BY J. W. POWELL, DIRECTOR U. S. BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY.

So far as human nights come and

The course of human events is not an eternal round. In the wisdom of the ancients there are many proverbs to the effect that that which is, has been before, and will be again. experience extends, unaided by reason, days and go, winter follows summer, and summer follows winter, and all the phenomena of nature seem to constitute an endless succession of recurrent events. There is a higher knowledge which observes a progress made only by steps so minute that it was left to modern science to discover them. In the history of humanity the changes which result in progress are more readily perceived, and the aphorism of the ancients that "There is nothing new under the sun is but a proverb of ignorance. That which has been is not now, and that which is never will be again, in all the succession of phenomena with which anthropologists deal, for with apparent repetition there is always some observable change in the direction of progress.

Every child is born destitute of things possessed in manhood which distinguish him from the lower animals. Of all industries he is artless; of all institutions he is lawless; of all languages he is speechless; of all philosophies he is opinionless; of all reasoning he is thoughtless; but arts, institutions, languages, opinions and mentations he acquires as the years go by from childhood to manhood. In all these respects the new born babe is hardly the peer of the new-born beast; but as the years pass, ever and ever he exhibits his superiority in all of the great classes of activities, until the distance by which he is separated from the brute is so great that his realm of existence is in another kingdom of nature. The (97)

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activities that segregate mankind into a kingdom of his own are the humanities. The human race has been segregated from the tribes of beasts by the gradual acquisition of these humanities, namely: by the invention of arts; by the establishment of institutions; by the growth of languages; by the formation of opinions and by the evolution of reason. If this be true-and this is demonstrated by the science of anthropology-then the road by which man has traveled away from purely animal life must be very long; but this long way has its land-marks, so that it can be divided into parts. There are stages of human culture. The three grand stages have been denominated Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization.

In the popular mind, and even in the conception of many scholars, there is no clearly perceived and well-defined distinction between these stages. There is a vague idea that the barbarian is somehow a lower being in the scale of existence than the civilized man, and that the savage is still lower-that the savage is savage, that the barbarian is barbaric. But no attempt has been made to set forth the characteristics of these stages of culture systematically in all the grand classes of activities, and thus they have never been thoroughly and satisfactorily defined. In my last annual address to this Society the endeavor was made to characterize savagery and barbarism, and to show the nature and origin of the change from the lower to the middle stage. The endeavor will be made to-night to partially recharacterize barbarism in terms of the humanities, and then to show how all of these were changed and developed into something higher, that something higher being the proper attributes of civilization.

Before proceeding to this task certain errors in the current literature of anthropology must be dispelled.

It must be remembered that in the attempt to define savagery, barbarism, and civilization, they are treated as stages of culture, not as characteristics of individuals. A stage of culture is represented by the aggregate of human activities, the humanities, extant among the people and during the time to which such characterization belongs.

It must be further remembered that a stage of society which extends perhaps over many lands and embraces many bodies politic and continues through many generations exhibits a vast variety of individual characters, and it would be an absurdity to claim that in each man in civilization we discover a full exemplification of all of the attributes of that civilization. No one man, even the greatest, has been equal to the whole of the men of his time, and there are

always vast numbers who fall far short of acquiring the culture which properly characterizes their times. In every land and among every people there are some who are imbecile, depraved, or ignorant, and who thus utterly fail to exhibit the current culture. These are the degraded classes. But it should be noted that this degradation is not toward a more primitive culture. The vicious and ignorant in civilization do not lapse into barbarism by adopting the arts of barbarism, by establishing barbaric institutions, by returning to the use of barbaric languages, and by adopting the opinions of barbarism; but they fail in acquiring the culture of civilization by a failure in the acquisition of any culture. Retrogression in culture proper is rarely, perhaps never, exhibited on any large scale. The frequent failure of individuals to acquire the culture proper to their time and place in history has sometimes led to mistaken theories in regard to the general progress of culture, and in this manner the conclusion has been reached that there are progressive and retrogressive races and that culture itself waxes and wanes.

Civilized travelers among the lower races of mankind have often formed hasty judgments and have characterized peoples from the accidental observations of a day; but I think it may be safely asserted that no thorough study of any race or tribe has ever led to the discovery of an extended and continued loss of culture. The accounts of hasty travelers may be divided into two classes: In a general way, one set of writers have found among savage and barbaric peoples a state of affairs worthy only of execration, and all such peoples have thus been condemned as "devils;" another set of writers have discovered among such peoples only evidence of primitive innocence and the happiness of primitive simplicity, and such peoples have been pictured as "angels." But neither of these conclusions is reached by trained anthropologists whose studies of mankind are made by careful investigation.

Biologists discover degraded species, such degradation having resulted from untoward environment and especially from the acquisition of parasitic habits; but the culture of mankind is not a passive condition imposed by environment, but has all been acquired in the grand endeavor to create a new environment-better conditions for human happiness. Often individuals have become parasitic, and there are parasitic communities, like the gypsies, and history may even reveal to us parasitic tribes, whose existence has never yet been clearly pointed out. The fact remains, that these individ

uals and communities, though parasitic, do not exemplify the culture by which they are surrounded.

Again it must be noted that advances in culture are often made with unsteady steps. A new art may be invented a little too early to be generally adopted, and the struggles to the advanced position may be followed by a relapse into the former position, which lasts for a time; but no real industrial advance has ever been thoroughly accomplished and afterwards lost to mankind. In the same manner there is always a struggle for wiser and juster institutions, and statesmen and reformers often try to accomplish that for which the people are not yet ready; but no great principle of justice has ever been thoroughly woven into the laws of a state to afterwards be lost. In the same manner linguistic progress has been slow but constant. Not all reforms and advantageous linguistic contrivances have at once succeeded; yet the evolution of language, in all times and among all peoples, has been toward the better expression of thought. Philosophies, also, have steadily advanced from mythology to science. Individuals have sometimes made a progress in philosophy beyond their times and have failed to establish their opinions immediately, but the philosophy of no body of people, no great race, has ever fallen back to more antique, more mythologic methods of interpreting phenomena. The activities thus characterized are the products of the mind, and if mental products are forever slowly improving, the mental operations of which they are the product must be ever improving, and this can be shown by an analysis of the mental operations as they appear from time to time in the history of the races.

There is a phenomenon which accompanies the substitution of higher for lower activities that is often mistaken for degradation. When a new art is developed some old art may be gradually replaced thereby. In this case the old art, as it slowly falls into disuse, exhibits less and less skill because the more thrifty adopt the new, the less thrifty cling to the old. At the advent of European civilization on this continent, the Indian tribes were highly skilled in the fashioning of stone arrowheads, but when the people of a tribe were furnished with iron arrowheads by white men, or when they learned to fashion them from iron for themselves, the skill in the manufacture of stone arrowheads was gradually lost. The old art decayed because it was supplanted by a new and a higher one. Everywhere in the progress of arts substitutions of this character have been made, and again and again the decay of the older arts has been

cited as a loss of culture, while, in fact, in every case an advance in culture is made. These substitutions occur not only in arts but in all human activities. Old institutions decay as new institutions take their place. Old languages decay and are forgotten because new and higher languages are learned. When civilization meets with savagery or barbarism it always teaches it a new language. Old opinions, too, decay as wiser opinions take their place. Thus it is that mythologies, with all their grand personification, with all their wonderful mythic histories, with all their poetic imagery, decay into folk-lore, the absurd ghost and demon stories of old crones and the childish tales of the nursery. The decadence of activities that arises through the substitution of higher activities is not evidence of retrogression.

There is another class of changes which have been falsely interpreted as evidences of cultural degradation. When the savage or barbarian borrows an activity from civilization, that activity may not at first be carried on with the same skill by the borrower as by those from whom it was taken. When the Chinese razeed European vessels and made of them junks, Chinese navigation was improved thereby, although the vessels themselves may not have been equal to the ships of the Europeans; but the art of navigation was not degraded among Europeans by this change, while the art of the Chinese was in fact improved. When the barbarian adopts the fire-arms of civilization, he may prefer to use flint-locks instead of percussionlocks; the use of fire-arms among the civilized is not degraded thereby, but the flint-lock guns of the barbarian are greatly superior to the crossbows which he used before. The Muskoki Indians have organized a government modelled somewhat after the civilized governments of the States, yet this government has many of the old characteristics of tribal government; the upper and lower houses constiting the Muskoki legislature are but a modification of the old red and white fratri-councils. Now, there is a sense in which the Muskoki government may be considered a degradation from that of civilization, but in no sense are any people lowered in culture by its adoption. The Muskoki themselves have made a great step in the progress of institutional culture, and the white men have not been degraded thereby. When savage or barbaric peoples associate with civilized peoples they learn the civilized language and often abandon their own. For a long time the new language is imperfectly spoken and is mastered but to a limited extent. There is a sense