The Degeneracy of Savage Tribes.
MR. JOSEPH EDKINS, in Nature, adduces evidence to show that savage tribes are, in some cases at least, the products of degenerate culture rather than the examples of initial wildness. This is the view formerly represented by Dr. Whately, and to some extent by Humboldt, and now held by the Duke of Argyll and other writers. Mr. Tylor and many, perhaps most, of the modern archæologists and ethnologists hold the opposite view. Mr. Edkins mentions, among other facts in support of his opinion, the circumstance that in the Ilium now laid bare by Dr. Schliemann, the lower strata contain more copper and fewer stone implements than the upper—in other words, we have an “age of stone” after the “age of copper.” He argues also that the social conditions of certain forest tribes of Brazil, as found by Dr. Martins, indicated the existence of an earlier civilization, probably Asiatic; and that the names of numbers among Malayan and Polynesian tribes point to a similar degeneracy, the arithmetical faculty having dwindled in these insular peoples, in proportion to their distance from Asia, whence they originally brought far more complete and extensive numerical systems than they now possess.—Christian Union.