In all probability this fact has had much to do with the continued dependence of animals on smell. In fishes and reptiles a full sweep of vision is so slowly gained that some more active sentinel sense is requisite to safety. In mammals the head rotates more easily, but valuable time is lost in the rotation of the whole body. These animals, therefore, depend on both sight and smell, in some cases equally, in some more fully on one or the other of these senses. When we reach the semi-upright ape, we have to do with a form capable of turning the body and observing the whole surrounding circle of objects more quickly and readily than any quadruped. As a result, these animals have grown to depend more fully on vision and less on smell than the quadrupeds. Finally, in fully erect man, the power of quick turning and alert observation of the whole circle of the horizon reaches its ultimate, and in man sight has become in a large degree the dominant sense, and smell has fallen to a minor place.
With this change in the relations of the senses has come a change in the degree of mental development. It is highly probable that the dependenceof the apes on vision instead of smell has had much to do with their mental activity, quickness of observation, and active curiosity. In man there can be no question that it has played a great part in the rapid development of his intellectual powers, and in the extraordinary breadth of his conception of nature as compared with that of the lower animals. While hearing and smell advise us of neighboring conditions only, and have their chief utility as aids to the preservation of existence, sight makes us aware of the conditions of nature in remote localities, extending far beyond the limits of the earth. While this sense plays its part as one of the protective agencies, it is still more useful as an agent in the acquisition of knowledge in general, and has much to do with the development of the intellectual faculties. We may look, therefore, upon the increasing dominance of the sense of sight as a leading agency in the making of man as a thinking being, and may ascribe to this in a considerable measure the thirst for information and faculty of imitation so marked in the apes.
One of the characteristics of man, of which we spoke as among those to which his high development is due, is that of language. There is nothing that has had more to do with the mental progress of the human race than facility in the communication of thought, and in this vocal language is the principal agent and in the fullest measure is the instrument of the mind. Human speech has, in these modern times, become remarkably expressive, indicating all the conditions, relations, and qualities, not only of things, but of thoughts and ideal conceptions. And the utility of language has been enormously augmented by the development of the arts of writing and printing. Originally thought could only be communicated by word of mouth and transmitted by the aid of the memory. Now it can be recorded and kept indefinitely, so that no useful thought of able thinkers need be lost, but every valuable idea can be retained as an educative influence through unnumbered ages.
In this instrumentality, which has been of such extraordinary value to man, the lower animals are strikingly deficient. They are not quite devoid ofvocal language, though it is doubtful if any of the sounds made by them have a much higher linguistic office than that of the interjection. But emotional sounds, to which these belong, are not destitute of value in conveying intelligence. They embrace cries of warning, appeals to affection, demands for help, calls for food supplies, threats, and other indications of passion, fear, or feeling. And the significance of these vocal sounds to animals may often be higher than we suppose. That is, they may not be limited to the vague character of the interjection, but may occasionally convey a specific meaning, indicative of some object or some action. In other words, they may advance from the interjection toward the noun or the verb, and approach in value the verbal root, a sound which embraces a complete proposition. Thus a cry of warning may be so modulated as to indicate to the hearer, "Beware, a lion is coming!" or to convey some other specific warning. We know that accent or tone plays a great part in Chinese speech, the most primitive of existing forms, a variation in tone quite changing the meaning of words. The same may be the case with the sounds uttered by animals to a much greater extent than we suppose.
We know this to be the case with some of the birds. The common fowl of our poultry yards has a variety of distinct calls, each understood by its mates, while special modulations of some call or cry are not uncommon among birds. The mammalia are not fluent in vocal powers, their range of tones being limited, yet they certainly convey definite information to one another. Recent observers have come to the conclusion that the apes do, to a certain extent, talk with one another. The experiments to prove this have not been very satisfactory, yet they seem to indicate that the woodland cries of the apes possess a certain range of definite meaning.
We are utterly ignorant of what powers of speech the man-ape possessed. It must, in its developed state as a land-dwelling, wandering, and hunting biped, have needed a wider range of utterance than during its arboreal residence. It was exposed to new dangers, new exigencies of life affected it, and its old cries very probably gained new meanings, or new cries were developed to meet new perils or conditions. In this way a few root words may have been gained, rising above the value of the interjection, and expressing some degree of definite meaning, though still at the bottom of the scale of language, the first stepping stones from the vague cry toward the significant word.
Between this stage and that of human language an immense gap supervenes, a broad abyss which it seems at first sight impossible to bridge. As the facts stand, however, it has been largely bridged by man himself. Side by side with the highly intricate languages which now exist, are variousprimitive forms of speech which take us far back toward the origin of human language. So advanced a people as the Chinese speak a language practically composed of root words, the higher forms of expression being attained by simple devices in the combination of these primitive word forms. The same may be said, in a measure, of ancient Egyptian speech. We can conceive of an early state of affairs in which these devices of word compounding were not yet employed, and in which each word existed as a separate expression, unmodified by association with any other word. Among the savage races of the earth very crude forms of language often exist, the methods of associating words into sentences being of the simplest character, though few surpass the Chinese in simplicity of system.
But all this represents an advanced stage of language evolution, a development of thought and its instrument which has taken thousands of years to complete. We cannot fairly judge from it what the speech of primitive man may have been, for in every case there has been a long process of development; aided, no doubt, in many cases, by educative influences acting from the more advanced upon the speech of the less advanced races.
If we seek to analyze any of these languages, the most intricate as well as the least advanced, we find ourselves in most instances able to isolate the root word as the basic element of speech.From this simple form all the more developed forms seem to have arisen. Take away their combining devices, and the root words fall apart like so many beads of speech, each with a defined significance of its own and fully capable of existing by itself. The Aryan and the Chinese especially offer themselves to this analytic method. Strip off the suffixes and affixes from Aryan words, get down to the germinal forms from which these words have grown, isolate these germs of speech, and we find ourselves in a language of root forms, each of which has grown vague and wide in significance as the modifying elements that limited its meaning have been removed. In the Chinese the problem is a much simpler one. We need simply to take the existing words out of their place in the sentence and let them stand alone, and we have root words at first hand. We may go through the whole range of human speech and, with more or less difficulty, arrive at a similar result. In short, the evidence seems conclusive that the language of mankind began in the use of isolated words of vague and broad significance, and that all the subsequent development of language consisted in the combination of these words, with a modification and limitation of their meaning, the families of speech differing principally in the method of combination devised.
It must, indeed, be said that in isolating the root forms of modern languages we reach conditions stillfar removed from those of primitive speech. These roots are in a measure packed with meaning. Time has added to their significance, and they lack the simplicity they probably once possessed. In particular, they have gained ideal senses, entered in a measure into that broad language of the mind which has been gradually added to the language of outer nature. The recognition of the existence of mind and thought doubtless came somewhat late in human development. Man long knew only his body and the world that surrounded it. Step by step only did he discover his mind. And when it became necessary to speak of mental conditions, no new language was invented, but old words were broadened to cover the new conditions. The mind is analogous to the body in its operations, ideas are analogues of things, and it was usually necessary only to add to the physical significance of words the corresponding ideal significance. In this way a secondary language slowly grew up, underlying and subtending the primary language, until the words invented to express the world of things were employed to include as vast a world of thoughts.
In getting down, then, to the language of primitive man we are obliged to divest the root forms of speech of all this ideal significance, and confine them to their physical meanings. In dealing with the languages of the least advanced existing tribes of mankind, indeed, little of this is requisite. Thelanguage of the mind with them has not yet begun its growth or is in its first simple stages. Only half the work of the evolution of language is completed. There is, indeed, no tribe so undeveloped as to use the primitive forms of speech. The most savage of the races of mankind have made some progress in the art of combining words, gained some ideas of syntax and grammatical forms. Yet in certain instances the progress has been very slight, and in all we can see the living traces of the earlier method of speech from which they emerged.
It is to the ability to think abstractly and to form words with an abstract significance that human language owes much of its high development. But this ability is largely confined to civilized mankind, savages being greatly or wholly lacking in it. This deficiency is indicated in their modes of speech. Thus a native of the Society Islands, while able to say "dog's tail," "sheep's tail," etc., has no separate word for tail. He cannot abstract the general term from its immediate relations. In the same way the uncivilized Malay has twenty different words to express striking with various objects, as with thick or thin wood, a club, the fist, the palm, etc., but he has no word for "striking" as an isolated thought. We find the same deficiency in the speech of the American Indians. A Cherokee, for instance, has no word for "washing," but can express the different kinds of washing by no less than thirteen distinct words.
All this indicates a primitive stage in the evolution of language, one in which every word had its immediate and local application, while in each word a whole story was told. The power of dividing thought into its separate elements was not yet possessed. As thought progressed men got from the idea of "dog" to that of "dog's tail." They could not think of the part without the whole. Then they reached a word for "dog's tail wags." But the idea of "wags" as an abstract motion was beyond their powers of thought. They could not think of action, but only of some object in action. The language of the American Indians was an immediate derivation from this mode of word formation, every proposition, however intricate it might be, constituting a single word, whose component parts could not be used separately. The mode of speech here indicated is one form of development of the root. Other forms are the compounding of the Chinese and the Mongolian and the inflection of the Aryan and the Semitic, all pointing directly back to the root form as their unit of growth.
The inference to be drawn from all this is that the language of primitive man consisted of isolated words, sounds which may originally have been mere cries or calls, but which gradually gained some definiteness of meaning, as signifying some of the varied conditions of the outer world. This is the conclusion to which philologists have now very generally come. The recognition that languageconsists of root words, variously modified and combined, leads back irresistibly to a period in which those roots had not yet begun to be modified and combined. The roots are the hard, persistent things in human speech. Grammatical expedients are the net in which these roots have been caught and confined. Free them from the net, and it falls to pieces, while the roots remain intact, the solid and persistent primitive germs of speech.
Yet in isolating root language as the basis of grammatical language we go far toward closing the gap between animal and human speech. It is still, doubtless, of considerable width, yet the distinction is no longer one of kind, but is simply one of degree. Primitive man had a much greater scope of language than is possessed by any of the lower animals, and the vocal sounds used had a clearer and more definite significance; but their nature was the same. They doubtless began in calls and cries like those in use by animals, and though these had increased in number and gained more distinct meanings, the difference in character was not great. In short, the analytic method employed by modern philologists has gone far to remove the supposed vast distinction between brute and human speech, and has traced back the language of man to a stage in which it is nearly related in character to the language of animals. The distinction has been brought down to one of degree, scarcely one of kind. A direct and simple process of evolutionwas alone needed to produce it, and through that evolution man undoubtedly passed in his progress upward from his ancestral stage.
The language of the lower animals is a vowel form of speech. It lacks the consonantal elements, the characteristic of articulation. In this man seems to have at first agreed with them. The infant begins its vocal utterances with simple cries; only at a later age does it begin to articulate. If we may judge from the development of language in the child, man began to speak with the use of sounds native to the vocal organs, and progressed by a process of imitation, endeavoring to reproduce the sounds heard around him: the voices of animals, the sounds of nature, etc. This tendency to imitate is not peculiar to man. It exists in many birds, and in some attains a marked development. The mocking bird, for instance, has an extraordinary flexibility of the vocal organs and power of imitating the voices of other birds. The parrot and some other birds go farther in this direction, being capable of using articulate language and clearly repeating words used by man.
None of the mammalia possess this facility. It is not found in the apes, and probably was not possessed by the ancestor of man. But it is not difficult to believe that in the efforts of the latter to gain a greater variety of vocal utterance, its organs of speech became more flexible, and in time it gained the power of articulation.
There are races of existing men whose powers of language seem still in the transition stage between articulate and inarticulate speech. This seems the case with the Bushmen and Hottentots of South Africa, whose vocal utterances consist largely of a series of peculiar clicks that are certainly not articulate speech, though on the road toward it. The Pygmies of the Central African forests seem similarly to occupy an intermediate position in the development of language. Those who have endeavored to talk with them speak of their utterance as being inarticulate in sound. It appears to be a sort of link between articulate and inarticulate speech. In short, the great abyss which was of old thought to lie between the languages of man and the lower animals has largely vanished through the labors of philologists, and we can trace stepping-stones over every portion of the wide gap. The language of man has not alone been evidently a product of evolution, but also one of development from the vocal utterances of the lower animals; and the man-ape, in its slow and long progress from brute into man, seems to have gradually developed that noble instrument of articulate speech which has had so much to do with subsequent human progress.
In his bodily formation the man-ape differed little from man. The differences which existed were probably of a minor character, no greater than could readily exist within the limits of a species. If this assertion be questioned, it seems sufficient to call attention to the recent researches into the anatomy of the anthropoid apes, which differ in species, if not in genera, from man, yet are closely similar to him in all their main features of organization. Even in the brain, to whose great development man owes his superiority, the only marked difference is in size. Structurally, the distinctions are unimportant. If, then, these distant relatives so closely resemble man in physical frame, his immediate relative in the line of descent must have approached him still more closely in organization. After this ancestor had become a true, surface-dwelling biped, the differences in structure were probably so slight that physically the two forms were in effect identical. The man-ape was, as there is reason to believe, considerably smaller than man, perhaps about equal in size and stature to the chimpanzee, butthat does not constitute a specific difference. There may have been some differences in the skeletal and muscular structure. The vocal organs, for instance, probably differed, the evolution of language in man being accompanied with certain changes in the larynx. The skull was certainly much more ape-like. Yet variations of this kind, due to differences in mode of life, are minor in importance, and may easily come within the limits of a species. While the great features of organization remain intact, small changes, due to new exigencies of life, may take place without affecting the zoölogical position of an animal. The most striking difference between man-ape and man, that of the development of the brain to two or three times its size and weight, is similarly unessential in classification while the brain remains unchanged in structure. That it has remained unchanged we may safely deduce from the close similarity between the brain of man and those of the existing anthropoid apes. The cause of the increase in size is so evident that it need only be referred to. Since the era of the man-ape, almost the whole sum of the forces of development have been centred in the mental powers of this animal, with the result that the brain has grown in size and functional capacity, while the remainder of the body has remained practically unchanged.
That man as an animal has descended from the lower life realm, none who are familiar with thefacts of science now think of denying. This has attained to the scientist, and to many non-scientists, the level of a self-evident proposition. But that man as a thinking being has descended from the lower animals is a different matter, concerning which opinion is by no means in unison. Even among scientists some degree of difference of opinion exists, and such a radical evolutionist as Alfred Russell Wallace finds here a yawning gap in the line of descent, and is inclined to look upon the intellect of man as a direct gift from the realm of spirits. His explanation, it is true, is more difficult than the problem itself. There are no facts to sustain it, and even if he were not able to see how man's mind could be developed by natural selection, it is a sort ofreductio ad absurdumto call in the angels to bridge the chasm.
Romanes has dealt with the subject from a different and more scientific point of view, and seems to have succeeded in showing that man's intellect at its lowest level is not different in kind from the brute intellect at its highest level. Controversy on this subject is too apt to be based on the difference between the intellect of the brute and that of enlightened man, in disregard of the great mental gap which exists between the latter and the thought powers of the lowest savage. In the preceding section an effort was made to show how crude and imperfect must have been the language of primitive man. Its imperfection was a fair gauge ofthat of his powers of thought. His intellect stood at a very low level, seemingly no further above that of the highest apes than it was below that of enlightened man.
In fact, enormous as is the interval between the mind of the brute and that of the man of modern civilization, the whole long line of mental development can be traced, with the exception of a comparatively small interval. This is the gap between the intellect of the anthropoid ape and that of primitive man, the one important last chapter in the story of mental evolution. Supernaturalism, driven from its strongholds of the past, has taken its last stand upon this broken link, claiming that here the line of descent fails, and that the gap could not have been filled without a direct inflow of intellect from the world of spirits or an immediate act of creation from the Deity.
This view of the case is not likely to be accepted as final. Science has bridged so many gaps in the kingdom of nature that it is not likely to retire baffled from this one, but will continue its investigations in place of accepting conclusions that have not the standing even of hypothesis, since they are unsupported by a single known fact. At first sight, indeed, the facts which bear upon this question seem stubborn things to explain by the evolution theory. The gap in intellect between the highest apes and the lowest man is a considerable one, which no existing ape seems likely ever tocross. However the anthropoid apes gained their degree of mental ability, it does not appear to be on the increase. They are in a state of mental stagnation and may have remained so for millions of years. Something similar, indeed, can be said of the lowest savages. They also are mentally stagnant. The indications are that for thousands, or tens of thousands, of years in the past their intellectual progress has been almost nothing. Yet it is beyond reasonable question that the advanced thinker of to-day has evolved from an ancestor as low in the mental scale as this savage, probably much lower; and this renders it very conceivable that a similar process of evolution covered the interval between the ape intellect and that of primitive man.
Somewhere, at some time in the far past, the mental stagnation of man was broken, and the development of the mind began its long progression toward enlightenment. This was not in the localities in which the lower savages are now found, the equatorial forests of Africa and South America and other realms of savage life, the change in all probability taking place elsewhere, under new and severe exigencies of life. Similarly we have much justification in saying that somewhere, at some time, the mental stagnation of the ape was broken, and the long development of the mind from ape to man began. This did not take place in the instances of the existing anthropoids, and, as in theanalogous case of civilized man, its influencing cause must be looked for in exigencies of existence acting upon some form different in character and habitat from these apes.
The existing anthropoid apes may justly be compared in condition with the existing low savages. In both cases a satisfactory adaptation to their situation has been gained. These apes are still arboreal and frugivorous, as their remote ancestors were. They have for ages been in a state of close adaptation to their life conditions, and the influences of development have been largely wanting. Such evolution as took place must have been extremely slow. In like manner the lowest savages live in intimate relations with the conditions surrounding them. All problems of food-getting, habitation, climate, etc., have long since been solved, and in the tropical forests in which so many of them dwell they are in thorough accord with the situation. Mentally, therefore, they are practically at a standstill and have remained so for thousands of years. The two cases are parallel ones. We can safely say that the later development of man took place in other situations and under other conditions. We may fairly say the same in regard to the ape. Vigorous influences must have been brought to bear upon the ancestor of man as the instigating causes of its mental development into man; and similarly vigorous influences must have been brought to bear upon primitive man to set intrain his mental development into intellectual man. And the general character of these influences in both cases may readily be pointed out. An extraordinary development has taken place in the human intellect within a few thousands, or tens of thousands, of years, yielding the difference which exists between the cultivated man of to-day and the debased savage who probably preceded him, and whose counterpart still exists. This has undoubtedly been due to influences of the highest potency. If we can show that influences of equal potency acted upon man's ancestor, we shall have done much toward indicating how the ape brain may have grown into the brain of man.
In both cases the main agency was in all probability that of conflict. Both ape and man, as we take it, developed through some form of warfare. In the former case it was warfare with the animal kingdom; in the latter it was warfare with the conditions of nature and with hostile man. Each of these has been potent in its effects, and to each we owe the completion of a great stage in the evolution of man.
In the tropics, the home of the anthropoid apes of to-day and, probably, of the animal we have named the man-ape, war between man and nature scarcely exists. Nature is not hostile to man. There is no occasion for clothing and little for habitation. Food is abundant for the sparse populations. Little exertion is called for to sustainlife. Mental stagnation is very likely to supervene. Yet there, as elsewhere, conflict has had much to do with such mental progress as exists. Mastery in warfare is due to superior mental resources, which gradually arise from the exigencies of conflict, and manifest themselves in greater shrewdness or cunning, superior ability in leadership, better organization, fuller mutual aid, and the invention of more destructive weapons and more efficient tools. War acts vigorously on men's minds, peace acts sluggishly. In the former case man's most valued possession, his life, is in jeopardy, and his utmost powers are exerted for its preservation. Every resource within his power is brought to bear to save himself from wounds or death and to destroy his enemies. If the foes are equal physically, victory is apt to come to those which are superior mentally, which are quicker at devising new expedients, more alert in providing against danger, more skilful in the use of weapons, abler in combining their forces to act in unison. In short, the whole story of mankind tells us that mental evolution has been greatly aided by the influences of warfare, the reaction upon the mind of the effort at self-preservation, the destruction of those at a lower level of intellectual alertness, the preservation of the abler and more energetic, the effect of conflict in bringing into activity all the resources of the intellect, and the hereditary transmission of the powers of mind thus developed. Itis, undoubtedly, to war between man and man, and the conflict with the adverse conditions of nature in the colder regions of the earth, that man's development from his lowest to his highest intellectual state has been largely due. This is by no means to say that war is still necessary for this result. Other influences are now at work, of equal or superior potency, and while the conflict with nature and the conditions of society is still of importance, war between man and man is no longer necessary as a mental stimulant. The time was, and that not very far in the past, when it was an essential element in human development.
If we descend to the lowest existing savages, however, it is to find this agency almost non-existent. We can perceive in them no organized warfare and no alert conflict with nature. They are as yet at the very beginning of this stage of evolution, and it certainly exerts little influence upon them. Nature is not adverse, life needs little thought or exertion, they accept the world as they find it, without question or revolt, and their thoughts and habits are as unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and Persians. But the fact that active warfare does not now exist among the lowest tribes of mankind, does not argue that such a state has never existed. In truth, we maintain that primitive man is the outcome of an active and long-continued warfare, and that his settled and sluggish condition to-day is the ease that followsvictory. He has conquered and is at rest after his labors.
For if we compare primitive man with the anthropoid apes, it is to find one striking and important difference between them. The anthropoids are at a level in position with their animal neighbors. Man is lord and master of the animal kingdom, the dominant being in the world of life. He has no rival in this lordship, but stands alone in his relation to the animal kingdom. He is feared and avoided by the largest and strongest beasts of field and forest. He does not fight defensively, but offensively, and whatever his relation to his fellow-man, he admits no equal in the world of life below him. He is the only animal that has made a struggle for lordship. The gorilla is said to attack the lion and drive it from its haunts. If it does so, it is not with any desire for mastery, but simply to rid itself of a dangerous neighbor. The battle for dominion has been confined to man, and in the winning of it no small degree of mental development must have taken place.
The supremacy of man was not gained without a struggle, and that a severe and protracted one. The animal kingdom did not yield readily to man's lordship, and the war must have been long and bitter, settled as the relations now seem. Rest has succeeded victory. The lower animals are now submissive to man, or retire before him in dread of his strength and resources, and the strain upon hispowers has ceased. So far as this phase of evolution is concerned the influences aiding the mental development of man have lost their strength. The warfare is over, and man reigns supreme over the kingdom of life.
Of all animals the man-ape was the best adapted for such a struggle. The other anthropoid apes, while favored by the formation of their hands, lacked that freedom of the arms to which man mainly owes his success. No other animal has ever appeared with arms freed from duty in locomotion and at the same time endued with the power of grasping, and these are the features of organization to which the evolution of the human intellect was wholly due in its first stages. The man-ape was not able to contend successfully with the larger animals by aid of its natural weapons. Its diminutive size, its lack of tearing claws, and its lesser powers of speed, left it at a disadvantage, and had it attempted to conquer by the aid of its strength and the seizing and rending powers of teeth and nails, its victory over the larger animals would never have been won. Even with the aid of the cunning and alertness of the apes, their power of observation, their combination for defence and attack, and their general mental superiority to the tenants of the animal world, their supremacy in the event of their becoming carnivorous must have been confined to the smaller creatures, and could not have been established over the largeranimals of their native habitat except through the aid of other than their natural powers.
It was by the use of artificial weapons that the conquest was gained. The tendency to use missiles as weapons of offence and defence, which is shown by various species of monkeys, was in all probability greatly developed by the man-ape, the only carnivorous member, if our premises are correct, of the whole extensive family of the apes, and the only one with the free use of its hands and arms. By the use of weapons of this kind the powers of offence of this animal were enormously increased. As skill was acquired in their use, and more efficient weapons were selected or formed, the man-ape steadily advanced in controlling influence, and the lower animal world became more and more subordinated. No doubt the struggle was a protracted one. The previously dominant animals did not submit without a severe and long-continued contest. Thousands of years may have passed before the larger animals were subdued, for it is probable that the invention of superior weapons by an animal of low mental powers was a very slow process. Each stage of invention gave higher success, but these stages were very deliberate ones.
However this be, we can be assured that the superiority of the ancestral man lay in his mental resources, and that his victory was due to the employment of his mind rather than of his body. As a result, the developing influence of the conflictwas exerted upon his brain, the organ of the mind, far more than upon his physical frame, and this organ gradually increased in size, while the body as a whole remained practically unchanged. The conflict began with the man-ape on a level in power and dominance with animals of its own size and inferior to those of greater size and strength. It ended with man dominant over all the lower animals. Such a progress, if made by any animal through variation in physical structure, must have caused radical and extraordinary changes in size, strength, and utility of the natural organs of offence. If made, as in the instance in question, through development of the organ of the mind alone, it could pot but have produced a great increase in the size and power of this organ; and the dimensions of the brain in primitive man, as compared with those of the brain in the anthropoid apes, do not seem too great for the magnitude of the result.
The conflict ended, a new animal, man, finally and fully emerged from the family of the apes and settled down in the restful consciousness of victory, with a much larger brain and greatly superior mental powers than were possessed at the beginning of the struggle, yet in physical aspect not greatly changed from his ancestral form after it had first fully gained the erect attitude. The powers gained enabled early man easily to hold the position he had won, and there was no furtherspecial strain upon his faculties until a new contest began, that between man and nature, supplemented by a still more vital struggle, that between man and man.
To return to the point from which we set out, it may be said that, as the man-ape gained facility in walking in the erect attitude, and its hands and arms became fully adapted to the use of weapons, its standing in the animal kingdom changed essentially from that before held. Fear and flight ended, retreat ceased, attack began, pursuit succeeded flight, and the great battle for mastery entered upon its long course. An element which aided materially in the victory was the social habit of the animal in question, and the mutual aid which the members of any group gave one another. Educative influences also naturally follow association, every invention or improvement devised by one becomes the property of the whole, and nothing of importance once gained is lost.
The stages of this progress were, undoubtedly, in their outer aspect, stages of improvement in weapons. We seem to see ancestral man, in his early career as a carnivorous animal, seizing the stones and sticks that came readily to hand, and flinging them with some little skill at his prey, in the same manner as we can perceive the baboon doing the same thing. In like manner we observe him breaking off branches from the trees and using them as clubs. One of the first steps of development from this crude stage in the use of weapons would be the selection of stones suited by size and shape for throwing, and the choice of clubs of suitable length and thickness, the latter being stripped of their twigs.
For a long time fresh weapons, those immediately at hand, would be seized and used for every new conflict; but as the idea of the superiority of some weapons to others arose, a second stage of evolution must have begun. The selected club, broken from the tree and prepared for use with some care, and thus embodying a degree of choice and labor, would be too valuable to fling idly away, and might be retained for future use, the first personal possession of inchoate man. Similarly, stones carefully chosen for their suitability for throwing would be probably kept, and a small store of them collected. In short, we may conceive of the man-ape thus gathering a magazine of weapons,—clubs and stones,—sought or shaped during hours of leisure for use in hours of conflict. In this way our animal ancestor doubtless slowly became a skilful hunter, carrying his weapons with him in the chase, and using them efficiently in the conquest of prey.
A third stage in this progress was reached when to some wise-headed old man-ape came the idea of combining the two forms of weapon in use, of fastening in some way the stone to the club in order that a more effective blow might be struck.The vegetable kingdom furnishes natural cords, flat stones with more or less cutting edges could be chosen and bound to the end of the club, and the earliest form of the battle-axe would be produced. With its formation the man-ape made another important step of progress and added greatly to his powers of offence. Stage by stage he was bringing his animal competitors under his control.
The formation of an axe or hatchet, however crude it may have been, would naturally lead to another step in advance. With it the ancestral man had passed beyond the possession of a weapon into the possession of a tool. The shaping of his clubs previously had been done by a rude tearing or hammering off of their twigs. These could now be cut off, and in addition the club might be wrought into a better shape. Manufacture had begun. Our ancestor stood at one end of a long line, at the other end of which we behold the steam-engine, the electric motor, and an interminable variety of other instruments.
Primitive manufacture was not confined to the shaping of wood. The shaping of stone followed in due time. If a tree branch could be made more suitable for its purpose by cutting it into shape with a rude stone axe or hatchet, a stone of better shape might be obtained by hammering. Doubtless the chipping effect of striking stone upon stone had been often observed before the idea arose that this could be made useful, and that where stones of thedesired shape were not to be found, the shape of those at hand might in this way be improved.
If we seek for some turning-point, some stage of progress, in which the man-ape fairly emerged into man, perhaps it would be well to select that which we have now reached, that in which the animal in question, which had hitherto used the objects of nature in their natural form, first gained the idea of manufacture and began to shape these objects by the use of tools. In truth, the dividing line between man-ape and man was imperceptibly fine. Various points of demarcation might be chosen, each founded on some important step in evolution. But among them all that in which the effort to convert the objects of nature into better weapons by the use of tools is perhaps the best, as it was probably the first step in that long process of manufacture to which man owes his wonderful advance.
With this early effort at manufacture, man had reached a stage in which he was first able to make a permanent record of his existence upon the earth—aside from that of the very infrequent preservation of his bones as fossil remains. A chipped stone is a permanent object. Even a very rudely shaped one bears some indications of its origin upon its surface, some marks pointing back to man in his early days. Unfortunately for anthropologists, natural agencies sometimes produce effects resembling those achieved by man's hands,and some degree of skill in manufacture and well-marked design is necessary before one can be sure that a seeming stone weapon has not been shaped by nature instead of man. Within a recent period research for the evidence of early man in the shape of chipped stones has been diligently made, with an abundance of undoubted and a number of doubtful results. Some of these reach very far back in time, and if actually the work of man he must have lived upon the earth as a manufacturing animal for years that may be numbered by the million. Seemingly chipped stones have been found that belong to the remote Miocene geological age. With the latter are some scratches upon bones that also seem the work of tools. But these Miocene relics are questionable. They do not seem to surpass the shaping power of nature herself. Unless some more indubitable relics are found, we must place the advent of man as a tool-using animal at a much later date. How far back he may have existed as a man-like biped is another question, which we are not likely soon to solve.
It is scarcely necessary to pursue this branch of our subject farther. We have reached one end of a line of development, the succeeding course of which is well known. From the earliest rudely chipped stones and flints that are certainly the work of man, we can easily trace his progress upward through better examples of the chipped and later through those of the polished stone implement, until the age of metal began. And with these stones have been found many other indications of the progressing powers of man, in the shaping of bone, the invention and use of a considerable variety of implements and ornaments, and the earliest efforts of art, as stated in a preceding section. There is no occasion to go into the detail of these steps of progress. When they are reached, this section of our work ends. We are concerned here simply with man's ancestor and man in his earliest stage of existence, not with man in his later course of development.
The question has often been asked, if man has descended from an ape ancestor why is it that no traces of this ancestral form have been found in a fossil state? If man has gone through such an extended course of development, why has he left no remains? This question, looked upon as unanswerable by many of those who ask it, is really of minor importance. A half-dozen answers, each of considerable weight, could easily be made to it. In the first place, it may be said that the absence of remains referred to is far from a single instance, but one out of thousands. It is generally admitted that the species of animals found fossil are very far from representing all the species that have existed upon the earth, and probably form but a minute percentage of them. In the second place, the remains of man's ancestor have not been sought for in its native locality, the tropical regions. In the third place, man belongs to the class of animals least likely to be preserved in the fossil state, since they dwell in the depths of forests and at a distance from the lakes and streams in whose muddy bottoms the remains of so manyanimals have been fossilized. Another answer is, that of the various species of anthropoid apes that probably existed in the past, a few relics only of a single species have been found. If there were this one species alone, its number of individuals must have reached into the millions, yet of those hosts only a few fugitive bones are known to exist. There could not well be a more striking instance of the imperfection of the geological record. The sparse remains of Dryopithecus, the species in question, with some few other fossils of doubtfully anthropoid species, save us from a total blank, and open the vista to a myriad of active arboreal creatures which had their dwelling-place in the old-time European forests, but have almost utterly vanished from human knowledge.
These are not the only answers that can be made to the question propounded. Though the bones of the man-ape have not been found, relics of several stages of developing man exist. Most significant among these, until recently, was the celebrated Neanderthal skull, which in facial aspect departs widely from the ordinary human and approaches the simian type. More significant still is the Pithecanthropus cranium, indicative of an animal that stood midway between man and ape, a creature fully erect in posture, as its thigh bone proves, but with a brain that had attained but the halfway stage of development. In this notable find we seem to see man in the making, thebody already fully man-like, the brain advanced much beyond the stage of the ape intellect, but still far below that of man. It is the remnant of a creature significantly on the dividing line between man-ape and man.
So much for the response to the question as hitherto made. As the case stands, we are not obliged to stop at this point. Within the latter section of the nineteenth century discoveries have been made which fit in admirably with our argument. Rediscoveries, perhaps, we should call them, for they were imperfectly known in ancient times, but only recently have they fairly come within human ken. We refer to the Pygmy tribes of the African forests, not definitely offered hitherto as aids to the elucidation of this problem, yet which seem to adapt themselves closely to it, and certainly help essentially in filling the gap between civilized man and his ape-like ancestor.
We have already said that there appear to have been two separate and distinct stages in the evolution of man: one, that of his conflict with the animal world, ending in his mastery of the brute creation; the second that of his conflict with nature, ending in his mastery of the resources of the earth. Overlapping and succeeding the second there has been a third, that of the conflict of man with man, ending in the survival of the fittest of the human race. In the discussion of this problem, as hitherto made, these distinct stages of evolution,with their intermediate resting stages, have not been recognized; argument being based on man as a whole, and no thought directed to the possibility that existing man may represent several separate processes of development, with broad lapses between. The argument we propose to offer is that man as he was at the completion of his first stage, that of the subjugation of the animal world, and before the beginning of the conflict with nature, still exists, the first derivation from the man-ape, living in the location and possessing much of the appearance and many of the habits of this ancestral form.
Late travellers in Africa have found more than trees and streams in the forest depths. They have found there a distinct and peculiar race of men, negro-like in many particulars, yet differing from the negroes in others, and specially marked by their dwarfish stature, which is indicated in the name of Pygmies, usually given them. These diminutive beings were known as long ago as the days of Homer, and their legendary combats with the cranes are spoken of by him in his poems. He was not aware of what is known now, that theseforestdwarfs would disdain the cranes as antagonists, and are quite capable of overcoming the lordly elephant. In truth, they know no equals in the forest, and, while destitute of any knowledge of agriculture, are the most skilful, considering the primitive character of their weapons, of the hunters of the earth.
The forest is the home of the Pygmy, as in all probability it was of the man-ape. He dwells in its deepest recesses, its moist and sultry depths, and pines when removed from his native realm in the heart of the tropic woods. In truth, he is almost as fully arboreal as was his tree-dwelling ancestor and as are his forest relatives, the anthropoid apes of to-day; not inhabiting the limbs of trees, indeed, but living under their shade, and forming the true man of the woodland, the nomad hunters of the vast equatorial forests. It must be said, however, that this is not wholly the case. There are tribes seemingly belonging to this race in South Africa who dwell in the open desert, but retain there, in great measure, the habits of their forest kin.
The first of modern travellers to see the Pygmies was Du Chaillu, in his journey through the African woodlands in 1867. He describes them as averaging four feet seven inches in height, their complexion of a pale yellow brown, the hair of their head short, but their bodies covered with a thick growth of hair, as if the loss of their ancestral covering had not been completed. The tribe seen by him was known as the Obongo, and dwelt in Ashango Land, occupying the forest region between the Gaboon and the Congo.
Dr. Schweinfurth, whose exploration extended from 1868 to 1870, was the next to meet these nomads of the forests, of whom he has given aninteresting description in his "Heart of Africa." He met with them in the country of the Manbuttoo, on the Welle River, between three degrees and four degrees north latitude. The tribe seen by him, known as the Akka, was made up of very diminutive individuals, none being over four feet ten inches high, and some only four feet. Their bodies were in due proportion to their height, so that they resembled half-grown boys in size.
The Akkas, as described by him, have large heads, huge ears, and very prognathous faces. Their arms are long and lank, the chest flat and narrow, widening below to support a huge hanging abdomen, the legs short and bandy, and the walk a waddling motion, there being a sort of lurch with each step. In this latter respect they recall the gibbon in its effort to walk. The gaping aspect of the mouth has a suggestive resemblance to that of the ape. They are also ape-like in their incessant play of countenance, twitching of eyebrows, rapid gestures of hands and feet, nodding and wagging of the head, and remarkable agility. Their skin is of a dull brown color, "like partly roasted coffee," and destitute of the covering of hair seen by Du Chaillu on the Obongos. The hair of the head and the beard is scanty and of woolly texture.
Stanley, who frequently met those forest dwarfs in his expedition for the relief of Emin Pacha, gives much information concerning them in his"In Darkest Africa." He found, indeed, two types of dwarfs, one the Wambutti, who were of attractive aspect, having large, round eyes, full and prominent round faces with broad foreheads, jaws slightly prognathous, hands and feet small, figures well formed though diminutive, and complexion of a brick red hue. The other type, the Akka, he describes as having "small, cunning, monkey eyes, close and deeply set." One woman described by him had "protruding lips overhanging her chin, a prominent abdomen, narrow flat chest, sloping shoulders, long arms, feet strongly turned inward, and very short lower legs." She was "certainly deserving of being classed as an extremely low, degraded, almost a bestial type of a human being." The language of the Akka is of a very undeveloped type, and seems a link between articulate and inarticulate speech.
Stanley, in his journey down the Congo, heard many stories of the forest dwarfs, who were described to him as a yard high, with long beards and large heads. Other traditional accounts of them similarly speak of their long beards, though Stanley saw none answering to this description. The first individual seen by him in this journey was four feet six and a half inches high, and measured thirty inches round the chest. He was of a light chocolate color, with a thin fringe of whiskers, his legs bowed and with thin shanks, the calf being undeveloped. His body was covered with athick, fur-like hair, nearly half an inch long, in this respect agreeing with those described by Du Chaillu.
The Batwas, seen and measured by Dr. Ludwig Wolfe in the middle Congo basin in 1886, were of an average height of four feet three inches. They resemble the Akka in general appearance, and have longish heads, long narrow faces, and small reddish eyes. They bounded through the tall herbage "like grasshoppers" and were remarkably agile in climbing.
For several years past there have been rumors of a race of Pygmies in the interior of the Cameroons, but these reports were not verified until the year 1898, when the Bulu expedition of the German military force succeeded, with much difficulty, in seeing several individuals of this race, secured through the aid of a native chief. One woman was measured and proved to be just four feet high. The color was from chocolate-brown to copperish, except the palms, which were of a yellowish white. The hair was deep black, thick, and frizzled; the skull broad and high; the lips full and swollen. Like other Pygmy tribes, these are very shy, wandering from place to place in the forest, and avoiding frequented routes of travel. They are skilful hunters and collect much rubber, which they dispose of to the negro tribes.
In the same year Mr. Albert B. Lloyd made a journey in Central Africa, following Stanley'sroute down the Congo. He was alone, with the exception of a few carriers, and had the good fortune of passing through the country of the Pygmies and that of the cannibals of the Aruwimi without conflict or injury, entering into cordial relations with both peoples. He journeyed for three weeks in the Pygmy forest and had excellent opportunities for examining its inhabitants.
After entering the great primeval forest Mr. Lloyd went west for five days without the sight of a Pygmy. Suddenly he became aware of their presence by mysterious movements among the trees, which he at first attributed to the monkeys. Finally he came to a clearing and stopped at an Arab village, where he met a great number of the diminutive nomads. "They told me," says Mr. Lloyd, "that, unknown to me, they had been watching me for five days, peering through the growth of the forest. They appeared very much frightened, and even when speaking covered their faces. I asked a chief to allow me to photograph the dwarfs, and he brought a dozen together. I was able to secure a snap-shot, but did not succeed in the time exposure, as the Pygmies would not stand still. Then I tried to measure them, and found not one over four feet in height. All were fully developed, the women somewhat slighter than the men. I was amazed at their sturdiness. The men have long beards, reaching halfway down the chest. They are very timid, and willnot look a stranger in the face, their bead-like eyes constantly shifting. They are, it struck me, fairly intelligent. I had a long talk with a chief, who conversed intelligently about their customs in the forest and the number of the tribesmen. Both men and women, except for a tiny strip of bark, were quite nude. The men were armed with poisoned arrows. The chief told me the tribes were nomadic, and never slept two nights in the same place. They just huddle together in hastily thrown-up huts. Memories of a white traveller,—Mr. Stanley, of course,—who crossed the forest years ago, still linger among them."
The discovery of these forest Pygmies has directed attention to the Bushmen of South Africa, a desert-dwelling race, long known though comparatively little regarded in their ethnological significance. They are now by many regarded as an outlying branch of the forest Pygmies, the chief difference being in the shape of the skull, which is rather long in the Bushmen, rather short in the Pygmies. These degraded wanderers inhabit an area extending from the inner ranges of the mountains of Cape Colony, through the central Kalahari desert, to near Lake Ngami, and thence northwestward to the Ovambo River. Into these, the most barren portions of the South African deserts, they have been driven by the encroachments of Kaffirs, Hottentots, and Europeans.
They closely resemble the Akka tribes of the north, averaging about four and a half feet in height, and possessing deep-set, crafty eyes, small and depressed nose, and a generally repulsive countenance. Their complexion is of a dirty yellow. Their hair grows in small, woolly tufts. In the vicinity of Lake Ngami, Livingstone found them to be of larger stature and darker color, while Baines measured some in this region who were five feet six inches in height. In disposition the Bushmen are strikingly wild, malicious, and intractable, while their cerebral development is classed by Humboldt as belonging to almost the lowest class of the human species.
Close in affinity with the Bushmen, and in various respects unlike the dark races around them, are the Hottentots, the original inhabitants of Cape Colony, a race of herdsmen who are much superior in culture to the degraded desert nomads. They are not dwarfish, being of medium stature, but they resemble the Bushmen in complexion, in which and in general cast of features they present some similarity to the Chinese. Their hair, like that of the Bushmen, grows in tufts, with spaces between, and they are like them in language, their method of speech consisting largely in a series of clicking sounds. Their manner of talking has been compared to the clucking of a hen, and by the Dutch to the "gobbling of a turkeycock." The Hottentots present every appearanceof being a developed branch of the Pygmy family, or the result of a cross between Bushmen and negroes.
These tribes of dwarfs, now extended throughout the equatorial forests and over the South African deserts, were probably once far more widespread, inhabiting much of the continent and reaching as far as Madagascar, where a branch of them, known as Kinios or Quinias, are thought still to exist. They extended north to the Mediterranean, and have left their representatives in Morocco in a tribe of dwarfs, about four feet high, who differ widely in appearance from all other people of that country. As to their origin, there is a diversity of opinion. Some anthropologists look upon them as a primeval race, distinct from the negroes, who came among them later. Professor Virchow, on the contrary, is of the opinion that their only important difference from the negroes is that of size, and regards them as the remains of a primitive population from whom the negroes have descended.
In a preceding section a statement was made as to what was the probable general appearance of the man-ape. It was based upon the physical aspect of the Pygmies, whom we hold to form the immediate derivative of man's ape ancestor, and to have made no radical change in personal appearance, if we may judge from the various ape-like characteristics which they still present.Mentally they have made a very considerable advance, and have reached the stage of men of low intellectual powers; but while their brains have been growing their bodies have not greatly changed, and the marks of their origin are thick upon them. There has probably been little change in size, the diminutive stature and small bodily dimensions being in accord with their incessant activity, while the difficulties of traversing the thick growth of the tropical forest may have helped to keep them small. As it is, they are of about half the size of civilized man, the weight of a full grown adult male being probably not over ninety pounds.
Taking the Pygmies as a whole, it may be said that, though many of the Akkas are disproportionate in shape and tottering in gait, on the whole these people are well made, their protuberant paunch being probably a result of their habits of eating. Captain Guy Burrows says that a Pygmy will eat twice as much as would suffice a full-grown man, and that one of them will devour a whole stalk of bananas at a meal, with other food. Some tribes are described as physically and mentally degenerate, and prognathism is in many cases strongly declared, the lower part of the face having an ape-like contour, and the protruding chin, that feature peculiar to man, being very deficient. In their great abdominal development the adult Akkas resemble the children of Arabs and negroes. This, therefore, seems the retention of a primitive featurewhich has become a passing characteristic in the more advanced types of mankind.
The Pygmies are not destitute of intelligence, and are capable of receiving some of the elements of education. Two of them were brought to Italy about 1875, who within two years' time learned to read and write and to speak Italian with much fluency. They showed themselves superior in school studies to European children of ten or twelve years of age, and one of them became somewhat proficient in music. In their habits they resembled children, being sensitive and impulsive, fond of play, and very quick in their motions. Their readiness in gaining the elements of education is in accord with experience in the case of other savages. It is when studies requiring abstruse thought are reached that the facility in acquisition of the savage races comes to an end.
With this consideration of the characteristics and habitat of the Pygmies we may proceed to a review of their habits. The weapons which they seem to have developed during their long upward progress, and to which their supremacy over the wild beasts of the forest is probably due, consist of two, the bow and arrow and the spear. The bow and arrow are small and insignificant in appearance, and would be of little value but for the poison which the Pygmies have somehow learned how to obtain, and which makes them dreaded, not only by beasts, but by men. Wherever found, from the deserts ofthe south to the forest of the Welle and Aruwimi on the north, the poisoned arrow is a mark of affinity as decided in its way as their physical resemblance. Its wide distribution goes to indicate that it was the general weapon of the Pygmies ages ago, when, presumably, they had all Africa for their own, and ruled supreme over the animal world in that continent.
It is true, indeed, that the use of the poisoned arrow is not peculiar to them, but is a somewhat common possession of savage tribes in all parts of the earth. This makes it quite possible that it was not original with the Pygmies, but was derived by them from other tribes. On the other hand, in view of its great value in giving them supremacy over the lower animals, it may well have been a primeval Pygmy invention, and these tribes the original source of its existing wide distribution.
They possess more than one poison; one being a dark substance of the color and consistence of pitch, which is supposed to be made out of a species of arum. It is laid in the splints of their wooden arrows, or spread thickly upon their iron arrowheads, when they possess these. Another poison is of a pale glue color, which is supposed by Stanley to be made of crushed red ants. When fresh these poisons are deadly, producing excessive faintness, palpitation of the heart, nausea, and deep pallor, soon followed by death. In Stanley's experience one man died within a minute, from a merepin prick in the breast. Others lived during different intervals, extending up to one hundred hours. The difference in virulence seems to have depended on the degree of freshness of the venom, which apparently lost its strength as it became dry.
The possession of a weapon so deadly as this, together with the agility and daring and the unerring marksmanship of the forest dwarfs, seem sufficient to give them absolute control of the animals of the African wilds. The lion, the elephant, and the buffalo, the largest and fiercest of the beasts of field and forest, are powerless before the virulent venom of the arrows of the Pygmies, and doubtless for ages they have held dominion as the fearless rulers of wood and wild. Captain Burrows says of the skill with the bow of the Pygmy that "he will shoot three or four arrows, one after the other, with such rapidity that the last will have left the bow before the first has reached its goal."
The bow and spear are not their only means of obtaining food. They have certain of the arts of the trapper, perhaps original with them, perhaps borrowed from their larger neighbors. They sink pits in the pathways of their game, covering them with light sticks and leaves and sprinkling earth over the whole. They build hut-like structures, and lay nuts or plantains beneath, for the purpose of tempting chimpanzees, baboons, or other apes. A slight movement causes the hut to fall on the incautious animals. Bow traps are placed alongthe tracks of civets, ichneumons, and rodents, which snap and strangle them. The Pygmies do not hesitate to attack the elephant, spearing it from beneath, and hunting it for its ivory, which they trade with the settled tribes. In short, they are of unsurpassed agility, and are the best of woodsmen and hunters, their skill being taken advantage of by the settled tribes, who trade with them vegetables, tobacco, spears, knives, and arrows for meat, honey, the feathers of birds, the ivory of the elephant, and other forest spoil. So destructive are they of game that they would soon denude the surrounding forest if they stayed long in one spot, so that they are compelled to move frequently. Schweinfurth speaks of them as cruel and fond of tormenting animals.
They serve the settled natives in other ways, acting as scouts and informing them of the coming of strangers while still distant. Every forest road runs through their camps, their villages command every crossway, and no movement can take place in the forest without their knowledge, while they areadeptin the art of concealment.
The superior woodcraft, the malicious disposition, and the poisoned arrows and good marksmanship of these forest folks make them formidable enemies, and the settled tribes hold them in dread and are glad to keep on good terms with them. Yet they find them much of a nuisance, since their dwarfish neighbors claim free access to their gardens and plantain fields, where they help themselves to fruit in return for small supplies of meat and furs. In short, they are human parasites on the larger natives, who suffer from their extortions, yet fear to provoke their enmity. Burrows says that they will never steal, but that they pay very inadequately for the plantains they take, leaving a very small package of meat in return for an ample supply of food.
The Pygmies build their camps two or three miles away from the negro villages, living in groups of sixty to eighty families. A large clearing may have eight to twelve of these Pygmy camps around it, with perhaps two thousand inmates. Their dwellings are of the shape of an oval cut lengthwise, and are built in a rude circle, the residence of the chief occupying the centre. The doors are two or three feet high. On every track leading to the camp, at about one hundred yards' distance, is a sentry house large enough to hold two of the little folks, its doorway looking up the track from the camp. While wandering in the forest they build the flimsiest of leaf shelters.
The intelligence of the Pygmies is of a very low order. In the arts which they have been developing for ages they are experts, they are thoroughly familiar with the habits of animals, and as hunters they are unsurpassed. But in intellect they are decidedly lacking. They are destitute of agriculture, possess no animals except a few dogs, andhave none of the elements of culture. The Bushmen, for instance, can count only up to two; all beyond that is "many." Yet this low tribe of desert nomads is, as we have said, skilled in the art of drawing, its sketches of men and animals being widely distributed through Cape Colony.
The Pygmies seem greatly lacking in the social sentiments. Burrows, in his "Land of the Pygmies," says that they do not possess even the most ordinary ties of family affection. Such common and natural feelings of affinity as those between mother and son, brother and sister, etc., seemed to be wanting in them.
It is a fact of great interest that the Pygmy race does not seem confined to Africa, for tribes of men resembling the Pygmies in stature and in various other particulars are found in widely removed localities, as in Malacca, the Andaman Islands, and the Philippine Archipelago, while there are indications that they once spread widely over this island region of the earth. Those of the Philippines, known as Negritos or Aetas, have been somewhat closely observed and may be briefly described.
The Negritos are similar in stature to the Pygmies of Africa, the men averaging four feet eight inches high, and they are like them in general appearance. They are darker in complexion, some being as sable as negroes, and all of them darker than the African Pygmies. Their features are coarse andill-shaped, their nose depressed, lips full, hair black and frizzled. In body, like the Pygmies, they are thin and spindle-legged. The calf of the leg is not developed in any of these dwarfish people. The Negritos possess one marked and significant characteristic,—the separation of the great toe. This, while it has not the full power of movement shown in the apes, is much more separated from the others than in the whites, and can be readily used in grasping. By its aid the Negrito can not only pick up small objects, but can descend the rigging of a ship head downward, holding on like a monkey by his toes. It may be said that among uncivilized and barefoot people the great toe is usually very mobile. The artisans of Bengal can weave, the Chinese boatmen can row, with its aid, and it adds much to facility in climbing.
The Negritos wear little clothing, have no fixed abodes, and pass a wandering life in the forests, living on game, honey, wild fruits, roots of the arum, and other forest food. Their weapons consist of a bamboo lance, a bow of palm wood, and a quiver of poisoned arrows. It is certainly a striking fact that, wherever found, from South Africa to the Far East, the Pygmy tribes possess the art of poisoning their weapons. This art is not practised by the surrounding peoples, and is the strongest evidence of a community of origin. It seems to point back to a remote period when the Pygmy peoples spread far through the tropicsof the Eastern hemisphere, though in the region now under consideration they have almost vanished through the assaults of the Malays.