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Updated: May 6, 2025
Although we ought to be extremely cautious, as shewn in my work on 'Variation under Domestication, in concluding that any character, even with animals kept by semi-civilised people, has not been subjected to selection by man, and thus augmented, yet in the cases just specified this is improbable; more especially as the characters are confined to the males, or are more strongly developed in them than in the females.
Even amongst the Aztecs, who had reached a stage of social development, barbarous or semi-civilised, far beyond anything attained by the Australian tribes, the degree of personality and individuality reached by the vegetation deities was not such that those deities had strictly proper names: the deity of the maize was still only 'the maize-mother. Amongst the Australians, who are so far below the level reached in Mexico, the beings worshipped at the first-fruits ceremonies may well have been as nameless as the beings worshipped by the jungle-dwellers of Chota Nagpur.
But these civilised or semi-civilised visitors and settlers were separated from the indigenous Borneans by a great culture gap, and they probably had but little friendly intercourse with them and affected their culture but little, if at all; and though it is possible that they bartered salt, metal, tools, and weapons, for camphor and other jungle produce, their influence, like that of the Malays, probably extended but a little way from the coasts in most parts of the island.
His most important discovery was his last that of the Sandwich Islands since become an independent and semi-civilised kingdom. He sailed along the North American coast, where, from unavoidable circumstances, his surveys were less accurate than usual. They were, however, completed, many years after, by his follower Captain Vancouver.
I have described somewhat in detail this dancing party because it is the principal amusement of the semi-civilised inhabitants of all the Russian settlements in Siberia, and shows better than anything else the careless, happy disposition of the people.
These rude implements are capital in its embryonic form; and so far as they go, they verify the Marxian theory that capital is nothing but past labour crystallised. But we need not, in order to see labour, past and present, operating and producing in a practically unalloyed condition, go to savage or even semi-civilised countries.
See the chapters on these several animals in vol. i. of my 'Variation of Animals under Domestication; also vol. ii. p. 73; also chap. xx. on the practice of selection by semi-civilised people. For the Berbura goat, see Dr. Winwood Reade, it is not developed if the animal be castrated.
In semi-civilised countries, with little free communication, the spreading and knowledge of any new sub-breed will be a slow process.
His main contention concerns wars between great Powers, nearly equally matched Powers of high civilisation, with elaborate systems of credit and complicated interdependence of trade. But most recent wars have been attacks defensive attacks, of course upon small, powerless, and semi-civilised nations by the great Powers.
Indeed the evidence for the rejected and abnormal phenomena is even more 'recurrent' than the evidence for customs and institutions. Polyandry, totemism, human sacrifice, the taboo, are only reported as existing in remote and semi-civilised countries.
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