What, then, is to be done? Are we to say that there never were any savages, or that it is impossible to distinguish between a savage and a non-savage? Certainly not. All we have to do is to be on our guard against a very common trick of language, or rather against a very common mistake of philosophers, who imagine that the same name must always mean the same thing. All the difficulties hitherto detailed which have prevented anthropologists from agreeing on any real definition of savage have arisen from their having mixed up under the same name at least two totally different classes of men, both called savages in ordinary parlance, but each occupying its own place in the history of the world. How this should have happened is difficult to explain, but I think we can trace the first beginnings in the works of some of the earlier anthropologists, who were carried away by the idea that we can study in the illiterate races of the present day, such as we find in Africa, America, and Polynesia, the true character of the primitive man, as he emerged new-born from the bowels of nature. Scientific ethnologists have long since awaked from this fond dream, but the primitive savage has remained as a troublesome legacy in other quarters. Nothing can be more interesting than the study of races who have no literature, but whose former history may be read in their languages and their tools, and whose present state of civilisation or savagery may certainly be used to throw collateral light on many phases in the history of more highly civilised nations. Only let us remember that these races and their languages are as old as the most civilised races and their languages, while their history, if so we may call it, seldom carries us back beyond the mere surface of the day. If we in England are old, the Fuegians are not a day younger. If the question as to the age of the European and American races could be settled by geological evidence, it would seem as if America is now able to produce human skulls older than the Neanderthal skull.[14] No one, so far as I know, has ever succeeded in proving that after man had once been evolved or created, a new evolution or creation of man took place, attested by contemporaneous witnesses. The Duke of Argyll goes so far as to maintain[15] that those who hold the opinion that different races of men represent different species, or a species which spread from more than one place, stand outside the general current of scientific thought.