Hero-gods : Meru, Moso, Oru, Maru— Priests ; universality of the office — Priests and chiefs — Priest -kings — Consecration of priests — The priests' functions — Temples and places of sacrifice ; various kinds of sacred places — Graves as places of veneration — Temples — Lack of genuine idols — Embodiments of gods — The 7>V-^Stone images — Feather-idols — Graves and funeral customs ; stay of the soul near the body and about the grave — Various forms of interment — Skull-worship — Sacrifices to the dead — Burying alive. Universal animation, or the endowment of all things with a soul, is the broad foundation of all religion among Polynesians and Melanesians alike ; everything, even to the utensils, had a soul or was capable of having one. We must not, however, conceive this animation as exclusively of an ennobling kind. The words spirit and soul indicate generally any expression of life. The squeaking of rats, the talk of children in their sleep, is called "spirit" in Tahiti. But by the system of embodying tutelary spirits, souls are consciously imported into objects, and accordingly, just as a future life in Bolotu is assigned to the souls of men, beasts, plants, and stones, so it is also to the implements of every kind of handicraft. Thus this system led to the primitive pantheism which found its most characteristic stamp in the conception universal in Oceania of the Atua, Akua, or Hotua. Atua in Polynesia indicates the spiritual in the widest sense, tua apparently standing here in the sense of the other world : it is God, deified man, spirit, soul, shadow, ghost. The v/ord is consciously used in a generic sense just as mana is in Melanesia. Codrington says it is a power or influence which is in a certain sense supernatural, but expresses itself in any kind of force or superiority which man may possess. It has no fixed connection with anything, and can be trans- ferred to almost everything. But spirits, whether disembodied souls or supra- mundane beings, possess it and can impart it. All the religious rites of the Melanesians consist in obtaining mana, or deriving benefit from it. The other world can become practically effective for the living, either through the mediation of departed souls which wander between heaven and earth, or by the entry, whether temporary or permanent, of a god into an earthly object. In this way the tutelary spirits who are extraordinarily important in the practical service of the gods, came into existence. Their inspiration is desired because they bring to knowledge that which they have acquired in their intercourse with the gods of Bolotu. If they do not come willingly it is sought to constrain them by prayers and sacrifices, and in the last resort, by the incantations of delirious ecstasy. The Polynesian atua recurs in the Ani or Han of Ponap^, the Kasingl and Kalit of the Pelew, the RELIGION IN OCEANIA 301 Anut of Kusaie, and the Yaris of Tobi. This spirit worship which is directed towards creatures regarded as animated, appears in many places to have de- generated into pure beast worship. Thus in the Mortlocks the bastard mackerel {caranx) is reverenced as the god of war, and the Kurnai see in the Australian warbler and the azurine the creators of the sexes. That the animating element is also under- stood by Kalit appears from the fact that a Kalit is assigned to dead objects ; Semper was asked by the Pelew Islanders about the Kalit that ticked in his watch. The Vui of the New Hebrides dwell in a region called Panoi. They stand in relation with deified ancestors, and are invoked in case of danger. All serious illnesses, on the other hand, are attributed to magic, or the evil influence of the Atai or Tatnate, who are the souls of the dead, and as such very distinct from the Vui. No sooner has the soul left the body than it enters upon its wandering, which ends in various ways, according to its rank and deserts. At first it does not go far away, and by a combination of forces can often be recalled ; to which end the relations round the death-bed call out, loud and impressively, the name of the departing. It is believed that immediately after death the soul can be recaptured. In a Gilbert Island dirge, the dead man's wife calls upon him as a bird, which flies ever farther to its home and its adoptive parent. Wherever the two classes of spirits — those which had been souls, and the other which had never been in human form — were kept distinct, as was the case in the greater part of Melanesia, the divine worship of particular personalities is easily developed from the cult of souls in general. The Fijians, accordingly, distinguished between original deities and deified beings. They prayed to the images of departed relations, or arranged with living relations to raise them to divine honours whenever they should die. A man when in danger invokes the spirits of his father and grandfather in full assurance that they hear. The souls of old chiefs are deified after their death, and invoked by name with sacrifices. A certain gradation is imported into this troop of spirits and souls by the distinctions of rank which prevailed among their former earthly tabernacles. For this reason the destiny of the souls of chiefs and priests which have quitted the earth is materially higher than that of the lower classes, since even in life the former were inhabited by higher powers, and these will have a yet more powerful effect when freed from the bodily husk. Since the souls of chiefs go to the stars, while others wait upon or within the earth, the stars are designated simply as the souls of the departed. As these take their way upward in the darkness they are of course easily seized and dragged about by evil spirits. The origin of divine Ancestral image (Korvar) from New Guinea — one-fourth real size. ( British Museum. ) 302 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND honours in many cases falls almost within the recollection of living people. Warriors reverence as a war-god the ghost of some champion whose bones and hair have the effect of amulets. Great works, such as the stone terraces of Waieo in the Marquesas, were referred to gods, and men who had produced such things were raised to the rank of gods. Deification of heroic men was often quite a matter of notoriety. Tabuarik, the most respected god of the Gilbert Islanders, was formerly a chief. Now he appears sometimes as Hai, sometimes he lives above the clouds and thunders, on which occasion the face of his wife may be seen flashing through the clouds. Tamatoa. the chief . of Raiatea, was reverenced as a deity even in his lifetime. Even in the legends of the great creating gods we find indications of the notion that they have been men or can become so again, and a descent from the height of deity is an idea that constantly recurs. Spirits which never were souls appear on a higher level. A Banks Islander of the older generation explained a vui to Codrington as follows : " It lives, thinks, has more intelli- gence than a man, knows things which are secret with- out seeing, is supernaturally powerful with mana, has no form to be seen, has no soul, because itself is like a soul." They cannot, however, con- ceive even a ghost as entirely formless, and thus many assert that they have seen a ghost as vapour, or smoke, or some other indefinite form. Ghosts of this sort also pass into men ; in Mota nopitu is the name both for a ghost and for one possessed by a ghost, while in the Banks Islands good spirits of the nature of elves or gnomes are known as nopitu vui. They give gifts to honest men and feed the poor ; their presence is betrayed by a tender sound like the song of children. Places where they like to resort are rongo — that is sacred, as if they were tabooed. And even though they are themselves invisible, this connection with something corporeal affords a platform upon which they can be treated corporeally. All stones, trees, and animals found in such places are equally rongo. The idea is extended also to such animals as appear frequently in dwellings — lizards, snakes, and owls ; particular parts of a stream can also, for one reason or another, be rongo. The ghost is estimated according to the object in which he dwells, and whoever understands this estimate is counted able to mediate for other men with the good spirits. He must enter the rongo place alone, and offer sacrifice A Fiji Islander. (From a photograph in the Godeffroy Album.) RELIGION IN OCEANIA 303 there ; as he does this he prays and lays the sacrifice upon a stone which is beUeved to be connected with the spirit. At one festival the Fijians used to call the water babies, enticing them ashore with toys laid on the bank, and building little banks in order to make it easier for them to climb up. With a similar inten- tion in Anaiteum the roads which led from the sacred groves to the shore might never be blocked by hedges. But if prayer is made to a Vui to bring sickness or other evil upon an enemy, though he can provide the suppliant with ways and means to do it, he never brings about the trouble himself, since he is a good spirit. With spiritual beings in such superabund- ance, no striking aspect of Nature remains unprovided for, and thus thousands of nature- gods come into existence, who are nothing but localised spirits or souls. The sea alone is ruled by some twenty of them (see woodcut on p. 39). Some of them employ the large blue shark as their instrument of vengeance. Sharks are fed on fish and pigs till they acquire the habit of approaching the shore at certain times ; and the natives could assure you that they came at the bidding of the priest. Another famous sea-god is Hiro, originally a bold and ingenious native of Raiatea, who joined the ancient band of gods so recently that until the fall of paganism his skull was on view in Opoa. Chief among the gods of the air, who are often worshipped in the form of birds, are two children of Tangaroa, brother and sister. They dwell not far from the rock that bears the earth ; and any neglect of their worship they punish with storms and tempests. They were invoked to raise hurricanes when a hostile fleet was fitting out. Even at this day many islanders believe that in old times evil spirits had power over the winds, seeing that since the general conversion to Christianity there are never such terrible storms as formerly. The upper regions of the air are also peopled with higher beings. All the heavenly bodies were looked upon as gods. When the sun or the moon is eclipsed, some offended deity . Sacred drum with carving, from the Harvey Islands — one-fourth real size (Christy Collection). 2. Stick calen- dar of the Ngati Ranki tribe in New Zealand (British Museum). 304 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND has swallowed it ; and he is induced by abundant gifts to set the orb free again. They see gods or souls in meteors ; and Lamont mentions the case of a boy in Penrhyn who \\'ept at seeing a falling star, believing that the soul of an ancestor had appeared to him. Fairies that inhabit the mountains become visible in cloudy weather; and cloud is the offspring of Rangi, the sky, and Papatu Anuku, the wide plain. Giants with fiery eyes live on solitary islands, like the desert volcanic island Manua near Raiatea. In Hawaii are haunted places where ghosts go in procession to the sound of the pipe, and whoever hears them dies. Prognostications surround the whole of life with a dense network of inevitable con- sequences, and superstition has little trouble in discovering the most probable connection between cause and effect. Thus the subjection of Tahiti to a French Protectorate was foretold by a crack in the post supporting the palace gate. Lastly, spiritual beings preside over individual occupations. Special gods send the migratory fish inshore at stated times ; special gods are invoked by fishermen when they are making nets, going on board, or working at sea. So, too, agriculturists, carpenters, house and boat builders, have patterns peculiar to their craft. Even games are under the tutelage of five or six gods ; and not less, particular crimes and transgressions. The chiefs think it no shame to invoke Hiro, as protector of robbers, on their privy raids, which turn out most prosper- ously on the 17th, 1 8th, and 19th nights of the month. But when a pig is stolen, he often is put off with a piece of the tail, offered with the words : " Here is a bit of the pig ; say nothing about it, good Hiro." The tendency to multiply parallel conceptions makes the number of the gods increase. Thus many members of the heavenly crowd suggest that they are the creations of the hieroglyphic languages of the priests, meeting as this does the needs of a foreboding spiritually-minded imagination. In this fashion legendary figures multiply ; and are gradually impersonified as brothers and sisters, till they represent whole families. It is difficult to separate the guardian spirits of individuals from those of the tribe ; for both are treated alike, and are often essentially the same. The totem system comes in here. " One Samoan saw his god in the eel, another in the shark, another in the turtle, another in the dog, another in the owl, another in the lizard, and so on through every class of sea-fishes, birds, quadrupeds, and every kind of living thing, including even several mollusks. A man would eat freely of what was regarded as the incarnation of the god of another man, but the incarnation of his own god he would consider it death to injure or to eat ; for the god v/as supposed to avenge the guilt by taking up his abode in that person's body, and causing to generate there the very thing which he had eaten, until it produced death." 1 Beside the function of acting as the outward shell of guardian spirits, special duties were allotted, in the history of the gods and of their dealing with men, to animated objects. We hear much of the tree of life, by whose topmost branches the gods left heaven when descending to earth. In Tonga, the Toa-\x&^ grew up to heaven for that purpose. The talking tree is found near the habitation of Ikuleo, the lord of heaven ; and if he demands the death of a man, a canoe is sent to fetch him. This tree takes the souls ; and when men grew as shoots from the world-tree, they received their souls from the height of heaven. Legend reduced the heavenly [' Turner's Samoa. ] RELIGION IN OCEANIA 305 growth to a tree from which a man looked into heaven, as in Pelew ; or, as in the Banks Islands, made it grow till the divine being, Quat, climbed up it to escape his pursuers. Souls of gods, too, are confined in trees. Thus Maui learned from his uncle Inaporari, how to recognise in the lower world, by knocking on them, the noro-trees in which the lives of his brethren and himself were im- prisoned. Among the Maoris trees represent the god Tane, whose children are the birds of land and sea. In Tahiti, the ao -tree is planted near temples, since the god lives in it. From the jagged splinters of the az(o- tree, Tangaroa, the self- begotten, created the inferior gods before he produced men. In Melanesia, the Fijians venerate trees by throw- ing leaves on the spot where the last evening shadow lies. Besides the vesi-tree, the wood of which is good for canoes, the fig-tree with its spreading roots, and any coco-palm which forks, are regarded as seats for the gods, and so sacred. The good little soul-deities of the Veli sing from hollow trees. ^VeaponS are Magic dolls made of human bone, votive bunches of hair, and tortoise skull, . , . from a temple in the Admiralty Islands — one-fifth real size. (Christy rubbed with certain Collection.) leaves to ensure suc- cess ; but in Vate, leaves are buried near a house in order to cast a shade over it and cause illness. In the New Hebrides the pandanus receives special reverence. At sacred dances the neophytes appear shrouded in bunches of pandanus, and crowned with garlands of the same. In Micronesia, too, sacred trees are reverenced ; for example, in Bygor, coco-palms standing in enclosures, because the Am descend on to their tops. In Pelew, the Ka/ii who created the names of the chiefs, and dwelt originally within the earth, is embodied in great forest trees. A bush that grows before the king's house in Korror passes for the last scion of a plant brought from a submerged spirit X 3o6 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND land ; and at Tapituea in the Gilberts, New Year's sacrifices are offered under an old Mamam-tree. Birds appear in the Mani-legend as bearers and guardians of fire ; and also in a legend of the creation of man. Men were formed by the snipe or the lark, who was sent to earth by its fkther Tangaroa, during the process of scratching | up worms. A Samoan legend makes the souls of men in bird shape be brought down by the same birds. The seeds of useful plants are brought to earth moon. The New Zealander regarded the cockatoo as sacred ; while it was a bad omen if the iarata -hird flew over a column of warriors on the march. The owl caused absolute terror. Various other birds were also sacred in Polynesia as the bringers of fire and souls ; and in Tahiti the heron and the otaiare-hird. Red feathers symbol- ised the fire which the Creator places in all living beings. One who knows Fiji, says: " If you would sketch an appro- priate emblem of the old Fijian religion, you must select a fine pandanus, beneath which is sleeping coiled up a^ mighty snake, while hard by a cock with fine feathers is crowing to wake the sleeper." This bird, the harbinger of day, the herald of sunlight, the bird of the sun- god, is the same for destroying which the sons of Ndengeh aroused the wrath of the fathers of the gods to such a pitch that he sent a great deluge on the earth. Great white shells adorned his legs, and so numerous were his beautiful feathers, that by plucking one wing only you could cover the whole mountain-top as with a cloud. In the rest of Melanesia, next to the warm lizard, the buceros, hornbill or rhinoceros bird, is the most frequent subject of sculpture. In the Hamburg Museum is a carving, in which he is taking a child from its mother's body with his ripping beak. Among animals, the pig is the most distinguished in fable. Giants from Tahiti embarked in rafts to fight the man-eating pig in Eiva ; or Hiro, born of the sun, slew it. Pigs were the most costly victims for sacrifice, and only the priests might enter their styes. In Nukahiva a stone image of a pig's head was found in company with human bones. Besides these, we find fabulous animals. The subject, at once oceanic and amphibious, of an animal living on the land and with a serpent or eel-shaped extremity reaching to the sea, occurs in Fiji and elsewhere in Melanesia, in the form of tailed gods, as in the souls of the chiefs lying in prayer before Siuleo. Here, as in Australia, lizards are involved in a special cycle of legends, bringing Ancestral images from Easter Island — one-tenth real size. (Munich Museum.) RELIGION IN OCEANIA 307 them into close connection with the divine figure which strikes its roots deeply, the god of earthquake. In Fiji he Hved in a cave, and when he was driven thence by incantations the giant Hzard which he kept in a cage as a plaything remained behind till it was killed by the chief Tara. With it the legend connected an earthwork built in the form of a great lizard, on the river Waitio. On a campaign a green lizard is counted a bad omen. The Atuas like to appear in the form of lizards. Lizards creep through the openings of the body and bring illness ; and so among the Maoris the lizard god Mokotiti causes headache. Tare was also spoken of as dwelling in a lizard. Among the Melanesians, snakes were, of all animals, the most revered, and some places in Fiji were actually famous for snake worship. On the other hand, the Hattams of New Guinea preferred the snake to all other animals for food. Among the temple idols of the Papuas in Waigu, the crocodile also is found. Idols, shark below and man above, were set up on houses in the Solomon Islands, to avert evil influences. Skulls of those valuable food animals, the turtles, were kept in the temples. From Easter Island we have fish-headed idols, as shown on p. 50 ; and in Florida large eels are favourite places of residence for the souls of the dead. Lastly, we must refer to the widely-spread cult of stones. In Melanesia, hardly any sacred place is without its holy stone. The splintered and cloven rocks of the coast gave rise to legends of all sorts, which in many cases sound like an echo of those which we know in the west. Rocky wastes are shown as the battlefields of contending gods, or the places where, overtaken by daylight in the task of creating islands, they were obliged to leave the materials lying about. Gods were made the constructors of the great stone figures on Easter Island. Herewith, in islands where stone idols abound, legends were connected ; as in Tokelau, where the first man sprang from stone, and manufactured a woman out of sand, inserting a rib ; or as' in Tonga Levu, where a " dolmen " built by Tangaroa indicates the direction in which the gods travelled to Vavau and Hapai. In the Gilberts, sacrifices are offered on one stone in a stone circle, this being wreathed, with the innermost leaf of a palm. Fishermen worship upright stones, and idols may be made only of a particular sort of rock. "Rain-stones" are put in the fire when it rains too much, but wetted in time of drought. Some saw in stones the petrified remains of fish left behind by the great flood. Stone idols, wrapped with cloth, are venerated in Micronesia, many of them being brought from a distance. In a stone of this kind dwells Tuitokelau, who is revered as a god. In Mota, little stones are a remedy for evil of every kind. Circumcision may, in New Guinea, be performed only with freshly-manufactured stone knives ; though a bamboo splinter is allowed in cases of necessity. In the Pelews, Kubary found an idol of black volcanic rock. Small ancestor-images of stone were placed by the fishermen on their nets for luck. In Fiji, cliffs are the birth- place of the good Ndengeh ; in Pelew, the last remains of submerged spirit- islands, whence the giant forefathers of the present population, the Kalits, came into the land. Magic treasures often lie under them ; or, as below a reef in Korror, the kossol-xoo'i, which, laid on the prow of a canoe, of itself guides the voyage to its end. Reverence is also paid to the sea ; everything connected with it — as naviga- tion or shipbuilding — is highly esteemed. In Nukuor the priest strikes eight blows with a consecrated axe on the tree from which a canoe is to be built, and 3o8 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND it may not be felled or worked except in the three months elapsing after the death of the spiritual chief of the tribe. The people of Ponape hold a peculiar feast at which all boats built in the previous year are dedicated to the gods. The paddle that marks a grave represents the noblest activity of the man, as the spindle that of the woman ; and not corpses only, but persons dangerously ill or decrepit from age, are exposed in boats. In Mortlock the highest honour is paid to the god of the sea, by the conveyance to him of those who have fallen in battle, while those who have died naturally are buried in the ground. Under the breath of the universal tendency to animism which penetrated through mankind and Nature, gods and idols sprang up in crowds, and bore the Oceanian mind into a labyrinth of supra-terrestrial and sub-terrestrial conceptions. A racial feature appears in this luxuriant formative impulse. It is not by chance that Polynesia and Madagascar have a great extent of theogony in common, in the form of an extremely polytheistic mythology in one region, of exuberant fetishism in the other. And even if but a small fraction of these spirits soared to the heights of divine honours, while the great mass remained attached to the soil, yet the total was large. The list made by the missionaries in Raiatea contains nearly a hundred names of gods. Whether certain ones rose out of the mass depended on how the tribe lived. In a more distinct order, among the world of gods, we see a reflection of the stability of tradition. Thus in general more gods are found in the east among the Polynesians, more spirits and ghosts among the Melanesians and Micronesians to the west. Just when Christianity reached Polynesia, they were in the thick of a brisk process of god-manufacture ; new shoots, new blooms, sent forth by their excited fancy, found a more secure footing, partly in the more firmly crystallised cosmogonic legends, partly in a system of hierarchies and relationships, which naively spiritualised conditions prevailing on earth. Where the tendency to discuss genealogical traditions on fine evenings in places of public resort prevailed, as in New Zealand, time brought about organised methods of recording (see woodcut on p. 303). In such cases theology gains a firmer consistency than in districts where life is lax, and traditions and the priesthood have no organs. The highest gods were bound together by a common origin from Chaos or Po, anterior to all existence ; these were called the offspring of Night. Then demigods and heroes, as well as even men of high birth, made their way into the circle, with the result of obscuring Polynesian mythology. These late-promoted were often just the most considered in the realm of gods, even though they might be locally limited. On the other hand, to one only belongs, in the highest measure, a profounder connection with cosmogony ; this is Tangaroa, who is revered even in remoter islands, as Taaroa and Kanaloa. A Raiatean legend gives a grand picture of his all-pervading power ; how at first, concealed in an egg-shaped shell, he hovered around in the dark space of air, until weary of the monotonous move- ment, he stretched forth his hands and rose upright, and all became light around him. He looked down to the sand on the sea-shore, and said : " Come up hither." The sand replied : " I cannot fly to thee in the sky." Then he said to the rocks : " Come up hither to me." They answered : " We are rooted in the ground, and cannot leap on high to thee." So the god came down to them, flung off his shell, and added it to the mass of the earth, which became greater thereby. From the sherds of the shell were made the islands. Then he formed men out RELIGION IN OCEANIA 309 of his back, and turned himself into a boat. As he rowed in the storm, space was filled with his blood, which gave its colour to the sea, and, spreading from the sea to the air, made the morning and evening glows. At last his skeleton, as it lay on the ground with the backbone uppermost, became an abode for all gods, and at the same time the model for the temple ; and Tangaroa became the sky. In other traditions he appears as the Polynesian Neptune ; and he was also worshipped as the guardian of those who went to sea in dug-out canoes. Lastly, as the giver of the model for the temple, he was the patron of artists. It is indeed obvious enough for a maritime people to make the god of the sea the father and the first of the gods. While it is under his supreme sway that creation develops from plants through reptiles to men, these last were finished by the god Naio, and brought nearer to the gods themselves. This Naio, who arranges the revolution of the sun and the fixity of the earth, leads ultimately to the Maui of New Zealand. By this addition of subsidiary or assistant gods, Tangaroa's position as time went on got obliterated. He was called the Un- created, the Survivor from the age of Night, and hymned as follows : — Taaroa all around us. Taaroa like the seed-ground, Taaroa, rocks' foundation, Taaroa, like the sea-sand, Taaroa, widest spreading, Taaroa, light forth-breaking, Taaroa rules within us. Taaroa down beneath us, Taaroa, lord of wisdom. The places where he was publicly worshipped were but few. With his wife, by whom he had a son and a daughter, who in their turn had two sons, he is the first to emerge from Chaos ; and embracing the rocky soil he begat land and sea. But when the forerunners of the day — the dark-blue and light-blue sky — came to him, begging a soul for the earth, he bade his son Raitubu to carry out his will. He, by merely looking at heaven and earth, produced all that is in earth, sky, and sea. In Tangaroa's gigantic creative force, which allows good and evil to proceed from it indiscriminately, the root of his transformation to an evil principle may already be seen. In Tonga he eclipses the sun, and meets us in Hawaii as the evil spirit among the four chief deities. In Fiji, tagaloa means the odour of a corpse. In connection with Tangaroa another divine figure represents the man -forming side of his creation ; many traditions record Tii as the father of the human race, with his wife as the mother of mankind. Sprung from the alliance of a descendant of Tangaroa's with the sand of the shore, he himself formed his own wife, and their children were the patriarchs of the human race. In Opoa, two Tiis — one of the land, one of the sea — are said to have taken human bodies, and to have peopled the islands, hitherto inhabited by gods only. But some held that Tii and Tangaroa were one and the same being, like the sun by day and by night. Some again asserted of each alike that he was the first man who, living on after his death, was called by the name ; whence also the spirits of the departed had received this appellation. This legend looks like an extension of the notion, which is spread all over Polynesia, of Tangaroa the creator ; he and his wife were made to have inhabited and peopled all the islands in succession. Tii is in more ways a benefactor of the human race, by raising the heaven above the earth, by mutilating the earthquake god, by bringing fire, and creating man. Thereby he is closely linked with Maui ; and consistently with this we meet him in the Society Isles as god of light, sprung from the sun and moon. 3IO THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Thus did mythology develop from cosmogony, and here too it owes its existence mainly to a dim impulse towards knowledge. The impulse towards an arrangement of the conceptions of the next world has contributed something to it. Lords of heaven and hell were needed. Thus the eternal mirror of anthropomorphic impulse casts upon the deep shining sky, and upon the wide horizon of its island home, magnified and distorted human figures as bearers of the creative and destructive forces of nature. And they who there act and suffer gigantically are genuine Polynesians all the while. Efforts after dominion and power, jealous claims to honour and possession, inexorable vengeance for neglect, are common to all ; not one is adorned with moral pre-eminence, surpassing wisdom, or spontaneous goodness ; crimes of every sort find example and encouragement in the spirit- world. Thus even the highest beings are drawn down to earth by the polytheism which makes them in the likeness of men. Only in the beginnings of creation is the impulse to express in an image some inkling of the origin and inter- dependence of beings preserved. Creation begins in pro- found metaphysical depths. Here mythology goes near to bring forth science. Poetry and legend struggle to explain the riddle of the world, but in vain. Yet it is a brilliant testimony to the intellectual ability of the Polynesians; If their development in other domains had kept pace with it, they would have been a race of high distinction ; but at bottom the limitations of a life confined to the islands recur everywhere within their wide sea-horizon. The very beginning of cosmogony followed the course of natural development : the central point of the world came into existence by land being cast up from the primeval bottom, and later -discovered islands were fished up by heroes. Moreover, the whole is permeated by the view that the primitive forces of Nature, from which, personified as gods, the world of phenomena has come forth, are always striving, in pursuance of a process of development which is originally included in them, to swallow it up again. Although the existence of the gods had a beginning, Idol from New Zealand it knows no end : SO they hold in Tonga. Earth, heaven, all things, are of themselves divine ; and therefore Po, the Night, is placed at the beginning. Po was in labour for ten nights, and on the tenth appeared Kaka, father of Rangi and Papa, from whom sprang Tane, with his eight brothers. The nights had special names, to which the priests gave a profound interpretation. Similarly, among the Maoris, creation commences with the night. After untold periods desire awakes, then longing, then feeling. Thought follows upon the first pulse of life, or the first breath drawn ; and upon thought, mental activity. Then springs up the wish, directed to the sacred mystery or great riddle of life. Later, from the material prccreative power of love is developed the clinging to existence, permeated by a — one - half real size. (Christy Collection.) RELIGION IN OCEANIA 3" joyous sense of pleasure. Lastly, Atea, the universe, floats in space, divided by the difference of sex into Rangi and Papa, Heaven and Earth ; and individual creations now begin. Bastian asks in reference to this towering structure of thought : " Did some disguised Anaximander or Pythagoras wander this way ? " In every phrase, as we may say, are found resemblances with Asiatic or American cosmogonies. There is no need to refer to the Egyptian Ru and Buto, sun and night ; every cosmogonic idea of the Oceanians has relatives east and west of the Ocean. Papa, the Earth, and Rangi, the sky, lay in close contact with each other. From the attempts of poetry to explain their separation, and the consequent vaulting of heaven, sprang the whole legend of the gods, taking one form in Tahiti, another in Tonga, yet another in Samoa. A more localised variation brings us from Ru-Rongo, the god of heaven, to Tangaroa. Kaka, brother to Papa, the earth, represents the sky, or the light, in contrast to her. In Hawaii he appears as Wakea, and Papa's husband, who, in conjunction with her gives birth to many generations of gods, notably the series of the Mauis. Diving into the depths of the sea, he united himself with the sea-goddess ; and after he had returned to land, the Moa-hirds begotten of this union lighted on his shoulders. Metaphysical interpretations of what preceded the creation of earth are only conceivable among Polynesians of a large community, where a regular priestly order rendered a strict tradition possible — as in Hawaii, the Society Islands, or New Zealand. Where the lore was handed on only by the mixed society of the secret leagues, the history of creation remains wholly in the region of fable or legend. No doubt the outlines show faintly through, and some names recur ; but in details the conception has changed. It is with an interest born of old acquaintance that we find carpenters and artists in Mortlock worshipping the zenith under the name Lageilang as their most special patron-god ; by his nature he must be Rangi. Still more familiar, as we go east, is the notion of the sky as found in the Gilberts, according to which it was a spherical shell lying close to the earth, which a hero helped the gods to push higher. His sister, in the form of a cuttle-fish, supported him. Brother and sister appear otherwise, in the process of creation, as representing the male and female principles — as in the Mariannes, the Carolines, Pelews, and elsewhere. The character of the Melanesian variations on Polynesian legends of the gods is that of a jocose, almost anecdotic lowering of them to humbler spheres. What is myth in Polynesia here becomes fairy-tale, losing thereby in grandeur, but gaining in human affability. The primitive inhabitants of the islands, who correspond to the Kalits of Micronesia, are no giants, but helpful gnomes ; and their chief, Marawa, still shows treasures hidden in clefts of the rocks to poor people who confide in him. Sportive turns are in accordance with the cheerful nature of these curly-haired folk. In the New Hebrides they say of the creator, that he first made men go on all fours, and pigs upright. But this annoyed the birds and reptiles, and they called a meeting, at which the lizard was foremost in demanding a change, while the wagtail strongly opposed. The lizard forced his way through, crawled up a coco-palm, and jumped down on the back of a pig, making it drop on to its fore-legs. Since then pigs go on all fours, men upright. But the value of these traditions is quite misunderstood, if, as for obvious reasons the missionaries are apt to do, we see in these spirits, who at bottom are 312 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND cosmogonic figures, only the heroes of fairy tales. The Polynesian legend of the fishing up of the land from the depths of the sea takes the following form in Yap ; Mathikethik went out fishing with his two elder brothers. First, he hooked up crops of all sorts, and taro ; then the island of Fais. His hook is kept by the priests ; and since, if it were destroyed, Fais also would disappear, the inhabitants Tahitian idols, carved in wood — one-tentli real size. (London iVIissionary Society's Collection.) of that island are in constant subjection to the menaces of the Yap chiefs. Thus can a great piece of cosmogonic imagery sink to the level of trick and superstition. The connection of creative activity with sun and moon, still so clear in Polynesia, has become in Micronesia quite legendary. In Pelew they relate how a man and his wife, tired of staying in that island, went to the stone in Eymelijk whence they sprung, and called on the moon. It approached, and they climbed on to a serpent's neck, and so reached the moon, where they may now be seen. Other sun and moon notions take a similarly odd form. When the moon wanes, sorcerers are eating it in dough. The sun shines at night in another country. Once upon a time four men in Pelew, seeing the sun setting, leaped hastily into RELIGION IN OCEANIA 3'3 a canoe. They went on till they got to the denges-iree., and the sun asked what they wanted. The -people said, to visit him ; and he told them to let their canoe drift, and plunge down after him. The islanders did so, and found themselves in a strange country, in a well-built house, where the sun entertained them. The viands served in the dishes were tiny in size, but got no smaller with eating. At length the people prepared to depart ; but as their canoe had floated away, the sun took a thick bamboo-cane, an article hitherto unknown in Pelew, and shut them in it. He bade the bamboo float to Ngarginkl ; the men arrived there safely, and became the four highest chiefs. But the bamboo floated away to Ngareko-basango, where there are thickets of bamboo to this day, but none on Peleliu. In remembrance of their deed, however, the people of Ngarginkl are allowed to fetch bamboos from thence. The birth of the creator from stone or from the earth is the starting-point of Fijian and New Hebridean cosmogony. Ndengeh's priests point out a rock, which rises from a river at the foot of the hill which he inhabits, and say it is his father. The interpretation is to be found in the connection between father Heaven and mother Earth. Thus among the Banks Islanders the supreme god, Qat, emerges from a stone, which was his mother ; and then with the help of his companion, Marawa, creates the rest of the world. Marawa is invoked with Qat in all emergencies, and may easily be recognised as the legendary Maui of New Zealand and Hawaii. Qat was doomed to be slain, but succeeded in climbing a nutmeg-tree. He had hardly reached the top when, by the arts of his hostile brothers, the tree grew higher and higher, and became of such circumference that Qat could not have got down again, had not Marawa, seeing his friend's difficulty, blown to earth a thread, or a hair from his head. Here we have the sun ; and the tree of heaven is the same as that by way of whose top, in another story, the whole group of Tongaros saved themselves from a hostile spirit.^ Islands where volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are common must be just the places for myths to weave themselves in abundance about the force of the hidden fire. To this a life-generating effect was ascribed in the Marquesas ; and corresponding veneration was paid to Maui as creator of the world. After Nukahiva was raised up from the nether world by divine force, a woman gave birth to the sea as well as to the germs of beasts and plants ; while men and fish, who were enclosed in caverns, were ejected by a volcanic explosion. The fusion of fire below and above the earth into a single god of earthquake, fire, and sun, is not far off, when the theogonic position is so lofty ; the ever-varying and mobile nature of fire, of heat, opens an immeasurable field to fancy. Maui, the Hawaiian Prometheus, who fetches fire from the sun, is in Samoa the earthquake- god as well ; in Raiatea, the creator of the sun ; in the Marquesas, of everything that has life. So, too, a reason for his lofty position is offered by the separation which the Maoris make between Ru, their god of earthquakes, and volcanic fire, and the fire-god, Manika, who dwells in all living things. Here Maui is the fire-bringer and the animator. Around him is spun a network of legends of Promethean and Titanic character. The word maui means " broken," " beaten " ; when Maui fetched the fire, one of his arms was struck or twisted off by the earthquake-god, Tati. This occurs in the most various versions. His brothers, multiplied Mauis, appeared in a twofold form, as demigods and inhabitants of ' [The Tongaros are Qat's brothers. Marawa is occasionally a spider.] 314 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND earth. But the fire-bringing was Maui's performance, of which legend specially loved to treat. After he had obtained the fire by means of red-feathered birds, he completed his Promethean career by overcoming his father Kane, whom evil spirits had set at enmity with him, and Kane's brother, Kanaloa, in a riddle- guessing contest, attacking them, and vanquishing a whole host of spirits besides. Kane and Kanaloa fled from the temple and went aloft ; but Maui, as he was about to follow, suddenly felt himself struck in the breast by a missile. There- upon he lost all his supernatural power, and soon after died of sickness like a mortal man. What a sheaf of universally current thoughts and images have we here ! In the Society Islands Maui is brought otherwise into connection with the sun. He is there made to be the priest, who, wishing to finish divine service, caught the hurrying sun by its rays. In Hawaii, when the sun had taken refuge in Tahiti, he brought it back, and cut off one of its legs to make it move slower and dry his mother's washing. Lastly, we even find him as a god akin to Proserpine, for whose return from the underworld prayers were offered every year at the harvest-festival in Nukahiva. Fire was everywhere brought to earth against the wish of the gods. In Ulea a god who has been pushed out of heaven obtains it by threats from an old woman, Mafuike, and brings it to Fakaafo, where till then the food had been eaten raw. Since then fire, as being sacred to the god of day, may only be lighted at night for fishing purposes or at confinements. In Tokelau and Pelew the legends commemorate the making of fire by rubbing two pieces of wood. To this series of great Polynesian gods belongs Tane or Kane, who stands in the closest relationship with Kongo, Rangi, or Ru, the heaven, or bearer of heaven. After earth and heaven were sundered, Tane adorned the heaven with stars, and set up the deformed among his children on earth as trees. He appears thus as assistant and finisher in the work of creation. Another legend represents him as the maker of the first man, or of the beings who preceded. A yet more essential function in the Maori legend is that in fulfilment of which he discharges the important duty of separating his parents, Rangi (heaven) and Papa (earth), and raising the former aloft. When after this he went up to heaven to seek a wife, he found that there was only one woman there, and his father Rangi advised him to go back to his mother. From her hip he formed his wife Hine, on whom he begat a daughter. Recognising her father in Tane, this daughter fled, ashamed, to his brother, and in her anger with Tane transformed herself into the Titaness Hineanitepo (night), while Tane remained on earth. While Tane was searching everywhere for his daughter, he found his brother Rehua, the all-quickening fire, in the tenth or highest heaven. This visit to the fire seems to connect Tane with the Promethean Titan Maui, especially as he also sought the water of life as a protection against Maru, and is reckoned the father of birds ; two features which he has in common also with Tangaroa. In Tahiti, Rehua was a real star- god, the star of the New Year, who produced the Twins as well as the Pleiads, and is considered lord of the year. The morning star, the guide of shipmen, is the son of Heaven, while the evening star was designated as the son of the Sun, falling stars as Atuas, and the Twins as sons of men, who in their fear of being separated made their escape to heaven. Closely bound up with their tangled structure of mythologic notions, yet forming a world of themselves, are the Polynesian conceptions of a hereafter ; a RELIGION IN OCEANIA 315 somewhat ennobled reflection of the life on earth, and yet much nearer to the present world than to that of the gods. It is only the lord of the underworld who comes into the same line of reverence with them. He is Ikuleo, or Hikuleo, Maui's younger brother, lord of Bolotu, the nobles' heaven, and god and guide of their souls. Near his palace bubbles up the fountain of the water of life, which awakes the souls of departed princes to renewed youth, quickens the dead, heals the sick. Or he dwells in a cave on Bolotu, unable to go further from it than the length of his own tail, which has grown into the ground. Here he carouses with his wives and children, compelling the souls of chiefs and Matabulus to wait on him. A thirst after souls is one of his chief characteristics, but an emigration led by Tangaroa's sons carried off some of his subjects, and he endeavoured accordingly, by summoning the ghosts of chiefs, to attract them back from Tonga. He had a special fancy for the first-born of the noblest families ; and once such a mortality took place among these that Hikuleo had to be chained up in the earth by Maui, and in heaven by Tangaroa. He appears in Samoa, as Siuleo, at the head of the fighting men, whom he leads to victory if he is disposed to accept their sacrifices favourably. In Hawaii we know him as Milu and Wakea, two aspects of the same ideal. From the legends told here of him and his attendant shades we may form a sort of mosaic picture of the Polynesian Hades and Paradise. Milu's kingdom in the lower world will last for ever, and has existed from the beginning ; but persons apparently dead have brought back intelligence of it, as the Hawaiian legend related on p. 41. It is level and fertile, also fairly light ; everything grows of itself there. In Milu's palace court are facilities for enjoyment of every kind. The best-looking women who arrive are selected by Milu for himself, and are then tabooed to the other Akuas. Another ruler of the underworld is Wakea ; his kingdom was founded later than Milu's. Each kingdom is tabooed, and no one can go from one to the other. Before Wakea became a god, he was a sovereign on earth; Milu was also a man, but not so good. Down below Wakea rules over the higher souls, Milu over the lower. Departed souls are borne away in the direction of the setting sun, to Kane's islands. There they either leap from a rock into the sea, or disappear through a hole in the ground. A place in Oahu, near the West Cape, has been said to be the spot ; probably with a reminiscence of the similarly situated sacred spot in Pelew. But the souls do not come at once into the next world ; they wander some time on the frontier, and if they are only apparently dead can return to the upper world. For this reason the recently departed soul is an object of fear, since its semi-corporeal apparition is enough to frighten one into madness. In Milu's kingdom the souls amuse themselves with noisy games ; in Wakea's a solemn peace reigns. The place where the wicked are tormented, which is represented as the night of the everlasting death, and as a dark deep place at the back of the heaven where the stars are hung, may well have been imported from some foreign school of thought. In Hawaii, legends of a fire-goddess, Pele, belonging to the nether world, were called forth by the mighty scale of the volcanic phenomena, and grew into a cycle of myths in harmony with the Hades-legends. Superficial observers, regarding her as the most powerful of all the gods, ascribed to her not only the volcanic fire, but also the Hawaiian deluge. When Pele started upon her journey to Hawaii, which in those days was a monstrous desert waste, with the same 3i6 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND mountains as now, but with no fresh water, even no sea, her parents gave her the sea to carry her boat. While she was sailing to Hawaii, the flood rose till only the highest mountain-tops were visible ; but the sea shortly went down again till it reached its present level. Pele, with her terrible brethren, the lord of steam, the lightning, the thunderer, the fire-spitter, the boat-smasher with fiery eyes, the sky-splitter (a sister), and the rest, retired to the mountains. In the roar of the lava-waves the Kanaka hears their voices. Pele often changed her quarters ; driven out by the sea-god Moana, she now dwells in Kilauea, the only volcano of the group that is at present active. Even after the conversion of the islanders to Christianity the crater of Kilauea long remained under strict taboo. Even in the most recent times strangers have noticed their native guides, with bared heads, throwing into the lake of fire little offerings like glass beads, coral, shells, etc., with the salutation AloJia Pele ! while the hair-like threads of glass, " Pele's hair," which are found only in the crater of Kilauea, may serve as a memento of the once mighty goddess. The fancy of the Melanesians did not soar to such grand achievements in the decoration of their Elysian fields ; but it furnished the road thither with many and various obstacles. The Fijian name Mbulu points to the Tongan Bolotu ; and even the Hawaiian ball-game is reproduced in New Caledonia as a game played with oranges by the souls at the bottom of the sea. The first thing on the road to Hades is a city through all the houses of which the souls roam, for which reason the doors all open the same way. Then they have to pass in front of a giant, who tries to get them all with his great stone axe. Those who are wounded have to haunt the mountains as ghosts for ever ; those who escape the giant, after being acquitted by Ndengei, get permission to enjoy the odour of the human sacrifices. Souls of unmarried men come off worst. Nangga-Nangga lies in wait for them, and as soon as he has caught them, heaves them up in both hands and throws them down upon a rock, where they are broken in two. For this cause it was usual among the tribes in Fiji to strangle widows, because the god regards male ghosts, who come without women, as bachelors. If the wife is the first to die, the husband cuts off" his beard, and lays it under the left armpit of the corpse as proof of his existence. The fighter who guards the entrance to the next world is met with elsewhere in Melanesia. In the Hades of the Vate Islanders Salatau tries to hit those who enter on the head with a club. No doubt it is the same spirit who in Fiji, under the name of Samujal or Suma, and Ravujalo, lies in wait for souls to eat them with his brothers. The souls of common people succumb, those of nobles get to Mbulu. These go to the upper part of a mountain, and find at the top of a precipice a father and a son with a paddle in their hands. If they question them, they are thrown over, and have to reach the next world by swimming. Why the paddle, if the souls have to swim after all ? The meaning of the ferryman of souls has been forgotten ; though it is not so in Fiji, where the souls' places of embarkation lie to the north-west, and where it is believed that the rustle of the west wind can be heard all the way from Galongalo, the place of the swimming. After the death of their king the three eldest men of the tribe go with cloths in their hands to the bank of the river to escort the soul. There they call aloud for the ferryman, and wait till they see an extra large wave roll in upon the shore, the token of the invisible canoe. Immediately they turn away their faces, and cry : " Go on board, lord." Then RELIGION IN OCEANIA 31? they hasten thence with all speed, for no living eye may look on the embarkation. The corpse is buried in the usual way. Souls which are excluded from the next world, either perish or come back to wander restlessly about the earth, like those who were wounded in the fight mentioned above. The same fate awaits those who cannot hit the tree of Takivelajawa with the whale-tooth that is buried with them for the purpose, and according to Fijian legend, untattooed women also, and avaricious people. This dangerous way of souls is moreover divided into stations, at each of which the soul dies once again. In the belief of the Solomon Islanders, the avaricious, mur- derers, and other sinners undergo a purification by being turned into ugly rep- tiles, snakes, toads, and the like. Similar traces of dim notions about future rewards and punishments are to be found everywhere. But it was certainly no original conception of the Fijians that souls have to come before Ndengei's judgment seat. Usually souls go with the sun into the ocean, to reach the next world at his rising on the following day. This is why the promontories whence they venture their leap into the darkness, lie on the west of the islands. Where two souls were distinguished in every man and every object, as was the case among the Fijians, namely the shadow and the reflection, it is the dark one only that goes to the lower world, while that which is compared to a reflec- tion remains about the grave ; in this way the return of the dead in dreams is explained. Another conception sets a limit to the soul even in the next world, since it makes annihilation follow upon the highest stage of the life in Mbulu. But this annihilation is personified, and in another tradition assumes the character of the chief of the souls in Mbulu, who is thus probably conceived as a soul-eating god. Others, however, make the souls remain in their place until the earth has been destroyed by fire and renewed. The Melanesian doctrine of ghosts and gods is in its main features very like the Polynesian. It is not too much to say that the foundation of Melanesian mythology is woven of Polynesian threads ; only peculiar features are woven in, and often rest upon a weakening-down of threads and colours already in existence. Considering the great variety of gods in the oceanic regions, little importance can be assigned to the pre-eminence of any one. Name and dignity of the supreme god change from one island to another. It is only in the tales of the creation and of the nether world that more stability is to be observed. In Fiji the recognised chief of all gods and men is Dengeh, Tengei, or Ndengei. He is said to have at first moved about freely, but then in the form of a snake to have grown into the earth with his ringed tail. In that he resembles the Tongan lord of the place of spirits and Dianua the lord of spirits in New Caledonia. Since then he has become the god of earthquakes, storms, and the seasons. They say that whenever Ndengei shakes himself fertilising rain will fall, delicious fruits hang on the trees, and the yam fields yield an excellent crop. But Ndengei is also a god of wrath who declares himself in terrible fashion. He punishes and chastens his people, now by destroying the crops, now by floods ; he could indeed easily wipe out mankind from the earth, for since he has lived in the bowels of the earth he has been tormented with so insatiable hunger that he would like to take in and swallow the whole world. The gods in Fiji fall into different classes according to -the degree of their relationship to Ndengei. As in Polynesia, people 3if THE HISTORY OF MANKIND speak of the divine family — father, son, and daughter. Mautu-Maui, Ndengei's assistant in creation, is called the " bread fruit " and " the son of the supreme god." Ndengei has several sons besides who receive prayers on his account ; his grand- children are territorial gods, his distant relations subordinate tribal gods. Among them are symbolisations of properties or endowments, reminding one in their crude luxuriance of India ; mechanical dexterity with eight arms, wisdom with eight eyes, Waluwakatini with eighty stomachs. The two ferrymen of souls also, and Rokomutu, born from his elbow, are mentioned as Ndengd's children, for whom the legend of creation and the deluge offer the more obvious foundation. Men were made of stones or earth by the creator god and his attendants, or Sacred place in Dorey, New Guinea, (After Raffray. ) else they are simply the successors of the gods themselves, and of them a woman always appears first and then a man, from whose union the remaining heavenly and earthly beings come into existence. In the Banks Island, Qat forms a being by weaving supple twigs, and suddenly becomes aware by its smile that he has produced a woman. Where Ndengei appears as the creator of men, his son Mautu ( = Maui) is beside him as assistant. He made the first human pair from the eggs of the snipe, Kitu ; his son developed them further till they were capable of reproduction. In Micronesia, also, the creation of man took place from inanimate stone, unless he was immediately connected with the gods by a fall due to sin. In Fakaafo, the first man, having proceeded from stone, made the arms and legs of his consort, Ivi, from clay, and enclosed one of his own ribs in her body, and from them all other men sprang. In Pelew the divine couple, Irakaderngel and Ejluajngadassakor, created mankind, he producing the men, she the women. The modest creatrix hesitated to show her work, while the creator let his be seen freely. Since then all women wear a skirt of pandanus leaves, while the men go RELIGION IN OCEANIA 319 naked. The want of mental harmony prevailing between the two sexes is also referred back to this early time, for as the creating couple kept laying their creations pair by pair together on one side, it befell that many did not suit each other and disagreed. The first created beings were moreover pure Kalits, giants in body and strength, and rich in capacities which are lacking to the men of to-day. The inhabitants of Ascension consider that the stone monuments of their islands were built by these. From among the gods of the second rank the god of war most frequently takes his place beside the highest and the oldest, although the character of a hero is clearly stamped upon him. His variations, also, are remarkable ; in Samoa, Meru appears as the god of thunder and lightning, and passes into the war god Meso, or Moso, who again reminds us of the Tahitian Oro. Although in later times he was worshipped in the place of Maui as the finisher of creation, he is nevertheless human in his origin. In New Zealand Maru sends the rain and earthquakes also, he is recognised in the red planet Mars, and worshipped in the South Island as god of war to whom the slain are offered as sacrifices. Next to him the gods of the field and the harvest had the chief practical importance. Some of their attributes could be transferred to Tangaroa, Tu, or Tane, and worshipped with and in these. There were propitious and mischievous gods ; in Tonga one was worshipped at the time of planting and the time of harvest, another was prayed to at the irrigation of the fields. But the goddess of the wind overthrew the plantations if she was not duly honoured. In New Zealand the image of Tiki, the first man, was venerated at the time of harvest. In conclusion, let us draw attention to one of the host of heroes. A mighty figure meets us in Tawahaki, patriarch of the Maoris, whose acts were so illustrious that a daughter of heaven was willing to be his wife. After the birth of a child she fled back to heaven, and Tawahaki climbed up after her by a cobweb. But his brothers-in-law wounded him, and in revenge he called forth a flood ; or, as one tradition has it, stamping in his anger, he broke the crystal covering of heaven, and the flood burst out. In the other legend, the hero, having been healed of his wounds by his wife Hirepiripiri, prayed that the flood might descend and annihilate his foes. Since that time Tawahaki has been propitiated at funerals as the conductor who brings the souls of dead chiefs from earth to heaven. We meet with earth-stampers also in Tonga. Huanaki and Fao swam from Tonga to Niue, stamped on the island to make it rise higher, and by a second stamp called forth the plants from which the first human pair sprang. The condescension of female dwellers in heaven to earth-born heroes recurs in another form in many Polynesian legends. The daughters of Langi, the lord of heaven, feeling lonely in their empty house, made ready to set off and satisfy their curiosity by a nearer look at the folks below on the earth. Just then the sons of the prince were gathered at a festive kava-ArrvcC^uvg when the goddesses drew near, and soon by the charm of their beauty kindled a bloody quarrel. The fearful uproar was heard in Bolotu, terrifying the gods in their assembly-hall ; and Langi hastened with all speed to punish the disturbers of the peace. But the eldest daughter had already, in the wild hurly-burly, been torn to pieces by the infuriated rivals, and the enraged father himself struck off the head of the youngest. This was hurled into the sea and became a tortoise ; an animal which, since that, chiefs are forbidden to eat. 320 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND The legend of the Fall, by which men, once godlike, became mortal, recurs in varying forms all over the world. Formerly an old man merely stripped off his old skin and appeared again in a new and rejuvenated form ; but in the Solomon and Banks Islands all men became mortal in the following manner. An old woman threw her skin, in the usual way, into the water, but it caught and hung in a pro- jecting bush. With her youth renewed the mother returned home. But as her children declined to recognise her, the old skin had to be looked for, whether or no, and put on again. Since then every one has died. In Lifu, death came into the world with the islanders' best fruit, the yam. The sons of the first man had been turned into animals, and one of them, the rat, brought up to the surface, through a hole, a yam-root from the plantations of an old gentleman residing at the centre of the earth. This was planted, and then men began to die, their lives being required in compensation for the stolen provisions. We are reminded also of the Fall, when the god Nobu, having created men, deserts Erromango for ever. In Vate they relate how the inhabitants, during the absence of Nugerain, one day burnt his great store of pearl-shells, and were condemned to die as the penalty. To the fall of man corresponds a period of general decadence and degrada- tion among the gods, in which the transformation of the chief god into bestial shape plays so important a part that one may see therein ■ a justification of the apparently senseless worship of beasts. In Fiji they relate how Ndengei, looking once upon a time into a clear brook, was astonished to see how ugly he was. For •this cause he assumed the form of a serpent. " If," said he, " I remain an ugly man, I shall be despised ; but if I am a serpent, every one will fear and obey me." The preference shown for a beast-idol probably is due to a later growth, of the nature of a throwing-back. The purer and higher worship of a lord fell to that of a reptile ; fear took the place of heroic courage and wisdom. So too the demi- gods are evidence of a corrupter age, which became dissatisfied with the old gods, and sought others. In Fiji a chief betook himself one day to the mountains, and cried : " Who will be my god ? " No voice replied, and he went down to the sea and repeated his cry. Then a serpent answered " I will be thy god." The chief was ready to recognise the serpent, and became its priest. But even in the serpent form the worship was not permanent, for when Ndengei, with the end of his serpent-body petrified into the foundations of the earth, had lain down to sleep in the cavern of Raki-Raki, he was only visited by his old servant Uto ; and as the worshippers grew more and more lukewarm, he generally came with empty hands. A Deluge-legend recurs in many places, but unconnected so far as appears with other mythologic conceptions of the same kind. Sometimes the supreme deity originates the flood, sometimes heroes open the way for it. The Ndengei of Fiji is also the Melanesian Neptune ; and his relations to Tangaroa and Maui, the sovereigns of the sea and producers of floods, agree with this. When Ndengei, in those days a great chief, was dwelling on the seashore, a war with Tangaroa arose. Then he let the sea in from the north over all the low country and drowned the invader, while he himself took refuge in the mountains. On another occasion he flooded the whole country, because his twin sons had killed his favourite bird, a cock with beautiful feathers. He lastly banished the twins to the Reva district, where they became the patron gods of such as build canoes ; and for this reason ship carpenters hold an almost sacred position, as in Tonga. In the Pelews the Deluge-legend is told as follows. The old woman called RELIGION IN OCEANIA 321 Milath, who brought forth the four great lands, Hved, at an advanced age, in the country of Ngareksbukt in Ejrraj. Once on a time the people there had killed one of the seven Kalits, and his friends in their course through Pelew came to Milath's house. She invited them in in friendly fashion, and asked what they wanted. The searchers explained that they were the friends of the missing man. The old woman gave them food, but also imparted the sad news that he had been slain by the people of her country. Then the friends in their wrath decided to destroy the whole land, with the exception of Milath, and advised her accordingly to make herself a raft of bamboo. This she was to keep in readiness attached by a long cable of lianas to an anchor in front of her house, and shortly before the full moon put much victuals on board and sleep there, for a great flood was coming. The old woman did as she was advised, and then the water flooded all the dry land ; only the raft with old Milath remained afloat. But presently the cable of liana proved too short, and Milath was carried away by the flood and drowned. She drifted lifeless against a rock, and her hair got entangled in the boughs of a tree, where she was found by her friends. According to some, the body was changed into a stone, which is still to be seen ; but others say that it was revivified by a Kalit woman who took her form, and that she bore to the men who had taken part in the search those five children from whom the population of the Pelew Islands is descended. The Banks Islanders tell a somewhat similar tale. Otherwise these floods are not always of the nature of judgments. Ndengei indeed causes one when he turns round. Here, as everywhere, legends of migra- tions are mixed up with the floods, and thus even historical migrations of the Pacific races connect themselves therewith. The service of the gods is not exclusively the priests' affair ; but they occupy a pre-eminent position in consideration of their holding intercourse with the highest among the heavenly beings, and attending to their sanctuaries and sacrifices. Nothing is more sacred than matters connected with the gods ; temples, idols, sacrifices, feasts, and whatever is used thereat, animals, trees where the gods are wont at times to stay, and the like. In Tahiti the custom by which the king, as the most sacred member of the community, entered the house of a god at its dedication for the first time unattended, has been transferred to Christian churches. Every man's immediate worship was paid to the god of his family. To this family-god the father of the household prays before the fire at the time of the evening meal ; and at family feasts the eldest offers the ava-ho^\ to the gods of the household. But the child is dedicated at birth to the communal god whom the priest serves. He appears in the form of an animal, whose movements the priests interpret as omens. Lastly, the priests serve the great gods of the nation, being themselves chiefs or closely attached to the chiefs. Thence arose the state- ment, due to misunderstanding, that private persons served their gods in person, chiefs through the priests. These priests are in Tonga distinguished by the name " set apart," since they are men with a special kind of soul. Their posterity are regarded as similarly endowed, and thus the priesthood is always hereditary in a family standing over that of the chiefs, or the chiefs are themselves hereditary priests. A certain character oi Dei gratia extends even to the village headmen. In Samoa the fire may not go out, even at night, in a chief's house. Whoever would not bring the due first-fruits to the chief of his village was overtaken by disasters, for the chief Y THE HISTORY OF MANKIND shared the taxes with the Aitus. In time of war high chiefs remain in the village to assist by their prayers ; but on serious occasions the priest is taken into the battle to curse the enemy. In Hawaii one member at least of a chief's family received consecration to the priesthood. The priest is possessed by the souls of the dead, and his family god is his helper. Beside this inspiration a great deal of valuable traditional knowledge belong to him, the most important parts of which go back to the very highest gods, and form a source of great influence. If a priest can succeed in. getting possession of any small portion of another man, he can by art-magic exercise power over him, so the good and ill of their fellow-men is in the priest's hands. For this reason the chief's pocket-handkerchief carrier in Hawaii is never allowed to go far away. Relics of dead persons afforded the most important means of magic. In Mare a tuft of a priest's hair, his eyebrows, bones, finger and toe-nails ; in New Caledonia his finger-nails ; in Tonga bone figures in human form ; in Samoa tapa which has been worn by renowned ancestors, are talismans. But the most highly- valued article is the skull, which is prepared, preserved, and venerated in the most various ways. A man's hair, nails, etc., slowly burnt in a certain mixture, react on him so as to cause illness or even death. If a ^, „ . piece of a dead man's bone is wrapped Love charm, from New Guinea — one-fifth real size. : , , . , . : ., (Christy Collection. ) in leaves and laid m the way, while a verse is sung, the person for whom the magic is meant will be visited with boils, eruptions, and so on. The Maori priests kill their enemy by putting a stone for a heart into his image. Beside the priests there were sorcerers in New Zealand, astrologers in Hawaii. In the latter country the sons of Hina, the Polynesian Selene, were instructed in magic by their mothers. Great value was set upon knowledge in the priests. Their name Tohunga, literally " interpreter of tokens," was applied in New Zealand to any person conspicuous for achievements in any line, whether canoe-building or spear-making ; he was a learned man. All the tohungas in a New Zealand tribe regarded the most learned as Tino Tohunga, the highest of all, and he lived with the ariki or chiefs. Where there were no bards, as in the Marquesas, the priests were the guardians of historical tradition, as for instance the Kahunas of Hawaii. The social position of the priests was different in different groups. Out- wardly they were distinguished by their tattooing (of wavy lines on the. forehead, among the Maoris) and their long staff. Priest-kings, or ariki, formed among the Maoris the top of the social structure. They did not go to war, but left that duty to a selected chief of their kindred. They retained the power of laying on taboo, even if the chiefship had been transferred to another ; and boasted of being sprung from an older branch of the common family tree. None but the ariki knew the sacred songs. The place where he sat had to be avoided, or tabooed, and to touch his hand was a capital offenj:e. In Tonga, the eldest niece of the Tuitonga was a priest-princess, ranking with, and in some respects above, the prince. In other cases, those who were permanently inspired were priests only, even when they were only honoured servants. Boat-builders, as servants of Tangaroa, had priestly privileges ; and in Oahu a chief was zX once priest, schoolmaster fisher- RELIGION IN OCEANIA 323 man, and maker of wooden bowls. Among the Marquesans, the atuas or god- like prophets were at the head of the tabooed ranks ; next to them came hereditary chiefs ; then the tuas, who prophesied amid convulsions, and after their death received sacrifices as atuas ; the tohunas who offered sacrifices in accordance with tradition ; the ouhous or moas, assistants of the sacrificing priest ; the toas or leaders in war ; and lastly the natikahas, who uttered the curses. In Hawaii, also, the priest took precedence of the prince. Disputes about the sanctity, or the privileges of the priests, have very often occasioned splits in the tribe and migrations. Migrations of idols carried by the priests form an interesting part of the Polynesian migration legend. In order to maintain his place, or rise higher, the priest had to offer sacrifices in no small number. Among the Maoris,' the tohungas lived in celibacy, but the chief priest of the tribe had to marry in order to keep up the succession. Besides this, the consecrated tauiras had to fast, and lived apart from the rest with the priests, round the temple. Yap, Nukuor, and other Micronesian islands, have a priest-chief, and priests as distinct from sorcerers. In- visible Kalits pass for oracles by a fraud, at the back of which are the priests. They possess houses in a number of districts, each inhabited by a woman who is per- manently dedicated to them. Many obtain great in- fluence through intercourse with sacred animals. Lastly, the taboo-system contributes here also to the creation of limits, whereby the priests keep the power of inter- fering in every relation of life. In quite small tribes, the eldest person undertakes the management of worship, while in larger communities he has beside him a priest, who is doctor, weather-maker, and sorcerer. He must have the faculty of going into an ecstatic state. Tradi- tion is preserved in the family, and in his conjuration the Article employed in Meianesian priest turns for inspiration first to his ancestors. If he rites, for holding objects of use ^ . ,1. 1 • 1 1 t ,. in magic — one-half real size. has ancestors m whom others believe, he is doubly quali- (Berlin iviuseum.) fied to be priest. The priests draw omens from the sky, from the barking of dogs, the crowing of cocks, etc., or from their own oracular implements. Before a war, the Maori priest prophesies by putting up carved sticks on a sand-heap, according to the number of the friendly and hostile tribes, and throwing at them with a bunch of strings tied together ; the forecast is propitious if the sticks fall up hill. Before any undertaking, the Maori used to deliver magic sentences. Every chant has its rhythm, and is divided into verses, so that it may be propagated more easily from one generation to another. Other songs have an expiatory effect. The mata, or vision, is a mirror of the future. Nightly visions are interpreted as the soul's journeys into the spirit land ; and for this reason dreams serve to prescribe tribal decrees. In Hawaii, the priest, when prophesying, made the symbols of thunder and lightning with his stone axe, by way of calling upon the god of the sky for aid. The consecration of the priest took place with great ceremonies. In New 3-4 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND ^ ( % Zealand, where there was a kind of school of the priests, the candidates stood under a covering of boughs with one foot in the water, the other on land. The secret science of the priests was im- parted to their disciples by the head of the records ; this law demanded extraordinary attention. A single wrong word in conjurations might spoil everything, and even be fatal to the priest. Com- mune and tribe were no prouder of their god than of his tried and tested priest. Where things are on a small scale, the priest is doctor as well ; but where men are assembled in larger numbers, as in Hawaii, Tonga, or New Zealand, there is a class of priests specially occu- pied with medical practice. One of their chief duties is to get some information from the deity about the patient's illness ; to this end the priest, sitting near the sick man after conjurations, ad- dresses inquiries to the deity, and receives his answer in a shrieking voice. Sicknesses which cannot be cured by the priest are described as coming from forefathers. In the administration of justice, the priest's duty consists in discovering the criminal by secret means. They look for him in the water ; if they cannot catch sight of him they make fire by rubbing, and utter a curse over it. In this way they endeavour to find those who have caused perplexing cases of death by magic arts. Most ordeals also are in the hands of the priest ; in Hawaii, the suspected person must hold his hands over water, and the water must not tremble in the vessel while the priest looks on him. Dances and songs are indispensable parts of divine service, especially at the feast of the bread- fruit gathering. In this either they use dancing staves, or the operation consists only of harmonious movements of the arms and legs. Semper heard of loose dances practised by the women of Pelew, it was said on moonlight nights, in honour of a female deity, but he was kept in the dark on the subject. Dances are held to the accompaniment of songs recited by girls, in honour of fortunate head hunters. On these occasions it is usual to paint the legs and all the upper part of the body red, but a good part of the veneration of the gods consists in silence. Gods who possess no temple, must not be disturbed by noisy movement or shouting. When Rongala descends upon the island of Fais, there must be neither talking nor noise. The .X Human figure of shells and hermit- crabs, used as a temple-ornament in New Ireland — one-eighth real size. (Berlin Museum.) RELIGION IN OCEANIA 325 inhabitants draw near to the forest only in festal garments and softly. Sacred places are of many kinds ; one must not always expect buildings, the whole world is animate, and all Nature may be regarded as a temple. Places are sacred only by reason of the spirits that are dwelling in them ; where the conditions were simple, the priest's house, in which the fire might never go out, was the locality for sacred transactions ; every grave is holy of itself, and in all these places there was a right of asylum. The soul-worship, customary here, gave rise to places of adoration, where in course of time the cult of other spirits could also find a footing. Places devoted exclusively to the adoration of the gods as a rule existed more in the eastern group of islands, but these also were originally only places of burial. Since, at the death of any eminent person, no new burial place was made, but the interment took place in the sanctuary of an ancestor, the sanctity attaching to a place mounted up. Large octagonal stone buildings with steps were rare, and were devoted only to the most illustrious ; while in more recent times they seemed to have ceased. More usually rectangular mounds of earth were erected, 10 to 14 feet in height, surrounded at the bottom with a low wall: The level top was often paved, and one or more pretty shrines stood upon it, their floors carefully laid with small pebbles ; these covered the grave. On one of the longer sides, two or three high steps led to the level top, which was surrounded on the other three sides with a wall or a hedge. On it stood altars resembling high platforms, and also images of the gods, some of which were also usually fastened to the surrounding walls. There were single houses for the priests, and even sacred trees. In those times, too, the images of the chief gods were not in the temples, only on solemn occasions they were brought from the priests' house into the temple by sacred bearers who were not allowed to carry on any other occupation. In Micronesia, enclosures and buildings of wood and stone, frequently coinciding with burial places, serve as places of adoration, called Marae, and Amalau. Mausolea of this kind in the interior of Rotuma, consist of stone buildings like dolmens formerly used for graves ; they are octagonal near Metalanim in Ponap6, made like three boxes, one inside another, or in cellar-like excavations filled with bones ; there are similar buildings in Ualan. Other sacred stone erections take the form of a small step pyramid, ascended by a stair, and with a summit crowned by an upright stone. In the Pelew Islands, the Kalits dwell in octagonal wooden huts, inside of which a small partition of boards is set up, while the priest, through whom the spirit speaks to men, lives outside. It is just the same in Fiji, but here the old fashion is giving way to modern times. Semper even saw Kalits dwelling in simple huts. Among the Melanesians, again, the sacred places are graves, spots where the skull and other remains of ancestors are preserved, and solitary places in forests on the shore,- on mountain tops, in caves, which spirits like to visit. The nearest approach to temples are the common meeting-houses. In the Solomon Islands these are called sacred houses — the name " devil's house " is naturally the offspring of European fancy ; but they are never used exclusively for religious purposes. A far-reaching influence was produced on the life of these races by the fact that they made no special images of their gods, but regarded them rather as only temporarily embodied in arbitrarily selected things. Fetishes of this kind were, however, not absolutely necessary for intercourse with the gods. Prayers uttered in a low tone with a whispering movement of the lips were, as with us. 326 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND directed up to heaven, and in Hawaii customary language drew a contrast between the worship of idols and speech addressed to invisible beings. The idols were only reverenced when the god had taken up his abode in them, and the priest could obtain this by prayer and sacrifice. The choice of objects was quite arbitrary, it might be matting or wood, but only the sacred wood of the tree Casuarina equisetifolia, and only if this could not be obtained that of Calophyllum, Ficus, or Cordia. Stones were employed very frequently, roughly worked wood-blocks with a human countenance recognisable at a pinch, and frequently with the sexual parts indicated in an exaggerated degree ; blocks of stone similarly worked, even imposing statues, as on Easter Island, and giant stone figures ; spirits of the sand and of the rock are the nearest approach to our idea of an idol. But as a matter of fact, these are often less revered than some perfectly arbitrary figure — a bit of wood bound round with string, or a twig of banana tied up with coco-nut fibre. We must not see an " idol " in every carved image ; for figure-carving is an art, carried on con aniore and with great ability. In the stone figures we may possibly assume the survivals of a former cult, holding a closer relation to mythologic and historical conceptions than does that of shape- less lumps of wood. In the west we are obviously much nearer to the origin of these figures. If a Papua has died, his son carves a figure, sets it up in the house, and calls upon it in difficulties ; when the sculptor himself dies, his son makes an idol of him, and throws away the now useless grandfather. In the Duke of York Island (New Lauenburg) have been found double idols, supposed to repre- sent an ancestral married couple. These figures of souls conventionalised can easily pass into regular idols. The idols from Dorey in New Guinea, 6 to 8 inches high, represent unquestionably a sexless being, standing with its arms supported on an ornamental trellis (as in the cut on p. 301). This development converts the domestic ancestral figure into a public institution. In the Solomon Islands crude carvings of this kind support the roof of the assembly hall. In the far-famed Hawaii feather idols, the idea of the mythological bird (for instance, the sacred alae bird) lay no doubt originally at the root of the representation. In Tonga the patron god of a tribe was symbolised by a folded mat with red feathers ; in New Zealand red feathers were strewn about to ensure fertility. Idols were set up in spots where immediate help was expected from them. Along the roads in Hawaii stones wrapped in grass are pointed out as local gods; and on mountain-paths sacrifices were offered before upright stones to avert a fall. To this class belong also the gods' footprints in stone, to which legends have become attached even in comparatively recent times. Near Taupa in New Zealand a chief left his footstep on a rock ; and the prints of a chief who had been slain by Kamehameha were pointed out to Birgham. The temple precinct was a recognised asylum wherever social relations were at all advanced, and herein temple and grave coincide. In Hawaii, asylum might be sought near the grave of the kings, and similarly in Tonga a chiefs burial place was holy ground. Also the capability of affording protection passed in both cases from the place to the priest who served it. In Ranai an asylum was formed diagonally across the island, by a simple process. The priests allowed fugitives to pass under their staves, which they then crossed against the pursuers. Where the souls of ancestors held the front place as objects of veneration, sacrifice and prayer were devoted to them ; elsewhere spirits were the objects of RELIGION IN OCEANIA 327 these. But prayers of themselves reckoned as oblations — traditional forms, of which the meaning had often been long forgotten, but which had always passed by inheritance, and were even imparted for payment to the ignorant. Interces- sory hymns, well composed and often very long, were distinguished from short invoca- tions, the productions of the moment. They were held pleasing to the god, and even replaced the sacrifice. Fison notices, with regard to Fijian prayers, that petitions to the prejudice of an enemy as a rule balanced those for the suppliant's own profit. In funeral customs the main underlying thought is the sacredness of the corpse by reason of the neighbourhood of the soul, even after its departure. But this only holds good for the relatives ; strangers have no scruple about injuring a dead body. All dealings with the soul, which has been taken up to the gods, are most easily carried out in the neighbourhood of the body. For this reason, in New Zealand the priests sing over the body to assist the passage of the soul upwards at least to the eighth heaven ; and on the assumption that the soul must be invited, if not compelled, by prayer or magic to leave the corpse, they stroke this with a whisk, and shake it. Visits paid by souls of living people are often hindered by putting on a mask, which would cut off the soul's return. Souls which neither remain united with the deity, nor can be propitiated by sacrifices, roam about the houses at night as ghosts. These wandering souls may be heard in the rustle of the leaves and the surge of the waves, or seen by moonlight as white phantoms. Souls of persons who had died at a distance v/ere enticed by spreading a white cloth, and if a grasshopper or an ant came to the call, it was deemed that the end had been attained. Old age often obtained reverence from a wish to be on good terms with the soul which was soon to depart. The deeper meaning of the widespread custom of sending wives and servants to accompany the dead into eternity, lay in the wish to give the departed soul an escort, or to send at least one soul as protec- tion, in case it stood in need thereof In this way a mother, grandmother, or aunt was strangled when a child died, that the infant soul might not be Child-mummy on the bier used for burial, from Torres Straits — one-sixth real size. (Berlin Museum. ) THE HISTORY OF MANKIND unprotected. Provision also had to be made for the fights which, as we have seen, take place on the road to Hades. It is only after several days, when it may be assumed that the soul of the corpse has bden turned into a spirit, that the mourning begins ; its object being even to this day to start the spirit upon the road into the next world, which it is perhaps unwilling to take. In view of the possibility of a periodic return, care is taken to renew the noise at stated times. Great variety prevails in modes of interment. In the west the body is kept at hand as long as possible ; and at least portions of it, especially the skull, and above all the lower jaw, are prepared for permanent conservation. On the Maclay coast of New Guinea the corpse has usually to be dried before the fire in the hut. In other islands it is hung up in mats between the branches of trees until the soft parts have decayed away, after which it is laid symmetrically with other skeletons in a cave on the seashore. Children's bodies are merely hung up in basket under the roof Burial within the hut is customary in Fiji. Among the Motus of Port Moresby the only sign of mourning is the incessant beating of drums for three days. When this is over, the grave is dug in front of the house, the dead body laid in a mat, and a little hut built over the grave. After a time the grave is opened, the corpse taken out and smeared on the elbows and knees with red ochre, while the widow smears herself with the decaying flesh. Then the dead man is put by again, and the little sepulchral house is gradually pulled to pieces, so that no trace of the grave is left. All these proceedings are accompanied by carousals. In Tonga the corpses of eminent persons were washed, ornamented and oiled, and watched by women. At the actual interment the relations, clad in torn mats and wearing chaplets of the leaves of the 2)f-tree, carried the body into its house, and buried it there in its clothes, often in a chest or little boat, and its most valuable possession with it. Then all, loudly singing, went to the shore, made baskets of coco-palm leaves, and poured white sand therein, with which they filled the upper part of the grave. The men remained for twenty days in lightly constructed huts near the house of mourning, the women within, both occupied in sacred offices. On the twentieth day, all went again to the shore, fetched black and white pebbles in newly-made baskets, and paved the sepulchral house there- with. In Tahiti the entrails were removed and the cavity filled with cloths dipped in essential oils. The body was then kept till it fell to pieces, when the bones were buried, and the skull set up among the family. In the Marquesas, the notables were buried in the marais, in a sitting posture, with the knees drawn up, and the head pressed down between the legs, and the hands passed under the knees. Funeral feasts were held, the invitations to which were carried by richly-clothed messengers. There is an immediate relation between the dignity of the soul of a dead person and the treatment of his body. The lower classes seem often to have taken little trouble about their dead. In Hawaii a common man buried his dead in a crouching posture, wrapped in cloth, in a cave or in the ground ; sometimes in a house. Food was put beside him. In New Zealand the slaves were thinly covered with earth ; or in many cases thrown to the dogs or cast into the sea. In some districts it is said to have been usual to burn them. In Mangaia the custom obtained of wrapping the dead in white stuff and throwing them into one RELIGION IN OCEANIA 2,^9 of two deep holes, according to their rank in society, the entrance to the nether world being different for persons of high degree and for the common herd. But in the higher classes the corpse was generally mummified, and exposed to view for a certain time in the temple or the dead-house. For the purposes of embalm- ment the entrails were removed. In Hawaii the flesh was carefully separated from the bones and burnt ; while of the bones themselves part were deposited in the family heiau as objects of divine honours, part distributed among friends. A kind of embalming also took place in Hawaii, and was not unknown in New Zealand, where burial customs most resembled those of Tahiti. There people's own houses often served as graves, the remains of the dead being allowed to stand in chests ; otherwise they were interred. Children's bodies were also hung up in chests among the boughs of a tree. Indispensable articles were the kehui — the word means " forbidden," and passes into " taboo "■ — wooden posts, painted red, with carved faces, which stood round like sentinels. Only in certain small outer islands were variations found. In the Gambier Islands the mummies were laid out wrapped in mats and cloth tied up with strings and put away in mountain caverns. In Falefa chiefs were preserved in a hut or in a cave laid upon a double canoe. In Mulgrave the dead were laid out upon stones covered with coco-palm leaves and afterwards buried in the family vault. Isolated cases of the disposal of the body by launching it out to sea in a canoe were obviously a variation of the custom of placing a conveyance at the disposal of the soul for its journey into the other world. In the Gilbert Islands a widow sleeps under the same mat with the corpse of her deceased husband until the head drops off the body ; the skull is then cleaned, and she carries it about with her constantly, as is also done with the skull of a beloved child. This cult of skulls is also found elsewhere in Micronesia. In Yap the dead are never buried in the neighbourhood of the sea, the inhabitants of the mountains never anywhere but on mountain-tops. Adults were placed in a sitting position with knees drawn up, children and young people lying down. A curious combination of land and sea burial is found in Kusaie where the bones after burial are dug up, cleaned, tied in a bundle, and sunk in the sea. Where interment is usual the skull is often separated from the body. Owing to this A. B. Meyer was enabled to acquire many human skulls by barter, since the Papuas did not hesitate, after exhausting their own store of slain enemies' heads, to plunder their relatives' graves ; yet they could not at first make up their minds to hand over the lower jaw. Thus reverence for human remains has its limits, and yet these Papuas in West New Guinea always avoided handling the skulls. Great differences also occur within the much narrower limits of other archi- pelagos. On some islands in the Solomon group the corpse is thrown into the sea to swim away to the beautiful land in the west ; in Anaiteum it is only the body of the supreme chief that is interred. Before they are thrown into the sea female corpses are clothed with their girdles, and males have the face painted. In other islands the bodies are wrapped in mats and taken into the mangrove thickets, where they are exposed to the air until the head can be easily separated from the trunk. The head is then prepared and the rest buried in the common burying- place. In San Cristoval and other places, the dead are laid upon a high stage, and a trench is dug underneath to receive the flesh which is sliced off by the 330 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND mourners ; skull and finger-bones are taken away as heirlooms, and a hut or pjramidal framework covered with leaves is erected over the trench ; graves of children are strewn with flowers. While in Tanna the corpse is laid in a boat-shaped coffin, in New Caledonia paddle and spear are set up on the graves. Here ornaments are put with the body, but if not the whole skull at any rate the lower jaw is preserved as a relic, and so in New Ireland, Duke of York's Island, and Vate. In the last-named island trees in the neighbourhood of the graves are cut in a peculiar fashion. The outward indications of the grief of the mourners go as far as self-injuries and mutilations. In Tonga, when the king's mother died the chiefs descended from her branded their temples, and at the death of the high priest it was usual to cut off a joint of the little finger. The Tahiti women used as soon as they were married to fix sharks' teeth in a wooden handle with which to wound themselves when mourning for their husbands. On these occasions they, with their friends, invoked the soul of the departed. In Tahiti also, the chief mourner wore clothing made of the shroud, while the others went with their clothes torn and sprinkled with dust, and the neighbours who came to lament had a sham fight with the household of the departed in order to the due performance of the common lamenta- tion. Funeral fights were also held in Mangaia, where all the friends of the deceased went about the island in strange clothing to attack the ghosts of other districts. The practice of burying alive is widely extended, it was extensively used as a means of infanticide, but old and sick people sought of their own free will to be buried. In the case of new-born children a fire was lighted over the grave to stifle the soul. In Vate, when old people are to be buried alive, a pig is tied to their arm, which is afterwards consumed at the feast and accompanies the soul into the next world. In the Fiji Islands it is also customary to strangle, and the cord is regarded there as a great kindness in comparison with the club. If a chief in the Solomon Islands dies his wives are strangled in their sleep ; it would be a shame for them and an insult to the dead man's memory if they were to marry men ^ of lower rank. The same end is frequently allotted to the wives or nearest relations of an ordinary man ; even in death he must be surrounded by those who love him. In Anaiteum the women are said to wear the ominous cord round their necks from their wedding day. South Australian Native Women. (From a photograph.) B.— THE AUSTRALIANS lo. AUSTRALIA Australia, forming the south-eastern border of the great mass of land belonging to the " old world," looks south towards uninhabited regions, east towards the Pacific crowded with islands, numerous indeed but forming collectively only a small surface of land. Its position reminds us of South Africa. Those sides of the divisions of the earth which look out into vacancy were historically dead until a few centuries ago oceanic navigation brought to them trade and colonisation from afar. Australia, the most insular of all the quarters of the globe, has received a larger share than all the others of that culture-stunting gift — vacant coasts. Its situa- tion, open on three sides, forbids us to doubt that in so far as Australia has any recognisable relation with other parts of the earth, it can only be with Asia and the island world, — what little intercourse it had in the pre-European days, and the immigration of certain plants and animals, all point to this. This justifies us in claiming Australia as part of the old world, which can do no harm, especially from an ethnographic point of view. With great probability as regards its human population, with absolute certainty in respect to our modern culture, Australia may be regarded as the most south-easterly portion of the old world, as a depend- ency of Asia. If we consider ,the question of distances, the inhabitants would, without navigation, be confined to their quarter of the earth, but with even primi- tive navigation they could reach Asia and more immediately the eastern parts of the Malay archipelago. Their civilization will therefore have an isolated character ; but where there are deep-lying connections with the outside world, we shall have to direct our inquiries towards Asia. ■Even if Australia has more peninsulas than America and Africa, its coasts in compensation form the most desert portions of the land. Along the east coast runs a chain of mountains, the only marked watershed from the North to the South Cape. Similarly, the moderate elevations of West Australia rise near the coast. A great part of the north and north-west is a plain sloping up gently from the sea, and reaching its maximum height of 1600 to 2000 feet in a distance of 50 or 60 geographical miles. Rivers of similar fall flow down the slope, and often in the heavy tropical rains overflow their banks widely. The Barcoo, flowing along with a slight gradient and endless windings, is capable of watering a full third of the interior with its tributaries, that seldom have any water in them. But the South Australian lake region, towards which it bears its waters, does not rise very far above the level of the sea. The characteristics of its desert shores are sand hills between the lakes and on their banks, stony flats resembling the sea-shore and soil impregnated with salt. There is only one river system of considerable import- 334 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND ance, that of the Murray, the sources of which occupy the whole region on the western slope of the mountain range from New South Wales to Queensland. In the north and north-west, where there is more rain, watercourses are numerous, but there is no stream. In the west and interior, we find no doubt plenty of watercourses on the maps, but none in reality. They are merely creeks and Eucalyptus Forest in South Australia. (From the account of the voyage of the ' • Novara "). water-holes filled by rain during a small part of the year. We shall see how closely the life of the natives is bound up with these transitory watercourses and springs, and how insecure, owing to this dependence, is their entire life. The most promising collections of water dry up with extraordinary rapidity. The change- able direction of the streams, even in the larger river beds, makes the habitability of wide districts, if no permanent precautions are taken for damming up super- fluous water in the wet season, a matter of uncertainty. The rapid change from A USTRALIA 335 wet to dry causes wide tracts to become barren and desert. Even the lakes are subject to this, and the maintenance of old lakes or creation of new ones has become one of the most prominent necessities in the cultivation of Australia. Wide districts are impregnated with salt, an^ perfectly sweet water is a rarity. " Good water," says one of the missionaries from Hermansburg, speaking of the lower Barcoo, "that is, understanding it in the Australian sense ; for what at home we call bad water, passes here for good." The abundance of salt, by limiting the vegetation, produces in the interior landscapes which resemble barren coasts ; salt lakes with islands consisting of sand dunes are among the characteristic features of West Australian landscapes. The climate of Australia is predominantly dry ; the moist breezes which blow from other zones upon the north and south-east portions, cannot prevent the fundamentally dry quality of the trade-wind climate from prevailing over the entire continent. If Africa was limited to the region north of a line drawn from Cape Verd to Cape Guardafui, we should have in the northern hemisphere the counterpart of the climatic conditions of Australia. On the south coast, a climate like that of the Mediterranean prevails, with sharply-defined dry and' wet seasons. Between 30° and 18° South latitude lies a band of desert plateau corresponding with the Sahara, while in the north we have the rainy season of summer coming in when the sun is overhead. While in New Guinea, in the neighbourhood of the Equator,. the rainy time extends over the greater part of the year, we find in Tasmania rain at all seasons as in Central Europe. Thus there remains in the north . and south a considerable quantity of sufficiently fertile land, and to call Australia desert is going too far ; the effect of drought is confined mostly to the plateau formation. But even where the total amount of water which reaches the earth is, not absolutely small, it is often unfavourably distributed. As we go inland from the well-cultivated coast, the fields and pastures of the flourishing colonies of South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales, are only too often visited by the most ruinous droughts. The very appearance of the landscape in this region expresses dryness. Dry- ness and stiffness are the distinguishing marks of the Australian flora, even in the most favoured districts where lofty forests rise on the banks of permanent streams. The flora, though considerably richer than in Europe, is more uniform and less expressive. Australia is poor in forests ; trees when growing in masses have here the character less of forest than of grove. The wooded grass country is a posses- sion of Australia no less beautiful than useful. In the south-east and the north prairies of a considerable extent are found, and upon these the most extensive and most important branch of Australian industry is maintained. As the country becomes dryer, the grass thins away into isolated tufts, and takes the form of steppe, which gradually passes into desert as barren rock appears, or as the ground becomes impregnated with salt. The Australian steppe, in its most inhospitable form, is the scrub ; the region covered with inpenetrable bushes where the surface is covered thick with a tangle of ericacecz and proteacecB, with trees rising out of them here and there. The ordinary height of these bushy steppes, which cover many square miles, is always more considerable than that of our heaths. The forest savannah has been extolled as the blessing of the country, the inland scrub is its curse. Leichhardt, Sturt, Stewart, wandered round the scrub for weeks, nay months, without being able to find any way through it. Another steppe, overgrown with 336 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND the spinifex, Festuca irritans, affords a friendly and homelike picture of fields of ripe corn as far as the eye can reach, but in reality belongs to the most desolate and dangerous regions, for the grass-like stalks are dry and contain no nourishment, standing sharp and stiff. If then in estimating the capacity of Australia for culture, we can call it rather a great steppe country than a waste, yet these hardly accessible plains must be for a long time, and notoriously were for the aborigines at any time, a great hindrance to movement and to the production of food. Where the steppe thins away and dries up to a desert among sand dunes, salt, or rocky plains, its appear- ance is seldom so hopeless as in the great deserts of the old world ; it is hardly anywhere denuded of vegetation. Its counterpart is to be found in the lesser Kalahari ; the Sahara is incomparably barer, but there we find not merely an alterna- tion of rock plateaus and sandy plains, lofty mountains and deep depressions, uninhabitable regions and groups of oases, but above all whole nations, peoples of various race and speech, towns, villages, herds, roads, trade, and intercourse. The Australian desert suffers from the most tedious monotony, but has the advantage over Sahara in its more limited extent. The wealth of Australia in food products must not be judged from the fact that no single in- digenous plant has become an object of agriculture. We do not yet know all its articles of food, but some of them are things of which we should never have believed it possible to make use. Of vegetable food-stuffs. Grey adduces for South Australia alone twenty-one different roots, dwscorece, orchids, ferns, a typha, and others ; four kinds of gum or resin, seven fungi, several fruits ; among them a sago palm, and lastly the flowers of the Banksia with abundance of honey. In the north the list is larger, being materially enriched by others; sago palm, cabbage palm, the shoots of the mangrove, which are pounded fer- mented, and eaten mixed with an indigenous bean, the grain-bearing marsiliacece, the roots of nymphcea, and several fruits. The North-west Australians know how to deprive the sago fruit and the orchid bulbs of their poison. It is true that the root of the so-called Australian yam is small, and the eucalyptus gum has not Marsilia Drummondii.. PHYSICAL AND MENTAL CHARACTER OF THE AUSTRALIANS 337 much nourishment ; and we must also admit that Australia is remarkably poor in the plants which take away something of their natural poverty from other steppe countries, such as the various species of cucumber, gourd, and melon, and the various bulbous plants. But the fact that the Australians of themselves never reached the agricultural stage, depends not so much upon their flora as upon the degree of their civilization. So again, the fauna of Australia has not produced a single domestic or useful animal. Those who know, declare that the mammals which would be first in demand are too wild ; the dingo, which is the only Australian mammal accessible to taming, was in all probability imported tame, and afterwards ran wild. But with the poverty of vegetation, the fauna which will live in a wild state is poorly represented here. Significant also is the rarity of fish and other eatable aquatic animals caused by the deficiency of water. The South Australians first learnt from Europeans to eat oysters ; the West Australians eat four or five kinds of snakes, some poisonous, and three kinds of lizards. The grub of a beetle which lives in the grass palm is also much fancied, and birds' eggs are eagerly sought. The only parts where the larger mammals, especially kangaroos, still abound, are the broad grassy plains in the north and north-east. The poverty of the continent in animals has played an important part in the exploration of Australia, since no expedition has been able to depend for subsist- ence upon hunting. Kangaroo and emu hunting must, on account of the swiftness of those animals, have been extremely difficult for the Australians, equipped as they were with inferior weapons ; and besides this, snaring must have been rendered difficult by the nocturnal habits of by far the larger proportion of mammals. § II. PHYSICAL AND MENTAL CHARACTER OF THE AUSTRALIANS Uniformity of bodily characteristics throughout Australia — Mental distinctions — Malay and Negroid forms — Woolly and straight hair — Big and little men — Languages — Character and mental peculiarities — Courage — Writing — Language of signs — Rock -drawings — Effect of nomadism — Instances of its extent. The prominent characteristic of this continent is the agreement in degree of culture, in manner of life, in customs, to a certain extent even in language, and that a greater agreement than we find anywhere else in an equally limited area. But physically too the Australians have seemed to many modern anthropologists to be so little separated that the descriptions which these have given would hold good from the Murray to the York peninsula. It is said that they are men of medium stature, not badly proportioned in themselves, but lean owing to bad nutrition. In their cast of features may be recognised an intermediate stage between Negroes and Malays, what is called a hybrid physiognomy. We are reminded of the Malay by the straight rather than woolly hair, the prominent cheek-bones, the light brown or reddish tint of the skin ; of the Negro by the prominent eyebrows, the flat nose, the thick lips, the prognathous jaws. A conspicuous mark is formed by the insertion of the nose, so deeply depressed that a line drawn from one eye to the other describes only a slight curve. In build they are slim rather than squat ; almost all over the continent it is only in well-nourished individuals that arms, legs, and often hips are not too fine. Muscular z 338 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND development is not as a rule strong, but the joints show an astonishing suppleness, so that the most curious and apparently laborious postures are often adopted when resting. They find it quite easy to dodge the flight of a spear by an almost imperceptible movement. It must be observed that too little notice has been taken in most descriptions of the effects of defective nutrition, so that what is really a mark of low civilization has been treated as a racial peculiarity. But we look in vain for any really tangible marks such as a sharply circumscribed race ought to offer. Some peculiarities are to be referred to the influence of the conditions of their life, some have been indicated by the most unprejudiced observers as marks of hybridism, while others, as for instance reports about the hair, are difficult to bring into any consistency. Whenever the question of the unity of the Queensland girl. (From a photograph by C. Gunther. ) Australian race has turned up, it has been found impossible to adduce any con- vincing proofs of it. We should most naturally expect a solution of this question from careful skull measurements, but what do these tell us ? The Australian head is one of the smallest, but within these limits the variations are great. If we rely upon the twenty-four skulls measured by Davis, and the eighteen measured by Topinard, the horizontal circumference varies between 19 and 22 inches, and the cubic contents of the skull between 66 and 88 cubic inches. Davis even records a measurement of 102 cubic inches. The marked prognathy, the projecting eyebrows, the depression of the root of the nose, and the retreating forehead, Topinard failed to notice in five or six skulls out of eighteen. The roof-shaped skull which some anatomists have noticed as characteristic is anything but universal ; it is absent in more than half of Topinard's list of skulls. With differences such as these, Australian skulls would, seem to require classification rather than unification. In the colour of the skin two extreme types may be distinguished, one quite yellow and the other black all over. The intermediate or dark brown is the commonest, but in no way nullifies the diversity of the two extremes. We meet with the PHYSICAL AND MENTAL CHARACTER OF THE AUSTRALIANS 339 same in the hair ; curly haired Australians have been seen on Murchison Bay, on the west coast near Port Essington and on the Bogan River ; microscopic observa- tions further are said to show that there are persons here with completely Negro hair. But one feature which is unlike Negroes and still more unlike Malays is the strong growth of hair on the body, particularly in the beard. The taunt applied to beardless people, " You naked cheeks," is one of the challenges always taken up by the beardless youth among the South Australians. A hairless Australian is an isolated pathological accident. The most important question in these circumstances is that of the geographical distribution of the various types, and no more positive answer can be obtained to it than to any other suggestion as to the affinities, differences, and origin of the Australians. The earliest reports in no way authorise us to see the lighter type Young Queensland man. (From a photograph by C. Giinther). on the Malayan side or the darker in the opposite direction. Tasman in 1644, and Dampier in 1686, found dark, woolly-headed people on the north-west coast ; and it is no contradiction to this if Grey and Usborne found among them individuals of a light copper colour, with smaller heads, moderate-sized eyebrows, and well- proportioned limbs. In 1770 Cook saw in Endeavour Bay, on the north-east coast, chocolate-brown, straight-haired, well-built men, with noses not strikingly flat and not very thick lips. Among the aborigines of the south-east there were women as light as mulattoes. Dumont D'Urville notes certain tribes in the neighbourhood of King George's Sound as belonging to a more nobly-formed race. Similarly, Hombron and Flinders establish far-reaching distinctions between Australians of a higher and subordinate class. Stokes, one of the most experienced of all Australian travellers, sums up his judgment in the phrase : " The Australians vary as curiously as their soil." Stuart and Leichhardt are astonished by the peculiar and capricious differences ; and the discrepancies among the descriptions of later observers who have been able to study the Australians at their leisure, though under the influence of Europeans, are no less strongly marked. We need 340 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND only recall here Wilhelmi's study of the Port Lincoln tribes, and Earl's remark, "A circle of 500 miles round Port Essington would enclose an equal number of tribes, varying from deep black to the reddish yellow of the Polynesians." This is enough to justify the assumption of a wide internal difference among the Australian tribes. Undoubtedly, darker and lighter, woolly-haired and straight-haired are mixed up together, but where must we look for their origin ? Must we, with Topinard, speak of Negro and Polynesian, some Malay, and numerous originally Asiatic elements ? To the Australian aborigines the scattered and wandering inhabitants of the Native of New South Wales. (From a photograph. ) small islands which surround the continent also geographically belong. The Melville islanders, for instance, are genuine Australians, indicated ethnographically as such by their inferior spears and clubs, their miserable huts and bark canoes. The Prince of Wales Islands in Torres Straits deserve mention, since their popula- tion, the Kowraregas, form the extreme northern outposts of the New Hollanders, and are in immediate contact with the Papuas of Torres Straits. With their passion for wandering, the Papuas from New Guinea frequently visit these islands, so that PHYSICAL AND MENTAL CHARACTER OF THE AUSTRALIANS 341 they have a visible ethnographic bearing in that direction. New Guinea, with its Papuan population, has always provided the most obvious source for the dark races, and similarly the introduction of the straight-haired race seems in view of their Polynesian elements as well as the neighbourhood of the Malays and their inter- course with North-West Australia, to offer no great difficulties ; but since we have no historical record of such immigrations, nothing but a sharp geographical separa- tion of the two stocks according to their bodily characteristics could afford any secure evidence ; we can only regret that this is impossible. Least of all must we overlook the effect of the modes of living in this land where strong contrasts in natural characters are so abundant. Much that has been said about the physical characteristics of the Australians reminds us only too strongly of the description of Bushmen and Fuegians. Schurmann ascribes a direct effect to the influence of habitation when he says : " Where the land is desert the inhabitants are few in number and of miserable appearance ; where the land is good they are comparatively numerous, good-looking, and active." Besides this he finds that the stronger individuals are also the lighter-coloured, and here he has especially the South Australian tribes in his eye. That the women in general make a less favourable impression than the men must no doubt be ascribed to their more laborious and burdened existence and to more deficient nourishment. As is usual among people in the lower stages of culture who live under conditions of poverty, the Australians are not remarkable for great bodily power ; Europeans are better runners, jumpers, and pedestrians, but the Australians are dexterous in hurling spears, and no European has ever beaten them in throwing the boomerang. In the war of extermination which the colonists have carried on against them they have continued to place many difficulties in the way of their destroyers by extremely clever employment of all their forces — even of their colour. Their marches are as a rule short ; in the acuteness of their senses they surpass inost Europeans ; even women and children dive and swim well, save only in West Australia, where canoes and rafts are also absent. Diseases to which they are particularly liable are, according to Taplin, all those of a scrofulous nature — phthisis, liver disease, dysentery, and epidemic influenza are specially frequent ; measles and scarlet fever unusual even when they are rife among white men in the neighbourhood. Small-pox has caused great destruction among them, venereal diseases even greater. The frequency of old people is to be ascribed not so much to longevity as to early senility. The great mortality among children is to be referred to hereafter. Half-breeds between whites and Australians have some points of resemblance with the Negro hybrids known as mulattoes. There is a considerable number of them in Australia, and their physical strength and dexterity are employed chiefly in tending the herds ; they are fertile. One almost shrinks from inquiring, in the case of a people whose conditions of living are so unpropitious, into those qualities of soul and intellect for the pre- evolution of which only the most favourable external conditions suffice. In order to avoid being led astray by the phenomena of a dwindling race, we shall have to assign more importance to natural disposition than to what has actually arrived at development. In the disposition of the Australian, through his excessively nomadic mode of life, an important feature is a want of steadiness. Young Australians who have enjoyed the best opportunities of leading a tranquil and 342 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND profitable life have suddenly returned to savagery after years of successful educa- tion, after willingly adapting themselves to a settled life and regular activity, and in a short time have thrown to the winds all the requirements of civilization. In handicrafts and in the use of tools they have often been in no way inferior to white men, but they have lacked the power of concentrating their thoughts upon definite tasks. People have noticed in the Australians the acuteness of their senses, the power of imitating voices, an accurate musical ear, — all the results of a savage life. But the capital invested in this is not very productive ; no permanent acquisition of culture results from it, — nothing which can secure to a man a firm grip on Nature. Their soul-depressing misery hangs as a counter- poise to it, and the Australian stands unquestionably far behind the ideal child of Nature — the North American Indian. To this the climate contributes ; the Australian lives under the pressure of a climate particularly untrustworthy in respect of the moisture which is essential to the production of food. The oppressive heat of the steppe districts, the inevitable sudden transition to cold at night, contribute their stupefying effect. For this reason the Australians of the north are far more awake and intellectually more energetic than those of the south ; they are, too, of a more stable character, and that says much. If in spite of this we find more intelligence in the south than we expect, it produces the impression of fragments from a better condition. " Nothing shows this better than religion, in which every detail rings like muffled voices from an earlier and richer time," says Waitz-Gerland. Life under these influences for a long period has caused much which formerly existed in their natural endowment to slumber. What stimulating forces are there in a tribe where not more than a couple of hundred people live together? Europeans have occasionally, though seldom, through their personal example, trained aborigines into men good for something. Yet in recent times a more favourable judgment of the Australian character seems to be in course of formation. The mission schools show the Australians to be people of moderate endow- ments. In reading and writing they, as a rule, make good progress, but arith- metic is less satisfactory ; in many parts the aborigines have no expression for the higher numbers. According to the missionaries they possess a faculty of imitation and a retentive memory, but their intelligence is shallow ; everything with them is mechanical. They can be educated without very great difficulty in the simpler trades, but preachers and teachers, gifted like some who have been produced by Africa and Polynesia, are very seldom found among converted natives. Judged by the missionary standard, the races of Australia may best be compared with the light South African races. If all knowledge is fragmentary, that of the Australians is doubly so. They possess a good deal, but always in fragments, which easily submit to their destiny of falling into the oblivion natural to all that is lifeless and disconnected. Language occasionally casts some light upon the mode in which the aborigines look upon Nature, as when those of Adelaide use a generic term— /«2<:7«fl — for all stinging animals, or when the Dieyeri have, besides their word for sun, moon, stars, special terms for the evening star, the milky way, a bright winter star in the northern sky, two winter stars in the southern sky, a constellation like an eagle's claw appearing in the west in the winter, falling stars, the rainbow, noon, south and north, sunrise and sunset ; the myths also deal much with constellations. PHYSICAL AND MENTAL CHARACTER OF THE AUSTRALIANS 343 They know how to reckon time by the phase of the moon ; like the Polynesians they divide the sky into eight regions, and name the winds from them. In the west the year is divided into six seasons ; their capacity for taking their bearings is extraordinary, their knowledge of locality is so great that at the distance of a day's journey they can accurately describe the direction in which a point lies, and no less accurate is their recollection of localities which they have once visited. Besides these practical acquirements, the intellectual life of the Australians has very little to show. Taplin took some trouble to collect the traditions current among the Narrinyeri, which gives a notion of the vacuity of their minds. This tribe supposes itself, before it came to its present situation, to have wandered down the Murray and the Darling, and has some recollection of a devastating sickness which, before the arrival of the Europeans, came in the same direction. Some remember the terror which Sturt inspired in them when he crossed the Alexandra lake in his boat ; and the confusion which two oxen, who had strayed Billy Bull and Emma Dugal, natives of South Australia. {From photographs. ) from the eastward, caused in their camp, people retreating before them as if they were demons. In 1840 a ship was wrecked, and twenty -five of those who escaped were murdered by them. The Europeans killed some of them for punishment. In 1844 they killed a squatter, after which a good deal of friction ensued with the white police. This is the entire history of one generation of an Australian tribe. They scarcely attempt to fix their ideas in writing, yet there is no doubt that the Australians have made more progress in this art than was believed a few years ago. The first discovery of message-sticks with picture-writing capable of affording copious information to a native was made in 1880,^ a further token of the extremely fragmentary state of ethnographical study in the Australian domain. These sticks are brought to most perfection in West Australia ; in Queensland and New South Wales they are rougher. Similarly sentences, possibly exorcisms, are engraved upon stones which are used at the Corroboree dances, and not only are objects belonging to external nature represented in this picture-writing, but ' [This is hardly correct. They were known as far back as 1840. Stejotirn. Anthr. Inst, xviii. " Message slicks."! 344 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND conventional signs are included, lines cut straight and slanting, and the like, so that it is something more than mere picture-writing. The aborigines are said to be very clever at writing and reading these primitive hieroglyphics ; message-sticks of this kind have been conveyed to prisoners in order to inform them of plots for their release ; they are said also to be despatched when two tribes declare hostilities. The stick also serves the messenger as a safe conduct, often over great distances. With them it is not a question of the interpretation of language, but the representation of ideas. Messages written on sticks are read by persons belonging to very different tribes, and understood with some explanation on the part of the messenger. They appear also as plain wooden staves, symbol of the message which is orally trans- mitted ; the messenger is inviol- able. The same object is obtained, by simpler tokens ; notches in the smooth bark of trees, a heap of stones, a bunch of reeds, indicate the road taken, and inform the following troop as to the direction. Smoke and fire signals are fre- quent ; casting dust into the air is a sign of war ; on the declaration of war a stick with emu feathers is sent. In West Australia, according to Eyre, a network of reeds serves for a messenger's credentials, — a reminiscence of the once more widely-developed knot- writing of which Kortiim has given an example from Cooktown. Rock drawings certainly come under the same head ; not only animals, but men in all positions and attitudes are represented often in company with animals, which points to hunting or fishing. On the upper Glenelg is a chain of sandstone , hills with many caverns ; many of them are pamted, mostly yellowish red. In one was found a drawing of a fish a yard long ; on the slanting rock roof of another is painted on a black ground a white figure with yellow eyes and widely puffed-out, curly, red hair, with regular rows of white dots; the body is not finished, but is clad in a sort of closely-fittmg coat. On one of the walls near by may be seen four heads, one above another, with thick, blue, frizzed-out hair, and further up on the roof an elliptical figure, on which there is a red kangaroo on a golden-yellow ground stripped with red, and divided by a broad, white, transverse band, together with two arrow heads, one of which with two bullets is flying towards the animal, the other away from it ; hard by a man is depicted in rough outline dragging a Several other, but inferior, pictures of animals and men are found Message-sticks with picture-writing, from West Australia— one-third real size. (Berlin Museum. ) red kangaroo. < LjJ o o H CD < o o a: o t 1x1 < CL o CO PHYSICAL AND MENTAL CHARACTER OP THE AUSTRALIANS 345 close by. Some of these paintings have, perhaps, a religious signification. Gesture and finger-language is highly developed ; Kempe says that the Central Australian tribes of the Macdonnell range can express almost anything by the position or movement of the hands and fingers. The fundamental features of the Australian language, as Friedrich Miiller has pointed out, are its polysyllabic formation, with .syllables as a rule beginning with a consonant and ending with a vowel or liquid. Its affinity with the languages of Oceania still awaits evidence, so far as concerns the direction of individual points of relation. The sounds h,f, v, s, z are said to be wholly lacking. In inflection the suffix predominates. The numbers are singular, dual, plural. Besides the six usual cases of nouns, Taplin distinguishes in the South Australian ■ language special inflections for the various senses of the ablative — in pronouns also a ca'usative. The accent is usually on the penultimate. The Australian loves ellipses. Shortenings of words occur as well as extensions. From the point of view of their intellectual value, we find in the Australian languages a great wealth of concrete, contrasted with a dearth of abstract terms. Numerals seldom run beyond three or five ; anything further is expressed by compounds. Colour terms are defective ; but terms expressing relationship and degrees of age are copious. The very indifference of the aborigines makes the study of the Australian languages difficult. The casual way in which they speak, and the running of words into each other, the tendency to change the vowels, all interfere with fixity. New words are readily coined and foreign words adopted. There are in Australia numerous dialects which are fundamentally identical ; their multiplicity is more apparent than deep-reaching. Out of a number of synonyms, one tribe will, by preference, use one to express a given meaning, another another; but each understands both terms. They have a special word to denote every minutest portion oT the human body ; so that it is possible for different travellers to ask the name for a particular member, and get those for different bits of it. Of the number of the Australian languages and dialects we can only form an estimate. According to Grey and Bleek there are, in the south, seven languages, all broken up into a crowd of dialects, since every nomad tribe has its own. Certain languages have a wider distribution ; one is spoken frpm Moreton Bay to the Hawkesbury River, one from King George's Sound to Stark Bay and the Gascoigne River, and far into the interior. The same language with dialectic variations is found round Adelaide. The natives of the Murray and Murrumbidgee can understand those of King George's Sound, and similarly the Hunter and Macquarie languages are radically akin. The languages of the north coast are also numerous ; five are found in close proximity on Cape York, and four on the Coburg Peninsula. In the interior, according to Kempe, there is a general com- munity of language among the tribes within an area marked by 23" and 28° South latitude, 132° and 134° East longitude, perhaps even further; an area that is of 45,000 to 50,000 square miles. The following table of the terms for parts of the human body shows the resemblance between the languages of the south, south-west, and east. The intervening languages of the interior stand in the same relation to these as these to one another, so that we have here a widespread similarity, while the North Australian languages ought possibly to be classed separately, or more nearly allied to those of New Guinea and the neighbouring islands. 346 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Tribe and place of abode. Hand. Mouth. Tongue. Eye. Narrinyei'i Mari Tore Tallanggi Pili Adelaide Marra Ta Tadlanya Mena Port Lincoln ]Marra Narpata Yarli Mena Swan River Marhra Dta Dtallang Mel Blanchewater (S. Australia) . Hurra Tiya Yarley Minna New South Wales, Sydney . Mutturra Tullun Ngaikung Melbourne . •, Munung Myrongatha Warongatha ) kundernir J Tallan Myng Echuca Peean Warroo Saleng Maa Murundi on the Murray Mannurukoo Taako munno Ngantudh Korllo Moreton Bay Yamma Tambur Tallaun MiUo Wimmera (Victoria) Mannanyuk Tyarbuk Tyalli Mirr Wentworth Muna mambunya Yelka Tarlina Makie Kamilaroi . Murra Tulle Mil Dippil (Wide Bay) Dwruin Tunka Dunnum Mi The less we can expect to find moral courage among the Australians, the more must we admire such traces of it as have not been weakened in their struggle for a wretched existence. Examples are found among them of really heroic determination and admirable sangfroid ; suicide is unknown among these barbarians. On the other hand, they show a high degree of self control, which, in deference to superstition or tradition, they inflict or allow to be inflicted on themselves. As regards warlike disposition, different tribes vary, but it is seldom that any one is wholly free from a state of war. Menaces from a distance, and attacks from ambush, belong to the nature of primitive warfare, but in no way exclude the possibility of facing death when the moment comes. In West Australia, to the present day, the names of bold and fierce native leaders, who fought Europeans for years together, fall with a threatening sound on the ears of colonists. They were dexterous at covering themselves with their shields, clever at dodging spears, which they would sometimes catch and contemptuously throw back, aiming also only at such as covered themselves with their shields ; doubtless, from apprehension of blood feuds. Thus their fights often lasted for a long time without any one being wounded ; and, consequently, in fighting among themselves, they were hardly what we should call brave. In their conflicts with Europeans, however, they showed real valour, and would often have succeeded had their numbers been greater. Singing and dancing being the favourite entertainment of Australians, it is curious that they are of all races the poorest in musical instruments. They have, indeed, instruments for beating time, most frequently bamboos, which are struck with a stick, but even this is not common to all tribes. Most strike with one stick on another, it may be a throwing stick, holding it against their brea.st, but also merely upon a skin stretched or only unrolled. Among the West Australians, indeed, drums of very rough workmanship have been found, but among the South Australians the only music is that afforded by beating skins and shields. The Australians of Port Essington have a flute, probably got from the Malays, which is blown through the nose in the Polynesian style. We may also mention the hand clapping with which they accompany their songs. Dances are always accompanied by .songs, the modes of which have in all PHYSICAL AND MENTAL CHARACTER OF THE AUSTRALIANS 347 cases something melancholy about them. In them all one notices the drop from a high pitched tone to a lower one. It is not possible .sharply to distinguish speaking and singing. In times of emotion their speech passes imperceptibly into song, the time being in accordance with the degree of their passion. Joy, anger, and, says Grey, even hunger, move them to singing. The simple com- parisons or contrasts of their songs are, it must be confessed, not without a certain poetry, but, as in the adornment of their bodies, we trace here the simple and impoverished character of their fancy. Taplin has noted down a number of Narrinyeri dance songs ; they consist simply of the description of experiences of travel, the chase, or war. All Australian songs, which Grey and others have recorded, are equally primitive in structure and naive in thought, with a tendency to a final rhyme. A word should be added about the Corroboree, which is of the nature of a simple dance with singing, or is modified into a propitiatory or magic dance, or is held generally to celebrate events of the most various kinds. Generally the men dance while the women accompany with music and song. In Queensland it is a still more solemn occasion than in South Australia, and the following customs are observed. The men pass the day hidden in the thicket, when they have themselves rubbed with fat by their wives in a manner such as the festive dance deserves, and paint themselves in a way to strike terror. When it is dark the women light a mighty fire, begin to beat the drums, and sing a monotonous air. Thereupon the dancers appear with spears and firebrands in their hands, having their ankles bound round with bunches of gum-tree leaves. With hideous gestures they begin the dance, which at last passes into a wild fantastic running and chasing in circles, or backwards and forwards. From time to time they utter a wild howl and strike their spears violently together, or dash their torches upon the ground till the sparks fly far and wide. These dances only take place at night, chiefly at the time of full moon. The Corroboree often becomes indecent, particularly in the excep- tional cases when the women share in the dances. It is impossible to understand the Australians, apart from their extensive nomadism, to which all the natural qualities of the land contribute. At the bottom of it lies the deficiency of water, and the unequal distribution of food, plants, and animals, which partly results from this. The dry season causes a large number of places otherwise favourable to habitation to be simply im.possible. But since, owing to the almost total absence of mountains to feed the springs, permanent drought is no less great than the time and amount of rainfall are incal- culable, there are few permanent oases, and the arrivals of damp monsoons, few and far between as they are, are an insufficient check to nomadism. Vegetable food-stufifs are often to be sought for at great distances, while animals avoid the dry regions almost as much as men. Thus the lack of mountains and large rivers over the largest part of the country makes for migration, and if we further regard its isolated position, the conditions of Australia are as unfavourable as we can conceive for the development of a settled population. Thus the nomad tribes of the west go about, the men with their weapons in front, the women with the baggage and the children in the rear. Their burden is generally increased by the clothing, since on the march it is pleasant to go naked. Every woman carries on her back a sack containing a flat stone for crushing eatable roots, pieces of quartz for knives and spear heads, stones for axes, cakes of gum for mending 34S THE HISTORY OF MANKIND old weapons or preparing new ones, kangaroo sinews for thread, and needles of kangaroo bone, opossum hair to make girdles, pieces of kangaroo skin for polishing the spears, sharp shells to serve as ki)ives and axe heads, yellow and red ochre for painting, a piece of bark for making bast, ropes, girdles, ornaments of sorts, tinder for making fire, some fat and a piece of quartz revered as a relic, having been extracted by the doctor from a sick man as the seat of his sickness, and besides these, roots or fruits collected on the road. Between back and sack they carry a store of undressed hides, and in their hand a staff 5 or 6 feet in length, or a firebrand ; and often are burdened in addition with their husband's spears. Not more than 16 or 18 miles is, as a rule, done on one of these marches ; and if indications of game appear on the way, the men go off in pursuit, sending the women and children under the escort of the elder men direct to the camp previously fixed upon. The start is not made very early, and as a rule some urgency on the part of the more active is needed to put an end to the chattering and dawdling. The length of stay depends on the quantity of food, water, or other con- veniences ; but even so they seldom remain in one place longer than a fortnight, owing to the pressure exerted by other groups. Consequently changes of abode are usually more frequent in summer than in winter. The huts often remain when the camp is deserted, which explains the comparative frequency with which deserted camps appear in narratives. Meetings for the purpose of council or festivity are another cause of tribal wanderings. Many ceremonies require the co-operation of several allied tribes. Yet, again, fear of spots where a death has occurred, and other forms of superstition, are reasons for migration. Considering the number of children in a family usual in these days, over-population can seldom be regarded as a motive. Yet we must remember that if other conditions prevailed in this respect before the contact with Europeans, this must, by reducing the amount of available food, have created rapid shifting in the possibilities of obtaining subsistence. The number of Australians has always been small ; to all appearance larger in the north and north-east than in the south and west. Since the invasion of the European, it has decreased year by year — one of the darkest spots in modern history, and not only in that of Australia. The European immigration has been of much greater harm than benefit to the aborigines ; their land has been annexed, their game in great measure extirpated ; the strangers have destroyed the reeds of which they built their houses, the grass on which they slept ; the skins whereof they made clothes, the bark which served to build their canoes, are hardly to be found any longer. We must not therefore, from their present debased condition, draw conclusions as to what they were originally ; nor can we hope to find among their enervated and widely scattered tribes the better qualities which they once possessed. The Bushmen of Africa are perhaps the only race whom the white men have treated with so little consideration ; and when the Australian ventured to resent, by force of arms, infringement of their valued rights of property, they were abused for being quarrelsome. With thoughtless stupidity, England made Australia a penal colony, and recognised no right on the part of the natives to their own land. Nowhere was the colonial policy of laissez-aller and laissez-faire so eariy or so decisively condemned as here ; but it was in vain. The history of the Australian colonies recounts wanton slaughters en masse of defenceless DRESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER BELONGINGS OF THE AUSTRALIANS 349 natives — veritable man hunts, accompanied by licentiousness with its soul and body-destroying consequences, the importation of spirits, and so forth. The result has been a steady decrease in the number of aborigines. No trustworthy estimate of the total number of the Australians exists. Before the European immigration, we may put them with equal justice at one or at two hundred thousand. In 185 i, according to an estimate resting in some respects on a firmer basis, it was attempted to fix the number at S S ,000. The decrease, though universal, was not everywhere so great as in Victoria, where between 1836 and 1 88 1 the number fell from some 5000 to 770. The census of 1876 gives a total of 3953 for the colony of South Australia, of whom 1000 were living in settled districts; if we take the total in 1842 at 12,000, they would have diminished to a third. In districts which we can more easily check, there are also evidences of decrease. In 1877, the Narrinyeri of South Australia numbered 613, and among them Taplin noted for the eight years 1869-1877, 150 births and 162 deaths ; though he tries to mitigate the significance of these figures by pointing out that people were brought there to die. Yet even so the proportion is assuredly not encouraging. Among the natives who live more remote from the Europeans, we must also not overlook the prevalence of infanticide. If we inquire as to the causes of decrease which continue to operate, we may in the southern parts practically omit war. Although good relations with the government were early established in South Australia, the tribes had in 1878 so dwindled since the appointment of the first governor in 1836, that it was found difficult to get together a small collection of their weapons. As soon as the home government recognised the wretched way in which the natives were dying by sickness, and its own responsibility for this, it took various preventive steps. Between 1821 and 1842 ;£'8 0,000 was spent in the improvement and protection of the aborigines ; and almost every British Colonial Minister has considered it his duty to call upon the Australian government to look after them. Only this care, even if it could be of much avail under the prevailing system, came too late. Schools for natives were no doubt founded in Adelaide and other places, and liberally supported ; but in a few decades these schools became superfluous, for the Adelaide tribe died out, and its kindred as well. On the other hand, the mounted police has been constituted the chief organ of government in regard to the Blacks, and the work of the Protector of the Aborigines has become incon- siderable. The very discouraging report of the sub-protector in Adelaide for 1875 calls attention to the fact that the smallest birth-rate and the largest death- rate are always found among the settled tribes. They have been especially thinned by consumption, measles, and small-pox. § 12. DRESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER BELONGINGS OF THE AUSTRALIANS Clothing— Ornament— Painting— Tattooing— Weapons— Throwing-sticks and boomerangs— Huts— Villages— Canoes— Fishing— Hunting— Preparation of food— Food-stuff-s-Cannibalism— Dearth of water— Traces of agriculture — Implements and manual skill — Trade. Little is to be said, so far as matter goes, about the clothing of the Australians ; but the fact that it is little, or even negative, is in this case interesting, as it shows 35° THE HISTORY OF MANKIND how inadequately they acted with a view to their own good. In Central and South Australia the climate is singularly harsh and changeable ; yet we find Australians totally naked, or wearing only a body-ring, not merely in the tropical north, but also in the west and south. Even the poorest and most wretched do not forget to paint their bodies, justifying Martin's remark about the West Australians : " What they wear is ornament rather than clothing." The most universal article of clothing among male Australians is a girdle of plaited grass, bast, or hair, whether of man or some animal. In West Australia this is often some hundreds of yards in length, reaching as high as the navel. In many cases it is purely ornamental, but in the north it serves to carry boomerang, axe, and the like. In Southern Australia the men used to wear round their bodies a ring made of their own hair, adorned when possible with emu feathers, drawing it tight, so that it often served as a " soldier's luncheon." Woman's apron of emu feathers. {Berlin Museum. ) Probably, as in Melanesia and Africa, it also had some hygienic and religious meaning. Besides this, the cloak of opossum's or dog's skin is widely used. In the north it is rare, becoming more frequent south of the Arrowsmith river ; but it is by no means universal, even on the less genial west and south coasts. In some districts the skins are very carefully prepared, in West Australia the lighter skins of the kangaroo doe are selected. More general is the kangaroo skin worn like a sack, in which the women wrap their sucking children ; it is either knotted round the neck or fastened round the forehead with a cord of rushes. In the pre-European time no foot or head coverings were possessed by the Australians. The universal adornment is painting, by preference with red, white, and black ; colours with which we frequently meet on shields and other articles. There are certain distinctions of age and sex, but these are not found throughout. Face, body, and the chief part of the limbs are covered with this decoration, consisting on the north-west coast in a vigorous rubbing of the abdomen with red ochre, sometimes in similar covering of the face, sometimes in a combination, often tasteful, of dots and lines. The Australians of the south-east used to paint their bodies in regular circles, squares, and crosses ; some have been disposed to see DRESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER BELONGINGS OF THE AUSTRALIANS 351 especially in the red a kind of sacred colour, since corpses are painted with it, and it is the finery of festive dances ; while among some tribes is only per- mitted to the elder men, youths powdering their hair with red earth. At times they twist up their hair with a string, paint the whole thing red, and decorate it further with emu and cockatoo feathers, the tail of a dog, and such like. White is among some tribes in the north and west the war colour, in the south it is the mourning colour ; they also paint and powder their faces with white in the dances. In the west and north black is mourning. They are especially fond of wearing neck ornaments of mother-of-pearl, teeth, crabs' claws, armlets of vegetable fibre, necklaces made of bits of reed or straw tied to a cord. The elder men, however, seem to despise ornament. The form of tattooing which con- sists in cicatrisation of the skin is omitted only by some individual tribes. As a rule all the elder men of a tribe are thus scarred, while in certain tribes the operation has a place among the ceremonies of admission to the class of elders. The process consists in making a series of long oblique scars in the region of the breast, also upon the back and shoulders, seldom on the body below the waist, never on the face. The operation is performed with bits of shell or glass, and repeated before the wounds are completely healed, until strong cicatrices have developed. Weapons are essentially the same throughout Australia, — spear, shield, Wooden belt, said to be Australian, but perhaps from the New Hebrides — one-fourth real size. (Berlin Museum. ) Necklace of kangaroo teeth, probably from West Victoria— one-sixth real size. (Berlin IVIuseum. ) boomerang, axe, and wooden club. The natives of Cape York, and perhaps some other tribes of the extreme north, are said to carry bows and arrows ; certainly arrows with bone points are used by the inhabitants of Prince of Wales Island, but seem from the nature of their ornament to belong to the domain of Melanesian forms. The weapons are in general simple and coarse, so that herein the Australians are far inferior to their Polynesian and Malayan neighbours. Australian weapons are of imperfect finish and poor in ornament, nor does this arise only from the lack of iron and other metals, which is shared by the far more artistic Polynesians. They are much nearer to the South Africans, who also, though possessing iron, are distinguised by the extremely careless fashion of their weapons. The chief material everywhere 352 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND is wood ; stone and bone are less employed than the lack of metals would lead one to expect. Finely -polished stone weapons are never to be found in Australia, while cleverly -chipped flint-heads and blades are rare. In some districts the natives point their spears with flint and other stones ; even spear- heads of rock crystal are recorded in Queensland, and of opal in North -West Australia. They are also provided with barbs ; the setting of them in a wooden shaft by means of string and gum is also characteristic of Australian weapons. First and foremost come the spears. For these, thin stems of eucalyptus six 1 ;gs'^' '■^-ar , Wommeras or throwing-sticks of the Australians— one-fifth real size. (Berlin Museum and British Museum.) feet and more in length are chosen, which are straightened in the fire, slightly charred, and hardened at the end. This is the simplest form ; the first improve- ment consists in making a hole for throwing with the help of a throwing-stick. Besides this the spear-bearer generally has in his sheaf some spears provided with barbs ; a two-pointed piece of wood is attached by sinews to the spear point in such a way that its lower end projects barb-wise. These barbs are carried loose in a pouch until the hunting-ground is reached. Their use in war is prohibited among the Australians in Port Lincoln. A shorter, thicker spear, as a rule not more than a yard and a half long, is used for spearing fish. In North Australia a short light javelin for small game occurs. All the other spears, however, are hurled with a throwing-stick called wommera or wumera, in South Australia also midla; this is from 20 to 30 inches in length, smaller in the south than in the north, consisting in a flat piece of hard wood furnished at one end with a Wooden spears, mostly from North Australia ; the second and third from the right are fish-spears - one-fifth real size. (British Museum and Berlin Museum). 2 A 354 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND hook, while at the other end is fastened a lump of resin and a piece of quartz, or a tuft of opossum's hair, so that it may not slip out of the hand in the act of throwing. In the royal museum at Leyden there is a cylindrical throwing-stick probably from North Australia, ornamented at the handle end with a bunch of fringes made of human hair, the hook at the other end being fastened with the balsam of Xanthorrhoea. The hook, usually a kangaroo tooth, is laid in the hole New South Wales men, showing breast soars. (From a photograph. ) on the under side of the spear ; stick and spear are held with the fingers of the right hand, and the weapon thrown at the level of the eye. The throwing-stick gives the spear its direction, and by its action as a lever increases the force of the throw. For convenience the inner side is slightly concave, the outer convex ; both are frequently ornamented with oblique scratches. The throwing-stick ; is North Austrahan bow, said to be from Cape York— one- thirteenth real size. (British Museum.) unknown in some parts of the west, but is still used on the York peninsula. Other varieties of spears are made from light reed, with a point half a yard long of hard wood affixed to it, while others are provided with barbs of flint. The Australian club or waddy is usually a roughly -wrought cudgel, most nearly akin to the South African kirri. Its thicker end may be flattened into a four-sided shape, and set with spikes like a " morning star." With some slight modifications these appear as missile -clubs ; they strike their object with the handle whirling round the knob, and so form the transition to the boomerang. To the same class belong the widdis or wirris of the South Australians, made from DJiESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER BELONGINGS OF THE AUSTRALIANS 355 eucalyptus stems half a yard in length and about the thickness of a finger, with knots on one end, and at the other slightly curved in the fashion of a sabre. They are thrown at small animals, or used at the beginning of a fight before people take to the spear. The throwing-stick and missile-club or nu//a go, as a rule, together. A peculiar weapon is the boomerang, called also wagno, keili, and bomeran. The Australians make it from boughs of the acacia pen- dula, or from some other tree of similar growth, giving to the green wood the desired curvature in the fire. As is well known, the boome- rang when thrown travels forward for some distance, and returns in an ellipse to within a few s .0 paces of the thrower. If it strikes its mark it falls to the ground. A skilled thrower can give the weapon almost any direc- tion he likes ; to increase the force of the stroke it is hurled so as to touch the ground with its flat side, and rise ricochetting to a considerable height. The natives are capable of knocking over birds or small mammals at 200 paces ; as a weapon of war it is dangerous, from the impossibility of judg- ing at the moment when it is seen in the air how it will go or where it will come down. The most expert throwers of the boomerang are considered to be the tribes on the Macleay River, and those on the Shoal River in New South Wales. The Stone axes , the thiee above fiom North Austiil a the lower from Queensland or Victoria— one-sixth real size. (Berlin Museum.) genume boomerang must be bent almost at a right angle, with something of a twist in the surface, but it occurs in various forms. In South Australia it is long, thin, and heavy, and is only thrown at fish. Here it is called wadna, and is closely akin to the widdi. For warlike purposes it is larger and less curved than for the chase ot birds or for play. It is chiefly found in the east ; there are various specimens of it in our museums simply ornamented with scratched lines and anima figures. In the extreme north the boomerang is not in use, in the south-west it is little more than a toy. In the bush the Queenslanders use their large wooden sword, a piece of flat wood which has sharp pieces of stone set with gum in a groove. ,, Both in the south and the north the stone axe or /««/^ was once equally 356 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND common. It consisted of a stick to which a stone having either a groove ground or a hole bored in it was attached by means of gum, sinew, or bast. With Boomerangs and boomerang-shaped clubs. The stick in the middle is of uncertain use— one-tenth real size. (British Museum and Berlin Museum. ) this incisions were made in the smooth and strong stems of the trees, which the natives then climbed with the help of a cord looped round the stem. Polished DRESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER BELONGINGS OF THE AUSTRALIANS 2iS7 axes are for the most part not found, but a certain amount of smoothing was given by rubbing two stone blades together in water. The shields, as shown in the coloured plate, serve rather to protect the hand and to ward off blows than to cover the body. Their thickness is much greater than their breadth, and they more- over have an edge bearing a striking resemblance to the parrying shields used on the Upper Nile. The monotonous Australian ornament of oblique and serpentine lines is a characteristic feature of them. The best shields are found in the north, a broader form occurs in Northern Queensland ; on King George's Sound shields are not known at all. The transition from weapon to implement is formed by the digging-stick Axes of stone or horse-shoe iron from Queensland— one-fifth real size. (British Museum. ) which the South Australians call kiatta, a baton about a yard and a half long and as thick as the fist. It forms the inseparable companion of the women, who dig up roots with its thicker end sharpened and hardened in the fire. In the west a wooden implement like a meat-tray is used as spade, basket, and dish alike. Considering the nomadic ways of the Australians, their hut-building can only be imperfect, and for a similar reason it reaches a higher level in the north than in the south. The tribes on the east coast of Spencer Gulf in summer merely stick a few wretched boughs in the ground as a protection from - the wind. In winter they weave huts of a niche shape and cover them at times with bark ; the fire burns in front of the hut. Just as the family, when encamping after its wandering, lights a fire the first thing, and does not build its hut till this has been done, so as 358 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND a general rule the fire is the true centre of family life and business. Thus the South Australians use the word wurlie in the first place for fire, and then in a further sense for hut or habitation, that is fire-place. These weather-screens are found on Roebuck Bay, where also frequently a hole is dug in the earth large enough to hold two men and covered with a screen placed slanting. The worst dwellings were those of the aborigines of New South Wales, who put up an insufficient wall of woven work, and that only in wet and cold weather. In pre-European times ^ scarcely any country contained so many cave dwellers as Australia. On the east coast of Vincent Gulf, however, they have stockaded houses, and in places where the natives are wont to make a longer stay on account of periodical abundance of provisions, permanent huts are erected. In Central Australia, particularly, the great number of these, together with the quantity of foot-tracks, give the district the appearance of being more inhabited than it is. In Eastern and Central Australia their form is that of a pointed roof resting on the ground, some four yards long by two wide and very low, woven of boughs covered with eucalyptus bark and open on one side. In West Australia they have an arched opening about a yard high, and are so narrow that a man cannot lie at full length in them. This kind of hut, built hastily indeed but still with some stability, is used in the interior as well as on the Gulf of Carpen- taria, on Hanover Bay, and in some other places. They are not very roomy ; three persons crouching close together can scarcely find place in them. Similar to these are the huts in Endraghtsland, where they also lived in caves. The huts stand singly or in little villages of fifteen and more together, where any natural protection is found ; on sand-hills or hillocks or in the bush. In North and North-west Australia we meet with something like Papuan influence in the size and careful construction of the huts. Here, where the houses are as high as a man, large enough to hold ten persons, built of stakes daubed with clay, the village assumes quite a different position, losing the casual appearance and acquiring stability, organisation, and fixity. On Rockingham Bay four fire- places stood in the middle of the village and at one end a hut of extra size, six yards long, four high, and two wide, in which were kept the weapons, a curious red-painted shield, swords, fishing-lines, (British Museum.) ^^^ j^ ^^^^ ^j^^^ ^ V\\\2.gt hall of the Melanesian kind. The navigation of the Australian peoples is an indication of their isolated and backward position. A great part of the coast tribes know nothing about it. On the north-west coast there are only wretched rafts of mangrove branches. Where there are canoes, that is in the whole southern half of Australia, they are very imperfect bark canoes with paddles half a yard long. Yet even with these they are bold and hardy enough to sail several miles out to sea. Near Port Essington the indigenous canoe is of bark. The bark of the eucalyptus is taken off in broad and long strips, the strips are laid on the ground, and the sides as well as the ends, which roll up as they dry, are brought into the desired shape by binding together with string and weighting with stones. When newly made they are light and handy, but very soon begin to decay. In northern New South Wales and further Stone club, said to be Australian, possibly from New Britain. DRESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER BELONGINGS OF THE AUSTRALIANS 359 north there are canoes made of tree stems hollowed with fire. In the York Peninsula, Cook saw boats made of this kind, 1 3 feet long, with outrigger and long North Australian with spears, axe, and club. (From a photograph. ) flat paddles ; some still longer, even up to 33 feet with double outriggers, are obtained on the north-west coast by barter for tortoise-shell and trepang. Nothing is known of the Australians undertaking long journeys in their vessels. Most of the islands, on the south and east coasts, even those lying as near as Kangaroo 36o THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Island, are uninhabited. The bark canoe, which is the typical Australian craft, is only adapted for fishing purposes, though perhaps the custom of carrying fire in these narrow crank boats points to occasionally more protracted absences from the land. Except in the north, where Malay influence prevails, fishing with hooks was originally unknown to the Australians, but they knew the fish spear 4 yards long with its bone point, many having also nets made of grass or the roots of rushes. The women chew the material until it becomes supple, and the men weave, using a stick for needle. In these nets they catch not only fish but also water-fowl, yet all the coast tribes do not possess nets. The natives of Port Lincoln used to fish in .shallow water with the hand or with spreading twigs as well as with spears. The fish were dried and preserved packed in bark ; shell-fish, both salt and fresh water, were eaten in quantities, but never raw. On the coast of North Australia are found veritable kitchen-middens. All mammals are hunted, from the kangaroo to the mouse ; birds from the emu '^^^^S^s^.. Queensland canoe. (Godeffroy Collection, Leipzig.) to the smallest wren ; snakes too and other reptiles, the process being to stalk them to within spear or boomerang throw ; the attention of the animal is distracted by making a noise in the other direction. Larger animals are also driven, especi- ally the kangaroo, in winter when the soft ground is tiring to them, fire being employed to drive the animal towards the hunters. Animals living in holes are smoked out ; signs are used to avoid making a noise. A spear with a bunch of feathers stuck upright in the ground indicates concealed game ; the index finger moved with a jerking motion means kangaroo ; three fingers outstretched, with the middle one depressed, emu ; outstretched thumbs, opossum ; the whole hand edge downwards, fish. They prefer not to hunt by moonlight. The dogs are not of much use, for they can neither track nor retrieve, nor can they follow emu and kangaroo. The hunters therefore try to reinforce themselves with old traditional charms, which they mutter quickly when starting in chase of an animal ; only grown-up men know these. To them also are confided the rules, often cast in proverbial form, which concern the appointment and use made of the prey when captured. Among the Port Lincoln tribes full-grown male animals are eaten by men, female by women, young ones by the young people ; but all alike may partake of the common kangaroo rat. The wallaby and the two kinds of bandicoot may not be eaten by women or young people ; in the case of the former they are prejudicial to the regularity of their functions, while in the latter they make the DRESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER BELONGINGS OF THE AUSTRALIANS 361 beard grow of a light colour instead of the favourite black. On the other hand, lizards promote maturity in girls and snakes make women fruitful. Like so many other ancestral customs, these have in course of time lost much of their force. The dogs, which originally were only dingoes, but now are mostly crossed with European breeds are well treated, the young ones being in case of necessity suckled by the women ; they are also used for eating. Since Australia was never so rich in game as North America, and the weapons of the Australians are poor, the chase demands exertion and privation, and is the cause of frequent changes of place which are prejudicial to civilization ; it is most laborious, and at the same time most necessary, in the hot and dry season, when the sources of vege- table nourishment are scanty. The Australians much prefer an animal diet, but are compelled to content themselves in great measure with a vegetable one. Being entirely without pottery, they have only limited facilities for preparing food. Boiling over a fire is unknown : where vessels for this pur- pose are found, as in the extreme north, they are not indigenous. Pots and cups made of shells, of skulls made tight with gum, of tortoise-shells, will not stand the fire ; nor will bottles made from the skins of small animals. Meat is dressed by broiling over an open fire or on embers ; and the Polynesian fashion of steam- ing in holes dug in the ground is also known. On the Upper Glenelg these holes were circular, and lined with stone ; they were the common property of the tribe. Fruits and roots were eaten after the meat as dessert. The Australians are fond of honey from the Banksia and Xantkorrhoea ; also of the manna-like gum of a species of Eucalyptus, called " peppermmt gum, from which they make a sweet drink by adding water. Other kinds of eucalyptus and various plants also yield edible gums. The Australians do not, however, eat everything indiscriminately, but reject several things eaten by Europeans, as certain fish, crustaceans, or fungi ; yet they feel no disgust at such things as maggots or Striking and throwing clubs— one-eighth real size. (Berlin Museum.) 362 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND rotten eggs, or even the contents of the intestines of animals taken in hunting. Even among vegetables they use as articles of diet some that we reject for offensive taste or small nutritious value. Among the Australians of Port Lincoln, Schurmann saw only one root eaten raw ; all others were roasted in the ashes and peeled. Many fruits are gathered unripe and roasted ; in South Australia especially karkalla, the fruit of a sort of cactus, and a bean called rondo. This attracts a crowd of visitors every year to the sandhills of Sleaford Bay, and gives rise to fights. Food has a profound influence on the numbers of the population. Children before they have got most of their teeth are not competent to chew the hard roots and berries, which to some extent explains the high mortality among them. As to the luxuries of the Australians we have little information. In many places no intoxicating drink was found in use when Europeans first came. The only definite report of any- thing of the kind is that given by Braim in regard to the mead drunk by the natives of New South Wales. It is not certain whether they wgre ac- quainted with tobacco before the arrival of Europeans. The mode of smoking in the Cape York district is, however, peculiar enough. A piece of bamboo 2 or 3 feet long, and as thick as the arm, is filled with tobacco smoke, and every member of the company takes a whiff in turn ; which reminds us of the practice mentioned above, as obtaining in New Guinea. There is no doubt that the aborigines used parts of narcotic plants, whether for chewing, smoking, or snuiifing, but with the exception of an Eugenia, it is not known what these were. Schomburgh in 1881 first described a plant — Duboisia pituri — the dried leaves of which, either smoked or chewed, have properties nearly akin to those of opium and tobacco, and in their effect stand midway between the two. This grows in the interior, and forms an important article of trade there. Some tribes are acquainted with powerful vegetable poison, but the Narrinyeri, knowing of none such, use the products of putrefaction to poison their weapons. Cannibalism is practised in Australia from various motives, but is not universal, and, indeed, is abhorred by some tribes. A chief ground alleged by the Narrinyeri of the Lower Murray to account for their hatred of the Merkani ^ was that they stole fat people to eat them. A man who had a fat wife never liked to let her go alone. In the west districts, where Europeans live, cannibalism has ceased ; but even here cases of it still occur in times when food is scarce. In Central Australia it exists in its most comprehensive form, the pretext being deficiency of game. In Queensland, if the Bunya-bunya tree {Araucaria bidwillii of Hooker) bears an abundance of its floury nuts, the supply is more than the 1 ["Merkani" appears lo be the name applied by the Narrinyeri to all tribes outside their own.] New South Wales men, showing breast-scars. (From a photograph.) DUESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER BELONGINGS OF THE AUSTRALIANS 363 tribe can conSume, and strangers are permitted to share in the feast. When the native visitors liave lived for some time exclusively on this vegetable diet, they are said to feel an irresistible craving for meat, and since they dare not kill any of the local game, they are forced to slaughter one of their own number. But a more frequent cause of cannibalism is war. It is usual to eat the heart and the kidney-fat of the slain, with a view to appropriating the enemy's courage. With a similar object, in the north, you take your foe's head along with you, and eat his eyes and the meat off his cheeks, after which the skull is tossed about in a frenzied dance, and finally set up on a stake. The practice among the Australians about Lakes Albert and Alex- andra of using human skulls as drinking - cups, borders on anthropophagy. In former times every woman in those parts had a vessel of the kind, hol- lowed out, smoked, and prepared by herself The magicians pretend that they require to eat human flesh. In Queensland the men, having previously painted themselves white, devour certain portions of the body of a young woman or a girl, as a proof Australian bushels of woven grass — one-sixth real size. (British Museum.) of relationship or attach- ment. Among the Central Australian tribes bodies are devoured to avoid the necessity of further mourning. Among the Dieyeri a trial is first held at the grave, to ascertain who caused the death, after which the flesh is taken off the bones, distributed, and eaten. This, however, is done according to rule ; only mothers may eat their children, not fathers. Still less may sons eat their parents. Water, one of the most precious possessions in this land of drought, is, next to women, the most frequent cause of quarrels. The art of spring-finding is highly developed. As a substitute for it, covering the belly with mud is in repute as a thirst-quenching and cooling process. In accounts of travels in West Australia, we hear also of wells being sunk. One can hardly speak of agriculture among the Australians, only traces of it have been observed. Yams were found in cultivation on the Prince of Wales Island, in the north-west, and in the interior. Grey, in his journey from Gantheaume Bay to the Hutt River, came across a stretch of fertile ground more than 3 miles in breadth, representing a single plantation of warran {dioscored), literally honey- combed with holes for planting. The prohibition to dig up seed-bearing food- plants after the flowering is merely the necessary result of ever-imminent famine. It is a long step from this to their preservation and increase by cultivation. The life of the Australian native afforded little room for industrial activity, though the varying distribution of the raw materials gave occasion here and there for a division of labour. Game abounded about Adelaide, and the tribes of that 3^4 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND part were, accordingly, more expert in the manufacture of rugs and cloaks out of furs than were those of Port Lincoln. Hereditary dexterity contributed to this. Within the limits of a single tribe, individual families work at things for which the raw material is accessible, or other facilities exist, some at mats, some at weapons, and then barter their manufactures. But most things are made when and where they are wanted. In individual districts the productions are scanty and of little variety, and the districts show uncommonly few local peculiarities. Primitive industries like pottery, polishing stone weapons, everything connected with agriculture and the breeding of cattle, are altogether absent in Australia. Opossum rug ; one-eighth real size. (Berlin Museum.) The process of preparing skins consists of stretching them out, scraping and rubbing. The skins are sewn together with the tail sinews of the kangaroo, the holes being first pierced with a sharp-pointed bone. As the skins are not tanned, the natives are careful to preserve their cloaks from damp. The art of weaving comes chiefly into play for making nets ; and in this the Australians use a loop similar to that found in simple fishing-nets with us. In matting they do nothing remarkable ; but their basket-work is better, sometimes even excellent. The passion for ornament has never developed in Australia into such an inducement to trade as among the Africans, with their love of beads and cowries. Attempts to start a trade in beads with Australians did not result favourably ; and the lack of native products for exchange contributed to this. The aborigines had no knowledge how to get at gold, and the trader could obtain slaves in plenty THE FAMILY AND SOCIETY IN AUSTRALIA 365 nearer home ; so that the chief enticements to foreign commerce were absent. The small attraction which Australia offered to foreigners was certainly a main reason for the oblivion into which the discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries fell, as well as for the backward state of the whole country ethnographic- ally. In the interior some tribes carry on an insignificant trade with each other, and in the north the natives, employing intervening tribes as intermediaries, barter ochre for shields and other objects. The most important articles of local manu- facture that can be named are weapons ; trade is also done in skins for clothing, and in mats. In West Australia a word exists to denote a market or fair. § 13. THE FAMILY AND SOCIETY IN AUSTRALIA Birth Infanticide — Bringing up and naming of children — Names of the family groups — Kobong — Exogamy — System of relationship — Inheritance — Position of the woman — Morality — Wedlock — Marriage by capture — A scene from the daily life of the South Australians — Funeral ceremonies — Native inquests — Tombs and modes of burial — Weakness of the political organisation — Rights of property in land — Boundaries — Chief- ship — Family groups — Questions of law — Blood vengeance — Deliberative assemblies — Intercourse between tribes — State of war — Ngiampe ; Initiation of youths — Narembe ; Initiation of girls. When a woman feels that her time is approaching she retires from the camp with some female companions, and all male persons have to keep their distance from her. After the birth the father is summoned, and at once sets to work to render service to his wife by lighting a fire, fetching water, and in other similar ways. A barbarous neglect of the mother and the new-born child on the part of the husband is by no means the rule ; nor can we refuse either to mothers or to fathers the credit of tender affection towards their children. If these die the mothers not unfrequently carry the bodies till they decompose, and afterwards carry the bones with them in the sack on which they sleep. Fathers may be seen carefully leading their tired children by the hand or carrying them. A mother may sometimes have allowed the child which she carried wrapt up in a piece of bark to starve, to die of cold, or to burn itself in the fire ; the great infant mortality may offer strong evidence of mistakes in the bringing up and guarding of the little ones, yet the fact that the period of suckling is extended over two or three years shows plainly the natural degree of maternal love. Infanticide was and is very widespread, and in any case the number of births is out of all proportion to that of the children who survive. Usually the new- born child is killed immediately after birth by thrusting a stick through the ears into the skull, after which the little corpse is burnt in the fire, but cases of killing by throttling, or by a blow from a club, also occur. In 1 860, one-third of all the children born among the Narrinyeri were killed, every child that was born before the next elder could walk, all mis-shapen children, one or both of a pair of twins, at least half the children of white fathers owing to jealousy, female children, and finally, children of marriages entered into unwillingly. But if it is once decided that a child is to be kept, the patience with which it is tended is unbounded. In order to secure its thriving, superstition enjoins that the navel string be placed round its neck, it is never bathed, but rubbed down with dry sand. As soon as a boy can walk, his father takes him with him on hunting and fishing expeditions, 366 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND instructs him in all accomplishments, and teaches him the traditions. The only child s play for the boys is weapon play, especially with the spear. From his lourteenth or fifteenth year the youth takes part in war and other affrays, and at New South Wales women and child, (From a photograph. ) drl^fSetT' •""" '" *""" ""^'"^ '° ^'°"'- »= - '^■»"" into «.e The child receives a name as soon as it can wall^ K„f „^ special occasions,., .. ^e a„ai„„e„. of'r„:„S' 'Tn^Llr^nHir?. i! THE FAMILY AND SOCIETY IN AUSTRALIA 367 customary to take account of his place among his brothers and sisters, and of his birthplace. The father and mother also assume new names from the birth of one child to that of another. The origin of the female dual names is unknown. In consequence of the custom of never pronouncing the name of a deceased person, taken together with that of borrowing names from places, local peculiarities, animals, and events, a death is often followed by a change not only in the names of all persons bearing the same name with the deceased, but also in geographical and other appellations. To the proper name is added the tribal name, which is taken from some animate or inanimate object, and enjoys a wide extension. Over Queensland girls, one showing "scar-tattooing." (From a photograph.) a district of West Australia, 400 to 500 miles in breadth, Grey found the same names. The practice of exchanging names may also contribute to this — friends call each other brothers and have corresponding mutual obligations. In Wide Bay the custom was to rub noses while each pronounced the name of a friend, and therewith the alliance was concluded. The separate tribes are broken up into a larger or smaller number of groups, which were expected to abstain from marriage within themselves. For example, the South Australian tribe of the Narrinyeri is broken up into eighteen groups, each of which is regarded as a family among whose members marriage is pro- hibited. Each family group has its totem, known in West Australia as Kobong. Grey found everywhere an objection to any sort of interference with the Kobong. If a man finds the animal which forms his cognisance asleep, he will not kill it, and 368 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND in the chase he will certainly allow it to escape. Any one who has a plant for his Kobong will not pluck it during a definite portion of the year, and under certain circumstances. The West Australian regards each individual belonging to the animal or vegetable species in question as his nearest friend, the killing of whom would be a great crime. An important part of the men's initiation seems to be concerned with introduction into this system of patron spirits. The Port-Lincoln tribes are divided into Mattiri and Karraru. No Mattiri may marry a Mattiri, his wife must belong to the Karraru, and vice versa. Every child, in addition to his own name, bears that of the maternal group. Here, in the south, the Kobong also plays a part, though one of less importance ; but it is never transmitted to a son. On King George's Sound, also, we find two classes Young Queensland man with " scar-tattooing. " (From a photograph. ) with the same restriction on marriage. About Hermannsburg, the Peake River, and Charlotte Waters, the division is more complicated, the natives falling into four sub-groups ; and a similar division is found in West Australia, in the south of Queensland, and among the Darling tribes. It is doubtless owing to a tribal fission of this kind that we find on the Dawson two groups named respectively after the white and black cockatoos ; whence arose the comical misconception that the West Australians were named after the most important article of their diet. About the North-west Cape, the Kobong system is said not to be found. Alleged caste distinctions are almost certainly to be referred to this exoga'iiiic tribal organisation. It is reported that at Port Essington, besides the division of the tribe into families, there exists another strict division into three castes. According to Earl, the first claims descent from the fire, the second from the soil, while the name of the third means " net-makers," which points to Kobong. Wilson quotes similar names as existing about Raffles Bay. In spite of their strict separation these divisions have equal rights and are outwardly quite similar. Among many tribes no custom is held more sacred than exogamy. The least trace of blood-relationship is a bar to marriage, and the first question asked in Melanksian Axes, Clubs, and Hammers. (i. 2) Clubs from the D'Entrecasteaux Islands. (3-5) Adzes from Kastern New Guinea. (6) Bird's-head Club from New Caledonia. (7) Clubs from the Mores)Dy Islands. (8-10) Hammers from Western New Guinea. (11) Club with green-stone disk, from Eastern New Guinea. (12-14) Adzes and axe with blades of iron, shell, and stone, from the Anchorites and Admiralty Islands. (British Museum.) (i, ■^, 7-14) from the Christy Collection. 2 B THE FAMILY AND SOCIETY IN AUSTRALIA 371 courtship refers to this. If the couple unite in spite of it, their union is regarded as lawless ; and even punished with death, as incest, by the Australians, who in matters of morality are lax enough. It has also been proposed to refer to an exogamic origin the Ngia-Ngiampe ceremony, to be mentioned presently, though this is otherwise explicable. Yet it is a fact that it is employed when there is a wish to prevent marriage between members of different tribes. But its chief purpose is no doubt of another kind. It is plain that the number of women, already insufficient for the many aspirants to marriage, is rendered still more insufficient by polygamy, wherein the senior men are preferred to the disadvantage of their inferiors. Accordingly, in every family mar- riageable women have a high value, as is plainly expressed in the system of marriage by ex- change. It is thus the interest of all men of the same family that no one of them should marry any of their own young women, thereby depriving the rest of the valuable object to be obtained by an ex- change. Among the features of exogamy we naturally find the custom that the son-in-law shall not utter the name of his mother- in-law, nor the daughter-in-law that of her father-in-law, nor even use the name in a general mean- ing, if it has one ; also that persons united by this affinity shall never see each other after the betrothal, or that the future mother-in-law must keep her face covered in her son-in-law's presence. The fact that the rule of exogamy is observed in marriage, but not so strictly in illicit relations, may be interpreted on the supposition that this institution was started at a time when marriage was on a firmer footing. In any case its object is now not always attained. Connected with this is the strict determination of the degrees of kinship, which we find also among other exogamous races. Among the Narrinyeri and the Meru, a man calls his brother's children " son " and " daughter " ; his sister's children, " nephew " and " niece " ; a woman calls her sister's children " son " and " daughter," her brother's " nephew " and " niece." A Narrinyeri peculiarity is to call father and child collectively Retuleng, mother and child Ratuleng ; and to possess words denoting " a person who has had a loss," in the sense of widow or widower. Where political development is so feeble as among the Australians, nothing but this strict organisation of kinship gives social life any stability. Closely bound up with all this is the right of inheritance through females. New South Wales woman with " scar-tattooing.' (From a photograph.) 372 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Family connections, acquired through the mother, are most strictly maintained ; even blood-feuds pass by the mother, though to this there are exceptions. Among the Narrinyeri a son inherits his father's property. In the west, every father divides his land between his sons ; if he has none, his daughters' sons inherit. A woman can possess no real property. In the south, on the other hand, where the inherited land always has a name of its own, which the possessor also bears, women share in the inheritance ; in the north, where the youngest child takes the largest share, married daughters come in. The widow's position among the Central Australian tribes is peculiar ; a man may marry again, but a widow becomes the property of the tribe, — a form of polyandry. The West Australians have marriage with a brother's widow ; and also the custom that a married woman may enter into an engagement with an unmarried man, contingent on the death of her husband. That the wife should reckon as the absolute property of her husband, so far that in Adelaide the term for " married man," means " owner of a woman," is not peculiar to Australia. But we find here a whole number of customs and usages, tending to drive the wife still further into the background. The pressure of a life of poverty bears most heavily on the weaker sex. We hear nothing of female chiefs and Amazon bodyguards as in Africa, though, among the Kurnai, women seem to take part in consultation. Female magicians, female doctors, sacred females, are very rare. By taboo laws, which remind us of Polynesia, they may not eat with the men, and are excluded from all religious functions, and usually from dances. The list of articles of food which are forbidden to them is long ; including many fishes, for instance, and all turtles. Only women with child may eat pigeons ; with all others they disagree. Yet more important perhaps is the fact that while certain mystic rites exercise a great influence on the life of the men, the women being incapable of initiation are for that very reason placed on a lower level, and in many respects are without legal rights. Secret societies stand like a close aristocracy in the face of the excluded women and children. Even the vow which among some tribes the boy at his admission to manhood has to take, that he will abstain from all violence towards the woman, is easily broken among people of so unruly and incalculable disposition. The Australians share with all races in whose soul the feeling of magnanimity has not yet awakened to con- sciousness a hereditary tendency to despise women. The custom in vogue among the West Australians, by which one old woman undertakes the ofifice of grand- mother to the tribe, settles quarrels, separates fighters, but also summons to war, is the only vestige of compensation. In Central and South Australia great laxity of morals prevails both in and out of wedlock. European influences and the general process of decadence can only have tended to increase this, in many cases actually to call it into exist- ence. No aid is given to morality by the betrothal of girls in childhood, or, as in West Australia, soon after birth, to men of mature years ; nor by the jealousy with which they are subsequently watched. This is a safeguard against pro- fligacy only by making it an infringement of acquired rights ; just as adultery is punished with death without its being any breach of good behaviour on a man's part to make over his wife to his brothers. We are told that the aborigines of Port Lincoln hold the community of wives among brothers to be lawful, while they regard as disgraceful the loan of a wife to a friend, or the exchange of wives THE FAMILY AND SOCIETY IN AUSTRALIA 373 between acquaintances for one night, though this is no uncommon occurrence. In this connection it is significant that while the men use the word Yangara for their own wives, and Karteti for those to whom as wives of brothers or near relatives they have a claim, women have only one name for their husband and his brother. We meet with polygamy wherever women and food are in sufficient abund- ance. In the fertile north - west, men have been seen with eleven wives ; on the south-east coast with two. If the burden of existence lies heavy on the Australian, half of whose life is spent under privations, it falls with double weight on the wife. Yet, in spite of this, many observers praise the touching fidelity of the women to their husbands and lords. Wives are a valuable property, which the elder men try to keep and increase as much as may be, by the purchase of girls or the exchange of their own daughters for those of their friends. The census of South Australia for 1876 gave 2203 male natives against 1750 females. Even among tribes that have never come into contact with Europeans, scarcity of women occurs ; so that we need not wonder if the capture of women is frequently a cause of war, or if unfaithfulness on the part of wives is punished with death and mutilation. Capture of wives has been designated, with some exaggeration, as the Australian form of marriage-contract. When a woman is carried off, it is always by something of the nature of a warlike attack. There are, however, gentler modifications. In the south-east it is proper for a youth to obtain the assent of a girl from a neighbouring tribe, and then to elope with her, remaining two nights and a day in the bush, to escape an imaginary pursuit on the part of her tribe. In New South Wales the method is rougher. Here the girl, even when agreeable to the marriage, is always secretly seized and carried off by the bridegroom and his party. This often resulted in a hot fight, wherein the girl, snatched from side to side, might easily receive most of the blows. But frequently the fight is a mere pretence ; it is just a tradition, with which even the women would be sorry to do away. Some- times the wife is obtained by purchase or exchange, sometimes received in return for a present. In the two latter cases the arrangement is often made while she is still a child, or even at the breast. In that case the consent of the female partner is desired, but in no way necessary. The girl expresses her willingness by lighting a fire in the husband's hut. The consent of the parents and relatives is thought much more essential among the Narrinyeri ; a girl who enters into an informal connection with a man is regarded as a prostitute, the fact that no compensation is given for her being a blot on her reputation. Before the Narrinyeri had come much into contact with Europeans, the procedure was this. Marriage took place at ten or twelve years, and was a pure matter of exchange ; no man could take a wife who had not one to give. It is the brother more often than the father who gives the girl away, and receives the gift in return ; but he can sell this right to another, which brings us near to marriage by purchase. The man who wishes to marry a girl, approaches the one who has to give her away through an intermediary. Then the relations on both sides come and encamp at a little distance apart. In the evening the girls to be married are escorted by torchlight, with the men, into a large hut ; the relations sit about for a time in silence, then sing and dance wildly. Next evening the same thing is repeated and the marriage is complete. If a bride is still very young, her husband restores her for a while to her people ; and often rubs her with fat to make her grow. 374 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND The only death regarded by the Australians as natural is death in battle. Their mind cannot put up with the idea of death as a necessity. Every death that is not brought about by visible violence seems to them the result of magical arts. These are facilitated by giving the magician something which has been taken from the person to be acted upon ; and for this reason fragments of food, gnawed bones, and the like, are carefully burnt. The first funeral ceremony consists in discovering the enemy who has done the mischief Among the Port Lincoln tribes the nearest of kin sleeps the first night with his head on the body, in order that in his dreams some indication of the magician may reach him. On the following day the corpse is borne out upon a bier, and now the friends of the deceased call out the names of various persons. At some one of these they say that the body gives a start in a particular direction and moves towards the criminal. The Adelaide natives carry the dead on a wheel-shaped bier of branches ; one man in the centre supporting the body with his head, until the inquest has arrived at a conclusion. Relations who do not lament sufficiently at the funeral are easily suspected of complicity in the death. Among other tribes in the south the corpse is laid upon a bier called " the Knowing One," and questioned. A movement of the bier is regarded as an affirmative. If it does not move, further questions are asked. Among the Dieyeri the corpse has its great toes tied together, and is shrouded in a net. The grave is about 3 feet deep. Three or four men place the body in this and let it lie on its back for a few minutes. Then three men kneel down and lay their heads upon it. Then an old man takes a rod in each hand, places himself before the corpse, strikes the rods together, and questions the dead. The other men, sitting round in a circle and acting as mouthpieces for the dead man, denounce some one, upon whom the whole guilt of the death is cast. /Another way, used widely in the south-east, of detecting the magician, was to observe the direction in which some insect crawled from the grave. Or one man would cleverly find footprints leading towards a suspicious person. Among the Moreton Bay tribes, after the dead man had been eaten, the official sorcerer would hold up his skin before various persons, and draw conclusions from their demeanour as to the one responsible. An unnatural death is somewhat discreditable, and accordingly when the dead man has been swathed in bark, they whisper in his ear an injunction to say in the next world that he died naturally. The tribes of Cape York have a way of punishing the guilt of blood, which reminds us of Polynesian customs. After the funeral feast the chief enters the group of men with the skull, weapons, and ornaments of the deceased, and so long as the ceremony lasts, he is allowed even to commit homicide, as the representative of the dead man. If the reputed slayer belongs to another tribe, the friends of the accused formally curse the dead man and all his deceased relatives ; thus affording a casus belli. Before the fight the dead man's tribe raise a loud cry of grief, while the other side excite them by laughter, mocking dances, and buffooneries. Both sides then revile each other vigorously ; a few spears are thrown and a slight wound or two given. Finally the old men declare that honour is satisfied. The " native inquest," as it is called, is followed by the interment. This takes place either below or above the surface of the ground, the former method being more frequent in the southern half of Australia. In the north-west, and on the shores of Lake Alexandra, Grey and Taplin speak of great sepulchral mounds. These perhaps go back to a time when the deaths were more numerous ; among THE FAMILY AND SOCIETY IN AUSTRALIA 375 the Australians of to-day we find only single interments. A fire is first lighted in the narrow grave, to drive away all hurtful magic, then it is half filled with leaves, on which the body is laid either stretched out or doubled up. It is then secured with sticks and covered with leaves and earth. The earth which has been dug out is heaped up at the head and the foot. Further, the grave is strewn with leaves or red earth, and a tree-stem is laid upon it, or in many cases a hut built, at the door of which are placed the broken spears of the dead man. In front are three posts with carvings and figures, and painted red as a token that vengeance has been taken for the dead man. On the Pime River a chief's body is placed in a hollow tree, and the departure of the soul is encouraged by a whirring noise which the bystanders make. The head lies to the east on King George's Sound, to the west among the South Australians ; while the West Australian practice varies with the tribe. Where the body is doubled up, it is tied by the great toes or by the thumb and one "finger of each hand ; the arms are thrust under the knees and the head bent over them ; and the corpse is shrouded in a net or a hide. Often the beard and nails are removed before burial ; the weapons are regularly placed with the dead. Among many tribes a thread of cannibalism runs through the burial customs. The Dieyeri, after the " inquest," cut all the fat from the face, loins, arms, and stomach, and hand it round to be consumed by the mourners. Macdonald describes a less savage custom on the Upper Mary River in Queensland. The dead body was laid between two piles of logs and duly roasted. When the skin was black all over, the master of the ceremonies drew longitudinal and transverse lines with chalk upon it, divided it with a knife along the lines from head to foot, separated the head from the trunk, and cut every limb into pieces. Meantime the rest kept up a cannibal howling and gave themselves deep wounds with their battle-axes. Finally the divided portions were not eaten, but buried. The list of customs pre- ceding or following an interment is in many cases extensive. Painting is frequent ; also women beat themselves with sticks till the blood flows ; men pull their beards out. On Encounter Bay the women scrape the earth on which the body has lain into a heap, holding that the soul has passed into the earth and can only be set free by scraping it. In many cases the mound is not over the grave but to one side, the earth which has been thrown up is allowed to lie, and the walls of the grave, which is furnished with a side-niche, are trodden, in at once over the body. The graves are often conspicuous, especially by the grave-posts. Peron saw one on Cape Naturaliste, in front of which was a semicircle of black and a larger one of white sand, with circles, triangles, and squares, marked by planting rushes in them. Similarly he saw, on either side of a stream near King George's Sound, a circular patch about 3 feet in circumference, stuck round with eleven sharp spears, stained blood-red with gum, the points on either side turned towards the other. In the south and east graves are open clearings with paths to them, or conical sandhills surrounded by a circular trench or three rows of semi- circular benches ; hard by are posts with figures scratched on them. They often have huts or straw roofs built over them, or they are themselves the huts in which the corpse reposes. They are also covered with brushwood to keep the ghost from getting out. Lastly, cases occur of burial in ant heaps. The simplest form of above-ground burial is when the dead are put into hollow trees. Near Port Macquarie the corpse is sewn up in bark, and hung to a tree at a height of 10 376 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND feet. Stuart found on a tree near Hawker Creek a child's coffin, prettily carved in wood to the shape of a canoe, ornamented with narrow incisions at the side, covered with bark, and bound with string made of grass. In some places cremation prevails. On Portland Bay hollow trees are burnt with the body in them ; near Port Macquarie the body is hung up and a fire made below it. The remains are a hindrance in travelling, and in the hands of an enemy might be employed for mischievous purposes of magic, so they are afterwards thrown into the sea. A further variation is to skeletonise the body and preserve the bones. The aborigines of Cape York take the bones out of the grave after some months, and lay them in. a common receptacle in some remote forest ; and the Yardaikin about Somerset take them, after six months' burial, to York Island. But all bones are not put away. Skulls have a use as drinking vessels ; and the Papuan fashion of wearing the lower jaw of a slain enemy as a military decoration occurs as met with on Saibai Island. Mothers carry the bones of dead children with them in their bundles. In order to promote decomposition the body is exposed on a platform to sun and rain, just as about Port Moresby the corpse is laid under a roof, and a woman stays by it till it has decayed. Among the tribes on the Murray and on Encounter Bay the corpse is flayed, and afterwards roasted and dried on a frame. The relations crawl into the hut when this takes place, smear their bodies, and keep up a hideous howling day and night. When the body is dry they drag it about with them from place to place as a precious treasure. If they become so many as to be a nuisance, the oldest mummies are fastened to a piece of wood and hung up in a tree too high for the wild dogs to reach them. The Central Australian tribes preserve only chiefs or fallen warriors ; others are merely buried. Names of dead persons are avoided ; people who bear the same name take another. In Central Australia, also, graves are made only in places where a camp is never likely to be pitched. The Australian tribes have not, and never had, advanced to the point of forming states. Each family group lays claim to a definite tract of land, the enjoyment of which is either claimed in common or divided among individuals according to the nature of the produce. The first appears, in common rights of hunting and fruit-picking, while traces of personal property are so far developed that single families will assert preferential claims to a spring, a brook, a portion of forest, and the like. The two rights are determined separately for special cases. For ordinary hunting all land belongs alike to the community, but when grass has to be burnt the consent of individual occupants is asked. Even among nomad tribes certain families have a several right to particular camping-places. A number of tribes will unite in the common ownership of particular tracts, or in the use of phonolite quarries for purposes of axe-making. Against foreign invasion the feeling of joint union is highly developed. The external boundaries of many tribes are even said to be marked with stones, where they do not follow the course of mountains or rivers. Whoever crosses them must bear a message-stick as a token of safe conduct, or in some other way prove his right to do so. In West Australia, where the tribes from the interior come down every year to the coast, passage seems only to be allowed them for that purpose. The Australians cannot at all understand being treated as landless men, hence the apparently unprovoked attacks upon exploring parties of whites. THE FAMILY AND SOCIETY IN AUSTRALIA 377 The actual differences between tribes as regards power, culture, or consideration, are small. Some, however, gain influence from the reputation of having powerful magicians at command, others, like the Cockatoos of South Australia with their boomerangs, from fame of their stronger weapons. Little individuality is stamped upon some populations by their names. The simple name " Men " is often found ; thus the South Australians between 23° and 28° South, 132" and 134° East, are called nothing but " Erilla." The name " Narrinyeri," too, according to Taplin, denotes merely " belonging to mankind." Family groups take local names, or are called after the group-symbol. Nature being for the most part unpropitious, renders dispersion compulsory ; but, at the same time, knits the bonds of the family group closer. This favours a high degree of isolation, which imparts to the life of a community a republican or quasi-federative character. Every family group has its elective chief or Rupulle, who in all contentions conducts the proceedings as speaker. He had originally to live on the hunting-ground and break up the game. Generally he is the eldest, strongest, or most expert ; but a bully is sometimes elected. The chief has a council of the oldest men, called by the Narrinyeri Tendi. His seat in this is called the judgment-seat, and his chief duty is to pass sentence for every kind of transgression. If the tendis of two tribes hold a joint meeting, the circle is often composed of hundreds from one and the other. Europeans have to give leave to their servants, even in the midst of important work, in order that they may attend a meeting of this kind either as judges, witnesses, or spectators. In the reports of travellers mention is even made of " princes," as among the Yaribandemi on Macleay River. But since the chiefship is a post giving little pre-eminence, it often happens, on the other hand, that it is entirely lacking ; according to Schiirmann, the Port Lincoln aborigines have neither a chief nor any person of recognised authority. Among others a certain influence is exercised by the oldest, strongest, and bravest, also by magicians. If a native murder a member of another tribe, his life is forfeited to that tribe. The friends of the slain man demand his surrender, and he is speared to death. Then they bury two staves of a span long, one to represent the slayer, one the slain, and the deed is expiated. If the slayer dies before vengeance has been taken, or succeeds in escaping punishment, his nearest of kin has to bear the penalty. For lesser offences it suffices to run a spear, when occasion serves, through the leg or arm of the culprit. Among the Dieyeri the arbitrament of arms is called for even in cases of theft or slander. Other penalties, as for manslaughter, are banishment from the tribe, or compulsory withdrawal to the maternal kindred. For small trespasses stripes are commonly inflicted, increasing in severity, as we go south, to the point of beating with a club about the head. But they are glad to alleviate severe penalties by a touch of formality ; thus in the case of spearing, the culprit is furnished with a shield, and permitted to use it to keep himself uninjured. If a blood-feud has to be set on foot, it is quickly announced by means of loud cries, from the tone of which the degree of the crime can be judged even a long way off. The very children know if they are in danger by reason, of their kinship to the guilty person. But there are offences which are left to be dealt with by the gods. A man who eats a grub out of his neighbour's tree falls ill ; if he wishes to avert this, and private vengeance as well, he sticks a bough in the ground by 378 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND the tree. Among the Narrinyeri a refined form of revenge called neilyerie was introduced a generation ago from the Upper Murray. The person seeking revenge inserts the end of a spear or a sharp piece of bone into the flesh of a decaying corpse, and lets it stay there for some weeks. Then he anoints a bunch of hair with the fat of a corpse, wraps it round the point of his dagger-like neilyerie, and thus by a single prick can inoculate his enemy with the cadaveric poison. The natural conditions of the land, unfavourable as they are to communities of any size or permanence, the difficulty of obtaining food — in short, the hard struggle for existence, renders more acute the distrust between man and man, tribe and tribe. Belief in ghosts aids to produce this result. Even the return of acquaintances calls forth no signs of joy ; it is some time before unrestrained con- versation takes place. Strangers are thought to bring illness ; but if they are once received they are perfectly safe. Among the Dieyeri, if a man of rank appears the warriors go to meet him and make as though they would drive him off. But he too brandishes his weapons ; both parties parry with their shields ; he is embraced and brought into the camp to be entertained. Greeting is indicated by rubbing the breast, leave-taking by extending the hands and raising them to the head. We hear of mutual visits, of hospitalities, of reunions for the purpose of decid- ing contested points, or for trade, or at the initiation of the youths. Intercourse by messengers is conducted according to definite rules. Among the South Australians it is the women who carry overtures for peace ; if the women of the opposing side return the visit the quarrel is regarded as at an end. The institution of ngia-ngiampe throws a light upon the extent to which any intercourse between one tribe and another is conceived of as an important occasion. The navel-string of a child, tied up with a bunch of feathers, is presented to the father of a child of similar age in another tribe. The two children are thenceforth ngia-ngiampe to each other ; they must have no contact nor speech with each other, but when grown-up they act as agents in the barter-trade. The perforation of the nasal septum is also connected with the precautions for security in dealings with neigh- bouring tribes. The father of the child suggests the operation, which is performed at noon by an old man to the accompaniment of chanting. While the wound is healing the boy executes the commission he has to do, and henceforth he is regarded as sacred, and is honoured. A deep insight into the Australian mind is afforded by the long list of initia- tions, which accompany the passage of boys and girls to the age of maturity. With this is combined some sacrifice of a part of the body, whether by the knocking out of teeth or the amputation of a finger. Besides these we find the infliction of pain by blows, scarring, fasting, or compulsory seclusion ; everything being referred to divine institution. In the interior, boys creep with blindfolded eyes by a long passage into the circular enclosure called bora, and for a week after the festival have to look downwards. Among the Boyne River tribes candidates have to keep a strict fast for three weeks before the festival in a square enclosure within the forest. About Cape York circumcision and the knocking out of a tooth are followed by a month in the bush ; the youthful novices being painted white, and forbidden to be looked upon by any woman on pain of death. After this they return to their parents wearing a piece of white shell as a frontlet, and keep on their festival adorn- ments so long as they hold together. The Narrinyeri do not allow a boy from his THE FAMILY AND SOCIETY IN AUSTRALIA 379 body- is tenth year to comb or cut his hair, nor to partake of the thirteen kinds of game that are most easily procurable and most nutritious. Tattooing is often undergone at an early age ; among the Encounter Bay tribes by boys of ten years old When the time for it is come they are seized without warning by the men at night, and dragged off to a distant place ; the women meantime making a show of vigorous opposition, and throwing fire-brands. All the hair on the plucked out or singed off, the hair of the head is combed with a spear, and the body smeared with oil and ruddle. After fasting and watching for three days and nights they are allowed to eat and sleep ; but they must lay their heads across sticks stuck in the ground, drink only through a rush, and abstain from all foods that are permitted to women. They remain in this condition, as narumbe until their beards have grown three times. They are forbidden to take a wife, but may go after any girl of their own age. Formerly death was the penalty for a breach of these rules; and it is still firmly believed that their infraction will be punished by growing up ugly and by premature grey hairs. The original object of these laws was perhaps to toughen the men by means of pain and fatigue ; but now they certainly have the con- trary effect, and the health of the young men is often completely undermined by them. Australian magic-sticks. (Vienna Museum.) But besides the hardening process, there is a deeper meaning in these ceremonies, io begin with, they serve to remove the boy from the women ; which accounts for the care, amounting to pedantry, that is taken to exclude women from the initiatory rites. The instrument, resembling the "bull-roarer" of English boys (of which a representation will be found on a later page), which serves to indicate that sacred business is going on in the neighbourhood, may not be looked upon or touched by women and children. Similarly women may never, and lads not till after their last tattooing, behold the sacred quartz implement used for that purpose. The meaning of some initiations is quite obscure to us ; as for instance 38o THE HISTORY OF MANKIND one described by Wyatt, in which an Adelaide native opened one of his own veins, after previously tying it with a string of human hair, and sprinkled the back, head, and breast of the boys with blood, which was allowed to " dry on.'' This took place in a remote spot amid profound silence. Among certain tribes tattooing, by the manner of its execution, becomes of the nature of an initiatory rite, though its primary object was to give greater suppleness to the arms. The patient keeps away for some months from female society ; wears rings of opossum- skin on both upper arms, and carries two sticks polished by long use. Circumcision is so universal that to call a man " uncircumcised " is an insult. The nearest of kin arrange for and perform the operation. The boy makes as though he would fly. He is caught, laid on the ground, rubbed with dust, and lifted by the ears with loud yells, to rouse him from any spell that may have been cast upon him. Other mutilations are practised in West and Central Australia, it is supposed with the view of reducing the power of procreation ; but it is uncertain if they have this effect. In the case of girls also, the passage from childhood to womanhood is celebrated with initiatory rites and sacrifices. They are secluded and have to fast and undergo painting. Among the Larrakia of North Australia the girls on the approach of maturity are swathed in bark and kept in a hut for three weeks before the ceremony. Women have the top joint of the right forefinger cut off ; and, in commemoration of special events, have teeth knocked out or a finger amputated. Cicatrisation in them involves a smaller portion of the body than in men. § 14. THE TASMANIANS Physical resemblance to the Melanesians — Dress — Dwellings— Navigation — Weapons — Funeral customs- Superstition — Extinction of the race. Tasmania or Van Diemen's Land was formerly deemed to be a portion of Australia, and therefore the natives of these two regions were regarded as in all essentials conformable. But this is not entirely the case. There can be no doubt that both are on an equally low level of culture ; but a distinction is evident in the bodily characteristics, wherein the Tasmanians showed an approach to the Papuan type. The bodily appearance of the Tasmanians appeared at one time to experi- enced observers far from miserable. Cook describes them as for the most part slim, of average stature, woolly-haired like the aborigines of New Guinea, but without the flat noses and thick lips ; their features very far from disagreeable. The children were even pretty, the women at least not repellent. The accurate description which Cook's surgeon, Anderson, has given of the natives of Adventure Bay has in its main points been confirmed by the best observers. The colour of their skin was a blackish grey, not so dark as that of the Africans ; their hair was woolly arid divided into tufts like that of the Hottentots' ; the nose full and broad but not flat ; the eyes of medium size, the expression of them not remarkably lively or sharp, but open and frank ; the mouth wide, and surrounded by a thick beard smeared with grease and ruddle. Their build was in general well-propor- THE TASMANIANS 381 tioned, though the belly was rather strongly prominent ; in some degree owing to their favourite attitude with the upper part of the body thrown backward, and one hand across the back grasping the other arm as it hung. Cook and Anderson found the Tasmanians in a state of absolute nudity. For ornament narrow strips of hide were wound several times round the neck, like string, or pieces of hide wrapped round the ankles. The women had a kangaroo skin in its natural condition tied round the back and loins, but only for carrying the children on their backs, it did not cover the lower part of the body. When travelling they also wore mocassins which were not found among the Australians. Beside the scars on the body, as in the men, the women had their whole head 4 ) T A-.l ^^fJLa^ William Lanney, the last Tasmanian. (From a photograph. ) shaven, or at least a tonsure. The painting of the body and the powdering of the hair, which was worn by the men stiffly frizzed with red dust, are spoken of ; also the anointing with fat and adornment with strings of shells. Red feathers were popular, beads and coins were accepted with satisfaction, iron was not highly valued. The dwellings of the Tasmanians consisted of wretched huts. The huts showed great variety ; this want of a definite type may always be regarded as a sign of low development. There were also huts built in a hemi- spherical shape of stems and woven boughs, temporary tents, wind screens made of boughs, or grass piled up upon poles but no real villages ; the bark huts were mostly placed on accessible points of the coast, in their neighbourhood were great heaps of shells. The Tasmanians are more closely connected with the true Australians in the degree of culture possessed by them than anthropologically. One piece of 382 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND furniture which they had and the Austrahans had not was the head -cushion of skin. In spite of the climate they were no more of agriculturists than the Australians, but their shores and their forests provided flesh food in abundance. Their greater energy resulted from their better nourishment. They seem to have cooked, like the Australians, with hot stones. Their canoes were merely broad raft -like vessels made of bark or strong reeds. Accordingly they never ventured far out to sea, nor had they always paddles to propel their boats, often using only spears ; they could however swim and dive well. They lived by preference on shell -fish ; their weapons differed materially from those of the Australians ; they had no boomerangs, throwing- sticks, or bows and arrows. Truganina, the last Tasmanian woman. (From a photograph. ) They chiefly used long wooden spears, a sharpened missile stick half a yard long, wooden clubs, and for chopping and cutting rudely chipped flakes of stone. They lived almost constantly in a state of war, but they were not man-eaters, and they treated their women better than did the Australians. The 6000 or 8000 estimated inhabitants of the pre-European time were divided into numerous tribes. Their modes of burial remind us of Australia, and also the manifold ways even in this limited space of burning, of cremation, burial, putting away in hollow trees, building dead huts over the grave. The Tasmanian character displayed itself to this whites as in the main cheerful and good humoured ; their mental endowments were tolerable. Too late was education allowed to spread among the remains of this unhappy race, and too - late was it recognised that, as was expressed by Mr. A. R. Wallace, we had here to do with a race having dispositions towards progress to which civilization gave no time to bring its dispositions to perfection. THE RELIGION OF THE AUSTRALIANS 383 The 5000 aborigines living in Tasmania in 181 5 had fallen to 16 by i860. In order to atone to the remainder for the injustice that had been done them, the small band was assembled at Oyster Cove, on the east side of the island, and placed under the care of a protector of the aborigines, and provided with all necessaries of life. But by 1876 the Tasmanian stock became extinct in the woman whose portrait is given on the preceding page. § IS. RELIGION OF THE AUSTRALIANS Indistinctness of religious conceptions — Attempts at cosmogony — The creative god — Gods of the stars — Secondary creators — Gods who return to Heaven — Beast legends — Life after death— Ghosts— Other superstitions — Magicians — Sacred stones and wood — Plongge — Magicians and physicians — Changes in religious matters. The religious conceptions of the Australians give the impression of decadence and corruption. There is a sound about them not only as of an earlier time but as from foreign regions, confused indeed and indistinct, but with a ring of Melanesian and Polynesian tradition. Some say that they have heard talk of a supreme being, the giver of good, in the north under the name Koyan, in the south under that of Nurundere and Baiamai, but we can attach no great weight to this. In these rudimentary mythologies the supreme god is, as a rule, the one to whom the creation of the world is ascribed without his being self-created, and who was from the beginning in heaven before the hero gods existed. Such appears to be the Momaincherclu of the Adelaide tribes. The second god, Monana, ascended to heaven only later by means of spears thrown up one after another ; to him the creation of man was ascribed. Among the West Australians we meet with a certain Motogon as creator who produces the earth by calling and blowing. In South Australia Barim forms the world by drawing the plan of it instead of by speaking. We are reminded of him by the name of Boorambin, the son of the South Australian Baiamai. Also the Dieyeri legend that the moon created the world at the request of their head god Moora-moora, points to the notion of a second creator other than the chief deity. The chief distinction between Australian and Polynesian mythology is that the former does not grow up from its root in cosmogony to any fixed genealogy, any recognised history, any cycle of divine legends. We do indeed meet with attempts in this direction, but they have made no progress. The Dieyeri refer the origin of the sun to man's need of hunting the emu ; they used to pray in their dances that Moora-moora would cast heat upon the earth, and so he created the sun. The aborigines of Encounter Bay say that the sun passes every evening through spirits in long double rank, who implore his favour. Whoever obtains it bestows upon him the skin of a red kangaroo, and that is the reason why he returns in red robes. The same thoughtful people make the moon grow thin by reason of her long stay in the company of man ; the supreme being has her driven away, she conceals herself, and meantime obtains new strength by eating roots. The South Australians regard the moon as the sun's husband, and say that the wife kills the husband at every new moon ; and both here and in West Australia 3S4 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND it is believed that the two once lived on earth and produced children. Similar human traits are recounted of the stars. Other legends contain traces of other deities, and of contact with Polynesian myths. Many districts received their names from Nganno, who then changed himself into a sea monster. He is, perhaps, the same who came from heaven as Uandu, and made the Murray River. Narrundere created the fishes in the pond of Tulurung by throwing stones in, and fished up the rocky islands called Witung- enggui with a net ; thunder is the voice of his anger, which bellows from the rainbow. In this connection of earth with heaven there is a distinct Polynesian ring. From the fundamental idea that the souls of the departed go to the stars, or become stars, myths sprang up, bringing spiritual beings into connection with the stars. Thus it is believed in New South Wales that souls continue to live in the clouds, in the south that they become stars. The construction of constellations is an easy result from the belief of the Encounter Bay natives that the souls up above leave their huts in the evening and go about their business as they formerly did on earth. The Milky Way, for example, appears as a stream or a row of huts, where the tribes profess to be able plainly to recognise the ash-heaps and the ascending smoke. Falling stars are the children of the stars ; the rainbow, in which the Adelaide tribes distinguish the outer and inner bows as male and female, rises from the clouds as smoke. The moon is counted a good star, the sun a bad one, and accordingly the power over evil of many kinds is ascribed to the sun and its brethren. One who wishes to be healed spits in his hand and stretches it towards the sun. Among the Kamilaroi Baiamai appears as the creator of men. He made the first man as he rested on a rock between the streams, and then disappeared. This myth resembles that of the creation of man in the falls of the Moraby ; the nucleus of it is his origin from the water. After man had been made the god sent his daughter Karakarak to kill the serpents ; she had a stick which in breaking produced fire. In the north-west, also, the creation of fire was connected with a fire-god, but he was worshipped there, not in the person of the daughter of the god of heaven, but beside her. Among many tribes the lizard comes into the legend of the creation of man. We hear of Tarrotarre, a god in the shape of a lizard, who divided the sexes and created man and woman. The spirit cut off one lizard's tail, and the lizard went upright. Then he made them male and female that they might reproduce their species. This is the belief of the Dieyeri. In other ways, also, the human and the animal world are variously inter- mingled in the legends of creation, and this is connected with the Kobong or tribal cognisance. When the dancing ancestors of the Narrinyeri were making the hills and pools of Mutabarringa the strong Kondole was invited, and as he concealed his fire he was wounded by Rilballe in the neck with a spear ; they all laughed, and were accordingly changed into animals, while Rilballe placed the fire in the grasS-tree. The creation of a number of fish from the bits, into which with the help of his hunting companions he had torn a big fish, is related of the same deity. He produced a species of flat fish by throwing a flat stone into a pond. Everywhere it is imagined that a more powerful race was first created. To Wyungaree, the hunting companion of Nurrundaree, is ascribed the creation of small kangaroos by tearing up and strewing abroad the fragments of a giant Australian Shields. 2 C RELIGION OF THE AUSTRALIANS 387 kangaroo, and corresponding to this the gods and heroes were, as may be supposed, of the nature of giants. To these creative legends are attached a ^\'hole list of smaller beast legends, of which the wish to interpret striking properties was the ostensible parent. But these, too, are at bottom mythological. In South Australia it is related that the tortoise originally had poisoned fangs, and the snake none ; so the snake asked the tortoise to give her its fangs, as she could make a better use of them. The tortoise exchanged its fangs for the snake's head, so snakes have poisoned fangs, and tortoises have snakes' heads. The Narrinyeri mj-th about the origin of rain is original, and seems to be a weakened form of a deluge legend. An old man lived with two younger friends ; one day these, having made a good catch of fish, took the best for themselves, and set aside those of inferior quality for the old man. He went straightway into his hut and shut-to the door, and at once it began to rain hard. He remained dry, while they for punishment were wetted through. Afterwards all three were changed into birds, and when the old one screams it is a sign of approaching rain. A common feature is the return of a god to heaven after accomplishing great things, and also suffering ill-treatment on earth ; frequently he has grown old as well. Thus the Narrinyeri relate that when Nurrundaree, after destroying his fugitive wives by a flood — other legends speak of a metamorphosis into rocks — had returned in bad temper, as an aged man, to the far west, he found one of his children left behind. To him he threw the end of a rope attached to his staff, and pulled him up. Since that time, whenever a man dies, the god's son throws him this rope. When the dead persons reach the half-unconscious ancient, their dwelling-place is assigned to them, they become alive, young, and sound again, and receive wives according to the number of the tears, which show how many they left on earth. Just as with the Oceanians, the creation of gods comes about by the immediate promotion of the souls of mortals. Taplin's informants professed to recognise in Nurrundaree merely the apotheosis of a chief who had led their tribe to its present place of abode. The deity Bedall seems to stand quite alone. Of him it is said in Queensland, Bedall brooded over the clay, and made the world like a tortoise. But is not this tranquil god connected with him of Moreton Bay ? There Buddai or Budja, the progenitor, lies sleeping, an old man, with his head on his arm, and that buried in the sand ; and as at his former waking the earth was inundated, so at his next he will swallow mankind. Gods are changed into beasts, or appear at whiles in beast form. Turramullam appears in company as a snake ; Uokol is a demon who lives in the water as a gigantic serpent ; and Tarada, who taught scar-tattooing, was changed into a mighty kangaroo. A large number of demons, and especially the dreaded Melapi, appear as birds of the nature of vampires. Besides these there are a number of utterly absurd beast-legends. If a boy tickles a dog till it coughs, the dog becomes the boy, and the boy a panpandi tree. If you kill the fly tcnkeiideli without uttering the name, you will never swim again. And many more of the same kind. If, as we have seen, the funeral customs of the Australians point strongly to a belief in a life after death, allusions to the same are not lacking in their world of religious legend. Soul-myths are intimately entwined with their whole myth- ology. We find even indications of a belief which makes a distinction between the shade or ghost, and the vapour which rises, or thought. To the souls of children also a future life is assigned, even by tribes who only mourn a short time 3S8 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND for their children. Most frequently the idea is anthropomorphic, with echoes from the migration of souls. Thus, in the west, it is held that the souls of the departed sit in trees and lament, but can be charmed down, and pass completely into other living beings. The souls of ancestors are imagined as in relations of active help- fulness, and reckon as beneficent spirits ; if a whale comes ashore it is their doing. Bad spirits also spring from the deceased, or the cunning and spiteful Mani ; just as apparitions of ghosts are frequent near graves, and the dead give harmful stones to the sorcerers for witchcraft. The Australians of Wellington say that white angels, or balumbal, live on honey in the western mountains. This is interpreted of souls, and recalls how, as with the Polynesians, many tribes place an island of souls in the west, or assume a connection between water and the next world. The souls of the good go to the good gods, those of the evil perish. The belief in a judgment-seat placed in heaven seems to have existed among the Narrinyeri from pre-Christian times. Schurmann came across the idea of Hades in the form of a spacious canoe, where, quite in Polynesian fashion, ancestral souls lived. Perhaps the consecration of certain localities is connected with the belief in abodes of souls. The widely- spread notion that the dead become white men, and return as such, is met with here also ; indeed the natives have in fact greeted certain whites as departed friends. There is a vast multitude of evil spirits, and the same was the case in Tasmania ; the Bunyip haunts the forest as a spectre, Kupir comes out of caves to steal, Arlak throttles people in the dark, Pukidni goes with them as an invisible companion. Like the Malayan witches, demons fly silently through the night air, but Mani approaches noisily, seizes the hair and beard and strangles the man. Club-bearing giants are dreaded in the south ; on the occasion of a fine aurora australis in March 1 8 8 1 , Coues's Queenslanders were in a state of great consternation because they took it for the angry flames of the malignant Coochie. In the belief of the West Australians, a winged serpent lives at the bottom of the water, causing sickness and ulcers. For this reason a great part of Australian conduct is dependent on rules for carrying on the fight with the creatures of their uneasy fancies, and the chief task of the medicine-men lies in appeasing or combating these. There exist most fantastic tales of alleged fights with evil spirits and the like ; who could venture to doubt them ? Europeans who have lived with Australians have more than once been awakened by them in order to take part in their night watch against ghosts. The Australian sorcerers are usually elderly men possessing some acquaintance with medicine, and accurate knowledge of the traditions relating to the discovery of persons who have caused deaths, to funeral initiations and conjurations. Bright transparent stones are sacred amulets which the priests alone may touch or investigate. It is believed that the sorcerers have a stone or bone in their stomach from which they secretly import splinters into the veins of those upon whom they work their art, and for this reason the cure of diseases consists chiefly in the extraction of these stones. This magic stone or bone is introduced into the sorcerer by means of a visit paid to the spirit-world whither they are transported in an ecstasy, or else by passing a night in a fresh grave. Besides this the sorcerers do a great deal with sacred wood which they obtain with incantations from a tree supposed to possess gifts of healing or consecration. Among the RELIGION OF THE AUSTRAUANS Dieyeri, all the sacred operations in which wood is required, such as knocking out the teeth or perforating the nasal septum, are performed with sticks of the kayamurra acacia. From this all magic wands are prepared, especially the knotted stick called plongge, by touching with which the breast of a sleeping man he may be caused to fall ill. For keeping the women away from the initiation of lads, a " bull-roarer " some ten inches long, with its string made of twisted human hair, is whirled by the boys so as to cause a humming roar. It is also used in hunting, in order with its sound to drive up an abundant ■prey. Ancestral figures seem to occur seldom amongst the Australians, nor, indeed, are representations of the human figure at all frequently found. There are, however, things which remind us of these and of fetishes, such as stones i8 inches long and covered with bark which Flinders found on the Sir Edward Pellew Islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria. In South Australia the mokani, a stone wedge fastened between two pieces of wood as handles, is said to bewitch people — men by touching them with the sharp end, women with the blunt end. The strongest magic resides in certain parts of the human body or in the remains of human food. Every blackfellow tries to obtain, for pur- poses of magic, the bones and the back-bones of certain birds and fishes of which some one has consumed the flesh. By means of these he thinks that he can acquire power over that man for life or death. In order to adapt the bones for that purpose they are first scraped, and then a lump of red ochre, fish oil, the eye of a fish, and the flesh from a corpse, are stuck upon them and the whole is laid on the breast of a human corpse. Then, if the other person annoys the magician, he sticks the bone in the earth near the fire so that the lump melts slowly away ; as it melts it causes the man for whom it is intended to fall ill at however great a distance. Human kidney fat possesses magical power against evil spirits, and it is accordingly extracted from corpses and even from living prisoners. The magicians, however, are not the only doctors ; besides them there is a special physician class, and in the west the old women also often practise. But, Australian bull roarers " — one-fourth real size. (Berlin Museum.) 390 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND as a rule, both businesses go together, and it is curious to see how the magicians, under certain circumstances, act as rational nature doctors. Among the Narrinyeri, the physician after exorcism operates by vigorous pressing and kneading of the suffering part. Against rheumatism they use vapour baths over hot stones upon which herbs previously wetted are laid. Cold bathings, scarification, blood-letting are also employed, but care is taken that the blood should never fall to the ground, but flow in a network of crossing lines over the body of another man. The fact that different doctors have each his special remedy may have some connection with the kobong ; one will use a snake, another an ant, a third seaweed, which they employ as friend or protector on every occasion. Among these races also, the objects of veneration are subject to change. Taplin found that the legends were not nearly so firm and complete in the popular recollection as H. E. A. Meyer, the missionary, had found them twenty-five or thirty years before. The younger men of the present generation know very little of them. C. MALAYS AND MALAGASIES § 1 6. THE MALAY ARCHIPELAGO The Malay Archipelago is the largest island group of the inhabited earth, and both by its nature and by its history a portion of Asia, the largest division of the earth. Borneo, Sumatra, and Java, islands in shallow water near the mainland, reach up to Further India. On the other side of this western division a deep channel forms the border, cutting it off from an eastern region which, in its fauna and flora, tends rather to show affinities increasing from west to east with Australian condi- tions. The connection between Asia and Australia is formed by the two main chains, Sumatra, Java, Timor, and Borneo, Celebes, Molucca, New Guinea, with which the Philippines are connected as a northern branch in the direction of Borneo to Formosa. The races comprehended under the term Malays live on these islands from Further India to the west coast of New Guinea. We meet with them even in the Nicobar Islands under Further Indian, especially Burmese, influences, while a branch of them peopled Madagascar. The coast of the archipelago and the islands off the coast afford plenty of well-sheltered anchorage. The greater or less degree of accessibility has here also left its mark upon the history of the races. Towards the Strait of Malacca Sumatra turns its eastern shores, approach to which is invited by fertile lowlands and navigable rivers. In the Battak country, life was already prospering both in the interior and on the gentle eastward slopes before the colonists were driven by over-population to descend upon the wilder west coasts. The nature of the ground is very various, almost all the islands are mountainous. The smaller islands, like Lombok and Sumbawa, are merely great volcanoes ; nearly all the highest peaks are volcanic and for the most part active. In the immediate neighbourhood of these mighty chimneys, which hurl out masses of ashes and stones, are the most fertile lowlands with their copious civilization and dense population. The destruction of 40,000 human lives by the eruption of the Sumbawa volcano in 1 8 1 5 , the washing away of 1 6,000 men by the diluvial waves which followed the eruptions of Krakatau in 1883, are no solitary instances. Besides this there are devastating earthquakes and cyclones ; it is indeed the chosen cock-pit of the destructive forces of Nature. The region from which volcanic activity is furthest removed is found in Borneo and the neighbouring islands ; here hilly country prevails which as it extends more widely increases to lofty table-lands. Junghuhn ascribes to the distinction between mountain and lowland a considerable influence upon the races of the archipelago. " The home of the Battaks," he says, " is a plateau with a cool and light air ; they have an uninterrupted view to the far distance; their horizon is open, their government is free. But the Javanese live 392 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND in the lowlands concealed under the shadow of trees, they are narrow spirited and cling pusillanimously to their domestic hearth." The contrast between progressive coast-races having free intercourse with their neighbours and the secluded old-fashioned races of the interior, gives everywhere a measure for the ethnography of the less cultivated northern and eastern districts : the Philippines, Celebes, the Moluccas, Banda, and Timor. A tropical and oceanic position makes it one of the most distinctly tropic climates of the earth. In a country where the rainfall is so distributed over the year that no sharply-defined dry season can be reckoned, where a deep alluvial soil retains the moisture, those steaming primeval forests spring up which have been styled the " gardens of the sun " ; enormous forcing-houses full of vegetation ; a great zoological garden full of rare and. curious beasts. But besides these, there are also regions, like the low lands of Acheen, with their forests peopled by ancestral orang-outans, where malaria and the impenetrable rattan thicket, harbouring its legions of leeches, have been able to preserve a Malay kingdom in independence. In Sumatra, the irregular but heavy rainfall streaming down with- out any monsoon -change, allows but few of the fruit trees, which in the neigh- bouring Java offer such splendid produce, to thrive. The lowland regions in these districts are traversed by streams the strength of whose flow varies with the more sharply distinguished seasons, and their recurring inundations make the land malarious and uninhabitable. Where during the east monsoon you can only progress with labour, you may during the west monsoon sail over broad sheets of water, often right through the forests of the inundated plains. Where tidal rivers prevail, the coast swamps, also teeming with fevers, form belts of mangroves infecting even the neighbourhood of the cultivated Samarang. The Malayan Archipelago possesses a flora Indian in character and of extreme variety in a narrow space. The primeval forest is distinguished by a greater abundance of palms, many of which man has converted to his own uses. By the banks of the rivers grows the thick-stemmed feathery-leaved true sago palm, one of the noblest and most useful of the palms, the chief habitat of which is found in Borneo. More than half the sago used on the earth is supplied by Sarawak. In the daily life of the Malays the nipa palm {Nipa fruticans) is valuable as material for building and roofing. The slender areca palm encloses the homesteads, and no market of the archipelago is without its nut, known as the Penang nut, or the sirili leaves. The bamboo finds employment for the purposes of hut building, for yokes, water -vessels, blow-guns, and various musical instruments. The edible banana is cultivated everywhere ; the arenga palm affords the brown sugar of the country. The flower spike is chopped off and the juice allowed to flow through a bamboo tube, it is then evaporated in metal basins and partaken of as palm wine. In the low lands the coco-palm is widely found ; clove and nutmeg also belong to the archipelago, and the bread-fruit tree to its eastern regions ; and it is one of the most important districts as regards the production of coffee, rice, sugar, spices, and tobacco. Rice is the principal article of food, especially in the west, and the native names for it overthrow the theory that this plant and its cultivation were imported from India. Among fruit trees the durian, with its dark leaves and lofty stem, bears a fruit said to be the best on earth. The Musa textilis of the Philippines furnishes manilla hemp. Among timber trees, the two araucarias of Borneo are of importance in native architecture. The Dyaks make BODILY CONFORMATION AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF MALAYS 393 a black varnish for colouring their teeth from Chalcas paniculata and a sort of Artocarpus. In Formosa, the mountains of the interior are covered with the camphor tree wherever the devastations of the Chinese have not penetrated. In Java and Borneo arrow poison is furnished by species of strychnos and antiaris, and the Malays flog thieves with freshly cut sprigs of a shrubby stinging nettle. Tracts of meadow and heath formed by cutting away timber often have a certain importance ethnographically. In Formosa the Chinese territory is almost treeless, and is planted with tea, coarse grass taking the place of the forest. In the highlands of Sumatra, the extent of the grass land has caused people to infer earlier settlements, since in these regions nothing but cultivation can drive back the forest. The nutritious grass of these clearings has caused them to become pasturage for the abundant cattle and horses of the Battaks ; on the other hand, in Borneo, the Dyaks do not venture across the dry moors deep in sand and sparsely covered with scrub, unless wearing sandals of bark. The elephant, the rhinoceros, the tiger, and the orang-outan are sufficient to indicate the abundant fauna of these islands ; it is greatest in Sumatra, where the elephant and tapir form a closer bond with the continent. Game of all kinds, buffalo, wild boar, roe and dwarf stag, are frequent in the less settled districts of Borneo and the Philippines, while monkeys and squirrels abound in the palm forests. The shores afford fish and shell -fish in profusion, and also valuable trepang and tortoise-shell, which called into existence from early times a brisk trade with China. The trepang fishery has brought Malays from Macassar, as far as Australia. Nor must we forget the edible swallow's nest of Java. § 17. BODILY CONFORMATION AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF THE MALAYS The Malay race— Comparison with the Polynesians— The true Malays and the Alfurs— Social and foreign influences- Indian, Chinese, Arabic, and European— Character— The civilized and the savage Malay- Religious notions— Intellectual capacity— Language— Writing— Literature— Art— Dances and games. The full description which we have given of the physical appearance of the Polynesian races makes it almost superfluous to do the same for the Malays,^ since both belong to one stock. However far they may have separated geographi- cally and ethnographically, they form, in respect of bodily characteristics and language, one Malay and Polynesian group, though an admixture of dark negroid blood is not absent from the western Malays as far as Malacca. But, on the whole, the population of the Malay Archipelago has preserved the character of the light brown, straight-haired, slim race of medium stature, in greater purity than that of Polynesia, which being numerically less and further from the point of origin, is for both reasons more accessible to effective crossing. The colour of the Malays may be called light brown, though there are varia- ' The name Malay denoted originally a small tribe of Sumatra. In Valentyn's time it was applied e^ecially to the tribe in the gold region of Sungei Pagu, but had already migrated to the coasts of Borneo, Sulu, Ternate, and Tidor, with the emigrants from Menangkabor and Malacca. In the mouth of Europeans *« "^0=' civilized race gave its name to the whole population of the archipelago. The etymology of the name Malay is obscure. 394 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND tions. The people of Acheen and the Battaks are dark compared with Javanese or Dyaks, and in general a dark tint of skin is more frequent in the east than in the west. Many Javanese are straw coloured, but the differences are by no means great, and tend to vanish. Considering the influence which social rank exercises here also upon physical characteristics, they only acquire a deeper interest where they are combined with other peculiarities. The Acheenese and the Battaks are alike bigger and stronger than their neighbours ; the light Javanese are smaller, while the still lighter Formosans and the Tagal half breeds of the Philippines, with their mixture of Chinese blood, are better grown than their Tagal neighbours. The hair is more decidedly straight than among their Polynesian kinsfolk ; similarity with the Polynesians is marked as regards the curly but not woolly-haired races in Ceram, Gilolo, Timor, and Amboyna, all these instances occurring in the eastern part of the archipelago. On the other hand, harsh straight hair, according to Riedel, characterises the people of Timorlaut ; among the Dyaks we find wavy hair with a Semitic type of face. In the region of transition the hair is the most striking of all marks of race, even for- the natives themselves, whence the name " Papua." When we get west of the Aru and Key Archipelagos we do not meet with true curly hair again till we are among the Orang-Panggang and Semang in the interior of the Malay peninsula. In Ceram, Timor, and Allor, the prevailing hair is rather woolly than curly, forming wigs sticking out in every direction, of vast circumference ; it fills a wide zone between the Malayan and Papuan regions, and is connected by Virchow with the Veddahs in the north and the Australians in the south. In their stature, 5 ft. to 5 ft. 8 in., the Malays are inferior to the Polynesians ; the smallest seem to belong to Amboyna. The form of skull is mainly brachycephalic, even to excess, but this is chiefly by artificial deformation. Long heads have been proved to exist among the Igorrotes of Luzon and the Ceramese, medium in the Moluccas and Timor, that is in the east. The question as to the original inhabitants of the archipelago has, except so far as regards the poor, hardly recognisable remains of it formed by the dark woolly-haired men to the eastward, been temporarily removed from the programme of ethnography. Papuan elements have permeated freely, especially in Ceram, Tidor, Ternate ; expressions like bastard Malays, bastard Ceramese are familiar to students of the subject. Papuas have invaded these regions as pirates and been imported as slaves. The origin of the scattered, dark, wavy, and woolly- haired people on the east side of Luzon, in the interior of the Malay Peninsula, and on Timor, is uncertain ; if the Orang-Semang of Malacca, whom Stavens has recently regarded as hybrids of negroid races with Malays, owe their Malayan resemblance to the neighbourhood of civilization, his idea has less anthropological value. The same is the case with the Negritos of the Philippines, and perhaps the Igorrotes stand nearer to the original population than they do. The names Negritos and Alfurs, which were once thought to imply negroid elements, often indicate in reality only straight-haired Mongoloid people in a low state of civilization. The unity of the Malayan races seems, at the very fifst glance, to be supported by their outward appearance. They are a highly-mixed race, and they have been pointed to as the best example of an artificially formed stock, and compared with the results of recognised race-breeding. In any case there certainly remains BODILY CONFORMATION AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF MALAYS 395 conspicuous a widespread similarity and symmetry of form. Where, in islands like Sumatra, traces appear of two strata of population, the only evidence for this is to be found in language and customs. Countless interminglings have taken place here, Malays and Battaks mutually pressed each other on to the high plateaus in Sumatra, and retired to the west and east coasts. The Lubus say that they migrated from Eastern Sumatra in three iit|j." bands, the Philippine tribes sought the coast under the attacks of savage moun- tain tribes, and others again for the sake of trade and commerce ; volcanic erup- tions, earthquakes, hurri- canes, inundations, famine, drove thousands into distant regions, and caused deserts which had to be replenished again by immigration from without. The Mahometan invasion forced the Bajus, a small people of Sunda, on to the almost inaccessible forest plateau of Pangeleran. The Orang-laut, a blend of homeless people, chiefly with Malay elements, are the Vikings of these seas, and their traces are found almost without exception in the islands. Like them were the Sikas of Borneo and the Wajus of Celebes. The genuine Malays, even when they had acquired settled dwelling-places, took to a sea life by inclina- tion. Fishery, trade, and . . c ^ a piracy are among their favourite occupations, their agriculture is impertect, and if there ever were pastoral races among them there are none now. A survey of all these influences makes it impossible to avoid the conviction that, however homogeneous the population may be on the surface, we must, in considering it, assume repeated mixtures. This consideration is necessary, not theoretical, and is always gaining in force. Thus we have like and unlike elements constantly permeating each other, and as the result, a progressive wearing down of differences. . . ^ Further, racial divergences in two directions have been due to social mtluences. Hard and regular labour stamps particular peoples with the traits of civilization A Battak of Sumatra. (From a photograph 396 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND almost to the point of malformation. Thus the Milanos of Borneo are far inferior to the Malays in stature and in regularity of feature. They are light-coloured, but the tint is often unhealthy. Passing their whole lives in treading or pressing sago from the pith of the palm, they get broad feet ; they are thick-set and dwarfish. The Javanese and Madurese, highly cultivated, and exposed for centuries to Indian, Chinese, and European influences, are of a more elegant and dignifjed build than their neighbours. That the " Orang-laut, the maritime Malay of the peninsula, who spend most of their existence on. the water, should be dark- coloured, is but natural. Forest and mountain tribes are changed by their wild, penurious, irregular life. Thus too, the Lubus, the Utos, and to some extent the Bajus, also the various tribes of the Philippines, whom the Spaniards incor- rectly lump together under the name of Igorrotes, are very pariahs in outward appearance. But it will not do to base divisions into races and sub-races on such slight variations. What we must firmly hold is the profound effect of influences from the con- tinent of Asia upon the more westerly regions ; whereby the Papuan affinities will, as a matter of course, be more noticeable in the east. From East Java, the seat of the true Javanese population, which does not belie its Indian schooling, civilizing influences radiated, affecting profoundly not only intel- lectual activity but also agriculture and manufactures. Indian traces in Borneo, Sulu, Sumatra, the Philippines, most of all in the ruins of Bali, point back, both in speech and in writing, to the Indian kingdoms in Java. Beside these there was in Sumatra, as is shown by the very independence of the Battak writing, a central point, perhaps of less grandeur, but of considerable importance. Fantastic as it is, the Malayan chronicle has some ground for dividing the world into the three empires of Rum (that is Rome including Constantinople), China, and Pulo Mas or the Golden Island, the empire of Menangkabau. Probably Malays, or A Dyak of Borneo. (From a photograph in the Damann Album. ) BODILY CONFORMATION AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF MALAYS 397 Javanese, or both, were the agents in bringing here the elements of the higher civilization. Malay traces in Borneo testify that not every kingdom which tradi- tion and history show to have existed there, owed its foundation to the Chinese only. The soil of Sumatra, too, gives up in increasing quantity sculptures of Indian Brahmanic character. Throughout the Western Archipelago the Malays are only poor foreigners upon a territory once rich in culture, whence, down to the fifteenth century, noble temples and palaces rose. W. von Humboldt found it probable, from a com- parative study of the language, that there was an old connection between the Malay races and those of the Sanskrit stock. Then, since the home of the genuine Malays must be sought in Sumatra, the tradition of relations between that island and India gains in significance, and therewith the assumption of several centres whence Indian civilization was diffused, becomes probable. In point of date the Brahman foundations in Java and Sumatra must fall near together. At present only the Klings, who are Tamils, are strongly represented in Malacca and Java. Chinese influence is greater than appears upon the Malay population. The Chinese drives no propaganda, and does not put himself forward ; but his effect goes all the deeper. Formosa and Manilla are witnesses to the progress of the China- man. The Chinese -Tagal hybrids are a very numerous race, extraordinarily efficient and superior to the half-breed of European blood. Even in a number of the Philippine peoples, such as Tinguians and Itanegs, Chinese blood is suspected. Hogan reckons 300,000 Chinese half-breeds in the Dutch East Indies. Chinese trade is known to have reached Java, Sumatra, and Malacca before the end of the tenth century of our era. Political rela- tions, amounting to dependence, came about between the small island states like Sulu and China. In Borneo actual kingdoms sprang from the settle- ments of Chinese gold-diggers. Banca, Billiton, and the tin districts of Malacca, on the mainland, '^^^^;:^^\:^^-Zi \Z^. were, and still are, worked only with the aid of holm Ethnographical Collection.) Chinese organisation. The sago trade and sago refining, the tortoise-shell and trepang trades, may almost be regarded as Chinese monopolies ; and still more the opium trade, which even forty years ago was in the hands of pure Malay tribes in the peninsula. Since the fifteenth century the Arabs have, in spite of their small^ numbers, acquired a great moral importance as bearers of Islam. With the multitude they are undoubtedly in the greatest esteem. It is hard to say whether a Chinese or an Arab is better at trading ; but as a strict Mussulman the Arab certainly holds the more important social position. In spite of opposition on the part of 39S THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Christian missionaries, Islam has, during recent years, acquired alrnost exclusive possession of wide regions in the interior of Sumatra ; and the eastern Sulu Islands have, for a long time, been rightly called the Mecca of the East. Europeans have only founded settlements in these beautiful tropic lands. In Java or Celebes, as in India, there are but few Europeans who are willing to finish their lives in the country and found a family. People go there merely to govern and to make money, especially to the Dutch East Indies. The Spanish and Portuguese have assimilated themselves much better to the natives, and the Spanish Tagal half-breeds in the Philippines may be reckoned by the hundred thousand. It is not clear whether Nature forbids the formation of a mixed race from Germans and Malays ; Riedel found in Kiser a half-breed colony of Dutch, French, and Germans, dating from the end of the seventeenth century, but the climate prevents northern Europeans from taking deep root. For this reason the influence of Europeans has done very little good in the richest countries of the archipelago. The native was there only to be used and used up, not to be improved. Indigenous trade was made to serve foreign interests ; agriculture and industry were supported only so far as they promised immediate profit. The only benefit conferred was peace, under the protection of which the population increased, and still increases, in Java, Madura, and Celebes ; in recent times also with extraordinary rapidity in Sumatra. The fundamental traits of the Malay character have much resembling the Mongol ; he is gentle, peaceable, quiet, and civil, submissive to authorities, and rarely disposed towards crime. But to this must be added a tendency towards suspicion and — its twin brother — lack of frankness. Other points are taciturnity, quietness in assemblies, formality in intercourse. The free Malay is marked with a more savage stamp ; many tribes show a warlike strain, as evidenced in the life of piracy which some follow, the difficulty of subjugating many Battak, Alfur, and Tagal races, and the excellence of the soldiers from Amboyna, Macassar, Madura, even Java. Concealed savagery often comes unexpectedly to light, and then we are inclined to doubt of the possibility of educating them to civilization, and are even disposed to doom them to extinction. The wild fury of the amok runner, blind wholesale murders, are sudden breaches in the cold husk. Even though the cannibalism of individual tribes may form no essential trait in the general character, the practice of such a custom, in an otherwise high state of civilization, remains a sign of a cruel disposition. The Malay's power of work, and delight in work, has often been unfavourably judged. The brisk activity in trade shown by certain Malay tribes, especially the Bugises, cannot blind us to the fact that a genuine impulse to energetic labour is not much more native to the Malay than to the Negro, and that he prefers to do only so much as the day requires. But with the sweating system in vogue, a distaste for labour is often only a distaste for compulsory labour ; in the Philippines a slight increase in wages exercised a great attraction for the native labourer, and Sarawak, under skilful management of free native labour, produced great results in the domain of agriculture. The religious temperament is not everywhere alike, and here, too, religious disposition is various. It may be said that the Dyak has more religion than the Battak ; at least he shows more outward manifestation of religious need, but his religion is decidedly worse than that of the Battak, upon whom it still exercises BODILY CONFORMATION AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF MALAYS 399 some slight moral influences. Thus it is said that the inhabitants of Timorlaut do nothing without prayer or sacrifice. The true Malays of Borneo, even when they dwell near the Dyaks, have accepted Islam more cordially than have these latter, who, in spite of their turbans and their pilgrimages to Mecca, have remained heathens inwardly. Even in that Mussulman fanaticism, which has actually caused fears for the European sovereignty in the Dutch and Spanish possessions, the A Calinga of Luzon in the Philippines. (From a photograph in the Damann Album.) tribes vary much. The most fanatical are the true Malays ; the hardest to convert, the Battaks, among whom Islam has made the slowest progress. In the Sulu Islands the Spaniards had to contend with assassins in the shape of the Moras juramentados, who had taken the oath to slay Christians. In Acheen the people are fairly tolerant towards those of another faith. Pilgrimages to Mecca have become very common among the Malays, chiefs give large sums to defray the pilgrims' journey, and a Hadji who has visited Mecca is now almost sure to be among the domestic staff of a rich man. 40O THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Intellectual capacity shows itself mainly in the gift of annexing foreign culture they are good imitators in everything ; they have even reached a certain dexterity in counterfeit coining. The different religions have made their way rapidly and close upon the heels of one another. It is some decades since English missionaries in Madagascar had to take steps to prevent the diffusion of Paine's Age of Reason, and other works of a free-thinking nature. Self-control is expressed in every- day life, and the oriental talent for tranquillity and moderation is retained, however hotly passions may seethe in their hearts. Their address is courteous, in the higher rank fastidious. Eloquence is native to the Malay, the language loves repetitions of varied forms, and thus preserves even an unintelligent flow of talk from faltering. The calculation of time is simple among the forest-tribes. They reckon the day from sunrise to sunset, and longer divisions of time according to the recurrence of full moon, and the dry and rainy seasons. The solar year is of Indian intro- duction. From the same source came writing and the elements of religion, as well as the designation of the eight regions of the heaven, the signs of the zodiac, and the month of thirty days. The identity -of the Malayo-Polynesian language from Easter Island to Mada- gascar, from Formosa to New Zealand, is beyond question. Forty dialects may be spoken in Timor or eleven in Aru, but a fundamental agreement prevails. All belong to the Agglutinative family. Root-words undergo little or no change, but new words are formed by means of prefixes, suffixes, insertion, and reduplication, The radicals are, with few exceptions, disyllabic, and do not show their grammatical value in this form. Quite a hundred derivatives may exist for any root. Juxta- position of consonants is avoided. Case, number, and gender are not expressed by inflection. The marks of Malayo-Polynesian languages" are euphony, simplicity, vagueness. These apply especially to Malay in the stricter sense, which for that reason has succeeded in becoming the lingua franca of the archipelago. Some of the differences may be referred to admixture with foreign elements. In the Tagal dialects we find Chinese and perhaps also Japanese, while Sanskrit and Tamil elements make up more than 40 per cent of the vocabulary of the westerly islands. Including Arabic, Chinese, and Dutch, the percentage of foreign words in many dialects must be over fifty. The frequent shiftings of population cause linguistic changes ; and further, pronunciation constitutes a ground of difference. The most various views have been expressed in regard to relations of the branches of the Malay family of languages towards each other. The dialects of Oceania are probably to be regarded as the older forms, while those of the west Malays have become modified by continental influences in a higher degree. The most important groups are the Tagals of the Philippines, to whom the Formosans and Sulu Islanders are akin ; and the Malays of Malacca, to whom belong the Acheenese, the Rejangs, and the Lampongs of Sumatra. Akin to the Javanese are the people of Bali and Madura, and to a less extent those of Sunda in West Java. The Macassarese and Bugises of Celebes form a companion group. To the Battaks of Sumatra belong the inhabitants of the Nias and Batu groups. Borneo belongs by origin to the Dyaks. Lastly, the Alfurs spread from the north of Celebes over the lesser archipelagos to New Guinea. In respect of language, the people of the Nicobars and the Tsiampas in the east of Further India are near to the Malay family. The influences of civilization have brought the BODILY CONFORMATION AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF MALAYS 401 great race together in larger groups, which we can distinguish as West Malays subject to Indian influence, North Malays to that of China and Japan, and East Malays lying out of the reach of either. A great many of the races of the Indian Ocean have mastered the art of writing, which has reached them from India ; as, for instance, the higher tribes of Sumatra, the Javanese, the people of Balu, and the Visayas, the Bugises, and the Tagals. Humboldt long ago called attention to internal differences ; were these acquired directly or indirectly, and have they undergone further development ? In most cases we may assume a secondary outflow, probably from Java, whence, even in historical times, powerful influences have reached to Sumatra also. Later, owing to the spread of Islam, Arabic became the usual writing among the genuine Malays, and most recently Dutch influence has brought Roman char- acters into use. The material on which the letters are inscribed is bast, bamboo-bark, or lombar-\e2ives ; also a stuff like parchment prepared from bamboo. The ruder tribes do without writing. As a substitute for it, knotted strings are used in Ceram, Formosa, and elsewhere. As to an independent Malay literature, so far as it has any special character, it is too insignifi- cant and too much in one line to call for mention ; , being limited to legends, anecdotes, and books of magic. Indeed, until at Marsden's instigation the legal customs of the T.^^„„g3^ ^j^^ Rejang characters, from Sumatra-four-fiftta Rejangs, Passamahs, and others were -. . . ,. collected a hundred years ago, there real size. ( Munich Museum. ) seems to have been no written Malay law ; though Arabic writings upon law and other subjects had already been translated into Malay, Javanese, and Bugis. Their poetry mingles Indian with Arabic forms. The greater poems, in the mythic -historical and descriptive manner (SJtar), consist of four-lined stanzas, the lines as a rule rhyming ; the lesser celebrate gods or men, contain reflections on the nothingness of the world, the unkindness of fortune, love, and the like. Here the oriental parallelism of thought recurs in double strophes with the character of recitative. In their singing too a recitative, mostly nasal and drawling, predom.inates. The imagery of their love-songs awakes reminiscences of the Koran or the Song of Solomon. The Javanese affect a vowel rhyme in the fabulous ballads, in which they represent the period 500 years ago as of remote mythical antiquity. The Pepos of Formosa, in songs composed m the Malay tongue, chant the moonshine and sunshine, the forest and liberty, and 2 D 402 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND the heroic deeds of various great chiefs. While Indian pantomimes are produced at the courts of Javanese princes, the Spaniards have naturalised their Moor-dramas in the Philippines no less than in America, setting forth in endless variations fights between Christians and Mussulmans, spiced w^ith amatory episodes. The Wajang actor illustrates the old heroic legends in puppets-shows with flat leather marionettes of grotesque form and colour ; using artificial stimulants to enable him to recite and act all night long. Every Javanese court possesses a player of this sort. In the tales, beasts play a great part. In the beast-fables, which Riedel has collected from the Minahassas and others, there are mythological traces reminding us of similar tales in South Africa and America ; the place of the jackal or coyote being here taken by the monkey. A great many others in the western islands deal with elephants. All this has, no doubt, among the more advanced tribes, been preserved in a pretty much unaltered form by means of writing, but it is, for the most part, a treasure of which no one now knows the right use. The sole importance of writing is that it prevents the monuments of past times from perishing utterly ; and it has certainly contributed to keep a race like the Battaks at a certain elevation, after their closer connection with their native civilization had been loosened. Mother-wit is attested by various proverbs. " Escaping the jaws of the alligator to fall into the fangs of the tiger " ; " When the junk founders, the shark gets his dinner " ; " The net calls the basket a coarse bit of work " ; " What use is it for the peacock to swagger in the jungle ? " ; " Can the ground turn itself into iron ? " A coward is called " a duck in spurs " ; a tricky person " sits like a cat and springs like a tiger " ; of a chatterer, " The turtle lays a thousand eggs and no one knows ; the hen lays one and tells all the world." A bit of fatalism is, " Even the fish who lives at the bottom of the sea comes to the net at last." Nothing speaks so plainly as their sculpture, of a descent from a higher level. We can see what Malay races under Indian influence achieved 600 or. 700 years ago. Not only do we find mighty ruins, and finished statues in stone or bronze ; but highly conventionalised forms appear even in the simple ornament with which the Alfurs beautify their wooden sepulchral monuments and stone coffins, richer and more regular than any that the art of " natural " races produces ; and this influence appears in operation as far away as New Guinea. Among the Dyaks we find a specially rich development of art in their wooden shields, the sheaths of daggers, krisses, and spears, carvings of every kind, and iron blades. It is interesting for its suggestions of China ; thus the Dyak dragon-ornament seems to be of Chinese origin. The modern temples of the Brahmanic Siva-worship are not comparable to the monuments of a great age. Their premises are extensive indeed, but modest. The famous settlement of the gods at Vator on Bali, the object of numerous pilgrimages, consists of many open spaces, separated by hedges and enclosed within a high wall. In these stand square pillars with niches, and oven-like shrines with a small hollow space above. Besides this there are stalls lightly built of bamboo, where the pious eat and sleep during the festival, which lasts for days. In the older buildings the most ornamental thing is the porch, with two octagonal side-pillars of vast thickness, set round with statues, and having stepped cornices, with reliefs in niches and other ornament. The most magnificent orna- BODILY CONFORMATION AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF MALAYS 403 ment of those periods is the temple, with its precincts at Burubudor, near Jokjokarta in Java. This dates from the eighth century, and forms an enormous group of five ledges -running in broken lines, with 555 n-iches for life-size images of Buddha, and narrow galleries with carvings of the most artistic kind. The bas-reliefs, if placed in a row, would extend to a length of over three miles. Like the Indian topes, this o-icrantic monument was intended to receive a sacred memorial of Buddha in a reliquary ; and the five rows of steps were for the procession to mount up and go round by. The palace- buildings, again, however spacious they may be, have at the present day Httle that is monumental about them. They remind one of the palaces of negro chiefs ; instead of one hut, such as the subject inhabits, we have a hun- dred. If any architectural flights occur, it is where, during the last century, not Indian but Chinese themes, and latterly misunderstood ideas from Europe, have made their way in. A palace of this kind is an entire city, enclosed in walls like a fortress, surrounded with bar- racks, traversed by courtyards and garden. It contains a population of officials, attendants, and hangers-on, and consists of courts sur- rounded by galleries and detached dwellings, decorated with plants and flowers in Chinese and Japanese pots, aviaries, wretched kiosks, and deformed trees. The musical instruments of the primitive Malay tribes do not reach a higher level than those of Melanesia. The Ilongotes play upon a piece of bamboo, in which they make strings by incisions in the outer bark, and they also make flutes of bamboo. Among the mountain tribes of southern Luzon we find an instrument recalling the gora of the Hottentots, a dried stalk of a scitamineous plant bent into a curve by using a tendril as a string, and a half coco-nut shell attached thereto to give reson- ance ; with the additioij of a stick we have the lyre and plectrum in its most primitive form. The nose flute and Pan-pipes, as well as a guitar of poor tone with two strings of rattan, are found in Borneo, Celebes, and Java. Among the Dyaks the Pan-pipe is provided v^^»>^ Fw "1 -^ \ Milii^ 1 IP' 1 |! y *? ^ 1, B i \ |, 1 '\ \ . i i \ 1 ^ Magic staves of the Battaks, used especially for weather-magic, and also in war— J real size. (Leip. and Dresd. borne Mus. ) 404 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND with a gourd for resonance, and the single pipes with holes like flutes. The Battaks have a violin and a guitar, each with two strings ; the alarm drum is called tabu ; tom-toms and gongs have become common through Indian or Chinese influence. The highest development of music in the Indian style is found at the courts of the rich chiefs. The gamelan or gamalang, the orchestra of a prince in Surakarta, consists of copper bowls of all shapes and sizes ; rows of copper discs from 2 inches to i yard long on bronze stands ; planks of resonant wood, resembling in their arrangement the African marimba ; gongs, large and small, 4 inches to 6 feet in diameter ; and lastly, two-stringed fiddles. Big drums also belong to the gamelan. The orchestra starts at a given signal, a hurly-burly of strange tones — loud, soft, silvery, wailing — ensues, amid which is heard the bellow of the gongs. It is seldom that any melody emerges. From time to time the screaming voices of the women accompany the doleful music. In Borneo and Celebes we find in the place of this Javanese orchestra only the gong and a kind of wooden harmonica ; in the Philippines Chinese music is cultivated. Dancing among the genuine Malays is participated in by the men only, but in Java and in the east by both sexes. At court festivals in Kutei, Dyaks appear in weapon dances, as well as the sultan's premiere danseuse from Java. Dance and pantomime merge into each other ; the dancers are also comedians, and the dance is almost always accompanied with singing. In general the dances are much too slow for our taste, and this is true even of the weapon dances with spear or kriss. Deportment rather than grace is their prevailing feature ; the taste for mimic dances, in which individual muscles rather than the whole body play a part, is here carried to an extreme, it is the refinement of oriental over-civilization. The people, however, both here and in Formosa, are still acquainted with wild round dances ; the Malays like festivity and play, but unbridled merriment is not in their nature. Indolence and indifference are the faults specially reprehended in the church festivals of the Philippine Malays ; still there are distinctions even in this, the true Malays are more serious than the less restrained Dyaks ; and, in general, life is cheery and bright in the east, in the west more taciturn and suspicious. At the popular feasts on the conclusion of the fast, and at their accession, the princes receive and feast everybody. At another feast both sexes live in the open country in tents and huts, they pay visits, sing to the tambourine and the violin,, while dance, pantomime, and song last whole days and nights. The toku, which is danced at funeral rites in Halmahera, consists of circling round and forming chains from evening till late in the morning. The funeral dance of the Alfurs is danced in a closed circle, which revolves continuously from right to left with shouts, while the orchestra, composed of old women, sits outside. In Celebes the weapon dance with shield and sword, such as is usual throughout the archipelago, displays no sign of melancholy or listlessness ; the whole body is in movement ; leaps, bendings, and twistings in every direction are executed ; and the face exhibits the wildest grimaces. Where head -hunting is customary, the very boys have a dance in imitation of the practice in which a coco-nut represents the highly-valued object of pursuit. If a skull has been captured, betel and tobacco are offered to it during the dance as an act of conciliation. Gambling is a prominent trait in the Malay character, legislation has even been found necessary to check its excesses, and by the common law of the DRESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER PROPERTY OF THE MALAYS 405 Redjangs, all games, except cock-fighting, are forbidden under heavy penalties. But cock-fighting is something more than an ordinary game, the prince and all his great men frequently assist at it. At the court of the Sultan of Kutei mains are fought every day ; sixty fine cocks are every day washed and carefully fed. In the evening people assemble to play something resembling heads and tails, or some game with Chinese cards, always for a stake — prince playing with commons, children with old people. The cock-fights often take days to decide, even more time, trouble, and money is required in the settlement of controversies and bets accord- ing to elaborate rules, the place is at once a gambling-hell and a stock exchange. No event seems too great or too small to afford an excuse for the sport. The cocks are fitted with steel spurs, which are rubbed with lemon-juice to make the wounds more painful. In the Battak country special huts are set apart for the sport, standing by some frequented road midway between two kampongs or villages. We find also among the Malays a great variety of board-games, including chess. The top is widely diffused. Games of football are customary among the Tobak- Battaks. Beast-fights, imitated from India, take place at the courts of the princes. Even tigers and rhinoceroses are brought into the arena, especially in Java ; while in Madura they have bull-races. At the tiger-baits, or Rampok, men armed with strong spears, four deep, form a square 150 to 200 yards in the side. The two front rows kneel, the others stand upright. In the middle is a bamboo cage covered with straw, and having its door fastened only by a thin cord, in which is the tiger. At a given signal the gamelan strikes up a slow martial melody, and two men set fire to the straw. The sparks excite the tiger to fury ; he leaps up, and shakes at his prison until the flames reach the cord and the door bursts open, allowing him to bound out and fly at the two men, who are retreating in time to the music. They take refuge behind the row of spears, which closes up after them- ; and when the tiger attempts by a mighty spring to break through the living wall, a score of spears pierce his breast. § 18. DRESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER PROPERTY OF THE MALAYS Dress— Stages from Ilongotes, Utos, and their allies to Javanese and Formosans — Indian and Chinese influences —Weapons : kampilan and kriss, bow, blow-gun, arrows, poisoned arrows, spears, shields, and general equipment — Architecture : pile buildings, free dwellings — Household implements — Agriculture : paddy fields, harvest festival — Cattle-breeding — Hunting and fishing — Food, tobacco, betel, opium — Industrial conditions : iron industry, pottery, weaving and dyeing — Trade — Bugises and Malays — Money. Malay costume fluctuates between nudity and superfluity, since sundry Arabic and Chinese influences have overspread the simplicity of the natural race. Where the population has come least into contact with these, or has been kept back by indolence, we find the simplest conditions. But we also see how these are always retreating, so that even the backward mountain tribes of the Philippines, whose loin-cloth is scarcely sufficient for decency, have partially begun to wear clothes. It is reported of the head-hunters of Luzon, the Ilongotes of the Principe province, who are real savages, that all their clothing is a band of beaten bark, while 4o6 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND immature boys and girls go stark naked ; yet when one of them has occasion to go into one of the neighbouring Christian villages, he puts on a shirt and trousers. The Formosans again vary between a scanty band and abundant clothing, accordino- to the season of the year and the nature of their work. The Lubus of Sumatra, who but ten years ago wore only a narrow girdle of bark, are now dressed after the style of the Battaks ; but bark and skins still play an important part over large districts of Borneo. The Cera- mese wear plain belts and thigh- cloths of bark ; the women, by way of further clothing, have a piece of bamboo hanging from the girdle ; the children, who run about otherwise naked, wear just the minimum of covering. Among the wandering Utos of South Borneo — the dreaded bearers of the blow -gun, men and women have chavats, wow&n of bast, while a deer or panther skin cover the upper part of the body ; a head-dress of fur, with the tail feathers of the hornbill stuck upright in it, forms part of a costume befitting hunters. The Dyak women wear round their breast and neck a tissue adorned with beads arid teeth which hang down the back ; the Maanjans of south-east Borneo have a sleeveless jacket of bark cloth in addition to their kilt, while the women wind' about their hips the tapis, a smaller edition of the sarong made out of home-woven tissue. Men of the wealthier class have jackets with sleeves, and their women breast-handkerchiefs. With the invasion of the Bugis element into Borneo, short trousers have been adopted by many of the natives, all the more readily from the fact that these active inhabitants of Celebes have for a long while carried on a trade in the requisite materials. In the more westerly parts, clothing is very different. In former times, Indian and Chinese stuffs came hither in great quantities, now sarongs are brought from Europe by the hundred thousand. In the country itself there is a flourishing and highly developed industry in weaving and dyeing ; in Malacca, Sumatra, and Java, and in the smaller islands, the Malayan Bugis colonies, on the coast of Borneo, and other islands, clothing consists of the sack-shaped sarong, which is worn in many tasteful forms. Among the more advanced, short wide trousers and a jacket A Calinga woman of Luzon. ( From a photograph in the Damann Album). DRESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER PROPERTY OF THE MALAYS 407 are added to this ; other usual articles of clothing are a head-kerchief, a narrow cloth called slendong, in which babies are carried ; sandals, a scarf or binder round the body, and a hat of leaves or rattan. Among the Tobah Battaks, whoever can afford it wears a smarter coat as fighting dress. The quality of the material distinguishes the rich from the poor, and, as in China, yellow distinguishes the man of rank from the plebeian. Cotton is, however, preferred for the sarong, since it is not lawful to pray in silk. Finer materials are reserved for the families of princes ; women often wear only the sarong. A jacket fashioned in front with a button or brooch and trimmed with gold is often worn, while valuable hairpins and bands, earrings, and also handsome finger rings, form their ornaments. Differences of dress extend also to the colours, which in many regions are striking in their variety, while elsewhere, as among the Malays of Sumatra, black is usual. Often there are very sharp distinctions in ornament, such as a tuft of feathers, flowers in the hair, and so on. In the nOrth-east, Arabic influence makes itself felt ; the dress of the Sulu islanders, which, like that of Mindanao, con- sists of turban, jacket, wide trousers, and a cloak like a burnoos, was at one time held to corroborate the idea of their Arabian descent. The Bugises of Celebes have imported their short cloth trousers into Sumbawa, Flores, and other places, while their trade has given a specially wide diffusion to the chequered sarongs of Macassar. In the most northerly parts, inhabited by Malays, namely in Formosa, we find Chinese affinities clearly expressed in trousers, shoes, and embroidered blouses. Here the black head -kerchief, as well as the turban, is favoured by both sexes. Among all the modern clothing, relics of the primitive dress often continue to lead a stunted existence. The bark girdle, which the Alfurs of Ceram put on with ceremonies in their fifteenth year, as a sign of maturity, has now turned into a meaningless thread worn under the cotton jacket and the sarong. In the same way, the women of the Andamans wear under their Christian clothing their old fig leaf in the shape of a bunch of leaves, while the children of well-to-do Malays have a gold or silver plate fastened by a chain round their bodies. The modes of dressing the hair are manifold. Usually all hair except that of the head is removed ; the Tagals in Luzon keep the hair cf the head short ; the Zambals leave one long lock ; the Shekwans of Formosa, following the Chinese customs, shave the front of the head and draw the hair into a pig-tail. ^ " Toangos of Northern Sumatra. (From a photograph. ) On the 4o8 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND other hand, the women dress their hair in a fashion which recurs in the Phih'ppines, in Celebes, and in Borneo. Part of the hair is combed down over the forehead, and cut in a fringe over the eyebrows, the rest is tied in a tight knot at the top of the head. On their heads they wear a square black handkerchief, the two corners of which are lightly fastened together at the back of the neck, forming a sort of cap which throws a deep shade on the face. The iangoi, or South-East Bornean head-dress — one-third and one- seventeenth real size. {Frankfort City Museum. ) In West Java the usual head-dress is a muffin cap of white, blue, or black satin, in Samarang a handkerchief fastened on the head, with two corners sticking out like wings. The people of Acheen, and some mountain tribes of Luzon, wear a little cap of the peculiar shape shown on page 399 ; the Battaks, a cloth worn like a turban. Among the Sumatrans of the interior, the chiefs place on their shaven heads little caps plaited of rushes and embroidered with gold. The women of the Bornean tribes wear large straw hats with brims a yard wide. The Tagal caps are perfect segments of spheres. Straw caps, like those worn by miners in Germany, are found in Borneo and Luzon ; pointed hats with tufts of DRESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER PROPERTY OF THE MALAYS 409 black palm fibre in Sulu. The women of Java gather their hair into a knot ; the Tagal women wind their long sleek black hair in two loose strands round their heads, and fasten it usually with a ribbon worn like a turban. In the Philippines, the Sulu Islands, and among many Mussulman tribes, the turban is in general use. In Sumatra, the mode of dressing the hair varies from one province to another ; sometimes it falls to the shoulders, sometimes it is cut short. In the twelve Kotas the ladies roll their hair into a coil and wrap it round with a piece of cloth, while in the contiguous provinces they plait it into a pig-tail on one side of the head. The Alfurs of Ceram also tie their hair to the left ; but for men, the most usual fashion is to wear the hair in a tight knot, under a head cloth, into Hats worn by chiefs of Kutei tribes in Borneo. (Munich Museum. ) which the Dyaks on festivals and market days fasten silver rings. High combs of wood are worn in Ceram ; of tortoise-shell in Sumatra ; but the modes oi dressing the hair for festivals in perfect helmets of many coloured feathers, flowers, and leaves, are picturesque beyond description. In pugilistic contests, the champion wears on his head a carved ring of wood, in which a bunch of leathers is stuck. In the Moluccas the skins of birds of Paradise adorn the hair ot the girls, while false pig-tails for women are offered for sale in the Battak markets. The distribution of tattooing is irregular. Among the Formosans, the men wear horizontal stripes across the whole forehead ; the women from ear to ear, and perpendicular stripes as well. Tattooing of the hands is said to occur in the interior of Formosa. In Luzon, almost every Igorrote has a figure of the sun on the back of his hand. Punctured tattooing with Japanese or Chinese patterns is found among the Catalangans. Among the Negritos as well as among the Igorrotes, " scar-tattooing " occurs. The skin is raised in folds over the whole body, 4IO THE HISTORY OF MANKIND and rectilineal designs worked with a pointed iron style, or a splinter of bamboQ, In Ceram, tattooing is only found in the west, and almost exclusively in women, Igorrote tattooing : a, i, designs on the calves of the legs ; c, d, on the stomach ; e front view ; /, back view of a Burik ; g, a woman's arm. (From drawings by Dr. Hans Meyer. ) on the breast, upper arm, navel, and forehead ; in Timorlaut it is universal. The tattooing of the Mentawei Islanders is executed in simple but elegant geometrical lines. In Borneo, again, extensive tattooing has been observed DRESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER PROPERTY OF THE MALAYS 411 almost solely among women, on the hands, feet, and the upper part of the thigh. Men often have merely a mark which possibly has a religious or social significa- tion ■ on the forehead, one arm, or one leg. Thus all the Tanjan Dyaks are Igorrote necklaces, with (a) tweezers for pulling out hair ; [b) pendants of crocodile teeth- one-third real size. (From Dr. Meyer's collection. ) marked with • — r— '. Among some Bornean tribes extensive tattooing occurs, but only among valiant warriors or head-hunters. Those who have come in contact with civilization, like the Milanos, have given it up altogether. In Kutei the more difficult patterns are executed by pro- fessionals. The outline is first cut in wood, and then the design is transferred to the body with a sharpened piece of bamboo, or a needle dipped in a vege- table pigment. The operation is very painful and lasts a long time, but the marks are indelible Tattooing takes place in the male sex, as a rule, at their entry upon manhood, among girls as soon as they are of an age to marry. For dancing the face 1= painted ; the thumb-nail of the left hand is, according to the custom in the east, allowed to grow an inch long, and the Bugis women even have a cover for it. Over the whole Malayan region special attention is paid to teeth mutilation, which often appears in connection with artificial colouring of the teeth. Most common of all is the filing of the upper incisors and canines so that they are made shorter but keep their shape. The same treatment is also applied to the corre- Ring worn by the Igorrotes on the upper arm when dancing- one-third real size. (From the same. ) 412 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND spending teeth of the lower jaw. Sometimes the teeth are filed to a point, sometimes a transverse groove is cut, or a triangle is knocked out between the two front teeth. This is, as a rule, first done at the age of puberty. Malay weapons : (1,2) Hat and shield from Mindanao, in the Philippines ; (3) Quiver with poisoned arrows from Celebes ; (4) a champion's shield from Solor ; (5) Sword from Gorontalo in Celebes ; (6) Mandau of the Kahayan River Dyaks ; (7) Outfit from Ombai ; (8) Spears from Java. (Dresden Collection.) though we find grown men who have not yet undergone it. But in any case good manners seem to require that it should take place before marriage. What- ever may be the original idea of teeth filing, it is now done as a gratification of the sense of beauty. Long white teeth are dog's teeth. Further evidence of this is the custom, widespread in Borneo and Sumatra, of drawing gold wire through DRESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER PROPERTY OF THE MALAYS 413 the four incisor teeth of the upper jaw. Among the Tobah Battaks a man often carries all his property about in his head ; in this case the teeth are always blackened, but, as a rule, they are also blackened after the first filing. This practice, which now is a mere matter of ornament, may have arisen from the wish to prevent the decay of the filed teeth, either by applying the gum of a kind of chalcas or artocarpus, as in Borneo, or by staining with a ferruginous ink, as in Java ; but, besides this, betel-chewing causes the teeth to have a dirty appearance. The tooth-filing is performed by experts ; formerly a stone was used, now a chisel or file. Mussulmans have a legend to account for it, that Mohammed, on the occasion of his flight from the sheikh of Lakad had four of his upper teeth knocked out. On the other hand, the Formosans assert that it is done to make the breathing easier. In Sumatra, the files, after the operation, are stuck into the stem of a banana in order to preserve the patient from injurious consequences. Circum- cision, sometimes in the form of slitting, was originally more widespread, but is now confined to the east, as Ceram and Flores, where it is celebrated with great Bow and arrows of the Negritos in Luzon— one-twelfth real size. (Dr. Meyer's Collection. ) pomp as a village, festivity. Deformation of the skull, usually by flattening the occiputs, more rarely by oblique pressure of the forehead, occurs in the most various Malay districts. Apart from the ornament, which is an imitation of Indian and European fashions, the wearing of arm-rings in large numbers, or formed by spiral twists, reminds us of African customs. Among the simple Ilongotes men and women wear rings of bronze or brass wire round their necks and arms, and these they set with hard brightly-coloured seed, such as those of the Abrus precatorius. The wire fits close to the muscular part of the arm, and no doubt is intended more for increasing the muscular strength than for ornament. The ring worn by the Igorrotes on the upper arm curiously resembles that similarly worn by the Negroes. Tight-lacing of the body is found in Formosa, where you may see boys runnmg about like wasps, while the bamboo or rattan belts of the Dyak women, worn one above another, remind us of the laced belts of South America. In caves on Luzon arm- rings of dugong vertebra; are found, just such as are prized by the Micronesians. In Central Sumatra, too, the ornament of betrothed girls consists, besides ear-rings, of narrow silver bangles worn on the wrist and fore-arm, often twenty and more in number, and reaching to the elbows. Unbetrothed girls may only wear them on one arm, married women not at all. The lads of Formosa are proud to wear arm-rings made from the pig-tails which once grew upon the captured heads 01 Chinese. The Dyaks regard it as the greatest adornment to have large holes in 414 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND their ears in which they wear wooden disks or heavy silver rings. So too the Battaks of Tobah and the Igorrotes of Luzon, who especially affect crocodile teeth. The upper part of the Dyak ear is gay with tassels of red cotton and the like, and as soon as a Dyak has become a distinguished head-hunter he is entitled to stick in a pair of leopard's fangs, while in Luzon the number of ear-plugs shows the number of decapitations performed by the wearer. When a Nias man has taken a head, he gets a wire neck -ring strung Bow from Sulu of Asiatic origin, and Negrito harpoon- one-twelfth real size. (Dresden Collection. ) with many rings carved from the nut Lodoicea sechellarum. The Formosans, who have been touched by Chinese ways, make but a moderate use of armed ear- rings, or of glass beads, but the unsophisticated inhabitants wear heavy ear pendants of bamboo, stone, or metal, frontlets of shells, and thin copper arm -rings. The Ceramese are often distinguished by a superfluity of bead pendants, so that the impression of nudity entirely disappears, and the Tinguians of Luzon wear heavy masses of beads or stones of many colours which are brought from the Batanes Islands. Compared with these the necklaces usual in Flores, made from the bright violet flowers of Calotropis gigantea, produce a splendid effect. The ornaments of progeni- tors, as well as their weapons, hold a high rank as valuable and legendary family possessions of mystic importance, and be- come in process of time amulets. The Malay race delights in weapons and finery. Among the poorer tribes, who are predominantly nomad, the weapons arc of a simpler kind and almost entirely missile in character— bow or blow-gun with arrows. Especially is this the case with the remote tribes in the interior of Borneo and Luzon, whom the practice of head-hunting keeps in a constant state of war. Dyaks, Utos, and Ilongotes never go unarmed, even for a few paces; they sleep with their weapons beside them. The Orang Punan of Borneo are seldom seen without a paddle in one hand and a blow-gun in the other ; in ^ r.i-^^„„ .-„„i <- i it, i_i Q- • . Blow-gun, arrows, and quiver, from Borneo — one- a strong contrast to the peaceable effemmate l^^Y. real size. (Stockholm Museum.) Javanese, Macassarese, or Padang Sumatrans, with their delight in fanciful ornamental weapons, five-lobed daggers, three-pointed spears, and the like. In Celebes, ornamental shields are hung up in the house, and the inhabitant looks to them for protection. The Negritos of East Luzon have only bows and arrows. The Ibilaos are reputed excellent archers ; but they shoot the wild pigs which they take in nets only at short ranges. The Igorrotes whom Hans Meyer saw were, as a rule, not acquainted witli this DRESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER PROPERTY OF THE MALAYS 415 weapon, though the Guinanese have words for bow and arrow. A Hne drawn east of Sumbawa, Celebes, and the Philippines divides the region in which the bow is generally diffused from that in which the blow -gun predominates. The form of bow prevailing in the eastern airchipelago is simple, and has affinity with one of the New Guinea forms. Where the bow is used by Bugises and others, it is in forms imported from Asia. Among the Dyaks, Utos, and other Bornean tribes the blow -gun replaces the bow. This consists among the Tubus of one bamboo inserted in another, among the Dyaks of a tube of iron- wood, the length of a man, smoothed with rough leaves and furnished on its front edge with a lance-point fitting like a bayonet on to an iron hook, probably for sighting. Through this instrument, called sumpit, the Dyak blows his arrows. They are light and thin, i o to 12 inches in length, and made of bamboo. The sharp point is poisoned, and for killing large animals the arrows are furnished with barbs. At the butt -end of the arrow is a piece of pith fitting the calibre of the tube, to serve at once as feather and "gas-check." With these missiles a Dyak can bring down the smallest bird with accuracy at fifty yards dis- tance, so that the weapon is more effec- tive than the weak, unevenly made bows used by the forest tribes of the Philip- pines with their clumsy arrows. The quiver, made of bamboo, is provided with hoops of plaited rattan and a bam- boo cover. The top is often adorned with a snail -shell. The less civilized Formosans carry bow and arrows of genuine Malay shape, and so also the Alfurs of Ceram. Their bows are of iron-wood, the strings of rattan, the arrow-heads of iron or bamboo ; quivers they have none. The Alfurs of Tarandu use both bow and blow-gun. A cross- bow of practical construction, not, like I'l if 1 1 ii ' 1 1 ! ('11' 1 \ fl ' \\\\ 1 ■ \v\\' 1 m 1 1 Awfei 1 Hilt Ir^rtpw li fl' Inl lliK\'^^ If ;W,l|||( iilt 1 IliVi lllf ffi§ ' II' if ii I'll III?™/ Ml Hi '' ililM li m il 1' 1 i''l^fW\l' m 'III '*" :^^^gy^rj55'=Ss5:=GS?^^-jr^^^"^=^'=^&^^ "- Blow-gun, small quiver, and spears of the Kahayan Dyaks of South Borneo ; bow, arrows, and quiver from Poggi. (Munich Museum.) 4i6 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND that of the Fans shown on p. 86, apparent only, is found among the Nico- barese, together with a very simple bow for shooting pigeons. The poisoned arrows of Java and Borneo are among the most effective that are known. The poison used in Java, called chettik, comes from the Strychnos tieutd ; another, antias, from Antiaris toxicaria, the " Upas." Both affect the heart. Mandaus or swords, krisses, and knives: (i) from South Celebes; (2) from the Batang-lupar Dyaks ; (3) from Java ; (4) from Gilolo ; (5) from Java ; (6) from the Kahayan Dyaks ; (7) from Menlawei ; (8) from the Rejangs of Sumatra — one-sixth real size. (Munich Museum. ) The Dyak poison, ipoh, is also from an Antiaris. The arrow-poisons of the Philippine tribes lose their effect when not fresh. Here too the forest tribes are regarded as dangerous poison-brewers, and European travellers are often warned by friendly natives against accepting food from them. Firearms have made considerable progress. In Formosa, bows and arrows have been almost driven out by Chinese matchlocks. The admirable armourers of Java, Sumatra, Bali, Celebes, and Borneo can also construct firearms. The DRESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER PROPERTY OF THE MALAYS 417 Sassaks of Lombok even bore their own gun-barrels. A round bar of iron is stuck perpendicularly in the ground, and a drill is inserted, attached to a bamboo with a cross-handle. In order to increase the pressure, a basket is woven round the bamboo and filled with stones. The Battaks carve stocks in correct style and know how to make powder. They find sulphur in their own volcanic country, and contrive to get saltpetre by washing the urine-soaked earth under the houses. Pieces of bamboo serve for cartridge-cases; and bits of coral are ground into bullets. The fact that in 1570 Manilla possessed guns of native casting, and that the Sultans of Sulu have for a long time disposed of a formidable artillery, has caused the question to be raised whether the Chinese had not introduced the art of casting cannon before the arrival of Europeans. But it seems simpler to explain the facts by the operations of Portuguese and Spanish renegades. In battle these races shoot away their powder quickly, so that the affair has, after all, to be decided by spear and throwing-knife. The spear holds an inferior place among Malay weapons. It is mainly an implement of hunting or an ornament, especially in Java, and only among certain races, as in Sulu, takes its place beside the kampilan and the kriss, among the more serious equipment for war. But among the Igorrotes of Luzon it is the chief weapon ; there a distinction is made between javelins with bamboo heads and thrusting spears with arrow-shaped iron heads ; the Alfurs of Ceram also still use a spear-head of bamboo. Among the Dyaks a long spear is used for boar-hunting ; among the Maanjans of south-east Borneo hardly any man goes out without spear and sword or hunting knife. It acquires, however, practical importance principally among the hunting tribes, the Lubus of Central Sumatra. The Ilongotes of Luzon do not pay so much attention to it as to the kampilan. In making the head they do not confine themselves to any special shape, but suit it to their piece of iron ; the shaft is always formed from the "pahna brava" {Corypha minor). The Formosan spear, three or four yards in length, has frequently a Chinese knife at its head ; in Borneo it takes the form, as we have seen, of a bayonet fastened on the blow-gun. In the northern Nicobar Islands, ornamental spears are found in the huts ; these are highly esteemed as marks of opulence but are never used. These spears are manufactured only in Chowra. Everywhere, away to Malacca, the national weapon is something between a hunting knife and a sword, though more recent than the bow, blow-gun, and arrow, for it is not found upon the sculptures of Parambanam, which reach down to the thirteenth century ; it has become closely interwoven with the life of these races. We meet with it, in a simple form, as the kampilan of the Ilongotes, who, though in other respects poor, are clever workers in iron and understand how to temper it. They generally ornament with gold wire the lower part of the one-edged, scarcely curved blades, while the end is fastened with wire to the brass-covered handle. To give a better grip this is bound with threads dipped in resin, the sheath is of wood, and consists of two pieces fastened together with broad bands of rush. The kampilan is attached to a belt of fine webbing worn over the shoulder or round the body. We notice an agreement in details which can have no doubt as to the common origin of these weapons. Whether it be the bols of the Igorrotes, or the mandan of the Dyaks, everywhere we find a one-edged, slightly curved blade with a broad back, a wooden hilt bound with wire, a wooden sheath, a cord to hang it by ; pretty inlaid work of brass and perforated pattern at the back, 2 E 4i8 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND richly carved hilt, and ornamented sheath complete the description. Hilts set with human teeth occur among the head-hunters, and here we also find the weapon finished off by a small sheath of bark attached to the lower side of the scabbard, containing a little knife with a long handle, with which the Dyak cuts off his victims' heads and strips the flesh from them. This appears also independently among the poorer inhabitants of the islands as a hunting and working knife, while wealthy and zealous head-hunters have half-a-dozen hanging on their walls as ornament. I The principal weapon among the Mussulman Malays is the wavy kriss, the national arm among the Sassaks of Lombok. The head-hunters test the sharp- Krisses : (i) from Celebes ; (2) said to be from Bali — one-fourth real size. (Munich Museum. ) ness of the edge, by preference, on the hair of their skins. Carved hilts orna- mented with gold and precious stones are among the most characteristic products of Malayan art industry, and one can trace upon them mythological themes gradually fading away into ornament. The flame-shaped damascened blade, the serpentine or dragon figures of the hilt, the decoration of the sheath, raise the kriss to the rank of a weapon closely allied with religious objects ; salutary texts are often engraved upon it ; in Wetter, a talisman wrapped up in rags is concealed in the scabbard. The Una, weapon and tool among the mountain tribes of Luzon, is a short, bluntly-triangular blade, broadest at the end, with the opposite edges convex and concave. In Java, crescent-shaped knives, with a handle fixed to the concave side, have been found in graves. Elsewhere, old knives have been found of a peculiar shape, with appendages resembling throwing knives. The Ifugaos of Luzon, who are equipped with spear, bow, and arrow, are said, on their head-hunting expeditions, to make use of the lasso, commonly employed in hunting the stag. Among the tribes that have received Indian influence, a great variety of pro- tective weapons is found. Wooden or wicker-work shields are to be mentioned DRESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER PROPERTY OF THE MALAYS 419 in the first instance ; the wooden shield is painted, covered with buffalo hide, or adorned with inlaid shell-work, especially in the Eastern Archipelago, in the Moluccas, and elsewhere. As we pass from group to group special forms appear ; thus, among the Ilongotes, the simple shield of light wood is deeply incurved above and below. It is dyed red with the juice of some plant, and adorned with carvings. Among the Dyak-like tribes in some part of Celebes, and in the north of Nias, it is heavy, of an elongated hexagonal shape, and almost as high as a man. It has a raised rib running throughout its length, and is painted on both sides with arabesques, mostly red. Occasionally, too, it is decorated with human hair; The inhabitants of the Talaut Islands have a narrow pattern of shield, prettily ornamented. Among the Alfurs of Ceram the shield is narrow in proportion to its bearer's claim to valour, and for every head which he cuts off he breaks a shell out of the shield, replacing it by a tuft of human hair. In the greater part of Nias the shield is lighter and of elegant shape ; this is chiefly used in hand-to-hand fighting ; another heavier kind, carried not with the fist but on the forearm, serves for covering. In Sulu also we find two shields, the smaller and most frequently carried, of circular or elliptic shape, covers only half the body, while the large shield forms a dagger from Borneo-one-fifth ^ ■' ' ° real size. (Roy. Mus. , Leyden. ) complete covering ; both are made of hard wood and often covered with buffalo -leather. Peculiar patterns are found in the Wetter shields made of cow-hide cut out into the form of a cross, and in those of Nanusa or Talaut with the narrow end shaped like a crocodile's head. (i) Sling and sheath of {2) Igorrote chopping-knife ; (3) Guinan hatchet, from Luzon — one-sixth real size. (From Dr. Hans Meyer's Collection. ) Armour of some sort, without being universal, occurs in all parts of the archipelago. In Sulu it is only the humblest class who are content with shields. 420 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Many persons wrap their bodies in a thick roll of cotton wadding ; others wear helmet and cuirass of buffalo-hide. Bastian mentions mail-coats of plaited string from Mandhar in the Moluccas, fastening at the back, and studded both before and behind with the broad ends of Conus and Trombus shells. In the Eastern Archi- pelago we find mail- vests of strong coco- nut fibre closely woven ; in Arru, upon hoops of rattan. Dyak head - hunters have them strengthened with iron rings as in woodcut on p. 423 ; and they also wear arrow -proof jackets, wadded with cotton, cuirasses thickly plated with the scales of the armadillo, and gorgets of buffalo - hide. The warrior's equipment is com- pleted by a basket or pouch of plaited work, which is carried on the back or the arm, and serves to receive food, flint and steel, and decapitated heads. ! The most con- spicuous peculiarity of the Malay house is that it is built on piles, as shown in our plate, "A Tagal Village." This style persists even in the European settlements.. At Padang, in Su- matra, the houses of European residents stand on piles a yard or two in height. On this account Banjermassing has been called the Venice of Borneo, as Palembang, on the River Musi, that of Sumatra. The most curious instance of this arrange- ment is the pile -built town of Kiluaru, on a little sandbank in the high sea between Ceramlaut and Kiser, where is an emporium of the trade of the Moluccas, and New Guinea. Igorrote and Guinan spears and shields — one-tenth real size. Dr. Hans Meyer's Collection. ) (From DRESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER PROPERTY OF THE MALAYS 421 That the motive of this style of building was protection against man and beast is shown by the decrease of pile-dwellings proportionately to the growth of public security. Thus, among the Milanos of Borneo, all the houses stood formerly on piles of hard wood, 40 feet high. Nowadays there is free intercourse among the dwellers by all the rivers, from the Rejang to the Bintulu, and the houses have come down to the earth, or at most a small space is left between the ground and the bamboo flooring. By the sea, however, and on the \ banks of the larger rivers, pile-dwell- \ ings retain their reason for existence, \V both as protection against floods and "^ swamps, and as facilitating the task \K of getting food from the water. In . W the Philippines there are houses of ,<>^ which the bamboo poles and wicker- \^> work are but little above the flood level of the water. These houses * are set close together, narrow passages alone running between the rows ; and the village straggles far along the shore. When we find Dyaks and Battaks building in the same style on high ground, we may assume that they formerly dwelt down by the rivers, and thus merely retained their accustomed fashion of building. But there is an even nearer reason in the security of the elevated posi- tion. When the tree-stem with the steps cut in it has been hauled up, the building is like a castle with the drawbridge raised ; and this, in ji a head - hunting country especially, must add materially to the safety ^S^^ of the domestic hearth. For addi- tional security the approaches consist ;H only of felled tree-stems. Among the objections to pile -building on dry land are want of cleanliness and defective stability. '^:nft^i^^ WeVL^o fS Defensible positions are every- (S) from Borneo. (Munich Museum, ) from from Men- Gorontalo ; 422 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND where selected with remarkable discrimination. Many of the kampongs or villages of the Sumatran Battaks, of the Ilongotes, and others, are placed upon almost inaccessible pinnacles. Favourite spots are the little plateaux formed by the broadening of a mountain ridge. But other defences are added. In the lower parts of the Battak country nearly all the kampongs were, in Jung- huhn's time, surrounded with high palisades, behind which watch-towers rose. Shield, blow-gun, spear, and swords of the Torabjas in Central Celebes — one-sixth real size. (Frankfort City Museum. ) Now all this has naturally disappeared wherever the Dutch government has put an end to internal fighting. Among the Battaks safe dwelling-places are also found at the point where a tree -stem forks or throws off branches ; the central shoot is lopped off, and the surrounding branches remain. The Ilongotes of Luzon erect at the tops of trees their forest-huts, made from the leaves of the nipa-^aXm and bamboo, and supported on tree-stems. Each of these DJiESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER PROPERTY OF THE MALAYS 423 little houses serves as a tranquil abode for a whole family. The Orang-Sakei and the Lubus of Sumatra also live to some extent in trees. The Ilongotes place prickly bamboo stems round their huts for security, stick sharp arrows in the ground, and make pit-falls, so that even a friend needs to announce his arrival some way off. Night and day sentries are posted. When Spanish troops are looking for a fugitive criminal, their approach is known long before, and if it is not desired to give the criminal up, nothing can be done ; they hide in the forest where bullets cannot reach them. The only thing is to burn their huts ; and these, says Schadenberg, are rebuilt in a day, as soon as the soldiers are gone. A further characteristic of Malay architecture is rhe steep roof, often 50 feet Mail-coats worn by the Dyaks of South-east Borneo. high, and coming far down. In the Alfur huts it comes down to the ground, and at the back side at once includes and shuts off the fire-place. It is a gable roof above a rectangular or square ground-plan. Round edifices are as scarce here as in Africa they are common. In Timor we find them oval, with conical roof ; in Tabelo there are octagonal huts ; in the Nicobars, dome-shaped roofs with angular substructure of stakes. In rectangular buildings the walls usually have an outward slope. The thatch is of palm leaves. In more elaborate houses, such as the out- buildings of chiefs' dwellings, the walls are prettily wattled with palm fibres. The gable end often bears buffalo-heads carved in wood, and other emblems, or inscribed tablets of the nature of amulets. In windy uplands the roofs are protected by poles from being blown off. \ The interior arrangements vary with the degree of civilization, and depend further upon the character of the dwelling — whether occupied jointly or severally, 424 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND whether the families occupy separate apartments or one in common. The Dyaks affect the long or village house, 80 or 90 yards in length, in which thirty or forty families live together, but in separate rooms ; while among the Battaks four to six families at most occupy one house, but they all live together in one room. The separation of the women's apartments is a peculiarity of the Dyaks, but unknown among the Battaks. The simple houses of the Mussulman Acheenese form an oblong square, containing only the most indispensable necessaries — one or two pots and pans, a few mats, and a sleeping-place shut off by a curtain, which in the better families is regarded as the owner's apartment. There are Malay utensils: (i) Comb from Timor; (2) Knife from the Philippines; (3) Sickle from Java; (4) Cow-bells from Sumatra ; (5) Brasier and rice-pot from Java ; (6) Basket from Celebes ; (7) Rice basket from Java, lor cooling steamed rice in the cover ; (8) Brass pipe of the Battaks. (Dresden Ethnographical Museum.) differences also in the fashion of building. The Battaks of Tobah build far more solidly than the Dyaks, with strong beams and mighty planks, putting much art and industry into the carving and painting of the woodwork. An outbuilding serves in its upper part to store rice, in the lower story as a place of sojourn during the day for certain people, also as a sleeping-place, and as a council-house. They even have verandahs on the narrow sides of their lofty houses. A house has to last until the children are grown up. Dyak house-building is rendered too easy by the gigantic development of the bamboo in their country. Throughout the archipelago plank houses are considered better than bamboo houses. In the huts baskets hang from the roof, and in the eastern islands the jaws of pigs and deer as ornament. Against the wall stands a great earthenware vessel, or a large DRESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER PROPERTY OF THE MALAYS 425 bamboo with the partitions of all knots except the last knocked out. Among the Battaks the strength of girls is measured by the number of such vessels they can bring from the spring to the house. The dwellings of people of importance are distinguished externally only by their circuit and height. The interior of the A house in Sumatra. (From a model in the Dresden Museum.) palace of a Moro chief in Mindanao is not divided by partitions ; mats and cushions lie in one corner, in another women and girls are occupied in peeling fruit, in another nets, hooks, and fishing-tackle are piled up, spears and krisses hang on the walls, and the middle space is the reception-room. Civilization is shown in Plough used by the Triamans of Bencoolen. (Dresden Museum. ) a few Stools, without backs, of bamboo wicker-work, for guests ; the Mores sit cross-legged upon the floor of bamboo poles. The furniture of a Dyak house, again, a mat or two, cooking pots and utensils round the hearth, which is placed at the entrance, would seem poor without the warlike finery of mandaus, spears, blow-guns, shields, and paddles, on the walls. A longitudinal partition of bamboo divides off the common living-room, which is also the sleeping-room of the youths 426 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND and unmarried men, the remainder is subdivided into smaller rooms according to the number of the married members of the family and the girls. In front of the door of the dwelling room is a platform. Light enters only through gaps in the bamboo wall. As a rule, no light burns at night for fear of attracting ghosts, but in emergencies candles of resin are lighted. Among the Vicols large shells with rush wicks serve as primitive lamps. Hagen says that among the Tobah Battaks he never saw any light save that of the hearth and the opium lamp. Among the shepherds of Java the practice of kindling fire by rubbing sticks is still found, but elsewhere it has among the civilized tribes been replaced by flint and touchwood. In Ternate they strike sparks upon tinder with a sherd of porcelain and a splinter of bamboo. Not only do the aquatic Malays pass the greatest part of their life on the un- certain element, but in the more thickly- peopled parts of the archipelago perman- ently-inhabited rafts lie at anchor beside the pile dwellings. Whether the custom be originally Chinese or not, it has quickly taken root among the Malays, who for months together carry rice, sago, and rattan down their sluggish rivers on rafts to market. Palembang has a whole suburb of this kind. Common houses called balei or baileo serve in many places as sleeping-places for unmarried men, sometimes as many as a hundred. Herein also are hung up the heads of slain persons and other trophies, while among the less savage Christians Agricultural implements used by the igorrotes • com-cobs, bulls' heads, and the like, take ^S)'^^'^r^'-$^^^r^^'^ P^^'^^' ^"'i f^^ti^^l^ ^re celebrated. Collection.) As a rule, they have either no walls at all, ,•-.,,., ^ or discontinuous walls. In Sumatra there a similar kind of common house where the head-men meet for consultation, ana travellers can pass the night; many of them are richly adorned with carved work. In front of the houses of the most respected inhabitants there hangs, under the roof of the ^«^«-shed, a tom-tom known as tabu, which is beaten on the occasion of festivals, accidents, and so on. In West Borneo this assembly house, where the young men sleep, takes the form which elsewhere is unfamiliar to the Malay style of a circle with a central hearth. The arrangement of the villages differs according to the civilization. Forest r. P?r^" f ^^""^ ^ tendency to isolated habitation, and accordingly in tne ^hihppines the single homestead or bario is distinguished from the village or rancherta. We find the forest nomads' dislike of the plains no less among the W egritos and Ilongotes of Luzon than among the Lubus of Sumatra. The Battaks, witn their highly developed terrace cultivation, can more easily remain in the DRSSS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER PROPERTY OF THE MALAYS 427 mountains than the Dyaks, with their passion for clearing a new rice-field every year or two. Yet even within narrow limits the position of the villages varies. In the Sindang and Roepit districts of Central Sumatra, the inhabited districts lie close to the mountains or actually among them. On the upper Ravas and its tributaries the mountain country is quite uninhabited ; the Tagals build almost solely by the water, the neighbouring tribes only in the mountains. The maritime Malays and Bugises have notably furnished the coast tracts and lowlands with a dense population of colonists. Since European dominion has spread over almost every district of the archipelago, the population has increased very much both in number and distribution. The extent of the villages holds no proportion to the number of the people, agriculture does not permit of the growth of large settle- ments. In general a good deal of land belongs to a house ; thus in Padang you must travel 2\ to 3 miles from the landing-place before reaching the last houses. The Igorrote rancheries of Luzon, in a mountain country with very extensive fields, seldom contain, according to Dr. Hans Meyer, more than 250 inhabitants. In the cities where Europeans have not represented the interests of sanitation, the Chinese and Further Indian system of packing together has prevailed. Agriculture among all the Malay tribes is primarily concerned with rice ; maize came, later into association with it in some districts — the Philippines, for instance — as the crop second in importance. The very breeding of cattle is connected with rice-farming, since the buffaloes work in the marshy fields. Even where cultivation is scanty, one always finds paddy-fields in the swampy bottoms. Elsewhere mountain-rice is grown on dry ground ; besides this crop the Ilongotes of Luzon live only on maize and edible roots. The nomad Lubus of Sumatra, too, grow rice and maize. In the eastern parts of the archipelago, onward from Borneo, sago is held in increasing esteem, until we find it the chief crop in the Moluccas and New Guinea. Beside this, tobacco is met with in the heart of Borneo, as well as among the mountain tribes of northern Luzon. Widely spread, also, are the sugar-palm {arenga), the sugar-cane, plantains, caladium, sweet potato, and tapioca. As a food-stuff the sweet potato stands close after rice. Palms, papaws, durians, and other fruit trees, make the villages in the cultivated parts of Formosa, Java, Sumatra, and Celebes, into verdant orchard-landscapes. Apart from European influence, the Battaks stand highest as agriculturists. The magnificent terrace-farming of the natives of Java, Bali, and Lombok, though in great measure of Indian origin, has only its present high development under Dutch rule. The Battaks in the highlands of Sumatra even use a plough, the share of which, a straight, rather narrow, iron blade, is set in a wooden handle. There is a simple pole with a wooden yoke for one or two buffaloes. The Tobah Battaks claim to have invented this plough ; at any rate, they had all the essentials for it. A similar plough in South Celebes, where Wallace saw also a rude wooden barrow in operation, has the share of hard palm-wood. For breaking the clods the Battaks use a wooden club. In former times the Battaks devoted themselves to agriculture on a more extended scale ; wide tracts of cleared forest- land indicate their places of abode in Sumatra. Now, however, they are in fact more stationary than the Dyaks, although they carry on cattle-breeding as well. In some districts they also manure the fields, carrying dung to them in baskets, or leading. the drainage from the cow-houses over the land. In the eastern archipelago there is no such practice. 428 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Quite apart from the plantation of coffee, tea, sugar-cane, and spices, — which the Dutch have made compulsory upon the Javanese, and the people of Padang and the fruitful Minahassa country, as the Spaniards have done in the Philippines in regard to tobacco, Manilla hemp, and cacao, — we find that the indigenous agricul- ture, and above all that of rice, shows marked gradations. It had obviously, even before the European time, perhaps even before the Indian time, been greatly advanced by reason of a higher civilization in the Western Archipelago. Java, Sumatra, and the Philippines, in which sixty different species of rice are known, stand higher in this respect than the rest of the islands. Battaks and Dyaks live mainly by agriculture ; but among the Battaks the rice is grown in fields laid out artificially in terraces, and irrigated by means of long water-leats ; while the Dyaks, owing to deficient irrigation, have to lay out new fields every two years Hoes from (i) Singapore ; {2) Sumatra — one-fourth real size. (Munich Museum.) in grubbed-up forest-land. And yet the Battaks do not represent the highest point attained ; this is found in the remote little-visited Nias Archipelago, off the coast of Sumatra, which was probably colonised by the Battaks. Among the Tinguians and Igorrotes of Luzon, rice farming stands at a high level, with its arrangement for flooding the ground, and dams against inundations. It is most meagre in the east, where it comes into contact, as in Timorlaut, with the more popular sago gathering. Hard labour does not end with the harvest. The daily task of the women begins with the pounding of the rice, which is kept in the husk. Even before sunrise it can be heard far and wide, like thrashing with us ; and as with us the village pump is the centre of gossip and jokes, so here is the rice-pounding. The mortars are pieces of tree-stem placed upright ; the pestles, heavy spars of wood, perhaps i o feet in length ; but occasionally rice is pounded in holes made in the rock. Afterwards the rice is cleansed by winnowing in four- cornered troughs of wood. The man does not, as a rule, begin his day's work till after his first meal, which takes place at 7 or 8 o'clock ; but on an emergency, he may have already done a couple of hours' work in the paddy field. In the Dyak villages of South-east Borneo, the scene becomes lively every morning BJiESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER PROPERTY OF THE MALAYS 429 about 7 o'clock, where men, women, and half-grown boys go out fully armed to work. Here, besides rice, maize, sugar-cane, and plantains are grown in gardens near the houses. At sunset they return, the men bearing firewood, the women the produce of the fields ; and the latter have then to set to work at pounding rice and filling the bamboo water-vessels. Only old persons, and those who are occupied in house or boat-building, remain at home. Rice-growing demands much toil. The sowing is done upon rafts covered with earth, which keep the germs constantly moist ; then the young plants are transferred to the fields, the hoeing of which forms an im- portant branch of the woman's labour. A more diiificult task is the protection of the fields against the depredation of wild swine and rats. Beside the mandau, with which brushwood is cleared and straw cut, a great instrument of agriculture is the hoe. The iron blade is fastened by sinews or bark thongs wrapped cross- wise into a stock of hard wood, which often forms its means of attachment to the long curved handle, frequently ornamented. The women work with a small knife, and the Igorrotes reap their rice stalk by stalk with a little sickle-shaped knife. Resin is collected for stopping chinks in wooden boxes, and for the preparation of torches ; gutta- percha, and wax from wild bees' nests ; in some districts also edible birds' nests. Rattan is also cut,an indispensable material in hut and boat-building, and in the manufacture of many articles of furniture ; so much coveted too, as an article of trade, that the chiefs of Borneo had a monopoly of it. What rice is to the Western Malays, sago is to the Eastern. Even m ^orth Borneo it is the chief produce of the Milanos. The palm forests are communal property, and felling the sago palm may only be performed m pursuance of a communal resolution. The stem is split with a sword, the pith cut out with a hoe, and broken small with a stone club. Leaves stitched together form the bucket ; cylindrical leaf-stalks, placed one below another, make a system of washing taps ; and a sieve is made of bast. In Ceram, one man can in this way prepare in a Battak hoes from Sumatra— one-seventh real size. (Leipzig Museum of Ethnology. ) 43° THE HISTORY OF MANKIND month so much sago that the half of it will keep him for a year, and with the rest he can buy knives and finery. The surplus of East Ceram provides for a whole number of neighbouring islands. Wallace calculates the cost of a man's victuals in this land of sago at twelve shillings a year. Harvest festivals hold a prominent position — among many tribes the most prominent. The Maanjans of Borneo offer sacrifices so soon as the first rice is ripe. Some of it is sent into the village ; a fowl is killed ; the whetstone and Javanese buffalo-cart. (From a photograph. ) other implements of field-work are symbolically fed, and a small carouse is held. In every house a fowl or a pig is sacrificed, when, at the November planting- season, a little bird called sinrik (probably a kind of wagtail), which goes north in April, first reappears ; it is regarded as the messenger of the good spirits. To cattle-breeding, nature has drawn narrow limits ; nor are the Malays (to whom we can safely attribute, as their original domestic animals, only pigs, fowls, and dogs, with the subsequent though early addition of buffaloes), save with few exceptions, a cattle-breeding race. Even those who have cattle and horses in plenty, as in Tobah, plough only with buffaloes. It may be said that only the Battaks devote much industry to their herds of cows, buffaloes, and pigs ; though even they do not in most places milk either cows or buffaloes. In recent times, however, the breeding of oxen has increased in Bali ; while the ponies and cavalry horses of Tobah have for some time formed an article of export from Sumatra BJiESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER PROPERTY OF THE MALAYS 431 and Sumba. Buffaloes are kep{ for the sake of the rice farms, even where there are no oxen. In addition to pigs, fowls, and dogs, with an occasional stumpy- tailed cat, which form the main stock of domestic animals, goats are found in the highlands. Some Dyak and Philippine tribes breed dogs for food, and the Igorrotes are said to do the same by horses. With the Tagals, the Balinese, and the Sassaks, duck-rearing is an important business ; but there must be some mis- understanding about the tale told of the Malays of Malacca, that their women suckle monkeys, fatten them, and eat them. Besides, the inhabitants of the animal-frequented forest regions are very fond of domesticable animals. A result of this abundance of animals is that every large island possesses its hunting tribes. Bezoary stones, rhinoceros ri ^,„„,=-^^^^M. hornb, tigers' galls, are by Malay, and still '^Slr^lL^Cr^B=!>«>^"'^ ^^^ moie b)' Chmese superstition stamped as (i) Wooden tureen and spoon from Luzon— one-third real size. (From Dr. Meyer's Collection) ; (2) Sumatran saddle. {Dresden Museum. ) valuable elements in magic apparatus. For the larger hunting parties, several families combine. The great nets of abaca (Manilla hemp), ten yards long by one and a half wide, are stretched between the trees, so that the game when driven may take one direction, where the hunters are ambushed with javelins, arrows, and dogs. They have no lack of pluck ; Beccari knew a tiger-hunter who had by himself brought down fourteen head. But in the cultivated regions of Java and Luzon there are agricultural tribes who know almost nothing of the chase. The Malays are masters in the art of setting traps. Six several kinds of Dyak traps have been described by Skertchly as bridges or platforms, arches, gangways. Many traps have two falls, which drop simultaneously, so that the tiger can neither get out nor reach the bait. Others are of the nature of walled pits, widening to the bottom. For the capture of the savage Carabao buffalo, the Ilongotes bend a stout branch, and by means of rattan twigs form it into a lasso trap. Even the poor Negritos of East Luzon own sporting dogs. Birds are caught with nets and limed twigs ; and among the 432 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Maanjans of Borneo, during the rainy season, almost the whole time of a man is taken up in catching a small but savoury parrot, Palceornis longicauda, in arranging the decoy bird, weaving cages, and preparing the bird-lime. The Bugises pursue the stag on horseback in thoroughly sportsmanlike style. Fishing is carried on with hooks, creels, spears, nets — -though these are avoided in the neighbourhood of coral reefs — and also with stupefying drugs. Dried, smoked or salted fish, form a great article of trade, especially in the Philippines ; and fishing- grounds are often let by the chiefs at a high rent. Deep-sea fishing is carried on by the Malays of the coast ; who also devote themselves to turtle-catching and the gathering of edible birds' nests and trepang. On the Andamans, where only Cyrena is now eaten, the shell -heaps or " kitchen -middens" contain Area and oyster-shells. Vegetable food preponderates — rice in the west, sago elsewhere. Fish comes next ; meat is by many persons eaten only on festive occasions. Owing to their preference of a shore life, sea products, even down to star -fish, are a favourite Beside the Mussulman laws as to feeding, there are ancient indigenous Dish-cover of armadillo scales from Sumatra- tenth real size. (Stockholm Museum. ) probably, as among Australians and food. rules, not accurately known, which Polynesians, are connected with tribal organisation. Thus the Mandangos of Borneo will not eat game. The Tagals are said to have learnt from the Chinese to eat eggs that have been sat upon, with the chick in them, as tit-bits. Betel chewing is found all over this region. In well- to-do houses it is reckoned as a courtesy to set before the visitor the elegant lane- jang or case for the imple- Dish-cover from South-east Borneo (Stockholm Museum. ) ments required for this pur- pose. It may be unknown in some out-of-the-way parts, but it is far more general than tobacco^ smoking, which is forbidden to the Bajus, and is not practised in the island of Ceram. The Tagals, however, and nearly all Mussulman Malays, are passionately fond of tobacco. " Hubble-bubbles " are made in Borneo with a small piece of hard ironwood, the water to cool the smoke being placed in a bamboo. In Luzon, the tobacco-pipes are made after the DRESS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER PROPERTY OF THE MALAYS 433 Chinese pattern, to hold a plug of tobacco not larger than a bean. In the interior of Borneo, of the outer Moluccas, and of Timor, the tobacco plant is cultivated without European intervention such as has made Luzon, Java, and Sumatra into headquarters of tobacco growing ; and everywhere tobacco is a coveted article of commerce. The Dyaks fill great cornets of green plantain-leaf with fine-cut tobacco ; and it is, as a rule, the business of the women to smoke these cigars. When the laborious task is accomplished, the remainder is moistened with saliva and made into balls of the size of a pigeon's egg. Opium smoking has been so widely disseminated by the Chinese, that in 1893 the Dutch colonial government (i) Bamboo betel and tobacco boxes from West Sumatra — one-third real size. (Munich Museum.) (a) Igorrote spindle — one-third real size. (From Dr. Meyer's Collection.) drew 18,500,000 guilders for the sale and farming of the drug, more than 90 per cent of which came from Java and Madura. Even among the Battaks, opium smoking is beginning to produce an enervating effect. On the other, betel chewing is on the increase among the Chinese. Spirituous drinks existed originally only in limited measure. Palm wine was indeed largely in use, and slightly alcoholic drinks from rice or sugar-cane ; but over large districts, as in Borneo or Sumatra, one seldom sees the natives drink anything but coco-nut milk or water. These races do not make much use of coffee, but prefer an infusion of coffee leaves. The Chinwans of Formosa brew a fermented drink from rice or millet ; the yeast being replaced by rice meal which has been chewed by an old woman. The Malay races are acquainted with the use and preparation of iron, though 2 F 434 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Tobacco pipes used by the Igorrotes and Guinans of Luzon- size. (Dr. Meyer's Collection. ) -two-thirds real cast. at the present day much foreign iron is worked in their countries, and the iron spear, as among the exile tribes of Luzon, is a weapon of luxury. In the Dyak country, famous for its weapons, Bock could nowhere see a mine or a smelting furnace,^ nor could he suggest whence the raw material for the weapons was actually brought. In Sumatra deserted ironworks are known, though to-day the Battaks work none but foreign iron. In Menang- kabau, on the other hand, iron is smelted in furnaces two yards high and three wide; there gun-barrels are welded and cannon Iron and copper ores are worked by the application of iire. In Ban- jermassing and Palembang, there is a large and flourishing manufacture of arms, the iron for which is fetched by prefer- ence from Celebes and Timor. This rivals in its damascened blades the most renowned workshops of the East. For damascen- ing, a special quality of iron is imported into Borneo, for example, from Celebes, and the processes of welding it with common iron and of etching are executed with the greatest care. The Malays of Sarawak, in Borneo, also are clever workers in iron, and no less those of the south-east coast, where Nagara is the seat of great arsenals. In Brunei and Sarawak, brass and gold are likewise wrought. The Battaks are cleverer at copper than at iron work, in which even the savage Dyaks surpass them. The Igorrotes formerly carried on copper mining actively, the mining claims being strictly delimited. The inhabitants of Banca do not understand how to prepare ^ [Schwaan, however, appears to have seen the process.] Carved wooden sirih box from Deli, East Sumatra- (From a drawing. ) -one-fourth real size. l>Ji£SS, WEAPONS, AND OTHER PROPERTY OF THE MALAYS 435 iron, while their next neighbours are familiar with the process. The manipu- lation of the bellows, made of bamboo tubes on the system of the double pump, is the same as in India and Africa ; but, besides this, Dr. Hans Meyer saw in an Igorrote smithy a bellows consisting of two hollowed tree -stems, with pipes opening on the ground. For instruments Martens found in a Malay smithy in Borneo, hammer, chisel, gouge, and axe, but not pincers. For hammers and axes the iron is fixed in the wooden handle with nothing but split rattan ; and for the handle a branching piece is selected, the iron being fixed in the main branch cut off short, while the some- what weaker side-bough serves as handle. Gold was obtained plentifully in the archipelago in pre- (i) Malay loom (from a photograph) ; (2) Sack carried by the Igorrotes of Luzon— one-eighth real size. (Dr. Meyer's Collection.) European times. The Malays of the western islands like to use gold in the most various ornaments ; even among the Battaks clever gold and silver smiths make filigree. Beside damascening they practise the overlaying of the steel, when hot, with gold, which is then impressed. In Amboyna and Buru, the words for gold and silver are Javanese ; so that these metals would appear to have been brought hither in later times from the west. Spinning and weaving are very common. Distaff and spindle resemble their European kindred. Even the Dyaks make excellent cloth from cotton on the simple upright loom, which, put together from a few sticks, leans at an angle against the wall of the house. The Battaks even know how to weave in gold threads. But the work demands much time. Wallace estimates the progress made in weaving a narrow sarong by a countrywoman in South Celebes at one inch per diem. In Surabaya and Macassar there is a great textile industry which is connected with artistic dyeing. The patterns are left colourless and drawn upon with liquid wax {batik industry) ; or the cloths have pieces of banana-leaf sewn upon them, and are artfully folded, the whole being dipped in various dyes ; so 436 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND that astonishing designs result. Java furnishes the black sarongs which the genuine Malay loves ; Macassar, coloured cloth ; Padang, the skndjangs or shawls with their charming patterns, often stitched with gold and silver threads, which the women use as head-coverings. Plaited baskets, pouches, and hats from the fibre of pandanus or certain palms reach even the markets of Europe. The " manilla- hemp " or abaca {Musa textilis), was cultivated in Luzon before Europeans came. Bark stuffs, the use of which has much decreased in the last century, are prepared especially by tribes in Sumatra and Borneo ; while the stuffs of Celebes attain the perfection of the Polynesian tapa, as thin as paper. The Malayan tapa is thick, more like leather or tinder. All Malays make pottery, but without special aptitude. Some make the vessels of clay, hollowed out and worked with a piece of metal. As a rule they are insufficiently burnt, and the things remain soft. Yet in some places there are great tileries and potteries. Among the Igorrotes, according to Hans Meyer, pottery seems to be the only handicraft, besides smith's work, that is carried on in a business-like way. The procelain cups and vases of China and Japan are highly valued. Vessels of bamboo stand to earthenware pots in the position of less perishable domestic utensils, and they do quite well to boil rice in. The Igorrotes have remarkable wooden platters with a large cavity for the food and a smaller for the salt. Tabelo has a speciality of making coco-nut oil. There are real industrial centres, where one industry has begotten another. Thus Nagara, on the south-east coast of Borneo, has a reputation for its manufac- ture of weapons, and at the same time for its pottery, its shipbuilding, and its mat-weaving. Ilocos is distinguished for its cloth, which provides northern Luzon with its " Ilocos mantles." But all tribes are not equally active in trade ; among the Battaks and other Sumatrans it is left to the women ; while the Lubus are quite passive. The great development of seafaring limits the area of internal trade. Since there are few navigable rivers, and beasts of burden are little used, everything is carried, almost exclusively by women, in open carrying-frames of rattan, in water- tight baskets, or in sack-like wallets supported by a band round the forehead ; whether homeward from the fields or to market. The trade is principally barter. Even in the remote parts of Central Borneo, and on the Tobah Plateau, the larger villages have their weekly markets in the open air — a combination of business and cock-fighting. They begin early, and are over long before noon. In many districts the market-days succeed each other in a regular order from place to place. These countries, at any rate in so far as they have felt Indian influence, must at some time have had better roads than the " mouse-tracks " of to-day ; otherwise the grand buildings of Java and Sumatra would be inconceivable. With Dutch influence, Dutch money is mostly current in Malay regions ; but the Battaks of the highlands recognise only the genuine Spanish peso ; on the frontier, however, we find also the Mexican. In Lombok, only Chinese coppers are taken in payment. Besides these, gold coins are in demand for purposes of ornament ; English sovereigns from the Australian mint fetch flfteen guilders in Borneo. The cleverness of the Malays in counterfeit coining points perhaps to Chinese training. THE MALAY FAMILY, COMMUNITY, STATE A37 § 19. THE MALAY FAMILY, COMMUNITY, STATE Courtship and wedding — Various kinds of bride-purchase — Wedding ceremonies — Position of the wife — The family and the tribe — Exogamy and polygamy — Forms of kinship — Birth and bringing-up — Political import- ance of the tribe — Sukus and similar institutions — The State : prevalence of small independent communities ; despotism or anarchy? — Examples of the sovereign's position in Acheen and Sulu — Preponderance of village aristocracy — Chiefs insignia — Political conditions in Bali — Landownership — Slavery — Colonisation — International relations — War and peace — Head- hunting ; its psychological and historical motives — Cannibalism — Legal matters ; law and penalties ; ordeals ; secret societies ; the Pamali, Fadi, or Fosso — Death and burial — Funeral ceremonies. Among the Malay tribes marriage is based almost entirely on purchase, and the wife is often called " the bought one." Where the number of women admits of it, polygamy is customary, if only as being encouraged by Islam, which is fast gaining ground. Yet among all the simpler tribes people are content with one wife, and here and there the polygamist allows himself one wife in his own village and others abroad. Exogamy and inheritance by the mother are represented, but admit of exceptions, — cases in which ignorance or disregard of marriage are due to insufficient observation. In Luzon, parts of Borneo, and Sumatra the purchase of a bride is a simple affair; the Ilongote youth has to serve in the house of the bride and to provide pigs and fowls for the wedding feast. A Lubu used to give the bride's father a blow-gun with quiver and arrows, the principal weapons of that people, and in addition offered a dog or, if he wished to do it in style, a pig for the banquet. Now instead of this it is a fowl, a measure of rice, and a small sum in money ; besides this the bridegroom has to assist his father-in-law for a certain period in his work. It is otherwise in places where distinction of ranks and capital have created wider demands. The price paid among people of the middle class in Halmahera amounts to eighty Dutch guilders, among rich people in Timorlaut even to one thousand. Besides this, weapons and dishes, in other places cattle, in Sulu even boats, cannons, and slaves are presented. In order that the wife may retain a certain amount of dependence, it is occasionally thought polite to leave a small part of the sum unpaid, but more often the wife defrays the cost of the marriage and the husband gives a present, in which case both sides are equal ; or else the man gives nothing at all, and thereby passes into a state of dependence on the wife's family— in the island of Nias even into a kind of debt-slavery. All these varieties of marriage are found in Menangkabau ; the Battaks have the first and last form, but among the Lampongs of Sumatra the last is regarded as disgraceful. Divorce shows corresponding differences ; if much has been paid for the bride the wife has to buy back the children ; but a fixed sum of twenty-five to one hundred guilders is also agreed upon in presence of witnesses before the marriage, and this, in the event of divorce, has to be paid by the guilty party. The most decisive ground for separation is sterility. The great importance attached to marriage by purchase is, among the more progressive and richer tribes, the cause of such conspicuous incongruities that so long as one hundred years ago it was indicated as the most fertile source oi litigation. In Menangkabau it is possible to exchange a daughter-in-law tor a daughter. By paying the difference she can be given in marriage by those to 438 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND whom she has been tjransferred as though she had been their own daughter. If the wife goes to her husband he is liable to answer for her in every respect, while she loses the right of inheritance in her own family ; if, as is the more usual case, the man goes to the wife, her family has to answer for her. The father is indeed bound to provide for his children under age ; but since they do not inherit from him, they are not responsible for his debts, and without the consent of his future heirs he can make them no presents except clothing. If the sum which is demanded for the bride appears to the bridegroom's friends exorbitant, while at the same time there is mutual inclination, they carry the bride off. The parents go out with arms to seek her, but after executing a mimic fight, they come to an agreement about the sum to be paid as indemnity or jujur. This is subsequently alleged in public from motives of ostentation to have been higher than it actually was. Many customs bear the stamp of the notion that the wife is the husband's property ; thus the Rejangs, when escorting the bride from the paternal house, tread on her big toe. Corruptions of marriage such as are certain to come about under these con- ditions are met with especially among some Dyaks of Borneo.- ^ The immorality of the priestesses in no way prejudices their chances of marriage ; among the Alfurs of the coast of Ceram recognised prostitution exists, and the young girls, called dojaro, have a captain over them. There is an important traffic in the much sought-after girls of Nias from Padang to Chinese places and to Acheen. The ease with which Malay women form transitory alliances with foreigners has borne its part in their rapid fusion with strangers. Nearly all the so-called Chinese women in Banca are half breeds from Malayan mothers. Exogamic marriage is very general. In the hill country of Padang no man marries in his own suku, or among the Battaks in his own marga. Similarly in Nias, Ceram, Buru, and Timor, the intending bridegroom is bidden to go outside his tribe. Inheritance through the mother is a frequent concomitant. Among the Padang Malays the child always belongs to its mother's suku, and all blood-relationship is reckoned through the wife as the real transmitter of the family ; the husband being only a stranger. For this reason his heirs are not his own children but the children of his sister, his brothers, and other uterine-relations ; children are the natural heirs of their mother only. Traces of this system are to be found among the Rejangs and Battaks of Sumatra. It is, however, to be observed that this everywhere applies to regular marriage only ; in such connec- tions as partake of the nature of concubinage the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, as might be expected, holds good. We may assume that wherever exogamy is now found co-existing with inheritance through the father (as among Rejangs and Battaks, the people of Nias and Timor, or the Alfurs of Ceram and Buru) this was formerly through the mother ; and that the other system has grown up out of dislike to the inconveniences arising from the insecure and dependent position of the husband in the wife's family. With inheritance through the father is connected the custom of marrying a brother's widow. For if the wife has become incorporated in her husband's family, it is they who have to look after her when she is a widow. Hence in Rejang there was a chief with seven wives, five of whom were the widows of his deceased brothers. The order of succession to the father is, first the children — of whom in Halmahera the eldest takes the household furniture, the younger the landed property — then THE MALAY FAMILY, COMMUNITY, STATE 439 brothers, sisters, nephews, and nieces. In this system the wife comes off worst. Having been purchased, she cannot inherit from her husband ; while, by leaving her paternal home, she has given up all claims upon it, and cannot inherit these either. Hence exogamy and patriarchate as a rule imply the exclusive succession of the male relations by blood. Courtship is often quite free, prompted by purely human sentiment, and without words ; though business considerations sometimes claim a place. In Sulu the bride is often offered for sale. In Halmahera the lads used to intimate their feelings to the girls at the festival dances, by appropriating some of the flowers or feathers which decked their heads. The right of the stronger pre- vailed here, and no young man attended the feast without sword and shield ; but here too the age is grown more peaceable. A few nights afterwards the fortunate wooer will go with his solepa, or one-stringed guitar, to the house where the maiden of his choice is sleeping, and standing outside by the wall, will perform his serenade. At first the tune expresses a modest entreaty ; then, if affection springs up, the melody changes, and he prays the maiden to twist him an arm-ring of bark. -On her side, she requests him to cut her out a piece of paper wherewith to adorn her betel-box ; and with that the suit is formally introduced. But the youth may neither see the maiden of his choice nor make any more advances ; the penalty for so doing would be a heavy fine, or obhgation to marry at once under conditions imposed by her relations. If the courtship is to be published, the girl is awakened some evening by a friend of her suitor's, who either pulls her hair or introduces his finger-nail under hers. This happens again the next evening, but this time the suitor has come too. He sits modestly on the floor behind the door of her bedroom ; she conceals herself in token that his request is granted. The rest light torches and go about as though searching for thieves. When the suitor is discovered, they invite him to chew betel with them. If he acts upon their invitation, the maiden is lost to him ; so he remains sitting with bowed head. This process is repeated on the two following evenings ; not till the fourth does the wedding festivity begin with the offer of betel, which again is surrounded with a mass of ceremonies. In Timorlaut the whole courtship has shrunk into a demand for betel, and the presentation of that highly-esteemed luxury. If the maiden grant the youth's request for sirih, his suit is heard, and the two live in a state of probationary association till the dowry is settled. Wedding festivities vie in pomp and duration with those which accompany funerals. The feast is held in the bride's house ; the best pig is sacrificed where the family is heathen, and the guests invoke celestial protection to chase ^ away evil spirits. At Rau on the west coast of Sumatra, where the wedding is got through in one day, the bridegroom, before asking for the bride's hand, makes three ceremonial evening calls in company with his friend, the lady receiving him with hers. The guests present jzWA and are entertained, while bridegroom and bride converse in poetry to the accompaniment of a tambourine. The mother-in-law does not appear till the third occasion, and then bride and bridegroom eat off the same plate, the lady putting the food to the gentleman's mouth. Then, and not till then, is the object of the visit declared ; and if this is done in m- sufficiently clear terms, it means that the gentleman wishes to withdraw his suit. Among the Maanjans of Borneo, people go on the wedding day, often with presents, to the bride's house, to ask if the bridegroom may draw near. Then 440 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND he advances with his relations, a copper dish being borne before them. This is placed upon another, whereon lies an egg which is broken and mingled with the blood of a hen or pig killed over the dish. After the banquet the happy pair are smeared with the mixture. This smearing, which is the operative part of the ceremony, is performed with a piece of silver or iron. It begins at the soles of the feet, proceeding in order to the knees, the pit of the stomach, the hands, elbows, shoulders, breast, forehead, and spine, a special form of words being used to avert bad luck or bring good. The young pair remain nine days in the bride's house, five with the parents of the bridegroom ; then he either begins to build a new house, or goes to one belonging to his father or mother. Among the Trings the young man, after his present has been accepted, works for some time for the father of his intended, and then gives her two slaves. A third present of rice, fowls, and pigs, is made to the mother-in-law immediately before marriage. Here too the couple sit near the copper dish and are smeared with the blood of a victim ; on the second day they bathe together in public, and on the fourth they go, holding a piece of rattan as a symbol of life, in search of an edible fruit, from which, when it is dressed, they ascertain their- destiny. Here and there the bride likes to hide herself to make a show of aversion to wedlock, or to seeing the bridegroom for the first night after marriage, or to being caught asleep, together with her kinsfolk, by the bridegroom on the wedding-day. Among the Alfurs of Halmahera the young man spends four nights with his bride without speaking of the marriage. When the dowry is arranged he sleeps in her room, but is not allowed a sight of her before the dawn. During this period presents and return presents and porcelain dishes pass to and fro, brought by deputations from the kinsfolk and friends, and on every occasion there is great festivity. The bridegroom is entitled to seize the bride, but he avoids doing so, as though the custom had fallen into disrepute. The concluding ceremony of betrothal consists in the preparation of a meal by the bride with a ceremonial form of words. Where the custom has been brought into harmony with Islam little is expected, at most a visit to the mosque on the wedding-day and a small tribute for the priest, all subsequent marriages being simply purchase. In Timorlaut, a boy and a girl, as symbols of the blessings of offspring, are placed between the couple at the wedding feast, while among the Tinguians of Luzon a boy sleeps the first night between the newly married pair. The position of women is in general by no rneans low ; among Mussulmans indeed she is less well off than among the heathens. Writing of Timorlaut, Riedl says, " The husband never beats the wife ; it is quite the other way." There are variations also in this, but in all respects the woman is highly valued ; in the blood-tariffs many a woman is valued higher than a man, the proportion among the Rejangs of Sumatra being as 150 to 80 ; only the highest chiefs are superior to their wives. The purchase money of a bride is accordingly no cheap business ; if marriage was a mere matter of purchase, the wife would become the husband's property, and after his death she and her children would become the property of his heirs. The social position of the wife is raised where both sides bear the cost of the wedding, and it is best of all where the marriage is concluded on the basis of ambil anak. Here indeed the husband pays nothing, but is liable to render service and has no right to the children. This method was chiefly in use when only one daughter remained of a family and the family had to be preserved THE MALAY FAMILY, COMMUNITY, STATE 441 through her marriage, but it gave rise to so much litigation that it was forbidden among the Rejangs. Connected with the varying ratio that prevails between marriage by purchase and social position is the higher position of the woman which we find among the Maanjans of Borneo, among whom no betrothal is concluded before the youth and the maiden are agreed. The young man, however, does not pay any dowry, his expenses consisting of a few guilders paid to the witnesses, of which the bride contributes half. Female sovereigns occur among the Dyaks, but only in isolated cases. Very little weight can be attached to the appearance of women in popular legends as founders of dynasties, it is merely the cosmogonic idea of the earth as the original ' mother. Priestesses in the same way are the mainstay of the most immoral customs ; we cannot look for any enhancement of the dignity of the female sex in their position. But we may account among the signs of woman's higher position the heavy penalties with which adultery was visited before the time of the disintegrating influence of Islam and Europe. Among the Acheenese the wife's relations make a circle around the guilty man and give him a weapon wherewith he may make his way out ; if he succeeds in doing so he is all right, if not he is hewn in pieces and buried on the spot. By the laws of the Rejangs heavy fines were inflicted for concubinage, illegitimate births, and even births following too soon after the conclusion of the marriage ; a similar disposition pre- vailed in Celebes. Foreign influence has caused adultery to be lightly regarded among the Tagals of Luzon, but the Igorrotes who remained untouched by it severely punished indiscretion on the part of girls, and beheaded adulteresses, though now, according to Hans Meyer, they take a more lenient view of the offence. In Sulu the Spaniards saw adulteresses put in irons for life. The death of the husband does not merely set the wife free ; in Sahu she can even leave her children to the husband's brother and re-enter her own family. As regards the division of labour between the sexes, the wife helps her husband in field-work while the house-work falls to her sole share ; in the former, however, the man takes the hardest part, while reaping is more the wife's business. The rule is observed here that the more laborious a race the fairer is the division of labour. Before the birth of a child the mother has to observe manifold rules involving the interpretation of omens and the choice of days. Neither she nor the father may look at a mirror nor into a bamboo tube, as otherwise the child will squint ; they must not break up tobacco or sirih in the betel bag, but before doing so take them out. Even the men may not work at a house, nor roof it, nor drive nails in, nor go in at a door, nor up a ladder, otherwise the child may not be born. Old women assist at the birth, which often takes place in a hut far from the dwelling ; then begin the preparations for naming. Among the Dyaks, so far as they are still head-hunters, the father must first take a head ; among the Ilongotes the name is not given till the fifth day, in Sahu hot till the ninth year. Beast names occur recalling those of the tribes. The father gives the name, and especially in places where the soul of an ancestor is deemed to exist in the child ; then the father also assigns this ancestral name to himself At the birth of a second son he takes his name also, so that the more sons the more names. Infanticide is common, and is specially practised in regard to the second born of a pair of twins. Entry upon adult age is denoted among some Dyaks by the seclusion in a 442 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND forest house of those who have attained that time of life, also by circumcision or the adoption of the bark belt. After this the youth has his place in the bachelors' sleeping-house, and is bound to take a head as soon as may be. Separate sleeping- houses for girls and youths are very common. Other signs of maturity are tattooing and teeth-filing. Boys practise themselves with bow and arrow, and, among the head-hunters, in decapitating straw dummies. Even where weapons are no longer used by grown-up people, as is the case with the bow in Java, they remain ' as children's playthings. Among the tribes that have grown up in a state of nature, as is well known, only warlike excellence is inculcated. Girls pass the period of their first maturity in huts apart ; in Ceram, in cages. Among the Alfurs of that island they are then, after washing and adorning themselves, anointed with palm- oil, and made to bite off a piece of banana and fish, which they spit out again. Teeth-filing and tattooing frequently take place at this time ; or, if neglected, the omission is retrieved at the first pregnancy. Girls as well as youths are distinguished from the married people by a ring of white shell on the upper arm. Among the Western Malays the girls are kept more strictly than in the East. In the former region they are accompanied by duennas, while in the latter they usually go about at liberty, especially at the feasts, with their general dances. Thus among the Alfurs of Halmahera almost every engagement may be traced to the lengthy dances at funeral feasts. The Battak girl will bathe tranquilly and composedly before men, who cast down their eyes as they pass ; but to a genuine Mussulman Malay this would be the height of disgrace. The basis of the state is the family tie, any developments which extend beyond this betray their unspontaneous character by indications of foreign origin, or by their constant tendency to break up again into the old patriarchal elements. In spite of the depth to which Indian influences have penetrated, strict caste distinctions do not exist. In Sumatra the old Malay state is built up from the sukus, that is the families and septs which together compose a tribe, and of which the heads or pangulus, also called pangkarans, rule the land. As many sukus as there are in a village, so many pangulus ; and the whole country side is ruled by the pangulus of its villages in meeting assembled ; as a rule, the dignity passes to the uterine brother or the sister's son. The chief function of these headmen is judicial. Besides marks of respect and obedience, they receive a tribute of rice and presents on festive occasions. The cost of their wedding and funeral is borne by their subjects ; they can only be deposed for gross violations of law and tradition. The origin of the sukus, the name of which — meaning a quarter — is hardly suitable to their great number, remains obscure. But a legend relates that the people of Tanah-Datar were composed of two tribes which divided into four branches. Later, when the population increased, many sukus were distinguished by separate names ; now there are, as a rule, four to six in one village. Next above the suku, as a larger subdivision of the people, comes the lara, the position of which is not completely explained as given in historic legend. Perhaps it must be referred to mutual exogamic marriage between two sukus. Organisa- tion in pairs is frequently found also in other Malayan districts. Among the Battaks, where the tribes which have distinctive names are called Margas, the territorial unit corresponding to the tribe known as Kuria was originally inhabited by a single marga, but this has been now replaced by duality ; one marga is that originally in possession, the other is the guest, and the two stand in a position of THE MALAY FAMILY, COMMUNITY, STATE 443 mutual inter-marriage. Eastward, in Buru and Ceram, the term hena denotes alike tribe and district, because every district is still inhabited by one particular tribe. Among the Alfurs of Halmahera, Ternate, and elsewhere, the to/as, within which marriage is forbidden to the fourth generation, correspond clearly to the sukus of the West Malays. If this system appears to have become obliterated in the Philippines and Formosa, still the dependence of plebeians on plutocrats, the Abitags and Baknanges, such as Hans Meyer describes it in Benget, recalls the cases in which a marga holds the position of guest. Among the Lampongs we may recognise similar principles. Here we meet with a still more perfect refine- ment of the tribe and village constitution. Every district or marga is made up of several villages, — seldom more than ten, — is governed by an independent chief, and named after the tribe. Each village again is divided into a number of quarters, with a head man in command of each, all the others being subordinate to the head man of the senior quarter. The foundation of a new quarter requires the consent of all the chiefs, and until this is given quite a large number of newly- founded homesteads remain dependent on their founders. Accordingly, here as well as in the suku constitution, all relations of dependency are regulated according to the connection of pedigree, for which reason even the sovereign may only address his subjects as tribesmen while the head of a family calls his children and cousins. This coincidence of tribe and district is very widely found, the Island of Nias is all divided into fifteen to twenty-five districts, and the people into a similar number of tribes. In Malay countries we find originally village states ; thus in the independent parts of Formosa the tribes live side by side in villages, and the island of Coram, less than ten miles in length, is broken up into twelve lordships. Larger king- doms have arisen in Tagal territory only where Islam has got a footing, as in Mindanao, Sulu, and the shores of the bay of Manilla. Besides these there were three kingdoms, vassal to the sultan of Tondo, and over these again strangers ruled — half-breeds from Malays of Borneo by Negrito women. Similarly, even among the Malays of Sumatra Javanese have taken a great share in founding more powerful states like Palembang upon an Indian pattern. For this reason com- prehensive names for races and countries are often lacking. The Formosans have no general name for their fellow-islanders, a token of their feeble political develop- ment which also causes frontiers to remain indistinct. In Malay annals quarrels about frontiers play an important part. The bond of union is always association in a tribe; the Maanjans formerly were under Majapahit, then under the Mussulman kingdom of Martapura, and finally under the sovereignty of the Dutch. Thus their independence was lost, and with it more than once the local connection of the tribes, but they have always found each other again. In the Philippines a chief aim of Spanish statecraft was to break up the old tribal fellowships and the village states or barangays. The inhabitants of several harangays were compelled to leave their homes and settle down together in one place, the new village forming a single commune under the name of a pueblo. But in the pueblo the members of the same barangay would settle down together, and so it broke up into fractions retaining the ancient name. Those who had been dattus were made alcaldes and collectors of the poll-tax. Villainage and also slavery were done away with, and the chiefs thereby deprived of the 444 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND substantial basis of their influence. Christianity also, by turning ^^ pueblo into a parish, contributed its share to the weakening of the old organisation. This, however, is so deeply rooted in tribal sentiment that each clan lives on its own barangay and treats its own Cabeza with reverence, and it was not until natives began to be ordained in large numbers that inferiors went over his head ; not, however, without some loss in the respect paid to the clergy. The villages are often called by the name of the oldest inhabitant. The scattered nomad tribes are yet a stage lower ; they, like the gipsies, recognise only an elected chief, which does not preclude his being chosen by preference from a special family. The Negrito hordes of Luzon often consist of only twenty to thirty souls ; they are historic instances of tribes formed by the breaking up of larger races. Even in the bigger states the sukus and their pangulus are often conspicuous as the elements which decide the nature of the community. In the genuine Malay constitution they are the rulers, while the rajah or sultan is only their delegate. Hence in most cases the constitution is a transitional stage from the patriarchal form to a confederated aristocracy tempered by representative elements. The leader of the tribe is the protector of his subjects, has to redeem them if they fall into slavery, is allowed to pledge them, draws the chief of his revenue from money fines, and has control over wood and meadow land if there is no arable. Even where the sovereign himself has the reins in his hands it is this rank which supplies the official posts at court and in the country. Below this hereditary aristocracy, which is also an aristocracy of property, and frequently is sub- divided into a higher nobility consisting of relations of a former sultan and a nobility by patent composed of officials and monied classes, stand the people proper, those who have to work, pay taxes, and render service. Last of all come the slaves. According as this fundamental arrangement subsists or has been ruined by sole monarchy, the Malayan state approaches anarchy or despotism. Thus in Sulu the dignity of the sultan is only nominal, the real power is in the hands of the magnates or dattus — among the Lubus of Sumatra the witch-doctors — who govern the districts and islands as fiefs on a life tenure. This nobility, from which the ministers also come, forms a council in which the influence of each dattu, often receiving expression by force of arms, is proportioned to the extent of his estates and the number of his slaves ; and without the consent of this council the sultan can issue no orders. Even where the sultanate is hereditary the understanding that a relative may be nominated as his successor offers a wide opening to free choice, and the members of the council are all more or less related to the sultan. All revenues, even the fines, are divided among the whole government ; the sultan gets only his allotted share, so that he has to send out his own slaves on trading or plundering expeditions. Monopolies such as that of coffee, which has made the Rajah of Goa in Celebes a millionaire many times over, or the tin monopoly enjoyed by Palembang over Banca, can only be imposed under European protection. More limited sources of revenue are found in the forming of royal rights such as those of fishing or rattan-cutting. Next to the inviolable prime minister, who has to superintend all the transactions of the sultan and the nobles, to the admiral and the minister of justice, stands the " tribune of the people " ; but his influence is as a rule only recognised so far as THE MALAY FAMILY, COMMUNITY, STATE 445 it agrees with the views of the dattus. The legal code of the Malays is here unknown, and the precepts of the Koran are scarcely followed. There exists no protection for property ; the dattus are fond of carrying off boys and girls ; and a levy en masse, such as has often terrified the Spanish officials in the Philippines, affords a gleam of hope, since so long as a war lasts, it forms a check to the lawless treatment of the non- governing classes. Where this many-headed despotism prevails, and religious fanaticism does not stir up hatred of foreigners, European sovereignty is regarded by the lower orders as a deliverance. Under the corroding influence of Brahminism the little island of Bali is broken up into nine kingdoms, which by means of four pervading castes, and through the importance of influential families, encroach upon each other. Within each little country there are clans, often several in one village, of which the most numerously represented is predominant, though the others pay no special obedience to it. Caste sets a number of citizens free from all burdens while loading others with tasks. But in general the Balinese are tolerant in spite of the obstinacy with which they have clung to the worship of Siva. To the dattus of Sulu correspond in Acheen the panglimas or tuwankus, the hereditary presidents of the sagi sub-divisions, who not only form the sultan's council, but also elect his successor, and even have authority to depose the monarch. They are not obliged even to inform the sultan of their arrangements, while he must not only submit to them at all times, but must, whenever he under- takes anything, admit the Panglima to his confidence in regard to it. He has to pay them a yearly compensation for the internal taxes which they collect for him, his own revenue consists of 5 per cent of the value of all goods which are imported into the harbour of his capital, as also from the income raised in the Sagi divisions on imported goods and on the sale of pepper, usually not more than three or four thousand pounds. In the old Malay states of Sumatra again the government is an absolute monarchy only in name ; in Sambas the sovereign is elected by the high council of sixteen, and is at bottom only their president. On the other hand, in Pontianak and in Secadau the monarchy is absolute in fact, but the oppression is the same everywhere. The nobles trouble themselves about nothing but the fines, and practise extortions on the wealthy and prominent men who act in the same manner by the people. The protection of European governments has often increased the native princes' means of acquiring power, so that rulers in Java sought in pompous extravagance a consolation for their lost independence. Similarly in conquered territories their authority has grown, the Sultan of Kutei raises ad valorem duties of 10 per cent on imports and exports, farms out the monopolies of opium and salt, works the coal mines of Pelarung and Batu-Pangal as part of his prerogative, and is besides the usurious banker of his subjects, getting an income of a million guilders. Where, as in the case in Tobah, religious motives allow to the ruler the position of a little pope, we see the reverse of the shield. In that case the Panglimas depend entirely on the rajah and are mere officials. The position of this ruler is strengthened by a tone of popular condescension, especially at festivals ; though the subject approaches his lord literally grovelling, he may talk with him freely and bring forward his complaints. Smaller rulers are not sharply distinguished from their subjects either in appear- ance or in their houses. In Jambi, Veth found the residence of the mighty sultan marked off from the other houses only by a somewhat broader ladder to 446 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND his pile-built palace. Apart from Java and some part of Celebes and Sumatra, population in the Indian Archipelago is in no way dense, and for this reason the rulers are shy of driving their subjects across the frontier by severity. The enlightened Sultan of Kutei used to send ships to the Amontai district in Borneo in order to stimulate immigration, paying the debts of the colonists and giving them free land. The insignia of chiefship are in their original form simple. Among the Tobah-Battaks the rajahs wear ivory rings on the upper arm ; ornamental weapons, silver-mounted daggers and swords, or guns with costly stocks, are also given to messengers as their credentials. Among the princes who have felt the influence of Indian Mohammedanism heavy gold crowns richly jewelled, and gold- embroidered uniforms are usual. The tribes have the use of the land, but the prince claims the ownership of it whenever he is strong enough to do so. Uncultivated land is common, but any one can cultivate it on his own account, and make it into property by his labour. In Timorlaut there is no such thing as sale of land, whereas Battak chiefs sell their land in every form. In Holontalo sale and demise of landed property can only take place with the chiefs consent. The right of the tribe to the ownership of the soil is stoutly maintained. An attempt on the part of the Dutch to move some tribes in Borneo lower down their river failed, because the people feared that the descendants of the Dyaks, who had formerly been settled there, would demand tribute from them, as they were entitled to do. If no heirs are forthcoming, the property is voted by the people to one of the head-men. Individuals certify their right to property by hanging up dolls. A branch which overhangs another man's land belongs to him. Colonisation, in the form of conquest and settlement beyond seas, plays, especially in the east, a part reminding us in its importance of the Greek migrations. It would hardly be possible to name a race, however small, the traditions of which are not based upon a migration, and every coast-district shows foreign elements which have made their way in uninvited, and often to the detriment of the older populations. Numerous legends tell of fraternal dissen- sions, sicknesses, or elemental catastrophes, as the causes of colonisation. Rights of conquest were granted by the rulers of Ternate to noble families, and these became viceroys with semi -sovereign power, in Buru, Ceram, and elsewhere. Colonisation was also regulated in the country itself In Java, where, as the population increased, clearings had to be made at points lying too far from a village, a party of settlers was sent out, and these as a rule remained in union with the village whence they came. Among both Malays and Battaks in Sumatra, and also in North Celebes, special names are found for these daughter-settlements. Perhaps certain political partnerships are connected with this ; thus the rulers of Ternate and Tidor treat each other as near of kin. Slavery, which has not much hold among the simpler races, is strongly developed among the " town Malays " of Palembang, Acheen, and the like. It affects prisoners of war, malefactors who cannot pay their fines, and other debtors, among them not a few who have gambled away their liberty ; whole tribes have become enslaved through debt. Illegitimate children, whether the parents are free or slaves, come into this class. As a rule slaves are treated as members of the household, can buy their freedom, and in practice are not inferior to poor THE MALAY FAMILY, COMMUNITY, STATE 447 relations who have been taken into the house for the worth of their service. Rejang law recognises temporary slavery as a penalty. Slave-capture and slave-trading is a chief line of business among all Malays who trade in ships of their own. Bali, where the men were valued as soldiers and the girls as mes- sengers, to the extent that in Batavia there is still a "Balinese village," lost a great part of its population in this way. In the states which have been conquered by the true Malays, the distinction between gentlemen and plebeians is often so sharp that one may speak of serfdom. The transition from freedom to slavery is found in the Ilapitas, who work in the paddy fields of the Holontalos, an« wash gold for the chief, without wages ; the Mongohules, who, as descendants of a particular race of slaves, assist their lords only on festive occasions, and lastly the "Wakos, who are slaves acquired by purchase, exchange, inheritance, or gift. The tribes are quite as exclusive towards outsiders as they are self-contained. Every tribe demands not only the sole use of the territory in which it lives, but also requires respect for its usages, for its graves, for places which it has declared fadi ox pamali, and which it protects by crafty traps. Other causes also contribute. Among the Ilongotes individual tribes fight fiercely with each other, though for the most part only within the families concerned in the matter ; but when there is any question of a campaign against Christians or Negritos, friends and foes combine. Head-hunting, kidnapping, and piracy of an incredibly impudent kind cannot be eradicated in the Spanish and Dutch territories. On the other hand, where the tribes have not been corrupted, hospitality towards white men is carried so far that the traveller may take up his quarters tranquilly in any house of a kampong that he pleases, without any danger of an unfriendly reception. The story that the Dyaks have a tendency to poison strangers who enter their territory has been stated, at any rate in South and Central Borneo, to have no foundation. The frequent state of war caused prescribed forms to grow up for declaring war, making peace, and contracting alliances. War was never carried on in blind rage, but in a chivalrous, almost sportsmanlike fashion. The Battaks, before taking up arms, announce the war by a cartel, and negotiate for days together in fiery speeches, while neighbouring chiefs try to effect an accommodation ; at the end of everything, the first death is decisive. The cartel consists of a piece of bamboo a span long, on which are written the grievances and the declaration of war, a bundle of straw and a bamboo knife, to denote fire-raising and throat-cutting, and a spear-head of carved bamboo ; the whole being tied up in a bundle and hung up at night where the enemy will see it. Among the Ilongotes war is signified by a bundle of arrows or the sprinkling of the road with blood. But in spite of all this, war does not break out unless some decided act of hostility is committed within eight days. Peace is often, unhappily, ratified by human sacrifices : and mingling of blood exalts friendship to the rank of blood brotherhood. Small quarrels of daily life are appeased by the sirih-\>oyi, which is not made costly and ornamental for nothing, and is a means of reconciliation like the tobacco-pouch or rum bottle elsewhere. Ever since the Malays have been known, the habit of cutting off heads with a view to the acquisition of trophies, head-snapping as the Dutch call it, has been one of their most successful institutions. Martin de Rada, provincial of the Augustinians, reports its existence in Luzon as early as the year 1577, and up 448 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND till the present time this custom of prizing the skulls of enemies has held its ground among savage Dyak and Tagal tribes in spite of vigorous opposition on the part of the colonial authorities. Head-hunting flourishes also abundantly in the east — for example, in Ceram. In order to understand the persistency of this custom we have to realise that it has a religious basis in the worship of skulls universal among the Malays, owing to which the skulls of enemies must have appeared the most desirable sacrifice which could be offered to ancestral spirits. Where Christianity or Islam have gained a footing, skull worship and • -. head - hunting with it have rapidly decreased within a generation. In North Borneo the skulls lie among old lumber. Among the Igorrotes, ac- cording to Hans Meyer, the only thing that sur- vives is the dance ac- companied by the singing of a derisive song round the bare pole on which the skull was formerly stuck. Among the Ilon- gotes before the marriage ceremony is completed, the bridegroom has to bring the bride a number of human heads, those of Christians being pre- ferred. But the Dyaks are said to fancy Dyak heads only. Heads are also in demand to place under the posts at the foundation of a house as a gift to a dead man, or to ornament the hall of a chiefs house ; none but a suc- cessful head-hunter is entitled to be tattooed. Skulls are also used for drinking cups, while the teeth and hair serve for the adornment of the body and weapons. When the Dutch have taken skulls away from head-hunters, these have declined to give up the scalp and the lower jaw. By the unwritten common law of these tribes cutting off heads is the only effective form of settling tribal enmities. Head- hunting, though it originally proceeded from religious and political motives, soon extended the circle of its victims, and the desire of possessing skulls became a passion. Every neighbouring village almost was looked upon as hostile, and heads were cut off even when a sleeping man had to be killed to do it. A further psychological motive for the practice lay in the decay of blood feuds owing to idleness ; the Dyak is lazy and will stroll patiently about in the neighbourhood of the paddy fields until he gets a good opportunity of falling upon one or two defenceless women and children. " Only once has it occurred," Basket of a Dyak head-hunter, with half a skull hanging on it. (Munich Museum.) THE MALAY FAMILY, COMMUNITY, AND STATE 449 says Michaelsen, " that a Dyak of Serajen, whose daughter had been murdered by a head-hunter of Katingan, followed the murderer and cut his head off actually at the festival which was being held in his honour. The deed caused such terror that the man who had dared to do such a thing in vengeance for his child was allowed to depart unhindered with the decapitated head." Head -hunting is carried on systematically; the Dyaks prepare for it by religious consecration. They build themselves a hut with a roof on four posts, and the floor raised a yard high ; the entrance is barred with coils of rattan which are hung with red flowers, young palm leaves, and a quantity of little wooden images of swords, shields, spears, flying hornbills, and the like. Inside the hut are spears, blow- guns, quivers with freshly-poisoned arrows, shields, swords, and cuirasses, enough to equip a band of head-hunters. In this hut the company stays for a period of four to six days according to the omens. Before they leave it they hide in the ground a number of rudely -carved figures equal in number to their numbers in order to appease the evil spirits. Any man who does not belong to the band is for- bidden, on pain of a heavy fine, or even death, to approach ^'"^" head-basket used by , 7 7 ■ 1 "-ni • • ) • Guinans of Luzon — one- tne balei hut. Ihe victims property is untouched, and third real size. (Dr. the Alfurs of Ceram before they place themselves in am- Meyer's Collection. ) bush even warn their victim by damaging his fruit-trees and even breaking off twigs. The connection of this practice with cannibalism, which crops up here and there quite independently of the stage of civilization, is indicated by the various uses to which the skull and other parts of the human body are put. One practice replaces the other — thus the Battaks are cannibals and the Dyaks head-hunters ; in Timorlaut alliances are clinched by eating a slave. In North Borneo, the people of Sulu, who are alleged not to be head-hunters, bind their victim and pierce him through the breast with spears, and every one belonging to the village gives a slash to the quivering body. After that they bury the corpse without taking the skull ; " the chiefs of Sulu do not wish that." Their neighbours catch the victim's blood in little bamboo pails in order to sprinkle their fields with it. According to Bock the Bahu-Trings eat the bodies of their victims, while the skulls are dric and become the property of the chief. A. B. Meyer has no doubt that the custoir., which Mas reports as existing among the Ifugaos of the Philippines and in Borneo of swallowing the brain, prevails to the present day in North Luzon. The Alfurs of Ceram lay the skull of a freshly-killed man in the foundation of their commoi^ house. Even though among the Battaks in recent times cannibalism is no dail)' occurrence performed at the discretion of individuals, but is only employed in the case of prisoners of war or criminals of a bad kind, yet there are evidences that the prevalence of this bad habit was formerly more universal. Human flesh is said to have been sold in the Battak country in open market, and certain rajahs are alleged to have eaten it daily as a matter of liking, and people have also eaten their relations when ill. A simple question of money has played no small part in the difficulty of eradicating cannibal habits. When a tiwa feast is held in honour of a dead person, it is clearly cheaper to slaughter six slaves at loo guilders than six buffaloes at 150. 2 G 45° THE HISTORY OF MANKIND The Malays are not devoid of fighting spirit, though large populations, like the Javanese, have been enervated by long subjection. It is impossible to deny courage to the thousands of Bugises who are devoted to piracy, or the bold slave- raiders of the New Guinea coasts. The Dyak is a born warrior ; in his weapons the requirements of modern perfection are replaced by thorough adaptation to the country, and the dexterity with which they are used. The training of boys proceeds mostly in the direction of arousing military valour ; war-dances, religious ceremonies at marching out, talismans, are aids to courage. In Timorlaut a butterfly is swallowed. Women and children often take part in war. The Battaks fetch champions from a distance, as from Acheen ; and their confidence is proportioned to the distance whence they come. To the tribe and its communal groups falls also the duty of punishing criminals ; and especially in the event of the criminal's insolvency to arrange for the payment of his fine. But they have also the right, as an alter- native, to expel hinl ; which puts him in the position of an outlaw, since personal protection can only be guaranteed by membership of a tribe. Further, the chief cannot enact a new law without the consent of the tribe. Malay jurisprudence, even though the conception of law and the judicial position are unknown, rests on usage; adat, handed down by tradition. It has passed the stage of private retalia- tion, and has advanced to the inflic- tion of prescribed penalties. The transition appears in the fact that in a case of adultery the injured husband is free to kill his wife and her para- mour if he catches them in the act, or until the trespass has been brought to the notice of the chief; in Nias he can even demand assistance for the purpose. But if he misses the moment, the offence must be dealt with by law. The same applies to theft and homicide. In Johore, even a blow in the face can be punished with death ; but it must be within three days. Cases of lynching have occurred even after the police had taken charge of the offender. When the law comes into operation, almost every trespass can be atoned for by a money-fine, and even this becomes superfluous since the injured party is satisfied if he can be indemnified by means of private agreement. If any one is suspected of theft, the friends of the person injured try, in the first instance, to ascertain whether the thief has the means to offer an indemnity. Indemnity or recompense is the right word ; the notion of " penalty " generally goes no further than private or blood-revenge. In the prosecution of a criminal Chief and dignitary of Nias. (From a photograph.) THE MALAY FAMILY, COMMUNITY, AND STATE 45 1 and the levying of the fine the community of tribal action is among many tribes very striking. In Macassar the atonement for a male slave is 20 reals, for a female 30, for a free man 30, for a free woman 40, for a man of noble family 80. Among the Rejangs of Sumatra, according to Marsden, it is 500 dollars in the higher class of chiefs, 250 in the lower, whether for man or woman, 150 for a free man's wife, and 80 for himself. Among the Pasemahs the atonement for a child of one of the higher classes is equal to that for a man of the next lower. Wounds above the hips cost more than those in the lower parts ; and those inflicted with a kriss more than those with a stick. That the system of money compen- sation leads to abuses will be obvious ; in the case of adultery it is absolutely made a source of profit. In South Borneo, ladies who overstep the limits of conjugal fidelity are not unfrequently in most demand, because of the rights which their husbands acquire to heavy fines. Affronts are also very frequent, since among the traits of the Malay character is an almost morbid feeling of the honour which is due to a man. A contemptuous look, a slight blow, the act of stepping over a person who is lying on the ground, often enough lead to homicide. Theft and adultery are the usual offences, while murder, serious wounding, incendiarism, and other grave misdeeds have, in some of the smaller territories like Buru and Engano, not occurred within the memory of man, which accounts for the high standard of penalties, particularly of theft ; it is usual to burn highway robbers. Appeals to the judgment of God are still frequent ; especially trial by fire. Common forms of ordeal are ducking, pulling a ring out of boiling oil, or licking red-hot iron. In cases of obstinate denial, or where the ordeal is indecisive, wager of battle decides in Timorlaut. The Tagals have borrowed from Christians the trial by candle, in which a consecrated candle, being lighted, bends towards the guilty person. Among the Igorrotes the two parties to a suit have the backs of their heads scratched with sharp splinters of bamboo, and the one who loses most blood loses his case. A form of divine judgment which here also occurs is arrived at by testing the size of the gall of a hen which has been roasted to death. Superstition encroaches upon penal law in so far that on great emergencies persons guilty of adultery or incest are put to death to propitiate the gods. Among the Lubus, when a man has to take an oath, the witch-doctor administers it in the formula, " May I be torn to pieces by tigers, carried away by water, swallowed by crocodiles, and killed by snakes if I am not speaking the truth." Among the Alfurs of Halmahera the oath is confirmed by drinking water in which weapons have been dipped ; among those of Coram, the persons swearing dip their weapons into a little cask of arrack in which are placed a small wooden crocodile and an ill- favoured human figure ; sentence is pronounced frequently beside sacred trees or stones. In Ceram, a league resembling the secret societies of the Oceanians grew in process of time into a judicial league, the chief aim of which was the settling of disputes without the interference of government. Every participator has a cross tattooed on his breast ; persons are admitted at fifteen or sixteen years of age, and for fourteen days before admission instruction is given by a teacher in a remote hut. The league has a tripartite council, which, on occasion, finds a sanction for its sentences in decapitation. The pamali,pali,fadi,fosso, or sassie of the Malay races is not simply equivalent to the taboo of the Polynesians, it has more the sense of the Micronesian mugul. 452 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND that which is well-mannered or lawful. Most nearly connected with it is the uJium of the Dyaks, it is only when it is employed for religious or political purposes that it acquires the stricter character of taboo. Places are tabooed commonly by hanging up a bunch of palm leaves ; they have either been so from ancient times or they are declared pamali by old men on the ground of their experience. The Alfurs of Halmahera are even forbidden to look upon the sea ; the prohibition of certain foods, such as apply to venison, pork, and various kinds of fish, require pamali to enforce them. Any contact with the wife of another is declared pamali in Ternate ; whole villages become pamali owing to a death, and inflict punishment for any infringement of it. The obviously arbitrary character of the tabooings permits of a thing being set down as unpermitted by reason of a dream. The fadi of the Malagasies, again, is not the mere taboo of the Polynesians overshadowing relations of every kind ; it means much the same as forbidden, unlucky, not to be touched, sacred. Hens Are- fadi in the district of Behare on the south coast of Madagascar ; and consequently no hen may come thither, and the shooting of birds is forbidden. Elsewhere the dog or some other beast occupies this position, perhaps with some reference to the kobong or totem. The monthly fadi days exercise great influence ; any child who is born on unlucky days of this kind is buried alive, as Grandidier quite recently reported in regard to the Antanosses. Tender parents, by means of money and good words, obtain permis- sion for the sacrifice of a finger-joint to be accepted as atonement for arrival on an unlucky day. A great part of the influence of the chiefs rests upon the fact of their being credited with a knowledge of lucky and unlucky days in which astrological considerations appear to be involved. In Imerina, every idol had formerly \i\?. fadi day upon which those who were specially dedicated to him did no work, and thus, even at the present time, every Hova of high rank abstains from particular foods on his fadi day and passes it in complete seclusion. Numerical superstitions are expressed in many curious ways. The number one arouses apprehension, and, accordingly, to every burden at least two bearers are required ; on the other hand twelve is a good number — the king has twelve wives, there are twelve sacred places in I marina, and twelve royal ancestors ; twelve capital crimes, and twelve executions for them. We find the same capricious tricks of thought as in fetish superstitions. § 20. THE MALAGASIES Madagascar— Its people— Negroid and Malay elements — Reported dwarfs— Influence of India, Europe, Arabia — The family : children and naming — Marriage — Blood-brotherhood — The polity^Classes— Slaves — Constitutions — The Hova kingdom — Historical sketch — The king — All properly vested in the crown- The sovereign as high priest— Lavifs— Ordeals— MiUtary affairs. Madagascar! is one of the largest inhabited islands. With an area of 250,000 square miles, in a genial climate, endowed with a good soil, and well watered, it offers not only space, but all the necessary conditions for the development of a ^ The name Madagascar is given to the island only by the Hovas, who called themselves Malagasy, in contra-distinction to the other tribes. The inhabitants of the adjacent islands use the term Tari-Be, or Great Land. The Swahili call it Bakini. The name in the form Madagascar occurs in Marco Polo. THE MALAGASIES 453 special race. It is 250 miles from the east coast of Africa, 450 from Bourbon, 1350 from Arabia, and about the same distance from India. The southward set of the currents isolates it still further on the south and west ; but the north and east coasts are washed by the tranquil waters of the Indian Ocean, with its regularly recurring monsoons ; interrupted, however, too often by devastating cyclones. The best harbours are on the north-west coast. Madagascar is mainly a country of highlands ; most of the interior consists of lofty plateaux and mountains, rising in the summit of Tsiafazavona to 8635 feet. The cool bracing climate of the Hova highlands has doubtless contributed to make the people what they are. There is a narrow belt of forest on the level coasts, then swamps and morasses, followed by gently-rising swelling plains, which gradually ascend in steps to the plateau of Imerina, crowned with peaks. This forest and meadow region is the most promising district in Madagascar ; on the highest plateaux heath prevails. The small extent of forest may be explained by the unequal distribution of rainfall over the year ; but a good deal of wood has been burnt, a common practice of the Malagasies with a view to obtaining arable land. Lying as the country does within the zone of trade-winds," the contrast between the wet and the longer dry season is heightened. No less in the highlands than in the low coast country droughts alternate with inundations, and the lie of the ground causes great inequalities in the rate at which the water runs off. The lagoons which lie in a long chain, especially on the east coast, form to some extent a substitute for rivers. The native flora supplies no part of the food of the people ; but the prairies of the coast and the grass-covered surface of the interior support the herds of cattle which play an important part in every department of Malagasy life. The best arable land is found where woods have been burnt. The coast is fringed with the coco-palm, perhaps indigenous. The sago-palm also grows, but the natives make no use of it. The most useful palm is the Rafia {Sagus raphid), of which the midrib of the leaves, some 20 feet long, and the delicate pinnate leaves, afford an admirable fibre. The plaiting of grass- mats, hats, and baskets is a great occupation of the Malagasy women. In some parts of the coast and in the Betsileo country the poor people use grass mats as clothing, houses are thatched with grass, and rafts, after the fashion of bamboo- rafts, are built with the light three-edged stems of a papyrus-like sedge. In the highlands, where wood is scarce, grass is almost the only fuel. There are many dye-plants, and indigo is cultivated. In few parts of the earth does man come so little into contact with the native fauna as here. It would seem as if imported plants and animals had had a far wider-reaching influence than those indigenous to the country ; no instance has been met with of real domestication of a native animal or cultivation of a native plant unless the coco-palm be one. Though compelled by its situation to link its fortunes with Africa, Madagascar is, so far as the national life is concerned, wholly detached from that continent. It lay, doubtless, from an early period, widely open to Asiatic influences; we can even at this present day trace to Southern Asia the separate origm of a portion of the population. The basis was, however, no doubt African, and the stage of civilization which this island, destined to be so important, has attamed, is rather African than Asiatic in its character. The course of its history has been aimlessly split up, with no influence on the sum of human development ; 454 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND the part taken by Madagascar in the history of the people surrounding the Indian Ocean has been as imperceptible as that of East Africa. We can perceive in the Malagasy population a great variety of physical characteristics. Their colour is of all shades, from the light bronzed yellow of the southern European to a deep brownish black ; their hair of all kinds, from the African wool to the stiff straight-haired shock of the Malay ; their physiognomy of every type between Negroid and Mongoloid. Sometimes we find all these peculiarities occurring in different degrees in the same stock ; sometimes obviously distributed among different stocks. The broad division into the two main com- ponent groups, Malayan and African respectively, of Hovas and Sakalavas, is as unquestionable as it is difficult to trace in indi- viduals. No less obscure is the history of their amalga- mation. In spite of transi- tional forms, showing mix- ture elsewhere, quite enough of the pure breed has con- tinued to exist on either side. The Malay element has apparently been preserved in its purest form among the most powerful people of Madagascar, the Hovas."^ They are not tall, but fairly well built, active and lively, tough rather than strong. Their colour is a yellowish olive, many being fairer than the average of southern Europeans ; the lower part of the face slightly retreating ; hair black, stiff or curly ; eyes chestnut brown. The Malayan features, however, are to be found not only among the Hovas ; indeed, owing to their wars and their wide extension all over the island they no longer display the type so clearly as some of the tribes which have remained settled near the coast. Sibree found among the Betsimi- sarakas persons lighter than the Hovas. Nor must the women be forgotten. Many light-complexioned Hova women are, in contrast to the men, of remarkable beauty. Owing also to their intellectual superiority, they have for a long time taken a leading place in the history of the island. Since the arrival of Euro- peans, mulattoes, whether from the island itself or Bourbon and Mauritius, have also played their part, more especially in connection with the European acquisition of property, and in the two Sakalava kingdoms to the west. More recent observers are inclined to attribute the Hova supremacy to a strong infusion of white blood. ' The French call the Hovas "Malgaches," and all the other inhabitants of the island " Sakalaves." Malagasy of Negroid type. (From a photograph in Pruner Bey's Collection. ) THE MALAGASIES 455 In former times a race of dwarfs was reported to exist on the island. Some consider these fabulous ; others hold that they have become extinct. Ellis has endeavoured to connect with the Wazimba the stories told by De Commerson (1 77 1) and others about the Quimos, a people said to be smaller than the Hovas, hght-coloured, and active. Tradition records them to have been the builders of those great dolmen-like stone sepulchres which are numerous in the interior. We cannot state with any certainty all the foreign elements in the popula- tion ; but there can be no doubt of their importance, especially in the econ- omic life. First appear the energetic, reckless Arabs and Swahilis ; then the more peaceful but at the same time more astute Indians. Swahili settle- ments may be found on almost every favourable point of the coast ; nearly all the trade is in the hands of Indians. There are some few traces of even more distant visitors. Edrisi speaks of trade with China as existing in his day ; and this has been newly revived by pig-tailed immigrants. We know nothing as to the number of the Arabs in the island, but it is certainly considerable. Tradition re- fers whole tribes to an Arab origin, and we find early evidence of a know- ledge of Madagascar in Arabian writers. The Arabic alphabet is used in the south of Madagascar, and Arabic books are found on the east coast ; while in the north, under English influence, the Hovas have introduced English letters. Christianity has in some parts degraded Arabic to the position of a magic language, and amulets are worn with Arabic inscriptions, now quite unintelligible. But how came Islam, which has carried out its propaganda with so much success in East Africa, to remain confined to the coast in Madagascar ? The Hovas, who are the born foes of the coast population, embraced Christianity very rapidly, seeing in it above all the antagonist of Islam. Formerly perhaps it was otherwise, for Cameron has collected Hova customs having a strong affinity with the Jewish ; and these may perhaps even more probably be an inheritance from the Arabs. As to the arrangement of the various elements or layers in point of date, we know that in a history of Madagascar published in 1874 at Antananarivo a list was given of thirty-six Hova chiefs and kings. This would correspond at most to a period of eight hundred years. Philologists, however, put the Malay immigration, on account of the ancient forms preserved in the Malagasy dialects, before the date of its extension over Polynesia. Besides Arabic and Swahili, only Malay dialects Malagasy of Negroid type. (Same source. \ 456 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND are spoken throughout the island ; and these are so much alike that all Malagasies can, even if with some difficulty, understand each other. No one has hitherto seriously doubted the essentially Malay nature of the Malagasy dialects, above all, of the Hova. But attempts have been made to diminish its importance, by regarding the Malay admixture as casual fragments, a kind of flotsam, as it were. At all events, the Malagasy has drawn not only on the Malay language ; its affinities were at least as strong with the Polynesian. Cousin regards it as an older independent offshoot from the same family of languages as thalt of which Malay and Polynesian are younger members. The successive appearance of African and South Asiatic elements in the population is an assured fact, resting more on physical than on linguistic evidence. If we demand ethnographic proofs we have the existence of an essentially East African breed of cattle. On the other hand, agriculture, with its cultivation of rice, tare, and the sugar-cane, inclines more to Southern Asia. The latter is more strongly Sakalava musical instrument — one-third real size. (Berlin Museum. ) represented in the east, among the Hovas ; the former in the west among the Sakalavas. The universal employment of rafia fabrics for clothing hardly explains the very small use made of skins, of which the cattle-breeding tribes of Africa are so fond ; bark is used here as freely as in Central Africa and Melanesia. Among weapons we do not find the Central African missile knife, nor the African bow. For smelting iron the Malagasy use the spring-bellows found among the Malays. Fadi suggests reminiscences of the Malayan and Polynesian taboo, but is not pushed to such extremes. Political life was, until the rise (with European help) of the Hovas, the great power in Madagascar, modelled on African lines ; but the religious ideas are more akin to those of Southern Asia. Thus the general impression produced by the ethnological facts tallies with that derived from language ; we have a Malay-African mixture in which the Malay and Polynesian element predominates. The first inhabitants were Africans. Then came Malays and other peoples from the eastern and northern shores of the Indian Ocean, and gradually mingled with the earlier comers. The Hovas and their kindred are shown by their relative purity of race to have come later. It is no less certain that more than one Malay immigration took place than that it was not a casual arrival. There must have been a long-continued influx, and the Malays must have had an intimate intercourse, perhaps connected with the old Malay civilization in further India and the Archipelago, with the countries to the west of the Indian Ocean. THE MALAGASIES 457 A,''' Malay traces in Africa show that these Orientals were not stopped by the Mozambique Channel. The modern conditions of seafaring in East Africa are, in the view of some ethnographers, opposed to the idea of a voluntary migration over sea. But seamanship and nautical capacity are no permanent possession, as we may learn from many instances in Polynesia and the Asiatic home of the Malays. There is no need to assume, as some have done, that at the date of this immigration there were many more volcanic islets in the Mozambique Channel, to serve as stepping-stones. Energetic Africans may easily have found their way across ; nor indeed have they ever lacked courage in those parts. How the cows were got over is still a puzzle ; here is involved a point in the art of sea-travel which we find indeed was known to the Arabs, but hardly among the races now more immediately under consideration. The population of Madagascar is estimated at three to four millions ; it is certainly fifteen or twenty times less than by European standards it should be. The Hovas are reckoned at 750,000 to 1,200,000. Imerina, on the interior table-land, and some parts of the provinces of Betsileo and Bara are the most densely inhabited. In forming a judgment of the character of the people, we must not overlook race -differences. The Hova, like all Malays, is undoubtedly cal- culating rather than straightforward, pliant rather than strong. Both his faults and his virtues have their origin in a kind of softness, which leads him to welcome European influences, and even Christianity, warmly, but does not allow him to keep a firm hold upon the benefits which they offer. When decision is required he avoids giving a definite answer, prevaricates, and always keeps a door of retreat open. His greed and insatiable cupidity are yet not adequate to the foundation of a vigorous economic life. Immoderate use of spirituous drinks has become , historical in Madagascar ; a king of good dispositions lost his throne by reason of it Political revenge, assassination, and poisoning are common. The Hova has a strong sense, scarcely justified by his general position, of his own superiority to the other races of the island, who are for the moment in subjection to him. Their love of home, which nothing wiir break, is of political importance; they always dislike going abroad, and are glad to return. The Malagasies are passionately fond of music, and the kmg and nobles always keep their bards close at hand. The instruments are eminently Malayan in character. The Antsiva or shell-trumpet of the Malays and Polynesians is regarded as very important. A great sea-shell, with a hoarse note, which only kings may legally use, serves to call the soldiers to arms. No religious ceremony takes place without dances, songs, or firing of guns. Great political revolutions, which ferment silently among the people, are often first announced by a mama for dancing, said to be demonic possession, which finds its victims in all classes. Dancing and singing are also used as cures for illness. Hova guitar and powder-horn. Museum. ) (Dresden 458 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND There are indications showing that before the arrival of Europeans the year consisted of twelve months, each of twenty-eight days. Another twenty-eight days were so distributed among the months as to make every new year begin with a new moon. The Hova names for the months are Arabic ; but the coast- tribes form names from words of their own. Navigation was so rare that we hear little of observations of the stars either for orientation or measurement of time. The planting of rice and other important affairs were regulated by the setting of the sun at a fixed point of the horizon. The original Malagasy costume, worn by Hovas and Sakalavas alike, consisted of a loin-cloth, reaching in the case of men to the knees, in women to the feet. This has unfortunately been driven out by Euro- pean dress, which the Hovas were actually the earliest to adopt. The woolly-haired tribes for the most part dress their hair in puffs ; the Hovas wear it short or parted in the middle, and on their heads broad- brimmed straw hats. The most favourite ornaments are arm or finger-rings, of brass or silver — the arm-rings more especially on the west coast, where Arab fashions prevail. Nose-rings in the Indian style are also found. Among the Sakalavas,, though the men are not tattooed, the women mark themselves with a thorn or a needle on their upper arms, where the outlines of crosses, stars, or serpentine figures may often be seen. The Hovas are not tattooed, but among the Betsileos the women tattoo neck and bosom. Among the Sakalavas of the west coast the barbaric Indian ear-lobe plugs may be seen. Some of the forest tribes of the interior have a way of staining their teeth black with a paste called by Sibree laingo ; they are said to stain alter- nate teeth, leaving the others white. The dominant position of the Hovas having been won easily by the use of European weapons, other tribes have had to follow suit, and fire-arms are almost universal. Even among the more remote tribes the warriors carry a gun with their two javelins. Yet even in Antananarivo one may often see spears, battle- axes, short daggers, and wooden shields covered with buffalo hide ; though only the wilder tribes are said still to possess any dexterity in handling the spear. Besides the bow the Malayan blow-gun, 6 to lo feet long, is also found; the arrows used with it are splinters of bamboo or reed, about 20 inches in length, padded at the hinder end with the silky fibres from the seed of an asclepiad plant, or with feathers, in order, by preventing windage, to increase the initial speed and steady the missile in its flight. Malagasy necklace of carved horn. Society's Museum. ) (Missionary THE MALAGASIES 459 All Malagasy houses are built on a very similar ground-plan ; an evidence for the similarity of the races from an ethnographical point of view. Clay, which in this granitic island occurs abundantly, is built up in layers about 20 inches high of rather less thickness. In this way are formed walls, which, to the surprise of Europeans, are capable of defying the heaviest rain for many years. The roof does not rest on the walls but on three posts. It is steep and high, and is thatched with reeds or rushes. Only the wealthiest people in Antananarivo have roofs of painted shingles or earthen tiles. At the gable the roof-spars cross ; their ends are notched and often terminate with some little carved work, such as a pair of ox-horns, or a small bird, in which we may probably see a reminiscence of the House of a Hova chief. (From the Globus.) tribal token. The height of the spars indicates the owner's rank. The house has at least one door and one window ; the doors open as a rule to the westward, and are placed about a foot and a half from the ground, so that you reach the threshold by a couple of stone steps. The eastern or north-eastern side of the house is sacred ; here stands the ancestral image or the cross. In building, the north-east corner-post is erected with solemn ceremonies. This is the regular Hova type, of which the construction of the capital offers magnificent examples. In the royal buildings — enormous huts with sharp roofs — every floor is surrounded with a verandah supported on mighty tree-stems. The town rises in terraces ; the narrow roads are steep and bad, and the houses do not stand in rows, but are placed anyhow. Some open spaces are used as market-places. In the Sakalava villages the houses are small, irregularly scattered about under the shade of large trees, and covered with foliage. They also are rectangular, and usually raised from three to six feet on piles. All villages and many single houses are enclosed with high walls of reeds or mud. Some have seen in this a Mahommedan custom ; but it probably is a relic of the times when every little 46o THE HISTORY OF MANKIND Hova tribe was at war with its neighbour, and on every hill there was a village with three lines of entrenchments round it. When a strong government had put an end to this reign of club-law, the people came down into the plains ; though there are still plenty of fortified villages in the Hova country. At an earlier period, generally referred to the latter half of the eighteenth century, masonry was better executed among the Malagasies than it is at present, so that unlike so many parts of Africa, the country possesses ruins and traditions. No tribe lives entirely without agriculture. As with the Negroes of East Africa, almost the only implement is a light hoe. The fields often lie far from the village in the valley-openings or, on the level ground by the streams, and Fenced farm-houses in Imerina, Madagascar. (After Ellis.) their position often changes. The people have little thought for the future, and sacrifice their woods recklessly so as to get fresh land and the manure of the ashes ; there is no replanting. Thus nearly the entire Hova country is now bare of wood and overgrown with grass ; only here and there some venerable giant rises aloft as an evidence of bygone grandeur. Indian, Arabian, and European influence have brought the cultivation of rice and sugar-cane to this altitude. In the east and the interior rice is the staple food, while in the west the inhabit- ants live more on maize, cassava, and various roots. Even in the last century the exportation of rice was considerable. The irrigation of the rice fields is in many cases artificial ; the treading down of the soil is performed by the cattle. For reaping,' a sickle resembling a slightly curved serrated knife is used. The ears are then thrashed out on a stone and winnowed. Sugar-cane is widely cultivated in the Hova country. It is crushed between cylinders of hard wood, and the juice allowed to flow into a trough. From this an intoxicating drink known as toakka is distilled. The sugar, imperfectly crystallised, is sold in the market of the country. Many fruit-trees have been imported, such as peaches, oranges, lemons. The vine is grown in the highlands, and hemp and THE MALAGASIES 461 Rice-mortar and paddle from Madagascar. Collection. ) (Stockholm Ethnographical tobacco are cultivated as luxuries. Tobacco is seldom smoked, and then only in water-pipes of the African kind, made of gourds grown into the shape of cow-horns, and clay — nor ever taken in snuff, but chewed with avidity in the form of powder. Cattle are currency. A bride is paid for in oxen, and no solemnity is complete without the sacrifice of an ox. The Malagasy scarcely ever eats meat except on festive occasions ; and to eat calves is entirely repugnant to the feeling of the country, which forbids the offspring to be taken from the mother. Cattle and rice form the chief source of revenue ; Mauritius, Reunion, even Zanzibar and places on the East African coast, supply themselves with these chiefly from Madagascar. All money is invested in cattle, and the greatest ambition of a poor man is to acquire at least two or three beasts. In the highlands milk is a chief article of food, and the rich Hovas have dairy- farms with five to eight hundred head of cattle on them. Some beasts are also stall-fed, in stalls h"^(ill^te'^')l''KtK^Sh. — --i'^*^^ /^K '^^^^ underground. Al- ^W^^^BamWM^T^S^r^^'' JfflW"'^ though cattle are placed ^^ ^'^■™Mr,J'1^^^^ .i^^Mf^' under the protection of ^JuKBiw^^^^^^Siw'^ ' ^^^ public, and among ^ ^^rn iI'Ml'Ifflilllfilllw' " ^^^ independent tribes to ' 7; lift I Wm' n'*' 1 ' steal them is a capital "' '' '' offence, cattle -lifting is frequent. The Malagasy ox resembles the East African. Sheep and goats are found only in the interior ; pigs, which are now universal, were first introduced by the English under Radama I. Fowls are not found in every village ; geese, ducks, and turkeys exist only among the Hovas. Dogs are either of the East African jackal -like breed or European mongrels.. Cats are held by all Malagasies to be animals of evil omen. The full development of labour among the free population is checked by the existence of slavery. Where there is occasion for operations on a large scale, as in the rice districts in the north of the Sakalava country, slaves are kept. Anything like industrial activity (with the exception of the preparation and working Madagascar hubble-bubble, in the African style- ( Berlin Museum.) -one-fifth real size. 462 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND of iron, in parts where the raw material is plentiful), is confined to the women. The Hovas like to imitate European patterns, but have little faculty of original invention. Among that part of the population with which foreigners come little Drawing of a herd of cattle, on the bamboo drinking-cup represented on opposite page. (Berlin Museum.) into contact the women's favourite occupation is the weaving rafia-'vUox^ into lantbas. You may see the looms set up day after day under great sheds ; and Woven pouch from Madagascar — one-half real size. (Berlin Museum. ) the completion of a single piece of this durable fabric often takes a month. The larger vessels of clay, especially the water-pots, of which one or two stand in fixed places in every hut, resemble those of East Africa in their form and method of burning, while the pots with covers used for cooking rice are Malayan style. The dishes and bottles of fine red clay remind one of Moorish pottery. The THE MALAGASIES 463 platting of mats, baskets, and bags, sometimes roughly shaped like animals, sometimes bottle-shaped, is the women's work. The pattern of the corn-baskets and mats, square and slightly bent up at the corners, is very pretty. The rush- baskets of Madagascar hold water, and keep it cool by evaporation. Owing to the bad state of the roads and the msecurity of communications, the internal trade is insignificant ; and even although foreign trade has gradu- ally become of the first importance to the Hova kingdom, all matters con- nected with business are in a wretched state. High import duties, from which the Hovas defray the greater part of their state-expenditure, are a burden on trade ; though they have their use, since brandy is one of the articles subject to them. Christianity in Madagascar had to make terms with polygamy, which was fostered by the raids of the Hovas. These have long ceased to be success- ful, and polygamy has been officially suppressed. The first wife is every- where the mistress of the house, and her children take precedence. The huts of the separate Vadikely, or bye- wives, lie grouped round the larger hut of the husband, who lives in this with his head-wife, or Vadi-be. She is seldom the prettiest of the wives, but is sure to be the richest and most equal in rank to the husband. Betrothal and mar- riage customs remind us of those in force among the Malays. Traces of wife-purchase appear in the custom of not holding a marriage to be concluded Hova drinking-cups of bamboo, used also for tobacco- boxes— one-half real size. (Berlin Museum. ) until the bride's parents have received a present from the bridegroom. In former times this used to be a rump of beef In general, the woman's position is not unduly inferior to that of the man. Great liberty is allowed to unmarried women. The heathen tribes like to see a young wife bring pre-nuptial children with her. In the morality of the half-civilized Christian Hovas hypocrisy plays an important part ; semi-cultivation has had a detrimental effect here in all directions, accom- panied as it has been by a diminution in thrift and an excessive indulgence in spirituous drinks. Among the most notable indications of Malayan affinities are exogamy and mother-right. Preference of the female line in inheritance, equivalence m the degree of kindred of father and father's brother, mother and mother's sister, and the fact that marriage between cousins \s fadi, or forbidden, to the fifth degree, are peculiarities quite diverse from African usage. Even the prominent share taken by women in 464 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND politics is primarily due to the great importance attached to direct descent in blood. The custom by which the first minister is the queen's consort, has fortified their position until three successive female reigns have gone far to give the Hova constitution the appearance of a gynecocracy. Regard for posterity, especially male posterity, has not succeeded in eradicating the horrible practice of infanticide. The greatest respect is shown to parents by their children, very much owing to the honour paid to age as such. For instance, if two slaves of different ages have Antananarivo, the Hova capital. (From a photograph. ) a load to carry, the younger will, if possible, take it all. Blood brotherhood, contracted over a slaughtered ox, recalls an African custom. Society among the Hovas falls under thrfee classes ; the nobles {Andrian), the citizens {Hova), and the slaves {Andevo or Ampory). The nobility consists mostly of descendants of former chiefs. It is the most distinguished class, but not the richest ; you may even hear people say " poor as a lord." The government is free to employ all subjects as it pleases ; service is claimed from rich and poor, young and old. Services rendered to the government are accordingly, as might be expected, gratuitous ; and thence follows important results on the power of the government, as well as the fact that the ministers are the chief traders in the country. In this co^^/^-system too, we may find a reason for the backward condi- tion of the people, seeing that it is just those of most ability who lose most of the THE MALAGASIES 46s pleasure of enjoying the fruits of their own work. By the introduction of wage- paid labour the Europeans have acted beneficially on the social and economic condition of the Hovas. An official nobility, ranking between the citizens and the nobles by birth, has since the da,ys of Radama I. been created by the bestowal of honours upon servants of the state. The freemen are divided into numerous clans, which, as a rule, do not intermarry. They fall also into the two classes of persons liable to military service, and simple citizens. Of slaves three kinds are distinguished ; Tsatsa-Hova, Andevo, and Mozambik. The first are of the same blood as the Hovas, but have been reduced to slavery Rainitnalavona and Rainilaiarivona, two Prime Ministers of Radama II. (After Ellis. ) as a punishment for crimes committed by themselves, their fathers, or their brothers. The Andevo, who form the most numerous class, are recruited chiefly from prisoners of war ; they are slaves in the strictest sense. As a rule they are rather darker than the Hovas ; but in other respects their appearance varies very much, as might be expected from their various origin. The third class are Africans, imported by Arabs mostly from the Mozambique coast. Since 1877 the slaves have been nominally free in all parts of the island over which the Hova power extends. The slaves hold a somewhat lower position than other members of the family ; but may, by the goodwill of their masters, lead an existence which many a free man would envy. Thus the worst side of slavery is the bad influence which it exercises over labour in general ; people have got used to letting the smallest jobs be done by slaves. The Constitutions of Madagascar were originally of a very elementary nature. 2 H 466 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND The powerlessness of so-called " kings " often presented a comical contrast to the pretensions which interested Europeans tried to force upon them. But though the Hovas have raised themselves above this low political level, we must not over- estimate their achievements as founders of an empire. Large as their empire is, it rests upon a force of widely-scattered garrisons and civil officials, so that its very size is unfavourable to cohesion. The whole north and west, save for a few trading-centres on the coast, is still independent ; the south and south-east not much less so. In order to understand the effects from an ethnographic point of view of the extension of the Hova conquest, we must consider how long the struggle lasted, and with what energy and cruelty it was conducted. The only thing aimed at was to injure their opponents, and for this all means were thought allowable. If we further remember their custom of exporting as slaves all the able-bodied members of the defeated side, and, as already mentioned, the wide distribution of garrisons and officials, what else could we expect as the result of their " forward '' policy than a general patchwork of the population ? But in this fermenting mass the Hova is the leaven ; though outside of the narrow limits of his original territory, even he regards himself as a foreigner. Except the Hovas and the Betsileos, who must be treated as practically identical, and who form the nucleus of the Hova kingdom in the interior, the races of the west coast are comprised under the name of the most powerful among them as the Betsimisaraka. These with the Betanimenas inland, and the Tanalas, Tankays, and Sihanakas, who inhabit the forest-belt between the coast and the interior, are like the Hovas ; while, to north and south, the Taimoro, Taifasy, Taisaka, Tanosy, and Tandroy tribes have a darker skin and less stiff hair. Even among the Betsimisarakas we find persons with dark skin and curly hair. At one time the Sakalavas, reaching north and south on the west side, were limited only on the south by the kingdom of Menabe, and on the north by Imboina, founded some two hundred years ago by Sakalava chiefs. Thence they held the Hovas in subjection ; now it is they who are (for the most part nominally) subject to the Hovas. The Hova monarchy is by no means unlimited ; least of all is the Hova sovereign absolute. He is surrounded by a high nobility, to which belong the members of the royal house and the descendants of old families ; and from which are chosen the prince's companions and ministers. This body often acts as representative of the people and organ of the popular will. Possibly in this respect intercourse with Europeans has acted imperceptibly as an incitement, which among this easily -swayed people would be none the less effective because its origin was unobserved and its effects hard to calculate. If a king rules with a strong hand, and knows how to ingratiate himself with the people, the nobility and the pdpular assembly become of small consequence ; but their strength grows in proportion as the sovereign is weak or unpopular. But he has the means of making his authority thoroughly effective, for the king is not only the source of laws, punishments, and honours ; he is also the, universal owner. All belongs to him — person, property, time, labour, talent, invention. The administration is carried on even at the present day essentially, from the point of view of the king's private interests ; hence- arise the most senseless extortions and imposts. All minerals, all produce of wood or field which is not got with pick and spade, are crown property, even to the timber. The king can forbid his subjects to leave the island THE RELIGION OF THE MALAYS 467 under pain of death or penal servitude for life. Offences against the state are punished by the conversion of the right to the man's labour into a right to his person ; that is, the offender becomes the king's slave ; and this state-slavery still actually exists. Christianity has not left much remaining of the sovereign's status as high priest ; ^ indeed the priests appear to rank far below the higher court officials. But remains of the old belief exist among the masses, who regard the king as a great magician. The people have, as formerly with idols and their bearers, to keep away from everything that has been in contact with the king and his house. When the king is in mourning every Hova shaves his head. The method of taking an oath is akin to an ordeal ; the person swearing must sip a magic-drink, which, when the oath of allegiance is taken, must have stood upon a hump of lead, a box of earth, and a gun-wad. The terrible poison-ordeal, which as tangena among the Hovas and kizumba among the Sakalavas has played so destructive a part, is not yet extinct. The pomp of the court is in many respects only an imitation of European fashions, as may be seen in Ellis's picture of the coronation of Radama II. The laws of the Hovas are promulgated afresh by every king on his accession. They number at present about sixty. New ordinances are announced in the public market-place. For grave crimes various forms of capital punishment, and slavery, are prescribed ; the wives, children, slaves, and flocks of the criminal are confiscated and sold, if not redeemed by his relatives. The Hovas have become great by the sword, and hold their power thereby. The present dynasty has something military about it, translated into a Malagasy form. All persons able to bear arms are liable to serve, and the garrisons are formed of a portion selected at pleasure. These soldiers, like all other servants of the state, receive no pay, so that war is a main object with them ; and of all things they long for a good booty in cattle and young slaves. § 21. THE RELIGION OF THE MALAYS Natural religion or ancestor worship ?— Predominance of the latter— So-called fetish images— Animistic belief of the Negritos and proofs of its high antiquity— Complicated doctrine of the soul— Cult of skulls and bones— Veneration of old pots— Tree worship— Veneration of animals— Tiger superstitions— Plurality of spirits good and bad— Visible and invisible spirits— Amulets and relics— The Gangkan religion of the Alfurs— Malay theology— Deification of men— Indistinct idea of the supreme being— -5a/a?-a^«/-«—Sivaitic and Buddhist substratum— jTo/i'^-The war god— The spirit of the sea— Sun and moon— Spirit of the earthquake— Mythologic legends— Notions of the next world— The priesthood, magicians, priestesses- Religion and imposture — The places of worship. Religious veneration of ancestors and a lively faith in higher spirits, as well as a countless number of a lower class, added to magic of many kinds and superstition in many forms, form the kernel of the oldest religious ideas among the Malays. Natural curiosities do not escape the notice of the ' [That some traces of it remain appears in a letter from a missionary's wife, published in the Daily News of 4th December 1894, just before the last French invasion, where the writer mentions that " last Sunday morning, at the Palace Church, the Queen herself got up and addressed those assembled— her courtiers, soldiers, etc. — and led them in earnest prayer."] 468 THE HISTORY OF AfANKIND Malay, but his observations only serve to people Nature with spirits pro- ceeding from his animistic cult, and to procure amulets or fetishes in objects arousing veneration or fear. Every object found in a place where it would not have been expected becomes an amulet ; the hunter prays to a stone in the road, " Help me to catch pheasants to-day," and if his prayer is heard the stone becomes a fetish to him and all his village. Any stone or object like a stone which is found in the entrails of fish, birds, buffaloes, or men, any resinous growth on a tree, any shell or root, in short, anything striking or peculiar, is made into a fetish. The demand ever new, ever active, sharpens the eye, nor are portable objects only considered ; mountains become dragons, and monsters solitary rocks, and all mountain -tops are the places where spirits dwell ; in the craters of volcanoes the penalties of hell are carried out. We are told that in Celebes mountain heights formerly used for human sacrifices are specially esteemed. Forests are regarded as the seats of evil spirits ; when a clearing is made the last tree is left standing. In reaping, a patch of rice which, perhaps, has been sown on purpose, is allowed to remain because it does not do to drive the spirits to extremities. In Celebes terrible tales are in circulation about gigantic serpents which inhabit the peculiarly-shaped summit of -Sinalu, while in the north of that island every cave passes as the abode of one spirit in connection with which we may think of the use of caves, mountains, and forests, as a place of burial. Races which otherwise have no knowledge of idols erect stone or wooden monuments for the souls of ancestors. Before these clumsy figures oaths are administered and sacred operations performed, while offerings are laid in their navels. The Pangulu-Balang, the stone image of the Battaks, has no doubt often long ceased to be an ancestral image so far as its worshippers are conscious, for with the growth of the commune it became the tutelary spirit of the whole kampong. Although the soul immedi- ately after death came back and dwelt as tutelary spirit in a place where no one was allowed to sleep according to the view held in Ternate, later on it retires with other souls into the spirit-house ; then if the old images leave prayers unfulfilled they can readily be replaced by new igorrote ancestral image— one- ones, though at the Same time they are not destroyed. twelfth real size. {From a i • i i r • ■ i i Dr. Meyer's Collection.) Accordmg to the degree of veneration a-ssigned to them, they receive offerings monthly or annually, in the latter case with great ceremonies. It is only on this day that they will answer prayers, for the rest of the year they may be ignored. Graves count uni- versally as holy places, they are avoided since it is unlucky to step on them, and revisited in order that the spirits hovering around may be implored to bring luck. In the whole district of Minnahassa the only objects of a monumental kind are stone coffins with richly sculptured lids. If we inquire into the origin of the Malay idols or fetishes we usually come upon these ancestral images. The Igorrotes of Northern Luzon make no representation of their gods, but even they draw a couple of roughly designed THE RELIGION OF THE MALAYS 469 human figures in front of their granaries to represent two famous ancestors, and to them they confide the protection of their rites. In front of many huts in Central Luzon, Hans Meyer saw a little pot with food set out, and often also a little bench for the anitos to rest on. Among the Battaks these idols are made of a soft stone, and often exhibit a rudely worked head terminating in an irregular pointed base a foot long. If the Pangulu-Balang is wanted to be especially powerful the Guru bores a hole in the lower pointed end, fills it with a magic broth which he has concocted out of the entrails and the nose, eyes, lips, and ears of a fallen warrior, and carefully closes it up again ; in this way the Pangulu-Balang gets a soul. We may see in this a survival of human sacrifices. These images are found in the houses of Mussulmans no less than among the heathen. Carved sticks with figures of animals twined round them serve the Battaks as standards in war and for driving away diseases. If you listen closely you will be able to distinguish the humming voice of the soul within the stick. What little we know about the religion of the Negritos is also referable only to the belief in souls ; they do not like to leave the wild places where the souls of their forefathers dwell. They betray a great dread of the spot where one of them has died. After they have covered the corpse lightly over and blocked the approaches to the place of burial, they leave the place and communicate the fact to the neighbourhood. Any one who ventures to tread the forbidden spot is punished with death. The Lubus, who are at a similarly low stage, hear the spirit depart at death with a soft hissing noise ; if any one departs without this sound his spirit does not survive him. Among the Philippine tribes ancestral spirits proceed from the souls of grandfathers, and while most anitos are harmless, that of the village chief is dreaded. The entire complicated psychology of the Malays may perhaps be regarded as produced by a reaction from their ancestor -worship. The tendency to multiply spirits, which ascribes to the man three or seven souls, partly indwelling, partly external, but in connection with the inner life of the soul, must be based on the need for linking with his soul as many things as possible. When we hear that wicked souls require their form to be seven times destroyed before they can be at rest, we are in presence of an obvious misunderstanding of the wanderings of souls. People dread the wandering soul of the sleeper no less than the liberated soul of the dead ; and to step over a sleeping man, or even to wake him abruptly, passes for a serious injury. Veneration of skulls, together with head-hunting, has a close connection with ancestor-worship. The treatment of the heads often has at its foundation the idea of acquiring a spirit for the tribe. For this cause the Sea-Dyaks of Brunei, during months on end, devote special attention to the heads, speaking to them in endearing terms, and giving them the tit-bits at every meal, besides jzW/^-leaves, betel-nut, and even, according to Veth, cigars. The skulls are painted in red and white stripes, or blacked with antimony, often, too, covered with tinfoil, and the eyeholes filled with shells. Among some tribes these trophies are the property of the whole village. The practice of treasuring the skulls of beasts, especially of those taken in the chase, occurs in company with the cult of human skulls, among the Mussulmans of Java no less than among the pagans of Formosa. On the Negrito huts of Luzon the lower jaws of pigs may be seen 470 THE HISTORY OF MANKIND nailed up, and on the outer walls of those of the Igorrotes, the skulls of pigs, buffaloes, and dogs. All Dyaks are fond of setting up old jars, called blanga or iempajang, in their houses as the most honoured form of decoration. No doubt they were once reliquaries, and thus esteemed as the abode of a spirit. The custom reminds us of the Buddhist veneration of cups and urns, and of the curious Japanese super- stition, of holding in high honour pots which have grown to rocks at the bottom of the sea. The pots and basins in the house of a chief in South-east Borneo were worth at least 15,000 guilders, or £i2