most laborious pages
containing his lifelong observations on certain deviations of the
magnetic needle, and who had forgotten that in making these
observations he always had a pair of steel spectacles on his nose.
However, I have nothing to say against these observations, nor against
their more or less successful interpretations. But the real harm
begins when people imagine that in studying the ways of infants they
can discover what man was like in his original condition, whether as a
hairy or a hairless creature. To imagine that we can learn from the
way in which children begin to use our old words, how the primitive
language of mankind was formed, seems to me like imagining that
children playing with counters would teach us how and for what purpose
the first money was coined. There is no doubt a grain of truth in this
infantile psychology, but it requires as many caveats as that which is
called ethnological psychology, which makes us see in the savages of
the present day the representation of the first ancestors of our race,
and would teach us to discover in their superstitions the antecedents
of the mythology and religion of the Aryan or Semitic races. The same
philosophers who constantly fall back on heredity and atavism in
order to explain what seems inexplicable in the beliefs and customs
of the Brahmans, Greeks, or Romans, seem quite unconscious of the many
centuries that must needs have passed over the heads of the
Patagonians of the present day as well as of the Greeks at the time of
Homer. They look upon the Patagonians as the _tabula rasa_ of
humanity, and they forget that even if we admitted that the ancestors
of the Aryan race had once been more savage than the Patagonians, it
would not follow that their savagery was identical with that of the
people of Tierra del Fuego. Why should not the distance between
Patagonian and Vedic Rishis have been at least as great as that
between Vedic Rishis and Homeric bards? If there are ever so many
kinds of civilized life, was there only one and the same savagery?

To take, for instance, the feeling of fear; is it likely that we shall
find out whether it is innate in human nature or acquired and
intensified in each generation, by shaking our fists in the face of a
little baby, to see whether it will wink or shrink or shriek? Some
children may be more fearless than others, but whether that
fearlessness arises from ignorance or from stolidity is again by no
means easy to d