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The Degeneracy of Man

Abstract

DR. OSCAR PESCHEL, in his recently published “Völkerkunde” (p. 137), calls attention to a remark by the late Dr. von Martius, of much interest to anthropologists. It is well known that this distinguished naturalist avowed in the strongest terms his belief that the savage tribes of Brazil were the fallen descendants of more cultured nations. In 1838 he said:—“Every day I spent among the Indians of Brazil increased my conviction that they had once been in quite another state, but that in the lapse of dark ages there had broken in upon them manifold catastrophes, which had brought them down to their actual condition, that of a peculiar decline and degeneration. The Americans are not a wild race, they are a race run wild and degraded.” To students of civilisation (myself for example) Dr. Martius' views have been most embarrassing. It was not strange that the theory of savages being the degraded offspring of primeval civilised men should have been advocated by Archbishop Whately, who did not even take the trouble to examine his own evidence. Nor is it surprising that the Bishop of Ely, in the “Speaker's Commentary,” should still appeal to Whately as an unrefuted authority, for one hardly expects an orthodox commentator to test the arguments on his own side. But the case with Dr. Martius was quite different. Here was an eminent ethnologist, intimately acquainted with savage thought and life, declaring that it seemed to him not to indicate natural wildness, but to show traces of decay from an ancient higher culture. What made the matter more puzzling, was that Dr. Martius, in his researches, had come upon facts which he acknowledged to be evidence of progress taking place from savage toward civilised institutions. Thus, among the forest tribes of Brazil he found the rudest form of the “village community,” with its tribe-land common to all, but the huts and patches of tilled ground treated as acquired private property, not indeed of individuals, but of families. It was manifest that these tribes were passing through stages of that very development of the law of real property which is so clearly shown in the history of European law. This is a strong argument in favour of the development-theory of civilisation, but how could an ethnologist who understood the force of such arguments, remain an upholder of the degeneration-theory?

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TYLOR, E. The Degeneracy of Man. Nature 10, 146–147 (1874). https://doi.org/10.1038/010146c0

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