ement parts
of the earth, where the conditions necessary to a continuance in their
early civilization were absent; that, therefore, the descendants of
primeval, civilized men degenerated and sank in the scale of culture. To
use his own words, the weaker races were "driven by the stronger to the
woods and rocks," so that they became "mere outcasts of the human race."

In answer to this, while it was conceded, first, that there have been
examples of weaker tribes sinking in the scale of culture after escaping
from the stronger into regions unfavourable to civilization, and,
secondly, that many powerful nations have declined and decayed, it was
shown that the men in the most remote and unfavourable regions have not
always been the lowest in the scale; that men have been frequently found
"among the woods and rocks" in a higher state of civilization than on
the fertile plains, such examples being cited as Mexico, Peru, and even
Scotland; and that, while there were many examples of special and local
decline, overwhelming masses of facts point to progress as a rule.

The improbability, not to say impossibility, of many of the conclusions
arrived at by the duke appeared more and more strongly as more became
known of the lower tribes of mankind. It was necessary on his theory
to suppose many things which our knowledge of the human race absolutely
forbids us to believe: for example, it was necessary to suppose that
the Australians or New Zealanders, having once possessed so simple and
convenient an art as that of the potter, had lost every trace of it; and
that the same tribes, having once had so simple a means of saving labour
as the spindle or small stick weighted at one end for spinning, had
given it up and gone back to twisting threads with the hand. In fact,
it was necessary to suppose that one of the main occupations of man from
"the beginning" had been the forgetting of simple methods, processes,
and implements which all experience in the actual world teaches us are
never entirely forgotten by peoples who have once acquired them.

Some leading arguments of the duke were overthrown by simple statements
of fact. Thus, his instance of the Eskimo as pushed to the verge
of habitable America, and therefore living in the lowest depths of
savagery, which, even if it were true, by no means proved a general
rule, was deprived of its force by the simple fact that the Eskimos are
by no means the lowest race on the American continent,