Part 8

Many things appear natural and self-evident to the savage which seem to us actually revolting. When the Fuegians are hard pressed by want, they kill their old women for food rather than their dogs, saying: ‘Old women no use; dogs kill otters.’ ‘What I’ said a negro to Burton, ‘am I to starve while my sister has children whom she can sell?’

Lubbock, in his great work on ‘The Origin of Civilisation,’ cites hundreds of instances of savage rudeness and simplicity which seem almost incredible to one accustomed all his life to types of human character such as are found in Europe and America. For instance, ‘when the natives of the Lower Murray first saw pack-oxen, some of them were frightened and took them for demons with spears on their heads, while others thought they were the wives of the settlers, because they carried the baggage.’ Speaking of the wild men in the interior of Borneo, this writer says: ‘They live absolutely in a state of nature, neither cultivating the ground nor living in huts. They eat neither rice nor salt, and do not associate with each other, but rove about the woods like wild beasts. The sexes meet in the jungle. When the children are old enough to shift for themselves, they usually separate, neither one afterwards thinking of the other. At night they sleep under some large tree whose branches hang low. They fasten the children to the branches in a kind of swing, and build a fire around the tree to protect them from snakes and wild beasts. The poor creatures are looked on and treated by the other Dyaks as wild beasts.’ Lubbock sums up his conclusions on the morality of savages in the following pathetic acknowledgment: ‘I do not remember a single instance in which a savage is recorded as having shown any symptoms of remorse; and almost the only case I can call to mind in which a man belonging to one of the lower races has accounted for an act by saying explicitly that it was right, was when Mr. Hunt asked a young Figian why he had killed his mother’.

A few pages further on, the same author adds, regarding the deplorable state of morality among savages: ‘That there should be races of men so deficient in moral feeling was altogether opposed to the preconceived ideas with which I commenced the study of savage life, and I have arrived at the conviction by slow degrees, and even with reluctance. I have, however, been forced to this conclusion, not only by the direct statements of travellers, but also by the general tenor of their remarks, and especially by the remarkable absence of repentance and remorse among the lowest races of men.’ Among ourselves the words used to distinguish right and wrong are metaphors. Right originally meant ‘straight,’ and wrong meant ‘twisted.’ Language existed, therefore, before morality; for if moral ideas had preceded language, there would have been original words to stand for them. Religion, according to Lubbock, has no moral aspect or influence except among the more advanced races of men. ‘The deities of savages are evil, not good; they may be forced into compliance with the wishes of man; they generally delight in bloody, and often require human, sacrifices; they are mortal, not immortal; they are to be approached by dances rather than by prayers; and often approve what we call vice rather than what we esteem as virtue. In fact, the so-called religion of the lower races of mankind bears somewhat the same relation to religion in its higher forms as astrology does to astronomy or alchemy to chemistry’.

Savages have few general ideas of any kind, as is evidenced by the almost total absence among them of words denoting general ideas. Many savage races cannot comprehend numbers greater than five or six, and are unable to make the simplest mathematical computations without using the fingers. The languages of savages are extremely rude, words being freely pieced out with pantomime. Savages talk with difficulty in the dark, because of their great reliance on gesture in conversation. The rich vocabularies of the languages of Europe and America have grown up step by step with the evolution of European and American mind. Every language is an evolution. The languages of many primitive peoples lack the verb to be entirely, and all nouns are proper nouns. Words are often little more than grunts or clucks, and are without the euphony and articulation found in the languages of the civilised. Darwin says that the language of the Fuegians sounds like a man clearing his throat. Not only every language, but every word, both in its form and meaning, is in process of evolution. Spirit, for instance, originally meant ‘blowing,’ understanding meant ‘getting beneath,’ and development the physical act of ‘unfolding.’ Words are continually drifting from their original meanings under the stress of incessant use, as ships drag their anchors in a gale. Those words that are exposed to common use undergo the most rapid changes, while words sheltered from the rush of human affairs, like harboured ships, hold to their moorings forever. Let, for instance, once meant ‘hinder’; now it means ‘allow.’ Bisect, on the other hand, a word of rare and technical use, has remained unaltered in significance for twenty centuries.

Even our alphabet has been evolved. The twenty-six symbols composing it have been eroded into the peculiar forms in which they appear at present by the various peoples through whose hands they have come to us. The originals were pictographs such as are still found on the aged monuments of earth’s earliest civilisations. The English got their alphabet from the Romans, who obtained it, along with almost everything else they had, from the Greeks. The Greeks received it from the Phenicians, and the Phenicians from the papyrus writers of Egypt, who in turn procured it from those hieroglyph chiselers who carved their curious literature on the granite tombs of the Nile in the remotest dawn of human history. A, the first letter of our alphabet, is a figure which has been evolved, as the result of long wear and tear, from the picture of an eagle; B was originally the picture of a crane; C represents a throne; D a hand; F an asp; H a sieve; K a bowl; L a lioness; M an owl; N a water-line; R a mouth; S a garden; T a lasso; X a chairback; and Z a duck.

The psychology of civilised man, though derived from that of the savage, and hence resembling it fundamentally, is, nevertheless, very different from it, both in character and in what it contains. The mind of the savage is rude, unresourceful, vicious, and childlike, while that of the civilised man or woman may be overflowing with wisdom and benignity. This gulf has not been covered by a stride, but by the slow operation of the same laws of Inheritance, Variation, and Selection by which all progress has been brought about.

7. Degeneration is a necessary part of the process of organic evolution. All progress, whether anatomical, intellectual, or social, takes place through selection, and selection means the pining and ultimate passing away of that which is left. In individual evolution it is organs, ideas, and traits of character that are eliminated, and in social evolution it is customs and institutions. One of the reasons given in the preceding chapter for the belief in the evolution of structures is the existence in man and other animals of vestigial organs, organs which in lower forms of life are useful, but which in higher forms are represented by useless or even injurious remnants. Similar remnants are found in the psychology of man and other animals. These vestiges of mind are not so easily recognised as the vestiges of structure, but they are everywhere. We find them in the antiquated instincts of man and the domestic animals, in the silent letters and worn-out words of languages, and in the emaciated remains of abandoned beliefs and institutions.

The hunting and fishing instinct of civilised man is a vestigial instinct, normal in the savage, but without either sense or decency among men devoted to industrial pursuits. The savage hunts and fishes because he is hungry, never for pastime; civilised men and women do so because they are too mechanical to assort their impulses. Civilised man is a mongrel, a cross between a barbarian and a god. His psychology is a compound of the jungle and the sky. In their loftier moments, many men are able to obscure the cruder facts of their origin and to put into temporary operation those more splendid processes of mind which characterise their ideals. But even the most civilised are forever haunted by the returning ghosts of departed propensities—propensities which grew up in ages of hate, which are now out-of-date, but which in the trying tedium of daily life come back and usurp the high places in human nature. Revenge, hate, cruelty, pugnacity, selfishness, vanity, and the like, are all more or less vestigial among men who have entered seriously on the life of altruism. Like the vermiform appendix and the human tail, these old obsolete parts of the human mind are destined, in the ripening of the ages, to waste away and disappear through disuse.

The practice of the dog of turning round two or three times before lying down is in response to an instinct which was no doubt beneficial to it in its wild life, when it was wont to make its bed in the grasses, but which is now a pure waste of time. Darwin records it as a fact, that he has himself seen a simple-minded dog turn round twenty times before lying down. The sheep-killing mania, which sometimes comes over dogs when three or four of them get together and become actuated by the ‘mob’ spirit, is a vestige of the old instinct of the carnivore which centuries of domestication have not yet quite erased. Goodness, if too prolonged, becomes irksome to dogs for the same reason that it does to men. Dogs have come from savages just as men have, and, while the civilised nature of the dog is more constitutional than that of civilised man, the old deposed instincts mount to the throne once in awhile, and the faithful collie is for the time being a wolf again. The instinct of domestic sheep to imitate their leader in leaping over obstacles is another probable survival of wild life. If a bar or other obstacle be placed where the leader of a flock of sheep is compelled to leap over it, and the obstacle is then removed, the entire band of followers will leap at the same place regardless of the fact that the obstruction is no longer there. No other animals do this. The instinct is probably a survival of wild life, when these animals, pursued by their enemies over chasms and precipices, were compelled to imitate in the flight those in front of them in order to live. Darwin thinks the donkey shows its aboriginal desert nature in its aversion for crossing the smallest stream, and its relish for rolling in the dust. The same aversion for everything aquatic exists also in the camel. Quails kept in captivity, I am told, persist in scratching at the pan when they are feeding, just as they would need to do, and were accustomed to do, among the leaves and grasses of the groves. The restlessness of cage-birds and domestic fowls at migrating time, the mimic dipping and sporting of ducks when confined to a terrestrial habitat, the grave marshalling of geese by the chief gander of the band, the ferocity of cows, ewes, and the females of other domestic animals during the first few days of motherhood, the hunting instinct of dogs kept as shepherds and pets, the squatting of young pigs when suddenly alarmed—all of these are vestigial instincts, functional in the wild state, but now useless and absurd.

The silent letters and superannuated words and phrases found everywhere in literature are the vestigial parts of language. Every silent letter was originally sounded, and every obsolete word was at one time used. In the French word, temps, for instance, which means ‘time,’ neither the p nor the s is sounded. But in the Latin word tempus, from which the French word is derived, all of the letters are sounded.

Man has been defined as a creature of habit. As he has done a thing once, or as his ancestors have done a thing, so he does it again. By precept and example he transmits to each new generation the customs, beliefs, and points of view which he has invented. Social changes take place with extreme moderation. The drowsy ages take plenty of time to get anywhere. Civilisation is lazy, deliberate, unimpassioned. It loafs and hesitates. It holds on to the past. Living civilisations always drag behind them a trail of traditions from dead civilisations. Religions and philosophies change, and creeds and governments flow into strange and undreamed-of forms; but their personalities survive, their souls live on, their remnants, transmitted as traditions from generation to generation, defy the meddlings of innovators. Hence in every society there are forms and ceremonies, laws and customs, games and symbols, etc., which have been completely diverted from their original purposes, or which have become so reduced in importance as to be of no use. Spencer has shown that the forms of salutation in vogue among civilised societies are the vestiges of primitive ceremonial used to denote submission. The May Day festivals with which the opening spring is usually hailed are the much-modified survivals of pagan festivals in honour of plant and animal fecundity. Superstition and folklore are vestigial opinions. The gorgeous Easter egg is a survival of a dawn myth older than the Pyramids, and our Christmas dinner is a reminiscence of a cannibal carnival celebrating the turning back of the sun at the winter solstice (Brinton). In the English government, where democracy has in recent centuries made such inroads on the monarchy, there are numerous examples of vestigial institutions—institutions which continue to exist purely because they have existed in the past, but which were functional a few centuries ago. The supreme office itself is one of these. The King represents the petered-out tail-end of a privilege which in the time of the early Stuarts was almost unlimited. Similar vestiges exist in the United States, where the national spirit during the last century and a half has so completely wiped out colonialism. Such are the Town Meetings of Boston and of New Haven. The earliest form of human marriage was marriage by capture. The man stole the woman and carried her away by force. This form of marriage was in the course of evolution succeeded by marriage through purchase. A man anxious to become a husband could do so by paying to the father a stipulated amount of cash or cattle for his daughter. This second form of marriage finally evolved into marriage arranged by direct and peaceful negotiation between the prospective husband and wife. This is the form most commonly employed at the present time among the more advanced societies of men. But in the ceremonies which surround the nuptial event among civilised peoples survive vestiges of many of the facts associated with aboriginal marriages. A marriage in high life is a sort of epitome of the evolution of the institution. The coyness and hesitancy of the woman in accepting the offers of her proposed spouse are the lineal descendants of the original reluctance of her savage sisters. The wedding-ring is the old token accepted by the woman when she gave her pledge of bondage. The coming of the groom with his aids to the marriage is a figurative marauding expedition. The honeymoon is the abduction. And the charivari and missile-throwing indulged in by friends and relatives on the departure of the wedded twain is a good-humoured counterfeit of the armed protest made by relatives of old when a bride-snatcher came among them.

The vestiges found everywhere in the mental and social phenomena of man and other animals have arisen as necessary facts in the process of mental evolution. They are the vermiform appendices of the mind.

8. One of the strongest reasons for a belief in the physical evolution of animal species is that furnished by individual evolution. Each individual animal recapitulates in a wonderful manner the phylogenesis of its species. Now, it is extremely significant that a similar parallel exists in the case of mental evolution. Each individual mind ascends through a series of mental faculties which epitomises in a remarkable manner the psychogenesis of the animal kingdom.

The human child is not born with a full-grown mind any more than with a full-grown body. It grows. It exfoliates. It ripens with the years. It begins in infancy at the zero-point, and in manhood or womanhood may blaze with genius and philanthropy.

But the mind of the child not only unfolds: it unfolds in a certain order, the more complex parts and the more civilised emotions invariably appearing last. The initial powers of the newborn babe are those of sensation and perception. The babe cannot think. It has no feeling of fear, no affection, no sympathy, and no shame. It can see, and hear, and taste, and feel pain and satisfaction—and these are about all. Even these are vague and confused. In a week the perceptions are more sharp and vivid, more distinct and orderly. Memory arises. Memory is the power of reproducing past impressions. At three weeks the emotions begin to sprout. The first to make their appearance are fear and surprise. When the babe is seven weeks old the social affections show themselves, and the simplest acts of association are performed. At the age of twelve weeks jealousy and anger may be expected, together with simple exhibitions of association by similarity. At fourteen weeks affection and reason dawn. Sympathy germinates at about the age of five months; pride and resentment germinate at eight months; grief, hate, and benevolence at ten months; and shame and remorse at fifteen months.

Now, the remarkable thing about this is that this is the order, or very much like the order, in which mind in the animal kingdom as a whole has apparently evolved. The lower orders of animal life have none of the higher emotions and none of the more complicated processes of mind. There is no shame in the reptile, no dissimulation in the fish, no sympathy in the mollusk, and no memory in the sponge. Memory dawns in the echinoderms, or somewhere near the radiate stage of development, and fear and surprise in the worms. Pugnacity makes its appearance in the insects, imagination in the spiders, and jealousy in the fishes. Pride, emulation, and resentment originate in the birds: grief and hate in the carnivora; shame and remorse among dogs and monkeys; and superstition in the savage.

It is also an important fact bearing on the general problem of evolution, that the civilised child, from about the age of one on, is a sort of synopsis, rude but unmistakable, of the historic evolution of the human race. The child is a savage. It has the emotions of the savage, the savage’s conceptions of the world, and the desires, pastimes, and ambitions of the savage. It hates work, and takes delight in hunting, fishing, fighting, and loafing, like other savages. The hero of the child is the bully, just as the demigod of primitive man is a blood-letting Caesar or Achilles. The children of the civilised are savages—some more so than others—and if they ever become civilised—some do, and some do not—they do so through a process of rectification and selection similar to that through which the Aryan races have passed during the ages of human history.

There is a similar evolution in the young of other animals, especially of the higher animals. Each individual begins in a perfectly mindless form, and grows mentally as it develops physically. The young puppy has a very different thinking and feeling apparatus from the grown-up mastiff. It is controlled almost exclusively by sense and instinct. It is devoid of common-sense, and divides its time impartially between play and sleep. It is easily frightened, and cries at every little thing. It has the rollicking, awkward, irresponsible personality of a boy of six. About the same thing is true of kittens, colts, calves, bear cubs, the whelps of wolves, and other young quadrupeds. A kitten will chase shadows, try to catch flies crawling on the other side of a windowpane, sit and watch in wonder the moving objects about it, and do many other things which it never thinks of doing when it has grown to be a wise and sophisticated puss trained in the ways of the world about it. Doghood, cathood, and horsehood, like manhood and womanhood, are the ripened products of long processes of growth and exfoliation.

The parallel is, of course, imperfect. There are many abbreviations, many breaks and ambiguities, in the summary presented by the individual mind of the evolution of the race. And, in the present state of psychogeny, only the barest outline can be traced. But enough is known to render the fact unquestionable.

9. If human mind has been evolved, it is logical to expect to find in other animals, especially in those more closely resembling ourselves in structure, mind elements similar to those we find in ourselves. And this is precisely what we do find. The same great trunk impulses that animate men animate also those more rudimentary but not less real individuals below and around men. The great primary facts of sex, of self-preservation, of pleasure and pain, of life and death, of egoism and altruism, of motherhood, of alimentation, etc.—all of these are found everywhere, down almost to the very threshold of organic life. And they are the antecedents of the same great tendencies as those that control the lives of men. It is often supposed by the superficial that the facts of sex and alimentation, which are so prominent in other animals, have been relegated to a very subordinate place in the nature of man. But nothing could be much farther from the truth. It has been said that there are only two things that will induce the typical African or Australian to undergo prolonged labour—hunger and the sex appetite. It is probable that men—not only primitive men, but the most evolved races, including even poets and philosophers—will do more desperate and idiotic things and undergo more trying experiences when actuated by the sex impulse than from the effects of any other impulse in human nature. This impulse is especially overmastering in races like the Italian and Spanish, and has been mentioned by ethnologists as a probable factor in the deterioration of these races. The sentiments of love, marital affection, and family life control mankind more completely than any other motives. And next to these comes hunger. Let anyone who imagines that only the non-human creatures are carnal observe with what uniformity almost every function in both savage and civilised life gravitates toward eating and drinking. If it is a picnic, a convention, a national holiday, a Christmas celebration, a meeting of a fraternal society, a thanksgiving ceremony, or what not, eating is one of the main things, and the one exercise into which four-fifths of those present probably enter with the greatest enthusiasm.

The human soul is the blossom, not the beginning, of psychic evolution. Mother-love compassionated infancy long before a babe came from the stricken loins of woman. The inhabitants of the earth had been seeking pleasure and seeking to avoid pain, and seeking ever with the same sad futility, long before man with his retinue of puny philosophies strutted upon the scene. Hate poisoned the cisterns of the sea and dropped its pollutions through the steaming spaces ages before there was malice among men. Altruism is older than the mountains, and selfishness hardened the living heart before the continents were lifted. There was wonder in the woods and in the wild heart of the fastnesses before there were waitings in synagogues and genuflections about altar piles. The frogs, crickets, and birds had been singing love a thousand generations and more when the first amoroso knelt in dulcet descant to a beribboned Venus. Human nature is not an article of divine manufacture, any more than is the human form. It came out of the breast of the bird, out of the soul of the quadruped. The human heart does not draw back from the mysterious dissolutions of death more earnestly than does the hare that flees before resounding packs or the wild-fowl that reddens the reeds with its flounderings. Bowerbirds build their nest-side resorts, decorate them with gay feathers, and surround them with grounds ornamented with bright stones and shells, for identically the same reason as human beings design drawing-rooms, hang them with tapestries, and surround them with ornamented lawns. The scarlet waistcoat of the robin and the flaming dresses of tanagers and humming-birds, which seem, as they flash through the forest aisles, like shafts of cardinal-fire, serve the same vanities and minister to the same instincts as the plumage of the dandy and the tints and gewgaws of gorgeous dames. Art is largely a manifestation of sex, and it is about as old and about as persistent as this venerable impulse. How did Darwin’s dog know his master on his master’s return from a five-years’ trip around the world? Just as the boy remembers where the strawberries grow and the philosopher recalls his facts—by that power of the brain to retain and to reproduce past impressions. Why does the thinker search his soul for new theories and the spaces for new stars? For the same reason that the child asks questions and the monkey picks to pieces its toys. What is reason? A habit of wise men—an expedient of ants—a mania the fools of all ages are free from. All of the activities of men, however imposing or peculiar, are but elaborations in one way or another of the humble doings of the animalcule, whose home is a water-drop and whose existence can be discovered by human senses only by the aid of instruments.

10. Mind has evolved because the universe has evolved. Whether mind is a part of the universe, or all of it, or only an attribute of it, it is, in any case, inextricably mixed up with it. And, since the universe as a whole has evolved, it is improbable that any part of it or anything pertaining to it has remained impassive to the general tendency. There are no solids. Nothing stands. The whole universe is in a state of fluidity. Even the ‘eternal hills,’ the ‘unchanging continents,’ and the ‘everlasting stars,’ are flowing, flowing ever, slowly but ceaselessly, from form to form. So is mind. Indeed, if there is anywhere in the folds of creation a being such as the one whom man has long accused of having brought the universe into existence, we may rest assured that even he is not sitting passively apart from the enormous enterprise which he has himself inaugurated.

The evidence is conclusive. The evolution of mind is supported by a series of facts not less incontrovertible and convincing than that by which physical evolution is established. The data of mental evolution are not quite so definite and plentiful as those of physical evolution. But this is due to the greater intangibility of mental phenomena and to the backward condition of the psychological sciences, especially of comparative psychology. Mental phenomena are always more difficult to deal with than material phenomena, and hence are always more tardily attended to in the application of any theory. But taking everything into account, including the close connection between physical and psychical phenomena, it may be asserted that it is not more certain that the physical structure of man has been derived from sub-human forms of life than it is that the human mind has also been similarly derived.

Man is the adult of long evolution. The human soul has ancestors and consanguinities just as the body has. It is just as reasonable to suppose that the human physiology, with its definitely elaborated tissues, organs, and systems, is unrelated to the physiology of vertebrates in general, and through vertebrate physiology to the physiology of invertebrates, as to suppose that the states and impulses constituting human nature and consciousness began to exist in the anthropic type of anatomy and are unrelated to the states and impulses of vertebrate consciousness in general, and through vertebrate consciousness to those remoter types of sentiency lying away at the threshold of organic life. Human psychology is a part of universal psychology. It has been evolved. It has been evolved according to the same laws of heredity and adaptation as have physiological structures. And it is just as impossible to understand human nature and psychology unaided by those wider prospects of universal psychology as it is to understand the facts of human physiology unaided by analogous universalisations.

1. Romanes: Mental Evolution in Animals; New York, 1898. 2. Gilbraith: Ethnological Journal, 1869, p. 304. 3. Burton: First Footsteps in East Africa; London, 1856. 4. Lubbock: Origin of Civilisation; New York, 1898. 5. Demoor: Evolution by Atrophy; New York, 1899. 6. This topic is more fully presented in the chapter “The elements of the human and non-human mind compared.”

III. The Common-sense View.

But it is not necessary to be learned in Darwinian science in order to know that non-human beings have souls. Just the ordinary observation of them in their daily lives about us—in their comings and goings and doings—is sufficient to convince any person of discernment that they are beings with joys and sorrows, desires and capabilities, similar to our own. No human being with a conscientious desire to learn the truth can associate intimately day after day with these people—associate with them as he himself would desire to be associated with in order to be interpreted, without presumption or reserve, in a kind, honest, straightforward, magnanimous manner; make them his friends and really enter into their inmost lives—without realising that they are almost unknown by human beings, that they are constantly and criminally misunderstood, and that they are in reality beings actuated by substantially the same impulses and terrorised by approximately the same experiences as we ourselves. They eat and sleep, seek pleasure and try to avoid pain, cling valorously to life, experience health and disease, get seasick, suffer hunger and thirst, co-operate with each other, build homes, reproduce themselves, love and provide for their children, feeding, defending, and educating them, contend against enemies, contract habits, remember and forget, learn from experience, have friends and favourites and pastimes, appreciate kindness, commit crimes, dream dreams, cry out in distress, are affected by alcohol, opium, strychnine, and other drugs, see, hear, smell, taste, and feel, are industrious, provident and cleanly, have languages, risk their lives for others, manifest ingenuity, individuality, fidelity, affection, gratitude, heroism, sorrow, sexuality, self-control, fear, love, hate, pride, suspicion, jealousy, joy, reason, resentment, selfishness, curiosity, memory, imagination, remorse—all of these things, and scores of others, the same as human beings do.

The anthropoid races have the same emotions and the same ways of expressing those emotions as human beings have. They laugh in joy, whine in distress, shed tears, pout and apologise, and get angry when they are laughed at. They protrude their lips when sulky or pouting, stare with wide open eyes in astonishment, and look downcast when melancholy or insulted. When they laugh, they draw back the corners of their mouth and expose their teeth, their eyes sparkle, their lower eyelids wrinkle, and they utter chuckling sounds, just as human beings do. They have strong sympathy for their sick and wounded, and manifest toward their friends, and especially toward the members of their own family, a devotion scarcely equalled among the lowest races of mankind. They use rude tools, such as clubs and sticks, and resort to cunning and deliberation to accomplish their ends. The orang, when pursued, will throw sticks at his pursuers, and when wounded, and the wound does not prove instantly fatal, will sometimes press his hand upon the wound or apply grass and leaves to stop the flow of blood. The children of anthropoids wrestle with each other, and chase and throw each other, just as do the juveniles of human households. The gorilla, chimpanzee, and orang all build for themselves lodges made of broken boughs and leaves in which to sleep at night. These lodges, rude though they are, are not inferior to the habitations of many primitive men. The Puris, who live naked in the depths of the Brazilian forests, do not even have huts to live in, only screens made by setting up huge palm-leaves against a cross-pole. Some of the African tribes are said to live largely in caves and the crevices of rocks. This is the case with many primitive men. According to a writer in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (January, 1902), ‘common forms of dwelling among the wild tribes of the Malay Peninsula are rock-shelters (sometimes caves, but more commonly natural recesses under overhanging ledges) and leaf-shelters, which are sometimes formed on the ground and sometimes in the branches of trees. The simplest form of these leaf-shelters consists of a single palm-leaf planted in the ground to afford the wanderer some slight shelter for the night.’