escaped ancestors got at the Deluge, according to Dr. Martius; nor because, as Schlegel considered, they were so doomed by the law of nature. Why should they not have formed some rude pottery, when able to construct nets? But how did it happen that their clever neighbours of New Zealand and the South Seas were equally ignorant of clay moulds? It was not because, according to Klemm, they belonged to the Passive formation. Ritter once said of the Africans: "Must it be that civilization is to be brought from the exterior and inoculated, so to say, upon the inhabitants of the Soodàn, because, to judge according to the entire development of history, the others are called upon to give, and these to receive!" It was in this way that Eichthal would regard them as a portion of the female element of humanity in organization. It could not be because of their deficiency in physical beauty, as Courtet de l'Isle supposed, for perfection of form is a matter of taste. Other authors have regarded their inertness from the inauspicious position in which nature placed them. But, as Dr. Waitz properly observes, "The white man is not less dependent on external circumstances in his progress toward civilization than the black man." Mr. Buckle makes the civilization of Egypt, India, and Mexico, to arise from fertility of soil, while others see the advance of Europe from the rigour of climate and the inhospitality of soil. A German author declares for the state "where a people living in a healthy climate is master of the soil." But this was the condition of the Tasmanian.
The antagonism to progress, according to that thoughtful anthropologist, Mr. Wake, F.A.S.L., lies in the "permanent arrest of mental development." They were, to use the familiar expression of farmers, bark-bound, so as to present no perceptible growth. But Dr. Waitz, while acknowledging the tendency of the uncultivated, "be it European or African," to resist progress, according to the law of inertia, wishes it to be understood that the state "does not irresistibly lead to the conclusion that savage peoples are irreclaimable." Mr. Wake takes this hopeful view: "The explanation of the arrested development of the Chinese will be also that of the degradation of the negro and the native Australian; and an examination of the subject will show that both may be accounted for by the influences of the external conditions of existence, without requiring in
