ABSTRACT
From one point of view it might be said that the task before the author of such a work as this is like that of one who should sit down to compose a handy little manual on snakes in Iceland. In the first place, the wisest anthropologist would be in difficulties if he were obliged to say exactly what primitive man was. The most backward savages of whom we have any record have millennia of history behind them. They can make complicated things, canoes or boomerangs, infinitely above the capacity of the cleverest beast. They can remember complicated rules, such as the iniquity of even dreaming of marrying one’s third cousin on the mother’s side, twice removed, or the canonical arrangement of dots which typifies the ineffable mystery of the starfish clan’s totem. They give their children courses of instruction extending over years; they know the proper seasons and the proper ceremonies for collecting witchetty-grubs or mussels. They have legends of an enormously remote past in which their great ancestors originated and taught the customs they now observe; and, even if not forced into a feverishly rapid development by the coming of the white, they have machinery for changing, however slowly, their habits and their ceremonial. What homo sapiens was like when first he began to be distinguishable from his brethren, the other primates, we may conjecture, but we shall in all probability never know.
