[251] I am aware that what I have opposed to Sir J. Lubbock is only the contrary and not the contradictory of his proposition. I find, however, that a very competent authority, Wilson, "Archæology and Pre-historic Annals of Scotland," p. 42, says: "No people, however rude or debased be their state, have yet been met with so degraded to the level of the brutes as to entertain no notion of a Supreme Being, or no anticipation of a future state." "All polytheism is based on monotheism; idolatry implies religious feeling."--_Bunsen's Egypt_, iv. 69. But in truth it was not a priest or a missionary who first enunciated the contradictory of Sir John Lubbock's proposition--it was Cicero. "Itaque ex tot generibus nullum est animal, præter hominem, quod habeat notitiam aliquam dei: ipsisque in hominibus nulla gens est, neque _tam immansueta_, neque _tam fera_, quæ non _etiam si ignoret qualem habere deum deceat_, tamen _habendum sciat_." De Legibus; i. 8. Second, "It is a common opinion that savages are, as a general rule, only the miserable remnants of nations once more civilised; but although there are some well-established cases of national decay, there is no scientific evidence which would justify us in asserting that this is generally the case" (p. 337). In opposition to the first proposition, I maintain that there is no race of men so degraded as to be without some vestige of religion. And in opposition to the second, I assert that if they have a vestige of religion, and nothing else, they have still that which will convict them of degeneracy. First, To say that a savage has no idea of the Deity, is to say merely that he is a savage; and it appears to me that this extinction of all knowledge of the Deity among a people, precisely marks the point where the barbarian lapses into the savage. Taking the range of the authorities quoted by Sir J. Lubbock,[252] I find a great concurrence of testimony to the fact that there is some vestige of religion. One only--whose authority on any other point incidental to African travel I should regard as of the highest value--Captain Richard Burton, asserts without qualification, and in language sufficiently explicit, that "some of the tribes of the lake district of Central Africa admit neither God, nor angel, nor devil." Others assert the same negatively--they did not come upon any signs of religion, any external observances, any trace of ceremonial worship. For instance, it is said that the Tasmanians had no word for a Creator (p. 468, Lubbock), which need not excite surprise, as it is also said of them that they were incapable of forming any abstract ideas at all (p. 355, Lubbock). Again, in many of those cases where it is more or less roundly asserted that there is no vestige of religion, we find it plainly intimated that there is a belief in the devil, _e.g._ Lubbock, p. 469.