It is easy to say that the meaning of savage has been explained and defined by almost every writer on anthropology. I know these explanations and definitions, but not one of them can be considered as answering the requirements of a scientific definition. Some anthropologists say that savage means wild and cruel. But in that case no nation would be without its savages. Others say that savages are people who wear little or no clothing. But in that case the greatest philosophers, the gymnosophists of India, would have to be classed as savages. If it means people without a settled form of government, without laws and without a religion, then, go where you like, you will not find such a race. Again, if people who have no cities and no central government are to be called savages, then the Jews would have been savages, the Hindus, the Arabs, the ancient Germans, and other of the most important races in the history of the world. In fact, whatever characteristics are brought forward as distinctive of a savage, they can always be met by counter-instances, showing that each definition would either include races whom no one dares to call savage, or exclude races whom no one dares to call civilised. It used to be imagined that the use of letters was the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, to quote the words of Gibbon, “the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas committed to her charge, and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers, the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular.” Such arguments might pass in the days of Gibbon, but after the new light that has been thrown on the ancient history of some of the principal nations of the world they are no longer tenable. No one would call the ancient Brahmans savages, and yet writing was unknown to them before the third century B.C. Homer, quite apart from his blindness, was certainly unacquainted with writing for literary purposes. The ancient inhabitants of Germany, as described by Tacitus, were equally ignorant of the art of writing as a vehicle of literature; yet for all that we could not say, with Gibbon, that with them the nobler faculties of the mind had lost their powers, the judgment had become feeble, and the imagination languid.