No. 42.-VOL. IV.]

ANTHROPOLOGY AT FAULT.

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HE virtue of self-knowledge is as marked a characteristic of a healthy moral condition in the national or social as in the individual life of mankind, and if proof were needed of the disordered state of modern society it might be adduced from the ignorant conceit which it displays in estimating its own capacities and antecedents. According to its more popular theories, man is not only capable of unbounded material progress (a fact which it is not our purpose to dispute) but of an almost unlimited expansion and improvement of his intellectual capacities attending upon this development of his mechanical and physical knowledge. argument of the anthropologists derives its primâ facie force from the apparently close resemblance between the condition of paleontological man, as evinced in the traces of him discovered in the tertiary and quaternary deposits and the savage tribes now existing upon the face of the earth. In a former article* we quoted Mr. Wallace's remarks in his "Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection," showing clearly that the lowest savage possesses a brain very slightly inferior in capacity to that of the most civilised European. If the size of the cerebral sensorium is any criterion of intellectual capacity, it is evident, as Mr. Wallace asserts, that the savage possesses "in an undeveloped state faculties which he never requires to use." That is to say that, supposing the brain to be an indication of the mental powers, the savage possesses in embryo these powers almost to the same extent as, for instance, the future fellows of the Royal Society. There are as yet no data to disprove the * "Catholic Progress," no. 36, vol. iii. p. 356.

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existence of a compact nucleus of highly intelligent descendants of Adam clustered around the cradle of our race, as is apparently implied by the inspired narrative; but, even if we are to believe that the whole Adamic species were for a long series of years after the Fall plunged into the state of abjection in which Tertiary man is discovered in Europe, we must nevertheless own that his degradation was in this respect less complete than that of the Australians, Fuegians, and Andaman Islanders, in that he possessed the mental activity requisite for gradually raising himself to the civilised state. The intelligence required to take the first steps in the scale of material progress must have been quite as great as that which has distinguished his latest efforts to attain its summit. The discovery and use of fire, the manufacture of flint axes, the sinking of pits to entrap the elephant and the rhinoceros, the fabrication of arrows, harpoons, needles, spoons, and ornaments, nay, among the Troglodytes of the Périgord even sculptured designs and a system of numeration and writing, must severally have demanded as great an effort of intelligence in primeval man as was needed in after ages for inventing the compass, the printing press, the steam engine, and the electric telegraph. This brings us to consider the true mode of solving the question at issue. We are in the dark as to the condition of the populations which remained in the immediate vicinity of Eden, and which probably retained in their greatest integrity the religious and social traditions derived from our first parents. According to De Maistre and Whately, these more fortunate races were from the first possessed of a certain amount of material civilisation which they transmitted to posterity to be subsequently

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