but not impossible. Anthropology has, at all events, the advantage of studying an actual undeniably existing state of things. To sift the evidence as to that state of things, to examine the opportunities, the discretion, and the honesty of the witnesses, is part of the business of anthropology. A science which was founded on an uncritical acceptance of all the reports of missionaries, travellers, traders, and "beach-combers," would be worth nothing. But, as will be shown, anthropology is fortunate in the possession of a touchstone, "like that," as Theocritus says, "wherewith the money-changers try gold, lest perchance base metal pass for true."
The "difficulties which beset travellers and missionaries in their description of the religious and intellectual life of savages" have been catalogued by Mr. Max Müller. As he is not likely to have omitted anything which tells against the evidence of missionaries and travellers, we may adopt his statement in an abridged shape, with criticisms, and with additional illustrations of our own.[1]
First, "Few men are quite proof against the fluctuations of public opinion." Thus, in Rousseau's time, many travellers saw savages with the eyes of Rousseau—that is, as models of a simple "state of nature." In the same way, we may add, modern educated travellers are apt to see savages in the light cast on them by Mr. Tylor and Sir John Lubbock. Mr. Im Thurn, in Guiana, sees with Mr. Tylor's eyes; Messrs. Fison and Howitt, among the Kamilaroi in Australia, see with the eyes of Mr. Lewis Morgan, author of Systems of Consanguinity. Very well; we must allow for the bias in each case. But what are we to say when the travellers who lived long before Regnard report precisely the same facts of savage life as the witty Frenchman who wrote that "next to the ape, the Laplander is the animal nearest to man"? What are we to say when the mariner, or beach-comber, or Indian interpreter, who never heard of Rousseau, brings from Canada or the Marquesas
- ↑ Hibbert Lectures, p. 91.
