dently a retributive punishment
for wasting human food."

Mr. Wallace gives the most interesting testimony, in his "Malay
Archipelago," to the existence of a very distinct, and in some instances
highly developed moral sense in the natives with whom he came in contact.
In one case,[211] a Papuan who had been paid in advance for bird-skins and
who had not been able to fulfil his contract before Mr. Wallace was on{198}
the point of starting, "came running down after us holding up a bird, and
saying with great satisfaction, 'Now I owe you nothing!'" And this though
he could have withheld payment with complete impunity.

Mr. Wallace's observations and opinions on this head seem hardly to meet
with due appreciation in Sir John Lubbock's recent work on Primitive
Man.[212] But considering the acute powers of observation and the industry
of Mr. Wallace, and especially considering the years he passed in familiar
and uninterrupted intercourse with natives, his opinion and testimony
should surely carry with it great weight. He has informed the Author that
he found a strongly marked and widely diffused modesty, in sexual matters,
amongst all the tribes with which he came in contact. In the same way Mr.
Bonwick, in his work on the Tasmanians, testifies to the modesty exhibited
by the naked females of that race, who by the decorum of their postures
gave evidence of the possession in germ of what under circumstances would
become the highest chastity and refinement.

Hasty and incomplete observations and inductions are prejudicial enough to
physical science, but when their effect is to degrade untruthfully our
common humanity, there is an additional motive to regret them. A hurried
visit to a tribe, whose language, traditions and customs are unknown, is
sometimes deemed sufficient for "smart" remarks as to "ape characters,"
&c., which are as untrue as irrelevant. It should not be forgotten how
extremely difficult it is to enter into the ideas and feelings of an alien
race. If in the nineteenth century a French theatrical audience can witness
with acquiescent approval, as a type of English manners and ideas, the
representation of a marquis who sells his wife at Smithfield, &c. &c., it
is surely no wonder if the ideas of a tribe of newly visited savages {199}
should be more or less misunderstood. To enter into such ideas requires
long and familiar intimacy, like that experienced by the explorer of the
Malay Archipelago. From him, and ot