United States or Nauru ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
That this kind of doctrine receives religious sanction is certain, where we know the secret of savage mysteries. It is therefore quite incorrect, and strangely presumptuous, to deny, with almost all anthropologists, the alliance of ethics with religion among the most backward races. We must always remember their secrecy about their inner religion, their frankness about their mythological tales.
From instances like this, gathered from all over the world, it has generally been concluded by anthropologists that no evil physiological results necessarily follow the intermixture of races, even the most diverse, but that all supposed physiological evils coming from the intermixture of races really come from social rather than from physiological causes.
The customs of the people have been carefully studied and recorded by Bancroft, Schoolcraft, Morgan, Tylor, McGee, the Spanish historian, Herrera, and other travellers. When first visited by European anthropologists the country was divided into provinces, and in many provinces the people lived in communities or little republics.
They wore whiskers and a pointed beard, and dressed in long robes furnished with a sort of cape. Their physical characteristics are those of the Libyan neighbours of the Egyptians on the west, the forefathers of the fair-skinned and blue-eyed Kabyles or Berbers who inhabit the mountains of northern Africa to-day. Anthropologists connect these Libyans with the Kelts of our own islands.
We all know the civilised, the industrial eye how atrophied, how small and formless and expressionless it has become. The civilised nose, it would seem, degenerates in the other direction. Like the cultured potato or pumpkin, it swells in size. Parisians, it strikes me, are running to nose; they wax more rat-like every day. Here is a little problem for anthropologists.
Most villages along the south coast having rather more than the usual proportion of dark-haired folk have been claimed as asylums for the castaway sailors and soldiers of Spain by enthusiastic amateur anthropologists.
Next came the prehistoric specialist. Why in the name of the great Tyrannosaur had I not devoted more space to the wonderful race of Cro-Magnon men, who had developed such a high stage of civilisation 10,000 years ago? Indeed, and why not? The reason is simple. I do not take as much stock in the perfection of these early races as some of our most noted anthropologists seem to do.
A cultural unit, say the anthropologists; an idea of the divine mind, declare Mazzini and the mystics' of sociology. Each of these formulas possesses a certain relative truth, but all of them together come short of the whole truth. Nationality, which acts better perhaps than it argues, is one of the great forces of nature and of human nature that have got to be accepted.
These are characteristic of all Savage Spiritualism. The subject somewhat neglected by Anthropologists. Uniformity of phenomena. Mr. Tylor's theory of the origin of 'Animism'. Question whether there are any phenomena not explained by Mr. Tylor's theory. Examples of uniformity. The savage hypnotic trance. Hareskin examples. Cases from British Guiana. Australian rapping spirits. Maori oracles.
It was a piece of petrified skullbone, representing but a small portion of the head to which it had belonged, but yet sufficient to enable the anthropologists, who immediately fell to examining it, to draw ideal representations of the head as it must have been in life the head of a giant of enormous size, which, if it had possessed a highly organized brain, of proportionate magnitude, must have given to its possessor intellectual powers immensely greater than any of the descendants of Adam have ever been endowed with.
Word Of The Day