THE EYESIGHT OF SAVAGES.
THAT men who can see well will learn to shoot better than men who do not see well is a fact so patent that we do not wonder Sir Redvers Buller's remark about the superior eyesight of the Boers attracted public attention. He thinks, it is said, that the Boer has the " eyesight of the savage," and sees two miles further than the Englishman, and of course that fact, if it is proved, furnishes a sufficient explana- tion of many British mishaps in the South African Campaign, and accounts for losses of life which might otherwise be attributed to a reckless disregard of necessary precautions. But we do not quite understand the deduction so generally drawn from Sir Redvers's statement that savage eyesight is naturally better than the eyesight of civilised men. Why should it be better ? There is no difference of structure in the eyeball, and the difference in health is rather in favour of the civilised man. The latter, no doubt, very often loses something of the keenness of his sight from much reading and the use of artificial light, but Tommy Atkins is no philosopher, reads little more than the savage, and burns no midnight oil. The truth is the Boer, like the savage, habitually trains his eye, as the sailor does, to look into the far distance, and acquires from that training, and the habit of close attention to all signs of movement on the part of his quarry, a power of quick perception which seems to those without it almost miraculous. He sees game or an enemy minutes before Tommy can, just as a sailor sees a sail or a smoke minutes before a landsman can, but there is no difference of original or natural powers. Tommy could be trained, if we took sufficient trouble to train him and allowed sufficient time, just as well as the Boer, and very often is trained when he is a gamekeeper, or in any other way dependent upon the acuteness of his sight. Let any one who doubts this just take a walk with an ornithologist, and remark what the latter sees, and at what distance, when com- pared with himself.
The matter is of some interest, not only because the private soldier has to be taught to shoot as well as any enemy, but because it bears upon the very large question whether civilisa- tion necessarily diminishes the physical powers of the average human being. If it does, that is a great drawback to civilisa- tion, because it precludes the hope of man ever developing a kind of aristocracy with the powers both of body and mind increased to a point far beyond present experience. That is the dream, the rather lofty dream as it seems to us, of the dons who foster athletics as well as reading in their pupils ; but if the reading spoils physical as much as it develops mental power, that is a dream impossible of realisation. But does study necessarily have the effect of spoiling sinews ? That it does so is a very natural idea, because the savage seems so much more agile, and is besides trained by his mode of life, which the civilised man is not ; but we do not know that there is any solid evidence for the notion. The " big, black, bounding beggar," as Rudyard Kipling called him, can outrun the citizen, or outwalk him in a long march, or throw him in a wrestle for life, but the trained runner will outstrip the savage, the gamekeeper will walk with him till he drops from fatigue, and the Cumberland wrestler will like nothing better than to throw him over his head. The whole difference is that the savage is always, from the habits of his life, in a condition which the citizen only reaches after weeks of careful training have restored him to the full exercise of his natural powers. Just give a savage who has never been accustomed to carry weight, say a Red Indian of the North American forest, the weight to carry under which the British soldier habitually marches, and see which of them will give in first, though the savage has even then the advantage of having walked every day to his full' power all his life. If it were not so, man as an animal would differ from all other animals, for it is notorious that no wild horse can keep pace with a racer, and no wild dog can escape a hound. The Kanaka, it is true, of the South Seas can usually swim much farther than any civilised man, but then what civilised man passes half his life in swimming in water just warm enough to give his lungs fair play ? There is, we admit, one faculty in which the savage appears hopelessly to distance his rival. He retains, or appears to retain, the superior sense of smell, which belongs to so many animals, or perhaps, in different degrees, to all, detesting, for example, the odour of water or of land from a great distance; but then smell is the one sense which the civilised man, it may be from an instinct of self-defence, never cultivates at all, but permits to die unused. It is of course possible that in a clear, dry air like that of South Africa the eye acquires a certain keenness which is wanting to the eye used for generations to a humid atmosphere ; but that, if it occurs, is not due to any defect imposed by the conditions of civilisation. It is more like the extra thickness of skull which enables the negro to resist the direct rays of an African sun without discomposure or brain disease.
The truth is, we believe, that civilised man when cultivated up to a certain point acquires a latent spite against civilisa- tion, as essentially based upon a system of rather wearisome restrictions. He longs for more freedom, or as he calls it, simplicity of life, and being half inclined to revert to savagery, wishes to credit the savage with all the attractiveness he can. So strong was this feeling in the last century that the " state of Nature," which is really the state of the brutes, was represented through an entire literature as worthy of admira- tion. Serious thinkers, in France especially, actually believed in the " noble " savage, and even in some instances ventured to paint him as the " gentlest " of human beings. He is, as a matter of fact, neither gentle nor noble. Allowing, of course, for a very few individual exceptions, he is more capricious, revenge- ful, lustful, and cruel than the lowest of the civilised tribes, with the addition of a callousness like that of the Fiji King Thakombau, who used to launch his new war-boats by running them to the water over the bodies of his slaves, whom the weight of the boats disembowelled as they passed. He is usually treacherous, partly, it may be, from incapacity for continuous thought, and always greedy, while be is almost without exception more inclined to drunkenness than the least abstinent of the civilised races. As to his mental qualities, he makes little or no advance in thousands of years, witness the Ethiopian, or the negro on the banks of the Niger, or the Australian aborigine, while his physical qualities are certainly not beyond those of even semi-civilised men. A Turkish " hamal " will carry double the load of an Ashanti porter. That he often possesses courage is undeniable, but the moment his superstition is stirred he becomes an abject coward, a fact admitted even by Mr. Rider Haggard, who has done for the Zulus at least as much as Fenimore Cooper has done for the Red Indians of North America, which latter, be it remembered, delighted in nothing so much as the torture of their captives, Neither perfect savagery nor the wildest life in the woods has made "noble" persons of either the "Diggers" of California or the Veddahs of Ceylon, the two tribes in which, if savagery develops powers, they should be developed to the last degree. That the worst savages ought to be justly treated is our creed, and that something may be made of the majority, and something fine of a few, we firmly believe ; but it can only be done by the discipline, preferentially military discipline, which makes of self-control an instinctive habit, and supplies in part the deficiencies left by ages of the " noble " savage life. The more the savage is civilised out of savagery by a wise and kindly, yet irresistible, discipline, the wiser and the better and the braver he becomes, and we doubt greatly, if he does not drink, whether he pays for his advance in much loss of his physical vigour or his animal faculties. The evidence is against us on one point—the sense of smell—but before we accept the present notion about savage eyesight we should like to test that of a dozen Zulus against that of a dozen English sailors in the same dry air.
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