This is also to be taken into consideration: that those men, whose traces we find, could possibly have been the descendants of more noble predecessors, driven {91} off and degenerated, just as well as they could have been representatives of the whole former condition of culture of mankind. In England, where the questions of the first condition of culture of mankind are very warmly discussed, the Duke of Argyll particularly, in his "Primeval Man," advocates these views, and very forcibly calls attention to the fact that thus far the places of the discovery of the earliest traces of man undoubtedly lie very far from the original home of the human race; while Sir John Lubbock, in his "Origin of Civilization" and in his "Prehistoric Times," and also Tylor in his "Beginning of Culture" and in his "Early History of Mankind," take the opposite view of a progress of mankind from the most uncultivated beginnings. Archaeology, as a whole, seems to do no more than admit that its results can be incorporated into the theory of an origin of the human race through gradual development, _if_ this theory can be shown to be correct in some other way, and that its results can just as well be brought into harmony with a contradictory theory. _Comparative ethnology_ gives us quite a similar result. It is true, there are races of mankind in the lowest grades of human existence. It is well known how Darwin, in his voyage on board the "Beagle," got one of his first vivid impressions of the possibility of an evolution of man from the animal world, by seeing the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego; and it is remarkable that the arms, tools, and furniture, used by the lowest savages, are very similar to the earliest remains of civilized races found on earth. The conclusion lies extremely near, that the savages simply remained in earlier stages of human culture; and an ethnographic picture of mankind {92} at present would in a similar way give an approximately correct view of its former development, as the natural zooelogical and botanical system of the present fauna and flora must give us at the same time the key to their pedigree; supposing the Darwinian theory to be correct. If it were so, ethnology would be an altogether inestimable help for the exploration of the descent and development of the human race. For the extremely few and rare fossil remains of man--which, moreover, do not give us any answer to the most important questions in regard to the mental and moral quality of the primitive man--would be rendered complete by living examples of the kind, which remained at the old stages of development.