These recurring statements of travellers about the mirthfulness of savages are to some extent supported by other evidence. The writer on the Tasmanians, already quoted, gives us a number of their different local names for fun. When a people—and especially a savage people—has a name for a thing, it is a fair inference that it has some considerable acquaintance with the thing itself. To say that this or that tribe is given to laughter and joking does not, of course, imply that the merry temper is {226} the constant or even the predominant one. We are told, indeed, in certain cases that the mood is a changeable one, and that these undisciplined men and women resemble children in their rapid transitions from grave to gay. Thus one traveller to the Gold Coast remarks that the inhabitants will change suddenly from reckless gaiety to despondency.[155] On the other hand, as may be seen from our quotations, the predominance of the gay temper, as expressed in the habitual smile and readiness to laugh, seems to be a distinguishing trait of certain savage peoples. One traveller, writing of the Patagonians, tells us that their faces were “ordinarily bright and good-natured,” and that two of them in particular, whom he knew intimately, “always had a smile on their faces”.[156] On the other hand, there is reason to think that some tribes stand out from the general run of good-natured, merry folk by a habitual preponderance of the grave and austere in their bearing. Rengger, for example, remarks of the Indians of Paraguay that they are serious and gloomy (düster), laugh only rarely, and never break into loud laughter.[157] There are probably serious savage tribes, as there are serious children in England and other civilised countries. It would be strange, too, if the treatment of American Indians and other aboriginal races by their civilised conquerors should not have developed now and again, even in naturally merry folk, something of a gloomy demeanour, at least in presence of the white man. Hence, these exceptional cases do not seem to impair our general conclusion, that laughter has a large dwelling-place among the uncivilised peoples of the earth. {227} The descriptions of the movements expressive of mirth, given by these visitors to savage tribes, are not as a rule full or exact. This might be taken to mean that the laughter of a savage is much like our own. Yet this would be a rash inference; for we must remember that it is not easy for one untrained in the finer kinds of observation to note with precision movements so complex and so rapidly changeful as those which express gladness and mirth. The apparatus of the photographic camera and of the phonograph has not as yet, I believe, been made use of for the purpose of registering these presumably primitive forms of laughter ere they vanish from the earth.