Farrer surveys what travellers and missionaries had reported about tribal societies around the world, taking in their myths and beliefs, ways of praying, proverbs, moral ideas, political life, penal laws, wedding customs and fairy-lore. He argues, often against the prejudices of his day, that these peoples showed real intelligence and moral sense.
An early work of comparative anthropology, written in the Victorian vocabulary of “savages” that its own argument tends to undermine. Download the free EPUB.