isinformed.
Another traveller, the American geologist, Professor Hartt of Cornell
University, lived long among the tribes of the Amazon. But Professor
Hartt did not, like Mr. Bates, find them at all destitute of theories of
things--theories expressed in myths, and testifying to the intellectual
activity and curiosity which demands an answer to its questions.
Professor Hartt, when he first became acquainted with the Indians of the
Amazon, knew that they were well supplied with myths, and he set to work
to collect them. But he found that neither by coaxing nor by offers of
money could he persuade an Indian to relate a myth. Only by accident,
"while wearily paddling up the Paranamirim of the Ituki," did he
hear the steersman telling stories to the oarsmen to keep them awake.
Professor Hartt furtively noted down the tale, and he found that by
"setting the ball rolling," and narrating a story himself, he could make
the natives throw off reserve and add to his stock of tales. "After one
has obtained his first myth, and has learned to recite it accurately and
spiritedly, the rest is easy." The tales published by Professor Hartt
are chiefly animal stories, like those current in Africa and among the
Red Indians, and Hartt even believed that many of the legends had been
imported by Negroes. But as the majority of the Negro myths, like
those of the Australians, give a "reason why" for the existence of some
phenomenon or other, the argument against early man's curiosity and
vivacity of intellect is rather injured, even if the Amazonian myths
were imported from Africa. Mr. Spencer based his disbelief in the
intellectual curiosity of the Amazonian tribes and of Negroes on the
reports of Mr. Bates and of Mungo Park. But it turns out that both
Negroes and Amazonians have stories which do satisfy an unscientific
curiosity, and it is even held that the Negroes lent the Amazonians
these very stories.(1) The Kamschadals, according to Steller, "give
themselves a reason why for everything, according to their own lively
fancy, and do not leave the smallest matter uncriticised".(2) As far,
then, as Mr. Spencer's objections apply to existing savages, we may
consider them overweighed by the evidence, and we may believe in a naive
savage curiosity about the world and desire for explanations of the
causes of things. Mr. Tylor's opinion corroborates our own: "Man's
craving to know the causes at work in each event he witnesses, the
reasons why each s