rapping than a table at which he has only dined. Another general statement of failure to draw the line between men and the irrational creation is found in the old Jesuit missionary Le Jeune's Relations de la Nouvelle France.[1] "Les sauvages se persuadent que non seulement les hommes et les autres animaux, mais aussi que toutes les autres choses sont animées." Again, "Ils tiennent les poissons raisonnables, comme aussi les cerfs." In the Solomon Islands Mr. Romilly sailed with an old chief who used violent language to the waves when they threatened to dash over the boat, and "old Takki's exhortations were successful."[2] Waitz[3] discovers the same attitude towards the animals among the Negroes. Man, in their opinion, is by no means a separate sort of person on the summit of nature and high above the beasts; these he rather regards as dark and enigmatic beings, whose life is full of mystery, and which he therefore considers now as his inferiors, now as his superiors. A collection of evidence as to the savage failure to discriminate between human and non-human, animate and inanimate, has been brought together by Sir John Lubbock.[4]
To a race accustomed like ourselves to arrange and classify, to people familiar from childhood and its games with "vegetable, animal, and mineral," a condition of mind in which no such distinctions are drawn,
- ↑ 1636, p. 109.
- ↑ Western Pacific, p. 84.
- ↑ Anthropologie der Natur-Völker, ii. 177.
- ↑ Origin of Civilisation, p. 33. A number of examples of this mental attitude among the Bushmen will be found in chap. v., postea.
