well-being. That processes of development similar to these were
in prehistoric times effective to raise culture from the savage to the
barbaric level, two considerations especially tend to prove. First,
there are numerous points in the culture even of rude races which are
not explicable otherwise than on the theory of development. Thus, though
difficult or superfluous arts may easily be lost, it is hard to imagine
the abandonment of contrivances of practical daily utility, where little
skill is required and materials are easily accessible. Had the
Australians or New Zealanders, for instance, ever possessed the potter's
art, they could hardly have forgotten it. The inference that these
tribes represent the stage of culture before the invention of pottery is
confirmed by the absence of buried fragments of pottery in the districts
they inhabit. The same races who were found making thread by the
laborious process of twisting with the hand, would hardly have disused,
if they had ever possessed, so simple a labour-saving device as the
spindle, which consists merely of a small stick weighted at one end; the
spindle may, accordingly, be regarded as an instrument invented
somewhere between the lowest and highest savage levels (Tylor, _Early
Hist. of Mankind_, p. 193). Again, many devices of civilization bear
unmistakable marks of derivation from a lower source; thus the ancient
Egyptian and Assyrian harps, which differ from ours in having no front
pillar, appear certainly to owe this remarkable defect to having grown
up through intermediate forms from the simple strung bow, the still used
type of the most primitive stringed instrument. In this way the history
of numeral words furnishes actual proof of that independent intellectual
progress among savage tribes which some writers have rashly denied. Such
words as _hand, hands, foot, man_, &c., are used as numerals signifying
5, 10, 15, 20, &c., among many savage and barbaric peoples; thus
Polynesian _lima_, i.e. "hand," means 5; Zulu _tatisitupa_, i.e. "taking
the thumb," means 6; Greenlandish _arfersanek-pingasut_, i.e. "on the
other foot three," means 18; Tamanac _tevin itoto_, i.e. "one man,"
means 20, &c., &c. The existence of such expressions demonstrates that
the people who use them had originally no spoken names for these
numbers, but once merely counted them by gesture on their fingers and
toes in low savage fashion, till they obtained higher numerals by the
inventive proces