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Title: Primitive culture, vol. 1 (of 2)
Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy,
religion, language, art, and custom

Author: Edward B. Tylor

Release date: April 3, 2023 [eBook #70458]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: John Murray, 1871

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRIMITIVE
CULTURE, VOL. 1 (OF 2) ***

PRIMITIVE CULTURE

First Edition April, 1871.
Second Edition November, 1873.
Third Edition December, 1891.
Fourth Edition October, 1903.
Fifth Edition January, 1913.
Sixth Edition June, 1920.

PRIMITIVE CULTURE
RESEARCHES INTO THE DEVELOPMENT
OF MYTHOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION
LANGUAGE, ART, AND CUSTOM

BY EDWARD B. TYLOR, D.C.L., LL.D.,
F.R.S.
PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY
OF OXFORD

AUTHOR OF “RESEARCHES INTO THE EARLY HISTORY
OF MANKIND,” ETC.

“Ce n’est pas dans les possibilités, c’est dans l’homme même qu’il
faut étudier l’homme: il ne s’agit pas d’imaginer ce qu’il auroit pû
ou dû faire, mais de regarder ce qu’il fait.”—De Brosses.

IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I

LONDON

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

1920

Printed in U.S.A.
[Rights of Translation and Reproduction reserved]

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

The present volumes, uniform with the previous volume of ‘Researches into
the Early History of Mankind’ (1st Ed. 1865; 2nd Ed. 1870), carry on the
investigation of Culture into other branches of thought and belief, art and
custom. During the past six years I have taken occasion to bring tentatively
before the public some of the principal points of new evidence and
argument here advanced. The doctrine of survival in culture, the bearing of
directly-expressive language and the invention of numerals on the problem
of early civilization, the place of myth in the primitive history of the human
mind, the development of the animistic philosophy of religion, and the
origin of rites and ceremonies, have been discussed in various papers and
lectures,[1] before being treated at large and with a fuller array of facts in
this work.
The authorities for the facts stated in the text are fully specified in the foot-
notes, which must also serve as my general acknowledgment of obligations
to writers on ethnography and kindred sciences, as well as to historians,
travellers, and missionaries. I will only mention apart two treatises of which
I have made especial use: the ‘Mensch in der Geschichte,’ by Professor
Bastian, of Berlin, and the ‘Anthropologie der Naturvölker,’ by the late
Professor Waitz, of Marburg.
In discussing problems so complex as those of the development of
civilization, it is not enough to put forward theories accompanied by a few
illustrative examples. The statement of the facts must form the staple of the
argument, and the limit of needful detail is only reached when each group
so displays its general law, that fresh cases come to range themselves in
their proper niches as new instances of an already established rule. Should it
seem to any readers that my attempt to reach this limit sometimes leads to
the heaping up of too cumbrous detail, I would point out that the theoretical
novelty as well as the practical importance of many of the issues raised,

make it most unadvisable to stint them of their full evidence. In the course
of ten years chiefly spent in these researches, it has been my constant task
to select the most instructive ethnological facts from the vast mass on
record, and by lopping away unnecessary matter to reduce the data on each
problem to what is indispensable for reasonable proof.
E. B. T.
March, 1871.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

Since the publication of this work in 1871, translations have appeared in
German and Russian. In the present edition the form of page has been
slightly altered, for convenience of re-issue at once in England and
America. The matter, however, remains substantially the same. A few
passages have been amplified or altered for greater clearness, and on some
points additional or improved evidence has been put in. Among the
anthropologists whose published reviews or private communications have
enabled me to correct or strengthen various points, I will only mention by
name Professor Felix Liebrecht, of Liége, Mr. Clements R. Markham,
Professor Calderwood, Mr. Ralston, and Mr. Sebastian Evans.
It may have struck some readers as an omission, that in a work on
civilization insisting so strenuously on a theory of development or
evolution, mention should scarcely have been made of Mr. Darwin and Mr.
Herbert Spencer, whose influence on the whole course of modern thought
on such subjects should not be left without formal recognition. This absence
of particular reference is accounted for by the present work, arranged on its
own lines, coming scarcely into contact of detail with the previous works of
these eminent philosophers.
An objection made by several critics as to the accumulation of evidence in
these volumes leads me to remark, with sincere gratification, that this
objection has in fact been balanced by solid advantage. The plan of
collecting wide and minute evidence, so that readers may have actually
before them the means of judging the theory put forward, has been justified
by the reception of the book, even in circles to whose views many of its
arguments are strongly adverse, and that in matters of the first importance.
Writers of most various philosophical and theological schools now admit
that the ethnological facts are real, and vital, and have to be accounted for.
It is not too much to say that a perceptible movement of public opinion has

here justified the belief that the English mind, not readily swayed by
rhetoric, moves freely under the pressure of facts.
E. B. T.
September, 1873.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.

In this edition, while I have not found it needful to alter the general
argument, the new information which has become available during the last
twenty years has made it necessary to insert further details of evidence, and
to correct some few statements. For convenience of reference, the paging of
the last edition is kept to.
E. B. T.
September, 1891.

PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION.

For ordinary purposes the present edition may be taken as substantially
unchanged. In only a few passages noticeable alterations have been made,
(see vol. i. p. 167, vocal tone; vol. ii. pp. 234-7, totemism).
E. B. T.
October, 1903.

CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

CHAPTER I.
THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE.
Culture or Civilization—Its phenomena related according to definite Laws
—Method of classification and discussion of the evidence—Connexion of
successive stages of culture by Permanence, Modification, and Survival—
Principal topics examined in the present work 1
CHAPTER II.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE.
State of culture, industrial, intellectual, political, moral—Development of
culture in great measure corresponds with transition from savage through
barbaric to civilized life—Progression-theory—Degeneration-theory—
Development-theory includes both, the one as primary, the other as
secondary—Historical and traditional evidence not available as to low
stages of culture—Historical evidence as to principles of Degeneration—
Ethnological evidence as to rise and fall in culture, from comparison of
different levels of culture in branches of the same race—Extent of
historically recorded antiquity of civilization—Prehistoric Archæology
extends the antiquity of man in low stages of civilization—Traces of Stone
Age, corroborated by megalithic structures, lake-dwellings, shell-heaps,
burial-places, &c., prove original low culture throughout the world—Stages
of Progressive Development in industrial arts 26
CHAPTER III.
SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.
Survival and Superstition—Children’s games—Games of chance—
Traditional sayings—Nursery poems—Proverbs—Riddles—Significance

and survival in Customs: sneezing-formula, rite of foundation-sacrifice,
prejudice against saving a drowning man 70
CHAPTER IV.
Occult Sciences—Magical powers attributed by higher to lower races—
Magical processes based on Association of Ideas—Omens—Augury, &c.—
Oneiromancy—Haruspication, Scapulimancy, Chiromancy, &c.—
Cartomancy, &c.—Rhabdomancy, Dactyliomancy, Coscinomancy, &c.—
Astrology—Intellectual conditions accounting for the persistence of Magic
—Survival passes into Revival—Witchcraft, originating in savage culture,
continues in barbaric civilization; its decline in early mediæval Europe
followed by revival; its practices and counter-practices belong to earlier
culture—Spiritualism has its source in early stages of culture, in close
connexion with witchcraft—Spirit-rapping and Spirit-writing—Rising in
the air—Performances of tied mediums—Practical bearing of the study of
Survival 112
CHAPTER V.
EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.
Element of directly expressive Sound in Language—Test by independent
correspondence in distinct languages—Constituent processes of Language
—Gesture—Expression of feature, &c.—Emotional Tone—Articulate
sounds, vowels determined by musical quality and pitch, consonants—
Emphasis and Accent—Phrase-melody, Recitative—Sound-words—
Interjections—Calls to Animals—Emotional Cries—Sense-words formed
from Interjections—Affirmative and Negative particles, &c. 160
CHAPTER VI.
EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE (continued).
Imitative Words—Human actions named from sound—Animals’ names
from cries, &c.—Musical Instruments—Sounds reproduced—Words
modified to adapt sound to sense—Reduplication—Graduation of vowels to
express distance and difference—Children’s Language—Sound-words as
related to Sense-words—Language an original product of the lower Culture
200
CHAPTER VII.

THE ART OF COUNTING.
Ideas of Number derived from experience—State of Arithmetic among
uncivilized races—Small extent of Numeral-words among low tribes—
Counting by fingers and toes—Hand-numerals show derivation of Verbal
reckoning from Gesture-counting—Etymology of Numerals—Quinary,
Decimal, and Vigesimal notations of the world derived from counting on
fingers and toes—Adoption of foreign Numeral-words—Evidence of
development of Arithmetic from a low original level of Culture 240
CHAPTER VIII.
MYTHOLOGY.
Mythic fancy based, like other thought, on Experience—Mythology affords
evidence for studying laws of Imagination—Change in public opinion as to
credibility of Myths—Myths rationalized into Allegory and History—
Ethnological import and treatment of Myth—Myth to be studied in actual
existence and growth among modern savages and barbarians—Original
sources of Myth—Early doctrines of general animation of Nature—
Personification of Sun, Moon, and Stars; Water-spout, Sand-pillar,
Rainbow, Waterfall, Pestilence—Analogy worked into Myth and Metaphor
—Myths of Rain, Thunder, &c.—Effect of Language in formation of Myth
—Material Personification primary, Verbal Personification secondary—
Grammatical Gender, male and female, animate and inanimate, in relation
to Myth—Proper names of objects in relation to Myth—Mental State
proper to promote mythic imagination—Doctrine of Werewolves—
Phantasy and Fancy 273
CHAPTER IX.
MYTHOLOGY (continued).
Nature-myths, their origin, canon of interpretation, preservation of original
sense and significant names—Nature-myths of upper savage races
compared with related forms among barbaric and civilized nations—
Heaven and Earth as Universal Parents—Sun and Moon: Eclipse and
Sunset, as Hero or Maiden swallowed by Monster; Rising of Sun from Sea
and Descent to Under-World; Jaws of Night and Death, Symplegades; Eye
of Heaven, Eye of Odin and the Graiæ—Sun and Moon as mythic civilizers
—Moon, her inconstancy, periodical death and revival—Stars, their

generation—Constellations, their place in Mythology and Astronomy—
Wind and Tempest—Thunder—Earthquake 316
CHAPTER X.
MYTHOLOGY (continued).
Philosophical Myths: inferences become pseudo-history—Geological
Myths—Effect of doctrine of Miracles on Mythology—Magnetic Mountain
—Myths of relation of Apes to Men by development or degeneration—
Ethnological import of myths of Ape-men, Men with tails, Men of the
woods—Myths of Error, Perversion, and Exaggeration: stories of Giants,
Dwarfs, and Monstrous Tribes of men—Fanciful explanatory Myths—
Myths attached to legendary or historical Personages—Etymological Myths
on names of places and persons—Eponymic Myths on names of tribes,
nations, countries, &c.; their ethnological import—Pragmatic Myths by
realization of metaphors and ideas—Allegory—Beast-Fable—Conclusion
368
CHAPTER XI.
ANIMISM.
Religious ideas generally appear among low races of Mankind—Negative
statements on this subject frequently misleading and mistaken: many cases
uncertain—Minimum definition of Religion—Doctrine of Spiritual Beings,
here termed Animism—Animism treated as belonging to Natural Religion
—Animism divided into two sections, the philosophy of Souls, and of other
Spirits—Doctrine of Souls, its prevalence and definition among the lower
races—Definition of Apparitional Soul or Ghost-Soul—It is a theoretical
conception of primitive Philosophy, designed to account for phenomena
now classed under Biology, especially Life and Death, Health and Disease,
Sleep and Dreams, Trance and Visions—Relation of Soul in name and
nature to Shadow, Blood, Breath—Division or Plurality of Souls—Soul
cause of Life; its restoration to body when supposed absent—Exit of Soul
in Trances—Dreams and Visions: theory of exit of dreamer’s or seer’s own
soul; theory of visits received by them from other souls—Ghost-Soul seen
in Apparitions—Wraiths and Doubles—Soul has form of Body; suffers
mutilation with it—Voice of Ghost—Soul treated and defined as of Material
Substance; this appears to be the original doctrine—Transmission of Souls

to service in future life by Funeral Sacrifice of wives, attendants, &c.—
Souls of Animals—Their transmission by Funeral Sacrifice—Souls of
Plants—Souls of Objects—Their transmission by Funeral Sacrifice—
Relation of Doctrine of Object-Souls to Epicurean theory of Ideas—
Historical development of Doctrine of Souls, from the Ethereal Soul of
primitive Biology to the Immaterial Soul of modern Theology 417

CHAPTER I.
THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE.

Culture or Civilization—Its phenomena related according to definite
Laws—Method of classification and discussion of the evidence—
Connexion of successive stages of culture by Permanence,
Modification, and Survival—Principal topics examined in the present
work.

Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that
complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom,
and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of
society. The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind, in
so far as it is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a
subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action. On the one
hand, the uniformity which so largely pervades civilization may be
ascribed, in great measure, to the uniform action of uniform causes: while
on the other hand its various grades may be regarded as stages of
development or evolution, each the outcome of previous history, and about
to do its proper part in shaping the history of the future. To the investigation
of these two great principles in several departments of ethnography, with
especial consideration of the civilization of the lower tribes as related to the
civilization of the higher nations, the present volumes are devoted.
Our modern investigators in the sciences of inorganic nature are foremost to
recognize, both within and without their special fields of work, the unity of
nature, the fixity of its laws, the definite sequence of cause and effect
through which every fact depends on what has gone before it, and acts upon
what is to come after it. They grasp firmly the Pythagorean doctrine of
pervading order in the universal Kosmos. They affirm, with Aristotle, that
nature is not full of incoherent episodes, like a bad tragedy. They agree with

Leibnitz in what he calls ‘my axiom, that nature never acts by leaps (la
nature n’agit jamais par saut),’ as well as in his ‘great principle, commonly
little employed, that nothing happens without sufficient reason.’ Nor again,
in studying the structure and habits of plants and animals, or in
investigating the lower functions even of man, are these leading ideas
unacknowledged. But when we come to talk of the higher processes of
human feeling and action, of thought and language, knowledge and art, a
change appears in the prevalent tone of opinion. The world at large is
scarcely prepared to accept the general study of human life as a branch of
natural science, and to carry out, in a large sense, the poet’s injunction, to
‘Account for moral as for natural things.’ To many educated minds there
seems something presumptuous and repulsive in the view that the history of
mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature, that our thoughts, wills,
and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern the motion
of waves, the combination of acids and bases, and the growth of plants and
animals.
The main reasons of this state of the popular judgment are not far to seek.
There are many who would willingly accept a science of history if placed
before them with substantial definiteness of principle and evidence, but who
not unreasonably reject the systems offered to them, as falling too far short
of a scientific standard. Through resistance such as this, real knowledge
always sooner or later makes its way, while the habit of opposition to
novelty does such excellent service against the invasions of speculative
dogmatism, that we may sometimes even wish it were stronger than it is.
But other obstacles to the investigation of laws of human nature arise from
considerations of metaphysics and theology. The popular notion of free
human will involves not only freedom to act in accordance with motive, but
also a power of breaking loose from continuity and acting without cause,—
a combination which may be roughly illustrated by the simile of a balance
sometimes acting in the usual way, but also possessed of the faculty of
turning by itself without or against its weights. This view of an anomalous
action of the will, which it need hardly be said is incompatible with
scientific argument, subsists as an opinion patent or latent in men’s minds,
and strongly affecting their theoretic views of history, though it is not, as a
rule, brought prominently forward in systematic reasoning. Indeed the
definition of human will, as strictly according with motive, is the only
possible scientific basis in such enquiries. Happily, it is not needful to add

here yet another to the list of dissertations on supernatural intervention and
natural causation, on liberty, predestination, and accountability. We may
hasten to escape from the regions of transcendental philosophy and
theology, to start on a more hopeful journey over more practicable ground.
None will deny that, as each man knows by the evidence of his own
consciousness, definite and natural cause does, to a great extent, determine
human action. Then, keeping aside from considerations of extra-natural
interference and causeless spontaneity, let us take this admitted existence of
natural cause and effect as our standing-ground, and travel on it so far as it
will bear us. It is on this same basis that physical science pursues, with
ever-increasing success, its quest of laws of nature. Nor need this restriction
hamper the scientific study of human life, in which the real difficulties are
the practical ones of enormous complexity of evidence, and imperfection of
methods of observation.
Now it appears that this view of human will and conduct as subject to
definite law, is indeed recognised and acted upon by the very people who
oppose it when stated in the abstract as a general principle, and who then
complain that it annihilates man’s free will, destroys his sense of personal
responsibility, and degrades him to a soulless machine. He who will say
these things will nevertheless pass much of his own life in studying the
motives which lead to human action, seeking to attain his wishes through
them, framing in his mind theories of personal character, reckoning what
are likely to be the effects of new combinations, and giving to his reasoning
the crowning character of true scientific enquiry, by taking it for granted
that in so far as his calculation turns out wrong, either his evidence must
have been false or incomplete, or his judgment upon it unsound. Such a one
will sum up the experience of years spent in complex relations with society,
by declaring his persuasion that there is a reason for everything in life, and
that where events look unaccountable, the rule is to wait and watch in hope
that the key to the problem may some day be found. This man’s observation
may have been as narrow as his inferences are crude and prejudiced, but
nevertheless he has been an inductive philosopher ‘more than forty years
without knowing it.’ He has practically acknowledged definite laws of
human thought and action, and has simply thrown out of account in his own
studies of life the whole fabric of motiveless will and uncaused spontaneity.
It is assumed here that they should be just so thrown out of account in wider
studies, and that the true philosophy of history lies in extending and

improving the methods of the plain people who form their judgments upon
facts, and check them upon new facts. Whether the doctrine be wholly or
but partly true, it accepts the very condition under which we search for new
knowledge in the lessons of experience, and in a word the whole course of
our rational life is based upon it.
‘One event is always the son of another, and we must never forget the
parentage,’ was a remark made by a Bechuana chief to Casalis the African
missionary. Thus at all times historians, so far as they have aimed at being
more than mere chroniclers, have done their best to show not merely
succession, but connexion, among the events upon their record. Moreover,
they have striven to elicit general principles of human action, and by these
to explain particular events, stating expressly or taking tacitly for granted
the existence of a philosophy of history. Should any one deny the possibility
of thus establishing historical laws, the answer is ready with which Boswell
in such a case turned on Johnson: ‘Then, sir, you would reduce all history to
no better than an almanack.’ That nevertheless the labours of so many
eminent thinkers should have as yet brought history only to the threshold of
science, need cause no wonder to those who consider the bewildering
complexity of the problems which come before the general historian. The
evidence from which he is to draw his conclusions is at once so multifarious
and so doubtful, that a full and distinct view of its bearing on a particular
question is hardly to be attained, and thus the temptation becomes all but
irresistible to garble it in support of some rough and ready theory of the
course of events. The philosophy of history at large, explaining the past and
predicting the future phenomena of man’s life in the world by reference to
general laws, is in fact a subject with which, in the present state of
knowledge, even genius aided by wide research seems but hardly able to
cope. Yet there are departments of it which, though difficult enough, seem
comparatively accessible. If the field of enquiry be narrowed from History
as a whole to that branch of it which is here called Culture, the history, not
of tribes or nations, but of the condition of knowledge, religion, art, custom,
and the like among them, the task of investigation proves to lie within far
more moderate compass. We suffer still from the same kind of difficulties
which beset the wider argument, but they are much diminished. The
evidence is no longer so wildly heterogeneous, but may be more simply
classified and compared, while the power of getting rid of extraneous
matter, and treating each issue on its own proper set of facts, makes close

reasoning on the whole more available than in general history. This may
appear from a brief preliminary examination of the problem, how the
phenomena of Culture may be classified and arranged, stage by stage, in a
probable order of evolution.
Surveyed in a broad view, the character and habit of mankind at once
display that similarity and consistency of phenomena which led the Italian
proverb-maker to declare that ‘all the world is one country,’ ‘tutto il mondo
è paese.’ To general likeness in human nature on the one hand, and to
general likeness in the circumstances of life on the other, this similarity and
consistency may no doubt be traced, and they may be studied with especial
fitness in comparing races near the same grade of civilization. Little respect
need be had in such comparisons for date in history or for place on the map;
the ancient Swiss lake-dweller may be set beside the mediæval Aztec, and
the Ojibwa of North America beside the Zulu of South Africa. As Dr.
Johnson contemptuously said when he had read about Patagonians and
South Sea Islanders in Hawkesworth’s Voyages, ‘one set of savages is like
another.’ How true a generalization this really is, any Ethnological Museum
may show. Examine for instance the edged and pointed instruments in such
a collection; the inventory includes hatchet, adze, chisel, knife, saw, scraper,
awl, needle, spear and arrow-head, and of these most or all belong with
only differences of detail to races the most various. So it is with savage
occupations; the wood-chopping, fishing with net and line, shooting and
spearing game, fire-making, cooking, twisting cord and plaiting baskets,
repeat themselves with wonderful uniformity in the museum shelves which
illustrate the life of the lower races from Kamchatka to Tierra del Fuego,
and from Dahome to Hawaii. Even when it comes to comparing barbarous
hordes with civilized nations, the consideration thrusts itself upon our
minds, how far item after item of the life of the lower races passes into
analogous proceedings of the higher, in forms not too far changed to be
recognized, and sometimes hardly changed at all. Look at the modern
European peasant using his hatchet and his hoe, see his food boiling or
roasting over the log-fire, observe the exact place which beer holds in his
calculation of happiness, hear his tale of the ghost in the nearest haunted
house, and of the farmer’s niece who was bewitched with knots in her
inside till she fell into fits and died. If we choose out in this way things
which have altered little in a long course of centuries, we may draw a
picture where there shall be scarce a hand’s breadth difference between an

English ploughman and a negro of Central Africa. These pages will be so
crowded with evidence of such correspondence among mankind, that there
is no need to dwell upon its details here, but it may be used at once to
override a problem which would complicate the argument, namely, the
question of race. For the present purpose it appears both possible and
desirable to eliminate considerations of hereditary varieties or races of man,
and to treat mankind as homogeneous in nature, though placed in different
grades of civilization. The details of the enquiry will, I think, prove that
stages of culture may be compared without taking into account how far
tribes who use the same implement, follow the same custom, or believe the
same myth, may differ in their bodily configuration and the colour of their
skin and hair.
A first step in the study of civilization is to dissect it into details, and to
classify these in their proper groups. Thus, in examining weapons, they are
to be classed under spear, club, sling, bow and arrow, and so forth; among
textile arts are to be ranged matting, netting, and several grades of making
and weaving threads; myths are divided under such headings as myths of
sunrise and sunset, eclipse-myths, earthquake-myths, local myths which
account for the names of places by some fanciful tale, eponymic myths
which account for the parentage of a tribe by turning its name into the name
of an imaginary ancestor; under rites and ceremonies occur such practices
as the various kinds of sacrifice to the ghosts of the dead and to other
spiritual beings, the turning to the east in worship, the purification of
ceremonial or moral uncleanness by means of water or fire. Such are a few
miscellaneous examples from a list of hundreds, and the ethnographer’s
business is to classify such details with a view to making out their
distribution in geography and history, and the relations which exist among
them. What this task is like, may be almost perfectly illustrated by
comparing these details of culture with the species of plants and animals as
studied by the naturalist. To the ethnographer the bow and arrow is a
species, the habit of flattening children’s skulls is a species, the practice of
reckoning numbers by tens is a species. The geographical distribution of
these things, and their transmission from region to region, have to be
studied as the naturalist studies the geography of his botanical and
zoological, species. Just as certain plants and animals are peculiar to certain
districts, so it is with such instruments as the Australian boomerang, the
Polynesian stick-and-groove for fire-making, the tiny bow and arrow used

as a lancet or phleme by tribes about the Isthmus of Panama, and in like
manner with many an art, myth, or custom, found isolated in a particular
field. Just as the catalogue of all the species of plants and animals of a
district represents its Flora and Fauna, so the list of all the items of the
general life of a people represents that whole which we call its culture. And
just as distant regions so often produce vegetables and animals which are
analogous, though by no means identical, so it is with the details of the
civilization of their inhabitants. How good a working analogy there really is
between the diffusion of plants and animals and the diffusion of civilization,
comes well into view when we notice how far the same causes have
produced both at once. In district after district, the same causes which have
introduced the cultivated plants and domesticated animals of civilization,
have brought in with them a corresponding art and knowledge. The course
of events which carried horses and wheat to America carried with them the
use of the gun and the iron hatchet, while in return the whole world
received not only maize, potatoes, and turkeys, but the habit of tobacco-
smoking and the sailor’s hammock.
It is a matter worthy of consideration, that the accounts of similar
phenomena of culture, recurring in different parts of the world, actually
supply incidental proof of their own authenticity. Some years since, a
question which brings out this point was put to me by a great historian
—‘How can a statement as to customs, myths, beliefs, &c., of a savage tribe
be treated as evidence where it depends on the testimony of some traveller
or missionary, who may be a superficial observer, more or less ignorant of
the native language, a careless retailer of unsifted talk, a man prejudiced or
even wilfully deceitful?’ This question is, indeed, one which every
ethnographer ought to keep clearly and constantly before his mind. Of
course he is bound to use his best judgment as to the trustworthiness of all
authors he quotes, and if possible to obtain several accounts to certify each
point in each locality. But it is over and above these measures of precaution
that the test of recurrence comes in. If two independent visitors to different
countries, say a mediæval Mohammedan in Tartary and a modern
Englishman in Dahome, or a Jesuit missionary in Brazil and a Wesleyan in
the Fiji Islands, agree in describing some analogous art or rite or myth
among the people they have visited, it becomes difficult or impossible to set
down such correspondence to accident or wilful fraud. A story by a
bushranger in Australia may, perhaps, be objected to as a mistake or an

invention, but did a Methodist minister in Guinea conspire with him to
cheat the public by telling the same story there? The possibility of
intentional or unintentional mystification is often barred by such a state of
things as that a similar statement is made in two remote lands, by two
witnesses, of whom A lived a century before B, and B appears never to have
heard of A. How distant are the countries, how wide apart the dates, how
different the creeds and characters of the observers, in the catalogue of facts
of civilization, needs no farther showing to any one who will even glance at
the footnotes of the present work. And the more odd the statement, the less
likely that several people in several places should have made it wrongly.
This being so, it seems reasonable to judge that the statements are in the
main truly given, and that their close and regular coincidence is due to the
cropping up of similar facts in various districts of culture. Now the most
important facts of ethnography are vouched for in this way. Experience
leads the student after a while to expect and find that the phenomena of
culture, as resulting from widely-acting similar causes, should recur again
and again in the world. He even mistrusts isolated statements to which he
knows of no parallel elsewhere, and waits for their genuineness to be shown
by corresponding accounts from the other side of the earth, or the other end
of history. So strong, indeed, is this means of authentication, that the
ethnographer in his library may sometimes presume to decide, not only
whether a particular explorer is a shrewd, honest observer, but also whether
what he reports is conformable to the general rules of civilization. ‘Non
quis, sed quid.’
To turn from the distribution of culture in different countries, to its diffusion
within these countries. The quality of mankind which tends most to make
the systematic study of civilization possible, is that remarkable tacit
consensus or agreement which so far induces whole populations to unite in
the use of the same language, to follow the same religion and customary
law, to settle down to the same general level of art and knowledge. It is this
state of things which makes it so far possible to ignore exceptional facts and
to describe nations by a sort of general average. It is this state of things
which makes it so far possible to represent immense masses of details by a
few typical facts, while, these once settled, new cases recorded by new
observers simply fall into their places to prove the soundness of the
classification. There is found to be such regularity in the composition of
societies of men, that we can drop individual differences out of sight, and

thus can generalize on the arts and opinions of whole nations, just as, when
looking down upon an army from a hill, we forget the individual soldier,
whom, in fact, we can scarce distinguish in the mass, while we see each
regiment as an organized body, spreading or concentrating, moving in
advance or in retreat. In some branches of the study of social laws it is now
possible to call in the aid of statistics, and to set apart special actions of
large mixed communities of men by means of taxgatherers’ schedules, or
the tables of the insurance office. Among modern arguments on the laws of
human action, none have had a deeper effect than generalizations such as
those of M. Quetelet, on the regularity, not only of such matters as average
stature and the annual rates of birth and death, but of the recurrence, year
after year, of such obscure and seemingly incalculable products of national
life as the numbers of murders and suicides, and the proportion of the very
weapons of crime. Other striking cases are the annual regularity of persons
killed accidentally in the London streets, and of undirected letters dropped
into post-office letter-boxes. But in examining the culture of the lower
races, far from having at command the measured arithmetical facts of
modern statistics, we may have to judge of the condition of tribes from the
imperfect accounts supplied by travellers or missionaries, or even to reason
upon relics of prehistoric races of whose very names and languages we are
hopelessly ignorant. Now these may seem at the first glance sadly indefinite
and unpromising materials for scientific enquiry. But in fact they are neither
indefinite nor unpromising, but give evidence that is good and definite so
far as it goes. They are data which, for the distinct way in which they
severally denote the condition of the tribe they belong to, will actually bear
comparison with the statistician’s returns. The fact is that a stone arrow-
head, a carved club, an idol, a grave-mound where slaves and property have
been buried for the use of the dead, an account of a sorcerer’s rites in
making rain, a table of numerals, the conjugation of a verb, are things
which each express the state of a people as to one particular point of
culture, as truly as the tabulated numbers of deaths by poison, and of chests
of tea imported, express in a different way other partial results of the
general life of a whole community.
That a whole nation should have a special dress, special tools and weapons,
special laws of marriage and property, special moral and religious doctrines,
is a remarkable fact, which we notice so little because we have lived all our
lives in the midst of it. It is with such general qualities of organized bodies

of men that ethnography has especially to deal. Yet, while generalizing on
the culture of a tribe or nation, and setting aside the peculiarities of the
individuals composing it as unimportant to the main result, we must be
careful not to forget what makes up this main result. There are people so
intent on the separate life of individuals that they cannot grasp a notion of
the action of a community as a whole—such an observer, incapable of a
wide view of society, is aptly described in the saying that he ‘cannot see the
forest for the trees.’ But, on the other hand, the philosopher may be so intent
upon his general laws of society as to neglect the individual actors of whom
that society is made up, and of him it may be said that he cannot see the
trees for the forest. We know how arts, customs, and ideas are shaped
among ourselves by the combined actions of many individuals, of which
actions both motive and effect often come quite distinctly within our view.
The history of an invention, an opinion, a ceremony, is a history of
suggestion and modification, encouragement and opposition, personal gain
and party prejudice, and the individuals concerned act each according to his
own motives, as determined by his character and circumstances. Thus
sometimes we watch individuals acting for their own ends with little
thought of their effect on society at large, and sometimes we have to study
movements of national life as a whole, where the individuals co-operating
in them are utterly beyond our observation. But seeing that collective social
action is the mere resultant of many individual actions, it is clear that these
two methods of enquiry, if rightly followed, must be absolutely consistent.
In studying both the recurrence of special habits or ideas in several districts,
and their prevalence within each district, there come before us ever-
reiterated proofs of regular causation producing the phenomena of human
life, and of laws of maintenance and diffusion according to which these
phenomena settle into permanent standard conditions of society, at definite
stages of culture. But, while giving full importance to the evidence bearing
on these standard conditions of society, let us be careful to avoid a pitfall
which may entrap the unwary student. Of course the opinions and habits
belonging in common to masses of mankind are to a great extent the results
of sound judgment and practical wisdom. But to a great extent it is not so.
That many numerous societies of men should have believed in the influence
of the evil eye and the existence of a firmament, should have sacrificed
slaves and goods to the ghosts of the departed, should have handed down
traditions of giants slaying monsters and men turning into beasts—all this is

ground for holding that such ideas were indeed produced in men’s minds by
efficient causes, but it is not ground for holding that the rites in question are
profitable, the beliefs sound, and the history authentic. This may seem at the
first glance a truism, but, in fact, it is the denial of a fallacy which deeply
affects the minds of all but a small critical minority of mankind. Popularly,
what everybody says must be true, what everybody does must be right
—‘Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est, hoc est vere
proprieque Catholicum’—and so forth. There are various topics, especially
in history, law, philosophy, and theology, where even the educated people
we live among can hardly be brought to see that the cause why men do hold
an opinion, or practise a custom, is by no means necessarily a reason why
they ought to do so. Now collections of ethnographic evidence bringing so
prominently into view the agreement of immense multitudes of men as to
certain traditions, beliefs, and usages, are peculiarly liable to be thus
improperly used in direct defence of these institutions themselves, even old
barbaric nations being polled to maintain their opinions against what are
called modern ideas. As it has more than once happened to myself to find
my collections of traditions and beliefs thus set up to prove their own
objective truth, without proper examination of the grounds on which they
were actually received, I take this occasion of remarking that the same line
of argument will serve equally well to demonstrate, by the strong and wide
consent of nations, that the earth is flat, and nightmare the visit of a demon.
It being shown that the details of Culture are capable of being classified in a
great number of ethnographic groups of arts, beliefs, customs, and the rest,
the consideration comes next how far the facts arranged in these groups are
produced by evolution from one another. It need hardly be pointed out that
the groups in question, though held together each by a common character,
are by no means accurately defined. To take up again the natural history
illustration, it may be said that they are species which tend to run widely
into varieties. And when it comes to the question what relations some of
these groups bear to others, it is plain that the student of the habits of
mankind has a great advantage over the student of the species of plants and
animals. Among naturalists it is an open question whether a theory of
development from species to species is a record of transitions which
actually took place, or a mere ideal scheme serviceable in the classification
of species whose origin was really independent. But among ethnographers
there is no such question as to the possibility of species of implements or

habits or beliefs being developed one out of another, for development in
Culture is recognized by our most familiar knowledge. Mechanical
invention supplies apt examples of the kind of development which affects
civilization at large. In the history of fire-arms, the clumsy wheel-lock, in
which a notched steel wheel revolved by means of a spring against a piece
of pyrites till a spark caught the priming, led to the invention of the more
serviceable flint-lock, of which a few still hang in the kitchens of our farm-
houses for the boys to shoot small birds with at Christmas; the flint-lock in
time passed by modification into the percussion-lock, which is just now
changing its old-fashioned arrangement to be adapted from muzzle-loading
to breech-loading. The mediæval astrolabe passed into the quadrant, now
discarded in its turn by the seaman, who uses the more delicate sextant, and
so it is through the history of one art and instrument after another. Such
examples of progression are known to us as direct history, but so thoroughly
is this notion of development at home in our minds, that by means of it we
reconstruct lost history without scruple, trusting to general knowledge of
the principles of human thought and action as a guide in putting the facts in
their proper order. Whether chronicle speaks or is silent on the point, no one
comparing a long-bow and a cross-bow would doubt that the cross-bow was
a development arising from the simpler instrument. So among the fire-drills
for igniting by friction, it seems clear on the face of the matter that the drill
worked by a cord or bow is a later improvement on the clumsier primitive
instrument twirled between the hands. That instructive class of specimens
which antiquaries sometimes discover, bronze celts modelled on the heavy
type of the stone hatchet, are scarcely explicable except as first steps in the
transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, to be followed soon by the
next stage of progress, in which it is discovered that the new material is
suited to a handier and less wasteful pattern. And thus, in the other branches
of our history, there will come again and again into view series of facts
which may be consistently arranged as having followed one another in a
particular order of development, but which will hardly bear being turned
round and made to follow in reversed order. Such for instance are the facts I
have here brought forward in a chapter on the Art of Counting, which tend
to prove that as to this point of culture at least, savage tribes reached their
position by learning and not by unlearning, by elevation from a lower rather
than by degradation from a higher state.

Among evidence aiding us to trace the course which the civilization of the
world has actually followed, is that great class of facts to denote which I
have found it convenient to introduce the term ‘survivals.’ These are
processes, customs, opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by
force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they
had their original home, and they thus remain as proofs and examples of an
older condition of culture out of which a newer has been evolved. Thus, I
know an old Somersetshire woman whose hand-loom dates from the time
before the introduction of the ‘flying shuttle,’ which new-fangled appliance
she has never even learnt to use, and I have seen her throw her shuttle from
hand to hand in true classic fashion; this old woman is not a century behind
her times, but she is a case of survival. Such examples often lead us back to
the habits of hundreds and even thousands of years ago. The ordeal of the
Key and Bible, still in use, is a survival; the Midsummer bonfire is a
survival; the Breton peasants’ All Souls’ supper for the spirits of the dead is
a survival. The simple keeping up of ancient habits is only one part of the
transition from old into new and changing times. The serious business of
ancient society may be seen to sink into the sport of later generations, and
its serious belief to linger on in nursery folk-lore, while superseded habits
of old-world life may be modified into new-world forms still powerful for
good and evil. Sometimes old thoughts and practices will burst out afresh,
to the amazement of a world that thought them long since dead or dying;
here survival passes into revival, as has lately happened in so remarkable a
way in the history of modern spiritualism, a subject full of instruction from
the ethnographer’s point of view. The study of the principles of survival
has, indeed, no small practical importance, for most of what we call
superstition is included within survival, and in this way lies open to the
attack of its deadliest enemy, a reasonable explanation. Insignificant,
moreover, as multitudes of the facts of survival are in themselves, their
study is so effective for tracing the course of the historical development
through which alone it is possible to understand their meaning, that it
becomes a vital point of ethnographic research to gain the clearest possible
insight into their nature. This importance must justify the detail here
devoted to an examination of survival, on the evidence of such games,
popular sayings, customs, superstitions, and the like, as may serve well to
bring into view the manner of its operation.

Progress, degradation, survival, revival, modification, are all modes of the
connexion that binds together the complex network of civilization. It needs
but a glance into the trivial details of our own daily life to set us thinking
how far we are really its originators, and how far but the transmitters and
modifiers of the results of long past ages. Looking round the rooms we live
in, we may try here how far he who only knows his own time can be
capable of rightly comprehending even that. Here is the ‘honeysuckle’ of
Assyria, there the fleur-de-lis of Anjou, a cornice with a Greek border runs
round the ceiling, the style of Louis XIV, and its parent the Renaissance
share the looking-glass between them. Transformed, shifted, or mutilated,
such elements of art still carry their history plainly stamped upon them; and
if the history yet farther behind is less easy to read, we are not to say that
because we cannot clearly discern it there is therefore no history there. It is
thus even with the fashion of the clothes men wear. The ridiculous little tails
of the German postilion’s coat show of themselves how they came to
dwindle to such absurd rudiments; but the English clergyman’s bands no
longer so convey their history to the eye, and look unaccountable enough
till one has seen the intermediate stages through which they came down
from the more serviceable wide collars, such as Milton wears in his portrait,
and which gave their name to the ‘band-box’ they used to be kept in. In fact,
the books of costume, showing how one garment grew or shrank by gradual
stages and passed into another, illustrate with much force and clearness the
nature of the change and growth, revival and decay, which go on from year
to year in more important matters of life. In books, again, we see each
writer not for and by himself, but occupying his proper place in history; we
look through each philosopher, mathematician, chemist, poet, into the
background of his education,—through Leibnitz into Descartes, through
Dalton into Priestley, through Milton into Homer. The study of language
has, perhaps, done more than any other in removing from our view of
human thought and action the ideas of chance and arbitrary invention, and
in substituting for them a theory of development by the co-operation of
individual men, through processes ever reasonable and intelligible where
the facts are fully known. Rudimentary as the science of culture still is, the
symptoms are becoming very strong that even what seem its most
spontaneous and motiveless phenomena will, nevertheless, be shown to
come within the range of distinct cause and effect as certainly as the facts of
mechanics. What would be popularly thought more indefinite and

uncontrolled than the products of the imagination in myths and fables? Yet
any systematic investigation of mythology, on the basis of a wide collection
of evidence, will show plainly enough in such efforts of fancy at once a
development from stage to stage, and a production of uniformity of result
from uniformity of cause. Here, as elsewhere, causeless spontaneity is seen
to recede farther and farther into shelter within the dark precincts of
ignorance; like chance, that still holds its place among the vulgar as a real
cause of events otherwise unaccountable, while to educated men it has long
consciously meant nothing but this ignorance itself. It is only when men fail
to see the line of connexion in events, that they are prone to fall upon the
notions of arbitrary impulses, causeless freaks, chance and nonsense and
indefinite unaccountability. If childish games, purposeless customs, absurd
superstitions, are set down as spontaneous because no one can say exactly
how they came to be, the assertion may remind us of the like effect that the
eccentric habits of the wild rice-plant had on the philosophy of a Red Indian
tribe, otherwise disposed to see in the harmony of nature the effects of one
controlling personal will. The Great Spirit, said these Sioux theologians,
made all things except the wild rice; but the wild rice came by chance.
‘Man,’ said Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘ever connects on from what lies at
hand (der Mensch knüpft immer an Vorhandenes an).’ The notion of the
continuity of civilization contained in this maxim is no barren philosophic
principle, but is at once made practical by the consideration that they who
wish to understand their own lives ought to know the stages through which
their opinions and habits have become what they are. Auguste Comte
scarcely overstated the necessity of this study of development when he
declared at the beginning of his ‘Positive Philosophy’ that ‘no conception
can be understood except through its history,’ and his phrase will bear
extension to culture at large. To expect to look modern life in the face and
comprehend it by mere inspection, is a philosophy whose weakness can
easily be tested. Imagine any one explaining the trivial saying, ‘a little bird
told me,’ without knowing of the old belief in the language of birds and
beasts, to which Dr. Dasent, in the introduction to the Norse Tales, so
reasonably traces its origin. Attempts to explain by the light of reason things
which want the light of history to show their meaning, may be instanced
from Blackstone’s Commentaries. To Blackstone’s mind, the very right of
the commoner to turn his beast out to graze on the common, finds its origin
and explanation in the feudal system. ‘For, when lords of manors granted

out parcels of land to tenants, for services either done or to be done, these
tenants could not plough or manure the land without beasts; these beasts
could not be sustained without pasture; and pasture could not be had but in
the lord’s wastes, and on the uninclosed fallow grounds of themselves and
the other tenants. The law therefore annexed this right of common, as
inseparably incident, to the grant of the lands; and this was the original of
common appendant,’ &c.[2] Now though there is nothing irrational in this
explanation, it does not agree at all with the Teutonic land-law which
prevailed in England long before the Norman Conquest, and of which the
remains have never wholly disappeared. In the old village-community even
the arable land, lying in the great common fields which may still be traced
in our country, had not yet passed into separate property, while the
pasturage in the fallows and stubbles and on the waste belonged to the
householders in common. Since those days, the change from communal to
individual ownership has mostly transformed this old-world system, but the
right which the peasant enjoys of pasturing his cattle on the common still
remains, not as a concession to feudal tenants, but as possessed by the
commoners before the lord ever claimed the ownership of the waste. It is
always unsafe to detach a custom from its hold on past events, treating it as
an isolated fact to be simply disposed of by some plausible explanation.
In carrying on the great task of rational ethnography, the investigation of the
causes which have produced the phenomena of culture, and of the laws to
which they are subordinate, it is desirable to work out as systematically as
possible a scheme of evolution of this culture along its many lines. In the
following chapter, on the Development of Culture, an attempt is made to
sketch a theoretical course of civilization among mankind, such as appears
on the whole most accordant with the evidence. By comparing the various
stages of civilization among races known to history, with the aid of
archæological inference from the remains of prehistoric tribes, it seems
possible to judge in a rough way of an early general condition of man,
which from our point of view is to be regarded as a primitive condition,
whatever yet earlier state may in reality have lain behind it. This
hypothetical primitive condition corresponds in a considerable degree to
that of modern savage tribes, who, in spite of their difference and distance,
have in common certain elements of civilization, which seem remains of an
early state of the human race at large. If this hypothesis be true, then,
notwithstanding the continual interference of degeneration, the main

tendency of culture from primæval up to modern times has been from
savagery towards civilization. On the problem of this relation of savage to
civilized life, almost every one of the thousands of facts discussed in the
succeeding chapters has its direct bearing. Survival in Culture, placing all
along the course of advancing civilization way-marks full of meaning to
those who can decipher their signs, even now sets up in our midst primæval
monuments of barbaric thought and life. Its investigation tells strongly in
favour of the view that the European may find among the Greenlanders or
Maoris many a trait for reconstructing the picture of his own primitive
ancestors. Next comes the problem of the Origin of Language. Obscure as
many parts of this problem still remain, its clearer positions lie open to the
investigation whether speech took its origin among mankind in the savage
state, and the result of the enquiry is that consistently with all known
evidence, this may have been the case. From the examination of the Art of
Counting a far more definite consequence is shown. It may be confidently
asserted, that not only is this important art found in a rudimentary state
among savage tribes, but that satisfactory evidence proves numeration to
have been developed by rational invention from this low stage up to that in
which we ourselves possess it. The examination of Mythology contained in
the first volume, is for the most part made from a special point of view, on
evidence collected for a special purpose, that of tracing the relation between
the myths of savage tribes and their analogues among more civilized
nations. The issue of such enquiry goes far to prove that the earliest myth-
maker arose and flourished among savage hordes, setting on foot an art
which his more cultured successors would carry on, till its results came to
be fossilized in superstition, mistaken for history, shaped and draped in
poetry, or cast aside as lying folly.
Nowhere, perhaps, are broad views of historical development more needed
than in the study of religion. Notwithstanding all that has been written to
make the world acquainted with the lower theologies, the popular ideas of
their place in history and their relation to the faiths of higher nations are
still of the mediæval type. It is wonderful to contrast some missionary
journals with Max Müller’s Essays, and to set the unappreciating hatred and
ridicule that is lavished by narrow hostile zeal on Brahmanism, Buddhism,
Zoroastrism, besides the catholic sympathy with which deep and wide
knowledge can survey those ancient and noble phases of man’s religious
consciousness; nor, because the religions of savage tribes may be rude and

primitive compared with the great Asiatic systems, do they lie too low for
interest and even for respect. The question really lies between
understanding and misunderstanding them. Few who will give their minds
to master the general principles of savage religion will ever again think it
ridiculous, or the knowledge of it superfluous to the rest of mankind. Far
from its beliefs and practices being a rubbish-heap of miscellaneous folly,
they are consistent and logical in so high a degree as to begin, as soon as
even roughly classified, to display the principles of their formation and
development; and these principles prove to be essentially rational, though
working in a mental condition of intense and inveterate ignorance. It is with
a sense of attempting an investigation which bears very closely on the
current theology of our own day, that I have set myself to examine
systematically, among the lower races, the development of Animism; that is
to say, the doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings in general. More than
half of the present work is occupied with a mass of evidence from all
regions of the world, displaying the nature and meaning of this great
element of the Philosophy of Religion, and tracing its transmission,
expansion, restriction, modification, along the course of history into the
midst of our own modern thought. Nor are the questions of small practical
moment which have to be raised in a similar attempt to trace the
development of certain prominent Rites and Ceremonies—customs so full
of instruction as to the inmost powers of religion, whose outward
expression and practical result they are.
In these investigations, however, made rather from an ethnographic than a
theological point of view, there has seemed little need of entering into direct
controversial argument, which indeed I have taken pains to avoid as far as
possible. The connexion which runs through religion, from its rudest forms
up to the status of an enlightened Christianity, may be conveniently treated
of with little recourse to dogmatic theology. The rites of sacrifice and
purification may be studied in their stages of development without entering
into questions of their authority and value, nor does an examination of the
successive phases of the world’s belief in a future life demand a discussion
of the arguments adduced for or against the doctrine itself. The
ethnographic results may then be left as materials for professed theologians,
and it will not perhaps be long before evidence so fraught with meaning
shall take its legitimate place. To fall back once again on the analogy of
natural history, the time may soon come when it will be thought as

unreasonable for a scientific student of theology not to have a competent
acquaintance with the principles of the religions of the lower races, as for a
physiologist to look with the contempt of past centuries on evidence derived
from the lower forms of life, deeming the structure of mere invertebrate
creatures matter unworthy of his philosophic study.
Not merely as a matter of curious research, but as an important practical
guide to the understanding of the present and the shaping of the future, the
investigation into the origin and early development of civilization must be
pushed on zealously. Every possible avenue of knowledge must be
explored, every door tried to see if it is open. No kind of evidence need be
left untouched on the score of remoteness or complexity, of minuteness or
triviality. The tendency of modern enquiry is more and more towards the
conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere. To despair of what a
conscientious collection and study of facts may lead to, and to declare any
problem insoluble because difficult and far off, is distinctly to be on the
wrong side in science; and he who will choose a hopeless task may set
himself to discover the limits of discovery. One remembers Comte starting
in his account of astronomy with a remark on the necessary limitation of
our knowledge of the stars: we conceive, he tells us, the possibility of
determining their form, distance, size, and movement, whilst we should
never by any method be able to study their chemical composition, their
mineralogical structure, &c. Had the philosopher lived to see the
application of spectrum analysis to this very problem, his proclamation of
the dispiriting doctrine of necessary ignorance would perhaps have been
recanted in favour of a more hopeful view. And it seems to be with the
philosophy of remote human life somewhat as with the study of the nature
of the celestial bodies. The processes to be made out in the early stages of
our mental evolution lie distant from us in time as the stars lie distant from
us in space, but the laws of the universe are not limited with the direct
observation of our senses. There is vast material to be used in our enquiry;
many workers are now busied in bringing this material into shape, though
little may have yet been done in proportion to what remains to do; and
already it seems not too much to say that the vague outlines of a philosophy
of primæval history are beginning to come within our view.

CHAPTER II.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE.

Stages of culture, industrial, intellectual, political, moral—
Development of culture in great measure corresponds with transition
from savage through barbaric to civilized life—Progression-theory—
Degeneration-theory—Development-theory includes both, the one as
primary, the other as secondary—Historical and traditional evidence
not available as to low stages of culture—Historical evidence as to
principles of Degeneration—Ethnological evidence as to rise and fall in
culture from comparison of different levels of culture in branches of the
same race—Extent of historically recorded antiquity of civilization—
Prehistoric Archæology extends the antiquity of man in low stages of
civilization—Traces of Stone Age, corroborated by megalithic
structures, lake dwellings, shell-heaps, burial-places, &c., prove
original low culture throughout the world—Stages of Progressive
Development in industrial arts.

In taking up the problem of the development of culture as a branch of
ethnological research, a first proceeding is to obtain a means of
measurement. Seeking something like a definite line along which to reckon
progression and retrogression in civilization, we may apparently find it best
in the classification of real tribes and nations, past and present. Civilization
actually existing among mankind in different grades, we are enabled to
estimate and compare it by positive examples. The educated world of
Europe and America practically settles a standard by simply placing its own
nations at one end of the social series and savage tribes at the other,
arranging the rest of mankind between these limits according as they
correspond more closely to savage or to cultured life. The principal criteria
of classification are the absence or presence, high or low development, of

the industrial arts, especially metal-working, manufacture of implements
and vessels, agriculture, architecture, &c., the extent of scientific
knowledge, the definiteness of moral principles, the condition of religious
belief and ceremony, the degree of social and political organization, and so
forth. Thus, on the definite basis of compared facts, ethnographers are able
to set up at least a rough scale of civilization. Few would dispute that the
following races are arranged rightly in order of culture:—Australian,
Tahitian, Aztec, Chinese, Italian. By treating the development of civilization
on this plain ethnographic basis, many difficulties may be avoided which
have embarrassed its discussion. This may be seen by a glance at the
relation which theoretical principles of civilization bear to the transitions to
be observed as matter of fact between the extremes of savage and cultured
life.
From an ideal point of view, civilization may be looked upon as the general
improvement of mankind by higher organization of the individual and of
society, to the end of promoting at once man’s goodness, power, and
happiness. This theoretical civilization does in no small measure correspond
with actual civilization, as traced by comparing savagery with barbarism,
and barbarism with modern educated life. So far as we take into account
only material and intellectual culture, this is especially true. Acquaintance
with the physical laws of the world, and the accompanying power of
adapting nature to man’s own ends, are, on the whole, lowest among
savages, mean among barbarians, and highest among modern educated
nations. Thus a transition from the savage state to our own would be,
practically, that very progress of art and knowledge which is one main
element in the development of culture.
But even those students who hold most strongly that the general course of
civilization, as measured along the scale of races from savages to ourselves,
is progress towards the benefit of mankind, must admit many and manifold
exceptions. Industrial and intellectual culture by no means advances
uniformly in all its branches, and in fact excellence in various of its details
is often obtained under conditions which keep back culture as a whole. It is
true that these exceptions seldom swamp the general rule; and the
Englishman, admitting that he does not climb trees like the wild Australian,
nor track game like the savage of the Brazilian forest, nor compete with the
ancient Etruscan and the modern Chinese in delicacy of goldsmith’s work

and ivory carving, nor reach the classic Greek level of oratory and
sculpture, may yet claim for himself a general condition above any of these
races. But there actually have to be taken into account developments of
science and art which tend directly against culture. To have learnt to give
poison secretly and effectually, to have raised a corrupt literature to
pestilent perfection, to have organized a successful scheme to arrest free
enquiry and proscribe free expression, are works of knowledge and skill
whose progress toward their goal has hardly conduced to the general good.
Thus, even in comparing mental and artistic culture among several peoples,
the balance of good and ill is not quite easy to strike.
If not only knowledge and art, but at the same time moral and political
excellence, be taken into consideration, it becomes yet harder to reckon on
an ideal scale the advance or decline from stage to stage of culture. In fact,
a combined intellectual and moral measure of human condition is an
instrument which no student has as yet learnt properly to handle. Even
granting that intellectual, moral, and political life may, on a broad view, be
seen to progress together, it is obvious that they are far from advancing with
equal steps. It may be taken as man’s rule of duty in the world, that he shall
strive to know as well as he can find out, and to do as well as he knows
how. But the parting asunder of these two great principles, that separation
of intelligence from virtue which accounts for so much of the wrong-doing
of mankind, is continually seen to happen in the great movements of
civilization. As one conspicuous instance of what all history stands to
prove, if we study the early ages of Christianity, we may see men with
minds pervaded by the new religion of duty, holiness, and love, yet at the
same time actually falling away in intellectual life, thus at once vigorously
grasping one half of civilization, and contemptuously casting off the other.
Whether in high ranges or in low of human life, it may be seen that advance
of culture seldom results at once in unmixed good. Courage, honesty,
generosity, are virtues which may suffer, at least for a time, by the
development of a sense of value of life and property. The savage who
adopts something of foreign civilization too often loses his ruder virtues
without gaining an equivalent. The white invader or colonist, though
representing on the whole a higher moral standard than the savage he
improves or destroys, often represents his standard very ill, and at best can
hardly claim to substitute a life stronger, nobler, and purer at every point
than that which he supersedes. The onward movement from barbarism has

dropped behind it more than one quality of barbaric character which
cultured modern men look back on with regret, and will even strive to
regain by futile attempts to stop the course of history, and to restore the past
in the midst of the present. So it is with social institutions. The slavery
recognised by savage and barbarous races is preferable in kind to that which
existed for centuries in late European colonies. The relation of the sexes
among many savage tribes is more healthy than among the richer classes of
the Mohammedan world. As a supreme authority of government, the savage
councils of chiefs and elders compare favourably with the unbridled
despotism under which so many cultured races have groaned. The Creek
Indians, asked concerning their religion, replied that where agreement was
not to be had, it was best to ‘let every man paddle his canoe his own way:’
and after long ages of theological strife and persecution, the modern world
seems coming to think these savages not far wrong.
Among accounts of savage life, it is not, indeed, uncommon to find details
of admirable moral and social excellence. To take one prominent instance,
Lieut. Bruijn Kops and Mr. Wallace have described, among the rude
Papuans of the Eastern Archipelago, a habitual truthfulness, rightfulness,
and kindliness which it would be hard to match in the general moral life of
Persia or India, to say nothing of many a civilized European district.[3] Such
tribes may count as the ‘blameless Ethiopians’ of the modern world, and
from them an important lesson may be learnt. Ethnographers who seek in
modern savages types of the remotely ancient human race at large, are
bound by such examples to consider the rude life of primæval man under
favourable conditions to have been, in its measure, a good and happy life.
On the other hand, the pictures drawn by some travellers of savagery as a
kind of paradisiacal state may be taken too exclusively from the bright side.
It is remarked as to these very Papuans, that Europeans whose intercourse
with them has been hostile become so impressed with the wild-beast-like
cunning of their attacks, as hardly to believe in their having feelings in
common with civilized men. Our Polar explorers may well speak in kindly
terms of the industry, the honesty, the cheerful considerate politeness of the
Esquimaux; but it must be remembered that these rude people are on their
best behaviour with foreigners, and that their character is apt to be foul and
brutal where they have nothing to expect or fear. The Caribs are described
as a cheerful, modest, courteous race, and so honest among themselves that
if they missed anything out of a house they said quite naturally: ‘There has

been a Christian here.’ Yet the malignant ferocity with which these
estimable people tortured their prisoners of war with knife and fire-brand
and red pepper, and then cooked and ate them in solemn debauch, gave fair
reason for the name of Carib (Cannibal) to become the generic name of
man-eaters in European languages.[4] So when we read descriptions of the
hospitality, the gentleness, the bravery, the deep religious feeling of the
North American Indians, we admit their claims to our sincere admiration;
but we must not forget that they were hospitable literally to a fault, that
their gentleness would pass with a flash of anger into frenzy, that their
bravery was stained with cruel and treacherous malignity, that their religion
expressed itself in absurd belief and useless ceremony. The ideal savage of
the 18th century may be held up as a living reproof to vicious and frivolous
London; but in sober fact, a Londoner who should attempt to lead the
atrocious life which the real savage may lead with impunity and even
respect, would be a criminal only allowed to follow his savage models
during his short intervals out of gaol. Savage moral standards are real
enough, but they are far looser and weaker than ours. We may, I think,
apply the often-repeated comparison of savages to children as fairly to their
moral as to their intellectual condition. The better savage social life seems
in but unstable equilibrium, liable to be easily upset by a touch of distress,
temptation, or violence, and then it becomes the worse savage life, which
we know by so many dismal and hideous examples. Altogether, it may be
admitted that some rude tribes lead a life to be envied by some barbarous
races, and even by the outcasts of higher nations. But that any known
savage tribe would not be improved by judicious civilization, is a
proposition which no moralist would dare to make; while the general tenour
of the evidence goes far to justify the view that on the whole the civilized
man is not only wiser and more capable than the savage, but also better and
happier, and that the barbarian stands between.
It might, perhaps, seem practicable to compare the whole average of the
civilization of two peoples, or of the same people in different ages, by
reckoning each, item by item, to a sort of sum-total, and striking a balance
between them, much as an appraiser compares the value of two stocks of
merchandise, differ as they may both in quantity and quality. But the few
remarks here made will have shown how loose must be the working-out of
these rough-and-ready estimates of culture. In fact, much of the labour
spent in investigating the progress and decline of civilization has been mis-

spent, in premature attempts to treat that as a whole which is as yet only
susceptible of divided study. The present comparatively narrow argument
on the development of culture at any rate avoids this greatest perplexity. It
takes cognizance principally of knowledge, art, and custom, and indeed
only very partial cognizance within this field, the vast range of physical,
political, social, and ethical considerations being left all but untouched. Its
standard of reckoning progress and decline is not that of ideal good and
evil, but of movement along a measured line from grade to grade of actual
savagery, barbarism, and civilization. The thesis which I venture to sustain,
within limits, is simply this, that the savage state in some measure
represents an early condition of mankind, out of which the higher culture
has gradually been developed or evolved, by processes still in regular
operation as of old, the result showing that, on the whole, progress has far
prevailed over relapse.
On this proposition, the main tendency of human society during its long
term of existence has been to pass from a savage to a civilized state. Now
all must admit a great part of this assertion to be not only truth, but truism.
Referred to direct history, a great section of it proves to belong not to the
domain of speculation, but to that of positive knowledge. It is mere matter
of chronicle that modern civilization is a development of mediæval
civilization, which again is a development from civilization of the order
represented in Greece, Assyria, or Egypt. Thus the higher culture being
clearly traced back to what may be called the middle culture, the question
which remains is whether this middle culture may be traced back to the
lower culture, that is, to savagery. To affirm this, is merely to assert that the
same kind of development in culture which has gone on inside our range of
knowledge has also gone on outside it, its course of proceeding being
unaffected by our having or not having reporters present. If any one holds
that human thought and action were worked out in primæval times
according to laws essentially other than those of the modern world, it is for
him to prove by valid evidence this anomalous state of things, otherwise the
doctrine of permanent principle will hold good, as in astronomy or geology.
That the tendency of culture has been similar throughout the existence of
human society, and that we may fairly judge from its known historic course
what its prehistoric course may have been, is a theory clearly entitled to
precedence as a fundamental principle of ethnographic research.

Gibbon in his ‘Roman Empire’ expresses in a few vigorous sentences his
theory of the course of culture, as from savagery upward. Judged by the
knowledge of nearly a century later, his remarks cannot, indeed, pass
unquestioned. Especially he seems to rely with misplaced confidence on
traditions of archaic rudeness, to exaggerate the lowness of savage life, to
underestimate the liability to decay of the ruder arts, and in his view of the
effect of high on low civilization, to dwell too exclusively on the brighter
side. But, on the whole, the great historian’s judgment seems so
substantially that of the unprejudiced modern student of the progressionist
school, that I gladly quote the passage here at length, and take it as a text to
represent the development theory of culture:—‘The discoveries of ancient
and modern navigators, and the domestic history, or tradition, of the most
enlightened nations, represent the human savage naked both in mind and
body, and destitute of laws, of arts, of ideas, and almost of language. From
this abject condition, perhaps the primitive and universal state of man, he
has gradually arisen to command the animals, to fertilise the earth, to
traverse the ocean, and to measure the heavens. His progress in the
improvement and exercise of his mental and corporeal faculties has been
irregular and various; infinitely slow in the beginning, and increasing by
degrees with redoubled velocity: ages of laborious ascent have been
followed by a moment of rapid downfall; and the several climates of the
globe have felt the vicissitudes of light and darkness. Yet the experience of
four thousand years should enlarge our hopes, and diminish our
apprehensions: we cannot determine to what height the human species may
aspire in their advances towards perfection; but it may safely be presumed,
that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their
original barbarism. The improvements of society may be viewed under a
threefold aspect. 1. The poet or philosopher illustrates his age and country
by the efforts of a single mind; but these superior powers of reason or fancy
are rare and spontaneous productions; and the genius of Homer, or Cicero,
or Newton, would excite less admiration, if they could be created by the
will of a prince, or the lessons of a preceptor. 2. The benefits of law and
policy, of trade and manufactures, of arts and sciences, are more solid and
permanent; and many individuals may be qualified, by education and
discipline, to promote, in their respective stations, the interest of the
community. But this general order is the effect of skill and labour; and the
complex machinery may be decayed by time, or injured by violence. 3.

Fortunately for mankind, the more useful, or, at least, more necessary arts,
can be performed without superior talents, or national subordination;
without the powers of one, or the union of many. Each village, each family,
each individual, must always possess both ability and inclination, to
perpetuate the use of fire and of metals; the propagation and service of
domestic animals; the methods of hunting and fishing; the rudiments of
navigation; the imperfect cultivation of corn, or other nutritive grain; and
the simple practice of the mechanic trades. Private genius and public
industry may be extirpated; but these hardy plants survive the tempest, and
strike an everlasting root into the most unfavourable soil. The splendid days
of Augustus and Trajan were eclipsed by a cloud of ignorance; and the
barbarians subverted the laws and palaces of Rome. But the scythe, the
invention, or emblem of Saturn, still continued annually to mow the
harvests of Italy; and the human feasts of Læstrigons have never been
renewed on the coast of Campania. Since the first discovery of the arts, war,
commerce, and religious zeal, have diffused, among the savages of the Old
and New World, these inestimable gifts: they have been successively
propagated; they can never be lost. We may therefore acquiesce in the
pleasing conclusion, that every age of the world has increased, and still
increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the
virtue, of the human race.’[5]
This progression-theory of civilization may be contrasted with its rival, the
degeneration-theory, in the dashing invective of Count Joseph de Maistre,
written toward the beginning of the 19th century. ‘Nous partons toujours,’
he says, ‘de l’hypothèse banale que l’homme s’est élevé graduellement de
la barbarie à la science et à la civilisation. C’est le rêve favori, c’est
l’erreur-mère, et comme dit l’école le proto-pseudes de notre siècle. Mais si
les philosophes de ce malheureux siècle, avec l’horrible perversité que nous
leur avons connue, et qui s’obstinent encore malgré les avertissements
qu’ils ont reçus, avaient possédé de plus quelques-unes de ces
connaissances qui ont dû nécessairement appartenir aux premiers hommes,
&c.’[6] The degeneration-theory, which this eloquent antagonist of ‘modern
ideas’ indeed states in an extreme shape, has received the sanction of men
of great learning and ability. It has practically resolved itself into two
assumptions, first, that the history of culture began with the appearance on
earth of a semi-civilized race of men, and second, that from this stage
culture has proceeded in two ways, backward to produce savages, and

forward to produce civilized men. The idea of the original condition of man
being one of more or less high culture, must have a certain prominence
given to it on account of its considerable hold on public opinion. As to
definite evidence, however, it does not seem to have any ethnological basis
whatever. Indeed, I scarcely think that a stronger counter-persuasion could
be used on an intelligent student inclined to the ordinary degeneration-
theory than to induce him to examine critically and impartially the
arguments of the advocates on his own side. It must be borne in mind,
however, that the grounds on which this theory has been held have
generally been rather theological than ethnological. The strength of the
position it has thus occupied may be well instanced from the theories
adopted by two eminent French writers of the 18th century, which in a
remarkable way piece together a belief in degeneration and an argument for
progression. De Brosses, whose whole intellectual nature turned to the
progression-theory, argued that by studying what actually now happens ‘we
may trace men upward from the savage state to which the flood and
dispersion had reduced them.’[7] And Goguet, holding that the pre-existing
arts perished at the deluge, was thus left free to work out on the most
thorough-going progressionist principles his theories of the invention of
fire, cooking, agriculture, law, and so forth, among tribes thus reduced to a
condition of low savagery.[8] At the present time it is not unusual for the
origin of civilization to be treated as matter of dogmatic theology. It has
happened to me more than once to be assured from the pulpit that the
theories of ethnologists who consider man to have risen from a low original
condition are delusive fancies, it being revealed truth that man was
originally in a high condition. Now as a matter of Biblical criticism it must
be remembered that a large proportion of modern theologians are far from
accepting such a dogma. But in investigating the problem of early
civilization, the claim to ground scientific opinion upon a basis of
revelation is in itself objectionable. It would be, I think, inexcusable if
students who have seen in Astronomy and Geology the unhappy results of
attempting to base science on religion, should countenance a similar attempt
in Ethnology.
By long experience of the course of human society, the principle of
development in culture has become so ingrained in our philosophy that
ethnologists, of whatever school, hardly doubt but that, whether by progress
or degradation, savagery and civilization are connected as lower and higher

stages of one formation. As such, then, two principal theories claim to
account for their relation. As to the first hypothesis, which takes savage life
as in some sort representing an early human state whence higher states
were, in time, developed, it has to be noticed that advocates of this
progression-theory are apt to look back toward yet lower original conditions
of mankind. It has been truly remarked that the modern naturalist’s doctrine
of progressive development has encouraged a train of thought singularly
accordant with the Epicurean theory of man’s early existence on earth, in a
condition not far removed from that of the lower animals. On such a view,
savage life itself would be a far advanced condition. If the advance of
culture be regarded as taking place along one general line, then existing
savagery stands directly intermediate between animal and civilized life; if
along different lines, then savagery and civilization may be considered as at
least indirectly connected through their common origin. The method and
evidence here employed are not, however, suitable for the discussion of this
remoter part of the problem of civilization. Nor is it necessary to enquire
how, under this or any other theory, the savage state first came to be on
earth. It is enough that, by some means or other, it has actually come into
existence; and so far as it may serve as a guide in inferring an early
condition of the human race at large, so far the argument takes the very
practicable shape of a discussion turning rather on actual than imaginary
states of society. The second hypothesis, which regards higher culture as
original, and the savage condition as produced from it by a course of
degeneration, at once cuts the hard knot of the origin of culture. It takes for
granted a supernatural interference, as where Archbishop Whately simply
refers to miraculous revelation that condition above the level of barbarism
which he considers to have been man’s original state.[9] It may be
incidentally remarked, however, that the doctrine of original civilization
bestowed on man by divine intervention, by no means necessarily involves
the view that this original civilization was at a high level. Its advocates are
free to choose their starting-point of culture above, at, or below the savage
condition, as may on the evidence seem to them most reasonable.
The two theories which thus account for the relation of savage to cultured
life may be contrasted according to their main character, as the progression-
theory and the degradation-theory. Yet of course the progression-theory
recognizes degradation, and the degradation-theory recognizes progression,
as powerful influences in the course of culture. Under proper limitations the

principles of both theories are conformable to historical knowledge, which
shows us, on the one hand, that the state of the higher nations was reached
by progression from a lower state, and, on the other hand, that culture
gained by progression may be lost by degradation. If in this enquiry we
should be obliged to end in the dark, at any rate we need not begin there.
History, taken as our guide in explaining the different stages of civilization,
offers a theory based on actual experience. This is a development-theory, in
which both advance and relapse have their acknowledged places. But so far
as history is to be our criterion, progression is primary and degradation
secondary; culture must be gained before it can be lost. Moreover, in
striking a balance between the effects of forward and backward movement
in civilization, it must be borne in mind how powerfully the diffusion of
culture acts in preserving the results of progress from the attacks of
degeneration. A progressive movement in culture spreads, and becomes
independent of the fate of its originators. What is produced in some limited
district is diffused over a wider and wider area, where the process of
effectual ‘stamping out’ becomes more and more difficult. Thus it is even
possible for the habits and inventions of races long extinct to remain as the
common property of surviving nations; and the destructive actions which
make such havoc with the civilizations of particular districts fail to destroy
the civilization of the world.
The enquiry as to the relation of savagery to barbarism and semi-
civilization lies almost entirely in præ-historic or extra-historic regions.
This is of course an unfavourable condition, and must be frankly accepted.
Direct history hardly tells anything of the changes of savage culture, except
where in contact with and under the dominant influence of foreign
civilization, a state of things which is little to our present purpose.
Periodical examinations of low races otherwise left isolated to work out
their own destinies, would be interesting evidence to the student of
civilization if they could be made; but unfortunately they cannot. The lower
races, wanting documentary memorials, loose in preserving tradition, and
ever ready to clothe myth in its shape, can seldom be trusted in their stories
of long-past ages. History is oral or written record which can be
satisfactorily traced into contact with the events it describes; and perhaps no
account of the course of culture in its lower stages can satisfy this stringent
criterion. Traditions may be urged in support either of the progression-
theory or of the degradation-theory. These traditions may be partly true, and

must be partly untrue; but whatever truth or untruth they may contain, there
is such difficulty in separating man’s recollection of what was from his
speculation as to what might have been, that ethnology seems not likely to
gain much by attempts to judge of early stages of civilization on a
traditional basis. The problem is one which has occupied the philosophic
mind even in savage and barbaric life, and has been solved by speculations
asserted as facts, and by traditions which are, in great measure, mere
realized theories. The Chinese can show, with all due gravity, the records of
their ancient dynasties and tell us how in old times their ancestors dwelt in
caves, clothed themselves with leaves, and ate raw flesh, till, under such
and such rulers, they were taught to build huts, prepare skins for garments,
and make fire.[10] Lucretius can describe to us, in his famous lines, the large-
boned, hardy, lawless, primæval race of man, living the roving life of the
wild beasts which they overcame with stones and heavy clubs, devouring
berries and acorns, ignorant as yet of fire, and agriculture, and the use of
skins for clothing. From this state the Epicurean poet traces up the
development of culture, beginning outside but ending inside the range of
human memory.[11] To the same class belong those legends which, starting
from an ancient savage state, describe its elevation by divine civilizers: this,
which may be called the supernatural progression-theory, is exemplified in
the familiar culture-traditions of Peru and Italy.
But other minds, following a different ideal track from the present to the
past, have seen in a far different shape the early stages of human life. Those
men whose eyes are always turned to look back on the wisdom of the
ancients, those who by a common confusion of thought ascribe to men of
old the wisdom of old men, those who hold fast to some once-honoured
scheme of life which new schemes are superseding before their eyes, are apt
to carry back their thought of present degeneration into far-gone ages, till
they reach a period of primæval glory. The Parsi looks back to the happy
rule of King Yima, when men and cattle were immortal, when water and
trees never dried up and food was inexhaustible, when there was no cold
nor heat, no envy nor old age.[12] The Buddhist looks back to the age of
glorious soaring beings who had no sin, no sex, no want of food, till the
unhappy hour when, tasting a delicious scum that formed upon the surface
of the earth, they fell into evil, and in time became degraded to eat rice, to
bear children, to build houses, to divide property, and to establish caste. In
after ages, record preserves details of the continuing course of degeneration.

It was King Chetiya who told the first lie, and the citizens who heard of it,
not knowing what a lie was, asked if it were white, black or blue. Men’s
lives grew shorter and shorter, and it was King Maha Sâgara who, after a
brief reign of 252,000 years, made the dismal discovery of the first grey
hair.[13]
Admitting the imperfection of the historical record as regards the lowest
stages of culture, we must bear in mind that it tells both ways. Niebuhr,
attacking the progressionists of the 18th century, remarks that they have
overlooked the fact ‘that no single example can be brought forward of an
actually savage people having independently become civilized.’[14] Whately
appropriated this remark, which indeed forms the kernel of his well-known
Lecture on the Origin of Civilisation: ‘Facts are stubborn things,’ he says,
‘and that no authenticated instance can be produced of savages that ever did
emerge, unaided, from that state is no theory, but a statement, hitherto never
disproved, of a matter of fact.’ He uses this as an argument in support of his
general conclusion, that man could not have risen independently from a
savage to a civilized state, and that savages are degenerate descendants of
civilized men.[15] But he omits to ask the counter-question, whether we find
one recorded instance of a civilized people falling independently into a
savage state? Any such record, direct and well vouched, would be of high
interest to ethnologists, though, of course, it would not contradict the
development-theory, for proving loss is not disproving previous gain. But
where is such a record to be found? The defect of historical evidence as to
the transition between savagery and higher culture is a two-sided fact, only
half taken into Archbishop Whately’s one-sided argument. Fortunately the
defect is by no means fatal. Though history may not account directly for the
existence and explain the position of savages, it at least gives evidence
which bears closely on the matter. Moreover, we are in various ways
enabled to study the lower course of culture on evidence which cannot have
been tampered with to support a theory. Old traditional lore, however
untrustworthy as direct record of events, contains most faithful incidental
descriptions of manners and customs; archæology displays old structures
and buried relics of the remote past; philology brings out the undesigned
history in language, which generation after generation have handed down
without a thought of its having such significance; the ethnological survey of
the races of the world tells much; the ethnographical comparison of their
condition tells more.

Arrest and decline in civilization are to be recognised as among the more
frequent and powerful operations of national life. That knowledge, arts, and
institutions should decay in certain districts, that peoples once progressive
should lag behind and be passed by advancing neighbours, that sometimes
even societies of men should recede into rudeness and misery—all these are
phenomena with which modern history is familiar. In judging of the relation
of the lower to the higher stages of civilization, it is essential to gain some
idea how far it may have been affected by such degeneration. What kind of
evidence can direct observation and history give as to the degradation of
men from a civilized condition towards that of savagery? In our great cities,
the so-called ‘dangerous classes’ are sunk in hideous misery and depravity.
If we have to strike a balance between the Papuans of New Caledonia and
the communities of European beggars and thieves, we may sadly
acknowledge that we have in our midst something worse than savagery. But
it is not savagery; it is broken-down civilization. Negatively, the inmates of
a Whitechapel casual ward and of a Hottentot kraal agree in their want of
the knowledge and virtue of the higher culture. But positively, their mental
and moral characteristics are utterly different. Thus, the savage life is
essentially devoted to gaining subsistence from nature, which is just what
the proletarian life is not. Their relations to civilized life—the one of
independence, the other of dependence—are absolutely opposite. To my
mind the popular phrases about ‘city savages’ and ‘street Arabs’ seem like
comparing a ruined house to a builder’s yard. It is more to the purpose to
notice how war and misrule, famine and pestilence, have again and again
devastated countries, reduced their population to miserable remnants, and
lowered their level of civilization, and how the isolated life of wild country
districts seems sometimes tending towards savagery. So far as we know,
however, none of these causes have ever really reproduced a savage
community. For an ancient account of degeneration under adverse
circumstances, Ovid’s mention of the unhappy colony of Tomi on the Black
Sea is a case in point, though perhaps not to be taken too literally. Among
its mixed Greek and barbaric population, harassed and carried off into
slavery by the Sarmatian horsemen, much as the Persians till lately were by
the Turkomans, the poet describes the neglect of the gardener’s craft, the
decay of textile arts, the barbaric clothing of hides.

‘Nec tamen hæc loca sunt ullo pretiosa metallo:
Hostis ab agricola vix sinit illa fodi.
Purpura sæpe tuos fulgens prætexit amictus:
Sed non Sarmatico tingitur illa mari.
Vellera dura ferunt pecudes, et Palladis uti
Arte Tomitanæ non didicere nurus.
Femina pro lana Cerialia munera frangit,
Suppositoque gravem vertice portat aquam.
Non hic pampineis amicitur vitibus ulmus:
Nulla premunt ramos pondere poma suo.
Tristia deformes pariunt absinthia campi,
Terraque de fructu quam sit amara docet.’[16]

Cases of exceptionally low civilization in Europe may perhaps be
sometimes accounted for by degeneration of this kind. But they seem more
often the relics of ancient unchanged barbarism. The evidence from wild
parts of Ireland two or three centuries ago is interesting from this point of
view. Acts of Parliament were passed against the inveterate habits of
fastening ploughs to the horses’ tails, and of burning oats from the straw to
save the trouble of threshing. In the 18th century Ireland could still be thus
described in satire:—

‘The Western isle renowned for bogs,
For tories and for great wolf-dogs,
For drawing hobbies by the tails,
And threshing corn with fiery flails.’[17]

Fynes Moryson’s description of the wild or ‘meere’ Irish about 1600, is
amazing. The very lords of them, he says, dwelt in poor clay houses, or
cabins of boughs covered with turf. In many parts men as well as women
had in very winter time but a linen rag about the loins and a woollen mantle
on their bodies, so that it would turn a man’s stomach to see an old woman
in the morning before breakfast. He notices their habit of burning oats from
the straw, and making cakes thereof. They had no tables, but set their meat
on a bundle of grass. They feasted on fallen horses, and seethed pieces of
beef and pork with the unwashed entrails of beasts in a hollow tree, lapped

in a raw cow’s hide, and so set over the fire, and they drank milk warmed
with a stone first cast into the fire.[18] Another district remarkable for a
barbaric simplicity of life is the Hebrides. Till of late years, there were to be
found there in actual use earthen vessels, unglazed and made by hand
without the potter’s wheel, which might pass in a museum as indifferent
specimens of savage manufacture. These ‘craggans’ are still made by an old
woman at Barvas for sale as curiosities. Such a modern state of the potter’s
art in the Hebrides fits well with George Buchanan’s statement in the 16th
century that the islanders used to boil meat in the beast’s own paunch or
hide.[19] Early in the 18th century Martin mentions as prevalent there the
ancient way of dressing corn by burning it dexterously from the ear, which
he notices to be a very quick process, thence called ‘graddan’ (Gaelic,
grad=quick).[20] Thus we see that the habit of burning out the grain, for
which the ‘meere Irish’ were reproached, was really the keeping up of an
old Keltic art, not without its practical use. So the appearance in modern
Keltic districts of other widespread arts of the lower culture—hide-boiling,
like that of the Scythians in Herodotus, and stone-boiling, like that of the
Assinaboins of North America—seems to fit not so well with degradation
from a high as with survival from a low civilization. The Irish and the
Hebrideans had been for ages under the influence of comparatively high
civilization, which nevertheless may have left unaltered much of the older
and ruder habit of the people.
Instances of civilized men taking to a wild life in outlying districts of the
world, and ceasing to obtain or want the appliances of civilization, give
more distinct evidence of degradation. In connexion with this state of things
takes place the nearest known approach to an independent degeneration
from a civilized to a savage state. This happens in mixed races, whose
standard of civilization may be more or less below that of the higher race.
The mutineers of the Bounty, with their Polynesian wives, founded a small
but not savage community on Pitcairn’s Island.[21] The mixed Portuguese
and native races of the East Indies and Africa lead a life below the
European standard, but not a savage life.[22] The Gauchos of the South
American Pampas, a mixed European and Indian race of equestrian
herdsmen, are described as sitting about on ox-skulls, making broth in horns
with hot cinders heaped round, living on meat without vegetables, and
altogether leading a foul, brutal, comfortless, degenerate, but not savage
life.[23] One step beyond this brings us to the cases of individual civilized

men being absorbed in savage tribes and adopting the savage life, on which
they exercise little influence for improvement; the children of these men
may come distinctly under the category of savages. These cases of mixed
breeds, however, do not show a low culture actually produced as the result
of degeneration from a high one. Their theory is that, given a higher and a
lower civilization existing among two races, a mixed race between the two
may take to the lower or an intermediate condition.
Degeneration probably operates even more actively in the lower than in the
higher culture. Barbarous nations and savage hordes, with their less
knowledge and scantier appliances, would seem peculiarly exposed to
degrading influences. In Africa, for instance, there seems to have been in
modern centuries a falling off in culture, probably due in a considerable
degree to foreign influence. Mr. J. L. Wilson, contrasting the 16th and 17th
century accounts of powerful negro kingdoms in West Africa with the
present small communities, with little or no tradition of their forefathers’
more extended political organization, looks especially to the slave-trade as
the deteriorating cause.[24] In South-East Africa, also, a comparatively high
barbaric culture, which we especially associate with the old descriptions of
the kingdom of Monomotapa, seems to have fallen away, not counting the
remarkable ruins of buildings of hewn stone fitted without mortar which
indicate the intrusion of more civilized foreigners into the gold region![25] In
North America, Father Charlevoix remarks of the Iroquois of the last
century, that in old times they used to build their cabins better than other
nations, and better than they do themselves now; they carved rude figures in
relief on them; but since in various expeditions almost all their villages
have been burnt, they have not taken the trouble to restore them in their old
condition.[26] The degradation of the Cheyenne Indians is matter of history.
Persecuted by their enemies the Sioux, and dislodged at last even from their
fortified village, the heart of the tribe was broken. Their numbers were
thinned, they no longer dared to establish themselves in a permanent abode,
they gave up the cultivation of the soil, and became a tribe of wandering
hunters, with horses for their only valuable possession, which every year
they bartered for a supply of corn, beans, pumpkins, and European
merchandise, and then returned into the heart of the prairies.[27] When in the
Rocky Mountains, Lord Milton and Dr. Cheadle came upon an outlying
fragment of the Shushwap race, without horses or dogs, sheltering
themselves under rude temporary slants of bark or matting, falling year by

year into lower misery, and rapidly dying out; this is another example of the
degeneration which no doubt has lowered or destroyed many a savage
people.[28] There are tribes who are the very outcasts of savage life. There is
reason to look upon the miserable Digger Indians of North America and the
Bushmen of South Africa as the persecuted remnants of tribes who have
seen happier days.[29] The traditions of the lower races of their ancestors’
better life may sometimes be real recollections of a not far distant past. The
Algonquin Indians look back to old days as to a golden age when life was
better than now, when they had better laws and leaders, and manners less
rude.[30] And indeed, knowing what we do of their history, we may admit
that they have cause to remember in misery happiness gone by. Well, too,
might the rude Kamchadal declare that the world is growing worse and
worse, that men are becoming fewer and viler, and food scarcer, for the
hunter, and the bear, and the reindeer are hurrying away from here to the
happier life in the regions below.[31] It would be a valuable contribution to
the study of civilization to have the action of decline and fall investigated
on a wider and more exact basis of evidence than has yet been attempted.
The cases here stated are probably but part of a long series which might be
brought forward to prove degeneration in culture to have been, by no means
indeed the primary cause of the existence of barbarism and savagery in the
world, but a secondary action largely and deeply affecting the general
development of civilization. It may perhaps give no unfair idea to compare
degeneration of culture, both in its kind of operation and in its immense
extent, to denudation in the geological history of the earth.
In judging of the relations between savage and civilized life, something
may be learnt by glancing over the divisions of the human race. For this end
the classification by families of languages may be conveniently used, if
checked by the evidence of bodily characteristics. No doubt speech by itself
is an insufficient guide in tracing national descent, as witness the extreme
cases of Jews in England, and three-parts negro races in the West Indies,
nevertheless speaking English as their mother-tongue. Still, under ordinary
circumstances, connexion of speech does indicate more or less connexion of
ancestral race. As a guide in tracing the history of civilization, language
gives still better evidence, for common language to a great extent involves
common culture. The race dominant enough to maintain or impose its
language, usually more or less maintains or imposes its civilization also.
Thus the common descent of the languages of Hindus, Greeks, and Teutons

is no doubt due in great measure to common ancestry, but is still more
closely bound up with a common social and intellectual history, with what
Professor Max Müller well calls their ‘spiritual relationship.’ The wonderful
permanence of language often enables us to detect among remotely ancient
and distant tribes the traces of connected civilization. How, on such
grounds, do savage and civilized tribes appear to stand related, within the
various groups of mankind connected historically by the possession of
kindred languages?
The Semitic family, which represents one of the oldest known civilizations
of the world, includes Arabs, Jews, Phœnicians, Syrians, &c., and has an
earlier as well as a later connexion in North Africa. This family takes in
some rude tribes, but none which would be classed as savages. The Aryan
family has existed in Asia and Europe certainly for many thousand years,
and there are well-known and well-marked traces of its early barbaric
condition, which has perhaps survived with least change among secluded
tribes in the valleys of the Hindu Kush and Himalaya. There seems, again,
no known case of any full Aryan tribe having become savage. The Gypsies
and other outcasts are, no doubt, partly Aryan in blood, but their degraded
condition is not savagery. In India there are tribes Aryan by language, but
whose physique is rather of indigenous type, and whose ancestry is mainly
from indigenous stocks with more or less mixture of the dominant Hindu.
Some tribes coming under this category, as among the Bhils and Kulis of
the Bombay Presidency, speak dialects which are Hindi in vocabulary at
least, whether or not in grammatical structure, and yet the people
themselves are lower in culture than some Hinduized nations who have
retained their original Dravidian speech, the Tamils for instance. But these
all appear to stand at higher stages of civilization than any wild forest tribes
of the peninsula who can be reckoned as nearly savages; all such are non-
Aryan both in blood and speech.[32] In Ceylon, however, we have the
remarkable phenomenon of men leading a savage life while speaking an
Aryan dialect. This is the wild part of the race of Veddas or ‘hunters,’ of
whom a remnant still inhabit the forest land. These people are dark-skinned
and flat-nosed, slight of frame, and very small of skull, and five feet is an
average man’s height. They are a shy, harmless, simple people, living
principally by hunting; they lime birds, take fish by poisoning the water,
and are skilful in getting wild honey; they have bows with iron-pointed
arrows, which, with their hunting-dogs, are their most valuable possessions.

They dwell in caves or bark huts, and their very word for a house is
Singhalese for a hollow tree (rukula); a patch of bark was formerly their
dress, but now a bit of linen hangs to their waist-cords; their planting of
patches of ground is said to be recent. They count on their fingers, and
produce fire with the simplest kind of fire-drill twirled by hand. They are
most truthful and honest. Their monogamy and conjugal fidelity contrast
strongly with the opposite habits of the more civilized Singhalese. A
remarkable Vedda marriage custom sanctioned a man’s taking his younger
(not elder) sister as his wife; sister-marriage existing among the Singhalese,
but being confined to the royal family. Mistaken statements have been made
as to the Veddas having no religion, no personal names, no language. Their
religion, in fact, corresponds with the animism of the ruder tribes of India;
some of their names are remarkable as being Hindu, but not in use among
the modern Singhalese; their language is a Singhalese dialect. There is no
doubt attaching to the usual opinion that the Veddas are in the main
descended from the ‘yakkos’ or demons; i.e. from the indigenous tribes of
the island. Legend and language concur to make probable an admixture of
Aryan blood accompanying the adoption of Aryan speech, but the evidence
of bodily characteristics shows the Vedda race to be principally of
indigenous pre-Aryan type.[33]
The Tatar family of Northern Asia and Europe (Turanian, if the word be
used in a restricted sense) displays evidence of quite a different kind. This
wide-lying group of tribes and nations has members nearly or quite
touching the savage level in ancient and even modern times, such as
Ostyaks, Tunguz, Samoyeds, Lapps, while more or less high ranges of
culture are represented by Mongols, Turks, and Hungarians. Here, however,
it is unquestionable that the rude tribes represent the earlier condition of the
Tatar race at large, from which its more mixed and civilized peoples, mostly
by adopting the foreign culture of Buddhist, Moslem, and Christian nations,
and partly by internal development, are well known to have risen. The
ethnology of South-Eastern Asia is somewhat obscure; but if we may
classify under one heading the native races of Siam, Burma, &c., the wilder
tribes may be considered as representing earlier conditions, for the higher
culture of this region is obviously foreign, especially of Buddhist origin.
The Malay race is also remarkable for the range of civilization represented
by tribes classed as belonging to it. If the wild tribes of the Malayan
peninsula and Borneo be compared with the semi-civilized nations of Java

and Sumatra, it appears that part of the race survives to represent an early
savage state, while part is found in possession of a civilization which the
first glance shows to have been mostly borrowed from Hindu and Moslem
sources. Some forest tribes of the peninsula seem to be representatives of
the Malay race at its lowest level of culture, how far original and how far
degraded it is not easy to say. Among them the very rude Orang Sabimba,
who have no agriculture and no boats, give a remarkable account of
themselves, that they are descendants of shipwrecked Malays from the
Bugis country, but were so harassed by pirates that they gave up civilization
and cultivation, and vowed not to eat fowls, which betrayed them by their
crowing. So they plant nothing, but eat wild fruit and vegetables, and all
animals but the fowl. This, if at all founded on fact, is an interesting case of
degeneration. But savages usually invent myths to account for peculiar
habits, as where, in the same district, the Biduanda Kallang account for
their not cultivating the ground by the story that their ancestors vowed not
to make plantations. Another rude people of the Malay peninsula are the
Jakuns, a simple, kindly race, among whom some trace their pedigree to a
pair of white monkeys, while others declare that they are descendants of
white men; and indeed there is some ground for supposing these latter to be
really of mixed race, for they use a few Portuguese words, and a report
exists of some refugees having settled up the country.[34] The Melanesians,
Papuans, and Australians represent grades of savagery spread each over its
own vast area in a comparatively homogeneous way. Lastly, the relations of
savagery to higher conditions are remarkable, but obscure, on the American
continents. There are several great linguistic families whose members were
discovered in a savage state throughout; such are the Esquimaux,
Algonquin, and Guarani groups. On the other hand there were three
apparently unconnected districts of semi-civilization reaching a high
barbaric level, viz., in Mexico and Central America, Bogota, and Peru.
Between these higher and lower conditions were races at the level of the
Natchez of Louisiana and the Apalaches of Florida. Linguistic connexion is
not unknown between the more advanced peoples and the lower races
around them.[35] But definite evidence showing the higher culture to have
arisen from the lower, or the lower to have fallen from the higher, is
scarcely forthcoming. Both operations may in degree have happened.
It is apparent, from such general inspection of this ethnological problem,
that it would repay a far closer study than it has as yet received. As the

evidence stands at present, it appears that when in any race some branches
much excel the rest in culture, this more often happens by elevation than by
subsidence. But this elevation is much more apt to be produced by foreign
than by native action. Civilization is a plant much oftener propagated than
developed. As regards the lower races, this accords with the results of
European intercourse with savage tribes during the last three or four
centuries; so far as these tribes have survived the process, they have
assimilated more or less of European Culture and risen towards the
European level, as in Polynesia, South Africa, South America. Another
important point becomes manifest from this ethnological survey. The fact,
that during so many thousand years of known existence, neither the Aryan
nor the Semitic race appears to have thrown off any direct savage offshoot,
tells, with some force, against the probability of degradation to the savage
level ever happening from high-level civilization.
With regard to the opinions of older writers on early civilization, whether
progressionists or degenerationists, it must be borne in mind that the
evidence at their disposal fell far short of even the miserably imperfect data
now accessible. Criticizing an 18th century ethnologist is like criticizing an
18th century geologist. The older writer may have been far abler than his
modern critic, but he had not the same materials. Especially he wanted the
guidance of Prehistoric Archæology, a department of research only
established on a scientific footing within the last few years. It is essential to
gain a clear view of the bearing of this newer knowledge on the old
problem.
Chronology, though regarding as more or less fictitious the immense
dynastic schemes of the Egyptians, Hindus, and Chinese, passing as they do
into mere ciphering-book sums with years for units, nevertheless admits
that existing monuments carry back the traces of comparatively high
civilization to a distance of above five thousand years. By piecing together
Eastern and Western documentary evidence it seems that the great religious
divisions of the Aryan race, to which modern Brahmanism, Zarathustrism,
and Buddhism are due, belong to a period of remotely ancient history. Even
if we cannot hold, with Professor Max Müller, in the preface to his
translation of the ‘Rig Veda,’ that this collection of Aryan hymns ‘will take
and maintain for ever its position as the most ancient of books in the library
of mankind,’ and if we do not admit the stringency of his reckonings of its

date in centuries B.C., yet we must grant that he shows cause to refer its
composition to a very ancient period, where it then proves that a
comparatively high barbaric culture already existed. The linguistic
argument for the remotely ancient common origin of the Indo-European
nations, in a degree as to their bodily descent, and in a greater degree as to
their civilization, tends toward the same result. So it is again with Egypt.
The calculations of Egyptian dynasties in thousands of years, however
disputable in detail, are based on facts which at any rate authorize the
reception of a long chronology. To go no further than the identification of
two or three Egyptian names mentioned in Biblical and Classical history,
we gain a strong impression of remote antiquity. Such are the names of
Shishank; of the Psammitichos line, whose obelisks are to be seen in Rome;
of Tirhakah, King of Ethiopia, whose nurse’s coffin is in the Florence
Museum; of the city of Rameses, plainly connected with that great
Ramesside line which Egyptologists call the 19th Dynasty. Here, before
classic culture had arisen, the culture of Egypt culminated, and behind this
time lies the somewhat less advanced age of the Pyramid kings, and behind
this again the indefinite lapse of ages which such a civilization required for
its production. Again, though no part of the Old Testament can satisfactorily
prove for itself an antiquity of composition approaching that of the earliest
Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions, yet all critics must admit that the older
of the historical books give on the one hand contemporary documents
showing considerable culture in the Semitic world at a date which in
comparison with classic history is ancient; while on the other hand they
afford evidence by way of chronicle, carrying back ages farther the record
of a somewhat advanced barbaric civilization. Now if the development-
theory is to account for phenomena such as these, its chronological demand
must be no small one, and the more so when it is admitted that in the lower
ranges of culture progress would be extremely slow in comparison with that
which experience shows among nations already far advanced. On these
conditions of the first appearance of the middle civilization being thrown
back to distant antiquity, and of slow development being required to
perform its heavy task in ages still more remote, Prehistoric Archæology
cheerfully takes up the problem. And, indeed, far from being dismayed by
the vastness of the period required on the narrowest computation, the
prehistoric archæologist shows even too much disposition to revel in

calculations of thousands of years, as a financier does in reckonings of
thousands of pounds, in a liberal and maybe somewhat reckless way.
Prehistoric Archæology is fully alive to facts which may bear on
degeneration in culture. Such are the colossal human figures of hewn stone
in Easter Island, which may possibly have been shaped by the ancestors of
the existing islanders, whose present resources, however, are quite unequal
to the execution of such gigantic works.[36] A much more important case is
that of the former inhabitants of the Mississippi Valley. In districts where
the native tribes known in modern times rank as savages, there formerly
dwelt a race whom ethnologists call the Mound-Builders, from the amazing
extent of their mounds and enclosures, of which there is a single group
occupying an area of four square miles. The regularity of the squares and
circles and the repetition of enclosures similar in dimensions, raise
interesting questions as to the methods by which these were planned out. To
have constructed such works the Mound-Builders must have been a
numerous population, mainly subsisting by agriculture, and indeed vestiges
of their ancient tillage are still to be found. They did not however in
industrial arts approach the level of Mexico. For instance, their use of
native copper, hammered into shape for cutting instruments, is similar to
that of some of the savage tribes farther north. On the whole, judging by
their earthworks, fields, pottery, stone implements and other remains, they
seem to have belonged to those high savage or barbaric tribes of the
Southern States, of whom the Creeks and Cherokees, as described by
Bartram, may be taken as typical.[37] If any of the wild roving hunting tribes
now found living near the huge earthworks of the Mound-Builders are the
descendants of this somewhat advanced race, then a very considerable
degradation has taken place. The question is an open one. The explanation
of the traces of tillage may perhaps in this case be like that of the remains of
old cultivation-terraces in Borneo, the work of Chinese colonists whose
descendants have mostly been merged in the mass of the population and
follow the native habits.[38] On the other hand, the evidence of locality may
be misleading as to race. A traveller in Greenland, coming on the ruined
stone buildings at Kakortok, would not argue justly that the Esquimaux are
degenerate descendants of ancestors capable of such architecture, for in fact
these are the remains of a church and baptistery built by the ancient
Scandinavian settlers.[39] On the whole it is remarkable how little of
colourable evidence of degeneration has been disclosed by archæology. Its

negative evidence tells strongly the other way. As an instance may be
quoted Sir John Lubbock’s argument against the idea that tribes now
ignorant of metallurgy and pottery formerly possessed but have since lost
these arts. ‘We may also assert, on a general proposition, that no weapons or
instruments of metal have ever been found in any country inhabited by
savages wholly ignorant of metallurgy. A still stronger case is afforded by
pottery. Pottery is not easily destroyed; when known at all it is always
abundant, and it possesses two qualities, namely, those of being easy to
break and yet difficult to destroy, which render it very valuable in an
archæological point of view. Moreover, it is in most cases associated with
burials. It is, therefore, a very significant fact, that no fragment of pottery
has ever been found in Australia, New Zealand, or in the Polynesian
Islands.’[40] How different a state of things the popular degeneration-theory
would lead us to expect is pointedly suggested by Sir Charles Lyell’s
sarcastic sentences in his ‘Antiquity of Man.’ Had the original stock of
mankind, he argues, been really endowed with superior intellectual powers
and inspired knowledge, while possessing the same improvable nature as
their posterity, how extreme a point of advancement would they have
reached. ‘Instead of the rudest pottery or flint tools, so irregular in form as
to cause the unpractised eye to doubt whether they afford unmistakable
evidence of design, we should now be finding sculptured forms surpassing
in beauty the masterpieces of Phidias or Praxiteles; lines of buried railways
or electric telegraphs from which the best engineers of our day might gain
invaluable hints; astronomical instruments and microscopes of more
advanced construction than any known in Europe, and other indications of
perfection in the arts and sciences, such as the nineteenth century has not
yet witnessed. Still farther would the triumphs of inventive genius be found
to have been carried, when the later deposits, now assigned to the ages of
bronze and iron, were formed. Vainly should we be straining our
imaginations to guess the possible uses and meaning of such relics—
machines, perhaps, for navigating the air or exploring the depths of the
ocean, or for calculating arithmetical problems beyond the wants or even
the conceptions of living mathematicians.’[41]
The master-key to the investigation of man’s primæval condition is held by
Prehistoric Archæology. This key is the evidence of the Stone Age, proving
that men of remotely ancient ages were in the savage state. Ever since the
long-delayed recognition of M. Boucher de Perthes’ discoveries (1841 and

onward) of the flint implements in the Drift gravels of the Somme Valley,
evidence has been accumulating over a wide European area to show that the
ruder Stone Age, represented by implements of the Palæolithic or Drift
type, prevailed among savage tribes of the Quaternary period, the
contemporaries of the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, in ages for
which Geology asserts an antiquity far more remote than History can avail
to substantiate for the human race. Mr. John Frere had already written in
1797 respecting such flint instruments discovered at Hoxne in Suffolk. ‘The
situation in which these weapons were found may tempt us to refer them to
a very remote period indeed, even beyond that of the present world.’[42] The
vast lapse of time through which the history of London has represented the
history of human civilization, is to my mind one of the most suggestive
facts disclosed by archæology. There the antiquary, excavating but a few
yards deep, may descend from the débris representing our modern life, to
relics of the art and science of the Middle Ages, to signs of Norman, Saxon,
Romano-British times, to traces of the higher Stone Age. And on his way
from Temple Bar to the Great Northern Station he passes near the spot
(‘opposite to black Mary’s near Grayes inn lane’) where a Drift implement
of black flint was found with the skeleton of an elephant by Mr. Conyers,
about a century and a half ago, the relics side by side of the London
mammoth and the London savage.[43] In the gravel-beds of Europe, the
laterite of India, and other more superficial localities, where relics of the
Palæolithic Age are found, what principally testifies to man’s condition is
the extreme rudeness of his stone implements, and the absence of even
edge-grinding. The natural inference that this indicates a low savage state is
confirmed in the caves of Central France. There a race of men, who have
left indeed really artistic portraits of themselves and the reindeer and
mammoths they lived among, seem, as may be judged from the remains of
their weapons, implements, &c., to have led a life somewhat of Esquimaux
type, but lower by the want of domesticated animals. The districts where
implements of the rude primitive Drift type are found are limited in extent.
It is to ages later in time and more advanced in development, that the
Neolithic or Polished Stone Period belonged, when the manufacture of
stone instruments was much improved, and grinding and polishing were
generally introduced. During the long period of prevalence of this state of
things, Man appears to have spread almost over the whole habitable earth.
The examination of district after district of the world has now all but

established a universal rule that the Stone Age (bone or shell being the
occasional substitutes for stone) underlies the Metal Age everywhere. Even
the districts famed in history as seats of ancient civilization show, like other
regions, their traces of a yet more archaic Stone Age. Asia Minor, Egypt,
Palestine, India, China, furnish evidence from actual specimens, historical
mentions, and survivals, which demonstrate the former prevalence of
conditions of society which have their analogues among modern savage
tribes.[44] The Duke of Argyll, in his ‘Primeval Man,’ while admitting the
Drift implements as having been the ice hatchets and rude knives of low
tribes of men inhabiting Europe toward the end of the Glacial Period,
concludes thence ‘that it would be about as safe to argue from these
implements as to the condition of Man at that time in the countries of his
Primeval Home, as it would be in our own day to argue from the habits and
arts of the Eskimo as to the state of civilization in London or in Paris.’[45]
The progress of Archæology for years past, however, has been continually
cutting away the ground on which such an argument as this can stand, till
now it is all but utterly driven off the field. Where now is the district of the
earth that can be pointed to as the ‘Primeval Home’ of Man, and that does
not show by rude stone implements buried in its soil the savage condition of
its former inhabitants? There is scarcely a known province of the world of
which we cannot say certainly, savages once dwelt here, and if in such a
case an ethnologist asserts that these savages were the descendants or
successors of a civilized nation, the burden of proof lies on him. Again, the
Bronze Age and the Iron Age belong in great measure to history, but their
relation to the Stone Age proves the soundness of the judgement of
Lucretius, when, attaching experience of the present to memory and
inference from the past, he propounded what is now a tenet of archæology,
the succession of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages:

‘Arma antiqua manus ungues dentesque fuerunt,
Et lapides et item silvarum fragmina rami

Posterius ferri vis est ærisque reperta,
Et prior æris erat quam ferri cognitus usus.’[46]

Throughout the various topics of Prehistoric Archæology, the force and
convergence of its testimony upon the development of culture are

overpowering. The relics discovered in gravel-beds, caves, shell-mounds,
terramares, lake-dwellings, earthworks, the results of an exploration of the
superficial soil in many countries, the comparison of geological evidence,
of historical documents, of modern savage life, corroborate and explain one
another. The megalithic structures, menhirs, cromlechs, dolmens, and the
like, only known to England, France, Algeria, as the work of races of the
mysterious past, have been kept up as matters of modern construction and
recognized purpose among the ruder indigenous tribes of India. The series
of ancient lake-settlements which must represent so many centuries of
successive population fringing the shores of the Swiss lakes, have their
surviving representatives among the rude tribes of the East Indies, Africa,
and South America. Outlying savages are still heaping up shell-mounds like
those of far-past Scandinavian antiquity. The burial mounds still to be seen
in civilized countries have served at once as museums of early culture and
as proofs of its savage or barbaric type. It is enough, without entering
farther here into subjects fully discussed in modern special works, to claim
the general support given to the development-theory of culture by
Prehistoric Archæology. It was with a true appreciation of the bearings of
this science that one of its founders, the venerable Professor Sven Nilsson,
declared in 1843 in the Introduction to his ‘Primitive Inhabitants of
Scandinavia,’ that we are ‘unable properly to understand the significance of
the antiquities of any individual country without at the same time clearly
realizing the idea that they are the fragments of a progressive series of
civilization, and that the human race has always been, and still is, steadily
advancing in civilization.’[47]
Enquiry into the origin and early development of the material arts, as
judged of by comparing the various stages at which they are found existing,
leads to a corresponding result. Not to take this argument up in its full
range, a few typical details may serve to show its general character.
Amongst the various stages of the arts, it is only a minority which show of
themselves by mere inspection whether they are in the line of progress or of
decline. Most such facts may be compared to an Indian’s canoe, stem and
stern alike, so that one cannot tell by looking at it which way it is set to go.
But there are some which, like our own boats, distinctly point in the
direction of their actual course. Such facts are pointers in the study of
civilization, and in every branch of the enquiry should be sought out. A
good example of these pointer-facts is recorded by Mr. Wallace. In Celebes,

where the bamboo houses are apt to lean with the prevalent west wind, the
natives have found out that if they fix some crooked timbers in the sides of
the house, it will not fall. They choose such accordingly, the crookedest
they can find, but they do not know the rationale of the contrivance, and
have not hit on the idea that straight poles fixed slanting would have the
same effect in making the structure rigid.[48] In fact, they have gone half-
way toward inventing what builders call a ‘strut.’ but have stopped short.
Now the mere sight of such a house would show that the plan is not a
remnant of higher architecture, but a half-made invention. This is a fact in
the line of progress, but not of decline. I have mentioned elsewhere a
number of similar cases; thus the adaptation of a cord to the fire-drill is
obviously an improvement on the simpler instrument twirled by hand, and
the use of the spindle for making thread is an improvement on the clumsier
art of hand-twisting;[49] but to reverse this position, and suppose the hand-
drill to have come into use by leaving off the use of the cord of the cord-
drill, or that people who knew the use of the spindle left it off and painfully
twisted their thread by hand, is absurd. Again, the appearance of an art in a
particular locality where it is hard to account for it as borrowed from
elsewhere, and especially if it concerns some special native product, is
evidence of its being a native invention. Thus, what people can claim the
invention of the hammock, or the still more admirable discovery of the
extraction of the wholesome cassava from the poisonous manioc, but the
natives of the South American and West Indian districts to which these
things belong? As the isolated possession of an art goes to prove its
invention where it is found, so the absence of an art goes to prove that it
was never present. The onus probandi is on the other side; if anyone thinks
that the East African’s ancestors had the lamp and the potter’s wheel, and
that the North American Indians once possessed the art of making beer from
their maize like the Mexicans, but that these arts have been lost, at any rate
let him show cause for such an opinion. I need not, perhaps, go so far as a
facetious ethnological friend of mine, who argues that the existence of
savage tribes who do not kiss their women is a proof of primæval
barbarism, for, he says, if they had ever known the practice they could not
possibly have forgotten it. Lastly and principally, as experience shows us
that arts of civilized life are developed through successive stages of
improvement, we may assume that the early development of even savage
arts came to pass in a similar way, and thus, finding various stages of an art

among the lower races, we may arrange these stages in a series probably
representing their actual sequence in history. If any art can be traced back
among savage tribes to a rudimentary state in which its invention does not
seem beyond their intellectual condition, and especially if it may be
produced by imitating nature or following nature’s direct suggestion, there
is fair reason to suppose the very origin of the art to have been reached.
Professor Nilsson, looking at the remarkable similarity of the hunting and
fishing instruments of the lower races of mankind, considers them to have
been contrived instinctively by a sort of natural necessity. As an example he
takes the bow and arrow.[50] The instance seems an unfortunate one, in the
face of the fact that the supposed bow-and-arrow-making instinct fails
among the natives of Tasmania, to whom it would have been very useful,
nor have the Australians any bow of their own invention. Even within the
Papuan region, the bow so prevalent in New Guinea is absent, or almost so,
from New Caledonia. It seems to me that Dr. Klemm, in his dissertations on
Implements and Weapons, and Colonel Lane Fox, in his lectures on
Primitive Warfare, take a more instructive line in tracing the early
development of arts, not to a blind instinct, but to a selection, imitation, and
gradual adaptation and improvement of objects and operations which
Nature, the instructor of primæval man, sets before him. Thus Klemm traces
the stages by which progress appears to have been made from the rough
stick to the finished spear or club, from the natural sharp-edged or rounded
stone to the artistically fashioned celt, spear-head, or hammer.[51] Lane Fox
traces connexion through the various types of weapons, pointing out how a
form once arrived at is repeated in various sizes, like the spear-head and
arrow-point; how in rude conditions of the arts the same instrument serves
different purposes, as where the Fuegians use their arrow-heads also for
knives, and Kafirs carve with their assagais, till separate forms are adopted
for special purposes; and how in the history of the striking, cutting, and
piercing instruments used by mankind, a continuity may be traced, which
indicates a gradual progressive development from the rudest beginnings to
the most advanced improvements of modern skill. To show how far the
early development of warlike arts may have been due to man’s imitative
faculty, he points out the analogies in methods of warfare among animals
and men, classifying as defensive appliances hides, solid plates, jointed
plates, scales; as offensive weapons, the piercing, striking, serrated,

poisoned kinds, &c.; and under the head of stratagems, flight, concealment,
leaders, outposts, war-cries, and so forth.[52]
The manufacture of stone implements is now almost perfectly understood
by archæologists. The processes used by modern savages have been
observed and imitated. Sir John Evans, for instance, by blows with a
pebble, pressure with a piece of stag’s horn, sawing with a flint-flake,
boring with a stick and sand, and grinding on a stone surface, succeeds in
reproducing all but the finest kinds of stone implements.[53] On thorough
knowledge we are now able to refer in great measure the remarkable
similarities of the stone scrapers, flake-knives, hatchets, spear- and arrow-
heads, &c., as found in distant times and regions, to the similarity of natural
models, of materials, and of requirements which belong to savage life. The
history of the Stone Age is clearly seen to be one of development.
Beginning with the natural sharp stone, the transition to the rudest
artificially shaped stone implement is imperceptibly gradual, and onward
from this rude stage much independent progress in different directions is to
be traced, till the manufacture at last arrives at admirable artistic perfection,
by the time that the introduction of metal is superseding it. So with other
implements and fabrics, of which the stages are known through their whole
course of development from the merest nature to the fullest art. The club is
traced from the rudest natural bludgeon up to the weapon of finished shape
and carving. Pebbles held in the hand to hammer with, and cutting-
instruments of stone shaped or left smooth at one end to be held in the hand,
may be seen in museums, hinting that the important art of fixing
instruments in handles was the result of invention, not of instinct. The stone
hatchet, used as a weapon, passes into the battle-axe. The spear, a pointed
stick or pole, has its point hardened in the fire, and a further improvement is
to fix on a sharp point of horn, bone, or chipped stone. Stones are flung by
hand, and then by the sling, a contrivance widely but not universally known
among savage tribes. From first to last in the history of war the spear or
lance is grasped as a thrusting weapon. Its use as a missile no doubt began
as early, but it has hardly survived so far in civilization. Thus used, it is
most often thrown by the unaided arm, but a sling for the purpose is known
to various savage tribes. The short cord with an eye used in the New
Hebrides, and called a ‘becket’ by Captain Cook, and a whip-like
instrument noticed in New Zealand, are used for spear-throwing. But the
more usual instrument is a wooden handle, a foot or two long. This spear-

thrower is known across the high northern districts of North America,
among some tribes of South America, and among the Australians. These
latter, it has been asserted, could not have invented it in their present state
of barbarism. But the remarkable feature of the matter is that the spear-
thrower belongs especially to savagery, and not to civilization. Among the
higher nations the nearest approach to it seems to have been the classic
amentum, a thong attached to the middle of the shaft of the javelin to throw
it with. The highest people known to have used the spear-thrower proper
were the nations of Mexico and Central America. Its existence among them
is vouched for by representations in the mythological pictures, by its
Mexican name ‘atlatl,’ and by a beautifully artistic specimen of the thing
itself in the Christy Museum; but we do not hear of it as in practical use
after the Spanish Conquest. In fact the history of the instrument seems in
absolute opposition to the degradation-theory, representing as it does an
invention belonging to the lower civilization, and scarcely able to survive
beyond. Nearly the same may be said of the blow-tube, which as a serious
weapon scarcely ranges above rude tribes of the East Indies and South
America, though kept up in sport at higher levels. The Australian
boomerang has been claimed as derived from some hypothetical high
culture, whereas the transition-stages through which it is connected with the
club are to be observed in its own country, while no civilized race possesses
the weapon.
The use of spring traps of boughs, of switches to fillip small missiles with,
and of the remarkable darts of the Pelew Islands, bent and made to fly by
their own spring, indicate inventions which may have led to that of the bow,
while the arrow is a miniature form of the javelin. The practice of poisoning
arrows, after the manner of stings and serpents’ fangs, is no civilized
device, but a characteristic of lower life, which is generally discarded even
at the barbaric stage. The art of narcotizing fish, remembered but not
approved by high civilization, belongs to many savage tribes, who might
easily discover it in any forest pool where a suitable plant had fallen in. The
art of setting fences to catch fish at the ebb of the tide, so common among
the lower races, is a simple device for assisting nature quite likely to occur
to the savage, in whom sharp hunger is no mean ally of dull wit. Thus it is
with other arts. Fire-making, cooking, pottery, the textile arts, are to be
traced along lines of gradual improvement.[54] Music begins with the rattle
and the drum, which in one way or another hold their places from end to

end of civilization, while pipes and stringed instruments represent an
advanced musical art which is still developing. So with architecture and
agriculture. Complex, elaborate, and highly-reasoned as are the upper
stages of these arts, it is to be remembered that their lower stages begin with
mere direct imitation of nature, copying the shelters which nature provides,
and the propagation of plants which nature performs. Without enumerating
to the same purpose the remaining industries of savage life, it may be said
generally that their facts resist rather than require a theory of degradation
from higher culture. They agree with, and often necessitate, the same view
of development which we know by experience to account for the origin and
progress of the arts among ourselves.
In the various branches of the problem which will henceforward occupy our
attention, that of determining the relation of the mental condition of savages
to that of civilized men, it is an excellent guide and safeguard to keep
before our minds the theory of development in the material arts. Throughout
all the manifestations of the human intellect, facts will be found to fall into
their places on the same general lines of evolution. The notion of the
intellectual state of savages as resulting from decay of previous high
knowledge, seems to have as little evidence in its favour as that stone celts
are the degenerate successors of Sheffield axes, or earthen grave-mounds
degraded copies of Egyptian pyramids. The study of savage and civilized
life alike avail us to trace in the early history of the human intellect, not
gifts of transcendental wisdom, but rude shrewd sense taking up the facts of
common life and shaping from them schemes of primitive philosophy. It
will be seen again and again, by examining such topics as language,
mythology, custom, religion, that savage opinion is in a more or less
rudimentary state, while the civilized mind still bears vestiges, neither few
nor slight, of a past condition from which savages represent the least, and
civilized men the greatest advance. Throughout the whole vast range of the
history of human thought and habit, while civilization has to contend not
only with survival from lower levels, but also with degeneration within its
own borders, it yet proves capable of overcoming both and taking its own
course. History within its proper field, and ethnography over a wider range,
combine to show that the institutions which can best hold their own in the
world gradually supersede the less fit ones, and that this incessant conflict
determines the general resultant course of culture. I will venture to set forth
in mythic fashion how progress, aberration, and retrogression in the general

course of culture contrast themselves in my own mind. We may fancy
ourselves looking on Civilization, as in personal figure she traverses the
world; we see her lingering or resting by the way, and often deviating into
paths that bring her toiling back to where she had passed by long ago; but,
direct or devious, her path lies forward, and if now and then she tries a few
backward steps, her walk soon falls into a helpless stumbling. It is not
according to her nature, her feet were not made to plant uncertain steps
behind her, for both in her forward view and in her onward gait she is of
truly human type.

CHAPTER III.
SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.
Survival and Superstition—Children’s games—Games of chance—
Traditional sayings—Nursery poems—Proverbs—Riddles—
Significance and survival in Customs: sneezing-formula, rite of
foundation-sacrifice, prejudice against saving a drowning man.

When a custom, an art, or an opinion is fairly started in the world,
disturbing influences may long affect it so slightly that it may keep its
course from generation to generation, as a stream once settled in its bed will
flow on for ages. This is mere permanence of culture; and the special
wonder about it is that the change and revolution of human affairs should
have left so many of its feeblest rivulets to run so long. On the Tatar
steppes, six hundred years ago, it was an offence to tread on the threshold or
touch the ropes in entering a tent, and so it appears to be still.[55] Eighteen
centuries ago Ovid mentions the vulgar Roman objection to marriages in
May, which he not unreasonably explains by the occurrence in that month
of the funeral rites of the Lemuralia:—

‘Nec viduæ tædis eadem nec virginis apta
Tempora. Quæ nupsit, non diuturna fuit.
Hac quoque de causa, si te proverbia tangunt,
Mense malas Maio nubere volgus ait.’[56]

The saying that marriages in May are unlucky survives to this day in
England, a striking example how an idea, the meaning of which has
perished for ages, may continue to exist simply because it has existed.
Now there are thousands of cases of this kind which have become, so to
speak, landmarks in the course of culture. When in the process of time there
has come general change in the condition of a people, it is usual,

notwithstanding, to find much that manifestly had not its origin in the new
state of things, but has simply lasted on into it. On the strength of these
survivals, it becomes possible to declare that the civilization of the people
they are observed among must have been derived from an earlier state, in
which the proper home and meaning of these things are to be found; and
thus collections of such facts are to be worked as mines of historic
knowledge. In dealing with such materials, experience of what actually
happens is the main guide, and direct history has to teach us, first and
foremost, how old habits hold their ground in the midst of a new culture
which certainly would never have brought them in, but on the contrary
presses hard to thrust them out. What this direct information is like, a single
example may show. The Dayaks of Borneo were not accustomed to chop
wood, as we do, by notching out V-shaped cuts. Accordingly, when the
white man intruded among them with this among other novelties, they
marked their disgust at the innovation by levying a fine on any of their own
people who should be caught chopping in the European fashion; yet so well
aware were the native wood-cutters that the white man’s plan was an
improvement on their own, that they would use it surreptitiously when they
could trust one another not to tell.[57] The account is twenty years old, and
very likely the foreign chop may have ceased to be an offence against
Dayak conservatism, but its prohibition was a striking instance of survival
by ancestral authority in the very teeth of common sense. Such a proceeding
as this would be usually, and not improperly, described as a superstition;
and, indeed, this name would be given to a large proportion of survivals,
such for instance as may be collected by the hundred from books of folk-
lore and occult science. But the term superstition now implies a reproach,
and though this reproach may be often cast deservedly on fragments of a
dead lower culture embedded in a living higher one, yet in many cases it
would be harsh, and even untrue. For the ethnographer’s purpose, at any
rate, it is desirable to introduce such a term as ‘survival,’ simply to denote
the historical fact which the word ‘superstition’ is now spoiled for
expressing. Moreover, there have to be included as partial survivals the
mass of cases where enough of the old habit is kept up for its origin to be
recognizable, though in taking a new form it has been so adapted to new
circumstances as still to hold its place on its own merits.
Thus it would be seldom reasonable to call the children’s games of modern
Europe superstitions, though many of them are survivals, and indeed

remarkable ones. If the games of children and of grown-up people be
examined with an eye to ethnological lessons to be gained from them, one
of the first things that strikes us is how many of them are only sportive
imitations of the serious business of life. As children in modern civilized
times play at dining and driving horses and going to church, so a main
amusement of savage children is to imitate the occupations which they will
carry on in earnest a few years later, and thus their games are in fact their
lessons. The Esquimaux children’s sports are shooting with a tiny bow and
arrow at a mark, and building little snow-huts, which they light up with
scraps of lamp-wick begged from their mothers.[58] Miniature boomerangs
and spears are among the toys of Australian children; and even as the
fathers keep up as a recognized means of getting themselves wives the
practice of carrying them off by violence, so playing at such Sabine
marriage has been noticed as one of the regular games of the little native
boys and girls.[59] Now it is quite a usual thing in the world for a game to
outlive the serious practice of which it is an imitation. The bow and arrow is
a conspicuous instance. Ancient and widespread in savage culture, we trace
this instrument through barbaric and classic life and onward to a high
mediæval level. But now, when we look on at an archery meeting, or go by
country lanes at the season when toy bows and arrows are ‘in’ among the
children, we see, reduced to a mere sportive survival, the ancient weapon
which among a few savage tribes still keeps its deadly place in the hunt and
the battle. The cross-bow, a comparatively late and local improvement on
the longbow, has disappeared yet more utterly from practical use; but as a
toy it is in full European service, and likely to remain so. For antiquity and
wide diffusion in the world, through savage up to classic and mediæval
times, the sling ranks with the bow and arrow. But in the middle ages it fell
out of use as a practical weapon, and it was all in vain that the 15th century
poet commended the art of slinging among the exercises of a good soldier:
—

‘Use eek the cast of stone, with slynge or honde:
It falleth ofte, yf other shot there none is,
Men harneysed in steel may not withstonde,
The multitude and mighty cast of stonys;
And stonys in effecte, are every where,
And slynges are not noyous for to beare.’[60]

Perhaps as serious a use of the sling as can now be pointed out without the
limits of civilization is among the herdsmen of Spanish America, who sling
so cleverly that the saying is they can hit a beast on either horn and turn him
which way they will. But the use of the rude old weapon is especially kept
up by boys at play, who are here again the representatives of remotely
ancient culture.
As games thus keep up the record of primitive warlike arts, so they
reproduce, in what are at once sports and little children’s lessons, early
stages in the history of childlike tribes of mankind. English children
delighting in the imitations of cries of animals and so forth, and New
Zealanders playing their favourite game of imitating in chorus the saw
hissing, the adze chipping, the musket roaring, and the other instruments
making their proper noises, are alike showing at its source the imitative
element so important in the formation of language.[61] When we look into
the early development of the art of counting, and see the evidence of tribe
after tribe having obtained numerals through the primitive stage of counting
on their fingers, we find a certain ethnographic interest in the games which
teach this earliest numeration. The New Zealand game of ‘ti’ is described as
played by counting on the fingers, a number being called by one player, and
he having instantly to touch the proper finger; while in the Samoan game
one player holds out so many fingers, and his opponent must do the same
instantly or lose a point.[62] These may be native Polynesian games, or they
may be our own children’s games borrowed. In the English nursery the
child learns to say how many fingers the nurse shows, and the appointed
formula of the game is ‘Buck, Buck, how many horns do I hold up?’ The
game of one holding up fingers and the others holding up fingers to match
is mentioned in Strutt. We may see small schoolboys in the lanes playing at
the guessing-game, where one gets on another’s back and holds up fingers,
the other must guess how many. It is interesting to notice the wide

distribution and long permanence of these trifles in history when we read
the following passage from Petronius Arbiter, written in the time of Nero:
—‘Trimalchio, not to seem moved by the loss, kissed the boy and bade him
get up on his back. Without delay the boy climbed on horseback on him,
and slapped him on the shoulders with his hand, laughing and calling out
‘bucca, bucca, quot sunt hic?’[63] The simple counting-games played with
the fingers must not be confounded with the addition-game, where each
player throws out a hand, and the sum of all the fingers shown has to be
called, the successful caller scoring a point; each should call the total before
he sees his adversary’s hand, so that the skill lies especially in shrewd
guessing. This game affords endless amusement to Southern Europe, where
it is known in Italian as ‘morra,’ and in French as ‘mourre,’ and it is popular
in China under the name of ts’ai mei, or ‘guess how many!’ So peculiar a
game would hardly have been invented twice over in Europe and Asia, and
as the Chinese term does not appear to be ancient, we may take it as likely
that the Portuguese merchants introduced the game into China, as they
certainly did into Japan. The ancient Egyptians, as their sculptures show,
used to play at some kind of finger-game, and the Romans had their finger-
flashing, ‘micare digitis,’ at which butchers used to gamble with their
customers for bits of meat. It is not clear whether these were morra or some
other games.[64]
When Scotch lads, playing at the game of ‘tappie-tousie,’ take one another
by the forelock and say, ‘Will ye be my man?’[65] they know nothing of the
old symbolic manner of receiving a bondman which they are keeping up in
survival. The wooden drill for making fire by friction, which so many rude
or ancient races are known to have used as their common household
instrument, and which lasts on among the modern Hindus as the time-
honoured sacred means of lighting the pure sacrificial flame, has been
found surviving in Switzerland as a toy among the children, who made fire
with it in sport, much as Equimaux would have done in earnest.[66] In
Gothland it is on record that the ancient sacrifice of the wild boar has
actually been carried on into modern time in sportive imitation, by lads in
masquerading clothes with their faces blackened and painted, while the
victim was personated by a boy rolled up in furs and placed upon a seat,
with a tuft of pointed straws in his mouth to imitate the bristles of the boar.
[67]
One innocent little child’s sport of our own time is strangely mixed up
with an ugly story of about a thousand years ago. The game in question is

thus played in France:—The children stand in a ring, one lights a spill of
paper and passes it on to the next, saying, ‘petit bonhomme vit encore,’ and
so on round the ring, each saying the words and passing on the flame as
quickly as may be, for the one in whose hands the spill goes out has to pay
a forfeit, and it is then proclaimed that ‘petit bonhomme est mort.’ Grimm
mentions a similar game in Germany, played with a burning stick, and
Halliwell gives the nursery rhyme which is said with it when it is played in
England:—

‘Jack’s alive and in very good health,
If he dies in your hand you must look to yourself.’

Now, as all readers of Church history know, it used to be a favourite engine
of controversy for the adherents of an established faith to accuse heretical
sects of celebrating hideous orgies as the mysteries of their religion. The
Pagans told these stories of the Jews, the Jews told them of the Christians,
and Christians themselves reached a bad eminence in the art of slandering
religious opponents whose moral life often seems in fact to have been
exceptionally pure. The Manichæans were an especial mark for such
aspersions, which were passed on to a sect considered as their successors—
the Paulicians, whose name reappears in the middle ages, in connexion with
the Cathari. To these latter, apparently from an expression in one of their
religious formulas, was given the name of Boni Homines, which became a
recognized term for the Albigenses. It is clear that the early Paulicians
excited the anger of the orthodox by objecting to sacred images, and calling
those who venerated them idolaters; and about A.D. 700, John of Osun,
Patriarch of Armenia, wrote a diatribe against the sect, urging accusations
of the regular anti-Manichæan type, but with a peculiar feature which
brings his statement into the present singular connexion. He declares that
they blasphemously call the orthodox ‘image-worshippers;’ that they
themselves worship the sun; that, moreover, they mix wheaten flour with
the blood of infants and therewith celebrate their communion, and ‘when
they have slain by the worst of deaths a boy, the first-born of his mother,
thrown from hand to hand among them by turns, they venerate him in
whose hand the child expires, as having attained to the first dignity of the
sect.’ To explain the correspondence of these atrocious details with the

nursery sport, it is perhaps the most likely supposition, not that the game of
‘Petit Bonhomme’ keeps up a recollection of a legend of the Boni Homines,
but that the game was known to the children of the eighth century much as
it is now, and that the Armenian Patriarch simply accused the Paulicians of
playing at it with live babes.[68]
It may be possible to trace another interesting group of sports as survivals
from a branch of savage philosophy, once of high rank though now fallen
into merited decay. Games of chance correspond so closely with arts of
divination belonging already to savage culture, that there is force in
applying to several such games the rule that the serious practice comes first,
and in time may dwindle to the sportive survival. To a modern educated
man, drawing lots or tossing up a coin is an appeal to chance, that is, to
ignorance; it is committing the decision of a question to a mechanical
process, itself in no way unnatural or even extraordinary, but merely so
difficult to follow that no one can say beforehand what will come of it. But
we also know that this scientific doctrine of chance is not that of early
civilization, which has little in common with the mathematician’s theory of
probabilities, but much in common with such sacred divination as the
choice of Matthias by lot as a twelfth apostle, or, in a later age, the
Moravian Brethren’s rite of choosing wives for their young men by casting
lots with prayer. It was to no blind chance that the Maoris looked when they
divined by throwing up lots to find a thief among a suspected company;[69]
or the Guinea negroes when they went to the fetish-priest, who shuffled his
bundle of little strips of leather and gave his sacred omen.[70] The crowd
with uplifted hands pray to the gods, when the heroes cast lots in the cap of
Atreides Agamemnon, to know who shall go forth to do battle with Hektor
and help the well-greaved Greeks.[71] With prayer to the gods, and looking
up to heaven, the German priest or father, as Tacitus relates, drew three lots
from among the marked fruit-tree twigs scattered on a pure white garment,
and interpreted the answer from their signs.[72] As in ancient Italy oracles
gave responses by graven lots,[73] so the modern Hindus decide disputes by
casting lots in front of a temple, appealing to the gods with cries of ‘Let
justice be shown! Show the innocent!’[74]
The uncivilized man thinks that lots or dice are adjusted in their fall with
reference to the meaning he may choose to attach to it, and especially he is
apt to suppose spiritual beings standing over the diviner or the gambler,

shuffling the lots or turning up the dice to make them give their answers.
This view held its place firmly in the middle ages, and later in history we
still find games of chance looked on as results of supernatural operation.
The general change from mediæval to modern notions in this respect is well
shown in a remarkable work published in 1619, which seems to have done
much toward bringing the change about. Thomas Gataker, a Puritan
minister, in his treatise ‘Of the Nature and Use of Lots,’ states, in order to
combat them, the following among the current objections made against
games of chance:—‘Lots may not be used but with great reverence, because
the disposition of them commeth immediately from God’ ... ‘the nature of a
Lot, which is affirmed to bee a worke of Gods speciall and immediate
providence, a sacred oracle, a divine judgement or sentence: the light use of
it therefore to be an abuse of Gods name; and so a sinne against the third
Commandement.’ Gataker, in opposition to this, argues that ‘to expect the
issue and event of it, as by ordinarie meanes from God, is common to all
actions: to expect it by an immediate and extraordinarie worke is no more
lawfull here than elsewhere, yea is indeed mere superstition.’[75] It took
time, however, for this opinion to become prevalent in the educated world.
After a lapse of forty years, Jeremy Taylor could still bring out a remnant of
the older notion, in the course of a generally reasonable argument in favour
of games of chance when played for refreshment and not for money. ‘I have
heard,’ he says, ‘from them that have skill in such things, there are such
strange chances, such promoting of a hand by fancy and little arts of
geomancy, such constant winning on one side, such unreasonable losses on
the other, and these strange contingencies produce such horrible effects, that
it is not improbable that God hath permitted the conduct of such games of
chance to the devil, who will order them so where he can do most mischief;
but, without the instrumentality of money, he could do nothing at all.’[76]
With what vitality the notion of supernatural interference in games of
chance even now survives in Europe, is well shown by the still flourishing
arts of gambler’s magic. The folk-lore of our own day continues to teach
that a Good Friday’s egg is to be carried for luck in gaming, and that a turn
of one’s chair will turn one’s fortune; the Tyrolese knows the charm for
getting from the devil the gift of winning at cards and dice; there is still a
great sale on the continent for books which show how to discover, from
dreams, good numbers for the lottery; and the Lusatian peasant will even

hide his lottery-tickets under the altar-cloth that they may receive the
blessing with the sacrament, and so stand a better chance of winning.[77]
Arts of divination and games of chance are so similar in principle, that the
very same instrument passes from one use to the other. This appears in the
accounts, very suggestive from this point of view, of the Polynesian art of
divination by spinning the ‘niu’ or coco-nut. In the Tongan Islands, in
Mariner’s time, the principal purpose for which this was solemnly
performed was to enquire if a sick person would recover; prayer was made
aloud to the patron god of the family to direct the nut, which was then spun,
and its direction at rest indicated the intention of the god. On other
occasions, when the coco-nut was merely spun for amusement, no prayer
was made, and no credit given to the result. Here the serious and the
sportive use of this rudimentary teetotum are found together. In the Samoan
Islands, however, at a later date, the Rev. G. Turner finds the practice
passed into a different stage. A party sit in a circle, the coco-nut is spun in
the middle, and the oracular answer is according to the person towards
whom the monkey-face of the fruit is turned when it stops; but whereas
formerly the Samoans used this as an art of divination to discover thieves,
now they only keep it up as a way of casting lots, and as a game of forfeits.
[78]
It is in favour of the view of serious divination being the earlier use, to
notice that the New Zealanders, though they have no coco-nuts, keep up a
trace of the time when their ancestors in the tropical islands had them and
divined with them; for it is the well-known Polynesian word ‘niu,’ i.e. coco-
nut, which is still retained in use among the Maoris for other kinds of
divination, especially that performed with sticks. Mr. Taylor, who points out
this curiously neat piece of ethnological evidence, records another case to
the present purpose. A method of divination was to clap the hands together
while a proper charm was repeated; if the fingers went clear in, it was
favourable, but a check was an ill omen; on the question of a party crossing
the country in war-time, the locking of all the fingers, or the stoppage of
some or all, were naturally interpreted to mean clear passage, meeting a
travelling party, or being stopped altogether. This quaint little symbolic art
of divination seems now only to survive as a game; it is called ‘puni-
puni.’[79] A similar connexion between divination and gambling is shown by
more familiar instruments. The hucklebones or astragali were used in
divination in ancient Rome, being converted into rude dice by numbering
the four sides, and even when the Roman gambler used the tali for

gambling, he would invoke a god or his mistress before he made his throw.
[80]
Such implements are now mostly used for play, but, nevertheless, their
use for divination was by no means confined to the ancient world, for
hucklebones are mentioned in the 17th century among the fortune-telling
instruments which young girls divined for husbands with,[81] and Negro
sorcerers still throw dice as a means of detecting thieves.[82] Lots serve the
two purposes equally well. The Chinese gamble by lots for cash and
sweetmeats, whilst they also seriously take omens by solemn appeals to the
lots kept ready for the purpose in the temples, and professional diviners sit
in the market-places, thus to open the future to their customers.[83] Playing-
cards are still in European use for divination. That early sort known as
‘tarots’ which the French dealer’s license to sell ‘cartes et tarots’ still keeps
in mind, is said to be preferred by fortune-tellers to the common kind; for
the tarot-pack, with its more numerous and complex figures, lends itself to a
greater variety of omens. In these cases, direct history fails to tell us
whether the use of the instrument for omen or play came first. In this
respect, the history of the Greek ‘kottabos’ is instructive. This art of
divination consisted in flinging wine out of a cup into a metal basin some
distance off without spilling any, the thrower saying or thinking his
mistress’s name, and judging from the clear or dull splash of the wine on
the metal what his fortune in love would be; but in time the magic passed
out of the process, and it became a mere game of dexterity played for a
prize.[84] If this be a typical case, and the rule be relied on that the serious
use precedes the playful, then games of chance may be considered survivals
in principle or detail from corresponding processes of magic—as divination
in sport made gambling in earnest.
Seeking more examples of the lasting on of fixed habits among mankind, let
us glance at a group of time-honoured traditional sayings, old saws which
have a special interest as cases of survival. Even when the real signification
of these phrases has faded out of men’s minds, and they have sunk into
sheer nonsense, or have been overlaid with some modern superficial
meaning, still the old formulas are handed on, often gaining more in
mystery than they lose in sense. We may hear people talk of ‘buying a pig
in a poke,’ whose acquaintance with English does not extend to knowing
what a poke is. And certainly those who wish to say that they have a great
mind to something, and who express themselves by declaring that they have
‘a month’s mind’ to it, can have no conception of the hopeless nonsense

they are making of the old term of the ‘month’s mind,’ which was really the
monthly service for a dead man’s soul, whereby he was kept in mind or
remembrance. The proper sense of the phrase ‘sowing his wild oats’ seems
generally lost in our modern use of it. No doubt it once implied that these ill
weeds would spring up in later years, and how hard it would then be to root
them out. Like the enemy in the parable, the Scandinavian Loki, the
mischief-maker, is proverbially said in Jutland to sow his oats (‘nu saaer
Lokken sin havre’), and the name of ‘Loki’s oats’ (Lokeshavre) is given in
Danish to the wild oats (avena fatua).[85] Sayings which have their source in
some obsolete custom or tale, of course lie especially open to such ill-
usage. It has become mere English to talk of an ‘unlicked cub’ who ‘wants
licking into shape,’ while few remember the explanation of these phrases
from Pliny’s story that bears are born as eyeless, hairless, shapeless lumps
of white flesh, and have afterwards to be licked into form.[86]
Again, in relics of old magic and religion, we have sometimes to look for a
deeper sense in conventional phrases than they now carry on their face, or
for a real meaning in what now seems nonsense. How an ethnographical
record may become embodied in a popular saying, a Tamil proverb now
current in South India will show perfectly. On occasions when A hits B, and
C cries out at the blow, the bystanders will say, ‘’Tis like a Koravan eating
asafœtida when his wife lies in!’ Now a Koravan belongs to a low race in
Madras, and is defined as ‘gipsy, wanderer, ass-driver, thief, eater of rats,
dweller in mat tents, fortune-teller, and suspected character;’ and the
explanation of the proverb is, that whereas native women generally eat
asafœtida as strengthening medicine after childbirth, among the Koravans it
is the husband who eats it to fortify himself on the occasion. This, in fact, is
a variety of the world-wide custom of the ‘couvade,’ where at childbirth the
husband undergoes medical treatment, in many cases being put to bed for
days. It appears that the Koravans are among the races practising this quaint
custom, and that their more civilized Tamil neighbours, struck by its oddity,
but unconscious of its now-forgotten meaning, have taken it up into a
proverb.[87] Let us now apply the same sort of ethnographical key to dark
sayings in our own modern language. The maxim, a ‘hair of the dog that bit
you’ was originally neither a metaphor nor a joke, but a matter-of-fact
recipe for curing the bite of a dog; one of the many instances of the ancient
homœopathic doctrine, that what hurts will also cure: it is mentioned in the
Scandinavian Edda, ‘Dog’s hair heals dog’s bite.’[88] The phrase ‘raising the

wind’ now passes as humorous slang, but it once, in all seriousness,
described one of the most dreaded of the sorcerer’s arts, practised especially
by the Finland wizards, of whose uncanny power over the weather our
sailors have not to this day forgotten their old terror. The ancient ceremony
or ordeal of passing through a fire or leaping over burning brands has been
kept up so vigorously in the British Isles, that Jamieson’s derivation of the
phrase ‘to haul over the coals’ from this rite appears in no way far-fetched.
It is not long since an Irishwoman in New York was tried for killing her
child; she had made it stand on burning coals to find out whether it was
really her own or a changeling.[89] The English nurse who says to a fretful
child, ‘You got out of bed wrong foot foremost this morning,’ seldom or
never knows the meaning of her saying; but this is still plain in the German
folk-lore rule, that to get out of bed left foot first will bring a bad day,[90] one
of the many examples of that simple association of ideas which connects
right and left with good and bad respectively. To conclude, the phrase
‘cheating the devil’ seems to belong to that familiar series of legends where
a man makes a compact with the fiend, but at the last moment gets off scot-
free by the interposition of a saint, or by some absurd evasion—such as
whistling the gospel he has bound himself not to say, or refusing to
complete his bargain at the fall of the leaf, on the plea that the sculptured
leaves in the church are still on their boughs. One form of the mediæval
compact was for the demon, when he had taught his black art to a class of
scholars, to seize one of them for his professional fee, by letting them all
run for their lives and catching the last—a story obviously connected with
another popular saying: ‘devil take the hindmost.’ But even at this game the
stupid fiend may be cheated, as is told in the folk-lore of Spain and
Scotland, in the legends of the Marqués de Villano and the Earl of
Southesk, who attended the Devil’s magic schools at Salamanca and Padua.
The apt scholar only leaves the master his shadow to clutch as following
hindmost in the race, and with this unsubstantial payment the demon must
needs be satisfied, while the new-made magician goes forth free, but ever
after shadowless.[91]
It seems a fair inference to think folk-lore nearest to its source is where it
has its highest place and meaning. Thus, if some old rhyme or saying has in
one place a solemn import in philosophy or religion, while elsewhere it lies
at the level of the nursery, there is some ground for treating the serious
version as the more original, and the playful one as its mere lingering

survival. The argument is not safe, but yet is not to be quite overlooked. For
instance, there are two poems kept in remembrance among the modern
Jews, and printed at the end of their book of Passover services in Hebrew
and English. One is that known as ‫( חד גדיא‬Chad gadyâ): it begins, ‘A kid, a
kid, my father bought for two pieces of money;’ and it goes on to tell how a
cat came and ate the kid, and a dog came and bit the cat, and so on to the
end.—‘Then came the Holy One, blessed be He! and slew the angel of
death, who slew the butcher, who killed the ox, that drank the water, that
quenched the fire, that burnt the stick, that beat the dog, that bit the cat, that
ate the kid, that my father bought for two pieces of money, a kid, a kid.’
This composition is in the ‘Sepher Haggadah,’ and is looked on by some
Jews as a parable concerning the past and future of the Holy Land.
According to one interpretation, Palestine, the kid, is devoured by Babylon
the cat; Babylon is overthrown by Persia, Persia by Greece, Greece by
Rome, till at last the Turks prevail in the land; but the Edomites (i.e. the
nations of Europe) shall drive out the Turks, the angel of death shall destroy
the enemies of Israel, and his children shall be restored under the rule of
Messiah. Irrespectively of any such particular interpretation, the solemnity
of the ending may incline us to think that we really have the composition
here in something like its first form, and that it was written to convey a
mystic meaning. If so, then it follows that our familiar nursery tale of the
old woman who couldn’t get her kid (or pig) over the stile, and wouldn’t get
home till midnight, must be considered a broken-down adaptation of this
old Jewish poem. The other composition is a counting-poem, and begins
thus:

‘Who knoweth one? I (saith Israel) know One:
One is God, who is over heaven and earth.
Who knoweth two? I (saith Israel) know two:
Two tables of the covenant; but One is our God who is over the
heavens and the earth.’

(And so forth, accumulating up to the last verse, which is—)

‘Who knoweth thirteen? I (saith Israel) know thirteen: Thirteen divine
attributes, twelve tribes, eleven stars, ten commandments, nine months
preceding childbirth, eight days preceding circumcision, seven days of

the week, six books of the Mishnah, five books of the Law, four
matrons, three patriarchs, two tables of the covenant; but One is our
God who is over the heavens and the earth.’

This is one of a family of counting-poems, apparently held in much favour
in mediæval Christian times, for they are not yet quite forgotten in country
places. An old Latin version runs: ‘Unus est Deus,’ &c., and one of the still-
surviving English forms begins, ‘One’s One all alone, and evermore shall
be so,’ thence reckoning on as far as ‘Twelve the twelve apostles.’ Here
both the Jewish and Christian forms are or have been serious, so it is
possible that the Jew may have imitated the Christian, but the nobler form
of the Hebrew poem here again gives it a claim to be thought the earlier.[92]
The old proverbs brought down by long inheritance into our modern talk
are far from being insignificant in themselves, for their wit is often as fresh,
and their wisdom as pertinent, as it ever was. Beyond these practical
qualities, proverbs are instructive for the place in ethnography which they
occupy. Their range in civilization is limited; they seem scarcely to belong
to the lowest tribes, but appear first in a settled form among some of the
higher savages. The Fijians, who were found a few years since living in
what archæologists might call the upper Stone Age, have some well-marked
proverbs. They laugh at want of forethought by the saying that ‘The
Nakondo people cut the mast first’ (i.e. before they had built the canoe); and
when a poor man looks wistfully at what he cannot buy, they say,
‘Becalmed, and looking at the fish.’[93] Among the list of the New
Zealanders’ ‘whakatauki,’ or proverbs, one describes a lazy glutton: ‘Deep
throat, but shallow sinews;’ another says that the lazy often profit by the
work of the industrious: ‘The large chips made by Hardwood fall to the
share of Sit-still;’ a third moralizes that ‘A crooked part of a stem of toetoe
can be seen; but a crooked part in the heart cannot be seen.’[94] Among the
Basutos of South Africa, ‘Water never gets tired of running’ is a reproach to
chatterers; ‘Lions growl while they are eating,’ means that there are people
who never will enjoy anything; ‘The sowing-month is the headache-month,’
describes those lazy folks who make excuses when work is to be done; ‘The
thief eats thunderbolts,’ means that he will bring down vengeance from
heaven on himself.[95] West African nations are especially strong in
proverbial philosophy; so much so that Captain Burton amused himself
through the rainy season at Fernando Po in compiling a volume of native

proverbs,[96] among which there are hundreds at about as high an intellectual
level as those of Europe. ‘He fled from the sword and hid in the scabbard,’
is as good as our ‘Out of the frying-pan into the fire;’ and ‘He who has only
his eyebrow for a cross-bow can never kill an animal,’ is more picturesque,
if less terse than our ‘Hard words break no bones.’ The old Buddhist
aphorism, that ‘He who indulges in enmity is like one who throws ashes to
windward, which come back to the same place and cover him all over,’ is
put with less prose and as much point in the negro saying, ‘Ashes fly back
in the face of him who throws them.’ When someone tries to settle an affair
in the absence of the people concerned, the negroes will object that ‘You
can’t shave a man’s head when he is not there,’ while, to explain that the
master is not to be judged by the folly of his servant, they say, ‘The rider is
not a fool because the horse is.’ Ingratitude is alluded to in ‘The sword
knows not the head of the smith’ (who made it), and yet more forcibly
elsewhere, ‘When the calabash had saved them (in the famine), they said,
let us cut it for a drinking-cup.’ The popular contempt for poor men’s
wisdom is put very neatly in the maxim, ‘When a poor man makes a
proverb it does not spread,’ while the very mention of making a proverb as
something likely to happen, shows a land where proverb-making is still a
living art. Transplanted to the West Indies, the African keeps up this art, as
witness these sayings: ‘Behind dog it is dog, but before dog it is Mr. Dog;’
and ‘Toute cabinette tini maringouin’—‘Every cabin has its mosquito.’
The proverb has not changed its character in the course of history; but has
retained from first to last a precisely definite type. The proverbial sayings
recorded among the higher nations of the world are to be reckoned by tens
of thousands, and have a large and well-known literature of their own. But
though the range of existence of proverbs extends into the highest levels of
civilization, this is scarcely true of their development. At the level of
European culture in the middle ages, they have indeed a vast importance in
popular education, but their period of actual growth seems already at an
end. Cervantes raised the proverb-monger’s craft to a pitch it never
surpassed; but it must not be forgotten that the incomparable Sancho’s
wares were mostly heirlooms; for proverbs were even then sinking to
remnants of an earlier condition of society. As such, they survive among
ourselves, who go on using much the same relics of ancestral wisdom as
came out of the squire’s inexhaustible budget, old saws not to be lightly
altered or made anew in our changed modern times. We can collect and use

the old proverbs, but making new ones has become a feeble, spiritless
imitation, like our attempts to invent new myths or new nursery rhymes.
Riddles start near proverbs in the history of civilization, and they travel on
long together, though at last towards different ends. By riddles are here
meant the old-fashioned problems with a real answer intended to be
discovered, such as the typical enigma of the Sphinx, but not the modern
verbal conundrums set in the traditional form of question and answer, as a
way of bringing in a jest à propos of nothing. The original kind, which may
be defined as ‘sense-riddles,’ are found at home among the upper savages,
and range on into the lower and middle civilization; and while their growth
stops at this level, many ancient specimens have lasted on in the modern
nursery and by the cottage fireside. There is a plain reason why riddles
should belong only to the higher grades of savagery; their making requires a
fair power of ideal comparison, and knowledge must have made
considerable advance before this process could become so familiar as to fall
from earnest into sport. At last, in a far higher state of culture, riddles begin
to be looked on as trifling, their growth ceases, and they only survive in
remnants for children’s play. Some examples chosen among various races,
from savagery upwards, will show more exactly the place in mental history
which the riddle occupies.
The following are specimens from a collection of Zulu riddles, recorded
with quaintly simple native comments on the philosophy of the matter:—Q.
‘Guess ye some men who are many and form a row; they dance the
wedding-dance, adorned in white hip-dresses?’ A. ‘The teeth; we call them
men who form a row, for the teeth stand like men who are made ready for a
wedding-dance, that they may dance well. When we say, they are “adorned
with white hip-dresses,” we put that in, that people may not at once think of
teeth, but be drawn away from them by thinking, “It is men who put on
white hip-dresses,” and continually have their thoughts fixed on men,’ &c.
Q. ‘Guess ye a man who does not lie down at night: he lies down in the
morning until the sun sets; he then awakes, and works all night; he does not
work by day; he is not seen when he works?’ A. ‘The closing-poles of the
cattle-pen.’ Q. ‘Guess ye a man whom men do not like to laugh, for it is
known that his laughter is a very great evil, and is followed by lamentation,
and an end of rejoicing. Men weep, and trees, and grass; and everything is
heard weeping in the tribe where he laughs; and they say the man has

laughed who does not usually laugh?’ A. ‘Fire. It is called a man that what
is said may not be at once evident, it being concealed by the word “man.”
Men say many things, searching out the meaning in rivalry, and missing the
mark. A riddle is good when it is not discernible at once,’ &c.[97] Among the
Basutos, riddles are a recognized part of education, and are set like
exercises to a whole company of puzzled children. Q. ‘Do you know what
throws itself from the mountain top without being broken?’ A. ‘A waterfall.’
Q. ‘There is a thing that travels fast without legs or wings, and no cliff, nor
river, nor wall can stop it?’ A. ‘The voice.’ Q. ‘Name the ten trees with ten
flat stones on the top of them.’ A. ‘The fingers.’ Q. ‘Who is the little
immovable dumb boy who is dressed up warm in the day and left naked at
night?’ A. ‘The bed-clothes’ peg.’[98] From East Africa, this Swahili riddle is
an example: Q. ‘My hen has laid among thorns?’ A. ‘A pineapple.’[99] From
West Africa, this Yoruba one: ‘A long slender trading woman who never
gets to market?’ A. ‘A canoe (it stops at the landing-place).’[100] In
Polynesia, the Samoan Islanders are given to riddles. Q. ‘There are four
brothers, who are always bearing about their father?’ A. ‘The Samoan
pillow,’ which is a yard of three-inch bamboo resting on four legs. Q. ‘A
white-headed man stands above the fence, and reaches to the heavens?’ A.
‘The smoke of the oven.’ Q. ‘A man who stands between two ravenous
fish?’ A. ‘The tongue.’[101] (There is a Zulu riddle like this, which compares
the tongue to a man living in the midst of enemies fighting.) The following
are old Mexican enigmas: Q. ‘What are the ten stones one has at his sides?’
A. ‘The finger-nails.’ Q. ‘What is it we get into by three parts and out of by
one?’ A. ‘A shirt.’ Q. ‘What goes through a valley and drags its entrails after
it?’ A. ‘A needle.’[102]
These riddles found among the lower races do not differ at all in nature
from those that have come down, sometimes modernized in the setting, into
the nursery lore of Europe. Thus Spanish children still ask, ‘What is the
dish of nuts that is gathered by day, and scattered by night?’ (the stars.) Our
English riddle of the pair of tongs: ‘Long legs, crooked thighs, little head,
and no eyes,’ is primitive enough to have been made by a South Sea
Islander. The following is on the same theme as one of the Zulu riddles: ‘A
flock of white sheep, On a red hill; Here they go, there they go; Now they
stand still?’ Another is the very analogue of one of the Aztec specimens:
‘Old Mother Twitchett had but one eye, And a long tail which she let fly;
And every time she went over a gap, She left a bit of her tail in a trap?’

So thoroughly does riddle-making belong to the mythologic stage of
thought, that any poet’s simile, if not too far-fetched, needs only inversion
to be made at once into an enigma. The Hindu calls the Sun Saptâsva, i.e.
‘seven-horsed,’ while, with the same thought, the old German riddle asks,
‘What is the chariot drawn by the seven white and seven black horses?’ (the
year, drawn by the seven days and nights of the week.[103]) Such, too, is the
Greek riddle of the two sisters, Day and Night, who gave birth each to the
other to be born of her again:

Εἰσὶ κασίγνηται διτταί, ὧν ἡ μία τίκτει
Τὴν ἑτέραν, αὐτὴ δὲ τεκοῦσ ὑπὸ τῆσδε τεκνοῦται;

and the enigma of Kleoboulos, with its other like fragments of rudimentary
mythology:

Εἷς ὀ πατήρ, παῖδες δὲ δυώδεκα· τῶν δέ γ’ ἑκάστῳ
Παῖδες ἔασι τριήκοντ’ ἄνδιχα εἷδος ἔχουσαι·
Ηι μὲν λευκαὶ ἔασιν ἰδεῖν, ᾖ δ’ αὗτε μέλαιναι·
Ἀθάνατοι δέ τ’ ἐοῦσαι ἀποφθίνουσιν ἄπασαι.

‘One is the father, and twelve the children, and, born unto each one,
Maidens thirty, whose form in twain is parted asunder,
White to behold on the one side, black to behold on the other,
All immortal in being, yet doomed to dwindle and perish.’[104]

Such questions as these may be fairly guessed now as in old times, and
must be distinguished from that scarcer class which require the divination
of some unlikely event to solve them. Of such the typical example is
Samson’s riddle, and there is an old Scandinavian one like it. The story is
that Gestr found a duck sitting on her nest in an ox’s horned skull, and
thereupon propounded a riddle, describing with characteristic Northman’s
metaphor the ox with its horns fancied as already made into drinking-horns.
The following translation does not exaggerate the quaintness of the original:
—‘Joying in children the bill-goose grew, And her building-timbers
together drew; The biting grass-shearer screened her bed, With the
maddening drink-stream overhead.’[105] Many of the old oracular responses
are puzzles of precisely this kind. Such is the story of the Delphic oracle,
which ordered Temenos to find a man with three eyes to guide the army,
which injunction he fulfilled by meeting a one-eyed man on horseback.[106]
It is curious to find this idea again in Scandinavia, where Odin sets King
Heidrek a riddle, ‘Who are they two that fare to the Thing with three eyes,
ten feet, and one tail?’ the answer being, the one-eyed Odin himself on his
eight-footed horse Sleipnir.[107]

The close bearing of the doctrine of survival on the study of manners and
customs is constantly coming into view in ethnographic research. It seems
scarcely too much to assert, once for all, that meaningless customs must be
survivals, that they had a practical, or at least ceremonial, intention when
and where they first arose, but are now fallen into absurdity from having
been carried on into a new state of society, where their original sense has
been discarded. Of course, new customs introduced in particular ages may
be ridiculous or wicked, but as a rule they have discernible motives.
Explanations of this kind, by recourse to some forgotten meaning, seem on
the whole to account best for obscure customs which some have set down to
mere outbreaks of spontaneous folly. A certain Zimmermann, who
published a heavy ‘Geographical History of Mankind’ in the 18th century,
remarks as follows on the prevalence of similar nonsensical and stupid
customs in distant countries:—‘For if two clever heads may, each for
himself, hit upon a clever invention or discovery, then it is far likelier,
considering the much larger total of fools and blockheads, that like fooleries
should be given to two far-distant lands. If, then, the inventive fool be
likewise a man of importance and influence, as is, indeed, an extremely
frequent case, then both nations adopt a similar folly, and then, centuries
after, some historian goes through it to extract his evidence for the
derivation of these two nations one from the other.’[108]
Strong views as to the folly of mankind seem to have been in the air about
the time of the French Revolution, Lord Chesterfield was no doubt an
extremely different person from our German philosopher, but they were
quite at one as to the absurdity of customs. Advising his son as to the
etiquette of courts, the Earl writes thus to him:—‘For example, it is
respectful to bow to the King of England, it is disrespectful to bow to the
King of France; it is the rule to courtesy to the Emperor; and the prostration
of the whole body is required by Eastern Monarchs. These are established
ceremonies, and must be complied with; but why they were established, I
defy sense and reason to tell us. It is the same among all ranks, where
certain customs are received, and must necessarily be complied with,
though by no means the result of sense and reason. As for instance, the very
absurd, though almost universal custom of drinking people’s healths. Can
there be anything in the world less relative to any other man’s health, than
my drinking a glass of wine? Common sense, certainly, never pointed it out,
but yet common sense tells me I must conform to it.’[109] Now, though it

might be difficult enough to make sense of the minor details of court
etiquette, Lord Chesterfield’s example from it of the irrationality of
mankind is a singularly unlucky one. Indeed, if any one were told to set
forth in few words the relations of the people to their rulers in different
states of society, he might answer that men grovel on their faces before the
King of Siam, kneel on one knee or uncover before a European monarch,
and shake the hand of the President of the United States as though it were a
pump-handle. These are ceremonies at once intelligible and significant.
Lord Chesterfield is more fortunate in his second instance, for the custom of
drinking healths is really of obscure origin. Yet it is closely connected with
an ancient rite, practically absurd indeed, but done with a conscious and
serious intention which lands it quite outside the region of nonsense. This is
the custom of pouring out libations and drinking at ceremonial banquets to
gods and the dead. Thus the old Northmen drank the ‘minni’ of Thor, Odin,
and Freya, and of kings likewise at their funerals. The custom did not die
out with the conversion of the Scandinavian and Teutonic nations. Such
formulas as ‘God’s minne!’ ‘a bowl to God in heaven!’ are on record, while
in like manner Christ, Mary, and the Saints were drunk to in place of
heathen gods and heroes, and the habit of drinking to the dead and the
living at the same feast and in similar terms goes far to prove here a
common origin for both ceremonies. The ‘minne’ was at once love,
memory, and the thought of the absent, and it long survived in England in
the ‘minnying’ or ‘mynde’ days, on which the memory of the dead was
celebrated by services or banquets. Such evidence as this fairly justifies the
writers, older and newer, who have treated these ceremonial drinking
usages as in their nature sacrificial.[110] As for the practice of simply
drinking the health of living men, its ancient history reaches us from several
districts inhabited by Aryan nations. The Greeks in symposium drank to one
another, and the Romans adopted the habit (προπίνειν, propinare, Græco
more bibere). The Goths cried ‘hails!’ as they pledged each other, as we
have it in the curious first line of the verses ‘De conviviis barbaris’ in the
Latin Anthology, which sets down the shouts of a Gothic drinking-bout of
the fifth century or so, in words which still partly keep their sense to an
English ear.

‘Inter eils Goticum scapiamatziaia drincan
Non audet quisquam dignos educere versus.’

As for ourselves, though the old drinking salutation of ‘wæs hæl?’ is no
longer vulgar English, the formula remains with us, stiffened into a noun.
On the whole, there is presumptive though not conclusive evidence that the
custom of drinking healths to the living is historically related to the
religious rite of drinking to the gods and the dead.
Let us now put the theory of survival to a somewhat severe test, by seeking
from it some explanation of the existence, in practice or memory, within the
limits of modern civilized society, of three remarkable groups of customs
which civilized ideas totally fail to account for. Though we may not succeed
in giving clear and absolute explanations of their motives, at any rate it is a
step in advance to be able to refer their origins to savage or barbaric
antiquity. Looking at these customs from the modern practical point of
view, one is ridiculous, the others are atrocious, and all are senseless. The
first is the practice of salutation on sneezing, the second the rite of laying
the foundations of a building on a human victim, the third the prejudice
against saving a drowning man.
In interpreting the customs connected with sneezing, it is needful to
recognize a prevalent doctrine of the lower races, of which a full account
will be given in another chapter. As a man’s soul is considered to go in and
out of his body, so it is with other spirits, particularly such as enter into
patients and possess them or afflict them with disease. Among the less
cultured races, the connexion of this idea with sneezing is best shown
among the Zulus, a people firmly persuaded that kindly or angry spirits of
the dead hover about them, do them good or harm, stand visibly before
them in dreams, enter into them, and cause diseases in them. The following
particulars are abridged from the native statements taken down by Dr.
Callaway:—When a Zulu sneezes, he will say, ‘I am now blessed. The
Idhlozi (ancestral spirit) is with me; it has come to me. Let me hasten and
praise it, for it is it which causes me to sneeze!’ So he praises the manes of
his family, asking for cattle, and wives, and blessings. Sneezing is a sign
that a sick person will be restored to health; he returns thanks after
sneezing, saying, ‘Ye people of ours, I have gained that prosperity which I

wanted. Continue to look on me with favour!’ Sneezing reminds a man that
he should name the Itongo (ancestral spirit) of his people without delay,
because it is the Itongo which causes him to sneeze, that he may perceive
by sneezing that the Itongo is with him. If a man is ill and does not sneeze,
those who come to him ask whether he has sneezed or not; if he has not
sneezed, they murmur, saying, ‘The disease is great!’ If a child sneezes,
they say to it, ‘Grow!’ it is a sign of health. So then, it is said, sneezing
among black men gives a man strength to remember that the Itongo has
entered into him and abides with him. The Zulu diviners or sorcerers are
very apt to sneeze, which they regard as an indication of the presence of the
spirits, whom they adore by saying, ‘Makosi!’ (i.e. lords or masters). It is a
suggestive example of the transition of such customs as these from one
religion to another, that the Amakosa, who used to call on their divine
ancestor Utixo when they sneezed, since their conversion to Christianity
say, ‘Preserver, look upon me!’ or, ‘Creator of heaven and earth!’[111]
Elsewhere in Africa, similar ideas are mentioned. Sir Thomas Browne, in
his ‘Vulgar Errors,’ made well known the story that when the King of
Monomotapa sneezed, acclamations of blessing passed from mouth to
mouth through the city; but he should have mentioned that Godigno, from
whom the original account is taken, said that this took place when the king
drank, or coughed, or sneezed.[112] A later account from the other side of the
continent is more to the purpose. In Guinea, in the last century, when a
principal personage sneezed, all present fell on their knees, kissed the earth,
clapped their hands, and wished him all happiness and prosperity.[113] With a
different idea, the negroes of Old Calabar, when a child sneezes, will
sometimes exclaim, ‘Far from you!’ with an appropriate gesture as if
throwing off some evil.[114] Polynesia is another region where the sneezing
salutation is well marked. In New Zealand, a charm was said to prevent evil
when a child sneezed;[115] if a Samoan sneezed, the bystanders said, ‘Life to
you!’[116] while in the Tongan group a sneeze on the starting of an expedition
was a most evil presage.[117] A curious American instance dates from
Hernando de Soto’s famous expedition into Florida, when Guachoya, a
native chief, came to pay him a visit. ‘While this was going on, the cacique
Guachoya gave a great sneeze; the gentlemen who had come with him and
were lining the walls of the hall among the Spaniards there all at once
bowing their heads, opening their arms, and closing them again, and
making other gestures of great veneration and respect, saluted him with

different words, all directed to one end, saying, “The Sun guard thee, be
with thee, enlighten thee, magnify thee, protect thee, favour thee, defend
thee, prosper thee, save thee,” and other like phrases, as the words came,
and for a good space there lingered the murmur of these words among
them, whereat the governor wondering said to the gentlemen and captains
with him, “Do you not see that all the world is one?” This matter was well
noted among the Spaniards, that among so barbarous a people should be
used the same ceremonies, or greater, than among those who hold
themselves to be very civilized. Whence it may be believed that this manner
of salutation is natural among all nations, and not caused by a pestilence, as
is vulgarly said,’ &c.[118]
In Asia and Europe the sneezing superstition extends through a wide range
of race, age, and country.[119] Among the passages relating to it in the classic
ages of Greece and Rome, the following are some of the most
characteristic,—the lucky sneeze of Telemachos in the Odyssey;[120] the
soldier’s sneeze and the shout of adoration to the god which rose along the
ranks, and which Xenophon appealed to as a favourable omen;[121]
Aristotle’s remark that people consider a sneeze as divine (τὸν ηὲν πταρμὸν
θεὸν ἡγούμεθα εἶναι), but not a cough,[122] &c.; the Greek epigram on the
man with the long nose, who did not say Ζεῦ σῶσον when he sneezed, for
the noise was too far off for him to hear;[123] Petronius Arbiter’s mention of
the custom of saying ‘Salve!’ to one who sneezed;[124] and Pliny’s question,
‘Cur sternutamentis salutamus?’ apropos of which he remarks that even
Tiberius Cæsar, that saddest of men, exacted this observance.[125] Similar
rites of sneezing have long been observed in Eastern Asia.[126] When a
Hindu sneezes, bystanders say, ‘Live!’ and the sneezer replies, ‘With you!’
It is an ill omen, to which among others the Thugs paid great regard on
starting on an expedition, and which even compelled them to let the
travellers with them escape.[127]
The Jewish sneezing formula is, ‘Tobim chayim!’ i.e. ‘Good life!’[128] The
Moslem says, ‘Praise to Allah!’ when he sneezes, and his friends
compliment him with proper formulas, a custom which seems to be
conveyed from race to race wherever Islam extends.[129] Lastly, the custom
ranges through mediæval into modern Europe. To cite old German
examples, ‘Die Heiden nicht endorften niesen, dâ man doch sprichet “Nu
helfiu Got?”’ ‘Wir sprechen, swer niuset, Got helfe dir.’[130] For a Norman

French instance in England, the following lines (A.D. 1100) may serve,
which show our old formula ‘waes hæl!’ (‘may you be well!’—‘wassail!’)
used also to avert being taken ill after a sneeze:—

‘E pur une feyze esternuer
Tantot quident mal trouer,
Si uesbeil ne diez aprez.’[131]

In the ‘Rules of Civility’ (A.D. 1685, translated from the French) we read:
—‘If his lordship chances to sneeze, you are not to bawl out, “God bless
you, sir,” but, pulling off your hat, bow to him handsomely, and make that
obsecration to yourself.’[132] It is noticed that Anabaptists and Quakers
rejected these with other salutations, but they remained in the code of
English good manners among high and low till half a century or so ago, and
are so little forgotten now, that most people still see the point of the story of
the fiddler and his wife, where his sneeze and her hearty ‘God bless you!’
brought about the removal of the fiddle case. ‘Got hilf!’ may still be heard
in Germany, and ‘Felicità!’ in Italy.
It is not strange that the existence of these absurd customs should have been
for ages a puzzle to curious enquirers. Especially the legend-mongers took
the matter in hand, and their attempts to devise historical explanations are
on record in a group of philosophic myths,—Greek, Jewish, Christian.
Prometheus prays for the preservation of his artificial man, when it gives
the first sign of life by a sneeze; Jacob prays that man’s soul may not, as
heretofore, depart from his body when he sneezes; Pope Gregory prays to
avert the pestilence, in those days when the air was so deadly that he who
sneezed died of it; and from these imaginary events legend declares that the
use of the sneezing formulas was handed down. It is more to our purpose to
notice the existence of a corresponding set of ideas and customs connected
with gaping. Among the Zulus, repeated yawning and sneezing are classed
together as signs of approaching spiritual possession.[133] The Hindu, when
he gapes, must snap his thumb and finger, and repeat the name of some
God, as Rama: to neglect this is a sin as great as the murder of a Brahman.
[134]
The Persians ascribe yawning, sneezing, &c., to demoniacal possession.
Among the modern Moslems generally, when a man yawns, he puts the
back of his left hand to his mouth, saying, ‘I seek refuge with Allah from

Satan the accursed!’ but the act of yawning is to be avoided, for the Devil is
in the habit of leaping into a gaping mouth.[135] This may very likely be the
meaning of the Jewish proverb, ‘Open not thy mouth to Satan!’ The other
half of this idea shows itself clearly in Josephus’ story of his having seen a
certain Jew, named Eleazar, cure demoniacs in Vespasian’s time, by
drawing the demons out through their nostrils, by means of a ring
containing a root of mystic virtue mentioned by Solomon.[136] The account
of the sect of the Messalians, who used to spit and blow their noses to expel
the demons they might have drawn in with their breath,[137] the records of
the mediæval exorcists driving out devils through the patients’ nostrils,[138]
and the custom, still kept up in the Tyrol, of crossing oneself when one
yawns, lest something evil should come into one’s mouth,[139] involve
similar ideas. In comparing the modern Kafir ideas with those of other
districts of the world, we find a distinct notion of a sneeze being due to a
spiritual presence. This, which seems indeed the key to the whole matter,
has been well brought into view by Mr. Haliburton, as displayed in Keltic
folk-lore, in a group of stories turning on the superstition that any one who
sneezes is liable to be carried off by the fairies, unless their power be
counteracted by an invocation, as ‘God bless you!’[140] The corresponding
idea as to yawning is to be found in an Iceland folk-lore legend, where the
troll, who has transformed herself into the shape of the beautiful queen,
says, ‘When I yawn a little yawn, I am a neat and tiny maiden; when I yawn
a half-yawn, then I am as a half-troll; when I yawn a whole yawn, then am I
as a whole troll.’[141] On the whole, though the sneezing superstition makes
no approach to universality among mankind, its wide distribution is highly
remarkable, and it would be an interesting problem to decide how far this
wide distribution is due to independent growth in several regions, how far
to conveyance from race to race, and how far to ancestral inheritance. Here
it has only to be maintained that it was not originally an arbitrary and
meaningless custom, but the working out of a principle.[142] The plain
statement by the modern Zulus fits with the hints to be gained from the
superstition and folk-lore of other races, to connect the notions and
practices as to sneezing with the ancient and savage doctrine of pervading
and invading spirits, considered as good or evil, and treated accordingly.
The lingering survivals of the quaint old formulas in modern Europe seem
an unconscious record of the time when the explanation of sneezing had not
yet been given over to physiology, but was still in the ‘theological stage.’

There is current in Scotland the belief that the Picts, to whom local legend
attributes buildings of prehistoric antiquity, bathed their foundation-stones
with human blood; and legend even tells that St. Columba found it
necessary to bury St. Oran alive beneath the foundation of his monastery, in
order to propitiate the spirits of the soil who demolished by night what was
built during the day. So late as 1843, in Germany, when a new bridge was
built at Halle, a notion was abroad among the people that a child was
wanted to be built into the foundation. These ideas of church or wall or
bridge wanting human blood or an immured victim to make the foundation
steadfast, are not only widespread in European folk-lore, but local chronicle
or tradition asserts them as matter of historical fact in district after district.
Thus, when the broken dam of the Nogat had to be repaired in 1463, the
peasants, on the advice to throw in a living man, are said to have made a
beggar drunk and buried him there. Thuringian legend declares that to make
the castle of Liebenstein fast and impregnable, a child was bought for hard
money of its mother and walled in. It was eating a cake while the masons
were at work, the story goes, and it cried out, ‘Mother, I see thee still;’ then
later, ‘Mother, I see thee a little still;’ and, as they put in the last stone,
‘Mother, now I see thee no more.’ The wall of Copenhagen, legend says,
sank as fast as it was built; so they took an innocent little girl, set her on a
chair at a table of toys and eatables, and, as she played and ate, twelve
master-masons closed a vault over her; then, with clanging music, the wall
was raised, and stood firm ever after. Thus Italian legend tells of the bridge
of Arta, that fell in and fell in till they walled in the master-builder’s wife,
and she spoke her dying curse that the bridge should tremble like a flower-
stalk henceforth. The Slavonic chiefs founding Detinez, according to old
heathen custom, sent out men to take the first boy they met and bury him in
the foundation. Servian legend tells how three brothers combined to build
the fortress of Skadra (Scutari); but, year after year, the demon (vila) razed
by night what the three hundred masons built by day. The fiend must be
appeased by a human sacrifice, the first of the three wives who should come
bringing food to the workmen. All three brothers swore to keep the dreadful
secret from their wives; but the two eldest gave traitorous warning to theirs,
and it was the youngest brother’s wife who came unsuspecting, and they
built her in. But she entreated that an opening should be left for her to
suckle her baby through, and for a twelve-month it was brought. To this
day, Servian wives visit the tomb of the good mother, still marked by a

stream of water which trickles, milky with lime, down the fortress wall.
Lastly, there is our own legend of Vortigern, who could not finish his tower
till the foundation-stone was wetted with the blood of a child born of a
mother without a father. As is usual in the history of sacrifice, we hear of
substitutes for such victims; empty coffins walled up in Germany, a lamb
walled in under the altar in Denmark to make the church stand fast, and the
churchyard in like manner handselled by burying a live horse first. In
modern Greece an evident relic of the idea survives in the superstition that
the first passer-by after a foundation-stone is laid will die within the year,
wherefore the masons will compromise the debt by killing a lamb or a black
cock on the stone. With much the same idea German legend tells of the
bridge-building fiend cheated of his promised fee, a soul, by the device of
making a cock run first across; and thus German folk-lore says it is well,
before entering a new house, to let a cat or dog run in.[143] From all this it
seems that, with due allowance for the idea having passed into an often-
repeated and varied mythic theme, yet written and unwritten tradition do
preserve the memory of a bloodthirsty barbaric rite, which not only really
existed in ancient times, but lingered long in European history. If now we
look to less cultured countries, we shall find the rite carried on in our own
day with a distinctly religious purpose, either to propitiate the earth-spirits
with a victim, or to convert the soul of the victim himself into a protecting
demon.
In Africa, in Galam, a boy and girl used to be buried alive before the great
gate of the city to make it impregnable, a practice once executed on a large
scale by a Bambarra tyrant; while in Great Bassam and Yarriba such
sacrifices were usual at the foundation of a house or village.[144] In
Polynesia, Ellis heard of the custom, instanced by the fact that the central
pillar of one of the temples at Maeva was planted upon the body of a human
victim.[145] In Borneo, among the Milanau Dayaks, at the erection of the
largest house a deep hole was dug to receive the first post, which was then
suspended over it; a slave girl was placed in the excavation; at a signal the
lashings were cut, and the enormous timber descended, crushing the girl to
death, a sacrifice to the spirits. St. John saw a milder form of the rite
performed, when the chief of the Quop Dayaks set up a flagstaff near his
house, a chicken being thrown in to be crushed by the descending pole.[146]
More cultured nations of Southern Asia have carried on into modern ages
the rite of the foundation-sacrifice. A 17th century account of Japan

mentions the belief there that a wall laid on the body of a willing human
victim would be secure from accident; accordingly, when a great wall was
to be built, some wretched slave would offer himself as foundation, lying
down in the trench to be crushed by the heavy stones lowered upon him.[147]
When the gates of the new city of Tavoy, in Tenasserim, were built about
1780, as Mason relates on the evidence of an eye-witness, a criminal was
put in each post-hole to become a protecting demon. Thus it appears that
such stories as that of the human victims buried for spirit watchers under
the gates of Mandalay, of the queen who was drowned in a Burmese
reservoir to make the dyke safe, of the hero whose divided body was buried
under the fortress of Thatung to make it impregnable, are the records,
whether in historical or mythical form, of the actual customs of the land.[148]
Within our own dominion, when Rajah Sala Byne was building the fort of
Sialkot in the Punjab, the foundation of the south-east bastion gave way so
repeatedly that he had recourse to a soothsayer, who assured him that it
would never stand until the blood of an only son was shed there, wherefore
the only son of a widow was sacrificed.[149] It is thus plain that hideous rites,
of which Europe has scarcely kept up more than the dim memory, have held
fast their ancient practice and meaning in Africa, Polynesia, and Asia,
among races who represent in grade, if not in chronology, earlier stages of
civilization.
When Sir Walter Scott, in the ‘Pirate,’ tells of Bryce the pedlar refusing to
help Mordaunt to save the shipwrecked sailor from drowning, and even
remonstrating with him on the rashness of such a deed, he states an old
superstition of the Shetlanders. ‘Are you mad?’ says the pedlar; ‘you that
have lived sae lang in Zetland, to risk the saving of a drowning man? Wot
ye not, if you bring him to life again, he will be sure to do you some capital
injury?’ Were this inhuman thought noticed in this one district alone, it
might be fancied to have had its rise in some local idea now no longer to be
explained. But when mentions of similar superstitions are collected among
the St. Kilda islanders and the boatmen of the Danube, among French and
English sailors, and even out of Europe and among less civilized races, we
cease to think of local fancies, but look for some widely accepted belief of
the lower culture to account for such a state of things. The Hindu does not
save a man from drowning in the sacred Ganges, and the islanders of the
Malay archipelago share the cruel notion.[150] Of all people the rude
Kamchadals have the prohibition in the most remarkable form. They hold it

a great fault, says Kracheninnikow, to save a drowning man; he who
delivers him will be drowned himself.[151] Steller’s account is more
extraordinary, and probably applies only to cases where the victim is
actually drowning: he says that if a man fell by chance into the water, it was
a great sin for him to get out, for as he had been destined to drown he did
wrong in not drowning, wherefore no one would let him into his dwelling,
nor speak to him, nor give him food or a wife, but he was reckoned for
dead; and even when a man fell into the water while others were standing
by, far from helping him out, they would drown him by force. Now these
barbarians, it appears, avoided volcanoes because of the spirits who live
there and cook their food; for a like reason, they held it a sin to bathe in hot
springs; and they believed with fear in a fish-like spirit of the sea, whom
they called Mitgk.[152] This spiritualistic belief among the Kamchadals is, no
doubt, the key to their superstition as to rescuing drowning men. There is
even to be found in modern European superstition, not only the practice, but
with it a lingering survival of its ancient spiritualistic significance. In
Bohemia, a recent account (1864) says that the fishermen do not venture to
snatch a drowning man from the waters. They fear that the ‘Waterman’ (i.e.
water-demon) would take away their luck in fishing, and drown themselves
at the first opportunity.[153] This explanation of the prejudice against saving
the water-spirit’s victim may be confirmed by a mass of evidence from
various districts of the world. Thus, in discussing the doctrine of sacrifice, it
will appear that the usual manner of making an offering to a well, river,
lake, or sea, is simply to cast property, cattle, or men into the water, which
personally or by its indwelling spirit takes possession of them.[154] That the
accidental drowning of a man is held to be such a seizure, savage and
civilized folk-lore show by many examples. Among the Sioux Indians, it is
Unk-tahe the water-monster that drowns his victims in flood or rapid;[155] in
New Zealand huge supernatural reptile-monsters, called Taniwha, live in
river-bends, and those who are drowned are said to be pulled under by
them;[156] the Siamese fears the Pnük or water-spirit that seizes bathers and
drags them under to his dwelling;[157] in Slavonic lands it is Topielec (the
ducker) by whom men are always drowned;[158] when some one is drowned
in Germany, people recollect the religion of their ancestors, and say, ‘The
river-spirit claims his yearly sacrifice,’ or, more simply, ‘The nix has taken
him:’[159]—

‘Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen,
Am Ende Fischer und Kahn;
Und das hat mit ihrem Singen
Die Lorelei gethan.’

From this point of view it is obvious that to save a sinking man is to snatch
a victim from the very clutches of the water-spirit, a rash defiance of deity
which would hardly pass unavenged. In the civilized world the rude old
theological conception of drowning has long been superseded by physical
explanation; and the prejudice against rescue from such a death may have
now almost or altogether disappeared. But archaic ideas, drifted on into
modern folk-lore and poetry, still bring to our view an apparent connexion
between the primitive doctrine and the surviving custom.
As the social development of the world goes on, the weightiest thoughts and
actions may dwindle to mere survival. Original meaning dies out gradually,
each generation leaves fewer and fewer to bear it in mind, till it falls out of
popular memory, and in after-days ethnography has to attempt, more or less
successfully, to restore it by piecing together lines of isolated or forgotten
facts. Children’s sports, popular sayings, absurd customs, may be
practically unimportant, but are not philosophically insignificant, bearing as
they do on some of the most instructive phases of early culture. Ugly and
cruel superstitions may prove to be relics of primitive barbarism, for in
keeping up such Man is like Shakespeare’s fox,

‘Who, ne’er so tame, so cherish’d, and lock’d up,
Will have a wild trick of his ancestors.’

CHAPTER IV.
SURVIVAL IN CULTURE (continued).

Occult Sciences—Magical powers attributed by higher to lower races—
Magical processes based on Association of Ideas—Omens—Augury,
&c.—Oneiromancy—Haruspication, Scapulimancy, Chiromancy, &c.
—Cartomancy, &c.—Rhabdomancy, Dactyliomancy, Coscinomancy,
&c.—Astrology—Intellectual conditions accounting for the persistence
of Magic—Survival passes into Revival—Witchcraft, originating in
savage culture, continues in barbaric civilization; its decline in early
mediæval Europe followed by revival; its practices and counter-
practices belong to earlier culture—Spiritualism has its source in early
stages of culture, in close connexion with witchcraft—Spirit-rapping
and Spirit-writing—Rising in the air—Performances of tied mediums—
Practical bearing of the study of Survival.

In examining the survival of opinions in the midst of conditions of society
becoming gradually estranged from them, and tending at last to suppress
them altogether, much may be learnt from the history of one of the most
pernicious delusions that ever vexed mankind, the belief in Magic. Looking
at Occult Science from this ethnographic point of view, I shall instance
some of its branches as illustrating the course of intellectual culture. Its
place in history is briefly this. It belongs in its main principle to the lowest
known stages of civilization, and the lower races, who have not partaken
largely of the education of the world, still maintain it in vigour. From this
level it may be traced upward, much of the savage art holding its place
substantially unchanged, and many new practices being in course of time
developed, while both the older and newer developments have lasted on
more or less among modern cultured nations. But during the ages in which
progressive races have been learning to submit their opinions to closer and

closer experimental tests, occult science has been breaking down into the
condition of a survival, in which state we mostly find it among ourselves.
The modern educated world, rejecting occult science as a contemptible
superstition, has practically committed itself to the opinion that magic
belongs to a lower level of civilization. It is very instructive to find the
soundness of this judgment undesignedly confirmed by nations whose
education has not advanced far enough to destroy their belief in magic
itself. In any country an isolated or outlying race, the lingering survivor of
an older nationality, is liable to the reputation of sorcery. It is thus with the
Lavas of Burma, supposed to be the broken-down remains of an ancient
cultured race, and dreaded as man-tigers;[160] and with the Budas of
Abyssinia, who are at once the smiths and potters, sorcerers and were-
wolves, of their district.[161] But the usual and suggestive state of things is
that nations who believe with the sincerest terror in the reality of the magic
art, at the same time cannot shut their eyes to the fact that it more
essentially belongs to, and is more thoroughly at home among, races less
civilized than themselves. The Malays of the Peninsula, who have adopted
Mohammedan religion and civilization, have this idea of the lower tribes of
the land, tribes more or less of their own race, but who have remained in
their early savage condition. The Malays have enchanters of their own, but
consider them inferior to the sorcerers or poyangs belonging to the rude
Mintira; to these they will resort for the cure of diseases and the working of
misfortune and death to their enemies. It is, in fact, the best protection the
Mintira have against their stronger Malay neighbours, that these are careful
not to offend them for fear of their powers of magical revenge. The Jakuns,
again, are a rude and wild race, whom the Malays despise as infidels and
little higher than animals, but whom at the same time they fear extremely.
To the Malay the Jakun seems a supernatural being, skilled in divination,
sorcery, and fascination, able to do evil or good according to his pleasure,
whose blessing will be followed by the most fortunate success, and his
curse by the most dreadful consequences; he can turn towards the house of
an enemy, at whatever distance, and beat two sticks together till that enemy
will fall sick and die; he is skilled in herbal physic; he has the power of
charming the fiercest wild beasts. Thus it is that the Malays, though they
despise the Jakuns, refrain, in many circumstances, from ill-treating them.
[162]
In India, in long-past ages, the dominant Aryans described the rude
indigenes of the land by the epithets of ‘possessed of magical powers,’

‘changing their shape at will.’[163] To this day, Hindus settled in Chota-
Nagpur and Singbhum firmly believe that the Mundas have powers of
witchcraft, whereby they can transform themselves into tigers and other
beasts of prey to devour their enemies, and can witch away the lives of man
and beast; it is to the wildest and most savage of the tribe that such powers
are generally ascribed.[164] In Southern India, again, we hear in past times of
Hinduized Dravidians, the Sudras of Canara, living in fear of the
demoniacal powers of the slave-caste below them.[165] In our own day,
among Dravidian tribes of the Nilagiri district, the Todas and Badagas are
in mortal dread of the Kurumbas, despised and wretched forest outcasts, but
gifted, it is believed, with powers of destroying men and animals and
property by witchcraft.[166] Northern Europe brings the like contrast sharply
into view. The Finns and Lapps, whose low Tatar barbarism was
characterized by sorcery such as flourishes still among their Siberian
kinsfolk, were accordingly objects of superstitious fear to their
Scandinavian neighbours and oppressors. In the middle ages the name of
Finn was, as it still remains among sea-faring men, equivalent to that of
sorcerer, while Lapland witches had a European celebrity as practitioners of
the black art. Ages after the Finns had risen in the social scale, the Lapps
retained much of their old half-savage habit of life, and with it naturally
their witchcraft, so that even the magic-gifted Finns revered the occult
powers of a people more barbarous than themselves. Rühs writes thus early
in the last century: ‘There are still sorcerers in Finland, but the skilfullest of
them believe that the Lapps far excel them; of a well-experienced magician
they say, “That is quite a Lapp,” and they journey to Lapland for such
knowledge.’[167] All this is of a piece with the survival of such ideas among
the ignorant elsewhere in the civilized world. Many a white man in the West
Indies and Africa dreads the incantations of the Obi-man, and Europe
ascribes powers of sorcery to despised outcast ‘races maudites,’ Gypsies
and Cagots. To turn from nations to sects, the attitude of Protestants to
Catholics in this matter is instructive. It was remarked in Scotland: ‘There is
one opinion which many of them entertain, ... that a popish priest can cast
out devils and cure madness, and that the Presbyterian clergy have no such
power.’ So Bourne says of the Church of England clergy, that the vulgar
think them no conjurers, and say none can lay spirits but popish priests.[168]
These accounts are not recent, but in Germany the same state of things
appears to exist still. Protestants get the aid of Catholic priests and monks to

help them against witchcraft, to lay ghosts, consecrate herbs, and discover
thieves;[169] thus with unconscious irony judging the relation of Rome
toward modern civilization.
The principal key to the understanding of Occult Science is to consider it as
based on the Association of Ideas, a faculty which lies at the very
foundation of human reason, but in no small degree of human unreason
also. Man, as yet in a low intellectual condition, having come to associate in
thought those things which he found by experience to be connected in fact,
proceeded erroneously to invert this action, and to conclude that association
in thought must involve similar connexion in reality. He thus attempted to
discover, to foretell, and to cause events by means of processes which we
can now see to have only an ideal significance. By a vast mass of evidence
from savage, barbaric, and civilized life, magic arts which have resulted
from thus mistaking an ideal for a real connexion, may be clearly traced
from the lower culture which they are of, to the higher culture which they
are in.[170] Such are the practices whereby a distant person is to be affected
by acting on something closely associated with him—his property, clothes
he has worn, and above all cuttings of his hair and nails. Not only do
savages high and low like the Australians and Polynesians, and barbarians
like the nations of Guinea, live in deadly terror of this spiteful craft—not
only have the Parsis their sacred ritual prescribed for burying their cut hair
and nails, lest demons and sorcerers should do mischief with them, but the
fear of leaving such clippings and parings about lest their former owner
should be harmed through them, has by no means died out of European
folk-lore, and the German peasant, during the days between his child’s birth
and baptism, objects to lend anything out of the house, lest witchcraft
should be worked through it on the yet unconsecrated baby.[171] As the negro
fetish-man, when his patient does not come in person, can divine by means
of his dirty cloth or cap instead,[172] so the modern clairvoyant professes to
feel sympathetically the sensations of a distant person, if communication be
made through a lock of his hair or any object that has been in contact with
him.[173] The simple idea of joining two objects with a cord, taking for
granted that this communication will establish connexion or carry influence,
has been worked out in various ways in the world. In Australia, the native
doctor fastens one end of a string to the ailing part of the patient’s body, and
by sucking at the other end pretends to draw out blood for his relief.[174] In
Orissa, the Jeypore witch lets down a ball of thread through her enemy’s

roof to reach his body, that by putting the other end in her own mouth she
may suck his blood.[175] When a reindeer is sacrificed at a sick Ostyak’s tent
door, the patient holds in his hand a cord attached to the victim offered for
his benefit.[176] Greek history shows a similar idea, when the citizens of
Ephesus carried a rope seven furlongs from their walls to the temple of
Artemis, thus to place themselves under her safeguard against the attack of
Crœsus; and in the yet more striking story of the Kylonians, who tied a cord
to the statue of the goddess when they quitted the asylum, and clung to it
for protection as they crossed unhallowed ground; but by ill-fate the cord of
safety broke and they were mercilessly put to death.[177] And in our own day,
Buddhist priests in solemn ceremony put themselves in communication
with a sacred relic, by each taking hold of a long thread fastened near it and
around the temple.[178]
Magical arts in which the connexion is that of mere analogy or symbolism
are endlessly numerous throughout the course of civilization. Their
common theory may be readily made out from a few typical cases, and
thence applied confidently to the general mass. The Australian will observe
the track of an insect near a grave, to ascertain the direction where the
sorcerer is to be found, by whose craft the man died.[179] The Zulu may be
seen chewing a bit of wood, in order, by this symbolic act, to soften the
heart of the man he wants to buy oxen from, or of the woman he wants for a
wife.[180] The Obi-man of West Africa makes his packet of grave-dust,
blood, and bones, that this suggestive representation of death may bring his
enemy to the grave.[181] The Khond sets up the iron arrow of the War-god in
a basket of rice, and judges from its standing upright that war must be kept
up also, or from its falling that the quarrel may be let fall too; and when he
tortures human victims sacrificed to the Earth-goddess, he rejoices to see
them shed plentiful tears, which betoken copious showers to fall upon his
land.[182] These are fair examples of the symbolic magic of the lower races,
and they are fully rivalled in superstitions which still hold their ground in
Europe. With quaint simplicity, the German cottager declares that if a dog
howls looking downward, it portends a death; but if upward, then a
recovery from sickness.[183] Locks must be opened and bolts drawn in a
dying man’s house, that his soul may not be held fast.[184] The Hessian lad
thinks that he may escape the conscription by carrying a baby-girl’s cap in
his pocket—a symbolic way of repudiating manhood.[185] Modern Servians,
dancing and singing, lead about a little girl dressed in leaves and flowers,

and pour bowls of water over her to make the rain come.[186] Sailors
becalmed will sometimes whistle for a wind; but in other weather they hate
whistling at sea, which raises a whistling gale.[187] Fish, says the
Cornishman, should be eaten from the tail towards the head, to bring the
other fishes’ heads towards the shore, for eating them the wrong way turns
them from the coast.[188] He who has cut himself should rub the knife with
fat, and as it dries, the wound will heal; this is a lingering survival from
days when recipes for sympathetic ointment were to be found in the
Pharmacopœia.[189] Fanciful as these notions are, it should be borne in mind
that they come fairly under definite mental law, depending as they do on a
principle of ideal association, of which we can quite understand the mental
action, though we deny its practical results. The clever Lord Chesterfield,
too clever to understand folly, may again be cited to prove this. He relates
in one of his letters that the king had been ill, and that people generally
expected the illness to be fatal, because the oldest lion in the Tower, about
the king’s age, had just died. ‘So wild and capricious is the human mind,’ he
exclaims, by way of comment. But indeed the thought was neither wild nor
capricious, it was simply such an argument from analogy as the educated
world has at length painfully learnt to be worthless; but which, it is not too
much to declare, would to this day carry considerable weight to the minds
of four-fifths of the human race.
A glance at those magical arts which have been systematized into pseudo-
sciences, shows the same underlying principle. The art of taking omens
from seeing and meeting animals, which includes augury, is familiar to such
savages as the Tupis of Brazil[190] and the Dayaks of Borneo,[191] and extends
upward through classic civilization. The Maoris may give a sample of the
character of its rules: they hold it unlucky if an owl hoots during a
consultation, but a council of war is encouraged by prospect of victory
when a hawk flies overhead; a flight of birds to the right of the war-sacrifice
is propitious if the villages of the tribe are in that quarter, but if the omen is
in the enemy’s direction the war will be given up.[192] Compare these with
the Tatar rules, and it is obvious that similar thoughts lie at the source of
both. Here a certain little owl’s cry is a sound of terror, although there is a
white owl which is lucky; but of all birds the white falcon is most prophetic,
and the Kalmuk bows his thanks for the good omen when one flies by on
the right, but seeing one on the left turns away his face and expects
calamity.[193] So to the negro of Old Calabar, the cry of the great kingfisher

bodes good or evil, according as it is heard on the right or left.[194] Here we
have the obvious symbolism of the right and left hand, the foreboding of ill
from the owl’s doleful note, and the suggestion of victory from the fierce
swooping hawk, a thought which in old Europe made the bird of prey the
warrior’s omen of conquest. Meaning of the same kind appears in the
‘Angang,’ the omens taken from meeting animals and people, especially on
first going out in the morning, as when the ancient Slaves held meeting a
sick man or an old woman to bode ill-luck. Any one who takes the trouble
to go into this subject in detail, and to study the classic, mediæval, and
oriental codes of rules, will find that the principle of direct symbolism still
accounts for a fair proportion of them, though the rest may have lost their
early significance, or may have been originally due to some other reason, or
may have been arbitrarily invented (as a considerable proportion of such
devices must necessarily be) to fill up the gaps in the system. It is still plain
to us why the omen of the crow should be different on the right or left hand,
why a vulture should mean rapacity, a stork concord, a pelican piety, an ass
labour, why the fierce conquering wolf should be a good omen, and the
timid hare a bad one, why bees, types of an obedient nation, should be
lucky to a king, while flies, returning however often they are driven off,
should be signs of importunity and impudence.[195] And as to the general
principle that animals are ominous to those who meet them, the German
peasant who says a flock of sheep is lucky but a herd of swine unlucky to
meet, and the Cornish miner who turns away in horror when he meets an
old woman or a rabbit on his way to the pit’s mouth, are to this day keeping
up relics of early savagery as genuine as any flint implement dug out of a
tumulus.
The doctrine of dreams, attributed as they are by the lower and middle races
to spiritual intercourse, belongs in so far rather to religion than to magic.
But oneiromancy, the art of taking omens from dreams by analogical
interpretation, has its place here. Of the leading principle of such mystical
explanation, no better types could be chosen than the details and
interpretations of Joseph’s dreams (Genesis xxxvii., xl., xli.), of the sheaves
and the sun and moon and eleven stars, of the vine and the basket of meats,
of the lean and fat kine, and the thin and full corn-ears. Oneiromancy, thus
symbolically interpreting the things seen in dreams, is not unknown to the
lower races. A whole Australian tribe has been known to decamp because
one of them dreamt of a certain kind of owl, which dream the wise men

declared to forebode an attack from a certain other tribe.[196] The
Kamchadals, whose minds ran much on dreams, had special interpretations
of some; thus to dream of lice or dogs betokened a visit of Russian
travellers, &c.[197] The Zulus, experience having taught them the fallacy of
expecting direct fulfilment of dreams, have in some cases tried to mend
matters by rushing to the other extreme. If they dream of a sick man that he
is dead, and they see the earth poured into the grave, and hear the funeral
lamentation, and see all his things destroyed, then they say, ‘Because we
have dreamt of his death he will not die.’ But if they dream of a wedding-
dance, it is a sign of a funeral. So the Maoris hold that a kinsman dreamt of
as dying will recover, but to see him well is a sign of death.[198] Both races
thus work out, by the same crooked logic that guided our own ancestors, the
axiom that ‘dreams go by contraries.’ It could not be expected, in looking
over the long lists of precepts of classic, oriental, and modern popular
dream-interpretation, to detect the original sense of all their readings. Many
must turn on allusions intelligible at the time, but now obscure. The
Moslem dream-interpretation of eggs as concerning women, because of a
saying of Mohammed about women being like an egg hidden in a nest, is an
example which will serve as well as a score to show how dream-rules may
turn on far-fetched ideas, not to be recognized unless the key happens to
have been preserved. Many rules must have been taken at random to fill up
lists of omens, and of contingencies to match them. Why should a dream of
roasting meat show the dreamer to be a back-biter, or laughter in sleep
presage difficult circumstances, or a dream of playing on the clavicord the
death of relatives? But the other side of the matter, the still apparent
nonsensical rationality of so many dream omens, is much more remarkable.
It can only be considered that the same symbolism that lay at the root of the
whole delusion, favoured the keeping up and new making of such rules as
carried obvious meaning. Take the Moslem ideas that it is a good omen to
dream of something white or green, or of water, but bad to dream of black
or red, or of fire; that a palm-tree indicates an Arab, and a peacock a king;
that he who dreams of devouring the stars will live free at some great man’s
table. Take the classic rules as in the ‘Oneirocritica’ of Artemidorus, and
pass on through the mediæval treatises down to such a dream-dictionary as
servant-maids still buy in penny chap-books at the fair, and it will be seen
that the ancient rules still hold their places to a remarkable extent, while
half the mass of precepts still show their original mystic significance,

mostly direct, but occasionally according to the rule of contraries. An
offensive odour signifies annoyance; to wash the hands denotes release
from anxieties; to embrace one’s best beloved is very fortunate; to have
one’s feet cut off prevents a journey; to weep in sleep is a sign of joy; he
who dreams he hath lost a tooth shall lose a friend; and he that dreams that
a rib is taken out of his side shall ere long see the death of his wife; to
follow bees, betokens gain; to be married signifies that some of your
kinsfolk are dead; if one sees many fowls together, that shall be jealousy
and chiding; if a snake pursue him, let him be on his guard against evil
women; to dream of death, denotes happiness and long life; to dream of
swimming and wading in the water is good, so that the head be kept above
water; to dream of crossing a bridge, denotes you will leave a good
situation to seek a better; to dream you see a dragon is a sign that you shall
see some great lord your master, or a magistrate.[199]
Haruspication belongs, among the lower races, especially to the Malays and
Polynesians,[200] and to various Asiatic tribes.[201] It is mentioned as practised
in Peru under the Incas.[202] Captain Burton’s account from Central Africa
perhaps fairly displays its symbolic principle. He describes the mganga or
sorcerer taking an ordeal by killing and splitting a fowl and inspecting its
inside: if blackness or blemish appears about the wings, it denotes the
treachery of children and kinsmen; the backbone convicts the mother and
grandmother; the tail shows that the criminal is the wife, &c.[203] In ancient
Rome, where the art held so great a place in public affairs, the same sort of
interpretation was usual, as witness the omen of Augustus, where the livers
of the victims were found folded, and the diviners prophesied him
accordingly a doubled empire.[204] Since then, haruspication has died out
more completely than almost any magical rite, yet even now a characteristic
relic of it may be noticed in Brandenburg; when a pig is killed and the
spleen is found turned over, there will be another overthrow, namely a death
in the family that year.[205] With haruspication may be classed the art of
divining by bones, as where North American Indians would put in the fire a
certain flat bone of a porcupine, and judge from its colour if the porcupine
hunt would be successful.[206] The principal art of this kind is divination by a
shoulder-blade, technically called scapulimancy or omoplatoscopy. This art,
related to the old Chinese divination by the cracks of a tortoise-shell on the
fire, is especially found in vogue in Tartary. Its simple symbolism is well
shown in the elaborate account with diagrams given by Pallas. The

shoulder-blade is put on the fire till it cracks in various directions, and then
a long split lengthwise is reckoned as the ‘way of life,’ while cross-cracks
on the right and left stand for different kinds and degrees of good and evil
fortune; or if the omen is only taken as to some special event, then
lengthwise splits mean going on well, but crosswise ones stand for
hindrance, white marks portend much snow, black ones a mild winter, &c.
[207]
To find this quaint art lasting on into modern times in Europe, we can
hardly go to a better place than our own country; a proper English term for
it is ‘reading the speal-bone’ (speal = espaule). In Ireland, Camden
describes the looking through the blade-bone of a sheep, to find a dark spot
which foretells a death, and Drayton thus commemorates the art in his
Polyolbion:—

‘By th’ shoulder of a ram from off the right side par’d,
Which usually they boile, the spade-bone being bar’d,
Which when the wizard takes, and gazing therupon
Things long to come foreshowes, as things done long agone.’[208]

Chiromancy, or palmistry, seems much like this, though it is also mixed up
with astrology. It flourished in ancient Greece and Italy as it still does in
India, where to say, ‘It is written on the palms of my hands,’ is a usual way
of expressing a sense of inevitable fate. Chiromancy traces in the markings
of the palm a line of fortune and a line of life, finds proof of melancholy in
the intersections on the saturnine mount, presages sorrow and death from
black spots in the finger-nails, and at last, having exhausted the powers of
this childish symbolism, it completes its system by details of which the
absurdity is no longer relieved by even an ideal sense. The art has its
modern votaries not merely among Gypsy fortune-tellers, but in what is
called ‘good society.’[209]
It may again and again thus be noticed in magic arts, that the association of
ideas is obvious up to a certain point. Thus when the New Zealand sorcerer
took omens by the way his divining sticks (guided by spirits) fell, he quite
naturally said it was a good omen if the stick representing his own tribe fell
on top of that representing the enemy, and vice versâ. Zulu diviners still
work a similar process with their magical pieces of stick, which rise to say
yes and fall to say no, jump upon the head or stomach or other affected part

of the patient’s body to show where his complaint is, and lie pointing
towards the house of the doctor who can cure him. So likewise, where a
similar device was practised ages ago in the Old World, the responses were
taken from staves which (by the operation of demons) fell backward or
forward, to the right or left.[210] But when processes of this kind are
developed to complexity, the system has, of course, to be completed by
more arbitrary arrangements. This is well shown in one of the divinatory
arts mentioned in the last chapter for their connexion with games of chance.
In cartomancy, the art of fortune-telling with packs of cards, there is a sort
of nonsensical sense in such rules as that two queens mean friendship and
four mean chattering, or that the knave of hearts prophesies a brave young
man who will come into the family to be useful, unless his purpose be
reversed by his card being upside down. But of course the pack can only
furnish a limited number of such comparatively rational interpretations, and
the rest must be left to such arbitrary fancy as that the seven of diamonds
means a prize in the lottery, and the ten of the same suit an unexpected
journey.[211]
A remarkable group of divining instruments illustrates another principle. In
South-East Asia, the Sgau Karens, at funeral feasts, hang a bangle or metal
ring by a thread over a brass basin, which the relatives of the dead approach
in succession and strike on the edge with a bit of bamboo; when the one
who was most beloved touches the basin, the dead man’s spirit responds by
twisting and stretching the string till it breaks and the ring falls into the cup,
or at least till it rings against it.[212] Nearer Central Asia, in the north-east
corner of India, among the Bodo and Dhimal, the professional exorcist has
to find out what deity has entered into a patient’s body to punish him for
some impiety by an attack of illness; this he discovers by setting thirteen
leaves round him on the ground to represent the gods, and then holding a
pendulum attached to his thumb by a string, till the god in question is
persuaded by invocation to declare himself, making the pendulum swing
towards his representative leaf.[213] These mystic arts (not to go into the
question how these tribes came to use them) are rude forms of the classical
dactyliomancy, of which so curious an account is given in the trial of the
conspirators Patricius and Hilarius, who worked it to find out who was to
supplant the emperor Valens. A round table was marked at the edge with the
letters of the alphabet, and with prayers and mystic ceremonies a ring was
held suspended over it by a thread, and by swinging or stopping towards

certain letters gave the responsive words of the oracle.[214] Dactyliomancy
has dwindled in Europe to the art of finding out what o’clock it is by
holding a ring hanging inside a tumbler by a thread, till, without conscious
aid by the operator, it begins to swing and strikes the hour. Father Schott, in
his ‘Physica Curiosa’ (1662), refrains with commendable caution from
ascribing this phenomenon universally to demoniac influence. It survives
among ourselves in child’s play, and though we are ‘no conjurers,’ we may
learn something from the little instrument, which remarkably displays the
effects of insensible movement. The operator really gives slight impulses
till they accumulate to a considerable vibration, as in ringing a church-bell
by very gentle pulls exactly timed. That he does, though unconsciously,
cause and direct the swings, may be shown by an attempt to work the
instrument with the operator’s eyes shut, which will be found to fail, the
directing power being lost. The action of the famous divining-rod with its
curiously versatile sensibility to water, ore, treasure, and thieves, seems to
belong partly to trickery by professional Dousterswivels, and partly to more
or less conscious direction by honester operators. It is still known in
England, and in Germany they are apt to hide it in a baby’s clothes, and so
get it baptized for greater efficiency.[215] To conclude this group of
divinatory instruments, chance or the operator’s direction may determine
the action of one of the most familiar of classic and mediæval ordeals, the
so-called coscinomancy, or, as it is described in Hudibras, ‘th’ oracle of
sieve and shears, that turns as certain as the spheres.’ The sieve was held
hanging by a thread, or by the points of a pair of shears stuck into its rim,
and it would turn, or swing, or fall, at the mention of a thief’s name, and
give similar signs for other purposes. Of this ancient rite, the Christian
ordeal of the Bible and key, still in frequent use, is a variation: the proper
way to detect a thief by this is to read the 50th Psalm to the apparatus, and
when it hears the verse, ‘When thou sawest a thief, then thou consentedst
with him,’ it will turn to the culprit.[216]
Count de Maistre, with his usual faculty of taking an argument up at the
wrong end, tells us that judicial astrology no doubt hangs to truths of the
first order, which have been taken from us as useless or dangerous, or which
we cannot recognize under their new forms.[217] A sober examination of the
subject may rather justify the contrary opinion, that it is on an error of the
first order that astrology depends, the error of mistaking ideal analogy for
real connexion. Astrology, in the immensity of its delusive influence on

mankind, and by the comparatively modern period to which it remained an
honoured branch of philosophy, may claim the highest rank among the
occult sciences. It scarcely belongs to very low levels of civilization,
although one of its fundamental conceptions, namely, that of the souls or
animating intelligences of the celestial bodies, is rooted in the depths of
savage life. Yet the following Maori specimen of astrological reasoning is
as real an argument as could be found in Paracelsus or Agrippa, nor is there
reason to doubt its being home-made. When the siege of a New Zealand
‘pa’ is going on, if Venus is near the moon, the natives naturally imagine the
two as enemy and fortress; if the planet is above, the foe will have the upper
hand; but if below, then the men of the soil will be able to defend
themselves.[218] Though the early history of astrology is obscure, its great
development and elaborate systematization were undoubtedly the work of
civilized nations of the ancient and mediæval world. As might be well
supposed, a great part of its precepts have lost their intelligible sense, or
never had any, but the origin of many others is still evident. To a
considerable extent they rest on direct symbolism. Such are the rules which
connect the sun with gold, with the heliotrope and pæony, with the cock
which heralds day, with magnanimous animals, such as the lion and bull;
and the moon with silver, and the changing chamæleon, and the palm-tree,
which was considered to send out a monthly shoot. Direct symbolism is
plain in that main principle of the calculation of nativities, the notion of the
‘ascendant’ in the horoscope, which reckons the part of the heavens rising
in the east at the moment of a child’s birth as being connected with the child
itself, and prophetic of its future life.[219] It is an old story, that when two
brothers were once taken ill together, Hippokrates the physician concluded
from the coincidence that they were twins, but Poseidonios the astrologer
considered rather that they were born under the same constellation: we may
add, that either argument would be thought reasonable by a savage. One of
the most instructive astrological doctrines which has kept its place in
modern popular philosophy, is that of the sympathy of growing and
declining nature with the waxing and waning moon. Among classical
precepts are these: to set eggs under the hen at new moon, but to root up
trees when the moon is on the wane, and after midday. The Lithuanian
precept to wean boys on a waxing, but girls on a waning moon, no doubt to
make the boys sturdy and the girls slim and delicate, is a fair match for the
Orkney islanders’ objection to marrying except with a growing moon, while

some even wish for a flowing tide. The following lines, from Tusser’s ‘Five
Hundred Points of Husbandry,’ show neatly in a single case the two
contrary lunar influences:—

‘Sowe peason and beans in the wane of the moone
Who soweth them sooner, he soweth too soone:
That they, with the planet, may rest and rise,
And flourish with bearing, most plentiful wise.’[220]

The notion that the weather changes with the moon’s quarterings is still
held with great vigour in England. Yet the meteorologists, with all their
eagerness to catch at any rule which at all answers to facts, quite repudiate
this one, which indeed appears to be simply a maxim belonging to popular
astrology. Just as the growth and dwindling of plants became associated
with the moon’s wax and wane, so changes of weather became associated
with changes of the moon, while, by astrologer’s logic, it did not matter
whether the moon’s change were real, at new and full, or imaginary, at the
intermediate quarters. That educated people to whom exact weather records
are accessible should still find satisfaction in the fanciful lunar rule, is an
interesting case of intellectual survival.
In such cases as these, the astrologer has at any rate a real analogy,
deceptive though it be, to base his rule upon. But most of his pseudo-
science seems to rest on even weaker and more arbitrary analogies, not of
things, but of names. Names of stars and constellations, of signs denoting
regions of the sky and periods of days and years, no matter how arbitrarily
given, are materials which the astrologer can work upon, and bring into
ideal connexion with mundane events. That astronomers should have
divided the sun’s course into imaginary signs of the zodiac, was enough to
originate astrological rules that these celestial signs have an actual effect on
real earthly rams, bulls, crabs, lions, virgins. A child born under the sign of
the Lion will be courageous; but one born under the Crab will not go
forward well in life; one born under the Waterman is likely to be drowned,
and so forth. Towards 1524, Europe was awaiting in an agony of prayerful
terror a second deluge, prophesied for February in that year. As the fatal
month drew nigh, dwellers by the waterside moved in crowds to the hills,
some provided boats to save them, and the President Aurial, at Toulouse,

built himself a Noah’s Ark. It was the great astrologer Stoefler (the
originator, it is said, of the weather-prophecies in our almanacks) who
foretold this cataclysm, and his argument has the advantage of being still
perfectly intelligible—at the date in question, three planets would be
together in the aqueous sign of Pisces. Again, simply because astronomers
chose to distribute among the planets the names of certain deities, the
planets thereby acquired the characters of their divine namesakes. Thus it
was that the planet Mercury became connected with travel, trade, and theft,
Venus with love and mirth, Mars with war, Jupiter with power and
‘joviality.’ Throughout the East, astrology even now remains a science in
full esteem. The condition of mediæval Europe may still be perfectly
realized by the traveller in Persia, where the Shah waits for days outside the
walls of his capital till the constellations allow him to enter, and where on
the days appointed by the stars for letting blood, it literally flows in streams
from the barbers’ shops into the street. Professor Wuttke declares that there
are many districts in Germany where the child’s horoscope is still regularly
kept with the baptismal certificate in the family chest. We scarcely reach
this pitch of conservatism in England, but I happen to myself live within a
mile of an astrologer, and I lately saw a grave paper on nativities, offered in
all good faith to the British Association. The piles of ‘Zadkiel’s Almanack’
in the bookseller’s windows in country towns about Christmas are a
symptom how much yet remains to be done in popular education. As a
specimen at once of the survival and of the meaning of astrologic reasoning,
I cannot do better than quote a passage from a book published in London in
1861, and entitled ‘The Hand-Book of Astrology, by Zadkiel Tao-Sze.’ At
page 72 of his first volume, the astrologer relates as follows: ‘The Map of
the heavens given at page 45 was drawn on the occasion of a young lady
having been arrested on a charge of the murder of her infant brother. Having
read in a newspaper, at twenty-four minutes past noon on the 23rd July,
1860, that Miss C. K. had been arrested on a charge of the murder of her
young brother, the author felt desirous to ascertain whether she were guilty
or not, and drew the map accordingly. Finding the moon in the twelfth
house, she clearly signifies the prisoner. The moon is in a moveable sign,
and moves in the twenty-four hours, 14° 17´. She is, therefore, swift in
motion. These things indicated that the prisoner would be very speedily
released. Then we find a moveable sign in the cusp of the twelfth, and its
ruler, ♀, in a moveable sign, a further indication of speedy release. Hence it

was judged and declared to many friends that the prisoner would be
immediately released, which was the fact. We looked to see whether the
prisoner were guilty of the deed or not, and finding the Moon in Libra, a
humane sign, and having just past the ⚹ aspect of the Sun and ♃, both
being on the M. C. we felt assured that she was a humane, feeling, and
honourable girl, and that it was quite impossible she could be guilty of any
such atrocity. We declared her to be perfectly innocent, and as the Moon
was so well aspected from the tenth house, we declared that her honour
would be very soon perfectly established.’ Had the astrologer waited a few
months longer, to have read the confession of the miserable Constance
Kent, he would perhaps have put a different sense on his moveable signs,
just balances, and sunny and jovial aspects. Nor would this be a difficult
task, for these fancies lend themselves to endless variety of new
interpretation. And on such fancies and such interpretations, the great
science of the stars has from first to last been based.
Looking at the details here selected as fair samples of symbolic magic, we
may well ask the question, is there in the whole monstrous farrago no truth
or value whatever? It appears that there is practically none, and that the
world has been enthralled for ages by a blind belief in processes wholly
irrelevant to their supposed results, and which might as well have been
taken just the opposite way. Pliny justly saw in magic a study worthy of his
especial attention, ‘for the very reason that, being the most fraudulent of
arts, it had prevailed throughout the world and through so many ages’ (eo
ipso quod fraudulentissima artium plurimum in toto terrarum orbe
plurimisque seculis valuit). If it be asked how such a system could have
held its ground, not merely in independence but in defiance of its own facts,
a fair answer does not seem hard to give. In the first place, it must be borne
in mind that occult science has not existed entirely in its own strength.
Futile as its arts may be, they are associated in practice with other
proceedings by no means futile. What are passed off as sacred omens, are
often really the cunning man’s shrewd guesses at the past and future.
Divination serves to the sorcerer as a mask for real inquest, as when the
ordeal gives him invaluable opportunity of examining the guilty, whose
trembling hands and equivocating speech betray at once their secret and
their utter belief in his power of discerning it. Prophecy tends to fulfil itself,
as where the magician, by putting into a victim’s mind the belief that fatal
arts have been practised against him, can slay him with this idea as with a

material weapon. Often priest as well as magician, he has the whole power
of religion at his back; often a man in power, always an unscrupulous
intriguer, he can work witchcraft and statecraft together, and make his left
hand help his right. Often a doctor, he can aid his omens of life or death
with remedy or poison, while what we still call ‘conjurers’ tricks’ of sleight
of hand have done much to keep up his supernatural prestige. From the
earliest known stages of civilization, professional magicians have existed,
who live by their craft, and keep it alive. It has been said, that if somebody
had endowed lecturers to teach that two sides of a triangle are together
equal to the third, the doctrine would have a respectable following among
ourselves. At any rate, magic, with an influential profession interested in
keeping it in credit and power, did not depend for its existence on mere
evidence.
And in the second place, as to this evidence. Magic has not its origin in
fraud, and seems seldom practised as an utter imposture. The sorcerer
generally learns his time-honoured profession in good faith, and retains his
belief in it more or less from first to last; at once dupe and cheat, he
combines the energy of a believer with the cunning of a hypocrite. Had
occult science been simply framed for purposes of deception, mere
nonsense would have answered the purpose, whereas, what we find is an
elaborate and systematic pseudo-science. It is, in fact, a sincere but
fallacious system of philosophy, evolved by the human intellect by
processes still in great measure intelligible to our own minds, and it had
thus an original standing-ground in the world. And though the evidence of
fact was dead against it, it was but lately and gradually that this evidence
was brought fatally to bear. A general survey of the practical working of the
system may be made somewhat thus. A large proportion of successful cases
belong to natural means disguised as magic. Also, a certain proportion of
cases must succeed by mere chance. By far the larger proportion, however,
are what we should call failures; but it is a part of the magician’s profession
to keep these from counting, and this he does with extraordinary resource of
rhetorical shift and brazen impudence. He deals in ambiguous phrases,
which give him three or four chances for one. He knows perfectly how to
impose difficult conditions, and to lay the blame of failure on their neglect.
If you wish to make gold, the alchemist in Central Asia has a recipe at your
service, only, to use it, you must abstain three days from thinking of apes;
just as our English folk-lore says, that if one of your eyelashes comes out,

and you put it on your thumb, you will get anything you wish for, if you can
only avoid thinking of foxes’ tails at the fatal moment. Again, if the wrong
thing happens, the wizard has at least a reason why. Has a daughter been
born when he promised a son, then it is some hostile practitioner who has
turned the boy into a girl; does a tempest come just when he is making fine
weather, then he calmly demands a larger fee for stronger ceremonies,
assuring his clients that they may thank him as it is, for how much worse it
would have been had he not done what he did. And even setting aside all
this accessory trickery, if we look at honest but unscientific people
practising occult science in good faith, and face to face with facts, we shall
see that the failures which condemn it in our eyes carry comparatively little
weight in theirs. Part escape under the elastic pretext of a ‘little more or
less,’ as the loser in the lottery consoles himself that his lucky number came
within two of a prize, or the moon-observer points out triumphantly that a
change of weather has come within two or three days before or after a
quarter, so that his convenient definition of near a moon’s quarter applies to
four or six days out of every seven. Part escape through incapacity to
appreciate negative evidence, which allows one success to outweigh half-a-
dozen failures. How few there are even among the educated classes now,
who have taken in the drift of that memorable passage in the beginning of
the ‘Novum Organum:’—‘The human understanding, when any proposition
has been once laid down (either from general admission and belief, or from
the pleasure it affords), forces everything else to add fresh support and
confirmation; and although most cogent and abundant instances may exist
to the contrary, yet either does not observe or despises them, or gets rid of
and rejects them by some distinction, with violent and injurious prejudice,
rather than sacrifice the authority of its first conclusions. It was well
answered by him who was shown in a temple the votive tablets suspended
by such as had escaped the peril of shipwreck, and was pressed as to
whether he would then recognize the power of the gods, by an inquiry, “But
where are the portraits of those who have perished in spite of their
vows?”’[221]
On the whole, the survival of symbolic magic through the middle ages and
into our own times is an unsatisfactory, but not a mysterious fact. A once-
established opinion, however delusive, can hold its own from age to age, for
belief can propagate itself without reference to its reasonable origin, as
plants are propagated from slips without fresh raising from the seed.

The history of survival in cases like those of the folk-lore and occult arts
which we have been considering, has for the most part been a history of
dwindling and decay. As men’s minds change in progressing culture, old
customs and opinions fade gradually in a new and uncongenial atmosphere,
or pass into states more congruous with the new life around them. But this
is so far from being a law without exception, that a narrow view of history
may often make it seem to be no law at all. For the stream of civilization
winds and turns upon itself, and what seems the bright onward current of
one age may in the next spin round in a whirling eddy, or spread into a dull
and pestilential swamp. Studying with a wide view the course of human
opinion, we may now and then trace on from the very turning-point the
change from passive survival into active revival. Some well-known belief
or custom has for centuries shown symptoms of decay, when we begin to
see that the state of society, instead of stunting it, is favouring its new
growth, and it bursts forth again with a vigour often as marvellous as it is
unhealthy. And though the revival be not destined to hold on indefinitely,
and though when opinion turns again its ruin may be more merciless than
before, yet it may last for ages, make its way into the inmost constitution of
society, and even become a very mark and characteristic of its time.
Writers who desire to show that, with all our faults, we are wiser and better
than our ancestors, dwell willingly on the history of witchcraft between the
middle and modern ages. They can quote Martin Luther, apropos of the
witches who spoil the farmers’ butter and eggs, ‘I would have no pity on
these witches; I would burn them all.’ They can show the good Sir Matthew
Hale hanging witches in Suffolk, on the authority of scripture and the
consenting wisdom of all nations; and King James presiding at the torture
of Dr. Fian for bringing a storm against the king’s ship on its course from
Denmark, by the aid of a fleet of witches in sieves, who carried out a
christened cat to sea. In those dreadful days, to be a blear-eyed wizened
cripple was to be worth twenty shillings to a witch-finder; for a woman to
have what this witch-finder was pleased to call the devil’s mark on her body
was presumption for judicial sentence of death; and not to bleed or shed
tears or sink in a pond was torture first and then the stake. Reform of
religion was no cure for the disease of men’s minds, for in such things the
Puritan was no worse than the Inquisitor, and no better. Papist and
Protestant fought with one another, but both turned against that enemy of
the human race, the hag who had sold herself to Satan to ride upon a

broomstick, and to suck children’s blood, and to be for life and death of all
creatures the most wretched. But with new enlightenment there came in the
very teeth of law and authority a change in European opinion. Toward the
end of the seventeenth century the hideous superstition was breaking down
among ourselves; Richard Baxter, of the ‘Saint’s Rest,’ strove with fanatic
zeal to light again at home the witch-fires of New England, but he strove in
vain. Year by year the persecution of witches became more hateful to the
educated classes, and though it died hard, it died at last down to a vestige.
In our days, when we read of a witch being burnt at Camargo in 1860, we
point to Mexico as a country miserably in the rear of civilization. And if in
England it still happens that village boors have to be tried at quarter-
sessions for ill-using some poor old woman, who they fancy has dried a
cow or spoiled a turnip crop, we comment on the tenacity with which the
rustic mind clings to exploded follies, and cry out for more schoolmasters.
True as all this is, the ethnographer must go wider and deeper in his
enquiry, to do his subject justly. The prevailing belief in witchcraft that sat
like a nightmare on public opinion from the 13th to the 17th centuries, far
from being itself a product of mediævalism, was a revival from the remote
days of primæval history. The disease that broke out afresh in Europe had
been chronic among the lower races for how many ages we cannot tell.
Witchcraft is part and parcel of savage life. There are rude races of
Australia and South America whose intense belief in it has led them to
declare that if men were never bewitched, and never killed by violence,
they would not die at all. Like the Australians, the Africans will inquire of
their dead what sorcerer slew them by his wicked arts, and when they have
satisfied themselves of this, blood must atone for blood. In West Africa, it
has been boldly asserted that the belief in witchcraft costs more lives than
the slave trade ever did. In East Africa, Captain Burton, a traveller apt to
draw his social sketches in a few sharp lines, remarks that what with slavery
and what with black-magic, life is precarious among the Wakhutu, and ‘no
one, especially in old age, is safe from being burnt at a day’s notice;’ and,
travelling in the country of the Wazaramo, he tells us of meeting every few
miles with heaps of ashes and charcoal, now and then such as seemed to
have been a father and mother, with a little heap hard by that was a child.[222]
Even in districts of British India a state of mind ready to produce horrors
like these is well known to exist, and to be kept down less by persuasion
than by main force. From the level of savage life, we trace witchcraft

surviving throughout the barbarian and early civilized world. It was existing
in Europe in the centuries preceding the 10th, but with no especial
prominence, while laws of Rothar and Charlemagne are actually directed
against such as should put men or women to death on the charge of
witchcraft. In the 11th century, ecclesiastical influence was discouraging the
superstitious belief in sorcery. But now a period of reaction set in. The
works of the monastic legend and miracle-mongers more and more
encouraged a baneful credulity as to the supernatural. In the 13th century,
when the spirit of religious persecution had begun to possess all Europe
with a dark and cruel madness, the doctrine of witchcraft revived with all its
barbaric vigour.[223] That the guilt of thus bringing down Europe
intellectually and morally to the level of negro Africa lies in the main upon
the Roman Church, the records of Popes Gregory IX. and Innocent VIII.,
and the history of the Holy Inquisition, are conclusive evidence to prove. To
us here the main interest of mediæval witchcraft lies in the extent and
accuracy with which the theory of survival explains it. In the very details of
the bald conventional accusations that were sworn against the witches, there
may be traced tradition often hardly modified from barbarous and savage
times. They raised storms by magic rites, they had charms against the hurt
of weapons, they had their assemblies on wild heath and mountain-top, they
could ride through the air on beasts and even turn into witch-cats and were-
wolves themselves, they had familiar spirits, they had intercourse with
incubi and succubi, they conveyed thorns, pins, feathers and such things
into their victims’ bodies, they caused disease by demoniacal possession,
they could bewitch by spells and the evil eye, by practising on images and
symbols, on food and property. Now all this is sheer survival from præ-
Christian ages, ‘in errore paganorum revolvitur,’ as Burchard of Worms said
of the superstition of his time.[224] Two of the most familiar devices used
against the mediæval witches may serve to show the place in civilization of
the whole craft. The Oriental jinn are in such deadly terror of iron, that its
very name is a charm against them; and so in European folk-lore iron drives
away fairies and elves, and destroys their power. They are essentially, it
seems, creatures belonging to the ancient Stone Age, and the new metal is
hateful and hurtful to them. Now as to iron, witches are brought under the
same category as elves and nightmares. Iron instruments keep them at bay,
and especially iron horseshoes have been chosen for this purpose, as half
the stable doors in England still show.[225] Again, one of the best known of

English witch ordeals is the trial by ‘fleeting’ or swimming. Bound hand
and foot, the accused was flung into deep water, to sink if innocent and
swim if guilty, and in the latter case, as Hudibras has it, to be hanged only
for not being drowned. King James, who seems to have had a notion of the
real primitive meaning of this rite, says in his Dæmonology, ‘It appears that
God hath appointed for a supernatural signe of the monstrous impietie of
witches, that the water shall refuse to receive them in her bosom that have
shaken off them the sacred water of baptism,’ &c. Now, in early German
history this same trial by water was well known, and its meaning
recognized to be that the conscious element rejects the guilty (si aqua illum
velut innoxium receperit—innoxii submerguntur aqua, culpabiles
supernatant). Already in the 9th century the laws were prohibiting this
practice as a relic of superstition. Lastly, the same trial by water is
recognized as one of the regular judicial ordeals in the Hindu code of Manu;
if the water does not cause the accused to float when plunged into it, his
oath is true. As this ancient Indian body of laws was itself no doubt
compiled from materials of still earlier date, we may venture to take the
correspondence of the water-ordeal among the European and Asiatic
branches of the Aryan race as carrying back its origin to a period of remote
antiquity.[226]
Let us hope that if the belief in present witchcraft, and the persecution
necessarily ensuing upon such belief, once more come into prominence in
the civilized world, they may appear in a milder shape than heretofore, and
be kept down by stronger humanity and tolerance. But any one who fancies
from their present disappearance that they have necessarily disappeared for
ever, must have read history to little purpose, and has yet to learn that
‘revival in culture’ is something more than an empty pedantic phrase. Our
own time has revived a group of beliefs and practices which have their roots
deep in the very stratum of early philosophy where witchcraft makes its
first appearance. This group of beliefs and practices constitutes what is now
commonly known as Spiritualism.
Witchcraft and Spiritualism have existed for thousands of years in a
closeness of union not unfairly typified in this verse from John Bale’s 16th-
century Interlude concerning Nature, which brings under one head the art of
bewitching vegetables and poultry, and causing supernatural movement of
stools and crockery.

‘Theyr wells I can up drye,
Cause trees and herbes to dye,
And slee all pulterye,
Whereas men doth me move:
I can make stoles to daunce
And earthen pottes to praunce,
That none shall them enhaunce,
And do but cast my glove.’

The same intellectual movement led to the decline of both witchcraft and
spiritualism, till, early in the last century, men thought that both were dying
or all but dead together. Now, however, not only are spiritualists to be
counted by tens of thousands in America and England, but there are among
them several men of distinguished mental power. I am well aware that the
problem of the so-called ‘spirit-manifestations’ is one to be discussed on its
merits, in order to arrive at a distinct opinion how far it may be concerned
with facts insufficiently appreciated and explained by science, and how far
with superstition, delusion, and sheer knavery. Such investigation, pursued
by careful observation in a scientific spirit, would seem apt to throw light
on some most interesting psychological questions. But though it lies beyond
my scope to examine the spiritualistic evidence for itself, the ethnographic
view of the matter has, nevertheless, its value. This shows modern
spiritualism to be in great measure a direct revival from the regions of
savage philosophy and peasant folk-lore. It is not a simple question of the
existence of certain phenomena of mind and matter. It is that, in connexion
with these phenomena, a great philosophic-religious doctrine, flourishing in
the lower culture but dwindling in the higher, has re-established itself in full
vigour. The world is again swarming with intelligent and powerful
disembodied spiritual beings, whose direct action on thought and matter is
again confidently asserted, as in those times and countries where physical
science had not as yet so far succeeded in extruding these spirits and their
influences from the system of nature.
Apparitions have regained the place and meaning which they held from the
level of the lower races to that of mediæval Europe. The regular ghost-
stories, in which spirits of the dead walk visibly and have intercourse with
corporeal men, are now restored and cited with new examples as ‘glimpses

of the night-side of nature,’ nor have these stories changed either their
strength to those who are disposed to believe them, or their weakness to
those who are not. As of old, men live now in habitual intercourse with the
spirits of the dead. Necromancy is a religion, and the Chinese manes-
worshipper may see the outer barbarians come back, after a heretical
interval of a few centuries, into sympathy with his time-honoured creed. As
the sorcerers of barbarous tribes lie in bodily lethargy or sleep while their
souls depart on distant journeys, so it is not uncommon in modern
spiritualistic narratives for persons to be in an insensible state when their
apparitions visit distant places, whence they bring back information, and
where they communicate with the living. The spirits of the living as well as
of the dead, the souls of Strauss and Carl Vogt as well as of Augustine and
Jerome, are summoned by mediums to distant spirit-circles. As Dr. Bastian
remarks, if any celebrated man in Europe feels himself at some moment in a
melancholy mood, he may console himself with the idea that his soul has
been sent for to America, to assist at the ‘rough fixings’ of some
backwoodsman. Fifty years ago, Dr. Macculloch, in his ‘Description of the
Western Islands of Scotland,’ wrote thus of the famous Highland second-
sight: ‘In fact it has undergone the fate of witchcraft; ceasing to be believed,
it has ceased to exist.’ Yet a generation later he would have found it
reinstated in a far larger range of society, and under far better circumstances
of learning and material prosperity. Among the influences which have
combined to bring about the spiritualistic renaissance, a prominent place
may, I think, be given to the effect produced on the religious mind of
Europe and America by the intensely animistic teachings of Emanuel
Swedenborg, in the 18th century. The position of this remarkable visionary
as to some of the particular spiritualistic doctrines may be judged of by the
following statements from ‘The True Christian Religion.’ A man’s spirit is
his mind, which lives after death in complete human form, and this spirit
may be conveyed from place to place while the body remains at rest, as on
some occasions happened to Swedenborg himself. ‘I have conversed,’ he
says, ‘with all my relations and friends, likewise with kings and princes,
and men of learning, after their departure out of this life, and this now for
twenty-seven years without interruption.’ And foreseeing that many who
read his ‘Memorable Relations’ will believe them to be fictions of
imagination, he protests in truth they are not fictions, but were really seen

and heard; not seen and heard in any state of mind in sleep, but in a state of
complete wakefulness.[227]
I shall have to speak elsewhere of some of the doctrines of modern
spiritualism, where they seem to fall into their places in the study of
Animism. Here, as a means of illustrating the relation of the newer to the
older spiritualistic ideas, I propose to glance over the ethnography of two of
the most popular means of communicating with the spirit-world by rapping
and writing, and two of the prominent spirit-manifestations, the feat of
rising in the air, and the trick of the Davenport Brothers.
The elf who goes knocking and routing about the house at night, and whose
special German name is the ‘Poltergeist,’ is an old and familiar personage in
European folk-lore.[228] From of old, such unexplained noises have been
ascribed to the agency of personal spirits, who more often than not are
considered human souls. The modern Dayaks, Siamese, and Singhalese
agree with the Esths as to such routing and rapping being caused by spirits.
[229]
Knockings may be considered mysterious but harmless, like those
which in Swabia and Franconia are expected during Advent on the
Anklöpferleins-Nächte, or ‘Little Knockers’ Nights.’[230] Or they may be
useful, as when the Welsh miners think that the ‘knockers’ they hear
underground are indicating the rich veins of lead and silver.[231] Or they may
be simply annoying, as when, in the ninth century, a malignant spirit
infested a parish by knocking at the walls as if with a hammer, but being
overcome with litanies and holy water, confessed itself to be the familiar of
a certain wicked priest, and to have been in hiding under his cloak. Thus, in
the seventeenth century, the famous demon-drummer of Tedworth,
commemorated by Glanvil in the ‘Saducismus Triumphatus,’ thumped
about the doors and the outside of the house, and ‘for an hour together it
would beat Roundheads and Cuckolds, the Tat-too, and several other Points
of War, as well as any Drummer.’[232] But popular philosophy has mostly
attached to such mysterious noises a foreboding of death, the knock being
held as a signal or summons among spirits as among men. The Romans
considered that the genius of death thus announced his coming. Modern
folk-lore holds either that a knocking or rumbling in the floor is an omen of
a death about to happen, or that dying persons themselves announce their
dissolution to their friends in such strange sounds. The English rule takes in
both cases: ‘Three loud and distinct knocks at the bed’s head of a sick

person, or at the bed’s head or door of any of his relations, is an omen of his
death.’ We happen to have a good means of testing the amount of actual
correspondence between omen and event necessary to establish these rules:
the illogical people who were (and still are) able to discover a connexion
between the ticking of the ‘death-watch’ beetle and an ensuing death in the
house, no doubt found it equally easy to give a prophetic interpretation to
any other mysterious knocks.[233] There is a story, dated 1534, of a ghost that
answered questions by knocking in the Catholic church of Orleans, and
demanded the removal of the provost’s Lutheran wife, who had been buried
there; but the affair proved to be a trick of a Franciscan friar.[234] The system
of working an alphabet by counted raps is a device familiar to prison-cells,
where it has long been at once the despair of gaolers and an evidence of the
diffusion of education even among the criminal classes. Thus when, in
1847, the celebrated rappings began to trouble the township of Arcadia in
the State of New York, the Fox family of Rochester, founders of the modern
spiritual movement, had on the one hand only to revive the ancient
prevalent belief in spirit-rappings, which had almost fallen into the limbo of
discredited superstitions, while, on the other hand, the system of
communication with the spirits was ready made to their hand. The system
of a rapping-alphabet remains in full use, and numberless specimens of
messages thus received are in print, possibly the longest being a novel, of
which I can only give the title, ‘Juanita, Nouvelle par une Chaise. À
l’Imprimerie du Gouvernement, Basse Terre (Guadeloupe), 1853.’ In the
recorded communications, names, dates, &c., are often alleged to have been
stated under remarkable circumstances, while the style of thought,
language, and spelling fits with the intellectual quality of the medium. A
large proportion of the communications being obviously false and silly,
even when the ‘spirit’ has announced itself in the name of some great
statesman, moralist, or philosopher of the past, the theory has been adopted
by spiritualists that foolish or lying spirits are apt to personate those of
higher degree, and give messages in their names.
Spirit-writing is of two kinds, according as it is done with or without a
material instrument. The first kind is in full practice in China, where, like
other rites of divination, it is probably ancient. It is called ‘descending of
the pencil,’ and is especially used by the literary classes. When a Chinese
wishes to consult a god in this way, he sends for a professional medium.
Before the image of the god are set candles and incense, and an offering of

tea or mock money. In front of this, on another table, is placed an oblong
tray of dry sand. The writing instrument is a V-shaped wooden handle, two
or three feet long, with a wooden tooth fixed at its point. Two persons hold
this instrument, each grasping one leg of it, and the point resting in the
sand. Proper prayers and charms induce the god to manifest his presence by
a movement of the point in the sand, and thus the response is written, and
there only remains the somewhat difficult and doubtful task of deciphering
it. To what state of opinion the rite belongs may be judged from this: when
the sacred apricot-tree is to be robbed of a branch to make the spirit-pen an
apologetic inscription is scratched upon the trunk.[235] Notwithstanding
theological differences between China and England, the art of spirit-writing
is much the same in the two countries. A kind of ‘planchette’ seems to have
been known in Europe in the seventeenth century.[236] The instrument, which
may now be bought at the toy-shops, is a heart-shaped board some seven
inches long, resting on three supports, of which the two at the wide end are
castors, and the third at the pointed end is a pencil thrust through a hole in
the board. The instrument is placed on a sheet of paper, and worked by two
persons laying their fingers lightly on it, waiting till, without conscious
effort of the operators, it moves and writes answers to questions. It is not
everybody who has the faculty of spirit-writing, but a powerful medium
will write alone. Such mediums sometimes consider themselves acted on by
some power separate from themselves, in fact, possessed.
Ecclesiastical history commemorates a miracle at the close of the Nicene
Council. Two bishops, Chrysanthus and Mysonius, had died during its
sitting, and the remaining crowd of Fathers brought the acts, signed by
themselves, to the tomb, addressed the deceased bishops as if still alive, and
left the document. Next day, returning, they found the two signatures added,
to this effect:—‘We, Chrysanthus and Mysonius, consenting with all the
Fathers in the holy first and œcumenical Nicene Synod, although translated
from the body, have also signed the volume with our own hands.’[237] Such
spirit-writing without material instrument has lately been renewed by the
Baron de Guldenstubbé. This writer confirms by new evidence the truth of
the tradition of all peoples as to souls of the dead keeping up their
connexion with their mortal remains, and haunting the places where they
dwelt ‘during their terrestrial incarnation.’ Thus Francis I. manifests himself
principally at Fontainebleau, while Louis XV. and Marie-Antoinette roam
about the Trianons. Moreover, if pieces of blank paper be set out in suitable

places, the spirits, enveloped in their ethereal bodies, will concentrate by
their force of will electric currents on the paper, and so form written
characters. The Baron publishes, in his ‘Pneumatologie Positive,’ a mass of
facsimiles of spirit-writings thus obtained. Julius and Augustus Cæsar give
their names near their statues in the Louvre; Juvenal produces a ludicrous
attempt at a copy of verses; Héloise at Père-la-Chaise informs the world, in
modern French, that Abelard and she are united and happy; St. Paul writes
himself ελζιστος αποστολον (meaning, we may suppose, ελαχιστος
αποστολων); and Hippokrates the physician (who spells himself
Hippōkratĕs) attended M. de Guldenstubbé at his lodgings in Paris, and
gave him a signature which of itself cured a sharp attack of rheumatism in a
few minutes.[238]
The miracle of rising and floating in the air is one fully recognized in the
literature of ancient India. The Buddhist saint of high ascetic rank attains
the power called ‘perfection’ (irdhi), whereby he is able to rise in the air, as
also to overturn the earth and stop the sun. Having this power, the saint
exercises it by the mere determination of his will, his body becoming
imponderous, as when a man in the common human state determines to
leap, and leaps. Buddhist annals relate the performance of the miraculous
suspension by Gautama himself, as well as by other saints, as, for example,
his ancestor Maha Sammata, who could thus seat himself in the air without
visible support. Even without this exalted faculty, it is considered possible
to rise and move in the air by an effort of ecstatic joy (udwega prîti). A
remarkable mention of this feat, as said to be performed by the Indian
Brahmans, occurs in the third-century biography of Apollonius of Tyana;
these Brahmans are described as going about in the air some two cubits
from the ground, not for the sake of miracle (such ambition they despised),
but for its being more suitable to solar rites.[239] Foreign conjurers were
professing to exhibit this miracle among the Greeks in the second century,
as witness Lucian’s jocular account of the Hyperborean conjurer:—‘Thou
art joking, said Kleodemos, but I was once more incredulous than thou
about such things, for I thought nothing could have persuaded me to believe
them; but when I first saw that foreign barbarian flying—he was of the
Hyperboreans, he said—I believed, and was overcome in spite of my
resistance. For what was I to do, when I saw him carried through the air in
daylight, and walking on the water, and passing leisurely and slowly
through the fire? What? (said his interlocutor), you saw the Hyperborean

man flying, and walking on the water? To be sure, said he, and he had on
undressed leather brogues as they generally wear them; but what’s the use
of talking of such trifles, considering what other manifestations he showed
us,—sending loves, calling up demons, raising the dead, and bringing in
Hekate herself visibly, and drawing down the moon?’ Kleodemos then goes
on to relate how the conjurer first had his four minæ down for sacrificial
expenses, and then made a clay Cupid, and sent it flying through the air to
fetch the girl whom Glaukias had fallen in love with, and presently, lo and
behold, there she was knocking at the door! The interlocutor, however,
comments in a sceptical vein on the narrative. It was scarce needful, he
says, to have taken the trouble to send for the girl with clay, and a magician
from the Hyperboreans, and even the moon, considering that for twenty
drachmas she would have let herself be taken to the Hyperboreans
themselves; and she seems, moreover, to have been affected in quite an
opposite way to spirits, for whereas these beings take flight if they hear the
noise of brass or iron, Chrysis no sooner hears the chink of silver anywhere,
but she comes toward the sound.[240] Another early instance of the belief in
miraculous suspension is in the life of Iamblichus, the great Neo-Platonist
mystic. His disciples says Eunapius, told him they had heard a report from
his servants, that while in prayer to the gods he had been lifted more than
ten cubits from the ground, his body and clothes changing to a beautiful
golden colour, but after he ceased from prayer his body became as before,
and then he came down to the ground and returned to the society of his
followers. They entreated him therefore, ‘Why, O most divine teacher, why
dost thou do such things by thyself, and not let us partake of the more
perfect wisdom?’ Then Iamblichus, though not given to laughter, laughed at
this story, and said to them, ‘It was no fool who tricked you thus, but the
thing is not true.’[241]
After a while, the prodigy which the Platonist disclaimed, became a usual
attribute of Christian saints. Thus St. Richard, then chancellor to St.
Edmund, Archbishop of Canterbury, one day softly opening the chapel door,
to see why the archbishop did not come to dinner, saw him raised high in
the air, with his knees bent and his arms stretched out; falling gently to the
ground, and seeing the chancellor, he complained that he had hindered him
of great spiritual delight and comfort. So St. Philip Neri used to be
sometimes seen raised several yards from the ground during his rapturous
devotions, with a bright light shining from his countenance. St. Ignatius

Loyola is declared to have been raised about two feet under the same
circumstances, and similar legends of devout ascetics being not only
metaphorically but materially ‘raised above the earth’ are told in the lives of
St. Dominic, St. Dunstan, St. Theresa, and other less-known saints. In the
last century, Dom Calmet speaks of knowing a good monk who rises
sometimes from the ground and remains involuntarily suspended, especially
on seeing some devotional image or hearing some devout prayer, and also a
nun who has often seen herself raised in spite of herself to a certain distance
from the earth. Unfortunately the great commentator does not specify any
witnesses as having seen the monk and nun rise in the air. If they only
thought themselves thus elevated, their stories can only rank with that of the
young man mentioned by De Maistre, who so often seemed to himself to
float in the air, that he came to suspect that gravitation might not be natural
to man.[242] The hallucination of rising and floating in the air is extremely
common, and ascetics of all religions are especially liable to it.
Among modern accounts of diabolic possession, also, the rising in the air is
described as taking place not subjectively but objectively. In 1657, Richard
Jones, a sprightly lad of twelve years old, living at Shepton Mallet, was
bewitched by one Jane Brooks; he was seen to rise in the air and pass over a
garden wall some thirty yards, and at other times was found in a room with
his hands flat against a beam at the top of the room, and his body two or
three feet from the ground, nine people at a time seeing him in this latter
position. Jane Brooks was accordingly condemned and executed at Chard
Assizes in March, 1658. Richard, the Surrey demoniac of 1689, was hoisted
up in the air and let down by Satan; at the beginning of his fits he was, as it
were, blown or snatched or borne up suddenly from his chair, as if he would
have flown away, but that those who held him hung to his arms and legs
and clung about him. One account (not the official medical one) of the
demoniacal possessions at Morzine in Savoy, in 1864, relates that a patient
was held suspended in the air by an invisible force during some seconds or
minutes above the cemetery, in the presence of the archbishop.[243] Modern
spiritualists claim this power as possessed by certain distinguished living
mediums, who, indeed, profess to rival in sober fact the aerostatic miracles
of Buddhist and Catholic legend. The force employed is of course
considered to be that of the spirits.

The performances of tied mediums have been specially represented in
England by the Davenport Brothers, who ‘are generally recognized by
Spiritualists as genuine media, and attribute the reverse opinion so deeply
rooted in the public mind, to the untruthfulness of the London and many
other newspapers.’ The performers were bound fast and shut by themselves
in a dark cabinet, with musical instruments, whence not only musical
sounds proceeded, but the coats of the mediums were taken off and
replaced; yet on inspection their bodies were discovered still bound. The
spirits would also release the bound mediums from their cords, however
carefully tied about them.[244] Now the idea of supernatural unbinding is
very ancient, vouched for as it is by no less a personage than the crafty
Odysseus himself, in his adventure on board the ship of the Thesprotians:

‘Me on the well-benched vessel, strongly bound,
They leave, and snatch their meal upon the beach.
But to my help the gods themselves unwound
My cords with ease, though firmly twisted round.’

In early English chronicle, we find it in a story told by the Venerable Bede.
A certain Imma was found all but dead on the field of battle, and taken
prisoner, but when he began to recover and was put in bonds to prevent his
escaping, no sooner did his binders leave him but he was loose again. The
earl who owned him enquired whether he had about him such ‘loosening
letters’ (literas solutorias) as tales were told of; the man replied that he
knew naught of such arts; yet when his owner sold him to another master,
there was still no binding him. The received explanation of this strange
power was emphatically a spiritual one. His brother had sought for his dead
body, and finding another like him, buried it and proceeded to say masses
for his brother’s soul, by the celebration whereof it came to pass that no one
could fasten him, for he was out of bonds again directly. So they sent him
home to Kent, whence he duly returned his ransom, and his story, it is
related, stimulated many to devotion, who understood by it how salutary are
masses to the redemption both of soul and body. Again, there prevailed in
Scotland up to the 18th century this notion: when the lunatics who had been
brought to St. Fillan’s Pool to be bathed, were laid bound in the
neighbouring church next night, if they were found loose in the morning

their recovery was expected, but if at dawn they were still bound, their cure
was doubtful.
The untying trick performed among savages is so similar to that of our
mountebanks, that when we find the North American Indian jugglers doing
both this and the familiar trick of breathing fire, we are at a loss to judge
whether they inherited these two feats from their savage ancestors, or
borrowed them from the white men. The point is not, however, the mere
performance of the untying trick, but its being attributed to the help of
spiritual beings. This notion is thoroughly at home in savage culture. It
comes out well in the Esquimaux’ accounts which date from early in the
18th century. Cranz thus describes the Greenland angekok setting out on his
mystic journey to heaven and hell. When he has drummed awhile and made
all sorts of wondrous contortions, he is himself bound with a thong by one
of his pupils, his head between his legs, and his hands behind his back. All
the lamps in the house are put out, and the windows darkened, for no one
must see him hold intercourse with his spirit, no one must move or even
scratch his head, that the spirit may not be interfered with—or rather, says
the missionary, that no one may catch him at his trickery, for there is no
going up to heaven in broad daylight. At last, after strange noises have been
heard, and a visit has been received or paid to the torngak or spirit, the
magician reappears unbound, but pale and excited, and gives an account of
his adventures. Castrén’s account of the similar proceedings of the Siberian
shamans is as follows: ‘They are practised’ he says, ‘in all sorts of
conjuring-tricks, by which they know how to dazzle the simple crowd, and
inspire greater trust in themselves. One of the most usual juggleries of the
shamans in the Government of Tomsk consists of the following hocus-
pocus, a wonder to the Russians as well as to the Samoieds. The shaman sits
down on the wrong side of a dry reindeer-hide spread in the middle of the
floor. There he lets himself be bound hand and foot by the assistants. The
shutters are closed, and the shaman begins to invoke his ministering spirits.
All at once there arises a mysterious ghostliness in the dark space. Voices
are heard from different parts, both within and without the yurt, while on
the dry reindeer skin there is a rattling and drumming in regular time. Bears
growl, snakes hiss, and squirrels leap about in the room. At last this
uncanny work ceases, and the audience impatiently await the result of the
game. A few moments pass in this expectation, and behold, the shaman
walks in free and unbound from outside. No one doubts that it was the

spirits who were drumming, growling, and hissing, who released the
shaman from his bonds, and who carried him by secret ways out of the
yurt.’[245]
On the whole, the ethnography of spiritualism bears on practical opinion
somewhat in this manner. Beside the question of the absolute truth or falsity
of the alleged possessions, names-oracles, doubles, brain-waves, furniture
movings, and floatings in the air, there remains the history of spiritualistic
belief as a matter of opinion. Hereby it appears that the received
spiritualistic theory of the alleged phenomena belongs to the philosophy of
savages. As to such matters as apparitions or possessions this is obvious,
and it holds in more extreme cases. Suppose a wild North American Indian
looking on at a spirit-séance in London. As to the presence of disembodied
spirits, manifesting themselves by raps, noises, voices, and other physical
actions, the savage would be perfectly at home in the proceedings, for such
things are part and parcel of his recognized system of nature. The part of the
affair really strange to him would be the introduction of such arts as
spelling and writing, which do belong to a different state of civilization
from his. The issue raised by the comparison of savage, barbaric, and
civilized spiritualism, is this: Do the Red Indian medicine-man, the Tatar
necromancer, the Highland ghost-seer, and the Boston medium, share the
possession of belief and knowledge of the highest truth and import, which,
nevertheless, the great intellectual movement of the last two centuries has
simply thrown aside as worthless? Is what we are habitually boasting of and
calling new enlightenment, then, in fact a decay of knowledge? If so, this is
a truly remarkable case of degeneration, and the savages whom some
ethnographers look on as degenerate from a higher civilization, may turn on
their accusers and charge them with having fallen from the high level of
savage knowledge.
Throughout the whole of this varied investigation, whether of the dwindling
survival of old culture, or of its bursting forth afresh in active revival, it
may perhaps be complained that its illustrations should be chosen so much
among things worn out, worthless, frivolous, or even bad with downright
harmful folly. It is in fact so, and I have taken up this course of argument
with full knowledge and intent. For, indeed, we have in such enquiries
continual reason to be thankful for fools. It is quite wonderful, even if we
hardly go below the surface of the subject, to see how large a share

stupidity and unpractical conservatism and dogged superstition have had in
preserving for us traces of the history of our race, which practical
utilitarianism would have remorselessly swept away. The savage is firmly,
obstinately conservative. No man appeals with more unhesitating
confidence to the great precedent-makers of the past; the wisdom of his
ancestors can control against the most obvious evidence his own opinions
and actions. We listen with pity to the rude Indian as he maintains against
civilized science and experience the authority of his rude forefathers. We
smile at the Chinese appealing against modern innovation to the golden
precepts of Confucius, who in his time looked back with the same prostrate
reverence to sages still more ancient, counselling his disciples to follow the
seasons of Hea, to ride in the carriage of Yin, to wear the ceremonial cap of
Chow.
The nobler tendency of advancing culture, and above all of scientific
culture, is to honour the dead without grovelling before them, to profit by
the past without sacrificing the present to it. Yet even the modern civilized
world has but half learnt this lesson, and an unprejudiced survey may lead
us to judge how many of our ideas and customs exist rather by being old
than by being good. Now in dealing with hurtful superstitions, the proof
that they are things which it is the tendency of savagery to produce, and of
higher culture to destroy, is accepted as a fair controversial argument. The
mere historical position of a belief or custom may raise a presumption as to
its origin which becomes a presumption as to its authenticity. Dr.
Middleton’s celebrated Letter from Rome shows cases in point. He
mentions the image of Diana at Ephesus which fell from the sky, thereby
damaging the pretensions of the Calabrian image of St. Dominic, which,
according to pious tradition, was likewise brought down from heaven. He
notices that as the blood of St. Januarius now melts miraculously without
heat, so ages ago the priests of Gnatia tried to persuade Horace, on his road
to Brundusium, that the frankincense in their temple had the habit of
melting in like manner:

‘... dehinc Gnatia lymphis
Iratis exstructa dedit risusque jocosque;
Dum flamma sine thura liquescere limine sacro,
Persuadere cupit: credat Judæus Apella;
Non ego.’[246]

Thus ethnographers, not without a certain grim satisfaction, may at times
find means to make stupid and evil superstitions bear witness against
themselves.
Moreover, in working to gain an insight into the general laws of intellectual
movement, there is practical gain in being able to study them rather among
antiquarian relics of no intense modern interest, than among those seething
problems of the day on which action has to be taken amid ferment and
sharp strife. Should some moralist or politician speak contemptuously of the
vanity of studying matters without practical moment, it will generally be
found that his own mode of treatment will consist in partizan diatribes on
the questions of the day, a proceeding practical enough, especially in
confirming those who agree with him already, but the extreme opposite to
the scientific way of eliciting truth. The ethnographer’s course, again,
should be like that of the anatomist who carries on his studies if possible
rather on dead than on living subjects; vivisection is nervous work, and the
humane investigator hates inflicting needless pain. Thus when the student
of culture occupies himself in viewing the bearings of exploded
controversies, or in unravelling the history of long-superseded inventions,
he is gladly seeking his evidence rather in such dead old history, than in the
discussions where he and those he lives among are alive with intense party
feeling, and where his judgment is biassed by the pressure of personal
sympathy, and even it may be of personal gain or loss. So, from things
which perhaps never were of high importance, things which have fallen out
of popular significance, or even out of popular memory, he tries to elicit
general laws of culture, often to be thus more easily and fully gained than in
the arena of modern philosophy and politics.
But the opinions drawn from old or worn-out culture are not to be left lying
where they were shaped. It is no more reasonable to suppose the laws of
mind differently constituted in Australia and in England, in the time of the

cave-dwellers and in the time of the builders of sheet-iron houses, than to
suppose that the laws of chemical combination were of one sort in the time
of the coal-measures, and are of another now. The thing that has been will
be; and we are to study savages and old nations to learn the laws that under
new circumstances are working for good or ill in our own development. If it
is needful to give an instance of the directness with which antiquity and
savagery bear upon our modern life, let it be taken in the facts just brought
forward on the relation of ancient sorcery to the belief in witchcraft which
was not long since one of the gravest facts of European history, and of
savage spiritualism to beliefs which so deeply affect our civilization now.
No one who can see in these cases, and in many others to be brought before
him in these volumes, how direct and close the connexion may be between
modern culture and the condition of the rudest savage, will be prone to
accuse students who spend their labour on even the lowest and most trifling
facts of ethnography, of wasting their hours in the satisfaction of a frivolous
curiosity.

CHAPTER V.
EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.

Element of directly expressive Sound in Language—Test by
independent correspondence in distinct languages—Constituent
processes of Language—Gesture—Expression of feature, &c.—
Emotional Tone—Articulate sounds, vowels determined by musical
quality and pitch, consonants—Emphasis and Accent—Phrase-melody,
Recitative—Sound-Words—Interjections—Calls to Animals—
Emotional Cries—Sense-Words formed from Interjections—
Affirmative and Negative particles, &c.

In carrying on the enquiry into the development of culture, evidence of
some weight is to be gained from an examination of Language. Comparing
the grammars and dictionaries of races at various grades of civilization, it
appears that, in the great art of speech, the educated man at this day
substantially uses the method of the savage, only expanded and improved in
the working out of details. It is true that the languages of the Tasmanian and
the Chinese, of the Greenlander and the Greek, differ variously in structure;
but this is a secondary difference, underlaid by a primary similarity in
method, namely, the expression of ideas by articulate sounds habitually
allotted to them. Now all languages are found on inspection to contain some
articulate sounds of a directly natural and directly intelligible kind. These
are sounds of interjectional or imitative character, which have their meaning
not by inheritance from parents or adoption from foreigners, but by being
taken up directly from the world of sound into the world of sense. Like
pantomimic gestures, they are capable of conveying their meaning of
themselves, without reference to the particular language they are used in
connexion with. From the observation of these, there have arisen
speculations as to the origin of language, treating such expressive sounds as

the fundamental constituents of language in general, and considering those
of them which are still plainly recognizable as having remained more or
less in their original state, long courses of adaptation and variation having
produced from such the great mass of words in all languages, in which no
connexion between idea and sound can any longer be certainly made out.
Thus grew up doctrines of a ‘natural’ origin of language, which, dating from
classic times, were developed in the eighteenth century into a system by
that powerful thinker, the President Charles de Brosses, and in our own time
have been expanded and solidified by a school of philologers, among whom
Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood is the most prominent.[247] These theories have no
doubt been incautiously and fancifully worked. No wonder that students
who found in nature real and direct sources of articulate speech, in
interjectional sounds like ah! ugh! h’m! sh! and in imitative sounds like
purr, whiz, tomtom, cuckoo, should have thought that the whole secret of
language lay within their grasp, and that they had only to fit the keys thus
found into one hole after another to open every lock. When a philosopher
has a truth in his hands, he is apt to stretch it farther than it will bear. The
magic umbrella must spread and spread till it becomes a tent wide enough
to shelter the king’s army. But it must be borne in mind that what criticism
touches in these opinions is their exaggeration, not their reality. That
interjections and imitative words are really taken up to some extent, be it
small or large, into the very body and structure of language, no one denies.
Such a denial, if anyone offered it, the advocates of the disputed theories
might dispose of in the single phrase, that they would neither be pooh-
poohed nor hooted down. It may be shown within the limits of the most
strict and sober argument, that the theory of the origin of language in
natural and directly expressive sounds does account for a considerable
fraction of the existing copia verborum, while it raises a presumption that,
could we trace the history of words more fully, it would account for far
more.
In here examining interjectional and imitative sounds with their derivative
words, as well as certain other parts of language of a more or less cognate
character, I purpose to bring forward as far as possible new evidence
derived from the languages of savage and barbarous races. By so doing it
becomes practicable to use a check which in great measure stops the main
source of uncertainty and error in such enquiries, the habit of etymologizing
words off-hand from expressive sounds, by the unaided and often flighty

fancy of a philologer. By simply enlarging the survey of language, the
province of the imagination is brought within narrower limits. If several
languages, which cannot be classed as distinctly of the same family, unite in
expressing some notion by a particular sound which may fairly claim to be
interjectional or imitative, their combined authority will go far to prove the
claim a just one. For if it be objected that such words may have passed into
the different languages from a common source, of which the trace is for the
most part lost, this may be answered by the question, Why is there not a
proportionate agreement between the languages in question throughout the
far larger mass of words which cannot pretend to be direct sound-words? If
several languages have independently chosen like words to express like
meanings, then we may reasonably suppose that we are not deluding
ourselves in thinking such words highly appropriate to their purpose. They
are words which answered the conditions of original language, conforming
as they do to the saying of Thomas Aquinas, that the names of things ought
to agree with their natures, ‘nomina debent naturis rerum congruere.’
Applied in such comparison, the languages of the lower races contribute
evidence of excellent quality to the problem. It will at the same time and by
the same proofs appear, that savages possess in a high degree the faculty of
uttering their minds directly in emotional tones and interjections, of going
straight to nature to furnish themselves with imitative sounds, including
reproductions of their own direct emotional utterances, as means of
expression of ideas, and of introducing into their formal language words so
produced. They have clearly thus far the means and power of producing
language. In so far as the theories under consideration account for the
original formation of language, they countenance the view that this
formation took place among mankind in a savage state, and even, for
anything appearing to the contrary, in a still lower stage of culture than has
survived to our day.[248]
The first step in such investigation is to gain a clear idea of the various
elements of which spoken language is made up. These may be enumerated
as gesture, expression of feature, emotional tone, emphasis, force, speed,
&c. of utterance, musical rhythm and intonation, and the formation of the
vowels and consonants which are the skeleton of articulate speech.
In the common intercourse of men, speech is habitually accompanied by
gesture, the hands, head, and body aiding and illustrating the spoken phrase.

So far as we can judge, the visible gesture and the audible word have been
thus used in combination since times of most remote antiquity in the history
of our race. It seems, however, that in the daily intercourse of the lower
races, gesture holds a much more important place than we are accustomed
to see it fill, a position even encroaching on that which articulate speech
holds among ourselves. Mr. Bonwick confirms by his experience Dr.
Milligan’s account of the Tasmanians as using ‘signs to eke out the meaning
of monosyllabic expressions, and to give force, precision, and character to
vocal sounds.’ Captain Wilson remarks on the use of gesticulation in
modifying words in the Chinook Jargon. There is confirmation to Spix and
Martius’ description of low Brazilian tribes completing by signs the
meaning of their scanty sentences, thus making the words ‘wood-go’ serve
to say ‘I will go into the wood,’ by pointing the mouth like a snout in the
direction meant. The Rev. J. L. Wilson, describing the Grebo language of
West Africa, remarks that they have personal pronouns, but seldom use
them in conversation, leaving it to gesture to determine whether a verb is to
be taken in the first or second person; thus the words ‘ni ne’ will mean ‘I do
it,’ or ‘you do it,’ according to the significant gestures of the speaker.[249]
Beside such instances, it will hereafter be noticed that the lower races, in
counting, habitually use gesture-language for a purpose to which higher
races apply word-language. To this prominent condition of gesture as a
means of expression among rude tribes, and to the development of
pantomime in public show and private intercourse among such peoples as
the Neapolitans of our own day, the most extreme contrast may be found in
England, where, whether for good or ill, suggestive pantomime is now
reduced to so small a compass in social talk, and even in public oratory.
Changes of the bodily attitude, corresponding in their fine gradations with
changes of the feelings, comprise conditions of the surface of the body,
postures of the limbs, and also especially those expressive attitudes of the
face to which our attention is particularly directed when we notice one
another. The visible expression of the features is a symptom which displays
the speaker’s state of mind, his feelings of pleasure or disgust, of pride or
humility, of faith or doubt, and so forth. Not that there is between the
emotion and its bodily expression any originally intentional connexion. It is
merely that a certain action of our physical machinery shows symptoms
which we have learnt by experience to refer to a mental cause, as we judge
by seeing a man sweat or limp that he is hot or footsore. Blushing is caused

by certain emotions, and among Europeans it is a visible expression or
symptom of them; not so among South American Indians, whose blushes, as
Mr. David Forbes points out, may be detected by the hand or a
thermometer, but being concealed by the dark skin cannot serve as a visible
sign of feeling.[250] By turning these natural processes to account, men
contrive to a certain extent to put on particular physical expressions,
frowning or smiling for instance, in order to simulate the emotions which
would naturally produce such expressions, or merely to convey the thought
of such emotions to others. Now it is well known to every one that physical
expression by feature, &c., forming a part of the universal gesture-
language, thus serves as an important adjunct to spoken language. It is not
so obvious, but on examination will prove to be true, that such expression
by feature itself acts as a formative power in vocal language. Expression of
countenance has an action beyond that of mere visible gesture. The bodily
attitude brought on by a particular state of mind affects the position of the
organs of speech, both the internal larynx, &c., and the external features
whose change can be watched by the mere looker-on. Even though the
expression of the speaker’s face may not be seen by the hearer, the effect of
the whole bodily attitude of which it forms part is not thereby done away
with. For on the position thus taken by the various organs concerned in
speech, depends what I have here called ‘emotional tone,’ whereby the
voice carries direct expression of the speaker’s feeling.
The ascertaining of the precise physical mode in which certain attitudes of
the internal and external face come to correspond to certain moods of mind,
is a physiological problem as yet little understood; but the fact that
particular expressions of face are accompanied by corresponding and
dependent expressions of emotional tone, only requires an observer or a
looking-glass to prove it. The laugh made with a solemn, contemptuous, or
sarcastic face, is quite different from that which comes from a joyous one;
the ah! oh! ho! hey! and so on, change their modulations to match the
expression of countenance. The effect of the emotional tone does not even
require fitness in the meaning of the spoken words, for nonsense or an
unknown tongue may be made to convey, when spoken with expressive
intonation, the feelings which are displayed upon the speaker’s face. This
expression may even be recognized in the dark by noticing the tone it gives
forth, while the forced character given by the attempt to bring out a sound
not matching even the outward play of the features can hardly be hidden by

the most expert ventriloquist, and in such forcing, the sound perceptibly
drags the face into the attitude that fits with it. The nature of communication
by emotional tone seems to me to be somewhat on this wise. It does not
appear that particular tones at all belong directly and of themselves to
particular emotions, but that their action depends on the vocal organs of the
speaker and hearer. Other animals, having vocal organs different from
man’s, have accordingly, as we know, a different code of emotional tones.
An alteration in man’s vocal organs would bring a corresponding alteration
in the effect of tone in expressing feeling; the tone which to us expresses
surprise or anger might come to express pleasure, and so forth. As it is,
children learn by early experience that such and such a tone indicates such
and such an emotion, and this they make out partly by finding themselves
uttering such tones when their feelings have brought their faces to the
appropriate attitudes, and partly by observing the expression of voice in
others. At three or four years old they are to be seen in the act of acquiring
this knowledge, turning round to look at the speaker’s face and gesture to
make sure of the meaning of the tone. But in later years this knowledge
becomes so familiar that it is supposed to have been intuitive. Then, when
men talk together, the hearer receives from each emotional tone an
indication, a signal, of the speaker’s attitude of body, and through this of his
state of mind. These he can recognize, and even reproduce in himself, as the
operator at one end of a telegraphic wire can follow, by noticing his
needles, the action of his colleague at the other. In watching the process
which thus enables one man to take a copy of another’s emotions through
their physical effects on his vocal tone, we may admire the perfection with
which a means so simple answers an end so complex, and apparently so
remote.
By eliminating from speech all effects of gesture, of expression of face, and
of emotional tone, we go far toward reducing it to that system of
conventional articulate sounds which the grammarian and the comparative
philologist habitually consider as language. These articulate sounds are
capable of being roughly set down in signs standing for vowels and
consonants, with the aid of accents and other significant marks; and they
may then again be read aloud from these written signs, by any one who has
learnt to give its proper sound to each letter.

What vowels are, is a matter which has been for some years well
understood.[251] They are compound musical tones such as, in the vox
humana stop of the organ, are sounded by reeds (vibrating tongues) fitted to
organ-pipes of particular construction. The manner of formation of vowels
by the voice is shortly this. There are situated in the larynx a pair of
vibrating membranes called the vocal chords, which may be rudely imitated
by stretching a piece of sheet india-rubber over the open end of a tube, so as
to form two half-covers to it, ‘like the parchment of a drum split across the
middle;’ when the tube is blown through, the india-rubber flaps will vibrate
as the vocal chords do in the larynx, and give out a sound. In the human
voice, the musical effect of the vibrating chords is increased by the cavity of
the mouth, which acts as a resonator or sounding-box, and which also, by
its shape at any moment, modifies the musical ‘quality’ or ‘timbre’ of the
sound produced. This, not the less felt because its effects are not registered
in musical notation, depends on the harmonic overtones accompanying the
fundamental tone which alone musical notation takes account of. It makes
the difference between the same note on two instruments, flute and piano
for instance, while some instruments, as the violin, can give to one note a
wide variation of quality. To such quality the formation of vowels is due.
This is perfectly shown by the common Jew’s harp, which when struck can
be made to utter the vowels a, e, i, o, u, &c., by simply putting the mouth in
the proper position for speaking these vowels. In this experiment the
player’s voice emits no sound, but the vibrating tongue of the Jew’s harp
placed in front of the mouth acts as a substitute for the vocal chords, and the
vowel-sounds are produced by the various positions of the cavity of the
mouth, modifying the quality of the note, by bringing out with different
degrees of strength the series of harmonic tones of which it is composed. As
to musical theory, emotional tone and vowel-tone are connected. In fact, an
emotional tone may be defined as a vowel, whose particular musical quality
is that produced by the human vocal organs, when adjusted to a particular
state of feeling.
Europeans, while using modulation of musical pitch as affecting the force
of words in a sentence, know nothing of making it alter the dictionary-
meaning of a word. But this device is known elsewhere, especially in
South-East Asia, where rises and falls of tone, to some extent like those
which serve us in conveying emphasis, question and answer, &c., actually
give different signification. Thus in Siamese, há=to seek, hã=pestilence,

hà=five. The consequence of this elaborate system of tone-accentuation is
the necessity of an accumulation of expletive particles, to supply the place
of the oratorical or emphatic intonation, which being thus given over to the
dictionary is lost for the grammar. Another consequence is, that the system
of setting poetry to music becomes radically different from ours; to sing a
Siamese song to a European tune makes the meaning of the syllables alter
according to their rise and fall in pitch, and turns their sense into the wildest
nonsense.[252] In West Africa, again, the same device appears: thus in
Dahoman so=stick, só=horse, sò=thunder; Yoruba, bá=with, bà=bend.[253]
For practical purposes, this linguistic music is hardly to be commended, but
theoretically it is interesting, as showing that man does not servilely follow
an intuitive or inherited scheme of language, but works out in various ways
the resources of sound as a means of expression.
The theory of consonants is much more obscure than that of vowels. They
are not musical vibrations as vowels are, but noises accompanying them. To
the musician such noises as the rushing of the wind from the organ-pipe, the
scraping of the violin, the sputtering of the flute, are simply troublesome as
interfering with his musical tones, and he takes pains to diminish them as
much as may be. But in the art of language noises of this kind, far from
being avoided, are turned to immense account by being used as consonants,
in combination with the musical vowels. As to the positions and movements
of the vocal organs in producing consonants, an excellent account with
anatomical diagrams is given in Professor Max Müller’s second series of
Lectures. For the present purpose of passing in review the various devices
by which the language-maker has contrived to make sound a means of
expressing thought, perhaps no better illustration of their nature can be
mentioned than Sir Charles Wheatstone’s account of his speaking machine;
[254]
for one of the best ways of studying difficult phenomena is to see them
artificially imitated. The instrument in question pronounced Latin, French,
and Italian words well: it could say, ‘Je vous aime de tout mon cœur,’
‘Leopoldus Secundus Romanorum Imperator,’ and so forth, but it was not
so successful with German. As to the vowels, they were of course simply
sounded by suitable reeds and pipes. To affect them with consonants,
contrivances were arranged to act like the human organs. Thus p was made
by suddenly removing the operator’s hand from the mouth of the figure, and
b in the same way, except that the mouth was not quite covered, while an
outlet like the nostrils was used in forming m; f and v were rendered by

modifying the shape of the mouth by a hand; air was made to rush through
small tubes to produce the sibilants s and sh; and the liquids r and l were
sounded by the action of tremulous reeds. As Wheatstone remarks, the most
important use of such ingenious mechanical imitations of speech may be to
fix and preserve an accurate register of the pronunciation of different
languages. A perfectly arranged speaking machine would in fact represent
for us that framework of language which consists of mere vowels and
consonants, though without most of those expressive adjuncts which go to
make up the conversation of speaking men.
Of vowels and consonants capable of being employed in language, man is
able to pronounce and distinguish an enormous variety. But this great stock
of possible sounds is nowhere brought into use altogether. Each language or
dialect of the world is found in practice to select a limited series of definite
vowels and consonants, keeping with tolerable exactness to each, and thus
choosing what we may call its phonetic alphabet. Neglecting such minor
differences as occur in the speech of individuals or small communities, each
dialect of the world may be said to have its own phonetic system, and these
phonetic systems vary widely. Our vowels, for instance, differ much from
those of French and Dutch. French knows nothing of either of the sounds
which we write as th in thin and that, while the Castilian lisped c, the so-
called ceceo, is a third consonant which we must again make shift to write
as th, though it is quite distinct in sound from both our own. It is quite a
usual thing for us to find foreign languages wanting letters even near in
sound to some of ours, while possessing others unfamiliar to ourselves.
Among such cases are the Chinese difficulty in pronouncing r, and the want
of s and f in Australian dialects. When foreigners tried to teach the
Mohawks, who have no labials in their language, to pronounce words with
p and b in them, they protested that it was too ridiculous to expect people to
shut their mouths to speak; and the Portuguese discoverers of Brazil,
remarking that the natives had neither f, l, nor r in their language, neatly
described them as a people with neither fé, ley, nor rey, neither faith, law,
nor king. It may happen, too, that sounds only used by some nations as
interjectional noises, unwritten and unwriteable, shall be turned to account
by others in their articulate language. Something of this kind occurs with
the noises called ‘clicks.’ Such sounds are familiar to us as interjections;
thus the lateral click made in the cheek (and usually in the left cheek) is
continually used in driving horses, while varieties of the dental and palatal

click made with the tongue against the teeth and the roof of the mouth, are
common in the nursery as expressions of surprise, reproof, or satisfaction.
Thus, too, the natives of Tierra del Fuego express ‘no’ by a peculiar cluck,
as do also the Turks, who accompany it with the gesture of throwing back
the head; and it appears from the accounts of travellers that the clicks of
surprise and admiration among the natives of Australia are much like those
we hear at home. But though here these clicking noises are only used
interjectionally, it is well known that South African races have taken such
sounds up into their articulate speech and have made, as we may say, letters
of them. The very name of Hottentots, applied to the Namaquas and other
kindred tribes, appears to be not a native name (as Peter Kolb thought) but a
rude imitative word coined by the Dutch to express the clicking ‘hot en tot,’
and the term Hottentotism has been thence adopted as a medical description
of one of the varieties of stammering. North-West America is another
district of the world distinguished for the production of strange clucking,
gurgling, and grunting letters, difficult or impossible to European voices.
Moreover, there are many sounds capable of being used in articulate speech,
varieties of chirping, whistling, blowing, and sucking noises, of which some
are familiar to our own use as calls to animals, or interjectional noises of
contempt or surprise, but which no tribe is known to have brought into their
alphabet. With all the vast phonetic variety of known languages, the limits
of possible utterance are far from being reached.
Up to a certain point we can understand the reasons which have guided the
various tribes of mankind in the selection of their various alphabets; ease of
utterance to the speaker, combined with distinctness of effect to the hearer,
have been undoubtedly among the principal of the selecting causes. We may
fairly connect with the close uniformity of men’s organs of speech all over
the world, the general similarity which prevails in the phonetic systems of
the most different languages, and which gives us the power of roughly
writing down so large a proportion of any one language by means of an
alphabet intended for any other. But while we thus account by physical
similarity for the existence of a kind of natural alphabet common to
mankind, we must look to other causes to determine the selection of sounds
used in different languages, and to account for those remarkable courses of
change which go on in languages of a common stock, producing in Europe
such variations of one original word as pater, father, vater, or in the islands
of Polynesia offering us the numeral 5 under the strangely-varied forms of

lima, rima, dima, nima, and hima. Changes of this sort have acted so widely
and regularly, that since the enunciation of Grimm’s law their study has
become a main part of philology. Though their causes are as yet so obscure,
we may at least argue that such wide and definite operations cannot be due
to chance or arbitrary fancy, but must be the result of laws as wide and
definite as themselves.
Let us now suppose a book to be written with a tolerably correct alphabet,
for instance an ordinary Italian book, or an English one in some good
system of phonetic letters. To suppose English written in the makeshift
alphabet which we still keep in use, would be of course to complicate the
matter in hand with a new and needless difficulty. If, then, the book be
written in a sufficient alphabet, and handed to a reader, his office will by no
means stop short at rendering back into articulate sounds the vowels and
consonants before him, as though he were reading over proofs for the press.
For the emotional tone just spoken of has dropped out in writing down the
words in letters, and it will be the reader’s duty to guess from the meaning
of the words what this tone should be, and to put it in again accordingly. He
has moreover to introduce emphasis, whether by accent or stress, on certain
syllables or words, thereby altering their effect in the sentence; if he says,
for example, ‘I never sold you that horse,’ an emphasis on any one of these
six words will alter the import of the whole phrase. Now, in emphatic
pronunciation two distinct processes are to be remarked. The effect
produced by changes in loudness and duration of words is directly
imitative; it is a mere gesture made with the voice, as we may notice by the
way in which any one will speak of ‘a short sharp answer,’ ‘a long weary
year,’ ‘a loud burst of music,’ ‘a gentle gliding motion,’ as compared with
the like manner in which the gesture-language would adapt its force and
speed to the kind of action to be represented. Written language can hardly
convey but by the context the striking effects which our imitative faculty
adds to spoken language, in our continual endeavour to make the sound of
each word we speak a sort of echo to its sense. We see this in the difference
between writing and telling the little story of the man who was worried by
being talked to about ‘good books.’ ‘Do you mean,’ he asked, speaking
shortly with a face of strong firm approval, ‘good books?’ ‘or,’ with a drawl
and a fatuous-benevolent simper, ‘goo-d books?’ Musical accent (accentus,
[255]
musical tone) is turned to account as a means of emphasis, as when we
give prominence to a particular syllable or word in a sentence by raising or

depressing it a semi-tone or more. The reader has to divide his sentences
with pauses, being guided in this to some extent by stops; the rhythmic
measure in which he will utter prose as well as poetry is not without its
effect; and he has again to introduce music by speaking each sentence to a
kind of imperfect melody. Professor Helmholtz endeavours to write down in
musical notes how a German with a bass voice, speaking on B flat, might
say, ‘Ich bin spatzieren gegangen.—Bist du spatzieren gegangen?’ falling a
fourth (to F) at the end of the affirmative sentence, and rising a fifth (to f) in
asking the question, thus ranging through an octave.[256] When an English
speaker tries to illustrate in his own language the rising and falling tones of
Siamese vowels, he compares them with the English ones of question and
answer, as in ‘Will you go? Yes.’[257] The rules of this imperfect musical
intonation in ordinary conversation have been as yet but little studied. But
as a means of giving solemnity and pathos to language, it has been more
fully developed and even systematized under exact rules of melody, and we
thus have on the one hand ecclesiastical intoning and the less conventional
half-singing so often to be heard in religious meetings, and on the other the
ancient and modern theatrical recitative. By such intermediate stages we
may cross the wide interval from spoken prose, with the musical pitch of its
vowels so carelessly kept, and so obscured by consonants as to be difficult
even to determine, to full song, in which the consonants are as much as
possible suppressed, that they may not interfere with the precise and
expressive music of the vowels.
Proceeding now to survey such parts of the vocabulary of mankind as
appear to have an intelligible origin in the direct expression of sense by
sound, let us first examine Interjections. When Horne Tooke spoke, in
words often repeated since, of ‘the brutish inarticulate Interjection,’ he
certainly meant to express his contempt for a mode of expression which lay
outside his own too narrow view of language. But the epithets are in
themselves justifiable enough. Interjections are undoubtedly to a certain
extent ‘brutish’ in their analogy to the cries of animals; and the fact gives
them an especial interest to modern observers, who are thus enabled to trace
phenomena belonging to the mental state of the lower animals up into the
midst of the most highly cultivated human language. It is also true that they
are ‘inarticulate,’ so far at least that the systems of consonants and vowels
recognized by grammarians break down more hopelessly than elsewhere in
the attempt to write down interjections. Alphabetic writing is far too

incomplete and clumsy an instrument to render their peculiar and variously-
modulated sounds, for which a few conventionally-written words do duty
poorly enough. In reading aloud, and sometimes even in the talk of those
who have learnt rather from books than from the living world, we may hear
these awkward imitations, ahem! hein! tush! tut! pshaw! now carrying the
unquestioned authority of words printed in a book, and reproduced letter for
letter with a most amusing accuracy. But when Horne Tooke fastens upon
an unfortunate Italian grammarian and describes him as ‘The industrious
and exact Cinonio, who does not appear ever to have had a single glimpse
of reason,’ it is not easy to see what the pioneer of English philology could
find to object to in Cinonio’s obviously true assertion, that a single
interjection, ah! or ahi! is capable of expressing more than twenty different
emotions or intentions, such as pain, entreaty, threatening, sighing, disdain,
according to the tone in which it is uttered.[258] The fact that interjections do
thus utter feelings is quite beyond dispute, and the philologist’s concern
with them is on the one hand to study their action in expressing emotion,
and on the other to trace their passage into more fully-formed words, such
as have their place in connected syntax and form part of logical
propositions.
In the first place, however, it is necessary to separate from proper
interjections the many sense-words which, often kept up in a mutilated or
old-fashioned guise, come so close to them both in appearance and in use.
Among classic examples are φέρε! δεῦτε! age! macte! Such a word is hail!
which as the Gothic Bible shows, was originally an adjective, ‘whole, hale,
prosperous,’ used vocatively, just as the Italians cry bravo! brava! bravi!
brave! When the African negro cries out in fear or wonder mámá! mámá!
[259]
he might be thought to be uttering a real interjection, ‘a word used to
express some passion or emotion of the mind,’ as Lindley Murray has it, but
in fact he is simply calling, grown-up baby as he is, for his mother; and the
very same thing has been noticed among Indians of Upper California, who
as an expression of pain cry, aná! that is ‘mother.’[260] Other exclamations
consist of a pure interjection combined with a pronoun, as οἴμοι! oimè! ah
me! or with an adjective, as alas! hélas! (ah weary!) With what care
interjections should be sifted, to avoid the risk of treating as original
elementary sounds of language what are really nothing but sense-words, we
may judge from the way in which the common English exclamation well!
well! approaches the genuine interjectional sound in the Coptic expression

‘to make ouelouele,’ which signifies to wail, Latin ululare. Still better, we
may find a learned traveller in the 18th century quite seriously remarking,
apropos of the old Greek battle-shout, ἀλαλά! ἀλαλά! that the Turks to this
day call out Allah! Allah! Allah! upon the like occasion.[261]
The calls to animals customary in different countries[262] are to a great extent
interjectional in their use, but to attempt to explain them as a whole is to
step upon as slippery ground as lies within the range of philology.
Sometimes they may be in fact pure interjections, like the schû schû!
mentioned as an old German cry to scare birds, as we should say sh sh!, or
the aá! with which the Indians of Brazil call their dogs. Or they may be set
down as simple imitations of the animal’s own cries, as the clucking to call
fowls in our own farm-yards, or the Austrian calls of pi pi! or tiet tiet! to
chickens, or the Swabian kauter kaut! to turkeys, or the shepherd’s baaing
to call sheep in India. In other cases, however, they may be sense-words
more or less broken down, as when the creature is spoken to by a sound
which seems merely taken from its own common name. If an English
countryman meets a stray sheep-dog, he will simply call to him ship! ship!
So schäp schäp! is an Austrian call to sheep, and köss kuhel köss! to cows.
In German districts gus gus! gusch gusch! gös gös! are set down as calls to
geese; and when we notice that the Bohemian peasant calls husy! to them,
we remember that the name for goose in his language is husa, a word
familiar to English ears in the name of John Huss. The Bohemian, again,
will call to his dog ps ps! but then pes means ‘dog.’ Other sense-words
addressed to animals break down by long repetition into mutilated forms.
When we are told that the to to! with which a Portuguese calls a dog is short
for toma toma! (i.e., ‘take take!’) which tells him to come and take his food,
we admit the explanation as plausible; and the coop coop! which a cockney
might so easily mistake for a pure interjection, is only ‘Come up! come up!’

‘Come uppe, Whitefoot, come uppe, Lightfoot,
Come uppe, Jetty, rise and follow,
Jetty, to the milking shed.’

But I cannot offer a plausible guess at the origin of such calls as hüf hüf! to
horses, hühl hühl! to geese, deckel deckel! to sheep. It is fortunate for
etymologists that such trivial little words have not an importance

proportioned to the difficulty of clearing up their origin. The word puss!
raises an interesting philological problem. An English child calling puss
puss! is very likely keeping up the trace of the old Keltic name for the cat,
Irish pus, Erse pusag, Gaelic puis. Similar calls are known elsewhere in
Europe (as in Saxony, pûs pûs!), and there is some reason to think that the
cat, which came to us from the East, brought with it one of its names, which
is still current there, Tamil pûsei! Afghan pusha, Persian pushak, &c. Mr.
Wedgwood finds an origin for the call in an imitation of the cat’s spitting,
and remarks that the Servians cry pis! to drive a cat away, while the
Albanians use a similar sound to call it. The way in which the cry of puss!
has furnished a name for the cat itself, comes out curiously in countries
where the animal has been lately introduced by Englishmen. Thus boosi is
the recognized word for cat in the Tonga Islands, no doubt from Captain
Cook’s time. Among Indian tribes of North-West America, pwsh, pish-pish,
appear in native languages with the meaning of cat; and not only is the
European cat called a puss puss in the Chinook Jargon, but in the same
curious dialect the word is applied to a native beast, the cougar, now called
‘hyas puss-puss,’ i.e., ‘great cat.’[263]
The derivation of names of animals in this manner from calls to them, may
perhaps not have been unfrequent. It appears that huss! is a cry used in
Switzerland to set dogs on to fight, as s—s! might be in England, and that
the Swiss call a dog huss or hauss, possibly from this. We know the cry of
dill! dilly! as a recognized call to ducks in England, and it is difficult to
think it a corruption of any English word or phrase, for the Bohemians also
call dlidli! to their ducks. Now, though dill or dilly may not be found in our
dictionaries as the name for a duck, yet the way in which Hood can use it as
such in one of his best-known comic poems, shows perfectly the easy and
natural step by which such transitions can be made:—

‘For Death among the water-lilies,
Cried “Duc ad me” to all her dillies.’

In just the same way, because gee! is a usual call of the English waggoner
to his horses, the word gee-gee has become a familiar nursery noun
meaning a horse. And neither in such nursery words, nor in words coined in
jest, is the evidence bearing on the origin of language to be set aside as

worthless; for it may be taken as a maxim of ethnology, that what is done
among civilized men in jest, or among civilized children in the nursery, is
apt to find its analogue in the serious mental effort of savage, and therefore
of primæval tribes.
Drivers’ calls to their beasts, such as this gee! gee-ho! to urge on horses,
and weh! woh! to stop them, form part of the vernacular of particular
districts. The geho! perhaps came to England in the Norman-French, for it
is known in France, and appears in the Italian dictionary as gio! The
traveller who has been hearing the drivers in the Grisons stop their horses
with a long br-r-r! may cross a pass and hear on the other side a hü-ü-ü!
instead. The ploughman’s calls to turn the leaders of the team to right and
left have passed into proverb. In France they say of a stupid clown ‘Il
n’entend ni à dia! ni à hurhaut!’ and the corresponding Platt-Deutsch
phrase is ‘He weet nich hutt! noch hoh!’ So there is a regular language to
camels, as Captain Burton remarks on his journey to Mekka: ikh ikh! makes
them kneel, yáhh yáhh! urges them on, hai hai! induces caution, and so
forth. In the formation of these quaint expressions, two causes have been at
work. The sounds seem sometimes thoroughly interjectional, as the Arab
hai! of caution, or the French hue! North German jö! Whatever their origin,
they may be made to carry their sense by imitative tones expressive to the
ear of both horse and man, as any one will say who hears the contrast
between the short and sharp high-pitched hüp! which tells the Swiss horse
to go faster, and the long-drawn hü-ü-ü-ü! which brings him to a stand.
Also, the way in which common sense-words are taken up into calls like
gee-up! woh-back! shows that we may expect to find various old broken
fragments of formal language in the list, and such on inspection we find
accordingly. The following lines are quoted by Halliwell from the Micro-
Cynicon (1599):—

‘A base borne issue of a baser syer,
Bred in a cottage, wandering in the myer,
With nailed shooes and whipstaffe in his hand,
Who with a hey and ree the beasts command.’

This ree! is equivalent to ‘right’ (riddle-me-ree = riddle me right), and tells
the leader of the team to bear to the right hand. The hey! may correspond

with heit! or camether! which call him to bear ‘hither,’ i.e., to the left. In
Germany har! här! har-üh! are likewise the same as ‘her,’ ‘hither, to the
left.’ So swude! schwude! zwuder! ‘to the left,’ are of course simply
‘zuwider,’ ‘on the contrary way.’ Pairs of calls for ‘right’ and ‘left’ in
German-speaking countries are hot!—har! and hott!—wist! This wist! is an
interesting example of the keeping up of ancient words in such popular
tradition. It is evidently a mutilated form of an old German word for the left
hand, winistrâ, Anglo-Saxon winstre, a name long since forgotten by
modern High German, as by our own modern English.[264]
As quaint a mixture of words and interjectional cries as I have met with, is
in the great French Encyclopædia,[265] which gives a minute description of
the hunter’s craft, and prescribes exactly what is to be cried to the hounds
under all possible contingencies of the chase. If the creatures understood
grammar and syntax, the language could not be more accurately arranged
for their ears. Sometimes we have what seem pure interjectional cries. Thus,
to encourage the hounds to work, the huntsman is to call to them hà halle
halle halle! while to bring them up before they are uncoupled it is
prescribed that he shall call hau hau! or hau tahaut! and when they are
uncoupled he is to change his cry to hau la y la la y la tayau! a call which
suggests the Norman original of the English tally-ho! With cries of this kind
plain French words are intermixed, hà bellement là ila, là ila, hau valet!—
hau l’ami, tau tau après après, à route à route! and so on. And sometimes
words have broken down into calls whose sense is not quite gone, like the
‘vois le ci’ and the ‘vois le ce l’est’ which are still to be distinguished in the
shout which is to tell the hunters that the stag they have been chasing has
made a return, vauleci revari vaulecelez! But the drollest thing in the
treatise is the grave set of English words (in very Gallic shape) with which
English dogs are to be spoken to, because, as the author says, ‘there are
many English hounds in France, and it is difficult to get them to work when
you speak to them in an unknown tongue, that is, in other terms than they
have been trained to.’ Therefore, to call them, the huntsman is to cry here
do-do ho ho! to get them back to the right track he is to say houpe boy,
houpe boy! when there are several on ahead of the rest of the pack, he is to
ride up to them and cry saf me boy! saf me boy! and lastly, if they are
obstinate and will not stop, he is to make them go back with a shout of
cobat, cobat!

How far the lower animals may attach any inherent meaning to
interjectional sounds is a question not easy to answer. But it is plain that in
most of the cases mentioned here they only understand them as recognized
signals which have a meaning by regular association, as when they
remember that they are fed with one noise and driven away with another,
and they also pay attention to the gestures which accompany the cries. Thus
the well-known Spanish way of calling the cat is miz miz! while zape zape!
is used to drive it away; and the writer of an old dictionary maintains that
there can be no real difference between these words except by custom, for,
he declares, he has heard that in a certain monastery where they kept very
handsome cats, the brother in charge of the refectory hit upon the device of
calling zape zape! to them when he gave them their food, and then he drove
them away with a stick, crying angrily miz miz; and this of course prevented
any stranger from calling and stealing them, for only he and the cats knew
the secret![266] To philologists, the manner in which such calls to animals
become customary in particular districts illustrates the consensus by which
the use of words is settled. Each case of the kind indicates that a word has
prevailed by selection among a certain society of men, and the main reasons
of words holding their ground within particular limits, though it is so
difficult to assign them exactly in each case, are probably inherent fitness in
the first place, and traditional inheritance in the second.
When the ground has been cleared of obscure or mutilated sense-words,
there remains behind a residue of real sound-words, or pure interjections. It
has long and reasonably been considered that the place in history of these
expressions is a very primitive one. Thus De Brosses describes them as
necessary and natural words, common to all mankind, and produced by the
combination of man’s conformation with the interior affections of his mind.
One of the best means of judging the relation between interjectional
utterances and the feelings they express, is to compare the voices of the
lower animals with our own. To a considerable extent there is a similarity.
As their bodily and mental structure has an analogy with our own, so they
express their minds by sounds which have to our ears a certain fitness for
what they appear to mean. It is so with the bark, the howl, and the whine of
the dog, the hissing of geese, the purring of cats, the crowing and clucking
of cocks and hens. But in other cases, as with the hooting of owls and the
shrieks of parrots and many other birds, we cannot suppose that these
sounds are intended to utter anything like the melancholy or pain which

such cries from a human being would be taken to convey. There are many
animals that never utter any cry but what, according to our notions of the
meaning of sounds, would express rage or discomfort; how far are the roars
and howls of wild beasts to be thus interpreted? We might as well imagine
the tuning violin to be in pain, or the moaning wind to express sorrow. The
connexion between interjection and emotion depending on the physical
structure of the animal which utters or hears the sound, it follows that the
general similarity of interjectional utterance among all the varieties of the
human race is an important manifestation of their close physical and
intellectual unity.
Interjectional sounds uttered by man for the expression of his own feelings
serve also as signs indicating these feelings to another. A long list of such
interjections, common to races speaking the most widely various languages,
might be set down in a rough way as representing the sighs, groans, moans,
cries, shrieks, and growls by which man gives utterance to various of his
feelings. Such for instance, are some of the many sounds for which ah! oh!
ahi! aie! are the inexpressive written representatives; such is the sigh which
is written down in the Wolof language of Africa as hhihhe! in English as
heigho! in Greek and Latin as ἒ ἒ! ἒ ἒ! heu! eheu! Thus the open-mouthed
wah wah! of astonishment, so common in the East, reappears in America in
the hwah! hwah-wa! of the Chinook Jargon; and the kind of groan which is
represented in European languages by weh! ouais! οὐαί! vae! is given in
Coptic by ouae! in Galla by wayo! in the Ossetic of the Caucasus by voy!
among the Indians of British Columbia by woī! Where the interjections
taken down in the vocabularies of other languages differ from those
recognized in our own, we at any rate appreciate them and see how they
carry their meaning. Thus with the Malagasy u-u! of pleasure, the North-
American Indian’s often-described guttural ugh! the kwish! of contempt in
the Chinook Jargon, the Tunguz yo yo! of pain, the Irish wb wb! of distress,
the native Brazilian’s teh teh! of wonder and reverence, the hai-yah! so well
known in the Pigeon-English of the Chinese ports, and even, to take an
extreme case, the interjections of surprise among the Algonquin Indians,
where men say tiau! and women nyau! It is much the same with expressions
which are not uttered for the speaker’s satisfaction, but are calls addressed
to another. Thus the Siamese call of hē! the Hebrew he! ha! for ‘lo!
behold!’ the hói! of the Clallam Indians for ‘stop!’ the Lummi hái! for
‘hold, enough!’—these and others like them belong just as much to English.

Another class of interjections are such as any one conversant with the
gesture-signs of savages and deaf-mutes would recognize as being
themselves gesture signs, made with vocal sound, in short, voice-gestures.
The sound m’m, m’n, made with the lips closed, is the obvious expression
of the man who tries to speak, but cannot. Even the deaf-and-dumb child,
though he cannot hear the sound of his own voice, makes this noise to show
that he is dumb, that he is mu mu, as the Vei negroes of West Africa would
say. To the speaking man, the sound which we write as mum! says plainly
enough ‘hold your tongue!’ ‘mum’s the word!’ and in accordance with this
meaning has served to form various imitative words, of which a type is
Tahitian mamu, to be silent. Often made with a slight effort which aspirates
it, and with more or less continuance, this sound becomes what may be
indicated as ‘m, ‘n, h’m, h’n, &c., interjections which are conventionally
written down as words, hem! ahem! hein! Their primary sense seems in any
case that of hesitation to speak, of ‘humming and hawing,’ but this serves
with a varied intonation to express such hesitation or refraining from
articulate words as belongs either to surprise, doubt or enquiry, approbation
or contempt. In the vocabulary of the Yorubas of West Africa, the nasal
interjection huñ is rendered, just as it might be in English, as ‘fudge!’
Rochefort describes the Caribs listening in reverent silence to their chief’s
discourse, and testifying their approval with a hun-hun! just as in his time
(17th century) an English congregation would have saluted a popular
preacher.[267] The gesture of blowing, again, is a familiar expression of
contempt and disgust, and when vocalized gives the labial interjections
which are written pah! bah! pugh! pooh! in Welsh pw! in Low Latin
puppup! and set down by travellers among the savages in Australia as pooh!
These interjections correspond with the mass of imitative words which
express blowing, such as Malay puput, to blow. The labial gestures of
blowing pass into those of spitting, of which one kind gives the dental
interjection t’ t’ t’! which is written in English or Dutch tut tut! and that this
is no mere fancy, a number of imitative verbs of various countries will serve
to show, Tahitian tutua, to spit, being a typical instance.
The place of interjectional utterance in savage intercourse is well shown in
Cranz’s description. The Greenlanders, he says, especially the women,
accompany many words with mien and glances, and he who does not well
apprehend this may easily miss the sense. Thus when they affirm anything
with pleasure they suck down air by the throat with a certain sound, and

when they deny anything with contempt or horror, they turn up the nose and
give a slight sound through it. And when they are out of humour, one must
understand more from their gestures than their words.[268] Interjection and
gesture combine to form a tolerable practical means of intercourse, as
where the communication between French and English troops in the Crimea
is described as ‘consisting largely of such interjectional utterances,
reiterated with expressive emphasis and considerable gesticulation.’[269] This
description well brings before us in actual life a system of effective human
intercourse, in which there has not yet arisen the use of those articulate
sounds carrying their meaning by tradition, which are the inherited words of
the dictionary.
When, however, we look closely into these inherited sense-words
themselves, we find that interjectional sounds have actually had more or
less share in their formation. Not stopping short at the function ascribed to
them by grammarians, of standing here and there outside a logical sentence,
the interjections have also served as radical sounds out of which verbs,
substantives, and other parts of speech have been shaped. In tracing the
progress of interjections upward into fully developed language, we begin
with sounds merely expressing the speaker’s actual feelings. When,
however, expressive sounds like ah! ugh! pooh! are uttered not to exhibit
the speaker’s actual feelings at the moment, but only in order to suggest to
another the thought of admiration or disgust, then such interjections have
little or nothing to distinguish them from fully formed words. The next step
is to trace the taking up of such sounds into the regular forms of ordinary
grammar. Familiar instances of such formations may be found among
ourselves in nursery language, where to woh is found in use with the
meaning of to stop, or in that real though hardly acknowledged part of the
English language to which belong such verbs as to boo-hoo. Among the
most obvious of such words are those which denote the actual utterance of
an interjection, or pass thence into some closely allied meaning. Thus the
Fijian women’s cry of lamentation oile! becomes the verb oile ‘to bewail,’
oile-taka ‘to lament for’ (the men cry ule!); now this is in perfect analogy
with such words as ululare, to wail. With different grammatical
terminations, another sound produces the Zulu verb gigiteka and its English
equivalent to giggle. The Galla iya, ‘to cry, scream, give the battle-cry’ has
its analogues in Greek ἰά, ἰή, ‘a cry,’ ἰήïος ‘wailing, mournful,’ &c. Good
cases may be taken from a curious modern dialect with a strong propensity

to the use of obvious sound-words, the Chinook Jargon of North-West
America. Here we find adopted from an Indian dialect the verb to kish-kish,
that is, ‘to drive cattle or horses’; humm stands for the word ‘stink,’ verb or
noun; and the laugh, heehee, becomes a recognized term meaning fun or
amusement, as in mamook heehee, ‘to amuse’ (i.e., ‘to make heehee’) and
heehee house, ‘a tavern.’ In Hawaii, aa is ‘to insult;’ in the Tonga Islands,
úi! is at once the exclamation ‘fie!’ and the verb ‘to cry out against.’ In New
Zealand, hé! is an interjection denoting surprise at a mistake, hé as a noun
or verb meaning ‘error, mistake, to err, to go astray.’ In the Quiché language
of Guatemala, the verbs ay, oy, boy, express the idea of ‘to call’ in different
ways. In the Carajas language of Brazil, we may guess an interjectional
origin in the adjective ei, ‘sorrowful,’ and can scarcely fail to see a
derivation from expressive sound in the verb hai-hai ‘to run away’ (the
word aie-aie, used to mean ‘an omnibus’ in modern French slang, is said to
be a comic allusion to the cries of the passengers whose toes are trodden
on). The Camacan Indians, when they wish to express the notion of ‘much’
or ‘many,’ hold out their fingers and say hi. As this is an ordinary savage
gesture expressing multitude, it seems likely that the hi is a mere
interjection, requiring the visible sign to convey the full meaning.[270] In the
Quichua language of Peru, alalau! is an interjection of complaint at cold,
whence the verb alalauñini, ‘to complain of the cold.’ At the end of each
strophe of the Peruvian hymns to the Sun was sung the triumphant
exclamation haylli! and with this sound are connected the verbs hayllini ‘to
sing,’ hayllicuni, ‘to celebrate a victory.’ The Zulu halala! of exultation,
which becomes also a verb ‘to shout for joy,’ has its analogues in the
Tibetan alala! of joy, and the Greek ἀλαλά, which is used as a noun
meaning the battle-cry and even the onset itself, ἀλαλάζω, ‘to raise the war-
cry,’ as well as Hebrew hillel, ‘to sing praise,’ whence hallelujah! a word
which the believers in the theory that the Red Indians were the Lost Tribes
naturally recognized in the native medicine-man’s chant of hi-le-li-lah! The
Zulu makes his panting ha! do duty as an expression of heat, when he says
that the hot weather ‘says ha ha’; his way of pitching a song by a ha! ha! is
apparently represented in the verb haya, ‘to lead a song,’ hayo ‘a starting
song, a fee given to the singing-leader for the haya’; and his interjectional
expression bà bà! ‘as when one smacks his lips from a bitter taste,’ becomes
a verb-root meaning ‘to be bitter or sharp to the taste, to prick, to smart.’
The Galla language gives some good examples of interjections passing into

words, as where the verbs birr-djeda (to say brr!) and birēfada (to make
brr!) have the meaning ‘to be afraid.’ Thus o! being the usual answer to a
call, and also a cry to drive cattle, there are formed from it by the addition
of verbal terminations, the verbs oada, ‘to answer,’ and ofa, ‘to drive.’
If the magnific and honorific o of Japanese grammar can be assigned to an
interjectional origin, its capabilities in modifying signification become
instructive.[271] It is used before substantives as a prefix of honour; couni,
‘country,’ thus becoming ocouni. When a man is talking to his superiors, he
puts o before the names of all objects belonging to them, while these
superiors drop the o in speaking of anything of their own, or an inferior’s;
among the higher classes, persons of equal rank put o before the names of
each other’s things, but not before their own; it is polite to say o before the
names of all women, and well-bred children are distinguished from little
peasants by the way in which they are careful to put it even before the
nursery names of father and mother, o toto, o caca, which correspond to the
papa and mama of Europe. A distinction is made in written language
between o, which is put to anything royal, and oo which means great, as
may be instanced in the use of the word mets’ké or ‘spy’ (literally ‘eye-
fixer’); o mets’ké is a princely or imperial spy, while oo mets’ké is the spy
in chief. This interjectional adjective oo, great, is usually prefixed to the
name of the capital city, which it is customary to call oo Yedo in speaking to
one of its inhabitants, or when officials talk of it among themselves. And
lastly, the o of honour is prefixed to verbs in all their forms of conjugation,
and it is polite to say ominahai matse, ‘please to see,’ instead of the mere
plebeian minahai matse. Now an English child of six years old would at
once understand these formations if taken as interjectional; and if we do not
incorporate in our grammar the o! of admiration and reverential
embarrassment, it is because we have not chosen to take advantage of this
rudimentary means of expression. Another exclamation, the cry of io! has
taken a place in etymology. When added by the German to his cry of ‘Fire!’
‘Murder!’ Feuerio! Mordio! it remains indeed as mere an interjection as the
o! in our street cries of ‘Pease-o!’ ‘Dust-o!’ or the â! in old German wafenâ!
‘to arms!’ ‘hilfâ! ‘help!’ But the Iroquois of North America makes a fuller
use of his materials, and carries his io! of admiration into the very
formation of compound words, adding it to a noun to say that it is beautiful
or good; thus, in Mohawk, garonta means a tree, garontio a beautiful tree;
in like manner, Ohio means ‘river-beautiful;’ and Ontario, ‘hill-rock-

beautiful,’ is derived in the same way. When, in the old times of the French
occupation of Canada, there was sent over a Governor-General of New
France, Monsieur de Montmagny, the Iroquois rendered his name from their
word ononte, ‘mountain,’ translating him into Onontio, or ‘Great
Mountain,’ and thus it came to pass that the name of Onontio was handed
down long after, like that of Cæsar, as the title of each succeeding governor,
while for the King of France was reserved the yet higher style of ‘the great
Onontio.’[272]
The quest of interjectional derivations for sense-words is apt to lead the
etymologist into very rash speculations. One of his best safeguards is to test
forms supposed to be interjectional, by ascertaining whether anything
similar has come into use in decidedly distinct languages. For instance,
among the familiar sounds which fall on the traveller’s ear in Spain is the
muleteer’s cry to his beasts, arre! arre! From this interjection, a family of
Spanish words are reasonably supposed to be derived; the verb arrear, ‘to
drive mules,’ arriero, the name for the ‘muleteer’ himself, and so forth.[273]
Now is this arre! itself a genuine interjectional sound? It seems likely to be
so, for Captain Wilson found it in use in the Pelew Islands, where the
paddlers in the canoes were kept up to their work by crying to them arree!
arree! Similar interjections are noticed elsewhere with a sense of mere
affirmation, as in an Australian dialect where a-ree! is set down as meaning
‘indeed,’ and in the Quichua language where ari! means ‘yes!’ whence the
verb ariñi, ‘to affirm.’ Two other cautions are desirable in such enquiries.
These are, not to travel too far from the absolute meaning expressed by the
interjection, unless there is strong corroborative evidence, and not to
override ordinary etymology by treating derivative words as though they
were radical. Without these checks, even sound principle breaks down in
application, as the following two examples may show. It is quite true that
h’m! is a common interjectional call, and that the Dutch have made a verb
of it, hemmen, ‘to hem after a person.’ We may notice a similar call in West
Africa, in the mma! which is translated ‘hallo! stop!’ in the language of
Fernando Po. But to apply this as a derivation for German hemmen, ‘to
stop, check, restrain,’ to hem in, and even to the hem of a garment, as Mr.
Wedgwood does without even a perhaps,[274] is travelling too far beyond the
record. Again, it is quite true that sounds of clicking and smacking of the
lips are common expressions of satisfaction all over the world, and words
may be derived from these sounds, as where a vocabulary of the Chinook

language of North-West America expresses ‘good’ as t’k-tok-te, or e-tok-te,
sounds which we cannot doubt to be derived from such clicking noises, if
the words are not in fact attempts to write down the very clicks themselves.
But it does not follow that we may take such words as deliciæ, delicatus,
out of a highly organized language like Latin, and refer them, as the same
etymologist does, to an interjectional utterance of satisfaction, dlick![275] To
do this, is to ignore altogether the composition of words; we might as well
explain Latin dilectus or English delight as direct formations from
expressive sound. In concluding these remarks on interjections, two or three
groups of words may be brought forward as examples of the application of
collected evidence from a number of languages, mostly of the lower races.
The affirmative and negative particles, which bear in language such
meanings as ‘yes!’ ‘indeed!’ and ‘no!’ ‘not,’ may have their derivations
from many different sources. It is thought that the Australian dialects all
belong to a single stock, but so unlike are the sounds they use for ‘no!’ and
‘yes!’ that tribes are actually named from these words as a convenient
means of distinction. Thus the tribes known as Gureang, Kamilaroi, Kogai,
Wolaroi, Wailwun, Wiratheroi, have their names from the words they use for
‘no,’ these being gure, kamil, ko, wol, wail, wira, respectively; and on the
other hand the Pikambul are said to be so called from their word pika, ‘yes.’
The device of naming tribes, thus invented by the savages of Australia, and
which perhaps recurs in Brazil in the name of the Cocatapuya tribe (coca
‘no,’ tapuya ‘man’) is very curious in its similarity to the mediæval division
of Langue d’oc and Langue d’oïl, according to the words for ‘yes!’ which
prevailed in Southern and Northern France: oc! is Latin hoc, as we might
say ‘that’s it!’ while the longer form hoc illud was reduced to oïl! and
thence to oui! Many other of the words for ‘yes!’ and ‘no!’ may be sense-
words, as, again, the French and Italian si! is Latin sic. But on the other
hand there is reason to think that many of these particles in use in various
languages are not sense-words, but sound-words of a purely interjectional
kind; or, what comes nearly to the same thing, a feeling of fitness of the
sound to the meaning may have affected the choice and shaping of sense-
words—a remark of large application in such enquiries as the present. It is
an old suggestion that the primitive sound of such words as non is a nasal
interjection of doubt or dissent.[276] It corresponds in sound with the visible
gesture of closing the lips, while a vowel-interjection, with or without
aspiration, belongs rather to open-mouthed utterance. Whether from this or

some other cause, there is a remarkable tendency among most distant and
various languages of the world, on the one hand to use vowel-sounds, with
soft or hard breathing, to express ‘yes!’ and on the other hand to use nasal
consonants to express ‘no!’ The affirmative form is much the commoner.
The guttural i-i! of the West Australian, the ēē! of the Darien, the a-ah! of
the Clallam, the é! of the Yakama Indians, the e! of the Basuto, and the ai!
of the Kanuri, are some examples of a wide group of forms, of which the
following are only part of those noted down in Polynesian and South
American districts—ii! é! ia! aio! io! ya! ey! &c., h’! heh! he-e! hü!
hoehah! ah-ha! &c. The idea has most weight where pairs of words for
‘yes!’ and ‘no!’ are found both conforming. Thus in the very suggestive
description by Dobrizhoffer among the Abipones of South America, for
‘yes!’ the men and youths say héé! the women say háá! and the old men
give a grunt; while for ‘no’ they all say yna! and make the loudness of the
sound indicate the strength of the negation. Dr. Martius’s collection of
vocabularies of Brazilian tribes, philologically very distinct, contains
several such pairs of affirmatives and negatives, the equivalents of
‘yes!’—‘no!’ being in Tupi ayé—aan! aani!; in Guato ii!—mau!; in
Jumana, aeae!—mäiu!; in Miranha ha ú!—nani! The Quichua of Peru
affirms by y! hu! and expresses ‘no,’ ‘not,’ ‘not at all,’ by ama! manan! &c.,
making from the latter the verb manamñi, ‘to deny.’ The Quiché of
Guatemala has e or ve for the affirmative, ma, man, mana, for the negative.
In Africa, again, the Galla language has ee! for ‘yes!’ and hn, hin, hm, for
‘not!’; the Fernandian ee! for ‘yes!’ and ‘nt for ‘not;’ while the Coptic
dictionary gives the affirmative (Latin ‘sane’) as eie, ie, and the negative by
a long list of nasal sounds such as an, emmen, en, mmn, &c. The Sanskrit
particles hi! ‘indeed, certainly,’ na, ‘not,’ exemplify similar forms in Indo-
European languages, down to our own aye! and no![277] There must be some
meaning in all this, for otherwise I could hardly have noted down
incidentally, without making any attempt at a general search, so many cases
from such different languages, only finding a comparatively small number
of contradictory cases.[278]
De Brosses maintained that the Latin stare, to stand, might be traced to an
origin in expressive sound. He fancied he could hear in it an organic radical
sign designating fixity, and could thus explain why st! should be used as a
call to make a man stand still. Its connexion with these sounds is often
spoken of in more modern books, and one imaginative German philologer

describes their origin among primæval men as vividly as though he had
been there to see. A man stands beckoning in vain to a companion who does
not see him, till at last his effort relieves itself by the help of the vocal
nerves, and involuntarily there breaks from him the sound st! Now the other
hears the sound, turns toward it, sees the beckoning gesture, knows that he
is called to stop; and when this has happened again and again, the action
comes to be described in common talk by uttering the now familiar st! and
thus sta becomes a root, the symbol of the abstract idea to stand![279] This is
a most ingenious conjecture, but unfortunately nothing more. It would be at
any rate strengthened, though not established, if its supporters could prove
that the st! used to call people in Germany, pst! in Spain, is itself a pure
interjectional sound. Even this, however, has never been made out. The call
has not yet been shown to be in use outside our own Indo-European family
of languages; and so long as it is only found in use within these limits, an
opponent might even plausibly claim it as an abbreviation of the very sta!
(‘stay! stop!’) for which the theory proposes it as an origin.[280]
That it is not unfair to ask for fuller evidence of a sound being purely
interjectional than its appearance in a single family of languages, may be
shown by examining another group of interjections, which are found among
the remotest tribes, and thus have really considerable claims to rank among
the primary sounds of language. These are the simple sibilants, s! sh! h’sh!
used especially to scare birds, and among men to express aversion or call
for silence. Catlin describes a party of Sioux Indians, when they came to the
portrait of a dead chief, each putting his hand over his mouth with a hush-
sh; and when he himself wished to approach the sacred ‘medicine’ in a
Mandan lodge, he was called to refrain by the same hush-sh! Among
ourselves the sibilant interjection passes into two exactly opposite senses,
according as it is meant to put the speaker himself to silence, or to
command silence for him to be heard; and thus we find the sibilant used
elsewhere, sometimes in the one way and sometimes in the other. Among
the wild Veddas of Ceylon, iss! is an exclamation of disapproval, as in
ancient or modern Europe; and the verb shârak, to hiss, is used in Hebrew
with a like sense, ‘they shall hiss him out of his place.’ But in Japan
reverence is expressed by a hiss, commanding silence. Captain Cook
remarked that the natives of the New Hebrides expressed their admiration
by hissing like geese. Casalis says of the Basutos, ‘Hisses are the most
unequivocal marks of applause, and are as much courted in the African

parliaments as they are dreaded by our candidates for popular favour.’[281]
Among other sibilant interjections, are Turkish sûsâ! Ossetic ss! sos!
‘silence!’ Fernandian sia! ‘listen!’ ‘tush!’ Yoruba sió! ‘pshaw!’ Thus it
appears that these sounds, far from being special to one linguistic family,
are very widespread elements of human speech. Nor is there any question as
to their passage into fully-formed words, as in our verb to hush, which has
passed into the sense of ‘to quiet, put to sleep’ (adjectively, ‘as hush as
death’), metaphorically to hush up a matter, or Greek σίζω ‘to hush, say
hush! command silence.’ Even Latin silere and Gothic silan, ‘to be silent,’
may with some plausibility be explained as derived from the interjectional
s! of silence.
Sanskrit dictionaries recognize several words which explicitly state their
own interjectional derivation; such are hûñkâra (hûm-making), ‘the
utterance of the mystic religious exclamation hûm!’ and çiççabda (çiç-
sound), ‘a hiss.’ Besides these obvious formations, the interjectional
element is present to some greater or less degree in the list of Sanskrit
radicals, which represent probably better than those of any other language
the verb-roots of the ancient Aryan stock. In ru, ‘to roar, cry, wail’ and in
kakh, ‘to laugh,’ we have the simpler kind of interjectional derivation, that
which merely describes a sound. As to the more difficult kind, which carry
the sense into a new stage, Mr. Wedgwood makes out a strong case for the
connexion of interjections of loathing and aversion, such as pooh! fie! &c.,
with that large group of words which are represented in English by foul and
fiend, in Sanskrit by the verbs pûy, ‘to become foul, to stink’ and piy, pîy,
‘to revile, to hate.’[282] Further evidence may be here adduced in support of
this theory. The languages of the lower races use the sound pu to express an
evil smell; the Zulu remarks that ‘the meat says pu’ (inyama iti pu),
meaning that it stinks; the Timorese has poöp ‘putrid;’ the Quiché language
has puh, poh ‘corruption, pus,’ pohir ‘to turn bad, rot,’ puz ‘rottenness, what
stinks;’ the Tupi word for nasty, puxi, may be compared with the Latin
putidus, and the Columbia River name for the ‘skunk,’ o-pun-pun, with
similar names of stinking animals, Sanskrit pûtikâ ‘civet-cat,’ and French
putois ‘pole-cat.’ From the French interjection fi! words have long been
formed belonging to the language, if not authenticated by the Academy; in
mediæval French ‘maistre fi-fi’ was a recognized term for a scavenger, and
fi-fi books are not yet extinct.

There has been as yet, unfortunately, too much separation between what
may be called generative philology, which examines into the ultimate
origins of words, and historical philology, which traces their transmission
and change. It will be a great gain to the science of language to bring these
two branches of enquiry into closer union, even as the processes they relate
to have been going on together since the earliest days of speech. At present
the historical philologists of the school of Grimm and Bopp, whose great
work has been the tracing of our Indo-European dialects to an early Aryan
form of language, have had much the advantage in fulness of evidence and
strictness of treatment. At the same time it is evident that the views of the
generative philologists, from De Brosses onward, embody a sound
principle, and that much of the evidence collected as to emotional and other
directly expressive words, is of the highest value in the argument. But in
working out the details of such word-formation, it must be remembered that
no department of philology lies more open to Augustine’s caustic remark on
the etymologists of his time, that like the interpretation of dreams, the
derivation of words is set down by each man according to his own fancy.
(Ut somniorum interpretatio ita verborum origo pro cujusque ingenio
prædicatur.)

CHAPTER VI.
EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE (continued).

Imitative Words—Human actions named from sound—Animals’ names
from cries, &c.—Musical Instruments—Sounds reproduced—Words
modified to adapt sound to sense—Reduplication—Graduation of
vowels to express distance and difference—Children’s Language—
Sound-words as related to Sense-words—Language an original product
of the lower Culture.

From the earliest times of language to our own day, it is unlikely that men
ever quite ceased to be conscious that some of their words were derived
from imitation of the common sounds heard about them. In our own modern
English, for instance, results of such imitation are evident; flies buzz, bees
hum, snakes hiss, a cracker or a bottle of ginger-beer pops, a cannon or a
bittern booms. In the words for animals and for musical instruments in the
various languages of the world, the imitation of their cries and tones is often
to be plainly heard, as in the names of the hoopoe, the ai-ai sloth, the kaka
parrot, the Eastern tomtom, which is a drum, the African ulule, which is a
flute, the Siamese khong-bong, which is a wooden harmonicon, and in like
manner through a host of other words. But these evident cases are far from
representing the whole effects of imitation on the growth of language. They
form, indeed, the easy entrance to a philological region, which becomes less
penetrable the farther it is explored.
The operations of which we see the results before us in the actual languages
of the world seem to have been somewhat as follows. Men have imitated
their own emotional utterances or interjections, the cries of animals, the
tones of musical instruments, the sounds of shouting, howling, stamping,
breaking, tearing, scraping, with others which are all day coming to their
ears, and out of these imitations many current words indisputably have their

source. But these words, as we find them in use, differ often widely, often
beyond all recognition, from the original sounds they sprang from. In the
first place, man’s voice can only make a very rude copy of most sounds his
ear receives; his possible vowels are very limited in their range compared
with natural tones, and his possible consonants still more helpless as a
means of imitating natural noises. Moreover, his voice is only allowed to
use a part even of this imperfect imitative power, seeing that each language
for its own convenience restricts it to a small number of set vowels and
consonants, to which the imitative sounds have to conform, thus becoming
conventionalized into articulate words with further loss of imitative
accuracy. No class of words have a more perfect imitative origin than those
which simply profess to be vocal imitations of sound. How ordinary
alphabets to some extent succeed and to some extent fail in writing down
these sounds may be judged from a few examples. Thus, the Australian
imitation of a spear or bullet striking is given as toop; to the Zulu, when a
calabash is beaten, it says boo; the Karens hear the flitting ghosts of the
dead call in the wailing voice of the wind, re, re, ro, ro; the old traveller,
Pietro della Valle, tells how the Shah of Persia sneered at Timur and his
Tartars, with their arrows that went ter ter; certain Buddhist heretics
maintained that water is alive, because when it boils it says chichitá,
chitichita, a symptom of vitality which occasioned much theological
controversy as to drinking cold and warm water. Lastly, sound-words taken
up into the general inventory of a language have to follow its organic
changes, and in the course of phonetic transition, combination, decay, and
mutilation, to lose ever more and more their original shape. To take a single
example, the French huer ‘to shout’ (Welsh hwa) may be a perfect imitative
verb; yet when it passes into modern English hue and cry, our changed
pronunciation of the vowel destroys all imitation of the call. Now to the
language-makers all this was of little account. They merely wanted
recognized words to express recognized thought, and no doubt arrived by
repeated trials at systems which were found practically to answer this
purpose. But to the modern philologist, who is attempting to work out the
converse of the problem, and to follow backward the course of words to
original imitative sound, the difficulty is most embarrassing. It is not only
that thousands of words really derived from such imitation may now by
successive change have lost all safe traces of their history; such mere
deficiency of knowledge is only a minor evil. What is far worse is that the

way is thrown open to an unlimited number of false solutions, which yet
look on the face of them fully as like truth as others which we know
historically to be true. One thing is clear, that it is of no use to resort to
violent means, to rush in among the words of language, explaining them
away right and left as derived each from some remote application of an
imitative noise. The advocate of the Imitative Theory who attempts this,
trusting in his own powers of discernment, has indeed taken in hand a
perilous task, for, in fact, of all judges of the question at issue, he has
nourished and trained himself up to become the very worst. His imagination
is ever suggesting to him what his judgment would like to find true; like a
witness answering the questions of the counsel on his own side, he answers
in good faith, but with what bias we all know. It was thus with De Brosses,
to whom this department of philology owes so much. It is nothing to say
that he had a keen ear for the voice of Nature; she must have positively
talked to him in alphabetic language, for he could hear the sound of
hollowness in the sk of σκάπτω ‘to dig,’ of hardness in the cal of callosity,
the noise of insertion of a body between two others in the tr of trans, intra.
In enquiries so liable to misleading fancy, no pains should be spared in
securing impartial testimony, and it fortunately happens that there are
available sources of such evidence, which, when thoroughly worked, will
give to the theory of imitative words as near an approach to accuracy as has
been attained to in any other wide philological problem. By comparing a
number of languages, widely apart in their general system and materials,
and whose agreement as to the words in question can only be accounted for
by similar formation of words from similar suggestion of sound, we obtain
groups of words whose imitative character is indisputable. The groups here
considered consist in general of imitative words of the simpler kind, those
directly connected with the special sound they are taken from, but their
examination to some extent admits of words being brought in, where the
connexion of the idea expressed with the sound imitated is more remote.
This, lastly, opens the far wider and more difficult problem, how far
imitation of sounds is the primary cause of the great mass of words in the
vocabularies of the world, between whose sound and sense no direct
connexion appears.
Words which express human actions accompanied with sound form a very
large and intelligible class. In remote and most different languages, we find
such forms as pu, puf, bu, buf, fu, fuf, in use with the meaning of puffing,

fuffing; or blowing; Malay puput; Tongan buhi; Maori pupui; Australian
bobun, bwa-bun; Galla bufa, afufa; Zulu futa, punga, pupuza (fu, pu, used
as expressive particles); Quiché puba; Quichua puhuni; Tupi ypeû; Finnish
puhkia; Hebrew puach; Danish puste; Lithuanian púciu; and in numbers of
other languages;[283] here, grammatical adjuncts apart, the significant force
lies in the imitative syllable. Savages have named the European musket
when they saw it, by the sound pu, describing not the report, but the puff of
smoke issuing from the muzzle. The Society Islanders supposed at first that
the white men blew through the barrel of the gun, and they called it
accordingly pupuhi, from the verb puhi to blow, while the New Zealanders
more simply called it a pu. So the Amaxosa of South Africa call it umpu,
from the imitative sound pu! The Chinook Jargon of North-West America
uses the phrase mamook poo (make poo) for a verb ‘to shoot,’ and a six-
chambered revolver is called tohum poo, i.e., a ‘six-poo.’ When a European
uses the word puff to denote the discharge of a gun, he is merely referring to
the smoke blown out, as he would speak of a puff of wind, or even a
powder-puff or a puff-ball; and when a pistol is called in colloquial German
a puffer, the meaning of the word matches that used for it in French Argot, a
‘soufflant.’ It has often been supposed that the puff imitates the actual
sound, the bang of the gun, and this has been brought forward to show by
what extremely different words one and the same sound may be imitated,
but this is a mistake.[284] These derivations of the name of the gun from the
notion of blowing correspond with those which give names to the
comparatively noiseless blow-tube of the bird-hunter, called by the Indians
of Yucatan a pub, in South America by the Chiquitos a pucuna, by the
Cocamas a puna. Looking into vocabularies of languages which have such
verbs ‘to blow,’ it is usual to find with them other words apparently related
to them, and expressing more or less distant ideas. Thus Australian poo-yu,
puyu ‘smoke;’ Quichua puhucuni ‘to light a fire,’ punquini ‘to swell,’ puyu,
puhuyu ‘a cloud;’ Maori puku ‘to pant,’ puka ‘to swell;’ Tupi púpú, pupúre
‘to boil;’ Galla bube ‘wind,’ bubiza ‘to cool by blowing;’ Kanuri (root fu)
fungin ‘to blow, swell,’ furúdu ‘a stuffed pad or bolster,’ &c., bubute
‘bellows’ (bubute fungin ‘I blow the bellows’); Zulu (dropping the prefixes)
puku, pukupu ‘frothing, foam,’ whence pukupuku ‘an empty frothy fellow,’
pupuma ‘to bubble, boil,’ fu ‘a cloud,’ fumfu ‘blown about like high grass in
the wind,’ whence fumfuta ‘to be confused, thrown into disorder,’ futo
‘bellows,’ fuba ‘the breast, chest,’ then figuratively ‘bosom, conscience.’

The group of words belonging to the closed lips, of which mum, mumming,
mumble are among the many forms belonging to European languages,[285]
are worked out in like manner among the lower races—Vei mu mu ‘dumb’;
Mpongwe imamu ‘dumb’; Zulu momata (from moma, ‘a motion with the
mouth as in mumbling’) ‘to move the mouth or lips,’ mumata ‘to close the
lips as with a mouthful of water,’ mumuta, mumuza ‘to eat mouthfuls of
corn, &c., with the lips shut;’ Tahitian mamu ‘to be silent,’ omumu ‘to
murmur;’ Fijian, nomo, nomo-nomo ‘to be silent;’ Chilian, ñomn ‘to be
silent;’ Quiché, mem ‘mute,’ whence memer ‘to become mute;’ Quichua,
amu ‘dumb, silent,’ amullini ‘to have something in the mouth,’ amul-
layacuni simicta ‘to mutter, to grumble.’ The group represented by Sanskrit
t’hût’hû ‘the sound of spitting,’ Persian thu kerdan (make thu) ‘to spit,’
Greek πτύω, may be compared with Chinook mamook toh, tooh, (make toh,
tooh); Chilian tuvcùtun (make tuv); Tahitian tutua; Galla twu; Yoruba tu.
Among the Sanskrit verb-roots, none carries its imitative nature more
plainly than kshu ‘to sneeze;’ the following analogous forms are from South
America:—Chilian, echiun; Quichua, achhini; and from various languages
of Brazilian tribes, techa-ai, haitschu, atchian, natschun, aritischune, &c.
Another imitative verb is well shown in the Negro-English dialect of
Surinam, njam ‘to eat’ (pron. nyam), njam-njam ‘food’ (‘en hem njanjam
ben de sprinkhan nanga boesi-honi’—‘and his meat was locusts and wild
honey’). In Australia the imitative verb ‘to eat’ reappears as g’nam-ang. In
Africa the Susu language has nimnim, ‘to taste,’ and a similar formation is
observed in the Zulu nambita ‘to smack the lips after eating or tasting, and
thence to be tasteful, to be pleasant to the mind.’ This is an excellent
instance of the transition of mere imitative sound to the expression of
mental emotion, and it corresponds with the imitative way in which the
Yakama language, in speaking of little children or pet animals, expresses
the verb ‘to love’ as nem-no-sha (to make n’m-n’). In more civilized
countries these forms are mostly confined to baby-language. The Chinese
child’s word for eating is nam, in English nurseries nim is noticed as
answering the same purpose, and the Swedish dictionary even recognizes
namnam ‘a tid-bit.’
As for imitative names of animals derived from their cries or noises, they
are to be met with in every language from the Australian twonk ‘frog,’ the
Yakama rol-rol ‘lark,’ to the Coptic eeiō ‘ass,’ the Chinese maou ‘cat,’ and
the English cuckoo and peewit. Their general principle of formation being

acknowledged, their further philological interest turns mostly on cases
where corresponding words have thus been formed independently in distant
regions, and those where the imitative name of the creature, or its habitual
sound, passes to express some new idea suggested by its character. The
Sanskrit name of the kâka crow reappears in the name of a similar bird in
British Columbia, the káh-káh; a fly is called by the natives of Australia a
bumberoo, like Sanskrit bambharâli ‘fly,’ Greek βομ-βύλιος, and our
bumble-bee. Analogous to the name of the tse-tse fly, the terror of African
travellers, is ntsintsi, the word for ‘fly’ among the Basutos, which also, by a
simple metaphor, serves to express the idea of ‘a parasite.’ Mr. H. W.
Bates’s description seems to settle the dispute among naturalists, whether
the toucan had its name from its cry or not. He speaks of its loud, shrill,
yelping cries having ‘a vague resemblance to the syllables tocáno, tocáno,
and hence the Indian name of this genus of birds.’ Granting this, we can
trace this sound-word into a very new meaning; for it appears that the bird’s
monstrous bill has suggested a name for a certain large-nosed tribe of
Indians, who are accordingly called Tucanos.[286] The cock, gallo
quiquiriqui, as the Spanish nursery-language calls him, has a long list of
names from various languages which in various ways imitate his crowing;
in Yoruba he is called koklo, in Ibo okoko, akoka, in Zulu kuku, in Finnish
kukko, in Sanskrit kukkuta, and so on. He is mentioned in the Zend-Avesta
in a very curious way, by a name which elaborately imitates his cry, but
which the ancient Persians seem to have held disrespectful to their holy
bird, who rouses men from sleep to good thought, word, and work:—

‘The bird who bears the name of Parôdars, O holy Zarathustra;
Upon whom evil-speaking men impose the name Kabrkataç.’[287]

The crowing of the cock (Malay kâluruk, kukuk) serves to mark a point of
time, cockcrow. Other words originally derived from such imitation of
crowing have passed into other curiously transformed meanings: Old
French cocart ‘vain;’ modern French coquet ‘strutting like a cock,
coquetting, a coxcomb;’ cocarde ‘a cockade’ (from its likeness to a cock’s
comb); one of the best instances is coquelicot, a name given for the same
reason to the wild poppy, and even more distinctly in Languedoc, where
cacaracá means both the crowing and the flower. The hen in some

languages has a name corresponding to that of the cock, as in Kussa
kukuduna ‘cock,’ kukukasi ‘hen;’ Ewe koklo-tsu ‘cock,’ koklo-no ‘hen;’ and
her cackle (whence she has in Switzerland the name of gugel, güggel) has
passed into language as a term for idle gossip and chatter of women, caquet,
caqueter, gackern, much as the noise of a very different creature seems to
have given rise not only to its name, Italian cicala, but to a group of words
represented by cicalar ‘to chirp, chatter, talk sillily.’ The pigeon is a good
example of this kind, both for sound and sense. It is Latin pipio, Italian
pippione, piccione, pigione, modern Greek πιπίνιον, French pipion (old),
pigeon; its derivation is from the young bird’s peep, Latin pipire, Italian
pipiare, pigiolare, modern Greek πιπινίζω, to chirp; by an easy metaphor, a
pigeon comes to mean ‘a silly young fellow easily caught,’ to pigeon ‘to
cheat,’ Italian pipione ‘a silly gull, one that is soon caught and trepanned,’
pippionare ‘to pigeon, to gull one.’ In an entirely different family of
languages, Mr. Wedgwood points out a curiously similar process of
derivation; Magyar pipegni, pipelni ‘to peep or cheep;’ pipe, pipök ‘a
chicken, gosling;’ pipe-ember (chicken-man), ‘a silly young fellow,
booby.’[288] The derivation of Greek βοῦς, Latin bos, Welsh bu, from the
ox’s lowing, or booing as it is called in the north country, has been much
debated. With an excessive desire to make Sanskrit answer as a general
Indo-European type, Bopp connected Sanskrit go, old German chuo,
English cow, with these words, on the unusual and forced assumption of a
change from guttural to labial.[289] The direct derivation from sound,
however, is favoured by other languages, Cochin-Chinese bo, Hottentot
bou. The beast may almost answer for himself in the words of that Spanish
proverb which remarks that people talk according to their nature: ‘Habló el
buey, y dijó bu!’ ‘The ox spoke, and he said boo!’
Among musical instruments with imitative names are the following:—the
shee-shee-quoi, the mystic rattle of the Red Indian medicine-man, an
imitative word which reappears in the Darien Indian shak-shak, the shook-
shook of the Arawaks, the Chinook shugh (whence shugh-opoots, rattletail,
i.e., ‘rattlesnake;’)—the drum, called ganga in Haussa, gañgañ in the
Yoruba country, gunguma by the Gallas, and having its analogue in the
Eastern gong;—the bell, called in Yakama (N. Amer.) kwa-lal-kwa-lal, in
Yalof (W. Afr.) walwal, in Russian kolokol. The sound of the horn is
imitated in English nurseries as toot-toot, and this is transferred to express
the ‘omnibus’ of which the bugle is the signal: with this nursery word is to

be classed the Peruvian name for the ‘shell-trumpet,’ pututu, and the Gothic
thuthaurn (thut-horn), which is even used in the Gothic Bible for the last
trumpet of the day of judgement,—‘In spêdistin thuthaúrna, thuthaúrneith
auk jah daúthans ustandand’ (I Cor. xv. 52). How such imitative words,
when thoroughly taken up into language, suffer change of pronunciation in
which the original sound-meaning is lost, may be seen in the English word
tabor, which we might not recognize as a sound-word at all, did we not
notice that it is French tabour, a word which in the form tambour obviously
belongs to a group of words for drums, extending from the small rattling
Arabic tubl to the Indian dundhubi and the tombe, the Moqui drum made of
a hollowed log. The same group shows the transfer of such imitative words
to objects which are like the instrument, but have nothing to do with its
sound; few people who talk of tambour-work, and fewer still who speak of
a footstool as a tabouret, associate these words with the sound of a drum,
yet the connexion is clear enough. When these two processes go on
together, and a sound-word changes its original sound on the one hand, and
transfers its meaning to something else on the other, the result may soon
leave philological analysis quite helpless, unless by accident historical
evidence is forthcoming. Thus with the English word pipe. Putting aside the
particular pronunciation which we give the word, and referring it back to its
mediæval Latin or French sound in pipa, pipe, we have before us an evident
imitative name of a musical instrument, derived from a familiar sound used
also to represent the chirping of chickens, Latin pipire, English to peep, as
in the translation of Isaiah viii. 19: ‘Seek ... unto wizards that peep, and that
mutter.’ The Algonquin Indians appear to have formed from this sound pib
(with a grammatical suffix) their name for the pib-e-gwun or native flute.
Now just as tuba, tubus, ‘a trumpet’ (itself very likely an imitative word)
has given a name for any kind of tube, so the word pipe has been
transferred from the musical instrument to which it first belonged, and is
used to describe tubes of various sorts, gas-pipes, water-pipes, and pipes in
general. There is nothing unusual in these transitions of meaning, which are
in fact rather the rule than the exception. The chibouk was originally a
herdsman’s pipe or flute in Central Asia. The calumet, popularly ranked
with the tomahawk and the mocassin among characteristic Red Indian
words, is only the name for a shepherd’s pipe (Latin calamus) in the dialect
of Normandy, corresponding with the chalumeau of literary French; for
when the early colonists in Canada saw the Indians performing the strange

operation of smoking, ‘with a hollow piece of stone or wood like a pipe,’ as
Jacques Cartier has it, they merely gave to the native tobacco-pipe the name
of the French musical instrument it resembled. Now changes of sound and
of sense like this of the English word pipe must have been in continual
operation in hundreds of languages where we have no evidence to follow
them by, and where we probably may never obtain such evidence. But what
little we do know must compel us to do justice to the imitation of sound as a
really existing process, capable of furnishing an indefinitely large supply of
words for things and actions which have no necessary connexion at all with
that sound. Where the traces of the transfer are lost, the result is a stock of
words which are the despair of philologists, but are perhaps none the less
fitted for the practical use of men who simply want recognized symbols for
recognized ideas.
The claim of the Eastern tomtom to have its name from a mere imitation of
its sound seems an indisputable one; but when it is noticed in what various
languages the beating of a resounding object is expressed by something like
tum, tumb, tump, tup, as in Javan tumbuk, Coptic tmno, ‘to pound in a
mortar,’ it becomes evident that the admission involves more than at first
sight appears. In Malay, timpa, tampa, is ‘to beat out, hammer, forge;’ in the
Chinook Jargon tum-tum is ‘the heart,’ and by combining the same sound
with the English word ‘water,’ a name is made for ‘waterfall,’ tum-wâta.
The Gallas of East Africa declare that a box on the ear seems to them to
make a noise like tub, for they call its sound tubdjeda, that is, ‘to say tub.’
In the same language, tuma is ‘to beat,’ whence tumtu, ‘a workman,
especially one who beats, a smith.’ With the aid of another imitative word,
bufa ‘to blow,’ the Gallas can construct this wholly imitative sentence,
tumtun bufa bufti, ‘the smith blows with bellows,’ as an English child might
say, ‘the tumtum puffs the puffer.’ This imitative sound seems to have
obtained a footing among the Aryan verb-roots, as in Sanskrit tup, tubh ‘to
smite,’ while in Greek, tup, tump, has the meaning of ‘to beat, to thump,’
producing for instance τύμπανον, tympanum, ‘a drum or tomtom.’ Again,
the verb to crack has become in modern English as thorough a root-word as
the language possesses. The mere imitation of the sound of breaking has
passed into a verb to break; we speak of a cracked cup or a cracked
reputation without a thought of imitation of sound; but we cannot yet use
the German krachen or French craquer in this way, for they have not
developed in meaning as our word has, but remain in their purely imitative

stage. There are two corresponding Sanskrit words for the saw, kra-kara,
kra-kacha, that is to say, the ‘kra-maker, kra-crier;’ and it is to be observed
that all such terms, which expressly state that they are imitations of sound,
are particularly valuable evidence in these enquiries, for whatever doubt
there may be as to other words being really derived from imitative sound,
there can, of course, be none here. Moreover, there is evidence of the same
sound having given rise to imitative words in other families of language,
Dahoman kra-kra, ‘a watchman’s rattle;’ Grebo grikâ ‘a saw;’ Aino chacha
‘to saw;’ Malay graji ‘a saw,’ karat ‘to gnash the teeth,’ karot ‘to make a
grating noise;’ Coptic khrij ‘to gnash the teeth,’ khrajrej ‘to grate.’ Another
form of the imitation is given in the descriptive Galla expression
cacakdjeda, i.e., ‘to say cacak,’ ‘to crack, krachen.’ With this sound
corresponds a whole family of Peruvian words, of which the root seems to
be the guttural cca, coming from far back in the throat; ccallani, ‘to break,’
ccatatani, ‘to gnash the teeth,’ ccacñiy, ‘thunder,’ and the expressive words
for ‘a thunder-storm,’ ccaccaccahay, which carries the imitative process so
much farther than such European words as thunder-clap, donner-klapf. In
Maori, pata is ‘to patter as water dropping, drops of rain.’ The Manchu
language describes the noise of fruits falling from the trees as pata pata (so
Hindustani bhadbhad); this is like our word pat, and we should say in the
same manner that the fruit comes pattering down, while French patatra is a
recognized imitation of something falling. Coptic potpt is ‘to fall,’ and the
Australian badbadin (or patpatin) is translated into almost literal English as
pitpatting. On the strength of such non-Aryan languages, are we to assign
an imitative origin to the Sanskrit verb-root pat, ‘to fall,’ and to Greek
πίπτω?
Wishing rather to gain a clear survey of the principles of language-making
than to plunge into obscure problems, it is not necessary for me to discuss
here questions of intricate detail. The point which continually arises is this,
—granted that a particular kind of transition from sound to sense is possible
in the abstract, may it be safely claimed in a particular case? In looking
through the vocabularies of the world, it appears that most languages offer
words which, by obvious likeliness or by their correspondence with similar
forms elsewhere, may put forward a tolerable claim to be considered
imitative. Some languages, as Aztec or Mohawk, offer singularly few
examples, while in others they are much more numerous. Take Australian
cases: walle, ‘to wail;’ bung-bung-ween, ‘thunder;’ wirriti, ‘to blow, as

wind;’ wirrirriti, ‘to storm, rage, as in fight;’ wirri, bwirri, ‘the native
throwing club,’ seemingly so called from its whir through the air; kurarriti,
‘to hum, buzz;’ kurrirrurriri, ‘round about, unintelligible,’ &c.; pitata, ‘to
knock, pelt, as rain,’ pitapitata, ‘to knock;’ wiiti, ‘to laugh, rejoice’—as in
our own ‘Turnament of Tottenham’:—

‘“We te he!” quoth Tyb, and lugh,
“Ye er a dughty man!”’

The so-called Chinook Jargon of British Columbia is a language crowded
with imitative words, sometimes adopted from the native Indian languages,
sometimes made on the spot by the combined efforts of the white man and
the Indian to make one another understand. Samples of its quality are hóh-
hoh, ‘to cough,’ kó-ko, ‘to knock,’ kwa-lal-kwa-lal, ‘to gallop,’ muck-a-
muck, ‘to eat,’ chak-chak, ‘the bald eagle’ (from its scream), mamook tsish
(make tsish), ‘to sharpen on the grindstone.’ It has been remarked by Prof.
Max Müller that the peculiar sound made in blowing out a candle is not a
favourite in civilized languages, but it seems to be recognized here, for no
doubt it is what the compiler of the vocabulary is doing his best to write
down when he gives mamook poh (make poh) as the Chinook expression
for ‘to blow out or extinguish as a candle.’ This jargon is in great measure
of new growth within the last seventy or eighty years, but its imitative
words do not differ in nature from those of the more ordinary and old-
established languages of the world. Thus among Brazilian tribes there
appear Tupi cororóng, cururuc, ‘to snore’ (compare Coptic kherkher,
Quichua ccorcuni (ccor)), whence it appears that an imitation of a snore
may perhaps serve the Carajás Indians to express ‘to sleep’ as arourou-cré,
as well as the related idea of ‘night,’ roou. Again Pimenteira ebaung, ‘to
bruise, beat,’ compares with Yoruba gba, ‘to slap,’ gbã (gbang) ‘to sound
loudly, to bang,’ and so forth. Among African languages, the Zulu seems
particularly rich in imitative words. Thus bibiza, ‘to dribble like children,
drivel in speaking’ (compare English bib); babala, ‘the larger bush-
antelope’ (from the baa of the female); boba, ‘to babble, chatter, be noisy,’
bobi, ‘a babbler;’ boboni, ‘a throstle’ (cries bo! bo! compare American
bobolink); bomboloza, ‘to rumble in the bowels, to have a bowel-
complaint;’ bubula, ‘to buzz like bees,’ bubulela, ‘a swarm of bees, a

buzzing crowd of people;’ bubuluza, ‘to make a blustering noise, like
frothing beer or boiling fat.’ These examples, from among those given
under one initial letter in one dictionary of one barbaric language, may give
an idea of the amount of the evidence from the languages of the lower races
bearing on the present problem.
For the present purpose of giving a brief series of examples of the sort of
words in which imitative sound seems fairly traceable, the strongest and
most manageable evidence is of course found among such words as directly
describe sounds or what produces them, such as cries of and names for
animals, the terms for action accompanied by sound, and the materials and
objects so acted upon. In further investigation it becomes more and more
requisite to isolate the sound-type or root from the modifications and
additions to which it has been subjected for grammatical and phonetical
adaptation. It will serve to give an idea of the extent and intricacy of this
problem, to glance at a group of words in one European language, and
notice the etymological network which spreads round the German word
klapf, in Grimm’s dictionary, klappen, klippen, klopfen, kläffen, klimpern,
klampern, klateren, kloteren, klitteren, klatzen, klacken, and more, to be
matched with allied forms in other languages. Setting aside the
consideration of grammatical inflexion, it belongs to the present subject to
notice that man’s imitative faculty in language is by no means limited to
making direct copies of sound and shaping them into words. It seizes upon
ready-made terms of whatever origin, alters and adapts them to make their
sound fitting to their sense, and pours into the dictionaries a flood of
adapted words of which the most difficult to analyse are those which are
neither altogether etymological nor altogether imitative, but partly both.
How words, while preserving, so to speak, the same skeleton, may be made
to follow the variation of sound, of force, of duration, of size, an imitative
group more or less connected with the last will show—crick, creak, crack,
crash, crush, crunch, craunch, scrunch, scraunch. It does not at all follow
that because a word suffers such imitative and symbolic changes it must be,
like this, directly imitative in its origin. What, for instance, could sound
more imitative than the name of that old-fashioned cannon for throwing
grape-shot, the patterero? Yet the etymology of the word appears in the
Spanish form pedrero, French perrier; it means simply an instrument for
throwing stones (piedra, pierre), and it was only when the Spanish word
was adopted in England that the imitative faculty caught and transformed it

into an apparent sound-word, resembling the verb to patter. The propensity
of language, especially in slang, to make sense of strange words by altering
them into something with an appropriate meaning has been often dwelt
upon by philologists, but the propensity to alter words into something with
an appropriate sound has produced results immensely more important. The
effects of symbolic change of sound acting upon verb-roots seem almost
boundless. The verb to waddle has a strong imitative appearance, and so in
German we can hardly resist the suggestion that imitative sound has to do
with the difference between wandern and wandeln; but all these verbs
belong to a family represented by Sanskrit vad, to go, Latin vado, and to
this root there seems no sufficient ground for assigning an imitative origin,
the traces of which it has at any rate lost if it ever had them. Thus, again, to
stamp with the foot, which has been claimed as an imitation of sound,
seems only a ‘coloured’ word. The root sta, ‘to stand,’ Sanskrit sthâ, forms
a causative stap, Sanskrit sthâpay, ‘to make to stand,’ English to stop, and a
foot-step is when the foot comes to a stand, a foot-stop. But we have Anglo-
Saxon stapan, stæpan, steppan, English to step, varying to express its
meaning by sound in to staup, to stamp, to stump, and to stomp, contrasting
in their violence or clumsy weight with the foot on the Dorset cottage-sill in
Barnes’s poem:—

‘Where love do seek the maïden’s evenèn vloor,
Wi’ stip-step light, an tip-tap slight
Ageän the door.’

By expanding, modifying, or, so to speak, colouring, sound is able to
produce effects closely like those of gesture-language, expressing length or
shortness of time, strength or weakness of action, and then passing into a
further stage to describe greatness or smallness of size or of distance, and
thence making its way into the widest fields of metaphor. And it does all
this with a force which is surprising when we consider how childishly
simple are the means employed. Thus the Bachapin of Africa call a man
with the cry héla! but according as he is far or farther off the sound of the
hêela! hê-ê-la! is lengthened out. Mr. Macgregor in his ‘Rob Roy on the
Jordan,’ graphically describes this method of expression, ‘“But where is
Zalmouda?”... Then with rough eagerness the strongest of the Dowana

faction pushes his long forefinger forward, pointing straight enough—but
whither? and with a volley of words ends, Ah-ah-a-a-a——a-a. This strange
expression had long before puzzled me when first heard from a shepherd in
Bashan.... But the simple meaning of this long string of “ah’s” shortened,
and quickened, and lowered in tone to the end, is merely that the place
pointed to is a “very great way off.”’ The Chinook Jargon, as usual
representing primitive developments of language, uses a similar device in
lengthening the sound of words to indicate distance. The Siamese can, by
varying the tone-accent, make the syllable non, ‘there,’ express a near,
indefinite, or far distance, and in like manner can modify the meaning of
such a word as ny, ‘little.’ In the Gaboon, the strength with which such a
word as mpolu, ‘great,’ is uttered serves to show whether it is great, very
great, or very very great, and in this way, as Mr. Wilson remarks in his
Mpongwe Grammar, ‘the comparative degrees of greatness, smallness,
hardness, rapidity, and strength, &c., may be conveyed with more accuracy
and precision than could readily be conceived.’ In Madagascar ratchi means
‘bad,’ but râtchi is ‘very bad.’ The natives of Australia, according to
Oldfield, show the use of this process in combination with that of symbolic
reduplication: among the Watchandie tribe jir-rie signifies ‘already or past,’
jir-rie jir-rie indicates ‘a long time ago,’ while jie-r-rie jirrie (the first
syllable being dwelt on for some time) signifies ‘an immense time ago.’
Again, boo-rie is ‘small,’ boo-rie-boo-rie ‘very small,’ and b-o-rie boorie
‘exceedingly small.’ Wilhelm von Humboldt notices the habit of the
southern Guarani dialect of South America of dwelling more or less time on
the suffix of the perfect tense, yma, y—ma, to indicate the length or
shortness of the distance of time at which the action took place; and it is
curious to observe that a similar contrivance is made use of among the
aboriginal tribes of India, where the Ho language forms a future tense by
adding á to the root, and prolonging its sound, kajee ‘to speak,’ Amg kajēēá
‘I will speak.’ As might be expected, the languages of very rude tribes show
extremely well how the results of such primitive processes pass into the
recognized stock of language. Nothing could be better for this than the
words by which one of the rudest of living races, the Botocudos of Brazil,
express the sea. They have a word for a stream, ouatou, and an adjective
which means great, ijipakijiou; thence the two words ‘stream-great,’ a little
strengthened in the vowels, will give the term for a river, ouatou-
ijiipakiiijou, as it were, ‘stream-grea-at,’ and this, to express the immensity

of the ocean, is amplified into ouatou-iijipakiijou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou. Another
tribe of the same family works out the same result more simply; the word
ouatou, ‘stream,’ becomes ouatou-ou-ou-ou, ‘the sea.’ The Chavantes very
naturally stretch the expression rom-o-wodi, ‘I go a long way,’ into rom-o-o-
o-o-wodi, ‘I go a very long way indeed,’ and when they are called upon to
count beyond five they say it is ka-o-o-oki, by which they evidently mean it
is a very great many. The Cauixanas in one vocabulary are described as
saying lawauugabi for four, and drawling out the same word for five, as if
to say ‘a long four,’ in somewhat the same way as the Aponegicrans, whose
word for six is itawuna, can expand this into a word for seven, itawuūna,
obviously thus meaning a ‘long six.’ In their earlier and simpler stages
nothing can be more easy to comprehend than these, so to speak, pictorial
modifications of words. It is true that writing, even with the aid of italics
and capitals, ignores much of this symbolism in spoken language, but every
child can see its use and meaning, in spite of the efforts of book-learning
and school-teaching to set aside whatever cannot be expressed by their
imperfect symbols, nor controlled by their narrow rules. But when we try to
follow out to their full results these methods, at first so easy to trace and
appreciate, we soon find them passing out of our grasp. The language of the
Sahaptin Indians shows us a process of modifying words which is far from
clear, and yet not utterly obscure. These Indians have a way of making a
kind of disrespectful diminutive by changing the n in a word to l; thus
twinwt means ‘tailless,’ but to indicate particular smallness, or to express
contempt, they make this into twilwt, pronounced with an appropriate
change of tone; and again, wana means ‘river,’ but this is made into a
diminutive wala by ‘changing n into l, giving the voice a different tone,
putting the lips out in speaking, and keeping them suspended around the
jaw.’ Here we are told enough about the change of pronunciation to guess at
least how it could convey the notions of smallness and contempt. But it is
less easy to follow the process by which the Mpongwe language turns an
affirmative into a negative verb by ‘an intonation upon, or prolongation of
the radical vowel,’ tŏnda, to love, tŏnda, not to love; tŏndo, to be loved,
tŏndo, not to be loved. So Yoruba, bába, ‘a great thing,’ bàba, ‘a small
thing,’ contrasted in a proverb, ‘Baba bo, baba molle’—‘A great matter puts
a smaller out of sight.’ Language is, in fact, full of phonetic modifications
which justify a suspicion that symbolic sound had to do with their
production, though it may be hard to say exactly how.

Again, there is the familiar process of reduplication, simple or modified,
which produces such forms as murmur, pitpat, helterskelter. This action,
though much restricted in literary dialects, has such immense scope in the
talk of children and savages that Professor Pott’s treatise on it[290] has
become incidentally one of the most valuable collections of facts ever made
with relation to early stages of language. Now up to a certain point any
child can see how and why such doubling is done, and how it always adds
something to the original idea. It may make superlatives or otherwise
intensify words, as in Polynesia loa ‘long,’ lololoa ‘very long’; Mandingo
ding ‘a child,’ dingding ‘a very little child.’ It makes plurals, as Malay raja-
raja ‘princes,’ orang-orang ‘people.’ It adds numerals, as Mosquito walwal
‘four’ (two-two), or distributes them, as Coptic ouai ouai ‘singly’ (one-one).
These are cases where the motive of doubling is comparatively easy to
make out. As an example of cases much more difficult to comprehend may
be taken the familiar reduplication of the perfect tense, Greek γέγραφα from
γράφω, Latin momordi from mordeo, Gothic haihald from haldan, ‘to
hold.’ Reduplication is habitually used in imitative words to intensify them,
and still more, to show that the sound is repeated or continuous. From the
immense mass of such words we may take as instances the Botocudo hou-
hou-hou-gitcha ‘to suck’ (compare Tongan hūhū ‘breast’), kiaku-käck-käck,
‘a butterfly’; Quichua chiuiuiuiñichi ‘wind whistling in the trees’; Maori
haruru ‘noise of wind’; hohoro ‘hurry’; Dayak kakakkaka ‘to go on
laughing loud’; Aino shiriushiriukanni ‘a rasp’; Tamil murumuru ‘to
murmur’; Akra ewiewiewiewie ‘he spoke repeatedly and continually’; and
so on, throughout the whole range of the languages of the world.
The device of conveying different ideas of distance by the use of a
graduated scale of vowels seems to me one of great philological interest,
from the suggestive hint it gives of the proceedings of the language-makers
in most distant regions of the world, working out in various ways a similar
ingenious contrivance of expression by sound. A typical series is the Javan:
iki ‘this’ (close by) ika ‘that’ (at some distance); iku ‘that’ (farther off). It is
not likely that the following list nearly exhausts the whole number of cases
in the languages of the world, for about half the number have been
incidentally noted down by myself without any especial search, but merely
in the course of looking over vocabularies of the lower races.[291]

Javan ... iki, this; ika, that (intermediate); iku, that.

Malagasy ... ao, there (at a short distance); eo, there (at a shorter
distance); io, there (close at hand). atsy, there (not far off); etsy, there
(nearer); itsy, this or these.
Japanese ... ko, here; ka, there. korera, these; karera, they (those).
Canarese ... ivanu, this; uvanu, that (intermediate); avanu, that.
Tamul ... î, this; â, that.
Rajmahali ... îh, this; âh, that.
Dhimal ... isho, ita, here; usho, uta, there. iti, idong, this; uti, udong,
that (of things and persons respectively).
Abchasian ... abri, this; ubri, that.
Ossetic ... am, here; um, there.
Magyar ... ez, this; az, that.
Zulu ... apa, here; apo, there. lesi, leso, lesiya; abu, abo, abuya; &c. =
this, that, that (in the distance).
Yoruba ... na, this; ni, that.
Fernandian ... olo, this; ole, that.
Tumale ... re, this; ri, that. ngi, I; ngo, thou; ngu, he.
Greenlandish ... uv, here, there (where one points to); iv, there, up there.
Sujelpa (Coleville Ind.) ... aa, this; ii, that.
Sahaptin ... kina, here; kuna, there.
Mutsun ... ne, here; nu, there.
Tarahumara ... ibe, here; abe, there.
Guarani ... nde, ne, thou; ndi, ni, he.
Botocudo ... ati, I; oti, thou, you, (prep.) to.
Carib ... ne, thou; ni, he.
Chilian ... tva, vachi, this; tvey, veychi, that.

It is obvious on inspection of this list of pronouns and adverbs that they
have in some way come to have their vowels contrasted to match the
contrast of here and there, this and that. Accident may sometimes account
for such cases. For instance it is well known to philologists that our own
this and that are pronouns partly distinct in their formation, thi-s being
probably two pronouns run together, but yet the Dutch neuters dit ‘this,’ and
dat ‘that,’ have taken the appearance of a single form with contrasted
vowels.[292] But accident cannot account for the frequency of such words in
pairs, and even in sets of three, in so many different languages. There must
have been some common intention at work, and there is evidence that some
of these languages do resort to a change of sound as a means of expressing
change of distance. Thus the language of Fernando Po can not only express
‘this’ and ‘that’ by olo, ole, but it can even make a change of the
pronunciation of the vowel distinguish between o boehe ‘this month,’ and
oh boehe, ‘that month.’ In the same way the Grebo can make the difference
between ‘I’ and ‘thou,’ ‘we,’ and ‘you,’ ‘solely by the intonation of the
voice, which the final h of the second persons mâh and ăh is intended to
express.’

mâ di, I eat; mâh di, thou eatest;
ă di, we eat; ăh di, ye eat.

The set of Zulu demonstratives which express the three distances of near,
farther, farthest, are very complex, but a remark as to their use shows how
thoroughly symbolic sound enters into their nature. The Zulus not only say
nansi, ‘here is,’ nanso, ‘there is,’ nansiya, ‘there is in the distance,’ but they
even express the greatness of this distance by the emphasis and
prolongation of the ya. If we could discern a similar gradation of the vowels
to express a corresponding gradation of distance throughout our list, the
whole matter would be easier to explain; but it is not so, the i-words for
instance, are sometimes nearer and sometimes farther off than the a-words.
We can only judge that, as even children can see that a scale of vowels
makes a most expressive scale of distances, many pronouns and adverbs in
use in the world have probably taken their shape under the influence of this
simple device, and thus there have arisen sets of what we may call
contrasted or ‘differential’ words.

How the differencing of words by change of vowels may be used to
distinguish between the sexes, is well put in a remark of Professor Max
Müller’s: ‘The distinction of gender ... is sometimes expressed in such a
manner that we can only explain it by ascribing an expressive power to the
more or less obscure sound of vowels. Ukko, in Finnic, is an old man; akka,
an old woman.... In Mandshu chacha is mas. ... cheche, femina. Again,
ama, in Mandshu, is father; eme, mother; amcha, father-in-law, emche,
mother-in-law.’[293] The Coretú language of Brazil has another curiously
contrasted pair of words tsáackö, ‘father,’ tsaacko ‘mother,’ while the Carib
has baba for father, and bibi for mother, and the Ibu of Africa has nna for
father and nne for mother. This contrivance of distinguishing the male from
the female by a difference of vowels is however but a small part of the
process of formation which can be traced among such words as those for
father and mother. Their consideration leads into a very interesting
philological region, that of ‘Children’s language.’
If we set down a few of the pairs of words which stand for ‘father’ and
‘mother’ in very different and distant languages—papa and mama; Welsh,
tad (dad) and mam; Hungarian, atya and anya; Mandingo, fa and ba;
Lummi (N. America), man and tan; Catoquina (S. America), payú and nayú;
Watchandie (Australia), amo and ago—their contrast seems to lie in their
consonants, while many other pairs differ totally, like Hebrew ab and im;
Kuki, p’ha and noo; Kayan, amay and inei; Tarahumara, nono and jeje.
Words of the class of papa and mama, occurring in remote parts of the
world, were once freely used as evidence of a common origin of the
languages in which they were found alike. But Professor Buschmann’s
paper on ‘Nature-Sound,’ published in 1853,[294] effectually overthrew this
argument, and settled the view that such coincidence might arise again and
again by independent production. It was clearly of no use to argue that
Carib and English were allied because the word papa, ‘father,’ belongs to
both, or Hottentot and English because both use mama for ‘mother,’ seeing
that these childish articulations may be used in just the opposite way, for the
Chilian word for mother is papa, and the Tlatskanai for father is mama. Yet
the choice of easy little words for ‘father’ and ‘mother’ does not seem to
have been quite indiscriminate. The immense list of such words collected
by Buschmann shows that the types pa and ta, with the similar forms ap
and at, preponderate in the world as names for ‘father,’ while ma and na,
am and an, preponderate as names for ‘mother.’ His explanation of this state

of things as affected by direct symbolism choosing the hard sound for the
father, and the gentler for the mother, has very likely truth in it, but it must
not be pushed too far. It cannot be, for instance, the same principle of
symbolism which leads the Welshmen to say tad for ‘father’ and mam for
‘mother,’ and the Indian of British Columbia to say maan, ‘father’ and taan,
‘mother,’ or the Georgian to say mama ‘father’ and deda ‘mother.’ Yet I
have not succeeded in finding anywhere our familiar papa and mama
exactly reversed in one and the same language; the nearest approach to it
that I can give is from the island of Meang, where mama meant ‘father,
man,’ and babi, ‘mother, woman.’[295]
Between the nursery words papa and mama and the more formal father and
mother there is an obvious resemblance in sound. What, then, is the origin
of these words father and mother? Up to a certain point their history is
clear. They belong to the same group of organized words with vater and
mutter, pater and mater, πατήρ and μήτηρ, pitar and mâtar, and other
similar forms through the Indo-European family of languages. There is no
doubt that all these pairs of names are derived from an ancient and common
Aryan source, and when they are traced back as far as possible towards that
source, they appear to have sprung from a pair of words which may be
roughly called patar and matar, and which were formed by adding tar, the
suffix of the actor, to the verb-roots pa and ma. There being two appropriate
Sanskrit verbs pâ and mâ, it is possible to etymologize the two words as
patar, ‘protector,’ and matar, ‘producer.’ Now this pair of Aryan words
must have been very ancient, lying back at the remote common source from
which forms parallel to our English father and mother passed into Greek
and Persian, Norse and Armenian, thus holding fixed type through the
eventful course of Indo-European history. Yet, ancient as these words are,
they were no doubt preceded by simpler rudimentary words of the
children’s language, for it is not likely that the primitive Aryans did without
baby-words for father and mother until they had an organized system of
adding suffixes to verb-roots to express such notions as ‘protector’ or
‘producer.’ Nor can it be supposed that it was by mere accident that the
root-words thus chosen happened to be the very sounds pa and ma, whose
types so often occur in the remotest parts of the world as names for ‘father’
and ‘mother.’ Prof. Adolphe Pictet makes shift to account for the
coincidence thus: he postulates first the pair of forms pâ and mâ as Aryan
verb-roots of unknown origin, meaning ‘to protect’ and ‘to create,’ next

another pair of forms pa and ma, children’s words commonly used to
denote father and mother, and lastly he combines the two by supposing that
the root-verbs pâ and mâ were chosen to form the Indo-European words for
parents, because of their resemblance to the familiar baby-words already in
use. This circuitous process at any rate saves those sacred monosyllables,
the Sanskrit verb-roots, from the disgrace of an assignable origin. Yet those
who remember that these verb-roots are only a set of crude forms in use in
one particular language of the world at one particular period of its
development, may account for the facts more simply and more thoroughly.
It is a fair guess that the ubiquitous pa and ma of the children’s language
were the original forms; that they were used in an early period of Aryan
speech as indiscriminately substantive and verb, just as our modern English,
which so often reproduces the most rudimentary linguistic processes, can
form from the noun ‘father’ a verb ‘to father;’ and that lastly they became
verb-roots, whence the words patar and matar were formed by the addition
of the suffix.[296]
The baby-names for parents must not be studied as though they stood alone
in language. They are only important members of a great class of words,
belonging to all times and countries within our experience, and forming a
children’s language, whose common character is due to its concerning itself
with the limited set of ideas in which little children are interested, and
expressing these ideas by the limited set of articulations suited to the child’s
first attempts to talk. This peculiar language is marked quite
characteristically among the low savage tribes of Australia; mamman
‘father,’ ngangan ‘mother,’ and by metaphor ‘thumb,’ ‘great toe’ (as is more
fully explained in jinnamamman ‘great toe,’ i.e. foot’s father), tammin
‘grandfather or grandmother,’ bab-ba ‘bad, foolish, childish,’ bee-bee, beep
‘breast,’ pappi ‘father,’ pappa ‘young one, pup, whelp,’ (whence is
grammatically formed the verb papparniti ‘to become a young one, to be
born.’) Or if we look for examples from India, it does not matter whether
we take them from non-Hindu or Hindu languages, for in baby-language all
races are on one footing. Thus Tamil appâ ‘father,’ ammâ ‘mother,’ Bodo
aphâ ‘father,’ âyâ ‘mother;’ the Kocch group nânâ and nâni ‘paternal
grandfather and grandmother,’ mâmâ ‘uncle,’ dâdâ ‘cousin,’ may be set
beside Sanskrit tata ‘father,’ nanâ ‘mother,’ and the Hindustani words of the
same class, of which some are familiar to the English ear by being
naturalized in Anglo-Indian talk, bâbâ ‘father,’ bâbû ‘child, prince, Mr.,’

bîbî ‘lady,’ dadâ ‘nurse’ (âyâ ‘nurse’ seems borrowed from Portuguese).
Such words are continually coming fresh into existence everywhere, and the
law of natural selection determines their fate. The great mass of the nana’s
and dada’s of the nursery die out almost as soon as made. Some few take
more root and spread over large districts as accepted nursery words, and
now and then a curious philologist makes a collection of them. Of such,
many are obvious mutilations of longer words, as French faire dodo ‘to
sleep’ (dormir), Brandenburg wiwi, a common cradle lullaby (wiegen).
Others, whatever their origin, fall, in consequence of the small variety of
articulations out of which they must be chosen, into a curiously
indiscriminate and unmeaning mass, as Swiss bobo ‘a scratch;’ bambam ‘all
gone;’ Italian bobò ‘something to drink,’ gogo ‘little boy,’ for dede ‘to play.’
These are words quoted by Pott, and for English examples nana ‘nurse,’
tata! ‘good-bye!’ may serve. But all baby-words, as this very name proves,
do not stop short even at this stage of publicity. A small proportion of them
establish themselves in the ordinary talk of grown-up men and women, and
when they have once made good their place as constituents of general
language, they may pass on by inheritance from age to age. Such examples
as have been here quoted of nursery words give a clue to the origin of a
mass of names in the most diverse languages, for father, mother,
grandmother, aunt, child, breast, toy, doll, &c. The negro of Fernando Po
who uses the word bubboh for ‘a little boy,’ is on equal terms with the
German who uses bube; the Congo-man who uses tata for ‘father’ would
understand how the same word could be used in classic Latin for ‘father,’
and in mediæval Latin for ‘pedagogue;’ the Carib and the Caroline Islander
agree with the Englishman that papa is a suitable word to express ‘father,’
and then it only remains to carry on the word, and make the baby-language
name the priests of the Eastern Church and the great Papa of the Western.
At the same time the evidence explains the indifference with which, out of
the small stock of available materials, the same sound does duty for the
most different ideas; why mama means here ‘mother,’ there ‘father,’ there
‘uncle,’ maman here ‘mother,’ there ‘father-in-law,’ dada here ‘father,’ there
‘nurse,’ there ‘breast,’ tata here ‘father,’ there ‘son.’ A single group of words
may serve to show the character of this peculiar region of language:
Blackfoot Indian ninnah ‘father;’ Greek νέννος ‘uncle,’ νέννα ‘aunt;’ Zulu
nina, Sangir nina, Malagasy nini ‘mother;’ Javan nini ‘grandfather or
grandmother;’ Vayu nini ‘paternal aunt;’ Darien Indian ninah ‘daughter;’

Spanish niño, niña ‘child;’ Italian ninna ‘little girl;’ Milanese ninin ‘bed;’
Italian ninnare ‘to rock the cradle.’
In this way a dozen easy child’s articulations, ba’s and na’s, ti’s and de’s,
pa’s and ma’s, serve almost as indiscriminately to express a dozen child’s
ideas as though they had been shaken in a bag and pulled out at random to
express the notion that came first, doll or uncle, nurse or grandfather. It is
obvious that among words cramped to such scanty choice of articulate
sounds, speculations as to derivation must be more than usually unsafe.
Looked at from this point of view, children’s language may give a valuable
lesson to the philologist. He has before him a kind of language, formed,
under peculiar conditions, and showing the weak points of his method of
philological research, only exaggerated into extraordinary distinctness. In
ordinary language, the difficulty of connecting sound with sense lies in
great measure in the inability of a small and rigid set of articulations to
express an interminable variety of tones and noises. In children’s language,
a still more scanty set of articulations fails yet more to render these
distinctly. The difficulty of finding the derivation of words lies in great
measure in the use of more or less similar root-sounds for most
heterogeneous purposes. To assume that two words of different meanings,
just because they sound somewhat alike, must therefore have a common
origin, is even in ordinary language the great source of bad etymology. But
in children’s language the theory of root-sounds fairly breaks down. Few
would venture to assert, for instance, that papa and pap have a common
derivation or a common root. All that we can safely say of connexion
between them is that they are words related by common acceptance in the
nursery language. As such, they are well marked in ancient Rome as in
modern England: papas ‘nutricius, nutritor,’ pappus ‘senex;’ ‘cum cibum et
potum buas ac papas dicunt, et matrem mammam, patrem tatam (or
papam).’[297]
From children’s language, moreover, we have striking proof of the power of
consensus of society, in establishing words in settled use without their
carrying traces of inherent expressiveness. It is true that children are
intimately acquainted with the use of emotional and imitative sound, and
their vocal intercourse largely consists of such expression. The effects of
this are in some degree discernible in the class of words we are considering.
But it is obvious that the leading principle of their formation is not to adopt

words distinguished by the expressive character of their sound, but to
choose somehow a fixed word to answer a given purpose. To do this,
different languages have chosen similar articulations to express the most
diverse and opposite ideas. Now in the language of grown-up people, it is
clear that social consensus has worked in the same way. Even if the extreme
supposition be granted, that the ultimate origin of every word of language
lies in inherently expressive sound, this only partly affects the case, for it
would have to be admitted that, in actual languages, most words have so far
departed in sound or sense from this originally expressive stage, that to all
intents and purposes they might at first have been arbitrarily chosen. The
main principle of language has been, not to preserve traces of original
sound-signification for the benefit of future etymologists, but to fix
elements of language to serve as counters for practical reckoning of ideas.
In this process much original expressiveness has no doubt disappeared
beyond all hope of recovery.
Such are some of the ways in which vocal sounds seem to have commended
themselves to the mind of the word-maker as fit to express his meaning, and
to have been used accordingly. I do not think that the evidence here adduced
justifies the setting-up of what is called the Interjectional and Imitative
Theory as a complete solution of the problem of original language. Valid as
this theory proves itself within limits, it would be incautious to accept a
hypothesis which can perhaps satisfactorily account for a twentieth of the
crude forms in any language, as a certain and absolute explanation of the
nineteen-twentieths whose origin remains doubtful. A key must unlock
more doors than this, to be taken as the master-key. Moreover, some special
points which have come under consideration in these chapters tend to show
the positive necessity of such caution in theorizing. Too narrow a theory of
the application of sound to sense may fail to include the varied devices
which the languages of different regions turn to account. It is thus with the
distinction in meaning of a word by its musical accent, and the distinction
of distance by graduated vowels. These are ingenious and intelligible
contrivances, but they hardly seem directly emotional or imitative in origin.
A safer way of putting the theory of a natural origin of language is to
postulate the original utterance of ideas in what may be called self-
expressive sounds, without defining closely whether their expression lay in
emotional tone, imitative noise, contrast of accent or vowel or consonant, or
other phonetic quality. Even here, exception of unknown and perhaps

enormous extent must be made for sounds chosen by individuals to express
some notion, from motives which even their own minds failed to discern,
but which sounds nevertheless made good their footing in the language of
the family, the tribe, and the nation. There may be many modes even of
recognizable phonetic expression, unknown to us as yet. So far, however, as
I have been able to trace them here, such modes have in common a claim to
belong not exclusively to the scheme of this or that particular dialect, but to
wide-ranging principles of formation of language. Their examples are to be
drawn with equal cogency from Sanskrit or Hebrew, from the nursery-
language of Lombardy, or the half-Indian, half-European jargon of
Vancouver’s Island; and wherever they are found, they help to furnish
groups of sound-words—words which have not lost the traces of their first
expressive origin, but still carry their direct significance plainly stamped
upon them. In fact, the time has now come for a substantial basis to be laid
for Generative Philology. A classified collection of words with any strong
claim to be self-expressive should be brought together out of the thousand
or so of recognized languages and dialects of the world. In such a
Dictionary of Sound-Words, half the cases cited might very likely be
worthless, but the collection would afford the practical means of
expurgating itself; for it would show on a large scale what particular sounds
have manifested their fitness to convey particular ideas, by having been
repeatedly chosen among different races to convey them.
Attempts to explain as far as may be the primary formation of speech, by
tracing out in detail such processes as have been here described, are likely
to increase our knowledge by sure and steady steps wherever imagination
does not get the better of sober comparison of facts. But there is one side of
this problem of the Origin of Language on which such studies have by no
means an encouraging effect. Much of the popular interest in such matters
is centred in the question, whether the known languages of the world have
their source in one or many primæval tongues. On this subject the opinions
of the philologists who have compared the greatest number of languages are
utterly at variance, nor has any one brought forward a body of philological
evidence strong and direct enough to make anything beyond mere vague
opinion justifiable. Now such processes as the growth of imitative or
symbolic words form a part, be it small or large, of the Origin of Language,
but they are by no means restricted to any particular place or period, and are
indeed more or less in activity now. Their operation on any two dialects of

one language will be to introduce in each a number of new and independent
words, and words even suspected of having been formed in this direct way
become valueless as proof of genealogical connexion between the
languages in which they are found. The test of such genealogical connexion
must, in fact, be generally narrowed to such words or grammatical forms as
have become so far conventional in sound and sense, that we cannot
suppose two tribes to have arrived at them independently, and therefore
consider that both must have inherited them from a common source. Thus
the introduction of new sound-words tends to make it practically of less and
less consequence to a language what its original stock of words at starting
may have been; and the philologist’s extension of his knowledge of such
direct formations must compel him to strip off more and more of any
language, as being possibly of later growth, before he can set himself to
argue upon such a residuum as may have come by direct inheritance from
times of primæval speech.
In concluding this survey, some general considerations suggest themselves
as to the nature and first beginnings of language. In studying the means of
expression among men in stages of mental culture far below our own, one
of our first needs is to clear our minds of the kind of superstitious
veneration with which articulate speech has so commonly been treated, as
though it were not merely the principal but the sole means of uttering
thought. We must cease to measure the historical importance of emotional
exclamations, of gesture-signs, and of picture-writing, by their comparative
insignificance in modern civilized life, but must bring ourselves to associate
the articulate words of the dictionary in one group with cries and gestures
and pictures, as being all of them means of manifesting outwardly the
inward workings of the mind. Such an admission, it must be observed, is far
from being a mere detail of scientific classification. It has really a most
important bearing on the problem of the Origin of Language. For as the
reasons are mostly dark to us, why particular words are currently used to
express particular ideas, language has come to be looked upon as a mystery,
and either occult philosophical causes have been called in to explain its
phenomena, or else the endowment of man with the faculties of thought and
utterance has been deemed insufficient, and a special revelation has been
demanded to put into his mouth the vocabulary of a particular language. In
the debate which has been carried on for ages over this much-vexed
problem, the saying in the ‘Kratylos’ comes back to our minds again and

again, where Sokrates describes the etymologists who release themselves
from their difficulties as to the origin of words by saying that the first words
were divinely made, and therefore right, just as the tragedians, when they
are in perplexity, fly to their machinery and bring in the gods.[298] Now I
think that those who soberly contemplate the operation of cries, groans,
laughs, and other emotional utterances, as to which some considerations
have been here brought forward, will admit that, at least, our present crude
understanding of this kind of expression would lead us to class it among the
natural actions of man’s body and mind. Certainly, no one who understands
anything of the gesture-language or of picture-writing would be justified in
regarding either as due to occult causes, or to any supernatural interference
with the course of man’s intellectual development. Their cause evidently
lies in natural operations of the human mind, not such as were effective in
some long-past condition of humanity and have since disappeared, but in
processes existing amongst us, which we can understand and even practise
for ourselves. When we study the pictures and gestures with which savages
and the deaf-and-dumb express their minds, we can mostly see at a glance
the direct relation between the outward sign and the inward thought which
it makes manifest. We may see the idea of ‘sleep’ shown in gesture by the
head with shut eyes, leant heavily against the open hand; or the idea of
‘running’ by the attitude of the runner, with chest forward, mouth half open,
elbows and shoulders well back; or ‘candle’ by the straight forefinger held
up, and as it were blown out; or ‘salt’ by the imitated act of sprinkling it
with thumb and finger. The figures of the child’s picture-book, the sleeper
and the runner, the candle and the salt-cellar, show their purport by the
same sort of evident relation between thought and sign. We so far
understand the nature of these modes of utterance, that we are ready
ourselves to express thought after thought by such means, so that those who
see our signs shall perceive our meaning.
When, however, encouraged by our ready success in making out the nature
and action of these ruder methods, we turn to the higher art of speech, and
ask how such and such words have come to express such and such thoughts,
we find ourselves face to face with an immense problem, as yet but in small
part solved. The success of investigation has indeed been enough to
encourage us to push vigorously forward in the research, but the present
explorations have not extended beyond corners and patches of an elsewhere
unknown field. Still the results go far to warrant us in associating

expression by gestures and pictures with articulate language as to principles
of original formation, much as men associate them in actual life by using
gesture and word at once. Of course, articulate speech, in its far more
complex and elaborate development, has taken up devices to which the
more simple and rude means of communication offer nothing comparable.
Still, language, so far as its constitution is understood, seems to have been
developed like writing or music, like hunting or fire-making, by the
exercise of purely human faculties in purely human ways. This state of
things by no means belongs exclusively to rudimentary philological
operations, such as the choosing expressive sounds to name corresponding
ideas by. In the higher departments of speech, where words already existing
are turned to account to express new meanings and shade off new
distinctions, we find these ends attained by contrivances ranging from
extreme dexterity down to utter clumsiness. For a single instance, one great
means of giving new meaning to old sound is metaphor, which transfers
ideas from hearing to seeing, from touching to thinking, from the concrete
of one kind to the abstract of another, and can thus make almost anything in
the world help to describe or suggest anything else. What the German
philosopher described as the relation of a cow to a comet, that both have
tails, is enough and more than enough for the language-maker. It struck the
Australians, when they saw a European book, that it opened and shut like a
mussel-shell, and they began accordingly to call books ‘mussels’ (mūyūm).
The sight of a steam engine may suggest a whole group of such transitions
in our own language; the steam passes along ‘fifes’ or ‘trumpets,’ that is,
pipes or tubes, and enters by ‘folding-doors’ or valves, to push a ‘pestle’ or
piston up and down in a ‘roller’ or cylinder, while the light pours from the
furnace in ‘staves’ or ‘poles,’ that is, in rays or beams. The dictionaries are
full of cases compared with which such as these are plain and
straightforward. Indeed, the processes by which words have really come
into existence may often enough remind us of the game of ‘What is my
thought like?’ When one knows the answer, it is easy enough to see what
junketting and cathedral canons have to do with reeds; Latin juncus ‘a
reed,’ Low Latin juncata, ‘cheese made in a reed-basket,’ Italian giuncata
‘cream cheese in a rush frail,’ French joncade and English junket, which are
preparations of cream, and lastly junketting parties where such delicacies
are eaten; Greek κάννη, ‘reed, cane,’ κανῶν, ‘measure, rule,’ thence
canonicus, ‘a clerk under the ecclesiastical rule or canon.’ But who could

guess the history of these words, who did not happen to know these
intermediate links?
Yet there is about this process of derivation a thoroughly human artificial
character. When we know the whole facts of any case, we can generally
understand it at once, and see that we might have done the same ourselves
had it come in our way. And the same thing is true of the processes of
making sound-words detailed in these chapters. Such a view is, however, in
no way inconsistent with the attempt to generalize upon these processes,
and to state them as phases of the development of language among
mankind. If certain men under certain circumstances produce certain
results, then we may at least expect that other men much resembling these
and placed under roughly similar circumstances will produce more or less
like results; and this has been shown over and over again in these pages to
be what really happens. Now Wilhelm von Humboldt’s view that language
is an ‘organism’ has been considered a great step in philological
speculation; and so far as it has led students to turn their minds to the search
after general laws, no doubt it has been so. But it has also caused an
increase of vague thinking and talking, and thereby no small darkening of
counsel. Had it been meant to say that human thought, language, and action
generally, are organic in their nature, and work under fixed laws, this would
be a very different matter; but this is distinctly not what is meant, and the
very object of calling language an organism is to keep it apart from mere
human arts and contrivances. It was a hateful thing to Humboldt’s mind to
‘bring down speech to a mere operation of the understanding.’ ‘Man,’ he
says, ‘does not so much form language, as discern with a kind of joyous
wonder its developments, coming forth as of themselves.’ Yet, if the
practical shifts by which words are shaped or applied to fit new meanings
are not devised by an operation of the understanding, we ought consistently
to carry the stratagems of the soldier in the field, or the contrivances of the
workman at his bench, back into the dark regions of instinct and involuntary
action. That the actions of individual men combine to produce results which
may be set down in those general statements of fact which we call laws,
may be stated once again as one of the main propositions of the Science of
Culture. But the nature of a fact is not altered by its being classed in
common with others of the same kind, and a man is not less the intelligent
inventor of a new word or a new metaphor, because twenty other intelligent
inventors elsewhere may have fallen on a similar expedient.

The theory that the original forms of language are to be referred to a low or
savage condition of culture among the remotely ancient human race, stands
in general consistency with the known facts of philology. The causes which
have produced language, so far as they are understood, are notable for that
childlike simplicity of operation which befits the infancy of human
civilization. The ways in which sounds are in the first instance chosen and
arranged to express ideas, are practical expedients at the level of nursery
philosophy. A child of five years old could catch the meaning of imitative
sounds, interjectional words, symbolism of sex or distance by contrast of
vowels. Just as no one is likely to enter into the real nature of mythology
who has not the keenest appreciation of nursery tales, so the spirit in which
we guess riddles and play at children’s games is needed to appreciate the
lower phases of language. Such a state of things agrees with the opinion
that such rudimentary speech had its origin among men while in a childlike
intellectual condition, and thus the self-expressive branch of savage
language affords valuable materials for the problem of primitive speech. If
we look back in imagination to an early period of human intercourse, where
gesture and self-expressive utterance may have had a far greater
comparative importance than among ourselves, such a conception
introduces no new element into the problem, for a state of things more or
less answering to this is described among certain low savage tribes. If we
turn from such self-expressive utterance, to that part of articulate language
which carries its sense only by traditional and seemingly arbitrary custom,
we shall find no contradiction to the hypothesis. Sound carrying direct
meaning may be taken up as an element of language, keeping its first
significance recognizable to nations yet unborn. But it may far more
probably become by wear of sound and shift of sense an expressionless
symbol, such as might have been chosen in pure arbitrariness—a
philological process to which the vocabularies of savage dialects bear full
witness. In the course of the development of language, such traditional
words with merely an inherited meaning have in no small measure driven
into the background the self-expressive words, just as the Eastern figures 2,
3, 4, which are not self-expressive, have driven into the background the
Roman numerals II, III, IIII, which are—this, again, is an operation which
has its place in savage as in cultivated speech. Moreover, to look closely at
language as a practical means of expressing thought, is to face evidence of
no slight bearing on the history of civilization. We come back to the fact, so

full of suggestion, that the languages of the world represent substantially
the same intellectual art, the higher nations indeed gaining more expressive
power than the lowest tribes, yet doing this not by introducing new and
more effective central principles, but by mere addition and improvement in
detail. The two great methods of naming thoughts and stating their relation
to one another, viz., metaphor and syntax, belong to the infancy of human
expression, and are as thoroughly at home in the language of savages as of
philosophers. If it be argued that this similarity in principles of language is
due to savage tribes having descended from higher culture, carrying down
with them in their speech the relics of their former excellence, the answer is
that linguistic expedients are actually worked out with as much originality,
and more extensively if not more profitably, among savages than among
cultured men. Take for example the Algonquin system of compounding
words, and the vast Esquimaux scheme of grammatical inflexion. Language
belongs in essential principle both to low grades and high of civilization; to
which should its origin be attributed? An answer may be had by comparing
the methods of language with the work it has to do. Take language all in all
over the world, it is obvious that the processes by which words are made
and adapted have far less to do with systematic arrangement and scientific
classification, than with mere rough and ready ingenuity and the great rule
of thumb. Let any one whose vocation it is to realize philosophical or
scientific conceptions and to express them in words, ask himself whether
ordinary language is an instrument planned for such purposes. Of course it
is not. It is hard to say which is the more striking, the want of scientific
system in the expression of thought by words, or the infinite cleverness of
detail by which this imperfection is got over, so that he who has an idea
does somehow make shift to get it clearly in words before his own and
other minds. The language by which a nation with highly developed art and
knowledge and sentiment must express its thoughts on these subjects, is no
apt machine devised for such special work, but an old barbaric engine
added to and altered, patched and tinkered into some sort of capability.
Ethnography reasonably accounts at once for the immense power and the
manifest weakness of language as a means of expressing modern educated
thought, by treating it as an original product of low culture, gradually
adapted by ages of evolution and selection, to answer more or less
sufficiently the requirements of modern civilization.

CHAPTER VII.
THE ART OF COUNTING.

Ideas of Number derived from experience—State of Arithmetic among
uncivilized races—Small extent of Numeral-words among low tribes—
Counting by fingers and toes—Hand-numerals show derivation of
Verbal reckoning from Gesture-counting—Etymology of Numerals—
Quinary, Decimal, and Vigesimal notations of the world derived from
counting on fingers and toes—Adoption of foreign Numeral-words—
Evidence of development of Arithmetic from a low original level of
Culture.

Mr. J. S. Mill, in his ‘System of Logic,’ takes occasion to examine the
foundations of the art of arithmetic. Against Dr. Whewell, who had
maintained that such propositions as that two and three make five are
‘necessary truths,’ containing in them an element of certainty beyond that
which mere experience can give, Mr. Mill asserts that ‘two and one are
equal to three’ expresses merely ‘a truth known to us by early and constant
experience: an inductive truth; and such truths are the foundation of the
science of Number. The fundamental truths of that science all rest on the
evidence of sense; they are proved by showing to our eyes and our fingers
that any given number of objects, ten balls for example, may by separation
and re-arrangement exhibit to our senses all the different sets of numbers
the sum of which is equal to ten. All the improved methods of teaching
arithmetic to children proceed on a knowledge of this fact. All who wish to
carry the child’s mind along with them in learning arithmetic; all who wish
to teach numbers, and not mere ciphers—now teach it through the evidence
of the senses, in the manner we have described.’ Mr. Mill’s argument is
taken from the mental conditions of people among whom there exists a
highly advanced arithmetic. The subject is also one to be advantageously

studied from the ethnographer’s point of view. The examination of the
methods of numeration in use among the lower races not only fully bears
out Mr. Mill’s view, that our knowledge of the relations of numbers is based
on actual experiment, but it enables us to trace the art of counting to its
source, and to ascertain by what steps it arose in the world among particular
races, and probably among all mankind.
In our advanced system of numeration, no limit is known either to largeness
or smallness. The philosopher cannot conceive the formation of any
quantity so large or of any atom so small but the arithmetician can keep
pace with him, and can define it in a simple combination of written signs.
But as we go downwards in the scale of culture, we find that even where the
current language has terms for hundreds and thousands, there is less and
less power of forming a distinct notion of large numbers, the reckoner is
sooner driven to his fingers, and there increases among the most intelligent
that numerical indefiniteness that we notice among children—if there were
not a thousand people in the street there were certainly a hundred, at any
rate there were twenty. Strength in arithmetic does not, it is true, vary
regularly with the level of general culture. Some savage or barbaric peoples
are exceptionally skilled in numeration. The Tonga Islanders really have
native numerals up to 100,000. Not content even with this, the French
explorer Labillardière pressed them farther and obtained numerals up to
1000 billions, which were duly printed, but proved on later examination to
be partly nonsense-words and partly indelicate expressions,[299] so that the
supposed series of high numerals forms at once a little vocabulary of
Tongan indecency, and a warning as to the probable results of taking down
unchecked answers from question-worried savages. In West Africa, a lively
and continual habit of bargaining has developed a great power of arithmetic,
and little children already do feats of computation with their heaps of
cowries. Among the Yorubas of Abeokuta, to say ‘you don’t know nine
times nine’ is actually an insulting way of saying ‘you are a dunce.’[300] This
is an extraordinary proverb, when we compare it with the standard which
our corresponding European sayings set for the limits of stupidity: the
German says, ‘he can scarce count five’; the Spaniard, ‘I will tell you how
many make five’ (cuantos son cinco); and we have the same saw in
England:—

‘... as sure as I’m alive,
And knows how many beans make five.’

A Siamese law-court will not take the evidence of a witness who cannot
count or reckon figures up to ten; a rule which reminds us of the ancient
custom of Shrewsbury, where a person was deemed of age when he knew
how to count up to twelve pence.[301]
Among the lowest living men, the savages of the South American forests
and the deserts of Australia, 5 is actually found to be a number which the
languages of some tribes do not know by a special word. Not only have
travellers failed to get from them names for numbers above 2, 3, or 4, but
the opinion that these are the real limits of their numeral series is
strengthened by the use of their highest known number as an indefinite term
for a great many. Spix and Martius say of the low tribes of Brazil, ‘They
count commonly by their finger joints, so up to three only. Any larger
number they express by the word “many.”’[302] In a Puri vocabulary the
numerals are given as 1. omi; 2. curiri; 3. prica, ‘many’: in a Botocudo
vocabulary, 1. mokenam; 2. uruhú, ‘many.’ The numeration of the
Tasmanians is, according to Jorgensen, 1. parmery; 2. calabawa; more than
2, cardia; as Backhouse puts it, they count ‘one, two, plenty;’ but an
observer who had specially good opportunities, Dr. Milligan, gives their
numerals up to 5, puggana, which we shall recur to.[303] Mr. Oldfield
(writing especially of Western tribes) says, ‘The New Hollanders have no
names for numbers beyond two. The Watchandie scale of notation is co-ote-
on (one), u-tau-ra (two), bool-tha (many), and bool-tha-bat (very many). If
absolutely required to express the numbers three or four, they say u-tar-ra
coo-te-oo to indicate the former number, and u-tar-ra u-tar-ra to denote the
latter.’ That is to say, their names for one, two, three, and four, are
equivalent to ‘one,’ ‘two,’ ‘two-one,’ ‘two-two.’ Dr. Lang’s numerals from
Queensland are just the same in principle, though the words are different: 1.
ganar; 2. burla; 3. burla-ganar, ‘two-one’; 4. burla-burla, ‘two-two’;
korumba, ‘more than four, much, great.’ The Kamilaroi dialect, though with
the same 2 as the last, improves upon it by having an independent 3, and
with the aid of this it reckons as far as 6: 1. mal; 2. bularr; 3. guliba; 4.
bularr-bularr, ‘two-two’; 5. bulaguliba, ‘two-three’; 6. guliba-guliba
‘three-three.’ These Australian examples are at least evidence of a very

scanty as well as clumsy numeral system among certain tribes.[304] Yet here
again higher forms will have to be noticed, which in one district at least
carry the native numerals up to 15 or 20.
It is not to be supposed, because a savage tribe has no current words for
numbers above 3 or 5 or so, that therefore they cannot count beyond this. It
appears that they can and do count considerably farther, but it is by falling
back on a lower and ruder method of expression than speech—the gesture-
language. The place in intellectual development held by the art of counting
on one’s fingers, is well marked in the description which Massieu, the Abbé
Sicard’s deaf-and-dumb pupil, gives of his notion of numbers in his
comparatively untaught childhood: ‘I knew the numbers before my
instruction, my fingers had taught me them. I did not know the ciphers; I
counted on my fingers, and when the number passed 10 I made notches on a
bit of wood.’[305] It is thus that all savage tribes have been taught arithmetic
by their fingers. Mr. Oldfield, after giving the account just quoted of the
capability of the Watchandie language to reach 4 by numerals, goes on to
describe the means by which the tribe contrive to deal with a harder
problem in numeration.
‘I once wished to ascertain the exact number of natives who had been slain
on a certain occasion. The individual of whom I made the enquiry, began to
think over the names ... assigning one of his fingers to each, and it was not
until after many failures, and consequent fresh starts, that he was able to
express so high a number, which he at length did by holding up his hand
three times, thus giving me to understand that fifteen was the answer to this
most difficult arithmetical question.’ Of the aborigines of Victoria, Mr.
Stanbridge says: ‘They have no name for numerals above two, but by
repetition they count to five; they also record the days of the moon by
means of the fingers, the bones and joints of the arms and the head.’[306] The
Bororos of Brazil reckon: 1. couai; 2. macouai; 3. ouai; and then go on
counting on their fingers, repeating this ouai.[307] Of course it no more
follows among savages than among ourselves that, because a man counts on
his fingers, his language must be wanting in words to express the number
he wishes to reckon. For example it was noticed that when natives of
Kamchatka were set to count, they would reckon all their fingers, and then
all their toes, so getting up to 20, and then would ask, ‘What are we to do
next?’ Yet it was found on examination that numbers up to 100 existed in

their language.[308] Travellers notice the use of finger-counting among tribes
who can, if they choose, speak the number, and who either silently count it
upon their fingers, or very usually accompany the word with the action; nor
indeed are either of these modes at all unfamiliar in modern Europe. Let
Father Gumilla, one of the early Jesuit missionaries in South America,
describe for us the relation of gesture to speech in counting, and at the same
time bring to our minds very remarkable examples (to be paralleled
elsewhere) of the action of consensus, whereby conventional rules become
fixed among societies of men, even in so simple an art as that of counting
on one’s fingers. ‘Nobody among ourselves,’ he remarks, ‘except
incidentally, would say for instance “one,” “two,” &c., and give the number
on his fingers as well, by touching them with the other hand. Exactly the
contrary happens among Indians. They say, for instance, “give me one pair
of scissors,” and forthwith they raise one finger; “give me two,” and at once
they raise two, and so on. They would never say “five” without showing a
hand, never “ten” without holding out both, never “twenty” without adding
up the fingers, placed opposite to the toes. Moreover, the mode of showing
the numbers with the fingers differs in each nation. To avoid prolixity, I
give as an example the number “three.” The Otomacs to say “three” unite
the thumb, forefinger, and middle finger, keeping the others down. The
Tamanacs show the little finger, the ring finger, and the middle finger, and
close the other two. The Maipures, lastly, raise the fore, middle, and ring
fingers, keeping the other two hidden.’[309] Throughout the world, the
general relation between finger-counting and word-counting may be stated
as follows. For readiness and for ease and apprehension of numbers, a
palpable arithmetic, such as is worked on finger-joints or fingers,[310] or
heaps of pebbles or beans, or the more artificial contrivances of the rosary
or the abacus, has so great an advantage over reckoning in words as almost
necessarily to precede it. Thus not only do we find finger-counting among
savages and uneducated men, carrying on a part of their mental operations
where language is only partly able to follow it, but it also retains a place
and an undoubted use among the most cultured nations, as a preparation for
and means of acquiring higher arithmetical methods.
Now there exists valid evidence to prove that a child learning to count upon
its fingers does in a way reproduce a process of the mental history of the
human race; that in fact men counted upon their fingers before they found
words for the numbers they thus expressed; that in this department of

culture, Word-language not only followed Gesture-language, but actually
grew out of it. The evidence in question is principally that of language
itself, which shows that, among many and distant tribes, men wanting to
express 5 in words called it simply by their name for the hand which they
held up to denote it, that in like manner they said two hands or half a man
to denote 10, that the word foot carried on the reckoning up to 15, and to 20,
which they described in words as in gesture by the hands and feet together,
or as one man, and that lastly, by various expressions referring directly to
the gestures of counting on the fingers and toes, they gave names to these
and intermediate numerals. As a definite term is wanted to describe
significant numerals of this class, it may be convenient to call them ‘hand-
numerals’ or ‘digit-numerals.’ A selection of typical instances will serve to
make it probable that this ingenious device was not, at any rate generally,
copied from one tribe by another or inherited from a common source, but
that its working out with original character and curiously varying detail
displays the recurrence of a similar but independent process of mental
development among various races of man.
Father Gilij, describing the arithmetic of the Tamanacs on the Orinoco,
gives their numerals up to 4: when they come to 5, they express it by the
word amgnaitòne, which being translated means ‘a whole hand;’ 6 is
expressed by a term which translates the proper gesture into words, itaconò
amgnaponà tevinitpe ‘one of the other hand,’ and so on up to 9. Coming to
10, they give it in words as amgna aceponàre ‘both hands.’ To denote 11
they stretch out both the hands, and adding the foot they say puittaponà
tevinitpe ‘one to the foot,’ and thus up to 15, which is iptaitòne ‘a whole
foot.’ Next follows 16, ‘one to the other foot,’ and so on to 20, tevin itòto,
‘one Indian;’ 21, itaconò itòto jamgnàr bonà tevinitpe ‘one to the hands of
the other Indian;’ 40, acciachè itòto, ‘two Indians;’ thence on to 60, 80, 100,
‘three, four, five Indians,’ and beyond if needful. South America is
remarkably rich in such evidence of an early condition of finger-counting
recorded in spoken language. Among its many other languages which have
recognizable digit-numerals, the Cayriri, Tupi, Abipone, and Carib rival the
Tamanac in their systematic way of working out ‘hand,’ ‘hands,’ ‘foot,’
‘feet,’ &c. Others show slighter traces of the same process, where, for
instance, the numerals 5 or 10 are found to be connected with words for
‘hand,’ &c., as when the Omagua uses pua, ‘hand,’ for 5, and reduplicates
this into upapua for 10. In some South American languages a man is

reckoned by fingers and toes up to 20, while in contrast to this, there are
two languages which display a miserably low mental state, the man
counting only one hand, thus stopping short at 5; the Juri ghomen apa ‘one
man,’ stands for 5; the Cayriri ibichó is used to mean both ‘person’ and 5.
Digit-numerals are not confined to tribes standing, like these, low or high
within the limits of savagery. The Muyscas of Bogota were among the more
civilized native races of America, ranking with the Peruvians in their
culture, yet the same method of formation which appears in the language of
the rude Tamanacs is to be traced in that of the Muyscas, who, when they
came to 11, 12, 13, counted quihicha ata, bosa, mica, i.e., ‘foot one, two,
three.’[311] To turn to North America, Cranz, the Moravian missionary, thus
describes about a century ago the numeration of the Greenlanders. ‘Their
numerals,’ he says, ‘go not far, and with them the proverb holds that they
can scarce count five, for they reckon by the five fingers and then get the
help of the toes on their feet, and so with labour bring out twenty,’ The
modern Greenland grammar gives the numerals much as Cranz does, but
more fully. The word for 5 is tatdlimat, which there is some ground for
supposing to have once meant ‘hand;’ 6 is arfinek-attausek, ‘on the other
hand one,’ or more shortly arfinigdlit, ‘those which have on the other hand;’
7 is arfinek-mardluk, ‘on the other hand two;’ 13 is arkanck-pingasut, ‘on
the first foot three;’ 18 is arfersanek-pingasut, ‘on the other foot three;’
when they reach 20, they can say inuk nâvdlugo, ‘a man ended,’ or inûp
avatai nâvdlugit,’ the man’s outer members ended;’ in this way by counting
several men they reach higher numbers, thus expressing, for example, 53 as
inûp pinga-jugsâne arkanek-pingasut, ‘on the third man on the first foot
three.’[312] If we pass from the rude Greenlanders to the comparatively
civilized Aztecs, we shall find on the Northern as on the Southern continent
traces of early finger-numeration surviving among higher races. The
Mexican names for the first four numerals are as obscure in etymology as
our own. But when we come to 5 we find this expressed by macuilli; and as
ma (ma-itl) means ‘hand,’ and cuiloa ‘to paint or depict,’ it is likely that the
word for 5 may have meant something like ‘hand-depicting.’ In 10,
matlactli, the word ma, ‘hand,’ appears again, while tlactli means half, and
is represented in the Mexico picture-writings by the figure of half a man
from the waist upward; thus it appears that the Aztec 10 means the ‘hand-
half’ of a man, just as among the Towka Indians of South America 10 is
expressed as ‘half a man,’ a whole man being 20. When the Aztecs reach 20

they call it cempoalli, ‘one counting,’ with evidently the same meaning as
elsewhere, one whole man, fingers and toes.
Among races of the lower culture elsewhere, similar facts are to be
observed. The Tasmanian language again shows the man stopping short at
the reckoning of himself when he has held up one hand and counted its
fingers; this appears by Milligan’s list before mentioned, which ends with
puggana, ‘man,’ standing for 5. Some of the West Australian tribes have
done much better than this, using their word for ‘hand,’ marh-ra; marh-jin-
bang-ga, ‘half the hands,’ is 5; marh-jin-bang-ga-gudjir-gyn, ‘half the
hands and one,’ is 6, and so on; marh-jin-belli-belli-gudjir-jina-bang-ga,
‘the hand on either side and half the feet,’ is 15.[313] As an example from the
Melanesian languages the Maré will serve; it reckons 10 as ome re rue
tubenine, apparently ‘the two sides’ (i.e. both hands), 20 as sa re
ngome,’one man,’ &c.; thus in John v. 5 ‘which had an infirmity thirty and
eight years,’ the numeral 38 is expressed by the phrase, ‘one man and both
sides five and three.’[314] In the Malayo-Polynesian languages, the typical
word for 5 is lima or rima, ‘hand,’ and the connexion is not lost by the
phonetic variations among different branches of this family of languages, as
in Malagasy dimy, Marquesan fima, Tongan nima, but while lima and its
varieties mean 5 in almost all Malayo-Polynesian dialects, its meaning of
‘hand’ is confined to a much narrower district, showing that the word
became more permanent by passing into the condition of a traditional
numeral. In languages of the Malayo-Polynesian family, it is usually found
that 6, &c., are carried on with words whose etymology is no longer
obvious, but the forms lima-sa, lima-zua ‘hand-one,’ ‘hand-two,’ have been
found doing duty for 6 and 7.[315] In West Africa, Kölle’s account of the Vei
language gives a case in point. These negroes are so dependent on their
fingers that some can hardly count without, and their toes are convenient as
the calculator squats on the ground. The Vei people and many other African
tribes, when counting, first count the fingers of their left hand, beginning,
be it remembered, from the little one, then in the same manner those of the
right hand, and afterwards the toes. The Vei numeral for 20, mō bánde,
means obviously ‘a person (mo) is finished (bande),’ and similarly 40, 60,
80, &c. ‘two men, three men, four men, &c., are finished,’ It is an
interesting point that the negroes who used these phrases had lost their
original descriptive sense—the words have become mere numerals to them.
[316]
Lastly, for bringing before our minds a picture of a man counting upon

his fingers, and being struck by the idea that if he describes his gestures in
words, these words may become an actual name for the number, perhaps no
language in the world surpasses the Zulu. The Zulu counting on his fingers
begins in general with the little finger of his left hand. When he comes to 5,
this he may call edesanta ‘finish hand;’ then he goes on to the thumb of the
right hand, and so the word tatisitupa ‘taking the thumb’ becomes a
numeral for 6. Then the verb komba ‘to point,’ indicating the forefinger, or
‘pointer,’ makes the next numeral, 7. Thus, answering the question ‘How
much did your master give you?’ a Zulu would say ‘U kombile’ ‘He pointed
with his forefinger,’ i.e., ‘He gave me seven,’ and this curious way of using
the numeral verb is shown in such an example as ‘amahasi akombile’ ‘the
horses have pointed,’ i.e., ‘there were seven of them.’ In like manner,
Kijangalobili ‘keep back two fingers,’ i.e. 8, and Kijangalolunje ‘keep back
one finger,’ i.e. 9, lead on to kumi, 10; at the completion of each ten the two
hands with open fingers are clapped together.[317]
The theory that man’s primitive mode of counting was palpable reckoning
on his hands, and the proof that many numerals in present use are actually
derived from such a state of things, is a great step towards discovering the
origin of numerals in general. Can we go farther, and state broadly the
mental process by which savage men, having no numerals as yet in their
language, came to invent them? What was the origin of numerals not named
with reference to hands and feet, and especially of the numerals below five,
to which such a derivation is hardly appropriate? The subject is a peculiarly
difficult one. Yet as to principle it is not altogether obscure, for some
evidence is forthcoming as to the actual formation of new numeral words,
these being made by simply pressing into the service names of objects or
actions in some way appropriate to the purpose.
People possessing full sets of inherited numerals in their own languages
have nevertheless sometimes found it convenient to invent new ones. Thus
the scholars of India, ages ago, selected a set of words from a memoria
technica in order to record dates and numbers. These words they chose for
reasons which are still in great measure evident; thus ‘moon’ or ‘earth’
expressed 1, there being but one of each; 2 might be called ‘eye,’ ‘wing,’
‘arm,’ ‘jaw,’ as going in pairs; for 3 they said ‘Rama,’ ‘fire,’ or ‘quality,’
there being considered to be three Ramas, three kinds of fire, three qualities
(guna); for 4 were used ‘veda’, ‘age,’ or ‘ocean,’ there being four of each

recognized; ‘season’ for 6, because they reckoned six seasons; ‘sage’ or
‘vowel’ for 7, from the seven sages and the seven vowels; and so on with
higher numbers, ‘sun’ for 12, because of his twelve annual denominations,
or ‘zodiac’ from its twelve signs, and ‘nail’ for 20, a word incidentally
bringing in a finger notation. As Sanskrit is very rich in synonyms, and as
even the numerals themselves might be used, it becomes very easy to draw
up phrases or nonsense-verses to record series of numbers by this system of
artificial memory. The following is a Hindu astronomical formula, a list of
numbers referring to the stars of the lunar constellations. Each word stands
as the mnemonic equivalent of the number placed over it in the English
translation. The general principle on which the words are chosen to denote
the numbers is evident without further explanation:—

‘Vahni tri rtvishu gunendu kritâgnibhûta
Bânâsvinetra çara bhûku yugabdhi râmâh
Rudrâbdhirâmagunavedaçatâ dviyugma
Dantâ budhairabhihitâh kramaço bhatârâh.’

3 3 6 5 3 1
‘Fire, three, season, arrow, quality, moon,

4 3 5
four-side of die, fire, element,

5 2 2 5 1 1 4 4 3
Arrow, Asvin, eye, arrow, earth, earth, age, ocean, Rama,

11 4 3 3 4 100 2 2
Rudra, ocean, Rama, quality, Veda, hundred, two, couple,

32
Teeth: by the wise have been set forth in order the mighty lords.’[318]

It occurred to Wilhelm von Humboldt, in studying this curious system of
numeration, that he had before his eyes the evidence of a process very like
that which actually produced the regular numeral words denoting one, two,

three, &c., in the various languages of the world. The following passage in
which, more than sixty years ago, he set forth this view, seems to me to
contain a nearly perfect key to the theory of numeral words. ‘If we take into
consideration the origin of actual numerals, the process of their formation
appears evidently to have been the same as that here described. The latter is
nothing else than a wider extension of the former. For when 5 is expressed,
as in several languages of the Malay family, by “hand” (lima), this is
precisely the same thing as when in the description of numbers by words, 2
is denoted by “wing.” Indisputably there lie at the root of all numerals such
metaphors as these, though they cannot always be now traced. But people
seem early to have felt that the multiplicity of such signs for the same
number was superfluous, too clumsy, and leading to misunderstandings.’
Therefore, he goes on to argue, synonyms of numerals are very rare. And to
nations with a deep sense of language, the feeling must soon have been
present, though perhaps without rising to distinct consciousness, that
recollections of the original etymology and descriptive meaning of
numerals had best be allowed to disappear, so as to leave the numerals
themselves to become mere conventional terms.
The most instructive evidence I have found bearing on the formation of
numerals, other than digit-numerals, among the lower races, appears in the
use on both sides of the globe of what may be called numeral-names for
children. In Australia a well-marked case occurs. With all the poverty of the
aboriginal languages in numerals, 3 being commonly used as meaning
‘several or many,’ the natives in the Adelaide district have for a particular
purpose gone far beyond this narrow limit, and possess what is to all intents
a special numeral system, extending perhaps to 9. They give fixed names to
their children in order of age, which are set down as follows by Mr. Eyre: 1.
Kertameru; 2. Warritya; 3. Kudnutya; 4. Monaitya; 5. Milaitya; 6. Marrutya;
7. Wangutya; 8. Ngarlaitya; 9. Pouarna. These are the male names, from
which the female differ in termination. They are given at birth, more
distinctive appellations being soon afterwards chosen.[319] A similar habit
makes its appearance among the Malays, who in some districts are reported
to use a series of seven names in order of age, beginning with 1. Sulung
(‘eldest’); 2. Awang (‘friend, companion’), and ending with Kechil (‘little
one’), or Bongsu (‘youngest’). These are for sons; daughters have Meh
prefixed, and nicknames have to be used for practical distinction.[320] In
Madagascar, the Malay connexion manifests itself in the appearance of a

similar set of appellations given to children in lieu of proper names, which
are, however, often substituted in after years. Males; Lahimatoa (‘first
male’), Lah-ivo (‘intermediate male’); Ra-fara-lahy (‘last born male’).
Females; Ramatoa (‘eldest female’), Ra-ivo (‘intermediate’), Ra-fara-vavy
(‘last born female’).[321] The system exists in North America. There have
been found in use among the Dacotas the following two series of names for
sons and daughters in order of birth. Eldest son, Chaské; second, Haparm;
third, Ha-pe-dah; fourth, Chatun; fifth Harka. Eldest daughter, Wenonah;
second, Harpen; third, Harpstenah; fourth, Waska; fifth, We-harka. These
mere numeral appellations they retain through childhood, till their relations
or friends find occasion to replace them by bestowing some more
distinctive personal name.[322] Africa affords further examples.[323]
As to numerals in the ordinary sense, Polynesia shows remarkable cases of
new formation. Besides the well-known system of numeral words prevalent
in Polynesia, exceptional terms have from time to time grown up. Thus the
habit of altering words which sounded too nearly like a king’s name, has led
the Tahitians on the accession of new chiefs to make several new words for
numbers. Thus, wanting a new term for 2 instead of the ordinary rua, they
for obvious reasons took up the word piti, ‘together,’ and made it a numeral,
while to get a new word for 5 instead of rima, ‘hand,’ which had to be
discontinued, they substituted pae, ‘part, division,’ meaning probably
division of the two hands. Such words as these, introduced in Polynesia for
ceremonial reasons, are expected to be dropped again and the old ones
replaced, when the reason for their temporary exclusion ceases, yet the new
2 and 5, piti and pae, became so positively the proper numerals of the
language, that they stand instead of rua and rima in the Tahitian translation
of the Gospel of St. John made at the time. Again, various special habits of
counting in the South Sea Islands have had their effect on language. The
Marquesans, counting fish or fruit by one in each hand, have come to use a
system of counting by pairs instead of by units. They start with tauna, ‘a
pair,’ which thus becomes a numeral equivalent to 2; then they count
onward by pairs, so that when they talk of takau or 10, they really mean 10
pair or 20. For bread-fruit, as they are accustomed to tie them up in knots of
four, they begin with the word pona, ‘knot,’ which thus becomes a real
numeral for 4, and here again they go on counting by knots, so that when
they say takau or 10, they mean 10 knots or 40. The philological
mystification thus caused in Polynesian vocabularies is extraordinary; in

Tahitian, &c., rau and mano, properly meaning 100 and 1,000, have come
to signify 200 and 2,000, while in Hawaii a second doubling in their sense
makes them equivalent to 400 and 4,000. Moreover, it seems possible to
trace the transfer of suitable names of objects still farther in Polynesia in the
Tongan and Maori word tekau, 10, which seems to have been a word for
‘parcel’ or ‘bunch,’ used in counting yams and fish, as also in tefuhi, 100,
derived from fuhi, ‘sheaf or bundle.’[324]
In Africa, also, special numeral formations are to be noticed. In the Yoruba
language, 40 is called ogodzi, ‘a string,’ because cowries are strung by
forties, and 200 is igba, ‘a heap,’ meaning again a heap of cowries. Among
the Dahomans in like manner, 40 cowries make a kade or ‘string,’ 50 strings
make one afo or ‘head;’ these words becoming numerals for 40 and 2,000.
When the king of Dahome attacked Abeokuta, it is on record that he was
repulsed with the heavy loss of ‘two heads, twenty strings, and twenty
cowries’ of men, that is to say, 4,820.[325]
Among cultured nations, whose languages are most tightly bound to the
conventional and unintelligible numerals of their ancestors, it is likewise
usual to find other terms existing which are practically numerals already,
and might drop at once into the recognized places of such, if by any chance
a gap were made for them in the traditional series. Had we room, for
instance, for a new word instead of two, then either pair (Latin par, ‘equal’)
or couple (Latin copula, ‘bond or tie,’) is ready to fill its place. Instead of
twenty, the good English word score, ‘notch,’ will serve our turn, while, for
the same purpose, German can use stiege, possibly with the original sense
of ‘a stall full of cattle, a sty;’ Old Norse drôtt, ‘a company,’ Danish, snees.
A list of such words used, but not grammatically classed as numerals in
European languages, shows great variety: examples are, Old Norse, flockr
(flock), 5; sveit, 6; drôtt (party), 20; thiodh (people), 30; fölk (people), 40;
öld (people), 80; her (army), 100; Sleswig, schilk, 12 (as though we were to
make a numeral out of ‘shilling’); Middle High-German, rotte, 4; New
High-German, mandel, 15; schock (sheaf), 60. The Letts give a curious
parallel to Polynesian cases just cited. They throw crabs and little fish three
at a time in counting them, and therefore the word mettens, ‘a throw,’ has
come to mean 3; while flounders being fastened in lots of thirty, the word
kahlis, ‘a cord,’ becomes a term to express this number.[326]

In two other ways, the production of numerals from merely descriptive
words may be observed both among lower and higher races. The Gallas
have no numerical fractional terms, but they make an equivalent set of
terms from the division of the cakes of salt which they use as money. Thus
tchabnana, ‘a broken piece’ (from tchaba, ‘to break,’ as we say ‘a
fraction’), receives the meaning of one-half; a term which we may compare
with Latin dimidium, French demi. Ordinal numbers are generally derived
from cardinal numbers, as third, fourth, fifth, from three, four, five. But
among the very low ones there is to be seen evidence of independent
formation quite unconnected with a conventional system of numerals
already existing. Thus the Greenlander did not use his ‘one’ to make ‘first,’
but calls it sujugdlek, ‘foremost,’ nor ‘two’ to make ‘second,’ which he calls
aipâ, ‘his companion;’ it is only at ‘third’ that he takes to his cardinals, and
forms pingajuat in connexion with pingasut, 3. So, in Indo-European
languages, the ordinal prathamas, πρῶτος, primus, first, has nothing to do
with a numerical ‘one,’ but with the preposition pra, ‘before,’ as meaning
simply ‘foremost;’ and although Greeks and Germans call the next ordinal
δεύτερος, zweite, from δυό, zwei, we call it second, Latin secundus, ‘the
following’ (sequi), which is again a descriptive sense-word.
If we allow ourselves to mix for a moment what is with what might be, we
can see how unlimited is the field of possible growth of numerals by mere
adoption of the names of familiar things. Following the example of the
Sleswigers we might make shilling a numeral for 12, and go on to express 4
by groat; week would provide us with a name for 7, and clover for 3. But
this simple method of description is not the only available one for the
purpose of making numerals. The moment any series of names is arranged
in regular order in our minds, it becomes a counting-machine. I have read of
a little girl who was set to count cards, and she counted them accordingly,
January, February, March, April. She might, of course, have reckoned them
as Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. It is interesting to find a case coming
under the same class in the language of grown people. We know that the
numerical value of the Hebrew letters is given with reference to their place
in the alphabet, which was arranged for reasons that can hardly have had
anything to do with arithmetic. The Greek alphabet is modified from a
Semitic one, but instead of letting the numeral value of their letters follow
throughout their newly-arranged alphabet, they reckon α, β, γ, δ, ε, properly,
as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, then put in σ for 6, and so manage to let ι stand for 10, as ‫י‬

does in Hebrew, where it is really the 10th letter. Now, having this
conventional arrangement of letters made, it is evident that a Greek who
had to give up the regular 1, 2, 3,—εἷς, δύο, τρεῖς, could supply their places
at once by adopting the names of the letters which had been settled to stand
for them, thus calling 1 alpha, 2 bēta, 3 gamma, and so onward. The thing
has actually happened; a remarkable slang dialect of Albania, which is
Greek in structure, though full of borrowed and mystified words and
metaphors and epithets understood only by the initiated, has, as its
equivalent for ‘four’ and ‘ten,’ the words δέλτα and ἰῶτα.[327]
While insisting on the value of such evidence as this in making out the
general principles of the formation of numerals, I have not found it
profitable to undertake the task of etymologizing the actual numerals of the
languages of the world, outside the safe limits of the systems of digit-
numerals among the lower races, already discussed. There may be in the
languages of the lower races other relics of the etymology of numerals,
giving the clue to the ideas according to which they were selected for an
arithmetical purpose, but such relics seem scanty and indistinct.[328] There
may even exist vestiges of a growth of numerals from descriptive words in
our Indo-European languages, in Hebrew and Arabic, in Chinese. Such
etymologies have been brought forward,[329] and they are consistent with
what is known of the principles on which numerals or quasi-numerals are
really formed. But so far as I have been able to examine the evidence, the
cases all seem so philologically doubtful, that I cannot bring them forward
in aid of the theory before us, and, indeed, think that if they succeed in
establishing themselves, it will be by the theory supporting them, rather
than by their supporting the theory. This state of things, indeed, fits
perfectly with the view here adopted, that when a word has once been taken
up to serve as a numeral, and is thenceforth wanted as a mere symbol, it
becomes the interest of language to allow it to break down into an apparent
nonsense-word, from which all traces of original etymology have
disappeared.
Etymological research into the derivation of numeral words thus hardly
goes with safety beyond showing in the languages of the lower culture
frequent instances of digit-numerals, words taken from direct description of
the gestures of counting on fingers and toes. Beyond this, another strong
argument is available, which indeed covers almost the whole range of the

problem. The numerical systems of the world, by the actual schemes of
their arrangement, extend and confirm the opinion that counting on fingers
and toes was man’s original method of reckoning, taken up and represented
in language. To count the fingers on one hand up to 5, and then go on with a
second five, is a notation by fives, or as it is called, a quinary notation. To
count by the use of both hands to 10, and thence to reckon by tens, is a
decimal notation. To go on by hands and feet to 20, and thence to reckon by
twenties, is a vigesimal notation. Now though in the larger proportion of
known languages, no distinct mention of fingers and toes, hands and feet, is
observable in the numerals themselves, yet the very schemes of quinary,
decimal, and vigesimal notation remain to vouch for such hand-and-foot-
counting having been the original method on which they were founded.
There seems no doubt that the number of the fingers led to the adoption of
the not especially suitable number 10 as a period in reckoning, so that
decimal arithmetic is based on human anatomy. This is so obvious, that it is
curious to see Ovid in his well-known lines putting the two facts close
together, without seeing that the second was the consequence of the first.

‘Annus erat, decimum cum luna receperat orbem.
Hic numerus magno tune in honore fuit.
Seu quia tot digiti, per quos numerare solemus:
Seu quia bis quino femina mense parit:
Seu quod adusque decem numero crescente venitur,
Principium spatiis sumitur inde novis.’[330]

In surveying the languages of the world at large, it is found that among
tribes or nations far enough advanced in arithmetic to count up to five in
words, there prevails, with scarcely an exception, a method founded on
hand-counting, quinary, decimal, vigesimal, or combined of these. For
perfect examples of the quinary method, we may take a Polynesian series
which runs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5·1, 5·2, &c.; or a Melanesian series which may be
rendered as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 2nd 1, 2nd 2, &c. Quinary leading into decimal is
well shown in the Fellata series 1 ... 5, 5·1 ... 10, 10·1 ...10·5, 10·5·1 ... 20,
... 30, ... 40, &c. Pure decimal may be instanced from Hebrew 1, 2 ... 10,
10·1 ... 20, 20·1 ... &c. Pure vigesimal is not usual, for the obvious reason
that a set of independent numerals to 20 would be inconvenient; but it takes

on from quinary, as in Aztec, which may be analyzed as 1, 2 ... 5, 5·1 ... 10,
10·1 ... 10·5, 10·5·1 ... 20, 20·1 ... 20·10, 20·10·1 ... 40, &c.; or from
decimal, as in Basque, 1 ... 10, 10·1 ... 20, 20·1 ... 20·10, 20·10·1 ... 40 &c.
[331]
It seems unnecessary to bring forward here the mass of linguistic details
required for any general demonstration of these principles of numeration
among the races of the world. Prof. Pott, of Halle, has treated the subject on
elaborate philological evidence, in a special monograph,[332] which is
incidentally the most extensive collection of details relating to numerals,
indispensable to students occupied with such enquiries. For the present
purpose the following rough generalization may suffice, that the quinary
system is frequent among the lower races, among whom also the vigesimal
system is considerably developed, but the tendency of the higher nations
has been to avoid the one as too scanty, and the other as too cumbrous, and
to use the intermediate decimal system. These differences in the usage of
various tribes and nations do not interfere with, but rather confirm, the
general principle which is their common cause, that man originally learnt to
reckon from his fingers and toes, and in various ways stereotyped in
language the result of this primitive method.
Some curious points as to the relation of these systems may be noticed in
Europe. It was observed of a certain deaf-and-dumb boy, Oliver Caswell,
that he learnt to count as high as 50 on his fingers, but always ‘fived,’
reckoning, for instance, 18 objects as ‘both hands, one hand, three
fingers.’[333] The suggestion has been made that the Greek use of πεμπάζειν,
‘to five,’ as an expression for counting, is a trace of rude old quinary
numeration (compare Finnish lokket ‘to count,’ from lokke ‘ten’). Certainly,
the Roman numerals I, II, ... V, VI ... X, XI ... XV, XVI, &c., form a
remarkably well-defined written quinary system. Remains of vigesimal
counting are still more instructive. Counting by twenties is a strongly
marked Keltic characteristic. The cumbrous vigesimal notation could hardly
be brought more strongly into view in any savage race than in such
examples as Gaelic aon deug is da fhichead ‘one, ten, and two twenties,’
i.e., 51; or Welsh unarbymtheg ar ugain ‘one and fifteen over twenty,’ i.e.,
36; or Breton unnek ha triugent ‘eleven and three twenties,’ i.e., 71. Now
French, being a Romance language, has a regular system of Latin tens up to
100; cinquante, soixante, septante, huitante, nonante, which are to be found
still in use in districts within the limits of the French language, as in
Belgium. Nevertheless, the clumsy system of reckoning by twenties has

broken out through the decimal system in France. The septante is to a great
extent suppressed, soixante-quatorze, for instance, standing for 74; quatre-
vingts has fairly established itself for 80, and its use continues into the
nineties, quatre-vingt-treize for 93; in numbers above 100 we find six-
vingts, sept-vingts, huit-vingts, for 120, 140, 160, and a certain hospital has
its name of Les Quinze-vingts from its 300 inmates. It is, perhaps, the most
reasonable explanation of this curious phenomenon, to suppose the earlier
Keltic system of France to have held its ground, modelling the later French
into its own ruder shape. In England, the Anglo-Saxon numeration is
decimal, hund-seofontig, 70; hund-eahtatig, 80; hund-nigontig, 90; hund-
teontig, 100; hund-enlufontig, 110; hund-twelftig, 120. It may be here also
by Keltic survival that the vigesimal reckoning by the ‘score,’ threescore
and ten, fourscore and thirteen, &c., gained a position in English which it
has not yet totally lost.[334]
From some minor details in numeration, ethnological hints may be gained.
Among rude tribes with scanty series of numerals, combination to make out
new numbers is very soon resorted to. Among Australian tribes addition
makes ‘two-one,’ ‘two-two,’ express 3 and 4; in Guachi ‘two-two’ is 4; in
San Antonio ‘four and two-one’ is 7. The plan of making numerals by
subtraction is known in North America, and is well shown in the Aino
language of Yesso, where the words for 8 and 9 obviously mean ‘two from
ten,’ ‘one from ten.’ Multiplication appears, as in San Antonio, ‘two-and-
one-two,’ and in a Tupi dialect ‘two-three,’ to express 6. Division seems not
known for such purposes among the lower races, and quite exceptional
among the higher. Facts of this class show variety in the inventive devices
of mankind, and independence in their formation of language. They are
consistent at the same time with the general principles of hand-counting.
The traces of what might be called binary, ternary, quaternary, senary
reckoning, which turn on 2, 3, 4, 6, are mere varieties, leading up to, or
lapsing into, quinary and decimal methods.
The contrast is a striking one between the educated European, with his easy
use of his boundless numeral series, and the Tasmanian, who reckons 3, or
anything beyond 2, as ‘many,’ and makes shift by his whole hand to reach
the limit of ‘man,’ that is to say, 5. This contrast is due to arrest of
development in the savage, whose mind remains in the childish state which

the beginning of one of our nursery number-rhymes illustrates curiously. It
runs—

‘One’s none,
Two’s some,
Three’s a many,
Four’s a penny,
Five’s a little hundred.’

To notice this state of things among savages and children raises interesting
points as to the early history of grammar. W. von Humboldt suggested the
analogy between the savage notion of 3 as ‘many’ and the grammatical use
of 3 to form a kind of superlative, in forms of which ‘trismegistus,’ ‘ter
felix,’ ‘thrice blest,’ are familiar instances. The relation of single, dual, and
plural is well shown pictorially in the Egyptian hieroglyphics, where the
picture of an object, a horse for instance, is marked by a single line | if but
one is meant, by two lines | | if two are meant, by three lines | | | if three or
an indefinite plural number are meant. The scheme of grammatical number
in some of the most ancient and important languages of the world is laid
down on the same savage principle. Egyptian, Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit,
Greek, Gothic, are examples of languages using singular, dual, and plural
number; but the tendency of higher intellectual culture has been to discard
the plan as inconvenient and unprofitable, and only to distinguish singular
and plural. No doubt the dual held its place by inheritance from an early
period of culture, and Dr. D. Wilson seems justified in his opinion that it
‘preserves to us the memorial of that stage of thought when all beyond two
was an idea of indefinite number.’[335]
When two races at different levels of culture come into contact, the ruder
people adopt new art and knowledge, but at the same time their own special
culture usually comes to a standstill, and even falls off. It is thus with the art
of counting. We may be able to prove that the lower race had actually been
making great and independent progress in it, but when the higher race
comes with a convenient and unlimited means of not only naming all
imaginable numbers, but of writing them down and reckoning with them by
means of a few simple figures, what likelihood is there that the barbarian’s
clumsy methods should be farther worked out? As to the ways in which the

numerals of the superior race are grafted on the language of the inferior,
Captain Grant describes the native slaves of Equatorial Africa occupying
their lounging hours in learning the numerals of their Arab masters.[336]
Father Dobrizhoffer’s account of the arithmetical relations between the
native Brazilians and the Jesuits is a good description of the intellectual
contact between savages and missionaries. The Guaranis, it appears,
counted up to 4 with their native numerals, and when they got beyond, they
would say ‘innumerable.’ ‘But as counting is both of manifold use in
common life, and in the confessional absolutely indispensable in making a
complete confession, the Indians were daily taught at the public catechising
in the church to count in Spanish. On Sundays the whole people used to
count with a loud voice in Spanish, from 1 to 1,000.’ The missionary, it is
true, did not find the natives use the numbers thus learnt very accurately
—‘We were washing at a blackamoor,’ he says.[337] If, however, we examine
the modern vocabularies of savage or low barbarian tribes, they will be
found to afford interesting evidence how really effective the influence of
higher on lower civilization has been in this matter. So far as the ruder
system is complete and moderately convenient, it may stand, but where it
ceases or grows cumbrous, and sometimes at a lower limit than this, we can
see the cleverer foreigner taking it into his own hands, supplementing or
supplanting the scanty numerals of the lower race by his own. The higher
race, though advanced enough to act thus on the lower, need not be itself at
an extremely high level. Markham observes that the Jivaras of the Marañon,
with native numerals up to 5, adopt for higher numbers those of the
Quichua, the language of the Peruvian Incas.[338] The cases of the indigenes
of India are instructive. The Khonds reckon 1 and 2 in native words, and
then take to borrowed Hindi numerals. The Oraon tribes, while belonging to
a race of the Dravidian stock, and having had a series of native numerals
accordingly, appear to have given up their use beyond 4, or sometimes even
2, and adopted Hindi numerals in their place.[339] The South American
Conibos were observed to count 1 and 2 with their own words, and then to
borrow Spanish numerals, much as a Brazilian dialect of the Tupi family is
noticed in the last century as having lost the native 5, and settled down into
using the old native numerals up to 3, and then continuing in Portuguese.[340]
In Melanesia, the Annatom language can only count in its own numerals to
5, and then borrows English siks, seven, eet, nain, &c. In some Polynesian
islands, though the native numerals are extensive enough, the confusion

arising from reckoning by pairs and fours as well as units, has induced the
natives to escape from perplexity by adopting huneri and tausani.[341] And
though the Esquimaux counting by hands, feet, and whole men, is capable
of expressing high numbers, it becomes practically clumsy even when it
gets among the scores, and the Greenlander has done well to adopt untrîte
and tusinte from his Danish teachers. Similarity of numerals in two
languages is a point to which philologists attach great and deserved
importance in the question whether they are to be considered as sprung
from a common stock. But it is clear that so far as one race may have
borrowed numerals from another, this evidence breaks down. The fact that
this borrowing extends as low as 3, and may even go still lower for all we
know, is a reason for using the argument from connected numerals
cautiously, as tending rather to prove intercourse than kinship.
At the other end of the scale of civilization, the adoption of numerals from
nation to nation still presents interesting philological points. Our own
language gives curious instances, as second and million. The manner in
which English, in common with German, Dutch, Danish, and even Russian,
has adopted Mediæval Latin dozena (from duodecim) shows how
convenient an arrangement it was found to buy and sell by the dozen, and
how necessary it was to have a special word for it. But the borrowing
process has gone farther than this. If it were asked how many sets of
numerals are now in use among English-speaking people in England, the
probable reply would be one set, the regular one, two, three, &c. There
exist, however, two borrowed sets as well. One is the well-known dicing-
set, ace, deuce, tray, cater, cinque, size; thus size-ace is ‘6 and one,’ cinques
or sinks, ‘double five.’ These came to us from France, and correspond with
the common French numerals, except ace, which is Latin as, a word of
great philological interest, meaning ‘one.’ The other borrowed set is to be
found in the Slang Dictionary. It appears that the English street-folk have
adopted as a means of secret communication a set of Italian numerals from
the organ-grinders and image-sellers, or by other ways through which
Italian or Lingua Franca is brought into the low neighbourhoods of London.
In so doing, they have performed a philological operation not only curious,
but instructive. By copying such expressions as, Italian due soldi, tre soldi,
as equivalent to ‘twopence,’ ‘threepence,’ the word saltee became a
recognized slang term for ‘penny,’ and pence are reckoned as follows:—

Oney saltee ... 1d. uno soldo.
Dooe saltee ... 2d. due soldi.
Tray saltee ... 3d. tre soldi.
Quarterer saltee ... 4d. quattro soldi.
Chinker saltee ... 5d. cinque soldi.
Say saltee ... 6d. sei soldi.
Say oney saltee or setter saltee ... 7d. sette soldi.
Say dooe saltee or otter saltee ... 8d. otto soldi.
Say tray saltee or nobba saltee ... 9d. nove soldi.
Say quarterer saltee or dacha saltee ... 10d. dieci soldi.
Say chinker saltee or dacha oney saltee ... 11d. undici soldi.
Oney beong ... 1s.
A beong say saltee ... 1s. 6d.
Dooe beong say saltee or madza caroon ... 2s. 6d. (half crown, mezza
corona.)[342]

One of these series simply adopts Italian numerals decimally. But the other,
when it has reached 6, having had enough of novelty, makes 7 by ‘six-one,’
and so continues. It is for no abstract reason that 6 is thus made the turning-
point, but simply because the costermonger is adding pence up to the silver
sixpence, and then adding pence again up to the shilling. Thus our
duodecimal coinage has led to the practice of counting by sixes, and
produced a philological curiosity, a real senary notation.
On evidence such as has been brought forward in this essay, the apparent
relations of savage to civilized culture, as regards the Art of Counting, may
now be briefly stated in conclusion. The principal methods to which the
development of the higher arithmetic are due, lie outside the problem. They
are mostly ingenious plans of expressing numerical relation by written
symbols. Among them are the Semitic scheme, and the Greek derived from
it, of using the alphabet as a series of numerical symbols, a plan not quite
discarded by ourselves, at least for ordinals, as in schedules A, B, &c.; the
use of initials of numeral words as figures for the numbers themselves, as in
Greek Π and Δ for 5 and 10, Roman C and M for 100 and 1,000; the device
of expressing fractions, shown in a rudimentary stage in Greek γ’, δ’, for
1/3, 1/4, γδ for 3/4; the introduction of the cipher or zero, by means of
which the Arabic or Indian numerals have their value according to their

position in a decimal order corresponding to the succession of the rows of
the abacus; and lastly, the modern notation of decimal fractions by carrying
down below the unit the proportional order which for ages had been in use
above it. The ancient Egyptian and the still-used Roman and Chinese
numeration are indeed founded on savage picture-writing,[343] while the
abacus and the swan-pan, the one still a valuable school-instrument, and the
other in full practical use, have their germ in the savage counting by groups
of objects, as when South Sea Islanders count with coco-nut stalks, putting
a little one aside every time they come to 10, and a large one when they
come to 100, or when African negroes reckon with pebbles or nuts, and
every time they come to 5 put them aside in a little heap.[344]
We are here especially concerned with gesture-counting on the fingers, as
an absolutely savage art still in use among children and peasants, and with
the system of numeral words, as known to all mankind, appearing scantily
among the lowest tribes, and reaching within savage limits to developments
which the highest civilization has only improved in detail. These two
methods of computation by gesture and word tell the story of primitive
arithmetic in a way that can be hardly perverted or misunderstood. We see
the savage who can only count to 2 or 3 or 4 in words, but can go farther in
dumb show. He has words for hands and fingers, feet and toes, and the idea
strikes him that the words which describe the gesture will serve also to
express its meaning, and they become his numerals accordingly. This did
not happen only once, it happened among different races in distant regions,
for such terms as ‘hand’ for 5, ‘hand-one’ for 6, ‘hands’ for 10, ‘two on the
foot’ for 12, ‘hands and feet’ or ‘man’ for 20, ‘two men’ for 40, &c., show
such uniformity as is due to common principle, but also such variety as is
due to independent working-out. These are ‘pointer-facts’ which have their
place and explanation in a development-theory of culture, while a
degeneration-theory totally fails to take them in. They are distinct records of
development, and of independent development, among savage tribes to
whom some writers on civilization have rashly denied the very faculty of
self-improvement. The original meaning of a great part of the stock of
numerals of the lower races, especially of those from 1 to 4, not suited to be
named as hand-numerals, is obscure. They may have been named from
comparison with objects, in a way which is shown actually to happen in
such forms as ‘together’ for 2, ‘throw’ for 3, ‘knot’ for 4; but any concrete