Which Reminds Me

Yes, I would agree that sometimes those 19th century travel writers, when observing persons and customs of cultures other than their own, were sometimes prone to say things that sound sort of strange and even oddly goofy to modern ears, indicative perhaps of primitive systems of thought that were not yet as refined as we are nowadays in our modern glory, and when you go back to the 16th and 17th or 18th centuries, you may find even more primitive things, although not really classifiable as a systematic theory, just some guys' offhand comments of the moment, not really the final word certainly. And if you can read that with a grain of salt, you can see how far we have come from those primitive days. But if you cannot read with a grain of salt, for example, the Rev. Clark's introduction to Scotty Kid's opus on street bums and Spanish Filipinos, then perhaps that is a matter of serious personal concern for you, whereas for us, we were barely aware of these ancient tomes until you brought them out of the oblivion and called them to our attention. We might have forgotten that if you had not made so much noise about it.