It may seem a truism, but is perhaps worth recollecting at the start, that no man or woman lacks individuality altogether, even if it cannot be regarded in a particular case as a high individuality.  No one is a mere item.  That useful figment of the statistician has no real existence under the sun.  We need to supplement the books of abstract theory with much sympathetic insight directed towards men and women in their concrete selfhood.  Said a Vedda cave-dweller to Dr. Seligmann (it is the first instance I light on in the first book I happen to take up):  “It is pleasant for us to feel the rain beating on our shoulders, and good to go out and dig yams, and come home wet, and see the fire burning in the cave, and sit round it.”  That sort of remark, to my mind, throws more light on the anthropology of cave-life than all the bones and stones that I have helped to dig out of our Mousterian caves in Jersey.  As the stock phrase has it, it is, as far as it goes, a “human document.”  The individuality, in the sense of the intimate self-existence, of the speaker and his group—­for, characteristically enough, he uses the first person plural—­is disclosed sufficiently for our souls to get into touch.  We are the nearer to appreciating human history from the inside.

Some of those students of mankind, therefore, who have been privileged to live amongst the ruder peoples, and to learn their language well, and really to be friends with some of them (which is hard, since friendship implies a certain sense of equality on both sides), should try their hands at anthropological biography.  Anthropology, so far as it relates to savages, can never rise to the height of the most illuminating kind of history until this is done.

It ought not to be impossible for an intelligent white man to enter sympathetically into the mental outlook of the native man of affairs, the more or less practical and hardheaded legislator and statesman, if only complete confidence could be established between the two.  That there are men of outstanding individuality who help to make political history even amongst the rudest peoples is, moreover, hardly to be doubted.  Thus Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, in the introductory chapter of their work on the Central Australians, state that, after observing the conduct of a great gathering of the natives, they reached the opinion that the changes which undoubtedly take place from time to time in aboriginal custom are by no means wholly of the subconscious and spontaneous sort, but are in part due also to the influence of individuals of superior ability.  “At this gathering, for example, some of the oldest men were of no account; but, on the other hand, others not so old as they were, but more learned in ancient lore or more skilled in matters of magic, were looked up to by the others, and they it was who settled everything.  It must, however, be understood that we have no definite proof to bring forward of the actual introduction by this means of any fundamental