Nor has the savage a great historic past behind him. He knows few but his tribesmen, and little of their ancestors save those whom his parents can remember before them. His perspective of the past is extremely limited. Nothing enables him to form that wide idea of the necessity and invariability of death which to us is so familiar. That “all men are mortal” is to civilised man a truism; to very early savages it would necessarily have seemed a startling paradox. No man ever dies within his own experience; ever since he can remember, he has continued to exist as a permanent part of all his adventures. Most of the savage’s family have gone on continuously living with him. A death has been a rare and startling occurrence. {045}Thus the notion of death as an inevitable end never arises at all; the notion of death as due to natural causes seems quite untenable. When a savage dies, the first question that arises is “Who has killed him?” If he is slain in war, or devoured by a tiger, or ripped up by an elephant, or drowned by a stream in spate, or murdered by a tribesman, the cause is obvious. If none of these, then the death is usually set down to witchcraft. Furthermore, the mere fact of death is much less certain among primitive or savage men than in civilised communities. We know as a rule with almost absolute certainty whether at a given moment a sick or wounded man is dead or living. Nevertheless, even among ourselves, cases of doubt not infrequently occur. At times we hesitate whether a man or woman is dead or has fainted. If the heart continues to beat, we consider them still living; if not the slightest flutter of the pulse can be perceived, we consider them dead. Even our advanced medical science, however, is often perplexed in very obscure cases of catalepsy; and mistakes have occurred from time to time, resulting in occasional premature burials. The discrimination of true from apparent death is not always easy. Vesalius, the eminent anatomist, opened a supposed corpse in which the heart was seen to be still beating; and the Abbé Prévost, who had been struck by apoplexy, was regarded as dead, but recovered consciousness once more under the surgeon’s scalpel. Naturally, among savages, such cases of doubt are far more likely to occur than among civilised people; or rather, to put it as the savage would think of it, there is often no knowing when a person who is lying stiff and lifeless may happen to get up again and resume his usual activity. The savage is accustomed to seeing his fellows stunned or rendered unconscious by blows, wounds, and other accidents, inflicted either by the enemy, by wild beasts, by natural agencies, or by the wrath of his tribesmen; and he never knows how soon the effect of such accidents may pass away, and the man may recover his {046}ordinary vitality. As a rule, he keeps and tends the bodies of his friends as long as any chance remains of their ultimate recovery, and often (as we shall see in the sequel) much