in drawing his conclusion the old proverb, Si duo dicunt idem, non est idem.

After these remarks it will perhaps seem less surprising that students of antiquity should decline to answer the point-blank question whether man began his life on earth as a savage. Every definition that has been attempted of a savage in general, has broken down as soon as it was confronted with facts. The only characteristic of the savage which remained, and was strong enough to withstand the sharpest cross-examination, was cannibalism. But I am not aware that even the most extreme believers in the primitive savage would insist on his having been necessarily a cannibal, a kind of human Kronos, swallowing his own kith and kin.

Every attempt to place the savage who can no longer be called civilised in the place of the savage who can not yet be so called, could only end, as it has, in utter confusion of thought.

Something, however, will be gained, or at all events some kind of mutual understanding will become possible, if in future discussions on the character of primitive man a careful distinction is made between the two kinds of savages, the progressive and the retrogressive. When that distinction has once been grasped, the question whether man began as a savage has no longer anything perplexing about it. Man certainly began as a savage, but as a progressive savage. He certainly did not begin with an innate knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic; but, on the other hand, there is nothing to lead us to suppose that he was a being altogether foul and filthy, that when he grew up he invariably ill-treated his wife or wives, and that still later in life he passed his time in eating his children.

If we must need form theories or reason by analogy on the primitive state of man, let us go to the nearest ci-près, such as the Vedic Hindus, or the Germans as described by Cæsar and Tacitus, but not to Fuegians, who in time and probably in space also are the most widely removed from the primitive inhabitants of our globe. If we knew nothing of the manners and customs of the Saxons, when they first settled in these isles, should we imagine that they must have resembled the most depraved classes of modern English society? Let us but once see clearly that the Fuegian, whether as described by Darwin or by Parker Snow, is the most modern of human beings, and we shall pause before we seek in him the image of the first ancestor of the human race. Wherever we look we can see the rise and fall of the human race. We can see it with our own eyes, if we look at the living representatives of some of our oldest and noblest families; we can read it in history if we compare ancient India with modern India, ancient Greece with modern Greece. The idea that the Fuegian was salted and preserved for us during many thousands of years, so that we might study in him the original type of man, is nothing but a poetical sentiment, unsupported alike by fact, analogy, and reason.

I know full well that when I speak of the Germans of Tacitus or of the Aryans of the Veda as the ci-près of primitive man, all the indications of modern, or at all events of secondary and tertiary thought which I have pointed out myself in the hymns of the RigVeda, and which might easily be collected from the book of Tacitus, will be mustered against me. Must I quote the old saying again: Est quoddam prodire tenus, si non datur ultra? All I maintain is that these historical documents bring us as near to the primitive man as historical documents can bring us; but that the nearest point within our reach is still very far from the cradle of the human race, no one has pointed out more often than myself.

There is, however, plenty of work still to be done in slowly following up the course of human progress and tracing it back to its earliest stages, as far as literary, monumental, and traditional documents will allow us to do so. There are many intricate windings of that historical river to be explored, many riddles to be solved, many lessons to be learnt. One thing only is quite certain-namely, that the private diary of the first man will never be discovered, least of all at Cape Horn.

I have thus tried to show how untenable is the theory which would boldly identify the modern savage with primitive man, and how cautious we ought to be whenever we take even a few hints here and there from degraded tribes of the present day in order to fill out our imaginary picture of the earliest civilisation of our race. Some lessons, and even important lessons, may be learnt from savages, if only they are studied in a truly scholarlike spirit, as they have been, for instance, by Callaway and Codrington, by Waitz and Tylor. But if the interpretation of an Homeric custom or myth requires care, that of African or Polynesian customs or myths requires ten times greater care, and if a man shrinks from writing on the Veda because he does not know Sanskrit, he should tremble whenever he writes the names of Zulus, unless he has some idea of what Bântu grammar means.

source.

In arguing so far, I have carefully kept to the historical point of view, though I am well aware that the principal traits in the imaginary picture of primitive man are generally taken from a very different We are so made that for everything that comes before us we have to postulate a cause and a beginning. We therefore postulate a cause and a beginning for man. The ethnologist is not concerned with the first cause of man, but he cannot resist the craving of his mind to know at least the beginning of man.

Most ethnologists used to hold that, as each individual begins as a child, mankind also began as a child; and they imagined that a careful observation of the modern child would give them some idea of the character of the primeval child. Much ingenuity has been spent on this subject since the days of Voltaire, and many amusing books have been the result, till it was seen at last that the modern

baby and the primeval baby have nothing in common but the name, not even a mother or a nurse.

It was chiefly due to Darwin and to the new impulse which he gave to the theory of evolution that this line of argument was abandoned as hopeless. Darwin boldly asked the question whose child the primeval human baby could have been, and he answered it by representing the human baby as the child of non-human parents. Admitting even the possibility of this transitio in aliud genus, which the most honest of Darwin's followers strenuously deny, what should we gain by this for our purpose-namely, for knowing the primitive state of man, the earliest glimmerings of the human intellect? Our difficulties would remain exactly the same, only pushed back a little further.

Disappointing as it may sound, the fact must be faced, nevertheless, that our reasoning faculties, wonderful as they are, break down completely before all problems concerning the origin of things. We may imagine, we may believe, anything we like about the first man; we can know absolutely nothing. If we trace him back to a primeval cell, the primeval cell that could become a man is more mysterious by far than the man that was evolved from a cell. If we trace him back to a primeval pro-anthropos, the pro-anthropos is more unintelligible to us than even the protanthropos would be. If we trace back the whole solar system to a rotating nebula, that wonderful nebula which by evolution and revolution could become an inhabitable universe is, again, far more mysterious than the universe itself.

The lesson that there are limits to our knowledge is an old lesson, but it has to be taught again and again. It was taught by Buddha, it was taught by Socrates, and it was taught for the last time in the most powerful manner by Kant. Philosophy has been called the knowledge of our knowledge; it might be called more truly the knowledge of our ignorance, or, to adopt the more moderate language of Kant, the knowledge of the limits of our knowledge.

F. MAX MÜLLER.

LOCUSTS AND FARMERS OF

AMERICA.

WHILE the hearts of British farmers may justly be filled with envy, when comparing the bounteous increase of cereal crops which rewards their American brethren with their own poorer returns, they may perhaps find a corner of consolation in reflecting on the comparative immunity from insect scourges, which appears to be their rightful heritage under the great law of compensation. Very suggestive are the reports published on this subject by the United States Government, in which the annual loss to the States from the attacks of injurious insects is estimated at no less than two hundred million dollars!

The losses from the ravages of the locusts in the border States in 1874 were estimated at forty-five million dollars. Those occasioned by chinch-bug in Illinois in 1864 were over seventy-three million dollars. In Missouri in 1874 they were estimated at nineteen million. The average annual loss from the attacks of the cotton-worm is not far under fifty million. When so much damage can be wrought by only three out of the thousand species of noxious insects which prey on field crops and pastures, vegetables and fruit-trees, shrubs and ornamental timber, hard-wood and pine forests, it is evident that the general luxuriance of a land in which Mother Nature is alike prolific of things good and evil is not altogether without its drawbacks.

Within the broad limits of the United States there are recognised no fewer than ten thousand species of bees, wasps, saw-flies, ichneumon-flies, and such like; about ten thousand species of twowinged flies; about an equal number of moths and butterflies (representing an appalling multitude of devouring grubs and caterpillars); several thousand species of grasshoppers, dragon-flies, caddis-flies, &c.; ten thousand beetles and bugs (the latter are classified as Hemiptera a necessary definition, where that honest English name is the accepted generic term for all manner of insects, from the lightning-bug to the sting-bug!2).

1

Thus, upwards of fifty thousand species of winged creatures are for ever seeking what they may devour, and the more luxuriant the crop the more certain is their presence. In addition to these, there

are hosts of millipedes and centipedes, mites and ticks, and an endless variety of insects of every sort and kind. Of these, those most dreaded by the farmers are the various cut-worms, the joint-worm, the canker-worm, the cotton-worm, chinch-bug, Hessian-fly, wheatmidge, wheat-fly, Northern army-worm, spindle-worms, stalk-borers, wire-worms, corn-weevils, Colorado potato-beetle, helmet-beetle, onion-fly, onion-thrips, turnip-beetle, cabbage butterfly, beanweevil, squash-borer, squash-bug, hop-vine-root-borer, tobacco-worm, tent-caterpillar, &c. But, in truth, each vegetable product has its special foe. While June-beetles and strawberry-crown-borers attack the strawberry-beds, saw-flies and span-worms destroy the currantbushes, grape-foresters and vine-leaf-hoppers aid the Phylloxera in ravaging the vineyards, plum-weevils devote their care to plumtrees, while apple-weevils are equally destructive to the apple-orchards. Such a catalogue might well dishearten any farmer, though it speaks volumes for the fertility of his land to know that, notwithstanding all the ravages of his insect foes, he should nevertheless be able to show such good returns.

Most prominent in these State Reports are the details of depredation by locusts in all parts of the wide-spread territories-north, south, east, and west, the locust armies are found, carrying destruction wherever they go.

At the present time, when our own colony of Cyprus is engaged in so very serious and prolonged a warfare with vast locust hordes,3 some details of how the same war is waged in America may not be without interest.

Each State has sent to Washington its report of its own locust experiences, and of the methods adopted in order to check the progress of the devouring hosts. Several different locusts are named, but by far the most numerous are the Caloptenus spretus and C. femur rubrum, i.e. the eastern red-legged locust. The latter is found in countless numbers every summer and autumn in Canada, and all over the New England States, from Maine to Massachusetts, where at times it is terribly destructive.

A very beautiful locust or grasshopper (for the terms are used synonymously, and occasionally degenerate into 'hopper-grass') is the Acrydium americanum, which is large, and of a brilliant clear pea-green colour, while some specimens are of a reddish amber hue. It is found in North Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Texas, Illinois, Tennessee, Mississippi, Columbia, Virginia, New York. A letter from Chattanooga Creek describes splendid fields of corn utterly devastated by these pretty hoppers: all the leaves and the husks peeled as close as if sheep had been at them. Another swarm in Indiana is described as literally covering the streets of Vevay.

In the Mississippi Valley, the forest-clad Atlantic States, Canada, Vide 'The Locust War in Cyprus.' Nineteenth Century, August 1883.