Each of these races, if left to
itself, will develop in time its own peculiar and special type of savage
cleverness. Each (in the scientific slang of the day) will adapt itself
to its particular environment. The people of the interior will acquire
and inherit a wonderful facility in spearing monkeys and knocking down
parrots; while the people of the sea-coast will become skilful managers
of canoes upon the water, and merciless plunderers of one another's
villages, after the universal fashion of all pirates. These original
differences of position and function will necessarily entail a thousand
minor differences of intelligence and skill in a thousand different
ways. For example, the sea-coast people, having of pure need to make
themselves canoes and paddles, will probably learn to decorate their
handicraft with ornamental patterns; and the aesthetic taste thus aroused
will, no doubt, finally lead them to adorn the facades of their wooden
huts with the grinning skulls of slaughtered enemies, prettily disposed
at measured distances. A thoughtless world may laugh, indeed, at these
naive expressions of the nascent artistic and decorative faculties in
the savage breast, but the aesthetic philosopher knows how to appreciate
them at their true worth, and to see in them the earliest ingenuous
precursors of our own Salisbury, Lichfield, and Westminster.
Now, so long as these two imaginary races of ours continue to remain
distinct and separate, it is not likely that idiosyncrasies or varieties
to any great extent will arise among them.
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