n
with the lowest savages about whom we possess accurate information, and
shall pass from them to higher races until, if time permitted, we might
come to the civilised nations of antiquity and of modern times. In this
way, by comparing the ideas and practices of peoples on different planes
of culture we may be able approximately to reconstruct or represent to
ourselves with a fair degree of probability the various stages through
which this particular phase of religion may be supposed to have passed
in the great civilised races before the dawn of history. Of course all
such reconstructions must be more or less conjectural. In the absence of
historical documents that is inevitable; but our reconstruction will be
more or less probable according to the degree in which the corresponding
stages of evolution are found to resemble or differ from each other in
the various races of men. If we find that tribes at approximately the
same level of culture in different parts of the world have approximately
the same religion, we may fairly infer that religion is in a sense a
function of culture, and therefore that all races which have traversed
the same stages of culture in the past have traversed also the same
stages of religion; in short that, allowing for many minor variations,
which flow inevitably from varying circumstances such as climate, soil,
racial temperament, and so forth, the course of religious development
has on the whole been uniform among mankind. This enquiry may be called
the embryology of religion, in as much as it seeks to do for the
development of religion what embryology in the strict sense of the word
attempts to do for the development of life. And just as biology or the
science of life naturally begins with the study of the lowest sorts of
living beings, the humble protozoa, so we shall begin our enquiry with a
study of the lowest savages of whom we possess a comparatively full and
accurate record, namely, the aborigines of Australia.

[Sidenote: Savagery a case not of degeneracy but of arrested or rather
retarded development.]

At the outset I would ask you to bear in mind that, so far as evidence
allows us to judge, savagery in all its phases appears to be nothing but
a case of arrested or rather retarded development. The old view that
savages have degenerated from a higher level of culture, on which their
forefathers once stood, is destitute alike of evidence and of
probability. On the contrary, the informa