Note 30 — Chapter I · METHOD AND DIVISIONS.

It has to be remarked that this is not an ascending series of stages of economic development. What the economic evolution has been we do not exactly know. Little credit is given to-day to the old division into the three successive stages of hunting, pastoral nomadism, and agriculture. This was not yet so in 1884, when Dargun could still write: “The evolutionary stages of hunting, pastoral, and agricultural life are so well established in science as stages of human evolution in general, that it seems rather audacious to object to this division. Taken in general, however, it is false; on the greater half of the globe pastoral life was not a transitory stage from hunting to agriculture; therefore the people concerned had not to pass through any regulation of property peculiar to herdsmen. They learned agriculture without having been pastoral. This phenomenon comprehends two parts of the world—America and Australia-Polynesia—completely, and two other parts—Asia and Africa—to a great extent, as the Malay Archipelago and the territory of the Negro tribes across Africa also are included. Therefore it will be necessary to leave off considering the three stages of hunting, pastoral and agricultural life as a rule of human progress. Moreover, nearly all pastoral tribes carry on agriculture, however negligently; and it is not at all certain that the origin of the latter does not go back to a more remote period than cattle-breeding; it is even probable that it does, for nomadic herdsmen are on the whole more civilized than the rudest agricultural tribes: cattle-breeding therefore is posterior to primitive agriculture”30. This view of Dargun’s is now generally accepted. But a new ascending series that would have any scientific value does not yet exist. And so we can only distinguish economic states, not stages of economic development.