ble, to obtain
several accounts to certify each point in each locality.' Mr. Tylor then
adduces 'the test of recurrence,' of undesigned coincidence in testimony,
as Millar had already argued in the last century.[2] If a mediaeval
Mahommedan in Tartary, a Jesuit in Brazil, a Wesleyan in Fiji, one may add
a police magistrate in Australia, a Presbyterian in Central Africa, a
trapper in Canada, agree in describing some analogous rite or myth in
these diverse lands and ages, we cannot set down the coincidence to chance
or fraud. 'Now, the most important facts of ethnography are vouched for in
this way.'

We may add that even when the ideas of savages are obscure, we can
often detect them by analysis of the institutions in which they are
expressed.[3]

Thus anthropological, like psychical or any other evidence, must be
submitted to conscientious processes of testing and sifting. Contradictory
instances must be hunted for sedulously. Nothing can be less scientific
than to snatch up any traveller's tale which makes for our theory, and to
ignore evidence, perhaps earlier, or later, or better observed, which
makes against it. Yet this, unfortunately, in certain instances (which
will be adduced) has been the occasional error of Mr. Huxley and Mr.
Spencer.[4] Mr. Spencer opens his 'Ecclesiastical Institutions' by the
remark that 'the implication [from the reported absence of the ideas of
belief in persons born deaf and dumb] is that the religious ideas of
civilised men are not innate' (who says they are?), and this implication
Mr. Spencer supports by 'proofs that among various savages religious ideas
do not exist.' 'Sir John Lubbock has given many of these.' But it would be
well to advise the reader to consult Roskoff's confutation of Sir John
Lubbock, and Mr. Tylor's masterly statement.[5] Mr. Spencer cited Sir
Samuel Baker for savages without even 'a ray of superstition' or a trace
of worship. Mr. Tylor, twelve years before Mr. Spencer wrote, had
demolished Sir Samuel Baker's assertion,[6] as regards many tribes, and so
shaken it as regards the Latukas, quoted by Mr. Spencer. The godless
Dinkas have 'a good deity and heaven-dwelling creator,' carefully recorded
years before Sir Samuel's 'rash denial.' We show later that Mr. Spencer,
relying on a single isolated sentence in Brough Smyth, omits all his
essential information about the Australian Supreme Being; while Mr.
Huxley--overlooking the copious and conclusive evidence as to