United States or Puerto Rico ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
During this period Wallace had been quietly pursuing his researches in the Malay Archipelago, though not without a keen interest in all that was taking place at home in so far as this reached him by means of correspondence and newspaper reports his only means of keeping in touch with the world beyond the boundaries of the semi-civilised countries in which he was then living.
In civilised life man is largely, but by no means exclusively, influenced in the choice of his wife by external appearance; but we are chiefly concerned with primeval times, and our only means of forming a judgment on this subject is to study the habits of existing semi-civilised and savage nations.
He even suffered the humiliation of having portraits at five-and-twenty francs a-piece refused, because he failed to produce a likeness; and he reached the lowest degree of distress he worked according to size for the petty dealers who sell daubs on the bridges, and export them to semi-civilised countries.
With all its failings, civilisation has certain advantages which I must say have a peculiar value in my eyes, not the least of which is the ability to live a quiet and peaceable life, free from all possible attacks by savages or the semi-civilised marauders which I have understood infest these Eastern Seas.
No one also is more hopeless about the civilisation of Africa than the semi-civilised African returning to the 'home of his fathers. He feels how hard has been his struggle to emerge from savagery; he acknowledges, in his own case, a selection of species; and he foresees no end to the centuries before there can be a nation equal even to himself.
A second and very rare condition of an elective government is a CALM national mind a tone of mind sufficiently staple to bear the necessary excitement of conspicuous revolutions. No barbarous, no semi-civilised nation has ever possessed this.
One of the largest semi-civilised tribes inhabiting the banks of the Tapajos are the Mundurucus. They are noted for tattooing their bodies more completely than any other tribe. The whole body is covered with straight lines in diagonal patterns from the mouth downwards, the upper part being left free.
Very few of the great acquisitions of nations have been made by means that were absolutely blameless, and in a great empire which has to deal with uncivilised or semi-civilised populations acts of violence are certain to be not infrequent.
If, in order to avoid all chance of direct communication, we direct our attention to the theology of semi-civilised people, such as the Polynesian Islanders, separated by the greatest possible distance, and by every conceivable physical barrier, from the inhabitants of Palestine, we shall find not merely that all the features of old Israelitic theology, which are revealed in the records cited, are found among them; but that extant information as to the inner mind of these people tends to remove many of the difficulties which those who have not studied anthropology find in the Hebrew narrative.
But the relations between civilised countries on the one hand, and uncivilised or semi-civilised countries on the other hand, are very much more difficult in many ways. Difficulties especially arise with regard to commerce.
Word Of The Day