Edward Burnett Tylor

“ Shall we wonder that the world, slowly trying its institutions by the experience of ages, has at last come to the stage of casting out the judicial ordeal; or shall we rather wonder at the constitution of the human mind, which for so many ages has set up the creations of delusive fancy to hold sway over a world of facts? ”

“ Travelers, observing the likeness of children's games in Europe and Asia, have sometimes explained it on this wise: that, the human mind being alike everywhere, the same games are naturally found in different lands, children taking to hockey, tops, stilts, kites, and so on, each at its proper season. But, if so, why is it that in outlying barbarous countries one hardly finds a game without finding also that there is a civilized nation within reach from whom it may have been learned? ”

“ Thus accurate method was applied to the insurance-table, which enables a man to hedge against his ugliest risks, to eliminate his chances of fire and death by betting that he shall have a new roof over his head and a provision for his widow. Of all the wonderful turns of the human mind in the course of culture, scarce any is more striking than this history of lots and dice. ”

“ It is not enough to look at a race of men as a mere body of people happening to have a common type or likeness. For the reason of their likeness is plain, and indeed our calling them a race means that we consider them a breed whose common nature is inherited from common ancestors. Now, experience of the animal world shows that a race or breed, while capable of carrying on its likeness from generation to generation, is also capable of varying. It must be admitted that our knowledge of the manner and causes of race-variation among mankind is still very imperfect. ”

“ The color of the skin, that important mark of race, may be best understood by looking at the darkest variety. The dark hue of the negro does not lie so deep as the innermost or true skin, which is substantially alike among all races of mankind. The negro, in spite of his name, is not black, but deep brown, and even this darkest hue does not appear at the beginning of life, for the new-born negro child is reddish-brown, soon becoming slaty-gray, and then darkening. Nor does the darkest tint ever extend over the negro's whole body, but his soles and palms are brown. ”

“ Who, in the middle ages, could have guessed what would be its next outcome—that magic sunk into sport should rise again as science, and man's failure to divine the future should lead him to success in controlling it?
Already in the ancient world there appear mentions of games where the throws of lots or dice, perhaps at first merely scored with counters on a board, give the excitement of chance to a game which is partly a draught-game, the player being allowed to judge with which pieces he will move his allotted number. In England this group of games is represented by backgammon. ”

“ Yet one can see, from the habits of modern savages, that already in early savage times society was setting itself to take measures against men who broke faith to save themselves from harm or to gain some coveted good. At the stage of civilization where social order was becoming regular and settled, the wise men turned their minds to devise guarantees stronger than mere yes and no. Thus the ordeal and the oath were introduced, that wrong-doing should not be concealed or denied, that unrighteous claims should not be backed by false witness, and that covenants made should not be broken. ”

“ The origin of kite-flying seems to lie somewhere in southeast Asia, where it is a sport even of grown-up men, who fight their kites by making them cut one another's strings, and fly birds and monsters of the most fantastic shapes and colors, especially in China, where old gentlemen may be seen taking their evening stroll, kite-string in hand, as though they were leading pet dogs. The English boy's kite appears thus an instance, not of spontaneous play-instinct, but of the migration of an artificial game from a distant center. ”

“ Truth in thought is fast spreading its wide waves through the outside world. Of intellectual truthfulness, truthfulness in word and act is the outward manifestation. In all modern philosophy there is no principle more fertile than the doctrine so plainly set forth by Herbert Spencer—that truth means bringing our minds into accurate matching with the realities in and around us; so that both intellectual and moral truth are bound up together in that vast process of evolution whereby man is gradually brought into fuller harmony with the universe he inhabits. ”

“ ANTHROPOLOGY finds race-differences most clearly in stature and proportions of limbs, conformation of the skull and the brain within, characters of features, skin, eyes, and hair, peculiarities of constitution, and mental and moral temperament.
In comparing races as to their stature, we concern ourselves not with the tallest or shortest men of each tribe, but with the ordinary or average-sized men who may be taken as fair representatives of their whole tribe. The difference of general stature is well shown where a tall and a short people come together in one district. ”

“ This remark of Paley's aptly illustrates a principle of the science of culture which cannot be too strongly impressed on the minds of all who study the institutions of their own or any other age. People often talk of mystic formulas and mystic ceremonies. But, the more we study civilization in its earlier stages, the more we shall find that formulas and ceremonies, both in law and in religion, are as purposeful and business-like as can be, if only we get at them anywhere near their origin. ”

“ By a stretch of imagination, it may be possible to fancy draughts or dice to have been fresh invented more than once. But, when it comes to a game which combines the two ideas, it seems to pass the bounds of ordinary probability to suppose, for instance, that a Greek and an Arab and a Birmese were separately seized by the same happy thought, and said, "Go to, let us cast lots, and count them to play at draughts by." ”

“ It is plain that nations moving into a new climate, if they are to flourish, must become adapted in body to the new state of life. Fitness for a special climate, being matter of life or death to a race, must be reckoned among the chief of race-characters.
Travelers notice striking distinctions in the temper of races. There seems no difference of condition between the native Indian and the African negro in Brazil to make the brown man dull and sullen, while the black is overflowing with eagerness and gayety. ”

“ A few enthusiastic amateurs still delight in the noble and costly game, but the many have reason to be grateful for lawn-tennis out of doors, though it be but a mild version of the great game, to which it stands as hockey to polo or as draughts to chess. ”

“ The famed ordeal by red-hot iron, also, has been a palpable swindle in the hands of the authorities. In India and Arabia the test is to lick the iron, which will burn the guilty tongue but not the innocent. ”

“ My purpose in briefly stating here the evidence of man's antiquity derived from race, language, and culture, is to insist that these arguments stand on their own ground. It is true that the geological argument from the implements in the drift-gravels and bone-caves, by leading to a general belief that man is extremely ancient on the earth, has now made it easier to anthropologists to maintain a rationally satisfactory theory of the race-types and mental development of mankind. ”

“ It is an often-repeated observation of travelers that a European landing among some people unlike his own, such as Chinese, or Mexican Indians, at first thinks them all alike. After days of careful observation he makes out their individual peculiarities, but at first his attention is occupied with the broad typical characters of the foreign race. It is just this broad type that the anthropologist desires to sketch and describe, and he selects as his examples such portraits of men and women as show it best. It is even possible to measure the type of a people. ”

“ In such a nation the race-type is peculiarly easy to make out. It is by no means always thus easy to represent a whole population. To see how difficult it may be, one has only to look at an English crowd, with its endless diversity. But, to get a view of the problem of human varieties, it is best to attend to the simplest cases first, looking at some uniform and well-marked race, and asking what in the course of ages may happen to it. ”

“ Admitting the necessity of taking children's evidence somehow, the question is how best to do it. In England it must be done on oath, and for this end there has arisen a custom in our courts of putting the child through an inquisition as to the theological consequences of perjury, so as usually to extract from it a well-known definition which the stiffest theologian will not stand to for a moment if put straight to him, but which is looked upon as a proper means for binding the conscience of a little child. ”

“ For ages afterward nations might still use either kind, or combine them by adding the penalty after death to that in life. But in the later course of history there comes plainly into view a tendency to subordinate the old mundane oath, and at last to suppress it altogether. How this came to pass is plain on the face of the matter. It was simply the result of accumulated experience. The continual comparison of opinions with facts could not but force observant minds to admit that a man might swear falsely on sword's edge or spear's point, and yet die with a whole skin ”

“ BY backgammon we usually mean one particular game played with dice and thirty draughts, on a board with twelve points on each side. But this is only one of a family of games, whose general definition is that they consist in moving pieces on a diagram, not at the player's free choice, as in draught-playing, but conformably to the throws of lots or dice. It can hardly be doubted that the set of games thus combining chance and skill are all, whether ancient or modern, the descendants of one original game. ”

“ The range of complexion among mankind, beginning with the tint of the fair-whites of Northern Europe and the dark whites of Southern Europe, passes to the brownish-yellow of the Malays, and the full brown of American tribes, the deep-brown of Australians, and the black-brown of negroes. Until modern times these race-tints have generally been described with too little care. Now, however, the traveler, by using Broca's set of pattern-colors, records the color of any tribe he is observing, with the accuracy of a mercer matching a piece of silk. ”

“ Many nations have glorified the plow in legend and religion, perhaps never more poetically than where the Hindoos celebrate Sítá, the spouse of Râma, rising brown and beauteous, crowned with corn-ears, from the plowed field; she is herself the furrow (sítá) personified. Between man's first rude husbandry and this advanced state of tillage lies the long interval which must be filled in by other than historical evidence. What has first to be looked for is hardly the actual invention of planting, which might seem obvious even to rude tribes who never practice it. ”

“ It has long been noticed that, looking at the native tribes of what is now the United States and the Dominion of Canada, the tribes on the east side had taken to making pottery and cultivating maize, while the tribes on the west had not, which seems as though there had been a flow or drift of civilization from the Central American district up the eastern half of the continent, which of itself ought to be enough to prevent any ethnologists from looking at the so called red-man of New England or the Lakes as the creator of his whole industrial and social life. ”