HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGENo. 37 _Editors:_HERBERT FISHER, M. A. , F. B. A. PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, LITT. D. , LL. D. , F. B. A. PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M. A. PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M. A. _A complete classified list of the volumes of_ THE HOME UNIVERSITYLIBRARY _already published will be found at the end of this book_. ANTHROPOLOGY BYR. R. MARETT, M. A. READER IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORDAUTHOR OF "THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION, " ETC. NEW YORKHENRY HOLT AND COMPANY LONDONWILLIAMS AND NORGATE CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I SCOPE OF ANTHROPOLOGY . . . 7 II ANTIQUITY OF MAN . . . . . 30 III RACE . . . . . . . . . . . 59 IV ENVIRONMENT . . . . . . . . 94 V LANGUAGE . . . . . . . . . 130 VI SOCIAL ORGANIZATION . . . . 152 VII LAW . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 VIII RELIGION . . . . . . . . . 204 IX MORALITY . . . . . . . . . 235 X MAN THE INDIVIDUAL . . . . 241 BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . 251 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . 254 "Bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, are these half-brutishprehistoric brothers. Girdled about with the immense darkness of thismysterious universe even as we are, they were born and died, sufferedand struggled. Given over to fearful crime and passion, plunged inthe blackest ignorance, preyed upon by hideous and grotesque delusions, yet steadfastly serving the profoundest of ideals in their fixed faiththat existence in any form is better than non-existence, they everrescued triumphantly from the jaws of ever-imminent destruction thetorch of life which, thanks to them, now lights the world for us. Howsmall, indeed, seem individual distinctions when we look back on theseoverwhelming numbers of human beings panting and straining under thepressure of that vital want! And how inessential in the eyes of Godmust be the small surplus of the individual's merit, swamped as itis in the vast ocean of the common merit of mankind, dumbly andundauntedly doing the fundamental duty, and living the heroic life!We grow humble and reverent as we contemplate the prodigiousspectacle. " WILLIAM JAMES, in _Human Immortality_. ANTHROPOLOGY CHAPTER ISCOPE OF ANTHROPOLOGY In this chapter I propose to say something, firstly, about the idealscope of anthropology; secondly, about its ideal limitations; and, thirdly and lastly, about its actual relations to existing studies. In other words, I shall examine the extent of its claim, and then goon to examine how that claim, under modern conditions of science andeducation, is to be made good. Firstly, then, what is the ideal scope of anthropology? Taken at itsfullest and best, what ought it to comprise? Anthropology is the whole history of man as fired and pervaded by theidea of evolution. Man in evolution--that is the subject in its fullreach. Anthropology studies man as he occurs at all known times. Itstudies him as he occurs in all known parts of the world. It studieshim body and soul together--as a bodily organism, subject to conditionsoperating in time and space, which bodily organism is in intimaterelation with a soul-life, also subject to those same conditions. Having an eye to such conditions from first to last, it seeks to plotout the general series of the changes, bodily and mental together, undergone by man in the course of his history. Its business is simplyto describe. But, without exceeding the limits of its scope, it canand must proceed from the particular to the general; aiming at nothingless than a descriptive formula that shall sum up the whole seriesof changes in which the evolution of man consists. That will do, perhaps, as a short account of the ideal scope ofanthropology. Being short, it is bound to be rather formal andcolourless. To put some body into it, however, it is necessary tobreathe but a single word. That word is: Darwin. Anthropology is the child of Darwin. Darwinism makes it possible. Reject the Darwinian point of view, and you must reject anthropologyalso. What, then, is Darwinism? Not a cut-and-dried doctrine. Not adogma. Darwinism is a working hypothesis. You suppose something tobe true, and work away to see whether, in the light of that supposedtruth, certain facts fit together better than they do on any othersupposition. What is the truth that Darwinism supposes? Simply thatall the forms of life in the world are related together; and that therelations manifested in time and space between the different livesare sufficiently uniform to be described under a general formula, orlaw of evolution. This means that man must, for certain purposes of science, toe theline with the rest of living things. And at first, naturally enough, man did not like it. He was too lordly. For a long time, therefore, he pretended to be fighting for the Bible, when he was really fightingfor his own dignity. This was rather hard on the Bible, which hasnothing to do with the Aristotelian theory of the fixity of species;though it might seem possible to read back something of the kind intothe primitive creation-stories preserved in Genesis. Now-a-days, however, we have mostly got over the first shock to our family pride. We are all Darwinians in a passive kind of way. But we need to darwinizeactively. In the sciences that have to do with plants, and with therest of the animals besides man, naturalists have been so active intheir darwinizing that the pre-Darwinian stuff is once for all laidby on the shelf. When man, however, engages on the subject of his nobleself, the tendency still is to say: We accept Darwinism so long asit is not allowed to count, so long as we may go on believing the sameold stuff in the same old way. How do we anthropologists propose to combat this tendency? By workingaway at our subject, and persuading people to have a look at our results. Once people take up anthropology, they may be trusted not to drop itagain. It is like learning to sleep with your window open. What couldbe more stupefying than to shut yourself up in a closet and swallowyour own gas? But is it any less stupefying to shut yourself up withinthe last few thousand years of the history of your own corner of theworld, and suck in the stale atmosphere of its own self-generatedprejudices? Or, to vary the metaphor, anthropology is like travel. Every one starts by thinking that there is nothing so perfect as hisown parish. But let a man go aboard ship to visit foreign parts, and, when he returns home, he will cause that parish to wake up. With Darwin, then, we anthropologists say: Let any and every portionof human history be studied in the light of the whole history of mankind, and against the background of the history of living things in general. It is the Darwinian outlook that matters. None of Darwin's particulardoctrines will necessarily endure the test of time and trial. Intothe melting-pot must they go as often as any man of science deems itfitting. But Darwinism as the touch of nature that makes the wholeworld kin can hardly pass away. At any rate, anthropology stands orfalls with the working hypothesis, derived from Darwinism, of afundamental kinship and continuity amid change between all the formsof human life. It remains to add that, hitherto, anthropology has devoted most ofits attention to the peoples of rude--that is to say, ofsimple--culture, who are vulgarly known to us as "savages. " The mainreason for this, I suppose, is that nobody much minds so long as thedarwinizing kind of history confines itself to outsiders. Only whenit is applied to self and friends is it resented as an impertinence. But, although it has always up to now pursued the line of leastresistance, anthropology does not abate one jot or tittle of its claimto be the whole science, in the sense of the whole history, of man. As regards the word, call it science, or history, or anthropology, or anything else--what does it matter? As regards the thing, however, there can be no compromise. We anthropologists are out to secure this:that there shall not be one kind of history for savages and anotherkind for ourselves, but the same kind of history, with the sameevolutionary principle running right through it, for all men, civilized and savage, present and past. * * * * * So much for the ideal scope of anthropology. Now, in the second place, for its ideal limitations. Here, I am afraid, we must touch for a momenton very deep and difficult questions. But it is well worth while totry at all costs to get firm hold of the fact that anthropology, thougha big thing, is not everything. It will be enough to insist briefly on the following points: thatanthropology is science in whatever way history is science; that itis not philosophy, though it must conform to its needs; and that itis not policy, though it may subserve its designs. Anthropology is science in the sense of specialized research that aimsat truth for truth's sake. Knowing by parts is science, knowing thewhole as a whole is philosophy. Each supports the other, and thereis no profit in asking which of the two should come first. One is awareof the universe as the whole universe, however much one may be resolvedto study its details one at a time. The scientific mood, however, isuppermost when one says: Here is a particular lot of things that seemto hang together in a particular way; let us try to get a general ideaof what that way is. Anthropology, then, specializes on the particulargroup of human beings, which itself is part of the larger particulargroup of living beings. Inasmuch as it takes over the evolutionaryprinciple from the science dealing with the larger group, namelybiology, anthropology may be regarded as a branch of biology. Let itbe added, however, that, of all the branches of biology, it is theone that is likely to bring us nearest to the true meaning of life;because the life of human beings must always be nearer to human studentsof life than, say, the life of plants. But, you will perhaps object, anthropology was previously identifiedwith history, and now it is identified with science, namely, with abranch of biology? Is history science? The answer is, Yes. I know thata great many people who call themselves historians say that it is not, apparently on the ground that, when it comes to writing history, truthfor truth's sake is apt to bring out the wrong results. Well, thedoctored sort of history is not science, nor anthropology, I am readyto admit. But now let us listen to another and a more serious objectionto the claim of history to be science. Science, it will be said bymany earnest men of science, aims at discovering laws that are cleanout of time. History, on the other hand, aims at no more than thegeneralized description of one or another phase of a time-process. To this it may be replied that physics, and physics only, answers tothis altogether too narrow conception of science. The laws of matterin motion are, or seem to be, of the timeless or mathematical kind. Directly we pass on to biology, however, laws of this kind are notto be discovered, or at any rate are not discovered. Biology dealswith life, or, if you like, with matter as living. Matter moves. Lifeevolves. We have entered a new dimension of existence. The laws ofmatter in motion are not abrogated, for the simple reason that inphysics one makes abstraction of life, or in other words leaves itspeculiar effects entirely out of account. But they are transcended. They are multiplied by _x_, an unknown quantity. This being so fromthe standpoint of pure physics, biology takes up the tale afresh, anddevises means of its own for describing the particular ways in whichthings hang together in virtue of their being alive. And biology findsthat it cannot conveniently abstract away the reference to time. Itcannot treat living things as machines. What does it do, then? It takesthe form of history. It states that certain things have changed incertain ways, and goes on to show, so far as it can, that the changesare on the whole in a certain direction. In short, it formulatestendencies, and these are its only laws. Some tendencies, of course, appear to be more enduring than others, and thus may be thought toapproximate more closely to laws of the timeless kind. But _x_, theunknown quantity, the something or other that is not physical, runsthrough them all, however much or little they may seem to endure. Forscience, at any rate, which departmentalizes the world, and studiesit bit by bit, there is no getting over the fact that living beingsin general, and human beings in particular, are subject to an evolutionwhich is simple matter of history. And now what about philosophy? I am not going into philosophicalquestions here. For that reason I am not going to describe biologyas natural history, or anthropology as the natural history of man. Let philosophers discuss what "nature" is going to mean for them. Inscience the word is question-begging; and the only sound rule inscience is to beg as few philosophical questions as you possibly can. Everything in the world is natural, of course, in the sense that thingsare somehow all akin--all of a piece. We are simply bound to take inthe parts as parts of a whole, and it is just this fact that makesphilosophy not only possible but inevitable. All the same, this factdoes not prevent the parts from having their own specific natures andspecific ways of behaving. The people who identify the natural withthe physical are putting all their money on one specific kind of natureor behaviour that is to be found in the world. In the case of man theyare backing the wrong horse. The horse to back is the horse that goes. As a going concern, however, anthropology, as part of evolutionarybiology, is a history of vital tendencies which are not natural inthe sense of merely physical. What are the functions of philosophy as contrasted with science? Two. Firstly, it must be critical. It must police the city of the sciences, preventing them from interfering with each other's rights and freedevelopment. Co-operation by all means, as, for instance, betweenanthropology and biology. But no jumping other folks' claims and layingdown the law for all; as, for instance, when physics would impose thekind of method applicable to machines on the sciences of evolving life. Secondly, philosophy must be synthetic. It must put all the ways ofknowing together, and likewise put these in their entirety togetherwith all the ways of feeling and acting; so that there may result atheory of reality and of the good life, in that organic interdependenceof the two which our very effort to put things together presupposesas its object. What, then, are to be the relations between anthropology andphilosophy? On the one hand, the question whether anthropology canhelp philosophy need not concern us here. That is for the philosopherto determine. On the other hand, philosophy can help anthropology intwo ways: in its critical capacity, by helping it to guard its ownclaim, and develop freely without interference from outsiders; andin its synthetic capacity, perhaps, by suggesting the rule that, oftwo types of explanation, for instance, the physical and the biological, the more abstract is likely to be farther away from the whole truth, whereas, contrariwise, the more you take in, the better your chanceof really understanding. It remains to speak about policy. I use this term to mean any and allpractical exploitation of the results of science. Sometimes, indeed, it is hard to say where science ends and policy begins, as we saw inthe case of those gentlemen who would doctor their history, becausepractically it pays to have a good conceit of ourselves, and believethat our side always wins its battles. Anthropology, however, wouldborrow something besides the evolutionary principle from biology, namely, its disinterestedness. It is not hard to be candid about beesand ants; unless, indeed, one is making a parable of them. But asanthropologists we must try, what is so much harder, to be candid aboutourselves. Let us look at ourselves as if we were so many bees andants, not forgetting, of course, to make use of the inside informationthat in the case of the insects we so conspicuously lack. This does not mean that human history, once constructed according totruth-regarding principles, should and could not be used for thepractical advantage of mankind. The anthropologist, however, is not, as such, concerned with the practical employment to which hisdiscoveries are put. At most, he may, on the strength of a convictionthat truth is mighty and will prevail for human good, invite practicalmen to study his facts and generalizations in the hope that, by knowingmankind better, they may come to appreciate and serve it better. Forinstance, the administrator, who rules over savages, is almostinvariably quite well-meaning, but not seldom utterly ignorant ofnative customs and beliefs. So, in many cases, is the missionary, another type of person in authority, whose intentions are of the best, but whose methods too often leave much to be desired. No amount ofzeal will suffice, apart from scientific insight into the conditionsof the practical problem. And the education is to be got by payingfor it. But governments and churches, with some honourable exceptions, are still wofully disinclined to provide their probationers with thenecessary special training; though it is ignorance that always provesmost costly in the long run. Policy, however, including bad policy, does not come within the official cognizance of the anthropologist. Yet it is legitimate for him to hope that, just as for many years alreadyphysiological science has indirectly subserved the art of medicine, so anthropological science may indirectly, though none the lesseffectively, subserve an art of political and religious healing inthe days to come. * * * * * The third and last part of this chapter will show how, under modernconditions of science and education, anthropology is to realize itsprogramme. Hitherto, the trouble with anthropologists has been to seethe wood for the trees. Even whilst attending mainly to the peoplesof rude culture, they have heaped together facts enough to bewilderboth themselves and their readers. The time has come to do some sorting;or rather the sorting is doing itself. All manner of groups of specialstudents, interested in some particular side of human history, comenow-a-days to the anthropologist, asking leave to borrow from his stockof facts the kind that they happen to want. Thus he, as generalstorekeeper, is beginning to acquire, almost unconsciously, a senseof order corresponding to the demands that are made upon him. The goodsthat he will need to hand out in separate batches are being graduallyarranged by him on separate shelves. Our best way, then, of proceedingwith the present inquiry, is to take note of these shelves. In otherwords, we must consider one by one the special studies that claim tohave a finger in the anthropological pie. Or, to avoid the disheartening task of reviewing an array of bloodless"-ologies, " let us put the question to ourselves thus: Be it supposedthat a young man or woman who wants to take a course, of at least ayear's length, in the elements of anthropology, joins some universitywhich is thoroughly in touch with the scientific activities of theday. A university, as its very name implies, ought to be anall-embracing assemblage of higher studies, so adjusted to each otherthat, in combination, they provide beginners with a good generaleducation; whilst, severally, they offer to more advanced studentsthe opportunity of doing this or that kind of specific research. Insuch a well-organized university, then, how would our buddinganthropologist proceed to form a preliminary acquaintance with thefour corners of his subject? What departments must he attend in turn?Let us draw him up a curriculum, praying meanwhile that themultiplicity of the demands made upon him will not take away his breathaltogether. Man is a many-sided being; so there is no help for it ifanthropology also is many-sided. For one thing, he must sit at the feet of those whose particular concernis with pre-historic man. It is well to begin here, since thus willthe glamour of the subject sink into his soul at the start. Let him, for instance, travel back in thought to the Europe of many thousandsof years ago, shivering under the effects of the great ice-age, yetpopulous with human beings so far like ourselves that they were aliveto the advantage of a good fire, made handy tools out of stone andwood and bone, painted animals on the walls of their caves, or engravedthem on mammoth-ivory, far more skilfully than most of us could donow, and buried their dead in a ceremonial way that points to a beliefin a future life. Thus, too, he will learn betimes how to blend themethods and materials of different branches of science. A human skull, let us say, and some bones of extinct animals, and some chipped flintsare all discovered side by side some twenty feet below the level ofthe soil. At least four separate authorities must be called in beforethe parts of the puzzle can be fitted together. Again, he must be taught something about race, or inherited breed, as it applies to man. A dose of practical anatomy--that is to say, some actual handling and measuring of the principal portions of thehuman frame in its leading varieties--will enable our beginner toappreciate the differences of outer form that distinguish, say, theBritish colonist in Australia from the native "black-fellow, " or thewhites from the negroes, and redskins, and yellow Asiatics in theUnited States. At this point, he may profitably embark on the detailsof the Darwinian hypothesis of the descent of man. Let him searchamongst the manifold modern versions of the theory of human evolutionfor the one that comes nearest to explaining the degrees of physicallikeness and unlikeness shown by men in general as compared with theanimals, especially the man-like apes; and again, those shown by themen of divers ages and regions as compared with each other. Nor isit enough for him, when thus engaged, to take note simply of physicalfeatures--the shape of the skull, the colour of the skin, the tintand texture of the hair, and so on. There are likewise mental charactersthat seem to be bound up closely with the organism and to follow thebreed. Such are the so-called instincts, the study of which shouldbe helped out by excursions into the mind-history of animals, ofchildren, and of the insane. Moreover, the measuring and testing ofmental functions, and, in particular, of the senses, is now-a-dayscarried on by means of all sorts of ingenious instruments; and someexperience of their use will be all to the good, when problems ofdescent are being tackled. Further, our student must submit to a thorough grounding inworld-geography with its physical and human sides welded firmlytogether. He must be able to pick out on the map the headquarters ofall the more notable peoples, not merely as they are now, but alsoas they were at various outstanding moments of the past. His nextbusiness is to master the main facts about the natural conditions towhich each people is subjected--the climate, the conformation of landand sea, the animals and plants. From here it is but a step to theeconomic life--the food-supply, the clothing, the dwelling-places, the principal occupations, the implements of labour. A selected listof books of travel must be consulted. No less important is it to worksteadily through the show-cases of a good ethnological museum. Norwill it suffice to have surveyed the world by regions. Thecommunications between regions--the migrations and conquests, thetrading and the borrowing of customs--must be traced and accountedfor. Finally, on the basis of their distribution, which the learnermust chart out for himself on blank maps of the world, the chiefvarieties of the useful arts and appliances of man can be followedfrom stage to stage of their development. Of the special studies concerned with man the next in order might seemto be that which deals with the various forms of human society; since, in a sense, social organization must depend directly on materialcircumstances. In another and perhaps a deeper sense, however, theprime condition of true sociality is something else, namely, theexclusively human gift of articulate speech. To what extent, then, must our novice pay attention to the history of language? Speculationabout its far-off origins is now-a-days rather out of fashion. Moreover, language is no longer supposed to provide, by itself at any rate, andapart from other clues, a key to the endless riddles of racial descent. What is most needed, then, is rather some elementary instructionconcerning the organic connection between language and thought, andconcerning their joint development as viewed against the backgroundof the general development of society. And, just as words and thoughtsare essentially symbols, so there are also gesture-symbols and writtensymbols, whilst again another set of symbols is in use for counting. All these pre-requisites of human intercourse may be convenientlytaken together. Coming now to the analysis of the forms of society, the beginner mustfirst of all face the problem: "What makes a people one?" Neither blood, nor territory, nor language, but only the fact of being more or lesscompactly organized in a political society, will be found to yieldthe unifying principle required. Once the primary constitution of thebody politic has been made out, a limit is set up, inside of whicha number of fairly definite forms of grouping offer themselves forexamination; whilst outside of it various social relationships of avaguer kind have also to be considered. Thus, amongst institutionsof the internal kind, the family by itself presents a wide field ofresearch; though in certain cases it is liable to be overshadowed bysome other sort of organization, such as, notably, the clan. Underthe same rubric fall the many forms of more or less voluntaryassociation, economic, religious, and so forth. On the other hand, outside the circle of the body politic there are, at all known stagesof society, mutual understandings that regulate war, trade, travel, the celebration of common rites, the interchange of ideas. Here, then, is an abundance of types of human association, to be first scrutinizedseparately, and afterwards considered in relation to each other. Closely connected with the previous subject is the history of law. Every type of association, in a way, has its law, whereby its membersare constrained to fulfil a certain set of obligations. Thus ourstudent will pass on straight from the forms of society to the mostessential of their functions. The fact that, amongst the less civilizedpeoples, the law is uncodified and merely customary, whilst themachinery for enforcing it is, though generally effective enough, yetoften highly indefinite and occasional, makes the tracing of the growthof legal institutions from their rudiments no less vitally important, though it makes it none the easier. The history of authority is astrictly kindred topic. Legislating and judging on the one hand, andgoverning on the other, are different aspects of the same generalfunction. In accordance, then, with the order already indicated, lawand government as administered by the political society in the personof its representatives, chiefs, elders, war-lords, priest-kings, andso forth, must first be examined; then the jurisdiction and disciplineof subordinate bodies, such as the family and the clan, or again thereligious societies, trade guilds, and the rest; then, lastly, theinternational conventions, with the available means of ensuring theirobservance. Again, the history of religion is an allied theme of far-reachinginterest. For the understanding of the ruder forms of society it mayeven be said to furnish the master-key. At this stage, religion isthe mainstay of law and government. The constraining force of custommakes itself felt largely through a magnifying haze of mysticsanctions; whilst, again, the position of a leader of society restsfor the most part on the supernormal powers imputed to him. Religionand magic, then, must be carefully studied if we would understand howthe various persons and bodies that exercise authority are assisted, or else hindered, in their efforts to maintain social discipline. Apartfrom this fundamental inquiry, there is another, no less importantin its way, to which the study of religion and magic opens up a path. This is the problem how reflection manages as it were to double humanexperience, by setting up beside the outer world of sense an innerworld of thought-relations. Now constructive imagination is the queenof those mental functions which meet in what we loosely term "thought";and imagination is ever most active where, on the outer fringe of themind's routine work, our inarticulate questionings radiate into theunknown. When the genius has his vision, almost invariably, among theruder peoples, it is accepted by himself and his society as somethingsupernormal and sacred, whether its fruit be an act of leadership oran edict, a practical invention or a work of art, a story of the pastor a prophecy, a cure or a devastating curse. Moreover, socialtradition treasures the memory of these revelations, and, blendingthem with the contributions of humbler folk--for all of us dream ourdreams--provides in myth and legend and tale, as well as in manifoldother art-forms, a stimulus to the inspiration of future generations. For most purposes fine art, at any rate during its more rudimentarystages, may be studied in connection with religion. So far as law and religion will not account for the varieties of socialbehaviour, the novice may most conveniently consider them under thehead of morals. The forms of social intercourse, the fashions, thefestivities, are imposed on us by our fellows from without, and nonethe less effectively because as a general rule we fall in with themas a matter of course. The difference between manners and morals ofthe higher order is due simply to the more pressing need, in the caseof our most serious duties, of a reflective sanction, a "moral sense, "to break us in to the common service. It is no easy task to keep legaland religious penalties or rewards out of the reckoning, when tryingto frame an estimate of what the notions of right and wrong, prevalentin a given society, amount to in themselves; nevertheless, it is worthdoing, and valuable collections of material exist to aid the work. The facts about education, which even amongst rude peoples is oftencarried on far into manhood, throw much light on this problem. So dothe moralizings embodied the traditional lore of the folk--theproverbs, the beast-fables, the stories of heroes. There remains the individual to be studied in himself. If theindividual be ignored by social science, as would sometimes appearto be the case, so much the worse for social science, which, to acorresponding extent, falls short of being truly anthropological. Throughout the history of man, our beginner should be on the look-outfor the signs, and the effects, of personal initiative. Freedom ofchoice, of course, is limited by what there is to choose from; so thatthe development of what may be termed social opportunity should beconcurrently reviewed. Again, it is the aim of every moral system soto educate each man that his directive self may be as far as possibleidentified with his social self. Even suicide is not a man's own affair, according to the voice of society which speaks in the moral code. Nevertheless, lest the important truth be overlooked that socialcontrol implies a will that must meet the control half-way, it is wellfor the student of man to pay separate and special attention to theindividual agent. The last word in anthropology is: Know thyself. CHAPTER IIANTIQUITY OF MAN History, in the narrower sense of the word, depends on written records. As we follow back history to the point at which our written recordsgrow hazy, and the immediate ancestors or predecessors of the peopleswho appear in history are disclosed in legend that needs much ekingout by the help of the spade, we pass into proto-history. At the backof that, again, beyond the point at which written records are of anyavail at all, comes pre-history. How, then, you may well inquire, does the pre-historian get to work?What is his method of linking facts together? And what are the sourcesof his information? First, as to his method. Suppose a number of boys are in a field playingfootball, whose superfluous garments are lying about everywhere inheaps; and suppose you want, for some reason, to find out in what orderthe boys arrived on the ground. How would you set about the business?Surely you would go to one of the heaps of discarded clothes, and takenote of the fact that this boy's jacket lay under that boy's waistcoat. Moving on to other heaps you might discover that in some cases a boyhad thrown down his hat on one heap, his tie on another, and so on. This would help you all the more to make out the general series ofarrivals. Yes, but what if some of the heaps showed signs of havingbeen upset? Well, you must make allowances for these disturbances inyour calculations. Of course, if some one had deliberately made haywith the lot, you would be nonplussed. The chances are, however, that, given enough heaps of clothes, and bar intentional and systematicwrecking of them, you would be able to make out pretty well which boypreceded which; though you could hardly go on to say with any precisionwhether Tom preceded Dick by half a minute or half an hour. Such is the method of pre-history. It is called the stratigraphicalmethod, because it is based on the description of strata, or layers. Let me give a simple example of how strata tell their own tale. Itis no very remarkable instance, but happens to be one that I haveexamined for myself. They were digging out a place for a gas-holderin a meadow in the town of St. Helier, Jersey, and carried their boringsdown to bed rock at about thirty feet, which roughly coincides withthe present mean sea-level. The modern meadow-soil went down aboutfive feet. Then came a bed of moss-peat, one to three feet thick. Therehad been a bog here at a time which, to judge by similar finds in otherplaces, was just before the beginning of the bronze-age. Underneaththe moss-peat came two or three feet of silt with sea-shells in it. Clearly the island of Jersey underwent in those days some sort ofsubmergence. Below this stratum came a great peat-bed, five to sevenfeet thick, with large tree-trunks in it, the remains of a fine forestthat must have needed more or less elevated land on which to grow. In the peat was a weapon of polished stone, and at the bottom weretwo pieces of pottery, one of them decorated with little pitted marks. These fragments of evidence are enough to show that the forestersbelonged to the early neolithic period, as it is called. Next occurredabout four feet of silt with sea-shells, marking another advance ofthe sea. Below that, again, was a mass, six to eight feet deep, ofthe characteristic yellow clay with far-carried fragments of rock init that is associated with the great floods of the ice-age. The landmust have been above the reach of the tide for the glacial drift tosettle on it. Finally, three or four feet of blue clay restingimmediately on bed-rock were such as might be produced by the sea, and thus probably betokened its presence at this level in the stillremoter past. Here the strata are mostly geological. Man only comes in at one point. I might have taken a far more striking case--the best I know--fromSt. Acheul, a suburb of Amiens in the north of France. Here M. Commontfound human implements of distinct types in about eight out of elevenor twelve successive geological layers. But the story would take toolong to tell. However, it is well to start with an example that isprimarily geological. For it is the geologist who provides thepre-historic chronometer. Pre-historians have to reckon in geologicaltime--that is to say, not in years, but in ages of indefinite extentcorresponding to marked changes in the condition of the earth's surface. It takes the plain man a long time to find out that it is no use askingthe pre-historian, who is proudly displaying a skull or a stoneimplement, "Please, how many years ago exactly did its owner live?"I remember hearing such a question put to the great savant, M. Cartailhac, when he was lecturing upon the pre-historic drawings foundin the French and Spanish caves; and he replied, "Perhaps not lessthan 6, 000 years ago and not more than 250, 000. " The backbone of ourpresent system of determining the series of pre-historic epochs isthe geological theory of an ice-age comprising a succession of periodsof extreme glaciation punctuated by milder intervals. It is for thegeologists to settle in their own way, unless, indeed, the astronomerscan help them, why there should have been an ice-age at all; what wasthe number, extent, and relative duration of its ups and downs; andat what time, roughly, it ceased in favour of the temperate conditionsthat we now enjoy. The pre-historians, for their part, must be contentto make what traces they discover of early man fit in with thispre-established scheme, uncertain as it is. Every day, however, moreagreement is being reached both amongst themselves and between themand the geologists; so that one day, I am confident, if not exactlyto-morrow, we shall know with fair accuracy how the boys, who lefttheir clothes lying about, followed one another into the field. Sometimes, however, geology does not, on the face of it, come intothe reckoning. Thus I might have asked the reader to assist at thedigging out of a cave, say, one of the famous caves at Mentone, onthe Italian Riviera, just beyond the south-eastern corner of France. These caves were inhabited by man during an immense stretch of time, and, as you dig down, you light upon one layer after another of hisleavings. But note in such a case as this how easily you may be baffledby some one having upset the heap of clothes, or, in a word, byrearrangement. Thus the man whose leavings ought to form the layerhalf-way up may have seen fit to dig a deep hole in the cave-floorin order to bury a deceased friend, and with him, let us suppose, tobury also an assortment of articles likely to be useful in the lifebeyond the grave. Consequently an implement of one age will be foundlying cheek by jowl with the implement of a much earlier age, or even, it may be, some feet below it. Thereupon the pre-historian must fallback on the general run, or type, in assigning the different implementseach to its own stratum. Luckily, in the old days fashions tended tobe rigid; so that for the pre-historian two flints with slightlydifferent chipping may stand for separate ages of culture as clearlyas do a Greek vase and a German beer-mug for the student of more recenttimes. * * * * * Enough concerning the stratigraphical method. A word, in the next place, about the pre-historian's main sources of information. Apart fromgeological facts, there are three main classes of evidence that serveto distinguish one pre-historic epoch from another. These are animalbones, human bones, and human handiwork. Again I illustrate by means of a case of which I happen to havefirst-hand knowledge. In Jersey, near the bay of St. Brelade, is acave, in which we dug down through some twenty feet of accumulatedclay and rock-rubbish, presumably the effects of the last throes ofthe ice-age, and came upon a pre-historic hearth. There were the bigstones that had propped up the fire, and there were the ashes. By theside were the remains of a heap of food-refuse. The pieces of decayedbone were not much to look at; yet, submitted to an expert, they dida tale unfold. He showed them to be the remains of the woolly rhinoceros, the mammoth's even more unwieldy comrade, of the reindeer, of two kindsof horse, one of them the pony-like wild horse still to be found inthe Mongolian deserts, of the wild ox, and of the deer. Truly therewas better hunting to be got in Jersey in the days when it formed partof a frozen continent. Next, the food-heap yields thirteen of somebody's teeth. Had they eatenhim? It boots not to inquire; though, as the owner was aged betweentwenty and thirty, the teeth could hardly have fallen out of theirown accord. Such grinders as they are too! A second expert declaresthat the roots beat all records. They are of the kind that goes withan immensely powerful jaw, needing a massive brow-ridge to counteractthe strain of the bite, and in general involving the type of skullknown as the Neanderthal, big-brained enough in its way, but uncommonlyape-like all the same. Finally, the banqueters have left plenty of their knives lying about. These good folk had their special and regular way of striking off abroad flat flake from the flint core; the cores are lying about, too, and with luck you can restore some of the flakes to their originalposition. Then, leaving one side of the flake untouched, they trimmedthe surface of the remaining face, and, as the edges grew blunt withuse, kept touching them up with the hammer-stone--there it is alsolying by the hearth--until, perhaps, the flake loses its oval shapeand becomes a pointed triangle. A third expert is called in, and hasno difficulty in recognizing these knives as the characteristichandiwork of the epoch known as the Mousterian. If one of these workedflints from Jersey was placed side by side with another from the caveof Le Moustier, near the right bank of the Vezere in south-centralFrance, whence the term Mousterian, you could hardly tell which waswhich; whilst you would still see the same family likeness if youcompared the Jersey specimens with some from Amiens, or from Northfleeton the Thames, or from Icklingham in Suffolk. Putting all these kinds of evidence together, then, we get a notion, doubtless rather meagre, but as far as it goes well-grounded, of ahunter of the ice-age, who was able to get the better of a woollyrhinoceros, could cook a lusty steak off him, had a sharp knife tocarve it, and the teeth to chew it, and generally knew how, under thevery chilly circumstances, both to make himself comfortable and tokeep his race going. There is one other class of evidence on which the pre-historian maywith due caution draw, though the risks are certain and the profitsuncertain. The ruder peoples of to-day are living a life that in itsbroad features cannot be wholly unlike the life of the men of longago. Thus the pre-historian should study Spencer and Gillen on thenatives of Central Australia, if only that he may take firm hold ofthe fact that people with skulls inclining towards the Neanderthaltype, and using stone knives, may nevertheless have very active minds;in short, that a rich enough life in its way may leave behind it apoor rubbish-heap. When it comes, however, to the borrowing of details, to patch up the holes in the pre-historic record with modern rags andtatters makes better literature than science. After all, theAustralians, or Tasmanians, or Bushmen, or Eskimo, of whom so muchis beginning to be heard amongst pre-historians, are ourcontemporaries--that is to say, have just as long an ancestry asourselves; and in the course of the last 100, 000 years or so our stockhas seen so many changes, that their stocks may possibly have seena few also. Yet the real remedy, I take it, against the misuse of analogyis that the student should make himself sufficiently at home in bothbranches of anthropology to know each of the two things he comparesfor what it truly is. * * * * * Having glanced at method and sources, I pass on to results. Sometext-book must be consulted for the long list of pre-historic periodsrequired for western Europe, not to mention the further complicationscaused by bringing in the remaining portions of the world. Thestone-age, with its three great divisions, the eolithic (_eos_, Greekfor dawn, and _lithos_, stone) the palaeolithic (_pallaeos_, old), and the neolithic (_neos_, new), and their numerous subdivisions, comes first; then the age of copper and bronze; and then the earlyiron-age, which is about the limit of proto-history. Here I shallconfine my remarks to Europe. I am not going far afield into suchquestions as: Who were the mound-builders of North America? And arethe Calaveras skull and other remains found in the gold-bearing gravelsof California to be reckoned amongst the earliest traces of man inthe globe? Nor, again, must I pause to speculate whether thedark-stained lustrous flint implements discovered by Mr. Henry Balfourat a high level below the Victoria Falls, and possibly deposited thereby the river Zambezi before it had carved the present gorge in thesolid basalt, prove that likewise in South Africa man was alive andbusy untold thousands of years ago. Also, I shall here confine myselfto the stone-age, because my object is chiefly to illustrate the longpedigree of the species from which we are all sprung. The antiquity of man being my immediate theme, I can hardly avoid sayingsomething about eoliths; though the subject is one that invariablysets pre-historians at each other's throats. There are eoliths andeoliths, however; and some of M. Rutot's Belgian examples arenow-a-days almost reckoned respectable. Let us, nevertheless, inquirewhether eoliths are not to be found nearer home. I can wish the readerno more delightful experience than to run down to Ightham in Kent, and pay a call on Mr. Benjamin Harrison. In the room above what usedto be Mr. Harrison's grocery-store, eoliths beyond all count are onview, which he has managed to amass in his rare moments of leisure. As he lovingly cons the stones over, and shows off their points, hisenthusiasm is likely to prove catching. But the visitor, we shallsuppose, is sceptical. Very good; it is not far, though a stiffishpull, to Ash on the top of the North Downs. Hereabouts are Mr. Harrison's hunting-grounds. Over these stony tracts he has conductedSir Joseph Prestwich and Sir John Evans, to convince the one authority, but not the other. Mark this pebbly drift of rusty-red colour spreadirregularly along the fields, as if the relics of some ancient streamor flood. On the surface, if you are lucky, you may pick up anunquestionable palaeolith of early type, with the rusty-red stain ofthe gravel over it to show that it has lain there for ages. But bothon and below the surface, the gravel being perhaps from five to sevenfeet deep, another type of stone occurs, the so-called eolith. It ispicked out from amongst ordinary stones partly because of its shape, and partly because of rough and much-worn chippings that suggest thehand of art or of nature, according to your turn of mind. Take oneby itself, explains Mr. Harrison, and you will be sure to rank it asordinary road-metal. But take a series together, and then, he urges, the sight of the same forms over and over again will persuade you inthe end that human design, not aimless chance, has been at work here. Well, I must leave Mr. Harrison to convert you into the friend or foeof his eoliths, and will merely add a word in regard to the probableage of these eolith-bearing gravels. Sir Joseph Prestwich has triedto work the problem out. Now-a-days Kent and Sussex run eastwards infive more or less parallel ridges, not far short of 1, 000 feet high, with deep valleys between. Formerly, however, no such valleys existed, and a great dome of chalk, some 2, 500 feet high at its crown, perhaps, though others would say less, covered the whole country. That is whyrivers like the Darenth and Medway cut clean through the North Downsand fall into the Thames, instead of flowing eastwards down the latervalleys. They started to carve their channels in the soft chalk inthe days gone by, when the watershed went north and south down theslopes of the great dome. And the red gravels with the eoliths in them, concludes Prestwich, must have come down the north slope whilst thedome was still intact; for they contain fragments of stone that hailfrom right across the present valleys. But, if the eoliths are man-made, then man presumably killed game and cut it up on top of the Wealdendome, how many years ago one trembles to think. * * * * * Let us next proceed to the subject of palaeoliths. There is, at anyrate, no doubt about them. Yet, rather more than half a century ago, when the Abbe Boucher de Perthes found palaeoliths in the gravels ofthe Somme at Abbeville, and was the first to recognize them for whatthey are, there was no small scandal. Now-a-days, however, the worldtakes it as a matter of course that those lumpish, discoloured, andmuch-rolled stones, shaped something like a pear, which come from thehigh terraces deposited by the Ancient Thames, were once upon a timethe weapons or tools of somebody who had plenty of muscle in his arm. Plenty of skill he had in his fingers, too; for to chip a flint-pebblealong both faces, till it takes a more or less symmetrical and standardshape, is not so easy as it sounds. Hammer away yourself at such apebble, and see what a mess you make of it. To go back for one momentto the subject of eoliths, we may fairly argue that experimental formsstill ruder than the much-trimmed palaeoliths of the early river-driftmust exist somewhere, whether Mr. Harrison's eoliths are to be classedamongst them or not. Indeed, the Tasmanians of modern days carved theirsimple tools so roughly, that any one ignorant of their history mighteasily mistake the greater number for common pieces of stone. On theother hand, as we move on from the earlier to the later types ofriver-drift implements, we note how by degrees practice makes perfect. The forms grow ever more regular and refined, up to the point of timewhich has been chosen as the limit for the first of the three mainstages into which the vast palaeolithic epoch has to be broken up. The man of the late St. Acheul period, as it is termed, was truly agreat artist in his way. If you stare vacantly at his handiwork ina museum, you are likely to remain cold to its charm. But probe aboutin a gravel-bed till you have the good fortune to light on amasterpiece; tenderly smooth away with your fingers the dirt stickingto its surface, and bring to view the tapering or oval outline, thestraight edge, the even and delicate chipping over both faces; then, wrapping it carefully in your handkerchief, take it home to wash, andfeast till bedtime on the clean feel and shining mellow colour of whatis hardly more an implement than a gem. They took a pride in theirwork, did the men of old; and, until you can learn to sympathize, youare no anthropologist. During the succeeding main stage of the palaeolithic epoch there wasa decided set-back in the culture, as judged by the quality of theworkmanship in flint. Those were the days of the Mousterians who dinedoff woolly rhinoceros in Jersey. Their stone implements, worked onlyon one face, are poor things by comparison with those of late St. Acheuldays, though for a time degenerated forms of the latter seem to haveremained in use. What had happened? We can only guess. Probablysomething to do with the climate was at the bottom of this change forthe worse. Thus M. Rutot believes that during the ice-age each bigfreeze was followed by an equally big flood, preceding each freshreturn of milder weather. One of these floods, he thinks, must havedrowned out the neat-fingered race of St. Acheul, and left the coastclear for the Mousterians with their coarser type of culture. Perhapsthey were coarser in their physical type as well. [1] [Footnote 1: Theirs was certainly the rather ape-like Neanderthalbuild. If, however, the skull found at Galley Hill, near Northfleetin Kent, amongst the gravels laid down by the Thames when it was aboutninety feet above its present level, is of early palaeolithic date, as some good authorities believe, there was a kind of man away backin the drift-period who had a fairly high forehead and moderatebrow-ridges, and in general was a less brutal specimen of humanitythan our Mousterian friend of the large grinders. ] To the credit of the Mousterians, however, must be set down the factthat they are associated with the habit of living in caves, and perhapsmay even have started it; though some implements of the drift typeoccur in Le Moustier itself, as well as in other caves, such as thefamous Kent's Cavern near Torquay. Climate, once more, has verypossibly to answer for having thus driven man underground. Anyway, whether because they must, or because they liked it, the Mousterianswent on with their cave life during an immense space of time, makinglittle progress; unless it were to learn gradually how to sharpen bonesinto implements. But caves and bones alike were to play a far morestriking part in the days immediately to follow. The third and last main stage of the palaeolithic epoch developed bydegrees into a golden age of art. But I cannot dwell on all its glories. I must pass by the beautiful work in flint; such as the thin bladesof laurel-leaf pattern, fairly common in France but rare in England, belonging to the stage or type of culture known as the Solutrian (fromSolutre in the department of Saone-et-Loire). I must also pass by theexquisite French examples of the carvings or engravings of bone andivory; a single engraving of a horse's head, from the cave at CreswellCrags in Derbyshire, being all that England has to offer in this line. Any good museum can show you specimens or models of these delightfulobjects; whereas the things about which I am going to speak must remainhidden away for ever where their makers left them--I mean the paintingsand engravings on the walls of the French and Spanish caves. I invite you to accompany me in the spirit first of all to the caveof Gargas near Aventiron, under the shadow of the Pic du Midi in theHigh Pyrenees. Half-way up a hill, in the midst of a wilderness ofrocky fragments, the relics of the ice-age, is a smallish hole, downwhich we clamber into a spacious but low-roofed grotto, stretchingback five hundred feet or so into infinite darkness. Hard by the mouth, where the light of day freely enters, are the remains of a hearth, with bone-refuse and discarded implements mingling with the ashes toa considerable depth. A glance at these implements, for instance thesmall flint scraper with narrow high back and perpendicular chippingalong the sides, is enough to show that the men who once warmed theirfingers here were of the so-called Aurignacian type (Aurignac in thedepartment of Haute Garonne, in southern France), that is to say, livedsomewhere about the dawn of the third stage of the palaeolithic epoch. Directly after their disappearance nature would seem to have sealedup the cave again until our time, so that we can study them here allby themselves. Now let us take our lamps and explore the secrets of the interior. The icy torrents that hollowed it in the limestone have eaten awayrounded alcoves along the sides. On the white surface of these, glazedover with a preserving film of stalactite, we at once notice theoutlines of many hands. Most of them left hands, showing that theAurignacians tended to be right-handed, like ourselves, and dustedon the paint, black manganese or red ochre, between the outspreadfingers in just way that we, too, would find convenient. Curiouslyenough, this practice of stencilling hands upon the walls of cavesis in vogue amongst the Australian natives; though unfortunately, theykeep the reason, if there is any deeper one than mere amusement, strictly to themselves. Like the Australians, again, and other rudepeoples, these Aurignacians would appear to have been given to loppingoff an occasional finger--from some religious motive, we may guess--tojudge from the mutilated look of a good many of the handprints. The use of paint is here limited to this class of wall-decoration. But a sharp flint makes an excellent graving tool; and the Aurignacianhunter is bent on reproducing by this means the forms of thosegame-animals about which he doubtless dreams night and day. His effortsin this direction, however, rather remind us of those of ourinfant-schools. Look at this bison. His snout is drawn sideways, butthe horns branch out right and left as if in a full-face view. Again, our friend scamps details such as the legs. Sheer want of skill, wemay suspect, leads him to construct what is more like the symbol ofsomething thought than the portrait of something seen. And so we wanderfarther and farther into the gloomy depths, adding ever new specimensto our pre-historic menagerie, including the rare find of a bird thatlooks uncommonly like the penguin. Mind, by the way, that you do notfall into that round hole in the floor. It is enormously deep; andmore than forty cave-bears have left their skeletons at the bottom, amongst which your skeleton would be a little out of place. Next day let us move off eastwards to the Little Pyrenees to see anothercave, Niaux, high up in a valley scarred nearly up to the top by formerglaciers. This cave is about a mile deep; and it will take you halfa mile of awkward groping amongst boulders and stalactites, not tomention a choke in one part of the passage such as must puzzle a fatman, before the cavern becomes spacious, and you find yourself in thevast underground cathedral that pre-historic man has chosen for hispicture-gallery. This was a later stock, that had in the meantimelearnt how to draw to perfection. Consider the bold black and whiteof that portrait of a wild pony, with flowing mane and tail, glossybarrel, and jolly snub-nosed face. It is four or five feet across, and not an inch of the work is out of scale. The same is true of nearlyevery one of the other fifty or more figures of game-animals. Theseartists could paint what they saw. Yet they could paint up on the walls what they thought, too. Thereare likewise whole screeds of symbols waiting, perhaps waiting forever, to be interpreted. The dots and lines and pothooks clearly belongto a system of picture-writing. Can we make out their meaning at all?Once in a way, perhaps. Note these marks looking like two differentkinds of throwing-club; at any rate, there are Australian weapons notunlike them. To the left of them are a lot of dots in what look likepatterns, amongst which we get twice over the scheme of one dot inthe centre of a circle of others. Then, farther still to the left, comes the painted figure of a bison; or, to be more accurate, the fronthalf is painted, the back being a piece of protruding rock that givesthe effect of low relief. The bison is rearing back on its haunches, and there is a patch of red paint, like an open wound, just over theregion of its heart. Let us try to read the riddle. It may well embodya charm that ran somewhat thus: "With these weapons, and by theseencircling tactics, may we slay a fat bison, O ye powers of the dark!"Depend upon it, the men who went half a mile into the bowels of amountain, to paint things up on the walls, did not do so merely forfun. This is a very eerie place, and I daresay most of us would notlike to spend the night there alone; though I know a pre-historianwho did. In Australia, as we shall see later on, rock-paintings ofgame-animals, not so lifelike as these of the old days, but symbolicalmost beyond all recognizing, form part of solemn ceremonies wherebygood hunting is held to be secured. Something of the sort, then, wemay suppose, took place ages ago in the cave of Niaux. So, indeed, it was a cathedral after a fashion; and, having in mind the carvenpillars of stalactite, the curving alcoves and side-chapels, theshining white walls, and the dim ceiling that held in scorn our powerfullamps, I venture to question whether man has ever lifted up his heartin a grander one. Space would fail me if I now sought to carry you off to the cave ofAltamira, near Santander, in the north-west of Spain. Here you mightsee at its best a still later style of rock-painting, which desertsmere black and white for colour-shading of the most free description. Indeed, it is almost too free, in my judgment; for, though the controlof the artist over his rude material is complete, he is inclined toturn his back on real life, forcing the animal forms into attitudesmore striking than natural, and endowing their faces sometimes, asit seems to me, with almost human expressions. Whatever may be thoughtof the likelihood of these beasts being portrayed to look like men, certain it is that in the painted caves of this period the men almostinvariably have animal heads, as if they were mythological beings, half animal and half human; or else--as perhaps is moreprobable--masked dancers. At one place, however--namely, in the rockshelter of Cogul near Lerida, on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, we have a picture of a group of women dancers who are not masked, butattired in the style of the hour. They wear high hats or chignons, tight waists, and bell-shaped skirts. Really, considering that we thushave a contemporary fashion-plate, so to say, whilst there are likewisethe numerous stencilled hands elsewhere on view, and even, as I haveseen with my own eyes at Niaux in the sandy floor, hardened over withstalagmite, the actual print of a foot, we are brought very near toour palaeolithic forerunners; though indefinite ages part them fromus if we reckon by sheer time. * * * * * Before ending this chapter, I have still to make good a promise tosay something about the neolithic men of western Europe. These peopleoften, though not always, polished their stone; the palaeolithic folkdid not. That is the distinguishing mark by which the world is pleasedto go. It would be fatal to forget, however, that, with this triflingdifference, go many others which testify more clearly to the contrastbetween the older and newer types of culture. Thus it has still tobe proved that the palaeolithic races ever used pottery, or that theydomesticated animals--for instance, the fat ponies which they wereso fond of eating; or that they planted crops. All these things didthe neolithic peoples sooner or later; so that it would not be strangeif palaeolithic man withdrew in their favour, because he could notcompete. Pre-history is at present almost silent concerning the mannerof his passing. In a damp and draughty tunnel, however, called Masd'Azil, in the south of France, where the river Arize still bores itsway through a mountain, some palaeolithic folk seem to have lingeredon in a sad state of decay. The old sureness of touch in the matterof carving bone had left them. Again, their painting was confined tothe adorning of certain pebbles with spots and lines, curious objects, that perhaps are not without analogy in Australia, whilst somethinglike them crops up again in the north of Scotland in what seems tobe the early iron-age. Had the rest of the palaeolithic men alreadyfollowed the reindeer and other arctic animals towards the north-east?Or did the neolithic invasion, which came from the south, wipe outthe lot? Or was there a commingling of stocks, and may some of us havea little dose of palaeolithic blood, as we certainly have a large doseof neolithic? To all these questions it can only be replied that wedo not yet know. No more do we know half as much as we should like about fifty thingsrelating to the small, dark, long-headed neolithic folk, with alanguage that has possibly left traces in the modern Basque, who spreadover the west till they reached Great Britain--it probably was anisland by this time--and erected the well-known long barrows and othermonuments of a megalithic (great-stone) type; though not the roundbarrows, which are the work of a subsequent round-headed race of thebronze-age. Every day, however, the spade is adding to our knowledge. Besides, most of the ruder peoples of the modern world were at theneolithic stage of culture at the time of their discovery by Europeans. Hence the weapons, the household utensils, the pottery, thepile-dwellings, and so on, can be compared closely; and we have a freshinstance of the way in which one branch of anthropology can aid another. In pursuance of my plan, however, of merely pitching here and thereon an illustrative point, I shall conclude by an excursion to Brandon, just on the Suffolk side of the border between that county and Norfolk. Here we can stand, as it were, with one foot in neolithic times andthe other in the life of to-day. When Canon Greenwell, in 1870, exploredin this neighbourhood one of the neolithic flint-mines known as Grime'sGraves, he had to dig out the rubbish from a former funnel-shaped pitsome forty feet deep. Down at this level, it appeared, the neolithicworker had found the layer of the best flint. This he quarried by meansof narrow galleries in all directions. For a pick he used a red-deer'santler. In the British Museum is to be seen one of these with the miner'sthumb-mark stamped on a piece of clay sticking to the handle. His lampwas a cup of chalk. His ladder was probably a series of rough stepscut in the sides of the pit. As regards the use to which the materialwas put, a neolithic workshop was found just to the south of Grime'sGraves. Here, scattered about on all sides, were the cores, thehammer-stones that broke them up, and knives, scrapers, borers, spear-heads and arrow-heads galore, in all stages of manufacture. Well, now let us hie to Lingheath, not far off, and what do we find?A family of the name of Dyer carry on to-day exactly the same old methodof mining. Their pits are of squarer shape than the neolithic ones, but otherwise similar. Their one-pronged pick retains the shape ofthe deer's antler. Their light is a candle stuck in a cup of chalk. And the ladder is just a series of ledges or, as they call them, "toes"in the wall, five feet apart and connected by foot-holes. The minersimply jerks his load, several hundredweight of flints, from ledgeto ledge by the aid of his head, which he protects with something thatneolithic man was probably without, namely, an old bowler hat. He eventalks a language of his own. "Bubber-hutching on the sosh" is the termfor sinking a pit on the slant, and, for all we can tell, may havea very ancient pedigree. And what becomes of the miner's output? Itis sold by the "jag"--a jag being a pile just so high that when youstand on any side you can see the bottom flint on the other--to theknappers of Brandon. Any one of these--for instance, my friend Mr. Fred Snare--will, while you wait, break up a lump with a short roundhammer into manageable pieces. Then, placing a "quarter" with his lefthand the leather pad that covers his knee, he will, with an oblonghammer, strike off flake after flake, perhaps 1, 500 in a morning; andfinally will work these up into sharp-edged squares to serve asgun-flints for the trade with native Africa. Alas! the palmy days ofknapping gun-flints for the British Army will never return to Brandon. Still, there must have been trade depression in those parts at anytime from the bronze-age up to the times of Brown Bess; for thestrike-a-lights, still to be got at a penny each, can have barely keptthe wolf from the door. And Mr. Snare is not merely an artisan butan artist. He has chipped out a flint ring, a feat which taxed thepowers of the clever neolithic knappers of pre-dynastic Egypt; whilstwith one of his own flint fishhooks he has taken a fine trout fromthe Little Ouse that runs by the town. Thus there are things in old England that are older even than someof our friends wot. In that one county of Suffolk, for instance, thegood flint--so rich in colour as it is, and so responsive to the hammer, at any rate if you get down to the lower layers or "sases, " for instance, the floorstone, or the black smooth-stone that is generally belowwater-level--has served the needs of all the palaeolithic periods, and of the neolithic age as well, and likewise of the modern Englishmenwho fought with flintlocks at Waterloo, or still more recently tookout tinder-boxes with them to the war in South Africa. And what doesthis stand for in terms of the antiquity of man? Thousands of years?We do not know exactly; but say rather hundreds of thousands of years. CHAPTER IIIRACE There is a story about the British sailor who was asked to state whathe understood by a Dago. "Dagoes, " he replied, "is anything wot isn'tour sort of chaps. " In exactly the same way would an ancient Greekhave explained what he meant by a "barbarian. " When it takes thiswholesale form we speak, not without reason, of race-prejudice. Wemay well wonder in the meantime how far this prejudice answers tosomething real. Race would certainly seem to be a fact that staresone in the face. Stroll down any London street: you cannot go wrong about that Hindustudent with features rather like ours but of a darker shade. The shortdapper man with eyes a little aslant is no less unmistakably a Japanese. It takes but a slightly more practised eye to pick out the German waiter, the French chauffeur, and the Italian vendor of ices. Lastly, whenyou have made yourself really good at the game, you will be scarcelymore likely to confuse a small dark Welshman with a broad floridYorkshireman than a retriever with a mastiff. Yes, but remember that you are judging by the gross impression, notby the element of race or breed as distinguished from the rest. Here, you say, come a couple of our American cousins. Perhaps it is theirspeech that betrayeth them; or perhaps it is the general cut of theirjib. If you were to go into their actual pedigrees, you would findthat the one had a Scotch father and a mother from out of Dorset; whilstthe other was partly Scandinavian and partly Spanish with a tinctureof Jew. Yet to all intents and purposes they form one type. And, themore deeply you go into it, the more mixed we all of us turn out tobe, when breed, and breed alone, is the subject of inquiry. Yet race, in the only sense that the word has for an anthropologist, meansinherited breed, and nothing more or less--inherited breed, and allthat it covers, whether bodily or mental features. For race, let it not be forgotten, presumably extends to mind as wellas to body. It is not merely skin-deep. Contrast the stoical Red Indianwith the vivacious Negro; or the phlegmatic Dutchman with thepassionate Italian. True, you say, but what about the influence oftheir various climates, or again of their different ideals ofbehaviour? Quite so. It is immensely difficult to separate the effectsof the various factors. Yet surely the race-factor counts for somethingin the mental constitution. Any breeder of horses will tell you thatneither the climate of Newmarket, nor careful training, nor anyquantity of oats, nor anything else, will put racing mettle intocart-horse stock. In what follows, then, I shall try to show just what the problem aboutthe race-factor is, even if I have to trespass a little way into generalbiology in order to do so. [2] And I shall not attempt to conceal thedifficulties relating to the race-problem. I know that the ordinaryreader is supposed to prefer that all the thinking should be donebeforehand, and merely the results submitted to him. But I cannotbelieve that he would find it edifying to look at half-a-dozen booksupon the races of mankind, and find half-a-dozen accounts of theirrelationships, having scarcely a single statement in common. Farbetter face the fact that race still baffles us almost completely. Yet, breed is there; and, in its own time and in its own way, breedwill out. [Footnote 2: The reader is advised to consult also the morecomprehensive study on _Evolution_ by Professors Geddes and Thomsonin this series. ] Race or breed was a moment ago described as a factor in human nature. But to break up human nature into factors is something that we cando, or try to do, in thought only. In practice we can never succeedin doing anything of the kind. A machine such as a watch we can taketo bits and then put together again. Even a chemical compound suchas water we can resolve into oxygen and hydrogen and then reproduceout of its elements. But to dissect a living thing is to kill it onceand for all. Life, as was said in the first chapter, is something unique, with the unique property of being able to evolve. As life evolves, that is to say changes, by being handed on from certain forms to certainother forms, a partial rigidity marks the process together with apartial plasticity. There is a stiffening, so to speak, that keepsthe life-force up to a point true to its old direction; though, shortof that limit, it is free to take a new line of its own. Race, then, stands for the stiffening in the evolutionary process. Just up to whatpoint it goes in any given case we probably can never quite tell. Yet, if we could think our way anywhere near to that point in regard toman, I doubt not that we should eventually succeed in forging a freshinstrument for controlling the destinies of our species, an instrumentperhaps more powerful than education itself--I mean, eugenics, theart of improving the human breed. To see what race means when considered apart, let us first of all takeyour individual self, and ask how you would proceed to separate yourinherited nature from the nature which you have acquired in the courseof living your life. It is not easy. Suppose, however, that you hada twin brother born, if indeed that were possible, as like you as onepea is like another. An accident in childhood, however, has causedhim to lose a leg. So he becomes a clerk, living a sedentary life inan office. You, on the other hand, with your two lusty legs to helpyou, become a postman, always on the run. Well, the two of you arenow very different men in looks and habits. He is pale and you arebrown. You play football and he sits at home reading. Nevertheless, any friend who knows you both intimately will discover fifty littlethings that bespeak in you the same underlying nature and bent. Youare both, for instance, slightly colour-blind, and both inclined tofly into violent passions on occasion. That is your common inheritancepeeping out--if, at least, your friend has really managed to makeallowance for your common bringing-up, which might mainly account forthe passionateness, though hardly for the colour-blindness. But now comes the great difficulty. Let us further suppose that youtwo twins marry wives who are also twins born as like as two peas;and each pair of you has a family. Which of the two batches of childrenwill tend on the whole to have the stronger legs? Your legs are strongby use; your brother's are weak by disuse. But do use and disuse makeany difference to the race? That is the theoretical question which, above all others, complicates and hampers our present-day attemptsto understand heredity. In technical language, this is the problem of use-inheritance, otherwise known as the inheritance of acquired characters. It is aptto seem obvious to the plain man that the effects of use and disuseare transmitted to offspring. So, too, thought Lamarck, who half acentury before Darwin propounded a theory of the origin of speciesthat was equally evolutionary in its way. Why does the giraffe haveso long a neck? Lamarck thought it was because the giraffe had acquireda habit of stretching his neck out. Every time there was a bad season, the giraffes must all stretch up as high as ever they could towardsthe leafy tops of the trees; and the one that stretched up farthestsurvived, and handed on the capacity for a like feat to his fortunatedescendants. Now Darwin himself was ready to allow that use and disusemight have some influence on the offspring's inheritance; but hethought that this influence was small as compared with the influenceof what, for want of a better term, he called spontaneous variation. Certain of his followers, however, who call themselves Neo-Darwinians, are ready to go one better. Led by the German biologist, Weismann, they would thrust the Lamarckians, with their hypothesis ofuse-inheritance, clean out of the field. Spontaneous variation, theyassert, is all that is needed to prepare the way for the selectionof the tall giraffe. It happened to be born that way. In other words, its parents had it in them to breed it so. This is not a theory thattells one anything positive. It is merely a caution to look away fromuse and disuse to another explanation of variation that is not yetforthcoming. After all, the plain man must remember that the effects of use anddisuse, which he seems to see everywhere about him, are mixed up withplenty of apparent instances to the contrary. He will smile, perhaps, when I tell him that Weismann cut off the tails of endless mice, and, breeding them together, found that tails invariably decorated the raceas before. I remember hearing Mr. Bernard Shaw comment on thisexperiment. He was defending the Lamarckianism of Samuel Butler, whodeclared that our heredity was a kind of race-memory, a lapsedintelligence. "Why, " said Mr. Shaw, "did the mice continue to growtails? Because they never wanted to have them cut off. " But men-folkare wont to shave off their beards because they want to have them off;and, amongst people more conservative in their habits than ourselves, such a custom may persist through numberless generations. Yet who everobserved the slightest signs of beardlessness being produced in thisway? On the other hand, there are beardless as well as bearded racesin the world; and, by crossing them, you could, doubtless, soon produceups and downs in the razor-trade. Only, as Weismann's school wouldsay, the required variation is in this case spontaneous, that is, comesentirely of its own accord. Leaving the question of use-inheritance open, I pass on to say a wordabout variation as considered in itself and apart from this doubtfulinfluence. Weismann holds, that organisms resulting from the unionof two cells are more variable than those produced out of a singleone. On this view, variation depends largely on the laws of theinteraction of the dissimilar characters brought together incell-union. But what are these laws? The best that can be said is thatwe are getting to know a little more about them every day. Amongstother lines of inquiry, the so-called Mendelian experiments promiseto clear up much that is at present dark. The development of the individual that results from such cell-unionis no mere mixture or addition, but a process of selective organization. To put it very absurdly, one does not find a pair of two-legged parentshaving a child with legs as big as the two sets of legs together, orwith four legs, two of them of one shape and two of another. In otherwords, of the possibilities contributed by the father and mother, someare taken and some are left in the case of any one child. Further, different children will represent different selections from amongstthe germinal elements. Mendelism, by the way, is especially concernedto find out the law according to which the different types oforganization are distributed between the offspring. Each child, meanwhile, is a unique individual, a living whole with an organizationof its very own. This means that its constituent elements form a system. They stand to each other in relations of mutual support. In short, life is possible because there is balance. This general state of balance, however, is able to go along with alot of special balancings that seem largely independent of each other. It is important to remember this when we come a little later on toconsider the instincts. All sorts of lesser systems prevail withinthe larger system represented by the individual organism. It is justas if within the state with its central government there were a numberof county councils, municipal corporations, and so on, each of themenjoying a certain measure of self-government on its own account. Thuswe can see in a very general way how it is that so much variation ispossible. The selective organization, which from amongst the germinalelements precipitates ever so many and different forms of fresh life, is so loose and elastic that a working arrangement between the partscan be reached in all sorts of directions. The lesser systems are sofar self-governing that they can be trusted to get along in almostany combination; though of course some combinations are naturallystronger and more stable than the rest, and hence tend to outlast them, or, as the phrase goes, to be preserved by natural selection. It is time to take account of the principle of natural selection. Wehave done with the subject of variation. Whether use and disuse havehelped to shape the fresh forms of life, or whether these are purelyspontaneous combinations that have come into being on what we arepleased to call their own account, at any rate let us take them asgiven. What happens now? At this point begins the work of naturalselection. Darwin's great achievement was to formulate this law;though it is only fair to add that it was discovered by A. R. Wallaceat the same moment. Both of them get the first hint of it from Malthus. This English clergyman, writing about half a century earlier, had shownthat the growth of population is apt very considerably to outstripthe development of food-supply; whereupon natural checks such asfamine or war must, he argued, ruthlessly intervene so as to redressthe balance. Applying these considerations to the plant and animalkingdoms at large, Darwin and Wallace perceived that, of themultitudinous forms of life thrust out upon the world to get alivelihood as best they could, a vast quantity must be weeded out. Moreover, since they vary exceedingly in their type of organization, it seemed reasonable to suppose that, of the competitors, those whowere innately fitted to make the best of the ever-changingcircumstances would outlive the rest. An appeal to the facts fullybore out this hypothesis. It must not, indeed, be thought that allthe weeding out which goes on favours the fittest. Accidents willalways happen. On the whole, however, the type that is most at homeunder the surrounding conditions, it may be because it is more complex, or it may be because it is of simpler organization, survives the rest. Now to survive is to survive to breed. If you live to eighty, and haveno children, you do not survive in the biological sense; whereas yourneighbour who died at forty may survive in a numerous progeny. Naturalselection is always in the last resort between individuals; becauseindividuals are alone competent to breed. At the same time, the reasonfor the individual's survival may lie very largely outside him. Amongstthe bees, for instance, a non-working type of insect survives to breedbecause the sterile workers do their duty by the hive. So, too, thatother social animal, man, carries on the race by means of some whomothers die childless in order to preserve. Nevertheless, breedingbeing a strictly individual and personal affair, there is always arisk lest a society, through spending its best too freely, end byrecruiting its numbers from those in whom the engrained capacity torender social service is weakly developed. To rear a goodly familymust always be the first duty of unselfish people; for otherwise thespirit of unselfishness can hardly be kept alive the world. Enough about heredity as a condition of evolution. We return, witha better chance of distinguishing them, to the consideration of thespecial effects that it brings about. It was said just now that heredityis the stiffening in human nature, a stiffening bound up with a moreor less considerable offset of plasticity. Now clearly it is in somesense true that the child's whole nature, its modicum of plasticityincluded, is handed on from its parents. Our business in this chapter, however, is on the whole to put out of our thoughts this plastic sideof the inherited life-force. The more or less rigid, definite, systematized characters--these form the hereditary factor, the race. Now none of these are ever quite fixed. A certain measure of plasticityhas to be counted in as part of their very nature. Even in the bee, with its highly definite instincts, there is a certain flexibilitybound up with each of these; so that, for instance, the inborn facultyof building up the comb regularly is modified if the hive happens tobe of an awkward shape. Yet, as compared with what remains over, thecharacters that we are able to distinguish as racial must show fixity. Unfortunately, habits show fixity too. Yet habits belong to the plasticside of our nature; for, in forming a habit, we are plastic at thestart, though hardly so once we have let ourselves go. Habits, then, must be discounted in our search for the hereditary bias in our lives. It is no use trying to disguise the difficulties attending an inquiryinto race. * * * * * These difficulties notwithstanding, in the rest of this chapter letus consider a few of what are usually taken to be racial features ofman. As before, the treatment must be illustrative; we cannot workthrough the list. Further, we must be content with a very rough divisioninto bodily and mental features. Just at this point we shall find itvery hard to say what is to be reckoned bodily and what mental. Leavingthese niceties to the philosophers, however, let us go ahead as bestwe can. Oh for an external race-mark about which there could be no mistake!That has always been a dream of the anthropologist; but it is a dreamthat shows no signs of coming true. All sorts of tests of this kindhave been suggested. Cranium, cranial sutures, frontal process, nasalbones, eye, chin, jaws, wisdom teeth, hair, humerus, pelvis, theheart-line across the hand, calf, tibia, heel, colour, and evensmell--all these external signs, as well as many more, have beenthought, separately or together, to afford the crucial test of a man'spedigree. Clearly I cannot here cross-examine the entire crowd ofclaimants, were I even competent to do so. I shall, therefore, saya few words about two, and two only, namely, head-form and colour. I believe that, if the plain man were to ask himself how, in walkingdown a London street, he distinguished one racial type from another, he would find that he chiefly went by colour. In a general way he knowshow to make allowance for sunburn and get down to the native complexionunderneath. But, if he went off presently to a museum and tried toapply his test to the pre-historic men on view there, it would failfor the simple reason that long ago they left their skins behind them. He would have to get to work, therefore, on their bony parts, anddoubtless would attack the skulls for choice. By considering head-formand colour, then, we may help to cover a certain amount of the ground, vast as it is. For remember that anthropology in this department drawsno line between ancient and modern, or between savage and civilized, but tries to tackle every sort of man that comes within its reach. Head-shape is really a far more complicated thing to arrive at forpurposes of comparison than one might suppose. Since no part of theskull maintains a stable position in regard to the rest, there canbe no fixed standard of measurement, but at most a judgment of likenessor unlikeness founded on an averaging of the total proportions. Thusit comes about that, in the last resort, the impression of a good expertis worth in these matters a great deal more than rows of figures. Moreover, rows of figures in their turn take a lot of understanding. Besides, they are not always easy to get. This is especially the caseif you are measuring a live subject. Perhaps he is armed with a club, and may take amiss the use of an instrument that has to be poked intohis ears, or what not. So, for one reason or another, we have oftento put up with that very unsatisfactory single-figure description ofthe head-form which is known as the cranial index. You take the greatestlength and greatest breadth of the skull, and write down the resultobtained by dividing the former into the latter when multiplied by100. Medium-headed people have an index of anything between 75 and80. Below that figure men rank as long-headed, above it as round-headed. This test, however, as I have hinted, will not by itself carry us far. On the other hand, I believe that a good judge of head-form in allits aspects taken together will generally be able to make a prettyshrewd guess as to the people amongst whom the owner of a given skullis to be placed. Unfortunately, to say people is not to say race. It may be that a givenpeople tend to have a characteristic head-form, not so much becausethey are of common breed, as because they are subjected after birth, or at any rate, after conception, to one and the same environment. Thus some careful observations made recently by Professor Boas onAmerican immigrants from various parts of Europe seem to show thatthe new environment does in some unexplained way modify the head-formto a remarkable extent. For example, amongst the East European Jewsthe head of the European-born is shorter and wider than that of theAmerican-born, the difference being even more marked in the secondgeneration of the American-born. At the same time, other Europeannationalities exhibit changes of other kinds, all these changes, however, being in the direction of a convergence towards one and thesame American type. How are we to explain these facts, supposing themto be corroborated by more extensive studies? It would seem that wemust at any rate allow for a considerable plasticity in the head-form, whereby it is capable of undergoing decisive alteration under theinfluences of environment; not, of course, at any moment during life, but during those early days when the growth of the head is especiallyrapid. The further question whether such an acquired character canbe transmitted we need not raise again. Before passing on, however, let this one word to the wise be uttered. If the skull can be so affected, then what about the brain inside it? If the hereditarily long-headedcan change under suitable conditions, then what about the hereditarilyshort-witted? It remains to say a word about the types of pre-historic men as judgedby their bony remains and especially by their skulls. Naturally thesubject bristles with uncertainties. By itself stands the so-called Pithecanthropus (Ape-man) of Java, aregular "missing link. " The top of the skull, several teeth, and athigh-bone, found at a certain distance from each other, are all thatwe have of it or him. Dr. Dubois, their discoverer, has made out afairly strong case for supposing that the geological stratum in whichthe remains occurred is Pliocene--that is to say, belongs to theTertiary epoch, to which man has not yet been traced back with anystrong probability. It must remain, however, highly doubtful whetherthis is a proto-human being, or merely an ape of a type related tothe gibbon. The intermediate character is shown especially in the headform. If an ape, Pithecanthropus had an enormous brain; if a man, hemust have verged on what we should consider idiocy. Also standing somewhat by itself is the Heidelberg man. All that wehave of him is a well-preserved lower jaw with its teeth. It was foundmore than eighty feet below the surface of the soil, in company withanimal remains that make it possible to fix its position in the scaleof pre-historic periods with some accuracy. Judged by this test, itis as old as the oldest of the unmistakable drift implements, theso-called Chellean (from Chelles in the department of Seine-et-Marnein France). The jaw by itself would suggest a gorilla, being bothchinless and immensely powerful. The teeth, however, are human beyondquestion, and can be matched, or perhaps even in respect to certainmarks of primitiveness out-matched, amongst ancient skulls of theNeanderthal order, if not also amongst modern ones from Australia. We may next consider the Neanderthal group of skulls, so named afterthe first of that type found in 1856 in the Neanderthal valley closeto Dusseldorf in the Rhine basin. A narrow head, with low and retreatingforehead, and a thick projecting brow-ridge, yet with at least twicethe brain capacity of any gorilla, set the learned world disputingwhether this was an ape, a normal man, or an idiot. It was unfortunatethat there were no proofs to hand of the age of these relics. Aftera while, however, similar specimens began to come in. Thus in 1866the jaw of a woman, displaying a tendency to chinlessness combinedwith great strength, was found in the Cave of La Naulette in Belgium, associated with more or less dateable remains of the mammoth, woollyrhinoceros and reindeer. A few years earlier, though its importancewas not appreciated at the moment, there had been discovered, nearForbes' quarry at Gibraltar, the famous Gibraltar skull, now to beseen in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Anyvisitor will notice at the first glance that this is no man of to-day. There are the narrow head, low crown, and prominent brow-ridge asbefore, supplemented by the most extraordinary eye-holes that wereever seen, vast circles widely separated from each other. And otherpeculiar features will reveal themselves on a close inspection; forinstance, the horseshoe form in which, ape-fashion, the teeth arearranged, and the muzzle-like shape of the face due to the absenceof the depressions that in our own case run down on each side fromjust outside the nostrils towards the corners of the mouth. And now at the present time we have twenty or more individuals of thisNeanderthal type to compare. The latest discoveries are perhaps themost interesting, because in two and perhaps other cases the man hasbeen properly buried. Thus at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, in the Frenchdepartment of Correze, a skeleton, which in its head-form closelyrecalls the Gibraltar example, was found in a pit dug in the floorof a low grotto. It lay on its back, head to the west, with one armbent towards the head, the other outstretched, and the legs drawn up. Some bison bones lay in the grave as if a food-offering had been made. Hard by were flint implements of a well-marked Mousterian type. Inthe shelter of Le Moustier itself a similar burial was discovered. The body lay on its right side, with the right arm bent so as to supportthe head upon a carefully arranged pillow of flints; whilst the leftarm was stretched out, so that the hand might be near a magnificentoval stone-weapon chipped on both faces, evidently laid there by design. So much for these men of the Neanderthal type, denizens of themid-palaeolithic world at the very latest. Ape-like they doubtlessare in their head-form up to a certain point, though almost all theirseparate features occur here and there amongst modern Australiannatives. And yet they were men enough, had brains enough, to believein a life after death. There is something to think about in that. Without going outside Europe, we have, however, to reckon with at leasttwo other types of very early head-form. In one of the caves of Mentone known as La Grotte des Enfants twoskeletons from a low stratum were of a primitive type, but unlike theNeanderthal, and have been thought to show affinities to the modernnegro. As, however, no other Proto-Negroes are indisputablyforthcoming either from Europe or from any other part of the world, there is little at present to be made out about this interesting racialtype. In the layer immediately above the negroid remains, however, as wellas in other caves at Mentone, were the bones of individuals of quiteanother order, one being positively a giant. They are known as theCro-Magnon race, after a group of them discovered in a rock shelterof that name on the banks of the Vezere. These particular people canbe shown to be Aurignacian--that is to say, to have lived just afterthe Mousterian men of the Neanderthal head-form. If, however, as hasbeen already suggested, the Galley Hill individual, who showsaffinities to the Cro-Magnon type, really goes back to the drift-period, then we can believe that from very early times there co-existed inEurope at least two varieties; and these so distinct, that someauthorities would trace the original divergence between them rightback to the times before man and the apes had parted company, linkingthe Neanderthal race with the gorilla and the Cro-Magnon race withthe orang. The Cro-Magnon head-form is refined and highly developed. The forehead is high, and the chin shapely, whilst neither thebrow-ridge nor the lower jaw protrudes as in the Neanderthal type. Whether this race survives in modern Europe is, as was said in thelast chapter, highly uncertain. In certain respects--for instance, in a certain shortness of face--these people present exceptionalfeatures; though some think they can still find men of this type inthe Dordogne district. Perhaps the chances are, however, consideringhow skulls of the neolithic period prove to be anything but uniform, and suggest crossings between different stocks, that we may claimkinship to some extent with the more good-looking of the two main typesof palaeolithic man--always supposing that head-form can be taken asa guide. But can it? The Pygmies of the Congo region have medium heads;the Bushmen of South Africa, usually regarded as akin in race, havelong heads. The American Indians, generally supposed to be all, ornearly all, of one racial type, show considerable differences ofhead-form; and so on. It need not be repeated that any race-mark isliable to deceive. * * * * * We have sufficiently considered the use to which the particularrace-mark of head-form has been put in the attempted classificationof the very early men who have left their bones behind them. Let usnow turn to another race-mark, namely colour; because, though it mayreally be less satisfactory than others, for instance hair, that isthe one to which ordinary people naturally turn when they seek toclassify by races the present inhabitants of the earth. When Linnaeus in pre-Darwinian days distinguished four varieties ofman, the white European, the red American, the yellow Asiatic, andthe black African, he did not dream of providing the basis of anythingmore than an artificial classification. He probably would have agreedwith Buffon in saying that in every case it was one and the same kindof man, only dyed differently by the different climates. But theDarwinian is searching for a natural classification. He wants todistinguish men according to their actual descent. Now race and descentmean for him the same thing. Hence a race-mark, if one is to be found, must stand for, by co-existing with, the whole mass of properties thatform the inheritance. Can colour serve for a race-mark in this profoundsense? That is the only question here. First of all, what is the use of being coloured one way or the other?Does it make any difference? Is it something, like the heart-line ofthe hand, that may go along with useful qualities, but in itself seemsto be a meaningless accident? Well, as some unfortunate people willbe able to tell you, colour is still a formidable handicap in thestruggle for existence. Not to consider the colour-prejudice in otheraspects, there is no gainsaying the part it plays in sexual selectionat this hour. The lower animals appear to be guided in the choice ofa mate by externals of a striking and obvious sort. And men and womento this day marry more with their eyes than with their heads. The coloration of man, however, though it may have come to subservethe purposes of mating, does not seem in its origin to have been likethe bright coloration of the male bird. It was not something whollyuseless save as a means of sexual attraction, though in such a capacityuseful because a mark of vital vigour. Colour almost certainlydeveloped in strict relation to climate. Right away in the back ageswe must place what Bagehot has called the race-making epoch, when thechief bodily differences, including differences of colour, aroseamongst men. In those days, we may suppose, natural selection actedlargely on the body, because mind had not yet become the prime conditionof survival. The rest is a question of pre-historic geography. Withinthe tropics, the habitat of the man-like apes, and presumably of theearliest men, a black skin protects against sunlight. A white skin, on the other hand--though this is more doubtful--perhaps economizessun-heat in colder latitudes. Brown, yellow and the so-called red areintermediate tints suitable to intermediate regions. It is not hardto plot out in the pre-historic map of the world geographical provinces, or "areas of characterization, " where races of different shadescorresponding to differences in the climate might develop, in anisolation more or less complete, such as must tend to reinforce theprocess of differentiation. Let it not be forgotten, however, that individual plasticity playsits part too in the determination of human colour. The Anglo-Indianplanter is apt to return from a long sojourn in the East with his skincharged with a dark pigment which no amount of Pears' soap will removeduring the rest of his life. It would be interesting to conductexperiments, on the lines of those of Professor Boas already mentioned, with the object of discovering in what degree the same capacity foramassing protective pigment declares itself in children of Europeanparentage born in the tropics or transplanted thither during infancy. Correspondingly, the tendency of dark stocks to bleach in coldcountries needs to be studied. In the background, too, lurks thequestion whether such effects of individual plasticity can betransmitted to offspring, and become part of the inheritance. One more remark upon the subject of colour. Now-a-days civilizedpeoples, as well as many of the ruder races that the former govern, wear clothes. In other words they have dodged the sun, by developing, with the aid of mind, a complex society that includes the makers ofwhite drill suits and solar helmets. But, under such conditions, thecolour of one's skin becomes more or less of a luxury. Protectivepigment, at any rate now-a-days, counts for little as compared withcapacity for social service. Colour, in short, is rapidly losing itsvital function. Will it therefore tend to disappear? In the long run, it would seem--perhaps only in the very long run--it will becomedissociated from that general fitness to survive under particularclimatic conditions of which it was once the innate mark. Be this asit may, race-prejudice, that is so largely founded on sheerconsiderations of colour, is bound to decay, if and when the racesof darker colour succeed in displaying, on the average, such qualitiesof mind as will enable them to compete with the whites on equal terms, in a world which is coming more and more to include all climates. * * * * * Thus we are led on to discuss race in its mental aspect. Here, morethan ever, we are all at sea, for want of a proper criterion. Whatis to be the test of mind? Indeed, mind and plasticity are almost thesame thing. Race, therefore, as being the stiffening in the evolutionof life, might seem by its very nature opposed to mind as a limitingor obstructing force. Are we, then, going to return to the oldpre-scientific notion of soul as something alien to body, and therebysimply clogged, thwarted and dragged down? That would never do. Bodyand soul are, for the working purposes of science, to be conceivedas in perfect accord, as co-helpers in the work of life, and as suchsubject to a common development. Heredity, then, must be assumed toapply to both equally. In proportion as there is plastic mind therewill be plastic body. Unfortunately, the most plastic part of body is likewise the hardestto observe, at any rate whilst it is alive, namely, the brain. Nocertain criterion of heredity, then, is likely to be available fromthis quarter. You will see it stated, for instance, that the size ofthe brain cavity will serve to mark off one race from another. Thisis extremely doubtful, to put it mildly. No doubt the average Europeanshows some advantage in this respect as compared, say, with the Bushman. But then you have to write off so much for their respective types ofbody, a bigger body going in general with a bigger head, that in theend you find yourself comparing mere abstractions. Again, the Europeanmay be the first to cry off on the ground that comparisons are odious;for some specimens of Neanderthal man in sheer size of the brain cavityare said to give points to any of our modern poets and politicians. Clearly, then, something is wrong with this test. Nor, if the brainitself be examined after death, and the form and number of itsconvolutions compared, is this criterion of hereditary brain-powerany more satisfactory. It might be possible in this way to detect thedifference between an idiot and a person of normal intelligence, butnot the difference between a fool and a genius. We cross the uncertain line that divides the bodily from the mentalwhen we subject the same problem of hereditary mental endowment tothe methods of what is known as experimental psychology. Thus acutenessof sight, hearing, taste, smell and feeling are measured by variousingenious devices. Seeing what stories travellers bring back with themabout the hawk-like vision of hunting races, one might suppose thatsuch comparisons would be all in their favour. The Cambridge Expeditionto Torres Straits, however, of which Dr. Haddon was the leader, included several well-trained psychologists, who devoted specialattention to this subject; and their results show that the sensorypowers of these rude folk were on the average much the same as thoseof Europeans. It is the hunter's experience only that enables him tosight the game at an immense distance. There are a great many morecomplicated tests of the same type designed to estimate the force ofmemory, attention, association, reasoning and other faculties thatmost people would regard as purely mental; whilst another set of suchtests deals with reaction to stimulus, co-ordination between hand andeye, fatigue, tremor, and, most ingenious perhaps of all, emotionalexcitement as shown through the respiration--phenomena which are, asit were, mental and bodily at once and together. Unfortunately, psychology cannot distinguish in such cases between the effects ofheredity and those of individual experience, whether it take the formof high culture or of a dissipated life. Indeed, the purely temporarycondition of body and mind is apt to influence the results. A man hasbeen up late, let us say, or has been for a long walk, or has misseda meal; obviously his reaction-times, his record for memory, and soon, will show a difference for the worse. Or, again, the subject mayconfront the experiment in very various moods. At one moment he maybe full of vanity, anxious to show what superior qualities hepossesses; whilst at another time he will be bored. Not to labour thepoint further, these methods, whatever they may become in the future, are at present unable to afford any criterion whatever of the mentalability that goes with race. They are fertile in statistics; but aninterpretation of these statistics that furthers our purpose is stillto seek. But surely, it will be said, we can tell an instinct when we come acrossit, so uniform as it is, and so independent of the rest of the system. Not at all. For one thing, the idea that an instinct is apiece ofmechanism, as fixed as fate, is quite out of fashion. It is now knownto be highly plastic in many cases, to vary considerably in individuals, and to involve conscious processes, thought, feeling and will, at anyrate of an elementary kind. Again, how are you going to isolate aninstinct? Those few automatic responses to stimulation that appearshortly after birth, as, for instance, sucking, may perhaps berecognized, since parental training and experience in general are outof the question here. But what about the instinct or group of instinctsanswering to sex? This is latent until a stage of life when experienceis already in full swing. Indeed, psychologists are still busydiscussing whether man has very few instincts or whether, on thecontrary, he appears to have few because he really has so many that, in practice, they keep interfering with one another all the time. Insupport of the latter view, it has been recently suggested by Mr. McDougall that the best test of the instincts that we have is to befound in the specific emotions. He believes that every instinctiveprocess consists of an afferent part or message, a central part, andan efferent part or discharge. At its two ends the process is highlyplastic. Message and discharge, to which thought and will correspond, are modified in their type as experience matures. The central part, on the other hand, to which emotion answers on the side of consciousness, remains for ever much the same. To fear, to wonder, to be angry, ordisgusted, to be puffed up, or cast down, or to be affected withtenderness--all these feelings, argues Mr. McDougall, and various morecomplicated emotions arising out of their combinations with each other, are common to all men, and bespeak in them deep-seated tendencies toreact on stimulation in relatively particular and definite ways. Andthere is much, I think, to be said in favour of this contention. Yet, granting this, do we thus reach a criterion whereby the differentraces of men are to be distinguished? Far from it. Nay, on the contrary, as judged simply by his emotions, man is very much alike everywhere, from China to Peru. They are all there in germ, though different customsand grades of culture tend to bring special types of feeling to thefore. Indeed, a certain paradox is to be noted here. The Negro, one wouldnaturally say, is in general more emotional than the white man. Yetsome experiments conducted by Miss Kellor of Chicago on negresses andwhite women, by means of the test of the effects of emotion onrespiration, brought out the former as decidedly the more stolid ofthe two. And, whatever be thought of the value of such methods of proof, certain it is that the observers of rude races incline to put downmost of them as apathetic, when not tuned up to concert-pitch by adance or other social event. It may well be, then, that it is not thehereditary temperament of the Negro, so much as the habit, which heshares with other peoples at the same level of culture, of living andacting in a crowd, that accounts for his apparent excitability. Butafter all, "mafficking" is not unknown in civilized countries. Thusthe quest for a race-mark of a mental kind is barren once more. * * * * * What, then, you exclaim, is the outcome of this chapter of negatives?Is it driving at the universal equality and brotherhood of man? Or, on the contrary, does it hint at the need of a stern system of eugenics?I offer nothing in the way of a practical suggestion. I am merely tryingto show that, considered anthropologically--that is to say, in termsof pure theory--race or breed remains something which we cannot atpresent isolate, though we believe it to be there. Practice, meanwhile, must wait on theory; mere prejudices, bad as they are, are hardly worseguides to action than premature exploitations of science. As regards the universal brotherhood of man, the most that can be saidis this: The old ideas about race as something hard and fast for alltime are distinctly on the decline. Plasticity, or, in other words, the power of adaptation to environment, has to be admitted to a greatershare in the moulding of mind, and even of body, than ever before. But how plasticity is related to race we do not yet know. It may bethat use-inheritance somehow incorporates its effects in the offspringof the plastic parents. Or it may be simply that plasticity increaseswith inter-breeding on a wider basis. These problems have still tobe solved. As regards eugenics, there is no doubt that a vast and persistentelimination of lives goes on even in civilized countries. It has beencalculated that, of every hundred English born alive, fifty do notsurvive to breed, and, of the remainder, half produce three-quartersof the next generation. But is the elimination selective? We can hardlydoubt that it is to some extent. But what its results are--whetherit mainly favours immunity from certain diseases, or the capacity fora sedentary life in a town atmosphere, or intelligence and capacityfor social service--is largely matter of guesswork. How, then, canwe say what is the type to breed from, even if we confine our attentionto one country? If, on the other hand, we look farther afield, andstudy the results of race-mixture or "miscegenation, " we but encounterfresh puzzles. That the half-breed is an unsatisfactory person maybe true; and yet, until the conditions of his upbringing are somehowdiscounted, the race problem remains exactly where it was. Or, again, it may be true that miscegenation increases human fertility, as somehold; but, until it is shown that the increase of fertility does notmerely result in flooding the world with inferior types, we are nonearer to a solution. If, then, there is a practical moral to this chapter, it is merelythis: to encourage anthropologists to press forward with their studyof race; and in the meantime to do nothing rash. CHAPTER IVENVIRONMENT When a child is born it has been subjected for some three-quartersof a year already to the influences of environment. Its race, indeed, was fixed once for all at the moment of conception. Yet that superaddedmeasure of plasticity, which has to be treated as something apart fromthe racial factor, enables it to respond for good or for evil to thepre-natal--that is to say, maternal--environment. Thus we may easilyfall into the mistake of supposing our race to be degenerate, whenpoor feeding and exposure to unhealthy surroundings on the part ofthe mothers are really responsible for the crop of weaklings that wedeplore. And, in so far as it turns out to be so, social reformersought to heave a sigh of relief. Why? Because to improve the race byway of eugenics, though doubtless feasible within limits, remains anunrealized possibility through our want of knowledge. On the otherhand, to improve the physical environment is fairly straight-aheadwork, once we can awake the public conscience to the need of undertakingthis task for the benefit of all classes of the community alike. Ifcivilized man wishes to boast of being clearly superior to the restof his kind, it must be mainly in respect to his control over thephysical environment. Whatever may have been the case in the past, it seems as true now-a-days to say that man makes his physicalenvironment as that his physical environment makes him. Even if this be granted, however, it remains the fact that our materialcircumstances in the widest sense of the term play a very decisivepart in the shaping of our lives. Hence the importance of geographicalstudies as they bear on the subject of man. From the moment that achild is conceived, it is subjected to what it is now the fashion tocall a "geographic control. " Take the case of the child of Englishparents born in India. Clearly several factors will conspire todetermine whether it lives or dies. For simplicity's sake let us treatthem as three. First of all, there is the fact that the child belongsto a particular cultural group; in other words, that it has been bornwith a piece of paper in its mouth representing one share in the BritishEmpire. Secondly, there is its race, involving, let us say, blue eyesand light hair, and a corresponding constitution. Thirdly, there isthe climate and all that goes with it. Though in the first of theserespects the white child is likely to be superior to the native, inasmuch as it will be tended with more careful regard to the lawsof health; yet such disharmony prevails between the other two factorsof race and climate, that it will almost certainly die, if it is notremoved at a certain age from the country. Possibly the English couldacclimatize themselves in India at the price of an immense toll ofinfant lives; but it is a price which they show no signs of being willingto pay. What, then, are the limits of the geographical control? Where doesits influence begin and end? Situation, race and culture--to reduceit to a problem of three terms only--which of the three, if any, inthe long run controls the rest? Remember that the anthropologist istrying to be the historian of long perspective. History which countsby years, proto-history which counts by centuries, pre-history whichcounts by millenniums--he seeks to embrace them all. He sees theEnglish in India, on the one hand, and in Australia on the other. Willthe one invasion prove an incident, he asks, and the other an event, as judged by a history of long perspective? Or, again, there are whitesand blacks and redskins in the southern portion of the United Statesof America, having at present little in common save a common climate. Different races, different cultures, a common geographicalsituation--what net result will these yield for the historian ofpatient, far-seeing anthropological outlook? Clearly there is heresomething worth the puzzling out. But we cannot expect to puzzle itout all at once. In these days geography, in the form known as anthropo-geography, isputting forth claims to be the leading branch of anthropology. And, doubtless, a thorough grounding in geography must henceforth be partof the anthropologist's equipment. [3] The schools of Ratzel in Germanyand Le Play in France are, however, fertile in generalizations thatare far too pretty to be true. Like other specialists, they exaggeratethe importance of their particular brand of work. The full meaningof life can never be expressed in terms of its material conditions. I confess that I am not deeply moved when Ratzel announces that manis a piece of the earth. Or when his admirers, anxious to improve onthis, after distinguishing the atmosphere or air, the hydrosphere orwater, the lithosphere or crust, and the centrosphere or interior mass, proceed to add that man is the most active portion of an intermittentbiosphere, or living envelope of our planet, I cannot feel that thelast word has been said about him. [Footnote 3: Thus the reader of the present work should not fail tostudy also Dr. Marion Newbigin's _Geography_ in this series. ] Or, again, listen for a moment to M. Demolins, author of a verysuggestive book, _Comment la route cree le type social_ ("How the roadcreates the social type"). "There exists, " he says in his preface, "on the surface of the terrestrial globe an infinite variety of peoples. What is the cause that has created this variety? In general the replyis, Race. But race explains nothing; for it remains to discover whathas produced the diversity of races. Race is not a cause; it is aconsequence. The first and decisive cause of the diversity of peoplesand of the diversity of races is the road that the peoples have followed. It is the road that creates the race, and that creates the social type. "And he goes further: "If the history of humanity were to recommence, and the surface of the globe had not been transformed, this historywould repeat itself in its main lines. There might well be secondarydifferences, for example, in certain manifestations of public life, in political revolutions, to which we assign far too great animportance; but the same roads would reproduce the same social types, and would impose on them the same essential characters. " There is no contending with a pious opinion, especially when it takesthe form of an unverifiable prophecy. Let the level-headedanthropologist beware, however, lest he put all his eggs into onebasket. Let him seek to give each factor in the problem its due. Racemust count for something, or why do not the other animals take a leafout of our book and build up rival civilizations on suitable sites?Why do men herd cattle, instead of the cattle herding the men? We arerational beings, in other words, because we have it in us to be rationalbeings. Again, culture, with the intelligence and choice it involves, counts for something too. It is easy to argue that, since there werethe Asiatic steppes with the wild horses ready to hand in them, manwas bound sooner or later to tame the horse and develop thecharacteristic culture of the nomad type. Yes, but why did man tamethe horse later rather than sooner? And why did the American redskinsnever tame the bison, and adopt a pastoral life in their vast prairies?Or why do modern black folk and white folk alike in Africa fail toutilize the elephant? Is it because these things cannot be done, orbecause man has not found out how to do them? When all allowances, however, are made for the exaggerations almostpardonable in a branch of science still engaged in pushing its wayto the front, anthropo-geography remains a far-reaching method ofhistorical study which the anthropologist has to learn how to use. To put it crudely, he must learn how to work all the time with a mapof the earth at his elbow. First of all, let him imagine his world of man stationary. Let himplot out in turn the distribution of heat, of moisture, of diseases, of vegetation, of food-animals, of the physical types of man, ofdensity of population, of industries, of forms of government, ofreligions, of languages, and so on and so forth. How far do thesedifferent distributions bear each other out? He will find a numberof things that go together in what will strike him as a natural way. For instance, all along the equator, whether in Africa or South Americaor Borneo, he will find them knocking off work in the middle of theday in order to take a siesta. On the other hand, other things willnot agree so well. Thus, though all will be dark-skinned, the SouthAmericans will be coppery, the Africans black, and the men of Borneoyellow. Led on by such discrepancies, perhaps, he will want next to set hisworld of man in movement. He will thereupon perceive a circulation, so to speak, amongst the various peoples, suggestive of interrelationsof a new type. Now so long as he is dealing in descriptions of a detachedkind, concerning not merely the physical environment, but likewisethe social adjustments more immediately corresponding thereto, he willbe working at the geographical level. Directly it comes, however, toa generalized description or historical explanation, as when he seeksto show that here rather than there a civilization is likely to arise, geographical considerations proper will not suffice. Distribution ismerely one aspect of evolution. Yet that it is a very important aspectwill now be shown by a hasty survey of the world according togeographical regions. * * * * * Let us begin with Europe, so as to proceed gradually from the moreknown to the less known. Lecky has spoken of "the European epoch ofthe human mind. " What is the geographical and physical theatre of thatepoch? We may distinguish--I borrow the suggestion from ProfessorMyres--three stages in its development. Firstly, there was theriver-phase; next, the Mediterranean phase; lastly, the present-dayAtlantic phase. Thus, to begin with, the valleys of the Nile andEuphrates were each the home of civilizations both magnificent andenduring. They did not spring up spontaneously, however. If the rivershelped man, man also helped the rivers by inventing systems ofirrigation. Next, from Minoan days right on to the end of the MiddleAges, the Mediterranean basin was the focus of all the higher lifein the world, if we put out of sight the civilizations of India andChina, together with the lesser cultures of Peru and Mexico. I willconsider this second phase especially, because it is particularlyinstructive from the geographical standpoint. Finally, since the timeof the discovery of America, the sea-trade, first called into existenceas a civilizing agent by Mediterranean conditions, has shifted itsbase to the Atlantic coast, and especially to that land of naturalharbours, the British Isles. We must give up thinking in terms of anEastern and Western Hemisphere. The true distinction, as applicableto modern times, is between a land-hemisphere, with the Atlantic coastof Europe as its centre, and a sea-hemisphere, roughly coinciding withthe Pacific. The Pacific is truly an ocean; but the Atlantic is becomingmore of a "herring-pond" every day. Fixing our eyes, then, on the Mediterranean basin, with its Black Seaextension, it is easy to perceive that we have here a well-definedgeographical province, capable of acting as an area ofcharacterization as perhaps no other in the world, once its variouspeoples had the taste and ingenuity to intermingle freely by way ofthe sea. The first fact to note is the completeness of the ring-fencethat shuts it in. From the Pyrenees right along to Ararat runs thegreat Alpine fold, like a ridge in a crumpled table-cloth; the SpanishSierras and the Atlas continue the circle to the south-west; and therest is desert. Next, the configuration of the coasts makes forintercourse by sea, especially on the northern side with its peninsulasand islands, the remains of a foundered and drowned mountain-country. This same configuration, considered in connection with the flora andfauna that are favoured by the climate, goes far to explain thatdiscontinuity of the political life which encouraged independencewhilst it prevented self-sufficiency. The forest-belt, owing to thedry summer, lay towards the snow-line, and below it a scrub-belt, yielding poor hunting, drove men to grow their corn and olives andvines in the least swampy of the lowlands, scattered like mere oasesamongst the hills and promontories. For a long time, then, man along the north coasts must have beenoppressed rather than assisted by his environment. It mademass-movements impossible. Great waves of migration from thesteppe-land to the northeast, or from the forest-land to the north-west, would thunder on the long mountain barrier, only to trickle acrossin rivulets and form little pools of humanity here and there. Pettyfeuds between plain, shore, and mountain, as in ancient Attica, wouldbut accentuate the prevailing division. Contrariwise, on the southernside of the Mediterranean, where there was open, if largely desert, country, there would be room under primitive conditions for ahomogeneous race to multiply. It is in North Africa that we mustprobably place the original hotbed of that Mediterranean race, slightand dark with oval heads and faces, who during the neolithic periodcolonized the opposite side of the Mediterranean, and threw out a wingalong the warm Atlantic coast as far north as Scotland, as well aseastwards to the Upper Danube; whilst by way of south and east theycertainly overran Egypt, Arabia, and Somaliland, with probableramifications still farther in both directions. At last, however, inthe eastern Mediterranean was learnt the lesson of the profitsattending the sea-going life, and there began the true Mediterraneanphase, which is essentially an era of sea-borne commerce. Then wasthe chance for the northern shore with its peninsular configuration. Carthage on the south shore must be regarded as a bold experiment thatdid not answer. The moral, then, would seem to be that the Mediterraneanbasin proved an ideal nursery for seamen; but only as soon as men werebrave and clever enough to take to the sea. The geographical factoris at least partly consequence as well as cause. * * * * * Now let us proceed farther north into what was for the earlierMediterranean folk the breeding-ground of barbarous outlanders, forming the chief menace to their circuit of settled civic life. Itis necessary to regard northern Europe and northern Asia as formingone geographic province. Asia Minor, together with the Euphratesvalley and with Arabia in a lesser degree, belongs to the Mediterraneanarea. India and China, with the south-eastern corner of Asia that liesbetween them, form another system that will be considered separatelylater on. The Eurasian northland consists naturally, that is to say, wherecultivation has not introduced changes, of four belts. First, to thesouthward, come the mountain ranges passing eastwards into highplateau. Then, north of this line, from the Lower Danube, as far asChina, stretches a belt of grassland or steppe-country at a lower level, a belt which during the milder periods of the ice-age and immediatelyafter it must have reached as far as the Atlantic. Then we find, stillfarther to the north, a forest belt, well developed in the Siberiaof to-day. Lastly, on the verge of the Arctic sea stretches the tundra, the frozen soil of which is fertile in little else than the lichenknown as reindeer moss, whilst to the west, as, for instance, in ourislands, moors and bogs represent this zone of barren lands in a milderform. The mountain belt is throughout its entire length the home ofround-headed peoples, the so-called Alpine race, which is generallysupposed to have originally come from the high plateau country of Asia. These round-headed men in western Europe appear where-ever there arehills, throwing out offshoots by way of the highlands of central Franceinto Brittany, and even reaching the British Isles. Here theyintroduced the use of bronze (an invention possibly acquired by contactwith Egyptians in the near East), though without leaving any markedtraces of themselves amongst the permanent population. At the otherend of Europe they affected Greece by way of a steady though limitedinfiltration; whilst in Asia Minor they issued forth from their hillsas the formidable Hittites, the people, by the way, to whom the Jewsare said to owe their characteristic, yet non-Semitic, noses. But arethese round-heads all of one race? Professor Ridgeway has put forwarda rather paradoxical theory to the effect that, just as the long-facedBoer horse soon evolved in the mountains of Basutoland into around-headed pony, so it is in a few generations with humanmountaineers, irrespective of their breed. This is almost certainlyto overrate the effects of environment. At the same time, in the presentstate of our knowledge, it would be premature either to affirm or denythat in the very long run round-headedness goes with a mountain life. The grassland next claims our attention. Here is the paradise of thehorse, and consequently of the horse-breaker. Hence, therefore, camethe charging multitudes of Asiatic marauders who, after many repulses, broke through the Mediterranean cordon, and established themselvesas the modern Turks; whilst at the other end of their beat they pouredinto China, which no great wall could avail to save, and establishedthe Manchu domination. Given the steppe-country and a horse-tamingpeople, we might seek, with the anthropo-geographers of the boldersort, to deduce the whole way of life, the nomadism, the ample food, including the milk-diet infants need and find so hard to obtain farthersouth, the communal system, the patriarchal type of authority, thecaravan-system that can set the whole horde moving along like a swarmof locusts, and so on. But, as has been already pointed out, the horsehad to be tamed first. Palaeolithic man in western Europe hadhorse-meat in abundance. At Solutre, a little north of Lyons, a heapof food-refuse 100 yards long and 10 feet high largely consists ofthe bones of horses, most of them young and tender. This shows thatthe old hunters knew how to enjoy the passing hour in their improvidentway, like the equally reckless Bushmen, who have left similar Golgothasbehind them in South Africa. Yet apparently palaeolithic man did nottame the horse. Environment, in fact, can only give the hint; and manmay not be ready to take it. The forest-land of the north affords fair hunting in its way, but itis doubtful if it is fitted to rear a copious brood of men, at anyrate so long as stone weapons are alone available wherewith to masterthe vegetation and effect clearings, whilst burning the brushwood downis precluded by the damp. Where the original home may have been ofthe so-called Nordic race, the large-limbed fair men of the Teutonicworld, remains something of a mystery; though it is now the fashionto place it in the north-east of Europe rather than in Asia, and tosuppose it to have been more or less isolated from the rest of theworld by formerly existing sheets of water. Where-ever it was, theremust have been grassland enough to permit of pastoral habits, modified, perhaps, by some hunting on the one hand, and by some primitiveagriculture on the other. The Mediterranean men, coming from NorthAfrica, an excellent country for the horse, may have vied with theAsiatics of the steppes in introducing a varied culture to the north. At any rate, when the Germans of Tacitus emerge into the light ofhistory, they are not mere foresters, but rather woodlanders, men ofthe glades, with many sides to their life; including an acquaintancewith the sea and its ways, surpassing by far that of those earlybeachcombers whose miserable kitchen-middens are to be found alongthe coast of Denmark. Of the tundra it is enough to say that all depends on the reindeer. This animal is the be-all and end-all of Lapp existence. When Nansen, after crossing Greenland, sailed home with his two Lapps, he calledtheir attention to the crowds of people assembled to welcome them atthe harbour. "Ah, " said the elder and more thoughtful of the pair, "if they were only reindeer!" When domesticated, the reindeer yieldsmilk as well as food, though large numbers are needed to keep thecommunity in comfort. Otherwise hunting and fishing must serve to ekeout the larder. Miserable indeed are the tribes or rather remnantsof tribes along the Siberian tundra who have no reindeer. On the otherhand, if there are plenty of wild reindeer, as amongst the Koryaksand some of the Chukchis, hunting by itself suffices. * * * * * Let us now pass on from the Eurasian northland to what is, zoologically, almost its annexe, North America; its tundra, for example, where theEskimo live, being strictly continuous with the Asiatic zone. Thoughhaving a very different fauna and flora, South America presumably formspart of the same geographical province so far as man is concerned, though there is evidence for thinking that he reached it very early. Until, however, more data are available for the pre-history of theAmerican Indian, the great moulding forces, geographical or other, must be merely guessed at. Much turns on the period assigned to thefirst appearance of man in this region; for that he is indigenous ishighly improbable, if only because no anthropoid apes are found here. The racial type, which, with the exception of the Eskimo, and possiblyof the salmon-fishing tribes along the north-west coast, is one forthe whole continent, has a rather distant resemblance to that of theAsiatic Mongols. Nor is there any difficulty in finding the immigrantsa means of transit from northern Asia. Even if it be held that theland-bridge by way of what are now the Aleutian Islands was closedat too early a date for man to profit by it, there is always the passageover the ice by way of Behring Straits; which, if it bore the mammoth, as is proved by its remains in Alaska, could certainly bear man. Once man was across, what was the manner of his distribution? On thispoint geography can at present tell us little. M. Demolins, it is true, describes three routes, one along the Rockies, the next down thecentral zone of prairies, and the third and most easterly by way ofthe great lakes. But this is pure hypothesis. No facts are adduced. Indeed, evidence bearing on distribution is very hard to obtain inthis area, since the physical type is so uniform throughout. The bestavailable criterion is the somewhat poor one of the distribution ofthe very various languages. Some curious lines of migration areindicated by the occurrence of the same type of language in widelyseparated regions, the most striking example being the appearance ofone linguistic stock, the so-called Athapascan, away up in thenorth-west by the Alaska boundary; at one or two points insouth-western Oregon and north-western California, where an absolutemedley of languages prevails; and again in the southern highlands alongthe line of Colorado and Utah to the other side of the Mexican frontier. Does it follow from this distribution that the Apaches, at the southernend of the range, have come down from Alaska, by way of the Rockiesand the Pacific slope, to their present habitat? It might be so inthis particular case; but there are also those who think that the signsin general point to a northward dispersal of tribes, who before hadbeen driven south by a period of glaciation. Thus the first thing tobe settled is the antiquity of the American type of man. A glance at South America must suffice. Geographically it consistsof three regions. Westwards we have the Pacific line of bracinghighlands, running down from Mexico as far as Chile, the home of twoor more cultures of a rather high order. Then to the east there isthe steaming equatorial forest, first covering a fan of rivers, thenrising up into healthier hill-country, the whole in its wild statehampering to human enterprise. And below it occurs the grassland ofthe pampas, only needing the horse to bring out the powers of its nativeoccupants. Before leaving this subject of the domesticated horse, of which somuch use has already been made in order to illustrate how geographicopportunity and human contrivance must help each other out, it is worthnoticing how an invention can quickly revolutionize even that culturallife of the ruder races which is usually supposed to be quite hide-boundby immemorial custom. When the Europeans first broke in upon theredskins of North America, they found them a people of hunters andfishers, it is true, but with agriculture as a second string everywhereeast of the Mississippi as well as to the south, and on the wholesedentary, with villages scattered far apart; so that in pre-Conquestdays they would seem to have been enjoying a large measure of securityand peace. The coming of the whites soon crowded them back uponthemselves, disarranging the old boundaries. At the same time the horseand the gun were introduced. With extraordinary rapidity the Indianadapted himself to a new mode of existence, a grassland life, complicated by the fact that the relentless pressure of the invadersgave it a predatory turn which it might otherwise have lacked. Something very similar, though neither conditions nor consequenceswere quite the same, occurred in the pampas of South America, wherehorse-Indians like the Patagonians, who seem at first sight theindigenous outcrop of the very soil, are really the recent by-productof an intrusive culture. * * * * * And now let us hark back to southern Asia with its two reservoirs oflife, India and China, and between them a jutting promontory pointingthe way to the Indonesian archipelago, and thence onward farther stillto the wide-flung Austral region with its myriad lands ranging in sizefrom a continent to a coral-atoll. Here we have a nursery of seamenon a vaster scale than in the Mediterranean; for remember that fromthis point man spread, by way of the sea, from Easter Island in theEastern Pacific right away to Madagascar, where we find Javaneseimmigrants, and negroes who are probably Papuan, whilst the languageis of a Malayo-Polynesian type. India and China each well-nigh deserve the status of geographicalprovinces on their own account. Each is an area of settlement; and, once there is settlement, there is a cultural influence whichco-operates with the environment to weed out immigrant forms; as wesee, for example, in Egypt, where a characteristic physical type, orrather pair of types, a coarser and a finer, has apparently persisted, despite the constant influx of other races, from the dawn of its longhistory. India, however, and China have both suffered so much invasionfrom the Eurasian northland, and at the same time are of such greatextent and comprise such diverse physical conditions, that they have, in the course of the long years, sent forth very various broods ofmen to seek their fortunes in the south-east. Nor must we ignore the possibility of an earlier movement in theopposite direction. In Indonesia, the home of the orang-utan and gibbon, not to speak of Pithecanthropus, many authorities would place theoriginal home of the human race. It will be wise to touch lightly onmatters involving considerations of palaeo-geography, that mostkaleidoscopic of studies. The submerged continents which it calls fromthe vasty deep have a habit of crumbling away again. Let us thereforerefrain from providing man with land-bridges (draw-bridges, they mightalmost be called), whether between the Indonesian islands; or betweenNew Guinea, Australia and Tasmania; or between Indonesia and Africaby way of the Indian Ocean. Let the curious facts about the presentdistribution of the racial types speak for themselves, thedifficulties about identifying a racial type being in the meantimeever borne in mind. Most striking of all is the diffusion of the Negro stocks with blackskin and woolly hair. Their range is certainly suggestive of abreeding-ground somewhere about Indonesia. To the extreme west arethe negroes of Africa, to the extreme east the Papuasians (Papuansand Melanesians) extending from New Guinea through the oceanic islandsas far as Fiji. A series of connecting links is afforded by the smallnegroes of the pygmy type, the so-called Negritos. It is not knownhow far they represent a distinct and perhaps earlier experiment innegro-making, though this is the prevailing view; or whether the negrotype, with its tendency to infantile characters due to the earlyclosing of the cranial sutures, is apt to throw off dwarfed forms inan occasional way. At any rate, in Africa there are several groupsof pygmies in the Congo region, as well as the Bushmen and allied stocksin South Africa. Then the Andaman Islanders, the Semang of the MalayPeninsula, the Aket of eastern Sumatra, the now extinct Kalangs ofJava, said to have been in some respects the most ape-like of humanbeings, the Aetas of the Philippines, and the dwarfs, with asurprisingly high culture, recently reported from Dutch New Guinea, are like so many scattered pieces of human wreckage. Finally, if weturn our gaze southward, we find that Negritos until the other dayinhabited Tasmania; whilst in Australia a strain of Negrito, or Negro(Papuan), blood is likewise to be detected. Are we here on the track of the original dispersal of man? It isimpossible to say. It is not even certain, though highly probable, that man originated in one spot. If he did, he must have beenhereditarily endowed, almost from the outset, with an adaptabilityto different climates quite unique in its way. The tiger is able torange from the hot Indian jungle to the freezing Siberian tundra; butman is the cosmopolitan animal beyond all others. Somehow, on thistheory of a single origin, he made his way to every quarter of theglobe; and when he got there, though needing time, perhaps, to acquirethe local colour, managed in the end to be at home. It looks as ifboth race and a dash of culture had a good deal to do with hisexploitation of geographical opportunity. How did the Australians andtheir Negrito forerunners invade their Austral world, at some periodwhich, we cannot but suspect, was immensely remote in time? Certainat least it is that they crossed a formidable barrier. What is knownas Wallace's line corresponds with the deep channel running betweenthe islands of Bali and Lombok and continuing northwards to the westof Celebes. On the eastern side the fauna are non-Asiatic. Yet somehowinto Australia with its queer monotremes and marsupials enteredtriumphant man--man and the dog with him. Haeckel has suggested thatman followed the dog, playing as it were the jackal to him. But thissounds rather absurd. It looks as if man had already acquired enoughseamanship to ferry himself across the zoological divide, and to takehis faithful dog with him on board his raft or dug-out. Until we havefacts whereon to build, however, it would be as unpardonable to laydown the law on these matters as it is permissible to fill up the blankby guesswork. It remains to round off our original survey by a word or two more aboutthe farther extremities, west, south, and east, of this vast southernworld, to which south-eastern Asia furnishes a natural approach. Thenegroes did not have Africa, that is, Africa south of the Sahara, allto themselves. In and near the equatorial forest-region of the westthe pure type prevails, displaying agricultural pursuits such as thecultivation of the banana, and, farther north, of millet, that musthave been acquired before the race was driven out of the more opencountry. Elsewhere occur mixtures of every kind with intrusivepastoral peoples of the Mediterranean type, the negro blood, however, tending to predominate; and thus we get the Fulahs and similar stocksto the west along the grassland bordering on the desert; the Niloticfolk amongst the swamps of the Upper Nile; and throughout the easternand southern parkland the vigorous Bantu peoples, who have swept theBushmen and the kindred Hottentots before them down into the desertcountry in the extreme south-west. It may be added that Africa hasa rich fauna and flora, much mineral wealth, and a physicalconfiguration that, in respect to its interior, though not to itscoasts, is highly diversified; so that it may be doubted whether thenatives have reached as high a pitch of indigenous culture as theresources of the environment, considered by itself, might seem towarrant. If the use of iron was invented in Africa, as some believe, it would only be another proof that opportunity is nothing apart fromthe capacity to grasp it. Of the Australian aborigines something has been said already. Apartfrom the Negrito or Negro strain in their blood, they are usually heldto belong to that pre-Dravidian stock represented by various jungletribes in southern India and by the Veddas of Ceylon, connecting linksbetween the two areas being the Sakai of the Malay Peninsula and EastSumatra, and the Toala of Celebes. It may be worth observing, also, that pre-historic skulls of the Neanderthal type find their nearestparallels in modern Australia. We are here in the presence of somevery ancient dispersal, from what centre and in what direction it ishard to imagine. In Australia these early colonists found pleasant, if somewhat lightly furnished, lodgings. In particular there were nodangerous beasts; so that hunting was hardly calculated to put a manon his mettle, as in more exacting climes. Isolation, and theconsequent absence of pressure from human intruders, is another factin the situation. Whatever the causes, the net result was that, despitea very fair environment, away from the desert regions of the interior, man on the whole stagnated. In regard to material comforts andconveniences, the rudeness of their life seems to us appalling. Onthe other hand, now that we are coming to know something of the innerlife and mental history of the Australians, a somewhat differentcomplexion is put upon the state of their culture. With very plainliving went something that approached to high thinking; and we mustrecognize in this case, as in others, what might be termed adifferential evolution of culture, according to which some elementsmay advance, whilst others stand still, or even decay. To another and a very different people, namely, the Polynesians, thesame notion of a differential evolution may be profitably applied. They were in the stone-age when first discovered, and had no bows andarrows. On the other hand, with coco-nut, bananas and bread-fruit, they had abundant means of sustenance, and were thoroughly at homein their magnificent canoes. Thus their island-life was rich in easeand variety; and, whilst rude in certain respects, they were almostcivilized in others. Their racial affinities are somewhat complex. What is almost certain is that they only occupied the Eastern Pacificduring the course of the last 1500 years or so. They probably camefrom Indonesia, mixing to a slight extent with Melanesians on theirway. How the proto-Polynesians came into existence in Indonesia ismore problematic. Possibly they were the result of a mixture betweenlong-headed immigrants from eastern India, and round-headed Mongolsfrom Indo-China and the rest of south-eastern Asia, from whom thepresent Malays are derived. * * * * * We have completed our very rapid regional survey of the world; andwhat do we find? By no means is it case after case of one regioncorresponding to one type of man and to one type of culture. It mightbe that, given persistent physical conditions of a uniform kind, andcomplete isolation, human life would in the end conform to theseconditions, or in other words stagnate. No one can tell, and no onewants to know, because as a matter of fact no such environmentalconditions occur in this world of ours. Human history reveals itselfas a bewildering series of interpenetrations. What excites thesemovements? Geographical causes, say the theorists of one idea. No doubtman moves forward partly because nature kicks him behind. But in thefirst place some types of animal life go forward under pressure fromnature, whilst others lie down and die. In the second place man hasan accumulative faculty, a social memory, whereby he is able to carryon to the conquest of a new environment whatever has served him inthe old. But this is as it were to compound environments--a processthat ends by making the environment coextensive with the world. Intelligent assimilation of the new by means of the old breaks downthe provincial barriers one by one, until man, the cosmopolitan animalby reason of his hereditary constitution, develops a cosmopolitanculture; at first almost unconsciously, but later on withself-conscious intent, because he is no longer content to live, butinsists on living well. As a sequel to this brief examination of the geographic controlconsidered by itself it would be interesting, if space allowed, toappend a study of the distribution of the arts and crafts of a moreobviously economic and utilitarian type. If the physical environmentwere all in all, we ought to find the same conditions evoking the sameindustrial appliances everywhere, without the aid of suggestions fromother quarters. Indeed, so little do we know about the conditionsattending the discovery of the arts of life that gave humanity itsall-important start--the making of fire, the taming of animals, thesowing of plants, and so on--that it is only too easy to misread ourmap. We know almost nothing of those movements of peoples, in the courseof which a given art was brought from one part of the world to another. Hence, when we find the art duly installed in a particular place, andutilizing the local product, the bamboo in the south, let us say, orthe birch in the north, as it naturally does, we easily slip into theerror of supposing that the local products of themselves called theart into existence. Similar needs, we say, have generated similarexpedients. No doubt there is some truth in this principle; but I doubtif, on the whole, history tends to repeat itself in the case of thegreat useful inventions. We are all of us born imitators, but inventivegenius is rare. Take the case of the early palaeoliths of the drift type. From Egypt, Somaliland, and many other distant lands come examples which Sir JohnEvans finds "so identical in form and character with British specimensthat they might have been manufactured by the same hands. " Andthroughout the palaeolithic age in Europe the very limited number andregular succession of forms testifies to the innate conservatism ofman, and the slow progress of invention. And yet, as some Americanwriters have argued--who do not find that the distinction betweenchipped palaeoliths and polished neoliths of an altogether later ageapplies equally well to the New World--it was just as easy to havegot an edge by rubbing as by flaking. The fact remains that in theOld World human inventiveness moved along one channel rather thananother, and for an immense lapse of time no one was found to strikeout a new line. There was plenty of sand and water for polishing, butit did not occur to their minds to use it. To wind up this chapter, however, I shall glance at the distribution, not of any implement connected directly and obviously with theutilization of natural products, but of a downright oddity, somethingthat might easily be invented once only and almost immediately droppedagain. And yet here it is all over the world, going back, we mayconjecture, to very ancient times, and implying interpenetrations ofbygone peoples, of whose wanderings perhaps we may never unfold thesecret. It is called the "bull-roarer, " and is simply a slat of woodon the end of a string, which when whirled round produces a ratherunearthly humming sound. Will the anthropo-geographer, after studyingthe distribution of wood and stringy substances round the globe, venture to prophesy that, if man lived his half a million years orso over again, the bull-roarer would be found spread about very muchwhere it is to-day? "Bull-roarer" is just one of our local names forwhat survives now-a-days as a toy in many an old-fashioned corner ofthe British Isles, where it is also known as boomer, buzzer, whizzer, swish, and so on. Without going farther afield we can get a hint ofthe two main functions which it seems to have fulfilled amongst ruderpeoples. In Scotland it is, on the one hand, sometimes used to "ca'the cattle hame. " A herd-boy has been seen to swing a bull-roarer ofhis own making, with the result that the beasts were soon runningfrantically towards the byre. On the other hand, it is sometimesregarded there as a "thunner-spell, " a charm against thunder, thesuperstition being that like cures like, and whatever makes a noiselike thunder will be on good terms, so to speak, with the real thunder. As regards its uses in the rest of the world, it may be said at oncethat here and there, in Galicia in Europe, in the Malay Peninsula inAsia, and amongst the Bushmen in Africa, it is used to drive or scareanimals, whether tame or wild. And this, to make a mere guess, mayhave been its earliest use, if utilitarian contrivances can generallyclaim historical precedence, as is by no means certain. As long asman hunted with very inferior weapons, he must have depended a gooddeal on drives, that either forced the game into a pitfall, or roundedthem up so as to enable a concerted attack to be made by the humanpack. No wonder that the bull-roarer is sometimes used to bring luckin a mystic way to hunters. More commonly, however, at the presentday, the bull-roarer serves another type of mystic purpose, its noise, which is so suggestive of thunder or wind, with a superadded touchof weirdness and general mystery, fitting it to play a leading partin rain-making ceremonies. From these not improbably have developedall sorts of other ceremonies connected with making vegetation andthe crops grow, and with making the boys grow into men, as is doneat the initiation rites. It is not surprising, therefore, to find acarved human face appearing on the bull-roarer in New Guinea, and againaway in North America, whilst in West Africa it is held to containthe voice of a very god. In Australia, too, all their higher notionsabout a benevolent deity and about religious matters in general seemto concentrate on this strange symbol, outwardly the frailest of toys, yet to the spiritual eye of these simple folk a veritable holy ofholies. And now for the merest sketch of its distribution, the details of whichare to be learnt from Dr. Haddon's valuable paper in _The Study ofMan_. England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales have it. It can be trackedalong central Europe through Switzerland, Germany, and Poland beyondthe Carpathians, whereupon ancient Greece with its Dionysiac mysteriestakes up the tale. In America it is found amongst the Eskimo, isscattered over the northern part of the continent down to the Mexicanfrontier, and then turns up afresh in central Brazil. Again, from theMalay Peninsula and Sumatra it extends over the great fan of darkerpeoples, from Africa, west and south, to New Guinea, Melanesia, andAustralia, together with New Zealand alone of Polynesian islands--afact possibly showing it to have belonged to some earlier race ofcolonists. Thus in all of the great geographical areas the bull-roareris found, and that without reckoning in analogous implements like theso-called "buzz, " which cover further ground, for instance, theeastern coastlands of Asia. Are we to postulate many independentorigins, or else far-reaching transportations by migratory peoples, by the American Indians and the negroes, for example? No attempt canbe made here to answer these questions. It is enough to have shownby the use of a single illustration how the study of the geographicaldistribution of inventions raises as many difficulties as it solves. Our conclusion, then, must be that the anthropologist, whilstconstantly consulting his physical map of the world, must not supposethat by so doing he will be saved all further trouble. Geographicalfacts represent a passive condition, which life, something by its verynature active, obeys, yet in obeying conquers. We cannot get away fromthe fact that we are physically determined. Yet, physicaldeterminations have been surmounted by human nature in a way to whichthe rest of the animal world affords no parallel. Thus man, as theold saying has it, makes love all the year round. Seasonal changesof course affect him, yet he is no slave of the seasons. And so itis with the many other elements involved in the "geographic control. "The "road, " for instance--that is to say, any natural avenue ofmigration or communication, whether by land over bridges and throughpasses, or by sea between harbours and with trade-winds to swell thesails--takes a hand in the game of life, and one that holds many trumps;but so again does the non-geographical fact that your travelling-machinemay be your pair of legs, or a horse, or a boat, or a railway, or anairship. Let us be moderate in all things, then, even in our referencesto the force of circumstances. Circumstances can unmake; but ofthemselves they never yet made man, nor any other form of life. CHAPTER VLANGUAGE The differentia of man--the quality that marks him off from the otheranimal kinds--is undoubtedly the power of articulate speech. Therebyhis mind itself becomes articulate. If language is ultimately acreation of the intellect, yet hardly less fundamentally is theintellect a creation of language. As flesh depends on bone, so doesthe living tissue of our spiritual life depend on its supportingframework of steadfast verbal forms. The genius, the heaven-bornbenefactor of humanity, is essentially he who wrestles with "thoughtstoo deep for words, " until at last he assimilates them to the schemeof meanings embodied in his mother-tongue, and thus raises themdefinitely above the threshold of the common consciousness, which islikewise the threshold of the common culture. There is good reason, then, for prefixing a short chapter on languageto an account of those factors in the life of man that together standon the whole for the principle of freedom--of rational self-direction. Heredity and environment do not, indeed, lie utterly beyond the rangeof our control. As they are viewed from the standpoint of human historyas a whole, they show each in its own fashion a certain capacity tomeet the needs and purposes of the life-force halfway. Regardedabstractly, however, they may conveniently be treated as purelypassive and limiting conditions. Here we are with a constitution notof our choosing, and in a world not of our choosing. Given thisinheritance, and this environment, how are we, by taking thought andtaking risks, to achieve the best-under-the-circumstances? Such isthe vital problem as it presents itself to any particular generationof men. The environment is as it were the enemy. We are out to conquer andenslave it. Our inheritance, on the other hand, is the impelling forcewe obey in setting forth to fight; it tingles in our blood, and nervesthe muscles of our arm. This force of heredity, however, abstractlyconsidered, is blind. Yet, corporately and individually, we fight witheyes that see. This supervening faculty, then, of utilizing the lightof experience represents a third element in the situation; and, fromthe standpoint of man's desire to know himself, the supreme element. The environment, inasmuch as under this conception are included allother forms of life except man, can muster on its side a certain amountof intelligence of a low order. But man's prerogative is to dominatehis world by the aid of intelligence of a high order. When he defiedthe ice-age by the use of fire, when he outfaced and outlived themammoth and the cave bear, he was already the rational animal, _homosapiens_. In his way he thought, even in those far-off days. Andtherefore we may assume, until direct evidence is forthcoming to thecontrary, that he likewise had language of an articulate kind. He triedto make a speech, we may almost say, as soon as he had learned to standup on his hind legs. Unfortunately, we entirely lack the means of carrying back the historyof human speech to its first beginnings. In the latter half of thelast century, whilst the ferment of Darwinism was freshly seething, all sorts of speculations were rife concerning the origin of language. One school sought the source of the earliest words in imitative soundsof the type of bow-wow; another in interjectional expressions of thetype of tut-tut. Or, again, as was natural in Europe, where, with theexception of Basque in a corner of the west, and of certain Asiaticlanguages, Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish, on the eastern border, allspoken tongues present certain obvious affinities, the comparativephilologist undertook to construct sundry great families of speech;and it was hoped that sooner or later, by working back to somelinguistic parting of the ways, the central problem would be solvedof the dispersal of the world's races. These painted bubbles have burst. The further examination of the formsof speech current amongst peoples of rude culture has not revealeda conspicuous wealth either of imitative or of interjectional sounds. On the other hand, the comparative study of the European, or, as theymust be termed in virtue of the branch stretching through Persia intoIndia, the Indo-European stock of languages, carries us back threeor four thousand years at most--a mere nothing in terms ofanthropological time. Moreover, a more extended search through theworld, which in many of its less cultured parts furnishes no literaryremains that may serve to illustrate linguistic evolution, showsendless diversity of tongues in place of the hoped-for system of afew families; so that half a hundred apparently independent types mustbe distinguished in North America alone. For the rest, it has becomeincreasingly clear that race and language need not go together at all. What philologist, for instance, could ever discover, if he had nohistory to help him, but must rely wholly on the examination of modernFrench, that the bulk of the population of France is connected by wayof blood with ancient Gauls who spoke Celtic, until the Roman conquestcaused them to adopt a vulgar form of Latin in its place. The Celtictongue, in its turn, had, doubtless not so very long before, oustedsome earlier type of language, perhaps one allied to the stillsurviving Basque; though it is not in the least necessary, therefore, to suppose that the Celtic-speaking invaders wiped out the previousinhabitants of the land to a corresponding extent. Races, in short, mix readily; languages, except in very special circumstances, hardlyat all. Disappointed in its hope of presiding over the reconstruction of thedistant past of man, the study of language has in recent years tendedsomewhat to renounce the historical--that is to say, anthropological--method altogether. The alternative is a purelyformal treatment of the subject. Thus, whereas vocabularies seemhopelessly divergent in their special contents, the general apparatusof vocal expression is broadly the same everywhere. That all men alikecommunicate by talking, other symbols and codes into which thoughtscan be translated, such as gestures, the various kinds of writing, drum-taps, smoke signals, and so on, being in the main but secondaryand derivative, is a fact of which the very universality may easilyblind us to its profound significance. Meanwhile, the science ofphonetics--having lost that "guid conceit of itself" which once ledit to discuss at large whether the art of talking evolved at a singlegeographical centre, or at many centres owing to similar capacitiesof body and mind--contents itself now-a-days for the most part withconducting an analytic survey of the modes of vocal expression ascorrelated with the observed tendencies of the human speech-organs. And what is true of phonetics in particular is hardly less true ofcomparative philology as a whole. Its present procedure is in the mainanalytic or formal. Thus its fundamental distinction between isolating, agglutinative and inflectional languages is arrived at simply bycontrasting the different ways in which words are affected by beingput together into a sentence. No attempt is made to show that one typeof arrangement normally precedes another in time, or that it is inany way more rudimentary--that is to say, less adapted to the needsof human intercourse. It is not even pretended that a given languageis bound to exemplify one, and one alone, of these three types; thoughthe process known as analogy--that is, the regularizing of exceptionsby treating the unlike as if it were like--will always be apt toestablish one system at the expense of the rest. If, then, the study of language is to recover its old pre-eminenceamongst anthropological studies, it looks as if a new direction mustbe given to its inquiries. And there is much to be said for any changethat would bring about this result. Without constant help from thephilologist, anthropology is bound to languish. To thoroughlyunderstand the speech of the people under investigation is thefield-worker's master-key; so much so, that the critic's firstquestion in determining the value of an ethnographical work must alwaysbe, Could the author talk freely with the natives in their own tongue?But how is the study of particular languages to be pursued successfully, if it lack the stimulus and inspiration which only the search forgeneral principles can impart to any branch of science? To relievethe hack-work of compiling vocabularies and grammars, there must bepresent a sense of wider issues involved, and such issues as maydirectly interest a student devoted to language for its own sake. Theformal method of investigating language, in the meantime, can hardlysupply the needed spur. Analysis is all very well so long as itsultimate purpose is to subserve genesis--that is to say, evolutionaryhistory. If, however, it tries to set up on its own account, it isin danger of degenerating into sheer futility. Out of time and historyis, in the long run, out of meaning and use. The philologist, then, if he is to help anthropology, must himself be an anthropologist, witha full appreciation of the importance of the historical method. Hemust be able to set each language or group of languages that he studiesin its historical setting. He must seek to show how it has evolvedin relation to the needs of a given time. In short, he must correlatewords with thoughts; must treat language as a function of the sociallife. * * * * * Here, however, it is not possible to attempt any but the most generalcharacterization of primitive language as it throws light on theworkings of the primitive intelligence. For one reason, the subjectis highly technical; for another reason, our knowledge about most typesof savage speech is backward in the extreme; whilst, for a third andmost far-reaching reason of all, many peoples, as we have seen, arenot speaking the language truly native to their powers and habits ofmind, but are expressing themselves in terms imported from anotherstock, whose spiritual evolution has been largely different. Thus itis at most possible to contrast very broadly and generally the morerudimentary with the more advanced methods that mankind employs forthe purpose of putting its experience into words. Happily the carefulattention devoted by American philologists to the aboriginal languagesof their continent has resulted in the discovery of certain principleswhich the rest of our evidence, so far as it goes, would seem to stampas of world-wide application. The reader is advised to study the moststimulating, if perhaps somewhat speculative, pages on language inthe second volume of E. J. Payne's _History of the New World calledAmerica_; or, if he can wrestle with the French tongue, to comparethe conclusions here reached with those to which Professor Levy-Bruhlis led, largely by the consideration of this same American group oflanguages, in his recent work, _Les Fonctions Mentales dans lesSocietes Inferieures_ ("Mental Functions in the Lower Societies"). If the average man who had not looked into the matter at all were askedto say what sort of language he imagined a savage to have, he wouldbe pretty sure to reply that in the first place the vocabulary wouldbe very small, and in the second place that it would consist of veryshort, comprehensive terms--roots, in fact--such as "man, " "bear, ""eat, " "kill, " and so on. Nothing of the sort is actually the case. Take the inhabitants of that cheerless spot, Tierra del Fuego, whoseculture is as rude as that of any people on earth. A scholar who triedto put together a dictionary of their language found that he had gotto reckon with more than thirty thousand words, even after suppressinga large number of forms of lesser importance. And no wonder that thetally mounted up. For the Fuegians had more than twenty words, somecontaining four syllables, to express what for us would be either "he"or "she"; then they had two names for the sun, two for the moon, andtwo more for the full moon, each of the last-named containing foursyllables and having no element in common. Sounds, in fact, are withthem as copious as ideas are rare. Impressions, on the other hand, are, of course, infinite in number. By means of more or less significantsounds, then, Fuegian society compounds impressions, and that somewhatimperfectly, rather than exchanges ideas, which alone are the currencyof true thought. For instance, I-cut-bear's-leg-at-the-joint-with-a-flint-nowcorresponds fairly well with the total impression produced by theparticular act; though, even so, I have doubtless selectively reducedthe notion to something I can comfortably take in, by leaving out alot of unnecessary detail--for instance, that I was hungry, in a hurry, doing it for the benefit of others as well as myself, and so on. Well, American languages of the ruder sort, by running a great number ofsounds or syllables together, manage to utter a portmanteauword--"holophrase" is the technical name for it--into which is packedaway enough suggestions to reproduce the situation in all its detail, the cutting, the fact that I did it, the object, the instrument, thetime of the cutting, and who knows what besides. Amusing examples ofsuch portmanteau words meet one in all the text-books. To go back tothe Fuegians, their expression _mamihlapinatapai_ is said to mean "tolook at each other hoping that either will offer to do something whichboth parties desire but are unwilling to do. " Now, since exactly thesame situation never recurs, but is partly the same and partlydifferent, it is clear that, if the holophrase really tried to hitoff in each case the whole outstanding impression that a givensituation provoked, then the same combination of sounds would neverrecur either; one could never open one's mouth without coining a newword. Ridiculous as this notion sounds, it may serve to mark a downwardlimit from which the rudest types of human speech are not so very farremoved. Their well-known tendency to alter their whole character intwenty years or less is due largely to the fluid nature of primitiveutterance; it being found hard to detach portions, capable of repeateduse in an unchanged form, from the composite vocables wherein theyregister their highly concrete experiences. Thus in the old Huron-Iroquois language _eschoirhon_ means"I-have-been-to-the-water, " _setsanha_ "Go-to-the-water, "_ondequoha_ "There-is-water-in-the-bucket, " _daustantewacharet_"There-is-water-in-the-pot. " In this case there is said to have beena common word for "water, " _awen_, which, moreover, is somehowsuggested to an aboriginal ear as an element contained in each of theselonger forms. In many other cases the difficulty of isolating thecommon meaning, and fixing it by a common term, has proved too muchaltogether for a primitive language. You can express twenty differentkinds of cutting; but you simply cannot say "cut" at all. No wonderthat a large vocabulary is found necessary, when, as in Zulu, "myfather, " "thy father, " "his-or-her-father, " are separatepolysyllables without any element in common. The evolution of language, then, on this view, may be regarded as amovement out of, and away from, the holophrastic in the direction ofthe analytic. When every piece in your play-box of verbal bricks canbe dealt with separately, because it is not joined on in all sortsof ways to the other pieces, then only can you compose new constructionsto your liking. Order and emphasis, as is shown by English, and stillmore conspicuously by Chinese, suffice for sentence-building. Ideally, words should be individual and atomic. Every modification they sufferby internal change of sound, or by having prefixes or suffixes tackedon to them, involves a curtailment of their free use and a sacrificeof distinctness. It is quite easy, of course, to think confusedly, even whilst employing the clearest type of language; though in sucha case it is very hard to do so without being quickly brought to book. On the other hand, it is not feasible to attain to a high degree ofclear thinking, when the only method of speech available is one thattends towards wordlessness--that is to say, is relatively deficientin verbal forms that preserve their identity in all contexts. Wordlessthinking is not in the strictest sense impossible; but its somewhatrestricted opportunities lie almost wholly on the farther side, asit were, of a clean-cut vocabulary. For the very fact that the wordsare crystallized into permanent shape invests them with a suggestionof interrupted continuity, an overtone of un-utilized significance, that of itself invites the mind to play with the corresponding fringeof meaning attaching to the concepts that the words embody. It would prove an endless task if I were to try here to illustrateat all extensively the stickiness, as one might almost call it, ofprimitive modes of speech. Person, number, case, tense, mood andgender--all these, even in the relatively analytical phraseology ofthe most cultured peoples, are apt to impress themselves on the verybody of the words of which they qualify the sense. But the meagre listof determinations thus produced in an evolved type of language canyield one no idea of the vast medley of complicated forms that servethe same ends at the lower levels of human experience. Moreover, thereare many other shades of secondary and circumstantial meaning whichin advanced languages are invariably represented by distinct words, so that when not wanted they can be left out, but in a more primitivetongue are apt to run right through the very grammar of the sentence, thus mixing themselves up inextricably with the really substantialelements in the thought to be conveyed. For instance, in some Americanlanguages, things are either animate or inanimate, and must bedistinguished accordingly by accompanying particles. Or, again, theyare classed by similar means as rational or irrational; women, by thebye, being designated amongst the Chiquitos by the irrational sign. Reverential particles, again, are used to distinguish what is highor low in the tribal estimation; and we get in this connection suchoddities as the Tamil practice of restricting the privilege of havinga plural to high-caste names, such as those applied to gods and humanbeings, as distinguished from the beasts, which are mere casteless"things. " Or, once more, my transferable belongings, "my-spear, " or"my-canoe, " undergo verbal modifications which are denied tonon-transferable possessions such as "my-hand"; "my-child, " be itobserved, falling within the latter class. Most interesting of all are distinctions of person. These cannot butbite into the forms of speech, since the native mind is taken up mostlywith the personal aspect of things, attaining to the conception ofa bloodless system of "its" with the greatest difficulty, if at all. Even the third person, which is naturally the most colourless, becauseexcluded from a direct part of the conversational game, undergoesmultitudinous leavening in the light of conditions which the primitivemind regards as highly important, whereas we should banish them fromour thoughts as so much irrelevant "accident. " Thus the Abipones inthe first place distinguished "he-present, " _eneha_, and"she-present, " _anaha_, from "he-absent" and "she-absent. " Butpresence by itself gave too little of the speaker's impression. So, if "he" or "she" were sitting, it was necessary to say _hiniha_ and_haneha_; if they were walking and in sight _ehaha_ and _ahaha_, but, if walking and out of sight, _ekaha_ and _akaha_; if they were lyingdown, _hiriha_ and _haraha_, and so on. Moreover, these were all"collective" forms, implying that there were others involved as well. If "he" or "she" were alone in the matter, an entirely different setof words was needed, "he-sitting (alone)" becoming _ynitara_, and soforth. The modest requirements of Fuegian intercourse have called morethan twenty such separate pronouns into being. Without attempting to go thoroughly into the efforts of primitivespeech to curtail its interest in the personnel of its world bygradually acquiring a stock of de-individualized words, let us glanceat another aspect of the subject, because it helps to bring out thefundamental fact that language is a social product, a means ofintersubjective intercourse developed within a society that hands onto a new generation the verbal experiments that are found to succeedbest. Payne shows reason for believing that the collective "we"precedes "I" in the order of linguistic evolution. To begin with, inAmerica and elsewhere, "we" may be inclusive and mean "all-of-us, "or selective, meaning "some-of-us-only. " Hence, we are told, amissionary must be very careful, and, if he is preaching, must usethe inclusive "we" in saying "we have sinned, " lest the congregationassume that only the clergy have sinned; whereas, in praying, he mustuse the selective "we, " or God would be included in the list of sinners. Similarly, "I" has a collective form amongst some American languages, and this is ordinarily employed, whereas the corresponding selectiveform is used only in special cases. Thus if the question be "Who willhelp?" the Apache will reply "I-amongst-others, " "I-for-one"; but, if he were recounting his own personal exploits, he says _sheedah_, "I-by-myself, " to show that they were wholly his own. Here we seemto have group-consciousness holding its own against individualself-consciousness, as being for primitive folk on the whole the morenormal attitude of mind. Another illustration of the sociality engrained in primitive speechis to be found in the terms employed to denote relationship. "My-mother, " to the child of nature, is something more than an ordinarymother like yours. Thus, as we have already seen, there may be a specialparticle applying to blood-relations as non-transferable possessions. Or, again, one Australian language has special duals, "we-two, " oneto be used between relations generally, another between father andchild only. Or an American language supplies one kind of plural suffixfor blood-relations, another for the rest of human beings. Theselinguistic concretions are enough to show how hard it is for primitivethought to disjoin what is joined fast in the world of everydayexperience. No wonder that it is usually found impracticable by the Europeantraveller who lacks an anthropological training to extract fromnatives any coherent account of their system of relationships; forhis questions are apt to take the form of "Can a man marry his deceasedwife's sister?" or what not. Such generalities do not enter at allinto the highly concrete scheme of viewing the customs of his tribeimposed on the savage alike by his manner of life and by the very formsof his speech. The so-called "genealogical method" initiated by Dr. Rivers, which the scientific explorer now invariably employs, restsmainly on the use of a concrete type of procedure corresponding tothe mental habits of the simple folk under investigation. John, whomyou address here, can tell you exactly whether he may, or may not, marry Mary Anne over there; also he can point out his mother, and tellyou her name, and the names of his brothers and sisters. You work roundthe whole group--it very possibly contains no more than a few hundredmembers at most--and interrogate them one and all about theirrelationships to this and that individual whom you name. In courseof time you have a scheme which you can treat in your own analyticway to your heart's content; whilst against your system of reckoningaffinity you can set up by way of contrast the native system; whichcan always be obtained by asking each informant what relationship-termshe would apply to the different members of his pedigree, and, reciprocally, what terms they would each apply to him. * * * * * Before closing this altogether inadequate sketch of a vast andintricate subject, I would say just one word about the expression ofideas of number. It is quite a mistake to suppose that savages haveno sense of number, because the simple-minded European traveller, compiling a short vocabulary in the usual way, can get no equivalentfor our numerals, say from 5 to 10. The fact is that the numericalinterest has taken a different turn, incorporating itself with otherinterests of a more concrete kind in linguistic forms to which ourown type of language affords no key at all. Thus in the island of Kiwai, at the mouth of the Fly River in New Guinea, the Cambridge Expeditionfound a whole set of phrases in vogue, whereby the number of subjectsacting on the number of objects at a given moment could be concretelyspecified. To indicate the action of two on many in the past, theysaid _rudo_, in the present _durudo_; of many on many in the past _rumo_, in the present _durumo_; of two on two in the past, _amarudo_, in thepresent _amadurudo_; of many on two in the past _amarumo_; of manyon three in the past _ibidurumo_, of many on three in the present_ibidurudo_; of three on two in the present, _amabidurumo_, of threeon two in the past, _amabirumo_, and so on. Meanwhile, words to servethe purpose of pure counting are all the scarcer because hands andfeet supply in themselves an excellent means not only of calculating, but likewise of communicating, a number. It is the one case in whichgesture-language can claim something like an independent status bythe side of speech. For the rest, it does not follow that the mind fails to appreciatenumerical relations, because the tongue halts in the matter ofsymbolizing them abstractly. A certain high official, when presidingover the Indian census, was informed by a subordinate that it wasimpossible to elicit from a certain jungle tribe any account of thenumber of their huts, for the simple and sufficient reason that theycould not count above three. The director, who happened to be a manof keen anthropological insight, had therefore himself to come to therescue. Assembling the tribal elders, he placed a stone on the ground, saying to one "This is your hut, " and to another "This is your hut, "as he placed a second stone a little way from the first. "And now whereis yours?" he asked a third. The natives at once entered into the spiritof the game, and in a short time there was plotted out a plan of thewhole settlement, which subsequent verification proved to be bothgeographically and numerically correct and complete. This story mayserve to show how nature supplies man with a ready reckoner in hisfaculty of perception, which suffices well enough for the affairs ofthe simpler sort of life. One knows how a shepherd can take in thenumbers of a flock at a glance. For the higher flights of experience, however, especially when the unseen and merely possible has to be dealtwith, percepts must give way to concepts; massive consciousness mustgive way to thinking by means of representations pieced together outof elements rendered distinct by previous dissection of the totalimpression; in short, a concrete must give way to an analytic way ofgrasping the meaning of things. Moreover, since thinking is littlemore or less than, as Plato put it, a silent conversation with oneself, to possess an analytic language is to be more than half-way on theroad to the analytic mode of intelligence--the mode of thinking bydistinct concepts. If there is a moral to this chapter, it must be that, whereas it isthe duty of the civilized overlords of primitive folk to leave themtheir old institutions so far as they are not directly prejudicialto their gradual advancement in culture, since to lose touch with one'shome-world is for the savage to lose heart altogether and die; yetthis consideration hardly applies at all to the native language. Ifthe tongue of an advanced people can be substituted, it is for thegood of all concerned. It is rather the fashion now-a-days amongstanthropologists to lay it down as an axiom that the typical savageand the typical peasant of Europe stand exactly on a par in respectto their power of general intelligence. If by power we are to understandsheer potentiality, I know of no sufficient evidence that enables usto say whether, under ideal conditions, the average degree of mentalcapacity would in the two cases prove the same or different. But Iam sure that the ordinary peasant of Europe, whose society provideshim, in the shape of an analytic language, with a ready-made instrumentfor all the purposes of clear thinking, starts at an immense advantage, as compared with a savage whose traditional speech is holophrastic. Whatever be his mental power, the former has a much better chance ofmaking the most of it under the given circumstances. "Give them thewords so that the ideas may come, " is a maxim that will carry us far, alike in the education of children, and in that of the peoples of lowerculture, of whom we have charge. CHAPTER VISOCIAL ORGANIZATION If an explorer visits a savage tribe with intent to get at the truemeaning of their life, his first duty, as every anthropologist willtell him, is to acquaint himself thoroughly with the socialorganization in all its forms. The reason for this is simply that onlyby studying the outsides of other people can we hope to arrive at whatis going on inside them. "Institutions" will be found a convenientword to express all the externals of the life of man in society, sofar as they reflect intelligence and purpose. Similarly, the internalor subjective states thereto corresponding may be collectivelydescribed as "beliefs. " Thus, the field-worker's cardinal maxim canbe phrased as follows: Work up to the beliefs by way of theinstitutions. Further, there are two ways in which a given set of institutions canbe investigated, and of these one, so far as it is practicable, shouldprecede the other. First, the institutions should be examined as somany wheels in a social machine that is taken as if it were standingstill. You simply note the characteristic make of each, and how itis placed in relation to the rest. Regarded in this static way, theinstitutions appear as "forms of social organization. " Afterwards, the machine is supposed to be set going, and you contemplate the partsin movement. Regarded thus dynamically, the institutions appear as"customs. " In this chapter, then, something will be said about the forms of socialorganization prevailing amongst peoples of the lower culture. Ourinterest will be confined to the social morphology. In subsequentchapters we shall go on to what might be called, by way of contrast, the physiology of social life. In other words, we shall brieflyconsider the legal and religious customs, together with the associatedbeliefs. How do the forms of social organization come into being? Does someone invent them? Does the very notion of organization imply anorganizer? Or, like Topsy, do they simply grow? Are they naturalcrystallizations that take place when people are thrown together? Formy own part, I think that, so long as we are pursuing anthropologyand not philosophy--in other words, are piecing together eventshistorically according as they appear to follow one another, and arenot discussing the ultimate question of the relation of mind to matter, and which of the two in the long run governs which--we must be preparedto recognize both physical necessity and spiritual freedom asinterpenetrating factors in human life. In the meantime, whenconsidering the subject of social organization, we shall do well, Ithink, to keep asking ourselves all along, How far does force ofcircumstances, and how far does the force of intelligent purpose, account for such and such a net result? If I were called upon to exhibit the chief determinants of human lifeas a single chain of causes and effects--a simplification of thehistorical problem, I may say at once, which I should never dream ofputting forward except as a convenient fiction, a device for makingresearch easier by providing it with a central line--I should do itthus. Working backwards, I should say that culture depends on socialorganization; social organization on numbers; numbers on food; andfood on invention. Here both ends of the series are represented byspiritual factors--namely, culture at the one end, and invention atthe other. Amongst the intermediate links, food and numbers may bereckoned as physical factors. Social organization, however, seems toface in both directions at once, and to be something half-way betweena spiritual and a physical manifestation. In placing invention at the bottom of the scale of conditions, Idefinitely break with the opinion that human evolution is throughouta purely "natural" process. Of course, you can use the word "natural"so widely and vaguely as to cover everything that was, or is, or couldbe. If it be used, however, so as to exclude the "artificial, " thenI am prepared to say that human life is preeminently an artificialconstruction, or, in other words, a work of art; the distinguishingmark of man consisting precisely in the fact that he alone of theanimals is capable of art. It is well known how the invention of machinery in the middle of theeighteenth century brought about that industrial revolution, thesocial and political effects of which are still developing at thishour. Well, I venture to put it forward as a proposition which appliesto human evolution, so far back as our evidence goes, that historyis the history of great inventions. Of course, it is true that climateand geographical conditions in general help to determine the natureand quantity of the food-supply; so that, for instance, however muchversed you may be in the art of agriculture, you cannot get corn togrow on the shores of the Arctic sea. But, given the needful inventions, superior weapons for instance, you need never allow yourselves to beshoved away into such an inhospitable region; to which you presumablydo not retire voluntarily, unless, indeed, the state of your arts--forinstance, your skill in hunting or taming the reindeer--inclines youto make a paradise of the tundra. Suppose it granted, then, that a given people's arts and inventions, whether directly or indirectly productive, are capable of a certainaverage yield of food, it is certain, as Malthus and Darwin would remindus, that human fertility can be reckoned on to bring the numbers upto a limit bearing a more or less constant ratio to the means ofsubsistence. At length we reach our more immediate subject--namely, socialorganization. In what sense, if any, is social organization dependenton numbers? Unfortunately, it is too large a question to thrash outhere. I may, however, refer the reader to the ingenious classificationof the peoples of the world, by reference to the degree of their socialorganization and culture, which is attempted by Mr. Sutherland in his_Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct_. He there tries to show thata certain size of population can be correlated with each grade in thescale of human evolution--at any rate up to the point at whichfull-blown civilization is reached, when cases like that of Athensunder Pericles, or Florence under the Medici, would probably causehim some trouble. For instance, he makes out that the lowest savages, Veddas, Pygmies, and so on, form groups of from ten to forty; whereasthose who are but one degree less backward, such as the Australiannatives, average from fifty to two hundred; whilst most of the NorthAmerican tribes, who represent the next stage of general advance, runfrom a hundred up to five hundred. At this point he takes leave ofthe peoples he would class as "savage, " their leading characteristicfrom the economic point of view being that they lead the more or lesswandering life of hunters or of mere "gatherers. " He then goes on toarrange similarly, in an ascending series of three divisions, thepeoples that he terms "barbarian. " Economically they are eithersedentary, with a more or less developed agriculture, or, if nomad, pursue the pastoral mode of life. His lowest type of group, whichincludes the Iroquois, Maoris, and so forth, ranges from one thousandto five thousand; next come loosely organized states, such as Dahomeyor Ashanti, where the numbers may reach one hundred thousand; whilsthe makes barbarism culminate in more firmly compacted communities, such as are to be found, for example, in Abyssinia or Madagascar, thepopulation of which he places at about half a million. Now I am very sceptical about Mr. Sutherland's statistics, and regardhis bold attempt to assign the world's peoples each to their own rungon the ladder of universal culture as, in the present state of ourknowledge, no more than a clever hypothesis; which some keenanthropologist of the future might find it well worth his while toput thoroughly to the test. At a guess, however, I am disposed to accepthis general principle that, on the whole and in the long run, duringthe earlier stages of human evolution, the complexity and coherenceof the social order follow upon the size of the group; which, sinceits size, in turn, follows upon the mode of the economic life, maybe described as the food-group. Besides food, however, there is a second elemental condition whichvitally affects the human race; and that is sex. Social organizationthus comes to have a twofold aspect. On the one hand, and perhapsprimarily, it is an organization of the food-quest. On the other hand, hardly less fundamentally, it is an organization of marriage. In whatfollows, the two aspects will be considered more or less together, as to a large extent they overlap. Primitive men, like other socialanimals, hang together naturally in the hunting pack, and no lessnaturally in the family; and at a very rudimentary stage of evolutionthere probably is very little distinction between the two. When, however, for some reason or other which anthropologists have stillto discover, man takes to the institution of exogamy, the law ofmarrying-out, which forces men and women to unite who are members ofmore or less distinct food-groups, then, as we shall presently see, the matrimonial aspect of social organization tends to overshadow thepolitico-economic; if only because the latter can usually take careof itself, whereas to marry a perfect stranger is an embarrassingoperation that might be expected to require a certain amount ofarrangement on both sides. * * * * * To illustrate the pre-exogamic stage of human society is not so easyas it may seem; for, though it is possible to find examples, especiallyamongst Negritos such as the Andamanese or Bushmen, of peoples of therudest culture, and living in very small communities, who apparentlyknow neither exogamy nor what so often accompanies it, namely, totemism, we can never be certain whether we are dealing in such a case withthe genuinely primitive, or merely with the degenerate. For instance, the chapter on the forms of social organization in Professor Hobhouse's_Morals in Evolution_ starts off with an account of the system in vogueamongst the Veddas of the Ceylon jungle, his description being foundedon the excellent observations of the brothers Sarasin. Now it isperfectly true that some of the Veddas appear to afford a perfectinstance of what is sometimes called "the natural family. " A tractof a few miles square forms the beat of a small group of families, four or five at most, which, for the most part, singly or in pairs, wander round hunting, fishing, gathering honey and digging up the wildyams; whilst they likewise take shelter together in shallow caves, where a roof, a piece of skin to lie on--though this is notessential--and, that most precious luxury of all, a fire, represent, apart from food, the sum total of their creature comforts. Now, under these circumstances, it is not, perhaps, wonderful thatthe relationships within a group should be decidedly close. Indeed, the correct thing is for the children of a brother and sister to marry;though not, it would seem, for the children of two brothers or of twosisters. And yet there is no approach to promiscuity, but, on thecontrary, a very strict monogamy, infidelities being as rare as theyare deeply resented. That they had clans of some sort was, indeed, known to Professor Hobhouse and to the authorities whom he follows;but these clans are dismissed as having but the slightest organizationand very few functions. An entirely new light, however, has been thrownon the meaning of this clan-system by the recent researches of Dr. And Mrs. Seligmann. It now turns out that some of the Veddas areexogamous--that is to say, are obliged by custom to marry outside theirown clan--though others are not. The question then arises, Which, forthe Veddas, is the older system, marrying-out or marrying-in? Seeingwhat a miserable remnant the Veddas are, I cannot but believe thatwe have here the case of a formerly exogamous people, groups of whichhave been forced to marry-in, simply because the alternative was notto marry at all. Of course, it is possible to argue that in so doingthey merely reverted to what was once everywhere the primeval conditionof man. But at this point historical science tails off into mereguesswork. * * * * * We reach relatively firm ground, on the other hand, when we pass onto consider the social organization of such exogamous and totemicpeoples as the natives of Australia. The only trouble here is thatthe subject is too vast and complicated to permit of a handling atonce summary and simple. Perhaps the most useful thing that can bedone for the reader in a short space is to provide him with a fewelementary distinctions, applying not only to the Australians, butmore or less to totemic societies in general. With the help of thesehe may proceed to grapple for himself with the mass of highlyinteresting but bewildering details concerning social organizationto be found in any of the leading first-hand authorities. For instance, for Australia he can do no better than consult the two fascinatingworks of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen on the Central tribes, or the noless illuminating volume of Howitt on the natives of the South-easternregion; whilst for North America there are many excellent monographsto choose from amongst those issued by the Bureau of Ethnology of theSmithsonian Institution. Or, if he is content to allow some one elseto collect the material for him, his best plan will be to consult Dr. Frazer's monumental treatise, _Totemism and Exogamy_, whichepitomizes the known facts for the whole wide world, as surveyed regionby region. The first thing to grasp is that, for peoples of this type, socialorganization is, primarily and on the face of it, identical withkinship-organization. Before proceeding further, let us see whatkinship means. Distinguish kinship from consanguinity. Consanguinityis a physical fact. It depends on birth, and covers all one's realblood-relationships, whether recognized by society or not. Kinship, on the other hand, is a sociological fact. It depends on theconventional system of counting descent. Thus it may exclude realrelationships; whilst, contrariwise, it may include such as are purelyfictitious, as when some one is allowed by law to adopt a child asif it were his own. Now, under civilized conditions, though there is, as we have just seen, such an institution as adoption, whilst, again, there is the case of the illegitimate child, who can claimconsanguinity, but can never, in English law at least, attain tokinship, yet, on the whole, we are hardly conscious of the differencebetween the genuine blood-tie and the social institution that ismodelled more or less closely upon it. In primitive society, however, consanguinity tends to be wider than kinship by as much again. In otherwords, in the recognition of kinship one entire side of the familyis usually left clean out of account. A man's kin comprises eitherhis mother's people or his father's people, but not both. Rememberthat by the law of exogamy, the father and mother are strangers toeach other. Hence, primitive society, as it were, issues a judgmentof Solomon to the effect that, since they are not prepared to halvetheir child, it must belong body and soul either to one party or tothe other. We may now go on to analyse this one-sided type of kinship-organizationa little more fully. There are three elementary principles that combineto produce it. They are exogamy, lineage and totemism. A word mustbe said about each in turn. Exogamy presents no difficulty until you try to account for its origin. It simply means marrying-out, in contrast to endogamy, or marrying-in. Suppose there were a village composed entirely of McIntyres andMcIntoshes, and suppose that fashion compelled every McIntyre to marrya McIntosh, and every McIntosh a McIntyre, whilst to marry an outsider, say a McBean, was bad form for McIntyres and McIntoshes alike; thenthe two clans would be exogamous in respect to each other, whereasthe village as a whole would be endogamous. Lineage is the principle of reckoning descent along one or other oftwo lines--namely, the mother's line or the father's. The former methodis termed matrilineal, the latter patrilineal. It sometimes, but byno means invariably, happens, when descent is counted matrilineally, that the wife stays with her people, and the husband has the statusof a mere visitor and alien. In such a case the marriage is calledmatrilocal; otherwise it is patrilocal. Again, when the matrilocaltype of marriage prevails, as likewise often when it does not, thewife and her people, rather than the father and his people, exercisesupreme authority over the children. This is known as the matripotestal, as contrasted with the patripotestal, type of family. When thematrilineal, matrilocal and matripotestal conditions are foundtogether, we have mother-right at its fullest and strongest. Wherewe get only two out of the three, or merely the first by itself, mostauthorities would still speak of mother-right; though it may bequestioned how far the word mother-right, or the corresponding, nowalmost discarded, expression, "the matriarchate, " can be safely usedwithout further explanation, since it tends to imply a right (in thelegal sense) and an authority, which in these circumstances is oftenno more than nominal. Totemism, in the specific form that has to do with kinship, means thata social group depends for its identity on a certain intimate andexclusive relation in which it stands towards an animal-kind, or aplant-kind, or, more rarely, a class of inanimate objects, or, veryrarely, something that is individual and not a kind or class at all. Such a totem, in the first place, normally provides the social groupwith its name. (The Boy Scouts, who call themselves Foxes, Peewits, and so on, according to their different patrols, have thus revertedto a very ancient usage. ) In the second place, this name tends to bethe outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace that, somehow flowing from the totem to the totemites, sanctifies theircommunion. They are "all-one-flesh" with one another, as certain ofthe Australians phrase it, because they are "all-one-flesh" with thetotem. Or, again, a man whose totem was _ngaui_, the sun, said thathis name was _ngaui_ and he "was" _ngaui_; though he was equally readyto put it in another way, explaining that _ngaui_ "owned" him. If wewish to express the matter comprehensively, and at the same time toavoid language suggestive of a more advanced mysticism, we may perhapsdescribe the totem as, from this point of view, the totemite's "luck. " There is considerable variation, however, to be found in the practicesand beliefs of a more or less religious kind that are associated withthis form of totemism; though almost always there are some. Sometimesthe totem is thought of as an ancestor, or as the common fund of lifeout of which the totemites are born and into which they go back whenthey die. Sometimes the totem is held to be a very present help intime of trouble, as when a kangaroo, by hopping along in a specialway, warns the kangaroo-man of impending danger. Sometimes, on theother hand, the kangaroo-man thinks of himself mainly as the helperof the kangaroo, holding ceremonies in order that the kangaroos maywax fat and multiply. Again, almost invariably the totemite shows somerespect towards his totem, refraining, for instance, from slaying andeating the totem-animal, unless it be in some specially solemn andsacramental way. The upshot of these considerations is that if the totem is, on theface of it, a name, the savage answers the question, "What's in a name?"by finding in the name that makes him one with his brethren a wealthof mystic meaning, such as deepens for him the feeling of socialsolidarity to an extent that it takes a great effort on our part toappreciate. Having separately examined the three principles of exogamy, lineageand totemism, we must now try to see how they work together. Generalization in regard to these matters is extremely risky, not tosay rash; nevertheless, the following broad statements may serve thereader as working hypotheses, that he can go on to test for himselfby looking into the facts. Firstly, exogamy and totemism, whether theybe in origin distinct or not, tend in practice to go pretty closelytogether. Secondly, lineage, or the one-sided system of reckoningdescent, is more or less independent of the other two principles. [4] [Footnote 4: That is to say, either mother-right or father-right inany of their forms may exist in conjunction with exogamy and totemism. It is certainly not the fact that, wherever totemism is in a stateof vigour, mother-right is regularly found. At most it may be urgedin favour of the priority of mother-right that, if there is change, it is invariably from mother-right to father-right, and never the otherway about. ] If, instead of consulting the evidence that is to hand about the savageworld as it exists to-day, you read some book crammed full with theoriesabout social origins, you probably come away with the impression thattotemic society is entirely an affair of clans. Some such notion asthe following is precipitated in your mind. You figure to yourselftwo small food-groups, whose respective beats are, let us say, on eachside of a river. For some unknown reason they are totemic, one groupcalling itself Cockatoo, the other calling itself Crow, whilst eachfeels in consequence that its members are "all-one-flesh" in somemysterious and moving sense. Again, for some unknown reason each isexogamous, so that matrimonial alliances are bound to take place acrossthe river. Lastly, each has mother-right of the full-blown kind. TheCockatoo-girls and the Crow-girls abide each on their own side of theriver, where they are visited by partners from across the water; who, whether they tend to stay and make themselves useful, or are merelyintermittent in their attentions, remain outsiders from the totemicpoint of view and are treated as such. The children, meanwhile, growup in the Cockatoo and Crow quarters respectively as little Cockatoosor Crows. If they need to be chastised, a Cockatoo hand, not necessarilythe mother's, but perhaps her brother's--never the father's, however--administers the slap. When they grow up, they take theirchances for better and worse with the mother's people; fighting whenthey fight, though it be against the father's people; sharing in thetoils and the spoils of the chase; inheriting the weapons and any otherproperty that is handed on from one generation to another; and, lastbut not least, taking part in the totemic mysteries that disclose tothe elect the inner meaning of being a Cockatoo or a Crow, as the casemay be. Now such a picture of the original clan and of the original inter-clanorganization is very pretty and easy to keep in one's head. And whenone is simply guessing about the first beginnings of things, thereis something to be said for starting from some highly abstract andsimple concept, which is afterwards elaborated by additions andqualifications until the developed notion comes near to matching thecomplexity of the real facts. Such speculations, then, are quitepermissible and even necessary in their place. To do justice, however, to the facts about totemic society, as known to us by actual observation, it remains to note that the clan is by no means the only form of socialorganization that it displays. The clan, it is true, whether matrilineal or patrilineal, tends atthe totemic level of society to eclipse the family. The natural family, of course--that is to say, the more or less permanent association offather, mother and children, is always there in some shape and to someextent. But, so long as the one-sided method of counting descentprevails, and is reinforced by totemism, the family cannot attain tothe dignity of a formally recognized institution. On the other hand, the totemic clan, of all the formally recognized groupings of societyto which an individual belongs in virtue of his birth and kinship, is, so to speak, the most specific. As the Australian puts it, it makeshim what he "is. " His social essence is to be a Cockatoo or a Crow. Consequently his first duty is towards his clan and its members, humanand not-human. Wherever there are clans, and so long as there is anytotemism worthy of the name, this would seem to be the general law. Besides the specific unity, however, provided by the clan, there arewider, and, as it were, more generic unities into which a man is born, in totemic society of the complex type that is found in the actualworld of to-day. First, he belongs to a phratry. In Australia the tribe--a term to bedefined presently--is nearly always split up into two exogamousdivisions, which it is usual to call phratries. [5] Then, in some ofthe Australian tribes, the phratry is subdivided into two, and, inothers, into four portions, between which exogamy takes placeaccording to a curious criss-cross scheme. These exogamoussubdivisions, which are peculiar to Australia, are known asmatrimonial classes. Dr. Frazer thinks that they are the result ofdeliberate arrangement on the part of native statesmen; and certainlyhe is right in his contention that there is an artificial and man-madelook about them. The system of phratries, on the other hand, whetherit carves up the tribe into two, or, as sometimes in North Americaand elsewhere, into more than two primary divisions, under which theclans tend to group themselves in a more or less orderly way, has allthe appearance of a natural development out of the clan-system. Thus, to revert to the imaginary case of the Cockatoos and Crows practisingexogamy across the river, it seems easy to understand how the numberson both sides might increase until, whilst remaining Cockatoos andCrows for cross-river purposes, they would find it necessary to adoptamong themselves subordinate distinctions; such as would be sure tomodel themselves on the old Cockatoo-Crow principle of separatetotemic badges. But we must not wander off into questions of origin. It is enough for our present purpose to have noted the fact that, withinthe tribe, there are normally other forms of social grouping into whicha man is born, as well as the clan. [Footnote 5: From a Greek word meaning "brotherhood, " which was appliedto a very similar institution. ] Now we come to the tribe. This may be described as the political unit. Its constitution tends to be lax and its functions vague. One way ofseizing its nature is to think of it as the social union within whichexogamy takes place. The intermarrying groups naturally hang together, and are thus in their entirety endogamous, in the sense that marriagewith pure outsiders is disallowed by custom. Moreover, by minglingin this way, they are likely to attain to the use of a common dialect, and a common name, speaking of themselves, for instance, as "the men, "and lumping the rest of humanity together as "foreigners. " To acttogether, however, as, for instance, in war, in order to repelincursions on the part of the said foreigners, is not easy withoutsome definite organization. In Australia, where there is very littlewar, this organization is mostly wanting. In North America, on theother hand, amongst the more advanced and warlike tribes, we findregular tribal officers, and some approach to a political constitution. Yet in Australia there is at least one occasion when a sort of tribalgathering takes place--namely, when their elaborate ceremonies forthe initiation of the youths is being held. It would seem, however, that these ceremonies are, as often as not, intertribal rather than tribal. So similar are the customs and beliefsover wide areas, that groups with apparently little or nothing elsein common will assemble together, and take part in proceedings thatare something like a Pan-Anglican Congress and a World's Fair rolledinto one. To this indefinite type of intertribal association the term"nation" is sometimes applied. Only when there is definiteorganization, as never in Australia, and only occasionally in NorthAmerica, as amongst the Iroquois, can we venture to describe it asa genuine "confederacy. " No doubt the reader's head is already in a whirl, though I haveperpetrated endless sins of omission and, I doubt not, of commissionas well, in order to simplify the glorious confusion of the subjectof the social organization prevailing in what is conveniently butloosely lumped together as totemic society. Thus, I have omitted tomention that sometimes the totems seem to have nothing to do at allwith the social organization; as, for example, amongst the famousArunta of central Australia, whom Messrs. Spencer and Gillen have socarefully described. I have, again, refrained from pointing out thatsometimes there are exogamous divisions--some would call them moietiesto distinguish them from phratries--which have no clans grouped underthem, and, on the other hand, have themselves little or no resemblanceto totemic clans. These, and ever so many other exceptional cases, I have simply passed by. An even more serious kind of omission is the following. I havethroughout identified the social organization with the kinshiporganization--namely, that into which a man is born in consequenceof the marriage laws and the system of reckoning descent. But thereare other secondary features of what can only be classed as socialorganization, which have nothing to do with kinship. Sex, for instance, has a direct bearing on social status. The men and the women oftenform markedly distinct groups; so that we are almost reminded of theway in which the male and the female linnets go about in separate flocksas soon as the pairing season is over. Of course, disparity ofoccupation has something to do with it. But, for the native mind, thedifference evidently goes far deeper than that. In some parts ofAustralia there are actually sex-totems, signifying that each sex isall-one-flesh, a mystic corporation. And, all the savage world over, there is a feeling that woman is uncanny, a thing apart, which feelingis probably responsible for most of the special disabilities--and thespecial privileges--that are the lot of woman at the present day. Again, age likewise has considerable influence on social status. Itis not merely a case of being graded as a youth until once for allyou legally "come of age, " and are enrolled, amongst the men. Thegrading of ages is frequently most elaborate, and each batch mountsthe social ladder step by step. Just as, at the university, each yearhas apportioned to it by public opinion the things it may do and thethings it may not do, whilst, later on, the bachelor, the master, andthe doctor stand each a degree higher in respect of academic rank;so in darkest Australia, from youth up to middle age at least, a manwill normally undergo a progressive initiation into the secrets oflife, accompanied by a steady widening in the sphere of his socialduties and rights. Lastly, locality affects status, and increasingly as the wanderinglife gives way to stable occupation. Amongst a few hundred people whoare never out of touch with each other, the forms of natal associationhold their own against any that local association is likely to suggestin their place. According to natal grouping, therefore, in the broadsense that includes sex and age no less than kinship, the members ofthe tribe camp, fight, perform magical ceremonies, play games, areinitiated, are married, and are buried. But let the tribe increasein numbers, and spread through a considerable area, over the face ofwhich communications are difficult and proportionately rare. Instantly the local group tends to become all in all. Authority andinitiative must always rest with the men on the spot; and the old natalcombinations, weakened by inevitable absenteeism, at last cease torepresent the true framework of the social order. They tend to lingeron, of course, in the shape of subordinate institutions. For instance, the totemic groups cease to have direct connection with the marriagesystem, and, on the strength of the ceremonies associated with them, develop into what are known as secret societies. Or, again, the clanis gradually overshadowed by the family, so that kinship, with itsrights and duties, becomes practically limited to the nearerblood-relations; who, moreover, begin to be treated for practicalpurposes as kinsmen, even when they are on the side of the family whichlineage does not officially recognize. Thus the forms of natalassociation no longer constitute the backbone of the body politic. Their public importance has gone. Henceforward, the social unit isthe local group. The territorial principle comes more and more todetermine affinities and functions. Kinship has dethroned itself byits very success. Thanks to the organizing power of kinship, primitivesociety has grown, and by growing has stretched the birth-tie untilit snaps. Some relationships become distant in a local and territorialsense, and thereupon they cease to count. My duty towards my kin passesinto my duty towards my neighbour. * * * * * Reasons of space make it impossible to survey the further developmentsto which social organization is subject under the sway of locality. It is, perhaps, less essential to insist on them here, because, whereastotemic society is a thing which we civilized folk have the verygreatest difficulty in understanding, we all have direct insight intothe meaning of a territorial arrangement; since, from the villagecommunity up to the modern state, the same fundamental type of socialstructure obtains throughout. Besides local contiguity, however, there is a second principle whichgreatly helps to shape the social order, as soon as society issufficiently advanced in its arts and industries to have taken firmroot, so to speak, on the earth's surface. This is the principle ofprivate property, and especially of private property in land. The mostfundamental of class distinctions is that between rich and poor. Thatbetween free and slave, in communities that have slavery, is not atfirst sight strictly parallel, since there may be a class of poorfreemen intermediate between the nobles and the slaves; but it isobvious that in this case, too, private property is really responsiblefor the mode of grading. Or sometimes social position may seem to dependprimarily on industrial occupation, the Indian caste-system providingan instance in point. Since, however, the most honourable occupationsin the long run coincide with those that pay best, we come back onceagain to private property as the ultimate source of social rank, underan economic system of the more developed kind. In this brief sketch it has been impossible to do more than hint howsocial organization is relative to numbers, which in their turn arerelative to the skill with which the food-quest is carried on. Butif, up to a certain point, it be true that the structure of societydepends on its mass in a more or less physical way, there is to beborne in mind another aspect of the matter, which also has been hintedat as we went rapidly along. A good deal of intelligence has throughouthelped towards the establishing of the social order. If socialorganization is in part a natural result of the expansion of thepopulation, it is partly also, in the best sense of the word, anartificial creation of the human mind, which has exerted itself todevise modes of grouping whereby men might be enabled to work togetherin larger and ever larger wholes. Regarded, however, in the purely external way which a study of itsmere structure involves, society appears as a machine--that is to say, appears as the work of intelligence indeed, but not as itself instinctwith intelligence. In what follows we shall set the social machinemoving. We shall then have a better chance of obtaining an inner viewof the driving power. We shall find that we have to abandon the notionthat society is a machine. It is more, even, than an organism. It isa communion of souls--souls that, as so many independent, yetinterdependent, manifestations of the life-force, are pressingforward in the search for individuality and freedom. CHAPTER VIILAW The general plan of this little book being to start from the influencesthat determine man's destiny in a physical, external, necessary sortof way, and to work up gradually to the spiritual, internal, voluntaryfactors in human nature--that strange "compound of clay and flame"--itseems advisable to consider law before religion, and religion beforemorality, whether in its collective or individual aspect, for thefollowing reason. There is more sheer constraint to be discerned inlaw than in religion, whilst religion, in the historical sense whichidentifies it with organized cult, is more coercive in its mode ofregulating life than the moral reason, which compels by force ofpersuasion. To one who lives under civilized conditions the phrase "the strongarm of the law" inevitably suggests the policeman. Apart from policemen, magistrates, and the soldiers who in the last resort must be calledout to enforce the decrees of the community, it might appear that lawcould not exist. And certainly it is hard to admit that what is knownas mob-law is any law at all. For historical purposes, however, wemust be prepared to use the expression "law" rather widely. We mustbe ready to say that there is law wherever there is punishment on thepart of a human society, whether acting in the mass, or through itsrepresentatives. Punishment means the infliction of pain on one whois judged to have broken a social rule. Conversely, then, a law isany social rule to the infringement of which punishment is by usageattached. So long as it is recognized that a man breaks a social ruleat the risk of pain, and that it is the business of everybody, or ofsomebody armed with the common authority, to make that risk a realityfor the offender, there is law within the meaning of the term as itexists for anthropology. Punishment, however, is by its very nature an exceptional measure. It is only because the majority are content to follow a social rule, that law and punishment are possible at all. If, again, every onehabitually obeys the social rules, law ceases to exist, because itis unnecessary. Now, one reason why it is hard to find any law inprimitive society is because, in a general way of speaking, no onedreams of breaking the social rules. Custom is king, nay tyrant, in primitive society. When Captain Cookasked the chiefs of Tahiti why they ate apart and alone, they simplyreplied, "Because it is right. " And so it always is with the ruderpeoples. "'Tis the custom, and there's an end on't" is their notionof a sufficient reason in politics and ethics alike. Now that way liesa rigid conservatism. In the chapter on morality we shall try todiscover its inner springs, its psychological conditions. For thepresent, we may be content to regard custom from the outside, as thesocial habit of conserving all traditional practices for their ownsake and regardless of consequences. Of course, changes are bound tooccur, and do occur. But they are not supposed to occur. In theory, the social rules of primitive society are like "the law of the Medesand Persians which altereth not. " This absolute respect for custom has its good and its bad sides. Onthe one hand, it supplies the element of discipline; without whichany society is bound soon to fall to pieces. We are apt to think ofthe savage as a freakish creature, all moods--at one moment a friend, at the next moment a fiend. So he might be, if it were not for thesocial drill imposed by his customs. So he is, if you destroy hiscustoms, and expect him nevertheless to behave as an educated andreasonable being. Given, then, a primitive society in a healthy anduncontaminated condition, its members will invariably be found to beon the average more law-abiding, as judged from the standpoint of theirown law, than is the case any civilized state. But now we come to the bad side of custom. Its conserving influenceextends to all traditional practices, however unreasonable orperverted. In that amber any fly is apt to be enclosed. Hence thewhimsicalities of savage custom. In _Primitive Culture_ Dr. Tylortells a good story about the Dyaks of Borneo. The white man's way ofchopping down a tree by notching out V-shaped cuts was not accordingto Dyak custom. Hence, any Dyak caught imitating the European fashionwas punished by a fine. And yet so well aware were they that this methodwas an improvement on their own that, when they could trust each othernot to tell, they would surreptitiously use it. These same Dyaks, itmay be added, are, according to Mr. A. R. Wallace, the best of observers, "among the most pleasing of savages. " They are good-natured, mild, and by no means bloodthirsty in the ordinary relations of life. Yetthey are well known to be addicted to the horrid practice ofhead-hunting. "It was a custom, " Mr. Wallace explains, "and as a customwas observed, but it did not imply any extraordinary barbarism or moraldelinquency. " The drawback, then, to a reign of pure custom is this: Meaninglessinjunctions abound, since the value of a traditional practice doesnot depend on its consequences, but simply on the fact that it is thepractice; and this element of irrationality is enough to perplex, tillit utterly confounds, the mind capable of rising above routine andreflecting on the true aims and ends of the social life. How to breakthrough "the cake of custom, " as Bagehot has called it, is the hardestlesson that humanity has ever had to learn. Customs have often beenbroken up by the clashing of different societies; but in that casethey merely crystallize again into new shapes. But to break throughcustom by the sheer force of reflection, and so to make rationalprogress possible, was the intellectual feat of one people, the ancientGreeks; and it is at least highly doubtful if, without their leadership, a progressive civilization would have existed to-day. It may be added in parenthesis that customs may linger on indefinitely, after losing, through one cause or another, their place amongst thevital interests of the community. They are, or at any rate seem, harmless; their function is spent. Hence, whilst perhaps the humblerfolk still take them more or less seriously, the leaders of societyare not at pains to suppress them. Nor would they always find it easyto do so. Something of the primeval man lurks in us all; and these"survivals, " as they are termed by the anthropologist, may often inlarge part correspond to impulses that are by no means dead in us, but rather sleep; and are hence liable to be reawakened, if theenvironment happens to supply the appropriate stimulus. Witness thefact that survivals, especially when the whirligig of social changebrings the uneducated temporarily to the fore, have a way of blossomingforth into revivals; and the state may in consequence have to undergosomething equivalent to an operation for appendicitis. The study ofso-called survivals, therefore, is a most important branch ofanthropology, which cannot unfortunately in this hasty sketch be givenits due. It would seem to coincide with the central interest of whatis known as folk-lore. Folk-lore, however, tends to broaden out tillit becomes almost indistinguishable from general anthropology. Thereare at least two reasons for this. Firstly, the survivals of customamongst advanced nations, such as the ancient Greeks or the modernBritish, are to be interpreted mainly by comparison with the similarinstitutions still flourishing amongst ruder peoples. Secondly, allthese ruder peoples themselves, without exception, have theirsurvivals too. Their customs fall as it were into two layers. On topis the live part of the fire. Underneath are smouldering ashes, which, though dying out on the whole, are yet liable here and there to rekindleinto flame. So much for custom as something on the face of it distinct from law, inasmuch as it seems to dispense with punishment. It remains to note, however, that brute force lurks behind custom, in the form of whatBagehot has called "the persecuting tendency. " Just a boy at schoolwho happens to offend against the unwritten code has his life madea burden by the rest of his mates, so in the primitive community thefear of a rough handling causes "I must not" to wait upon "I dare not. "One has only to read Mr. Andrew Lang's instructive story of the fateof "Why Why, the first Radical, " to realize how amongst savages--andis it so very different amongst ourselves?--it pays much better tobe respectable than to play the moral hero. * * * * * Let us pass on to examine the beginnings of punitive law. After all, even under the sway of custom, casual outbreaks are liable to occur. Some one's passions will prove too much for him, and there will bean accident. What happens then in the primitive society? Let us firstconsider one of the very unorganized communities at the bottom of theevolutionary scale; as, for example, the little Negritos of the AndamanIslands. Their justice, explains Mr. Man, in his excellent accountof these people, is administered by the simple method of allowing theaggrieved party to take the law into his own hands. This he usuallydoes by flinging a burning faggot at the offender, or by dischargingan arrow at him, though more frequently near him. Meanwhile all otherswho may be present are apt to beat a speedy retreat, carrying off asmuch of their property as their haste will allow, and remaining hidin the jungle until sufficient time has elapsed for the quarrel tohave blown over. Sometimes, however, friends interpose, and seek todeprive the disputants of their weapons. Should, however, one of themkill the other, nothing is necessarily said or done to him by the rest. Yet conscience makes cowards of us all; so that the murderer, fromprudential motives, will not uncommonly absent himself until he judgesthat the indignation of the victim's friends has sufficiently abated. Now here we seem to find want of social structure and want of law goingtogether as cause and effect. The "friends" of whom we hear need tobe organized into a police force. If we now turn to totemic society, with its elaborate clan-system, it is quite another story. Blood-revenge ranks amongst the foremost of the clansman's socialobligations. Over the whole world it stands out by itself as the typeof all that law means for the savage. Within the clan, indeed, themaxim of blood for blood does not hold; though there may be anotherkind of punitive law put into force by the totemites against an erringbrother, as, for instance, if they slay one of their number fordisregarding the exogamic rule and consorting with a woman who isall-one-flesh with him. But, between clans of the same tribe, thesystem of blood-revenge requires strict reprisals, according to theprinciple that some one on the other side, though not necessarily theactual murderer, must die the death. This is known as the principleof collective responsibility; and one of the most interesting problemsrelating to the evolution of early law is to work out how individualresponsibility gradually develops out of collective, until at length, even as each man does, so likewise he suffers. The collective method of settling one's grievances is natural enough, when men are united into groups bound together by the closest ofsentimental ties, and on the other hand there is no central andimpartial authority to arbitrate between the parties. One of our crewhas been killed by one of your crew. So a stand-up fight takes place. Of course we should like to get at the right man if we could; but, failing that, we are out to kill some one in return, just to teachyour crew a lesson. Comparatively early in the day, however, it strikesthe savage mind that there are degrees of responsibility. For instance, some one has to call the avenging party together, and to lead it. Hewill tend to be a real blood-relation, son, father, or brother. Thushe stands out as champion, whilst the rest are in the position of mereseconds. Correspondingly, the other side will tend to thrust forwardthe actual offender into the office of counter-champion. There isdirect evidence to show that, amongst Australians, Eskimo, and so on, whole groups at one time met in battle, but later on were representedby chosen individuals, in the persons of those who were principalsin the affair. Thus we arrive at the duel. The transition is seen insuch a custom as that of the Port Lincoln black-fellows. The brotherof the murdered man must engage the murderer; but any one on eitherside who might care to join in the fray was at liberty to do so. Henceit is but a step to the formal duel, as found, for instance, amongstthe Apaches of North America. Now the legal duel is an advance on the collective bear-fight, if onlybecause it brings home to the individual perpetrator of the crime thathe will have to answer for it. Cranz, the great authority on the Eskimoof Greenland, naively remarks that a Greenlander dare not murder orotherwise wrong another, since it might possibly cost him the lifeof his best friend. Did the Greenlander know that it would probablycost him his own life, his sense of responsibility, we may surmise, might be somewhat quickened. On the other hand, duelling is not asatisfactory way of redressing the balance, since it merely gives thepowerful bully an opportunity of adding a second murder to the first. Hence the ordeal marks an advance in legal evolution. A good manyAustralian peoples, for example, have reached the stage of requiringthe murderer to submit to a shower of spears or boomerangs at the handsof the aggrieved group, on the mutual understanding that theblood-revenge ends here. Luckily, however, for the murderer, it often takes time to bring himto book; and angry passions are apt in the meanwhile to subside. Theruder savages are not so bloodthirsty as we are apt to imagine. Warhas evolved like everything else; and with it has evolved the man wholikes fighting for its own sake. So, in place of a life for a life, compensation--"pacation, " as it is technically termed--comes to berecognized as a reasonable _quid pro quo_. Constantly we find customat the half-way stage. If the murderer is caught soon, he is killed;but if he can stave off the day of justice, he escapes with a fine. When private property has developed, the system of blood-fines becomesmost elaborate. Amongst the Iroquois the manslayer must redeem himselffrom death by means of no less than sixty presents to the injured kin;one to draw the axe out of the wound, a second to wipe the blood away, a third to restore peace to the land, and so forth. According to thecollective principle, the clansmen on one side share the price ofatonement, and on the other side must tax themselves in order to makeit up. Shares are on a scale proportionate to degrees of relationship. Or, again, further nice calculations are required, if it is soughtto adjust the gross amount of the payment to the degree of guilt. Henceit is not surprising that, when a more or less barbarous people, suchas the Anglo-Saxons, came to require a written law, it should be almostentirely taken up by regulations about blood-fines, that had becometoo complicated for the people any longer to keep in their heads. So far we have been considering the law of blood-revenge as purelyan affair between the clans concerned; the rest of the tribal publickeeping aloof, very much in the style of the Andamanese bystanderswho retire into the jungle when there is a prospect of a row. But withthe development of a central authority, whether in the shape of therule of many or of one, the public control of the blood-feud beginsto assert itself; for the good reason that endless vendetta is adissolving force, which the larger and more stable type of societycannot afford to tolerate if it is to survive. The following are afew instances illustrative of the transition from private to publicjurisdiction. In North America, Africa, and elsewhere, we find thechief or chiefs pronouncing sentence, but the clan or family left tocarry it out as best they can. Again, the kin may be entrusted withthe function of punishment, but obliged to carry it out in the wayprescribed by the authorities; as, for instance, in Abyssinia, wherethe nearest relation executes the manslayer in the presence of theking, using exactly the same kind of weapon as that with which themurder was committed. Or the right of the kin to punish dwindles toa mere form. Thus in Afghanistan the elders make a show of handingover the criminal to his accusers, who must, however, comply strictlywith the wishes of the assembly; whilst in Samoa the offender was boundand deposited before the family "as if to signify that he lay at theirmercy, " and the chief saw to the rest. Finally, the state, in the personof its executive officers, both convicts and executes. When the state is represented by a single ruler, crime tends to becomean offence against "the king's peace"--or, in the language of Romanlaw, against his "majesty. " Henceforward, the easy-going system ofgetting off with a fine is at an end, and murder is punished with theutmost sternness. In such a state as Dahomey, in the old days ofindependence, there may have been a good deal of barbarity displayedin the administration of justice, but at any rate human life was noless effectively protected by the law than it was, say, in mediaevalEurope. * * * * * The evolution of the punishment of murder affords the typical instanceof the development of a legal sanction in primitive society. Otherforms, however, of the forcible repression of wrong-doing deserve amore or less passing notice. Adultery is, even amongst the ruder peoples, a transgression that isreckoned only a degree less grave than manslaughter; especially asmanslaughter is a usual consequence of it, quarrels about womenconstituting one of the chief sources of trouble in the savage world. With a single interesting exception, the stages in the developmentof the law against adultery are exactly the same as in the case alreadyexamined. Whole kins fight about it. Then duelling is substituted. Then duelling gives way to the ordeal. Then, after the penalty haslong wavered between death and a fine, fines become the rule, so longas the kins are allowed to settle the matter. If, however, the communitycomes to take cognizance of the offence, severer measures ensue. Theone noticeable difference in the two developments is the following. Whereas murder is an offence against the chief's "majesty, " and assuch a criminal offence, adultery, like theft, with which primitivelaw is wont to associate it as an offence against property, tends toremain a purely civil affair. Kafir law, for example, according toMaclean, draws this distinction very clearly. It remains to add as regards adultery that, so far, we have only beenconsidering the punishment that falls on the guilty man. The guiltywoman's fate is a matter relating to a distinct department of primitivelaw. Family jurisdiction, as we find it, for instance, in an advancedcommunity such as ancient Rome, meant the right of the _pater familias_, the head of the house, to subject his _familia_, or household, whichincluded his wife, his children (up to a certain age), and his slaves, to such domestic discipline as he saw fit. Such family jurisdictionwas more or less completely independent of state jurisdiction; and, indeed, has remained so in Europe until comparatively recent times. What light, then, does the study of primitive society throw on thefirst beginnings of family law as administered by the house-father?To answer this question at all adequately would involve the writingof many pages on the evolution of the family. For our present purpose, all turns on the distinction between the matripotestal and thepatripotestal family. If the man and the woman were left to fight itout alone, the latter, despite the "shrewish sanction" that shepossesses in her tongue, must inevitably bow to the principle thatmight is right. But, as long as marriage is matrilocal--that is tosay, allows the wife to remain at home amongst male defenders of herown clan--she can safely lord it over her stranger husband; and therecan scarcely be adultery on her part, since she can always obtaindivorce by simply saying, Go! Things grow more complicated when thewife lives amongst her husband's people, and, nevertheless, the systemof counting descent favours her side of the family and not his. Doesthe mere fact that descent is matrilineal tend to imply on the wholethat the mother's kin take a more active interest in her, and are moreeffective in protecting her from hurt, whether undeserved or deserved?It is no easy problem to settle. Dr. Steinmetz, however, in hisimportant work on _The Evolution of Punishment_ (in German), seeksto show that under mother-right, in all its forms taken together, theadulteress is more likely to escape with a light penalty, or with noneat all, than under father-right. Whatever be the value of thestatistical method that he employs, at any rate it makes out the deathpenalty to be inflicted in only a third of his cases under the formersystem, but in about half under the latter. * * * * * We must be content with a mere glance at other types of wrong-doingwhich, whilst sooner or later recognized by the law of the community, affect its members in their individual capacity. Theft and slanderare cases in point. Amongst the ruder savages there cannot be much stealing, because thereis next to nothing to steal. Nevertheless, groups are apt to quarrelover hunting and fishing claims; whilst the division of the spoilsof the chase may give rise to disputes, which call for the interpositionof leading men. We even occasionally find amongst Australians theformal duel employed to decide cases of the violation ofproperty-rights. Not, however, until the arts of life have advanced, and wealth has created the two classes of "haves" and "have-nots, "does theft become an offence of the first magnitude, which the centralauthority punishes with corresponding severity. As regards slander, though it might seem a slight matter, it must beremembered that the savage cannot stand up for a moment again an adversepublic opinion; so that to rob him of his good name is to take awayall that makes life worth living. To shout out, Long-nose! Sunken-eyes!or Skin-and-bone! usually leads to a fight in Andamanese circles, asMr. Man informs us. Nor, again, is it conducive to peace in Australiansociety to sing as follows about the staying-powers of afellow-tribesman temporarily overtaken by European liquor: "Spiritlike emu--as a whirlwind--pursues--lays violent hold ontravelling--uncle of mine (this being particularly derisive)--tiredout with fatigue--throws himself down helpless. " Amongst more advancedpeoples, therefore, slander and abuse are sternly checked. Theyconstitute a ground for a civil action in Kafir law; whilst we evenhear of an African tribe, the Ba-Ngindo, who rejoice in the specialinstitution of a peace-maker, whose business is to compose troublesarising from this vexatious source. * * * * * Let us now turn to another class of offences, such as, from the first, are regarded as so prejudicial to the public interest that thecommunity as a whole must forcibly put them down. Cases of what may be termed military discipline fall under this head. Even when the functions of the commander are undeveloped, and war isstill "an affair of armed mobs, " shirking--a form of crime which, todo justice to primitive society, is rare--is promptly and effectivelyresented by the host. Amongst American tribes the coward's arms aretaken away from him; he is made to eat with the dogs; or perhaps ashower of arrows causes him to "run the gauntlet. " The traitor, onthe other hand, is inevitably slain without mercy--tied to a tree andshot, or, it may be, literally hacked to pieces. Naturally, with theevolution of war, these spontaneous outbursts of wrath and disgustgive way to a more formal system of penalties. To trace out thisdevelopment fully, however, would entail a lengthy disquisition onthe growth of kingship in one of its most important aspects. If constantfighting turns the tribe into something like a standing army, theposition of war-lord, as, for instance, amongst the Zulus, is boundto become both permanent and of all-embracing authority. There is, however, another side to the history of kingship, as the followingconsiderations will help to make clear. Public safety is construed by the ruder type of man not so much interms of freedom from physical danger--unless such a danger, the onsetof another tribe, for instance, is actually imminent--as in terms offreedom from spiritual, or mystic, danger. The fear of ill-luck, inother words, is the bogy that haunts him night and day. Hence his lifeis enmeshed, as Dr. Frazer puts it, in a network of taboos. A taboois anything that one must not do lest ill-luck befall. And ill-luckis catching, like an infectious disease. If my next-door neighbourbreaks a taboo, and brings down a visitation on himself, depend uponit some of its unpleasant consequences will be passed on to me andmine. Hence, if some one has committed an act that is not merely acrime but a sin, it is every one's concern to wipe out that sin; whichis usually done by wiping out the sinner. Mobbish feeling alwaysinclines to violence. In the mob, as a French psychologist has said, ideas neutralize each other, but emotions aggrandize each other. Nowwar-feeling is a mobbish experience that, I daresay, some of my readershave tasted; and we have seen how it leads the unorganized levy ofa savage tribe to make short work of the coward and traitor. Butwar-fever is a mild variety of mobbish experience as compared withpanic in any form, and with superstitious panic most of all. Beingattacked in the dark, as it were, causes the strongest to lose theirheads. Hence it is not hard to understand how it comes about that the violatorof a taboo is the central object of communal vengeance in primitivesociety. The most striking instance of such a taboo-breaker is theman or woman who disregards the prohibition against marriage withinthe kin--in other words, violates the law of exogamy. To be thus guiltyof incest is to incite in the community at large a horror which, ventingitself in what Bagehot calls a "wild spasm of wild justice, " involvescertain death for the offender. To interfere with a grave, to pry intoforbidden mysteries, to eat forbidden meats, and so on, are furtherexamples of transgressions liable to be thus punished. Falling under the same general category of sin, though distinct fromthe violation of taboo, is witchcraft. This consists in trafficking, or at any rate in being supposed to traffic, with powers of evil forsinister and anti-social ends. We have only to remember how England, in the seventeenth century, could work itself up into a frenzy on thisaccount to realize how, in an African society even of the better sort, the "smelling-out" and destroying of a witch may easily become ageneral panacea for quieting the public nerves. When crimes and sins, affairs of state and affairs of church thusoverlap and commingle in primitive jurisprudence, it is no wonder ifthe functions of those who administer the law should tend to displaya similar fusion of aspects. The chief, or king, has a "divine right, "and is himself in one or another sense divine, even whilst he takesthe lead in regard to all such matters as are primarily secular. Theearliest written codes, such as the Mosaic Books of the Law, with theirstrange medley of injunctions concerning things profane and sacred, accurately reflect the politico-religious character of all primitiveauthority. Indeed, it is only by an effort of abstraction that the present chapterhas been confined to the subject of law, as distinguished from thesubject of the following chapter, namely, religion. Any crime, asnotably murder, and even under certain circumstances theft, is aptto be viewed by the ruder peoples either as a violation of taboo, oras some closely related form of sin. Nay, within the limits of theclan, legal punishment can scarcely be said to be in theory possible;the sacredness of the blood-tie lending to any chastisement that maybe inflicted on an erring kinsman the purely religious complexion ofa sacrifice, an act of excommunication, a penance, or what not. Thusalmost insensibly we are led on to the subject of religion from thestudy of the legal sanction; this very term "sanction, " which isderived from Roman law, pointing in the same direction, since itoriginally stood for the curse which was appended in order to securethe inviolability of a legal enactment. CHAPTER VIIIRELIGION "How can there be a History of Religions?" once objected a Frenchsenator. "For either one believes in a religion, and then everythingin it appears natural; or one does not believe in it, and theneverything in it appears absurd!" This was said some thirty years ago, when it was a question of foundingthe now famous chair of the General History of Religions at the Collegede France. At that time, such chairs were almost unheard of. Now-a-daysthe more important universities of the world, to reckon them alone, can show at least thirty. What is the significance of this change? It means that the parochialview of religion is out of date. The religious man has to be a manof the world, a man of the wider world, an anthropologist. He has torecognize that there is a "soul of truth" in other religions besideshis own. It will be replied--and I fully realize the force of theobjection--that history, and therefore anthropology, has nothing todo with truth or falsehood--in a word, with value. In strict theory, this is so. Its business is to describe and generalize fact; andreligion from first to last might be pure illusion or even delusion, and it would be fact none the less on that account. At the same time, being men, we all find it hard, nay impossible, tostudy mankind impartially. When we say that we are going to play thehistorian, or the anthropologist, and to put aside for the time beingall consideration of the moral of the story we seek to unfold, we aremerely undertaking to be as fair all round as we can. Willy nilly, however, we are sure to colour our history, to the extent, at any rate, of taking a hopeful or a gloomy view of man's past achievements, asbearing on his present condition and his future prospects. In the same way, then, I do not believe that we can help thinking toourselves all the time, when we are tracing out the history ofworld-religion, either that there is "nothing in it" at all, or thatthere is "something in it, " whatever form it assume, and whether ithold itself to be revealed (as it almost always does) or not. On thelatter estimate of religion, however, it is still quite possible tojudge that one form of religion is infinitely higher and better thananother. Religion, regarded historically, is in evolution. The bestform of religion that we can attain to is inevitably the best for us;but, as a worse form preceded it, so a better form, we must allow andeven desire, may follow. Now, frankly, I am one of those who take themore sympathetic view of historical religion; an I say so at once, in case my interpretation of the facts turn out to be coloured by thissanguine assumption. Moreover, I think that we may easily exaggerate the differences inculture and, more especially, in religious insight and understandingthat exist between the ruder peoples and ourselves. In view of ourcommon hope, and our common want of knowledge, I would rather identifyreligion with a general striving of humanity than with the exclusivepretension of any one people or sect. Who knows, for instance, thefinal truth about what happens to the soul at death? I am quite readyto admit, indeed, that some of us can see a little farther into a brickwall than, say, Neanderthal man. Yet when I find facts that appearto prove that Neanderthal man buried his dead with ceremony, and tothe best of his means equipped them for a future life, I openly confessthat I would rather stretch out a hand across the ages and greet himas my brother and fellow-pilgrim than throw in my lot with theself-righteous folk who seem to imagine this world and the next tohave been created for their exclusive benefit. Now the trouble with anthropologists is to find a working definitionof religion on which they can agree. Christianity is religion, allwould have to admit. Again, Mahomedanism is religion, for allanthropological purposes. But, when a naked savage "dances" hisgod--when the spoken part of the rite simply consists, as amongst thesouth-eastern Australians, in shouting "Daramulun! Daramulun!" (thegod's name), so that we cannot be sure whether the dancers are indulgingin a prayer or in an incantation--is that religion? Or, worse still, suppose that no sort of personal god can be discovered at the backof the performance--which consists, let us say, as amongst the centralAustralians, in solemnly rubbing a bull-roarer on the stomach, so thatits mystic virtues may cause the man to become "good" and "glad" and"strong" (for that is his own way of describing the spiritualeffects)--is that religion, in any sense that can link it historicallywith, say, the Christian type of religion? No, say some, these low-class dealings with the unseen are magic, notreligion. The rude folk in question do not go the right way aboutputting themselves into touch with the unseen. They try to put pressureon the unseen, to control it. They ought to conciliate it, by bowingto its will. Their methods may be earnest, but they are not propitiatory. There is too much "My will be done" about it all. Unfortunately, two can play at this game of _ex-parte_ definition. The more unsympathetic type of historian, relentlessly pursuing theclue afforded by this distinction between control and conciliation, professes himself able to discover plenty of magic even in the higherforms of religion. The rite as such--say, churchgoing as such--appearsto be reckoned by some of the devout as not without a certain intrinsicefficacy. "Very well, " says this school, "then a good deal of averageChristianity is magic. " My own view, then, is that this distinction will only lead us intotrouble. And, to my mind, it adds to the confusion if it be furtherlaid down, as some would do, that this sort of dealing with the unseenwhich, on the face of it, and according to our notions, seems rathermechanical (being, as it were, an effort to get a hold on some hiddenforce) is so far from being akin to religion that its true affinityis with natural science. The natural science of to-day, I quite admit, has in part evolved out of experiments with the occult; just as law, fine art, and almost every other one of our higher interests havelikewise done. But just so long and so far as it was occult science, I would maintain, it was not natural science at all, but, as it were, rather supernatural science. Besides, much of our natural science hasgrown up out of straightforward attempts to carry out mechanical workon industrial lines--to smelt iron, let us say; but since then, asnow, there were numerous trade-secrets, an atmosphere of mystery wasapt to surround the undertaking, which helped to give it the air ofa trafficking with the uncanny. But because science then, as even nowsometimes, was thought by the ignorant to be somehow closely associatedwith all the powers of evil, it does not follow that then or now thetrue affinity of science must be with the devil. Magic and religion, according to the view I would support, belong tothe same department of human experience--one of the two greatdepartments, the two worlds, one might almost call them, into whichhuman experience, throughout its whole history, has been divided. Together they belong to the supernormal world, the _x_-region ofexperience, the region of mental twilight. Magic I take to include all bad ways, and religion all good ways, ofdealing with the supernormal--bad and good, of course, not as we mayhappen to judge them, but as the society concerned judges them. Sometimes, indeed, the people themselves hardly know where to drawthe line between the two; and, in that case, the anthropologist cannotwell do it for them. But every primitive society thinks witchcraftbad. Witchcraft consists in leaguing oneself with supernormal powersof evil in order to effect selfish and anti-social ends. Witchcraft, then, is genuine magic--black magic of the devil's colour. On the otherhand, every primitive society also distinguishes certain salutary waysof dealing with supernormal powers. All these ways taken togetherconstitute religion. For the rest, there will always be a mass of moreor less evaporated beliefs, going with practices that have more orless lost their hold on the community. These belong to the folklorewhich every people has. Under this or some closely related head mustalso be set down the mass of mere wonder-tales, due to the play offancy, and without direct bearing on the serious pursuits of life. The world to which neither magic nor religion belongs, but to whichphysical science, the knowledge of how to deal mechanically withmaterial things, does belong wholly, is the workaday world, the regionof normal, commonplace, calculable happenings. With our telescopesand microscopes we see farther and deeper into things than does thesavage. Yet the savage has excellent eyes. What he sees he sees. Consequently, we must duly allow for the fact that there is for him, as well as for us, a "natural, " that is to say, normal and workadayworld; even though it be far narrower in extent than ours. The savageis not perpetually spook-haunted. On the contrary, when he is engagedon the daily round, and all is going well, he is as careless and happyas a child. But savage life has few safeguards. Crisis is a frequent, ifintermittent, element in it. Hunger, sickness and war are examplesof crisis. Birth and death are crises. Marriage is usually regardedby humanity as a crisis. So is initiation--the turning-point in one'scareer, when one steps out into the world of men. Now what, in termsof mind, does crisis mean? It means that one is at one's wits' end;that the ordinary and expected has been replaced by the extraordinaryand unexpected; that we are projected into the world of the unknown. And in that world of the unknown we must miserably abide until, somehow, confidence is restored. Psychologically regarded, then, the function of religion is to restoremen's confidence when it is shaken by crisis. Men do not seek crisis;they would always run away from it, if they could. Crisis seeks them;and, whereas the feebler folk are ready to succumb, the bolder spiritsface it. Religion is the facing of the unknown. It is the courage init that brings comfort. [6] [Footnote 6: The courage involved in all live religion normallycoexists with a certain modesty or humility. I have tried to work outthis point elsewhere in a short study entitled _The Birth ofHumility_. ] We must go on, however, to consider religion sociologically. A religionis the effort to face crisis, so far as that effort is organized bysociety in some particular way. A religion is congregational--thatis to say, serves the ends of a number of persons simultaneously. Itis traditional--that is to say, has served the ends of successivegenerations of persons. Therefore inevitably it has standardized amethod. It involves a routine, a ritual. Also it involves some sortof conventional doctrine, which is, as it were, the inner side of theritual--its lining. Now in what follows I shall insist, in the first instance, on thissociological side of religion. For anthropological purposes it is thesounder plan. We must altogether eschew that "Robinson Crusoe method"which consists in reconstructing the creed of a solitary savage, whois supposed to evolve his religion out of his inner consciousness:"The mountain frowns, therefore it is alive"; "I move about in my dreamswhilst my body lies still, therefore I have a soul, " and so on. Nodoubt somebody had to think these things, for they are thoughts. Buthe did not think them, at any rate did not think them out, alone. Menthought them out together; nay, whole ages of living and thinkingtogether have gone to make them what they are. So a social method isneeded to explain them. The religion of a savage is part of his custom; nay, rather, it ishis whole custom so far as it appears sacred--so far as it coerceshim by way of his imagination. Between him and the unknown standsnothing but his custom. It is his all-in-all, his stand-by, his faithand his hope. Being thus the sole source of his confidence, his custom, so far as his imagination plays about it, becomes his "luck. " We maysay that any and every custom, in so far as it is regarded as lucky, is a religious rite. Hence the conservatism inherent in religion. "Nothing, " says RobertsonSmith, "appeals so strongly as religion to the conservativeinstincts. " "The history of religion, " once exclaimed Dr. Frazer, "isa long attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason, to find a soundtheory for absurd practice. " At first sight one is apt to see nothingbut the absurdities in savage custom and religion. After all, theseare what strike us most, being the curiosity-hunters that we all are. But savage custom and religion must be taken as a whole, the bad sidewith the good. Of course, if we have to do with a primitive societyon the down-grade--and very few that have been "civilizaded, " as JohnStuart Mill terms it, at the hands of the white man are not on thedown-grade--its disorganized and debased custom no longer serves avital function. But a healthy society is bound, in a wholesale way, to have a healthy custom. Though it may go about the business in aqueer and roundabout fashion, it must hit off the general requirementsof the situation. Therefore I shall not waste time, as I might easilydo, in piling up instances of outlandish "superstitions, " whetherhorrible and disgusting, from our more advanced point of view, ormerely droll and silly. On the contrary, I would rather make it myworking assumption that, with all its apparent drawbacks, the religionof a human society, if the latter be a going concern, is alwayssomething to be respected. In considering, however, the relation of religion to custom, we aremet by the apparent difficulty that, whereas custom implies "Do, " theprevailing note of primitive religion would seem rather to consistin "Do not. " But there is really no antagonism between them on thisaccount. As the old Greek proverb has it, "There is only one way ofgoing right, but there are infinite ways of going wrong. " Hence, anice observance of custom of itself involves endless taboos. Sincea given line of conduct is lucky, then this or that alternative courseof behaviour must be unlucky. There is just this difference betweenpositive customs or rites, which cause something to be done, andnegative customs or rites, which cause something to be left undone, that the latter appeal more exclusively to the imagination for theirsanction, and are therefore more conspicuously and directly a partof religion. "Why should I do this?" is answered well-nigh sufficientlyby saying, "Because it is the custom, because it is right. " It seemshardly necessary to add, "Because it will bring luck. " But "Why shouldI not do something else instead?" meets, in the primitive society, with the invariable answer, "Because, if you do, something awful willhappen to us all. " What precise shape the ill-luck will take need notbe specified. The suggestion rather gains than loses by theindefiniteness of its appeal to the imagination. * * * * * To understand more clearly the difference between negative andpositive types of custom as associated with religion, let us examinein some detail an example of each. It will be well to select our casesfrom amongst those that show the custom and the religion to be quiteinseparable--to be, in short, but two aspects of one and the same fact. Now nothing could be more commonplace and secular a custom than thatof providing for one's dinner. Yet for primitive society this customtends to be likewise a rite--a rite which may, however, be mainlynegative and precautionary, or mainly positive and practical incharacter, as we shall now see. The Todas, so well described by Dr. Rivers, are a small community, less than a thousand all told, who have retired out of the stress ofthe world into the fastnesses of the Nilgiri Hills, in southern India, where they spend a safe but decidedly listless life. They are in abackwater, and are likely to remain there. At any rate, their religionis not such as to make them more enterprising. Gods they may be saidto have none. The bare names of certain deities of the hill-tops areretained, but whether these were once the honoured gods of the Todasor, as some think, those of a former race, certain it is that thereis more shadow than substance about them now. The real religion ofthe people centres round a dairy-ritual. From a practical and economicpoint of view, the work of the dairy consists in converting the milkof their buffaloes into the butter and buttermilk which constitutetheir staple diet. From a religious point of view, it consists inconverting something they dare not eat into something they can eat. Many, though not all, of their buffaloes are sacred, and their milkmay not be drunk. The reason why it may not be drunk anthropologistsmay cast about to discover, but the Todas themselves do not know. Allthat they know, and are concerned to know, is that things would somehowall go wrong, if any one were foolish enough to commit such a sin. So in the Toda temple, which is a dairy, the Toda priest, who is thedairyman, sets about rendering the sacred products harmless. The dairyhas two compartments--one sacred, the other profane. In the first arestored the sacred vessels, into which the milk is placed when it comesfrom the buffaloes, and in which it is turned into butter and buttermilkwith the help of some of the previous brew, this having meanwhile beenput by in an especially sacred vessel. In the second compartment areprofane vessels, destined to receive the butter and buttermilk, afterthey have been carefully transferred from the sacred vessels with thehelp of an intermediary vessel, which stands exactly on the linebetween the two compartments. This transference, being carried outto the accompaniment of all sorts of reverential gestures andutterances, secures such a profanation of the sacred substance as iswithout the evil consequences that would otherwise be entailed. Thusthe ritual is essentially precautionary. A taboo is the hinge of thewhole affair. And the tendency of such a negative type of religion is to pileprecautions on precautions. Thus the dairyman, in order to be equalto his sacred office, must observe taboos without end. He must becelibate. He must avoid all contact with the dead. He is limited tocertain kinds of food; which, moreover, must be prepared in a certainway, and consumed in a certain place. His drink, again, is a specialmilk, which must be poured out with prescribed formulas. He isinaccessible to ordinary folk save on certain days and in certain ways, their mode of approach, their salutations, his greeting in reply, beingall regulated with the utmost nicety. He can only wear a special garb. He must never cut his hair. His nails must be suffered to grow long. And so on and so forth. Such disabilities, indeed, are wont tocircumscribe the life of all sacred persons, and can be matched fromevery part of the world. But they may fairly be cited here, as helpingto fill in the picture of what I have called the precautionary ornegative type of religious ritual. Further, there is something rotten in the state of Toda religion. Thedairymen struck Dr. Rivers as very slovenly in the performance of theirduties, as well as vague and inaccurate in their accounts of what oughtto be done. Indeed, it was hard to find persons willing to undertakethe office. Ritual duties involving uncomfortable taboos were apt tobe thrust on youngsters. The youngsters, being youngsters, wouldprobably violate the taboos; but anyway that was their look-out. Fromevasions to fictions is but a step. Hence when an unclean personapproached the dairyman, the latter would simply pretend not to seehim. Or the rule that he must not enter a hut, if women were within, would be circumvented by simply removing from the dwelling the threeemblems of womanhood, the pounder, the sieve, and the sweeper;whereupon his "face was saved. " Now wherefore all this lack ofearnestness? Dr. Rivers thinks that too much ritual was the reason. I agree; but would venture to add, "too much negative ritual. " Areligion that is all dodging must produce a sneaking kind ofworshipper. Now let us turn another type of primitive religion that is equallyidentified with the food-quest, but allied to its positive and activefunctions, which it seeks to help out. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen havegiven us a most minute account of certain ceremonies of the Arunta, a people of central Australia. These ceremonies they have named_Intichiuma_, and the name will probably stick, though there is reasonto believe that the native word for them is really something different. Their purpose is to make the food-animals and food-plants multiplyand prosper. Each animal or plant is attended to by the group thathas it for a totem. (Totemism amongst this very remarkable people hasnothing to do either with exogamy or with lineage; but that is a subjectinto which it is impossible to go here. ) The rites vary considerablyfrom totem to totem, but a typical case or two may be cited. The witchetty-grub men, for instance, want the grubs to multiply, thatthere may be plenty for their fellows to eat. So they wend their wayalong a certain path which tradition declares to have been traversedby the great leader of the witchetty-grubs of the days of long ago. (These were grubs transformed into men, who became by reincarnationancestors of the present totemites. ) The path brings them to a placein the hills where there is a big stone surrounded by many small stones. The big stone is the adult animal, the little stones are its eggs. So first they tap the big stone, chanting an invitation to it to layeggs. Then the master of the ceremonies rubs the stomach of eachtotemite with the little stones, and says, "You have eaten much food. " Or, again, the Kangaroo men repair to a place called Undiara. It isa picturesque spot. By the side of a water-hole that is sheltered bya tall gum-tree rises a curiously gnarled and weather-beaten face ofquartzite rock. About twenty feet from the base a ledge juts out. Whenthe totemites hold their ceremony, they repair to this ledge. For herein the days of long ago the ancestors who are now reincarnated in themcooked and ate kangaroo food; and here, moreover, the kangaroo animalsof that time deposited their spirit-parts. First the face of the rockbelow the ledge is decorated with long stripes of red ochre and whitegypsum, to represent the red fur and white bones of the kangaroo. Itis, in fact, one of those rock-paintings such as the palaeolithic menof Europe made in their caves. Then a number of men, say, seven oreight, mount upon the ledge, and, whilst the rest sing solemn chantsabout the prospective increase of the kangaroos, these men open veinsin their arms, so that the blood flows down freely upon the ceremonialstone. This is the first part of the rite. The second part is no lessinteresting. After the blood-letting, they hunt until they kill akangaroo. Thereupon the old men of the totem eat a little of the meat;then they smear some of the fat on the bodies of all the party; finally, they divide the flesh amongst them. Afterwards, the totemites painttheir bodies with stripes in imitation of the design upon the rock. A second hunt, followed by a second sacramental meal, concludes thewhole ceremony. That their meal is sacramental, a sort of communionservice, is proved by the fact that henceforth in an ordinary way theyallow themselves to partake of kangaroo meat at most but very sparingly, and of certain portions of the flesh not at all. One more example of these rites may be cited, in order to bring outthe earnestness of this type of religion, which is concerned with doing, instead of mere not-doing. There is none of the Toda perfunctorinesshere. It will be enough to glance at the commencement of the ritualof the honey-ant totemites. The master of the ceremonies places hishand as if he were shading his eyes, and gazes intently in the directionof the sacred place to which they are about to repair. As he does so, the rest kneel, forming a straight line behind him. In this positionthey remain for some time, whilst the leader chants in a subdued tone. Then all stand up. The company must now start. The leader, who hasfallen to the rear, that he may marshal the column in perfect line, gives the signal. Then they move off in single file, taking a directcourse to the holy ground, marching in perfect silence, and withmeasured step, as if something of the profoundest import were aboutto take place. I make no apology for describing these proceedings at some length. It is necessary to my argument to convey the impression that theessentials of religion are present in these apparently godlessobservances of the ruder peoples. They arise directly out of custom--inthis case the hunting custom. Their immediate design is to providethese people with their daily bread. Yet their appeal to theimagination--which in religion, as in science, art, and philosophy, is the impulse that presides over all progress, all creativeevolution--is such that the food-quest is charged with new and deepermeaning. Not bread alone, but something even more sustaining to thelife of man, is suggested by these tangled and obscure solemnities. They are penetrated by quickenings of sacrifice, prayer, and communion. They bring to bear on the need of the hour all the promise of thatmiraculous past, which not only cradled the race, but still yieldsit the stock of reincarnated soul-force that enables it to survive. If, then, these rites are part and parcel of mere magic, most, or all, of what the world knows as religion must be mere magic. But it is betterfor anthropology to call things by the names that they are known byin the world of men--that is, in the wider world, not in some corneror coterie of it. * * * * * In order to bring out more fully the second point that I have beentrying to make, namely, the close interdependence between religionand custom in primitive society, let me be allowed to quote one moreexample of the ritual of a rude people. And again let us resort tonative Australia, though this time to the south-eastern corner of it;since in Australia we have a cultural development on the whole verylow, having been as it were arrested through isolation, yet one thatturns out to be not incompatible with high religion in the making. Initiation in native Australia is the equivalent of what is knownamongst ourselves as the higher education. The only difference is that, with them, every one who is not judged utterly unfit is duly initiated;whereas, with us, the higher education is offered to some who are unfit, whilst many who are fit never have the luck to get it. Theinitiation-custom is intended to tide the boys over the difficult timeof puberty, and turn them into responsible men. The whole of the adultmales assist in the ceremonies. Special men, however, are told offto tutor the youth--a lengthy business, since it entails a retirement, perhaps for six months, into the bush with their charges; who are theretaught the tribal traditions, and are generally admonished, sometimesforcibly, for their good. Further, this is rather like a retirementinto a monastery for the young men, seeing that during all the timethey are strictly taboo, or in other words in a holy state that involvesmuch fasting and mortification of the flesh. At last comes the timewhen their actual passage across the threshold of manhood has to becelebrated. The rites may be described in one word as impressive. Society wishes to set a stamp on their characters, and believes instamping hard. Physically, then, the lads feel the force of society. A tooth is knocked out, they are tossed in the air to make them growtall, and so on--rites that, whilst they may have separate occult endsin view, are completely at one in being highly unpleasant. Spiritual means of education, however, are always more effective thanphysical, if designed and applied with sufficient wisdom. Thebull-roarer, of which something has been already said, furnishes theceremonies with a background of awe. It fills the woods, that surroundthe secret spot where the rites are held, with the rise and fall ofits weird music, suggestive of a mighty rushing wind, of spirits inthe air. Not until the boys graduate as men do they learn how the soundis produced. Even when they do learn this, the mystery of the voicespeaking through the chip of wood merely wings the imagination forloftier flights. Whatever else the high god of these mysteries, Daramulun, may be for these people--and undoubtedly all sorts of trainsof confused thinking meet in the notion of him--he is at any rate thegod of the bull-roarer, who has put his voice into the sacred instrument. But Daramulun is likewise endowed with a human form; for they set upan image of him rudely shaped in wood, and round about it dance andshout his name. Daramulun instituted these rites, as well as all theother immemorial rites of the assembled tribe or tribes. So when overthe heads of the boys, prostrated on the ground, are recited solemnlywhat Mr. Lang calls "the ten commandments, " that bid them honour theelders, respect the marriage law, and so on, there looms up beforetheir minds the figure of the ultimate law-giver; whilst his unearthlyvoice becomes for them the voice of the law. Thus is custom exalted, and its coercive force amplified, by the suggestion of a power--inthis case a definitely personal power--that "makes for righteousness, "and, whilst beneficent, is full of terror for offenders. * * * * * And now it may seem high time to pass on from the sociological andexternal view that has hitherto been taken of primitive religion toa psychological view of it--one that should endeavour to disclose thehidden motives, the spiritual sources, of the beliefs that underlieand sustain the customary practices. But precisely at this point theanthropological treatment of religion is apt to prove unsatisfactory. History can record that such and such is done with far more certaintythan that such and such a state of mind accompanies and inspires thedoing. Besides, the savage is no authority on the why and whereforeof his customs. "However else would a reasonable being think ofacting?" is his sufficient reason, as we have already seen. Not butwhat the higher minds amongst savages reflect in their own way uponthe meaning of their customs and rites. But most of this reflectionis no more than an elaborate "justification after the event. " The mindinvents what Mr. Kipling would call a "Just-so story" to account forsomething already there. How it might have come about, not how it didcome about, is all that the professed explanation amounts to. And whenit comes to choosing amongst mere possibilities, the anthropologist, instead of consulting the savage, may just as well endeavour to doit for himself. Now anthropological theories of the origin of religion seem to me togo wrong mainly because they seek to simplify too much. Having gotdown to what they take to be a root-idea, they straightway proclaimit _the_ root-idea. I believe that religion has just as few, or asmany, roots as human life and mind. The theory of the origin of religion that may be said to hold the field, because it is the view of the greatest of living anthropologists, isDr. Tylor's theory of animism. The term animism is derived from theLatin _anima_, which--like the corresponding word _spiritus_, whenceour "spirit"--signifies the breath, and hence the soul, whichprimitive folk tend to identify with the breath. Dr. Tylor's theoryof animism, then, as set forth in his great work, _Primitive Culture_, is that "the belief in spiritual beings" will do as a definition ofreligion taken at its least; which for him means the same thing astaken at its earliest. Now what is a "spiritual being"? Clearlyeverything turns on that. Dr. Tylor's general treatment of the subjectseems to lay most of the emphasis on the phantasm. A phantasm (as theetymology of the word shows) is essentially an appearance. In a dreamor hallucination one sees figures, more or less dim, but still having"vaporous materiality. " So, too, the shadow is something without bodythat one can see; though the breath, except on a frosty day, showsits subtle but yet sensible nature rather by being felt than by beingseen. Now there can be no doubt that the phantasm plays a considerablepart in primitive religion (as well as in those fancies of the primitivemind that have never found their way into religion, at all events intoreligion as identified with organized cult). Savages see ghosts, though probably not more frequently than we do; they have vivid dreams, and are much impressed by their dream-experiences; and so on. Besides, the phantasm forms a very convenient half-way house between the seenand the unseen; and there can be no doubt that the savage often saysbreath, shadow, and so forth, when he is trying to think and meansomething immaterial altogether. But animism would seem sometimes to be used by Dr. Tylor in a widersense, namely, as "a doctrine of universal vitality. " In dealing withthe myths of the ruder peoples, as, for example, those about the sun, moon, and stars, he shows how "a general animation of nature" is implied. The primitive man reads himself into these things, which, accordingto our science, are without life or personality. He thinks that theyhave a different kind of body, but the same kind of feelings and motives. But this is not necessarily to think that they are capable of givingoff a phantasm, as a man does when his soul temporarily leaves him, or when after death his soul becomes a ghost. There need be nothingghost-like about the sun, whether it is imagined as a shining orb, or as a shining being of human shape to whom the orb belongs. Thereis not anything in the least phantasmal about the Greek god Apollo. I think, then, that we had better distinguish this wider sense ofanimism by a different name, calling it "animatism, " since that willserve at once to disconnect and to connect the two conceptions. I am not sure, however, how far we ought to press this "doctrine ofuniversal vitality. " Does a savage, for instance, when he is hammeringat a piece of flint think of it as other than a "thing, " any more thanwe should? I doubt it. He may say "Confound you!" if it suddenly snapsin two, just as we might do. But though the language may seem to implya "you, " he would mean, I believe, to impute to the flint just as much, or as little, of personality as we should mean to do when using similarlanguage. In other words, I believe that, within the world of hisordinary work-a-day experience, he recognizes both things and persons;without giving a thought, in either case, to the hidden principlesthat make them be what they are, and act as they do. When, on the other hand, the thing, or the person, falls within theworld of supernormal experience, when they strike the imagination aswonderful and wonder-working, then there is much more reason why heshould seek to account to himself for the mystery in, or behind, thestrange appearance. Howitt, who knew his Australian natives intimately, cites the following as "a good example of how the native mind works. "To the black-fellow his club or his spear are part and parcel of hisordinary life. There is no, "medicine, " no "devil, " in them. If theyare to be made supernaturally potent, they must be specially charmed. But it is quite otherwise with his spear-thrower or his bull-roarer. The former for no obvious reason enables him to throw his spearextraordinarily far. (I have myself seen an Australian spear, withthe help of the spear-thrower, fly a hundred and fifty yards, and striketrue and deep at the end of its flight. ) The latter emits the noiseof thunder, though a mere chip of wood on the end of a string. These, then, are in themselves "medicine. " There is "virtue" in, or behind, them. Is, then, to attribute "virtue" the same thing, necessarily, as toattribute vitality? Are the spear-thrower and the bull-roarerinevitably thought of as alive? Or are they, as a matter of course, endowed with soul or spirit? Or may there be also an impersonal kindof "virtue, " "medicine, " or whatever the wonder-working power in thewonder-working thing is to be called? Now there is evidence that thesavage himself, in speaking about these matters, sometimes says power, sometimes vitality, sometimes spirit. But the simplest way ofdisposing of these questions is to remember that such fine distinctionsas these, which theorists may seek to draw, do not appeal at all tothe savage himself. For him the only fact that matters is that, whereassome things in the world are ordinary, and can be reckoned on, otherthings cannot be reckoned on, but are wonder-working. Moreover, of wonder-working things, some are good and some are bad. To get all the good kind of wonder-workers on to his side, so as toconfound the bad kind--that is what his religion is there to do forhim. "May blessings come, may mischiefs go!" is the import of hisreligious striving, whether anthropologists class it as spell or asprayer. Now the function of religion, it has been assumed, is to restoreconfidence, when man is mazed, and out of his depth, fearful of themysteries that obtrude on his life, yet compelled, if not exactlywishful, to face them and wrest from them whatever help is in them. This function religion fulfils by what may be described in one wordas "suggestion. " How the suggestion works psychologically--how, forinstance, association of ideas, the so-called "sympathetic magic, "predominates at the lower levels of religious experience--is adifficult and technical question which cannot be discussed here. Religion stands by when there is something to be done, and suggeststhat it can be done well and successfully; nay, that it is being sodone. And, when the religion is of the effective sort, the believersrespond to the suggestion, and put the thing through. As the Latinpoet says, "they can because they think they can. " What, from the anthropological point of view, is the effective sortof religion, the sort that survives because, on the whole, those whomit helps survive? It is dangerous to make sweeping generalizations, but there is at any rate a good deal to be said for classing the world'sreligions either as mechanical and ineffective, or as spiritual andeffective. The mechanical kind offers its consolations in the shapeof a set of implements. The "virtue" resides in certain rites andformularies. These, as we have seen, are especially liable to hardeninto mere mechanism when they are of the negative and precautionarytype. The spiritual kind of religion, on the other hand, which isespecially associated with the positive and active functions of life, tends to read will and personality into the wonder-working powers thatit summons to man's aid. The will and personality in the worshippersare in need not so much of implements as of more will and personality. They get this from a spiritual kind of religion; which in one way oranother always suggests a society, a communion, as at once the meansand the end of vital betterment. To say that religion works by suggestion is only to say that it worksthrough the imagination. There is good make-believe as well as bad;and one must necessarily imagine and make-believe in order to will. The more or less inarticulate and intuitional forces of the mind, however, need to be supplemented by the power of articulate reasoning, if the will is to make good its twofold character of a faculty of endsthat is likewise a faculty of the means to those ends. Suggestion, in short, must be purged by criticism before it can serve as the guideof the higher life. To bring this point out will be the object of thefollowing chapter. CHAPTER IXMORALITY Space is running out fast, and it is quite impossible to grapple withthe details of so vast a subject as primitive morality. For these thereader must consult Dr. Westermarck's monumental treatise, _The Originand Development of the Moral Ideas_, which brings together an immensequantity of facts, under a clear and comprehensive scheme of headings. He will discover, by the way, that, whereas customs differ immensely, the emotions, one may even say the sentiments, that form the rawmaterial of morality are much the same everywhere. Here it will be of most use to sketch the psychological groundworkof primitive morality, as contrasted with morality of the more advancedtype. In pursuance of the plan hitherto followed, let us try to moveyet another step on from the purely exterior view of human life towardsour goal; which is to appreciate the true inwardness of human life--sofar at least as this is matter for anthropology, which reaches nofarther than the historic method can take it. It is, of course, open to question whether either primitive or advancedmorality is sufficiently of one piece to allow, as it were, a compositephotograph to be framed of either. For our present purposes, however, this expedient is so serviceable as to be worth risking. Let us assume, then, that there are two main stages in the historical evolution ofsociety, as considered from the standpoint of the psychology of conduct. I propose to term them the synnomic and the syntelic phases of society. "Synnomic" (from the Greek _nomos_, custom) means that customs areshared. "Syntelic" (from the Greek _telos_, end) means that ends areshared. The synnomic phase is, from the psychological point of view, a kingdomof habit; the syntelic phase is a kingdom of reflection. The formeris governed by a subconscious selection of its standards of good andbad; the latter by a conscious selection of its standards. It remainsto show very briefly how such a difference comes about. The outstanding fact about the synnomic life of the ruder peoples isperhaps this--that there is hardly any privacy. Of course, many otherdrawbacks must be taken into account also--no wide-throwncommunications, no analytic language, no writing, no books, and soon; but perhaps being in a crowd all the time is the worst drawbackof all. For, as Disraeli says in _Sybil_, gregariousness is notassociation. Constant herding and huddling together hinders thedevelopment of personality. That independence of character which isthe prime condition of syntelic society cannot mature, even thoughthe germs be there. No one has a chance of withdrawing into his ownsoul. Therefore the individual does not experience that silentconversation with self which is reflection. Instead of turning inwards, he turns outwards. In short, he imitates. But how, it may be objected, does evolution take place, if every oneimitates every one else? Certainly, it looks at first sight like avicious circle. Nevertheless, there is room for a certain progress, or at any rate for a certain process of change. To analyse itspsychological springs would take us too long. If a phrase will doinstead of an explanation, we may sum them up, with the brilliant Frenchpsychologist, Tarde, as "a cross-fertilization of imitations. " We neednot, however, go far to get an impression of how this process of changeworks. It is going on every day in our midst under the name of "changeof fashion. " When one purchases the latest thing in ties or straw hats, one is not aiming at a rational form of dress. If there is progressin this direction, it is subconscious. The underlying spiritualcondition is not inaptly described by Dr. Lloyd Morgan as "asheep-through-the-gapishness. " From a moral point of view, this lack of capacity for private judgmentis equivalent to a want of moral freedom. We have seen how relativelyexternal are the sanctions of savage life. This does not mean, of course, that there is no answering judgment in the mind of the individual whenhe follows his customs. He says, "It is the custom; therefore it isright. " But this judgment can scarcely be said to proceed from a trulyjudging, that is to say, critical, self. The man watches his neighbours, taking his cue from them. His judgment is a judgment of sense. He doesnot look inwards to principle. A moral principle is a standard thatcan, by means of thought, be transferred from one sensible situationto another sensible situation. The general law, and its applicationto the situation present now to the senses, are considered apart, before being put together. Consequently, a possible application, however strongly suggested by custom, fashion, the action of one'sneighbours, one's own impulse or prejudice, or what not, can beresisted, if it appear on reflection not to be really suited to thecircumstances. In short, in order to be rational and "put two and twotogether, " one must be able to entertain two and two as distinctconceptions. Perceptions, on the contrary, can only be compared inthe lump. Just as in the chapter on language we saw how man began bytalking in holophrases, and only gradually attained to analytic, thatis, separable, elements of speech, so in this chapter we have to notethe strictly parallel development from confusion to distinction onthe side of thought. Savage morality, then, is not rational in the sense of analysed, butis, so to speak, impressionistic. We might, perhaps, describe it asthe expression of a collective impression. It is best understood inthe light of that branch of social psychology which usually goes bythe name of "mob-psychology. " Perhaps mob and mobbish are ratherunfortunate terms. They are apt to make us think of the wilderexplosions of collective feeling--panics, blood-mania, dancing-epidemics, and so on. But, though a savage society is by nomeans a mob in the sense of a weltering mass of humanity that has forthe time being lost its head, the psychological considerationsapplying to the latter apply also to the former, when due allowancehas been made for the fact that savage society is organized on apermanent basis. The difference between the two comes, in short, tothis, that the mob as represented in the savage society is a mobconsisting of many successive generations of men. Its traditionconstitutes, as it were, a prolonged and abiding impression, whichits conduct thereupon expresses. Savage thought, then, is not able, because it does not try, to breakup custom into separate pieces. Rather it plays round the edges ofcustom; religion especially, with its suggestion of the generalsacredness of custom, helping it to do so. There is found in primitivesociety plenty of vague speculation that seeks to justify the existing. But to take the machine to bits in order to put it together differentlyis out of the reach of a type of intelligence which, though competentto grapple with details, takes its principles for granted. Whenprogress comes, it comes by stealth, through imitating the letter, but refusing to imitate the spirit; until by means of legal fictions, ritual substitutions, and so on, the new takes the place of the oldwithout any one noticing the fact. Freedom, in the sense of intellectual freedom, may perhaps be saidto have been born in one place and at one time--namely, in Greece inthe fifth and fourth centuries B. C. [7] Of course, minglings andclashings of peoples had prepared the way. Ideas begin to count assoon as they break away from their local context. But Greece, inteaching the world the meaning of intellectual freedom, paved a waytowards that most comprehensive form of freedom which is termed moral. Moral freedom is the will to give out more than you take in; to repaywith interest the cost of your social education. It is the will totake thought about the meaning and end of human life, and by so doingto assist in creative evolution. [Footnote 7: Political freedom, which is rather a different matter, is perhaps pre-eminently the discovery of England. ] CHAPTER XMAN THE INDIVIDUAL By way of epilogue, a word about individuality, as displayed amongstpeoples of the ruder type, will not be out of place. There is a realdanger lest the anthropologist should think that a scientific viewof man is to be obtained by leaving out the human nature in him. Thiscomes from the over-anxiety of evolutionary history to arrive atgeneral principles. It is too ready to rule out the so-called"accident, " forgetful of the fact that the whole theory of biologicalevolution may with some justice be described as "the happy accidenttheory. " The man of high individuality, then, the exceptional man, the man of genius, be he man of thought, man of feeling, or man ofaction, is no accident that can be overlooked by history. On thecontrary, he is in no small part the history-maker; and, as such, shouldbe treated with due respect by the history-compiler. The "dry bones"of history, its statistical averages, and so on, are all very wellin their way; but they correspond to the superficial truth that historyrepeats itself, rather than to the deeper truth that history is anevolution. Anthropology, then, should not disdain what might be termedthe method of the historical novel. To study the plot without studyingthe characters will never make sense of the drama of human life. It may seem a truism, but is perhaps worth recollecting at the start, that no man or woman lacks individuality altogether, even if it cannotbe regarded in a particular case as a high individuality. No one isa mere item. That useful figment of the statistician has no realexistence under the sun. We need to supplement the books of abstracttheory with much sympathetic insight directed towards men and womenin 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 totake up): "It is pleasant for us to feel the rain beating on ourshoulders, and good to go out and dig yams, and come home wet, andsee 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 thanall the bones and stones that I have helped to dig out of our Mousteriancaves 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 intimateself-existence, of the speaker and his group--for, characteristicallyenough, he uses the first person plural--is disclosed sufficientlyfor our souls to get into touch. We are the nearer to appreciatinghuman history from the inside. Some of those students of mankind, therefore, who have been privilegedto live amongst the ruder peoples, and to learn their language well, and really to be friends with some of them (which is hard, sincefriendship implies a certain sense of equality on both sides), shouldtry their hands at anthropological biography. Anthropology, so faras it relates to savages, can never rise to the height of the mostilluminating kind of history until this is done. It ought not to be impossible for an intelligent white man to entersympathetically 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. Thatthere are men of outstanding individuality who help to make politicalhistory even amongst the rudest peoples is, moreover, hardly to bedoubted. Thus Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, in the introductory chapterof their work on the Central Australians, state that, after observingthe conduct of a great gathering of the natives, they reached theopinion that the changes which undoubtedly take place from time totime in aboriginal custom are by no means wholly of the subconsciousand spontaneous sort, but are in part due also to the influence ofindividuals of superior ability. "At this gathering, for example, someof the oldest men were of no account; but, on the other hand, othersnot so old as they were, but more learned in ancient lore or more skilledin matters of magic, were looked up to by the others, and they it waswho settled everything. It must, however, be understood that we haveno definite proof to bring forward of the actual introduction by thismeans of any fundamental change of custom. The only thing that we cansay is that, after carefully watching the natives during theperformance of their ceremonies and endeavouring as best we could toenter into their feelings, to think as they did, and to become forthe time being one of themselves, we came to the conclusion that ifone or two of the most powerful men settled upon the advisability ofintroducing some change, even an important one, it would be quitepossible for this to be agreed upon and carried out. " This passage is worth quoting at length if only for the admirable methodthat it discloses. The policy of "trying to become for the time beingone of themselves" resulted in the book that, of all first-hand studies, has done most for modern anthropology. At the same time Messrs. Spencerand Gillen, it is evident, would not claim to have done more thaninterpret the external signs of a high individuality on the part ofthese prominent natives. It still remains a rare and almost unheard-ofthing for an anthropologist to be on such friendly terms with a savageas to get him to talk intimately about himself, and reveal the realman within. There exist, however, occasional side-lights on human personality inthe anthropological literature that has to do with very rude peoples. The page from a human document that I shall cite by way of exampleis all the more curious, because it relates to a type of experiencequite outside the compass of ordinary civilized folk. Here and there, however, something like it may be found amongst ourselves. My friendMr. L. P. Jacks, for instance, in his story-book, _Mad Shepherds_, hasdescribed a rustic of the north of England who belonged to thisold-world order of great men. For men of the type in question can begreat, at any rate in low-level society. The so-called medicine manis a leader, perhaps even the typical leader, of primitive society;and, just because he is, by reason of his calling, addicted to privacyand aloofness, he certainly tends to be more individual, more of a"character, " than the general run of his fellows. I shall slightly condense from Howitt's _Native Tribes of South-EastAustralia_ the man's own story of his experience of initiation. Howittsays, by the way, "I feel strongly assured that the man believed thatthe events which he related were real, and that he had actuallyexperienced them"; and then goes on to talk about "subjectiverealities. " I myself offer no commentary. Those interested inpsychical research will detect hypnotic trance, levitation, and soforth. Others, versed in the spirit of William James' _Varieties ofReligious Experience_, will find an even deeper meaning in it all. The sociologist, meanwhile, will point to the force of custom andtradition, as colouring the whole experience, even when at its mostsubjective and dreamlike. But each according to his bent must workout these things for himself. In any case it is well that the end ofa book should leave the reader still thinking. The speaker was a Wiradjuri doctor of the Kangaroo totem. He said:"My father is a Lizard-man. When I was a small boy, he took me intothe bush to train me to be a doctor. He placed two large quartz-crystalsagainst my breast, and they vanished into me. I do not know how theywent, but I felt them going through me like warmth. This was to makeme clever, and able to bring things up. " (This refers to themedicine-man's custom of bringing up into the mouth, as if from thestomach, the quartz-crystal in which his "virtue" has its chiefmaterial embodiment or symbol; being likewise useful, as we see lateron, for hypnotizing purposes. ) "He also gave me some things likequartz-crystals in water. They looked like ice, and the water tastedsweet. After that, I used to see things that my mother could not see. When out with her I would say, 'What is out there like men walking?'She used to say, 'Child, there is nothing. ' These were the ghosts whichI began to see. " The account goes on to state that at puberty our friend went throughthe regular initiation for boys; when he saw the doctors bringing uptheir crystals, and, crystals in mouth, shooting the "virtue" intohim to make him "good. " Thereupon, being in a holy state like any othernovice, he had retired to the bush in the customary manner to fastand meditate. "Whilst I was in the bush, my old father came out to me. He said, 'Comehere to me, ' and then he showed me a piece of quartz-crystal in hishand. When I looked at it, he went down into the ground; and I sawhim come up all covered with red dust. It made me very frightened. Then my father said, 'Try and bring up a crystal. ' I did try, and broughtone up. He then said, 'Come with me to this place. ' I saw him standingby a hole in the ground, leading to a grave. I went inside and sawa dead man, who rubbed me all over to make me clever, and gave me somecrystals. When we came out, my father pointed to a tiger-snake, saying, 'That is your familiar. It is mine also. ' There was a string extendingfrom the tail of the snake to us--one of those strings which themedicine-men bring up out of themselves. My father took hold of thestring, and said, 'Let us follow the snake. ' The snake went throughseveral tree-trunks, and let us through them. At last we reached atree with a great swelling round its roots. It is in such places thatDaramulun lives. The snake went down into the ground, and came up insidethe tree, which was hollow. We followed him. There I saw a lot of littleDaramuluns, the sons of Baiame. Afterwards, the snake took us intoa great hole, in which were a number of snakes. These rubbed themselvesagainst me, and did not hurt me, being my familiars. They did thisto make me a clever man and a doctor. "Then my father said, 'We will go up to Baiame's Camp. ' [Amongst theWiradjuri, Baiame is the high god, and Daramulun is his son. What'little Daramuluns' may be is not very clear. ] He got astride a thread, and put me on another, and we held by each other's arms. At the endof the thread was Wombu, the bird of Baiame. We went up through theclouds, and on the other side was the sky. We went through the placewhere the doctors go through, and it kept opening and shutting veryquickly. My father said that, if it touched a doctor when he was goingthrough, it would hurt his spirit, and when he returned home he wouldsicken and die. On the other side we saw Baiame sitting in his camp. He was a very great old man with a long beard. He sat with his legsunder him, and from his shoulders extended two great quartz-crystalsto the sky above him. There were also numbers of the boys of Baiame, and of his people who are birds and beasts. [The totems. ] "After this time, and while I was in the bush, I began to bring crystalsup; but I became very ill, and cannot do anything since. " _November, 1911_. BIBLIOGRAPHY INTRODUCTORY NOTE. --It is impossible to provide a bibliography of sovast a subject, even when first-class authorities only are referredto; whilst selection must be arbitrary and invidious. Here bookswritten in English are alone cited, and those mostly the more modern. The reader is advised to spend such time as he can give to the subjectmostly on the descriptive treatises. A few very educative studies aremarked by an asterisk. In many cases, to save space, merely the author'sname with initials is given, and a library catalogue must be consulted, or a list of authors such as is to be found, _e. G. _ at the end ofWestermarck's works. A. THEORETICAL GENERAL. --E. B. Tylor, _Anthropology_* (best manual); _PrimitiveCulture_* (the greatest of anthropological classics); Lord Avebury'sworks; _Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor_. ANTIQUITY OF MAN. --W. J. Sollas, _Ancient Hunters and their ModernRepresentatives_ (best popular account). Subject difficult withoutspecial knowledge, to be derived from, _e. G. _ Sir J. Evans (StoneImplements); J. Geikie (Geology of Ice Age), etc. See also Brit. Mus. Guides to Stone Age, Bronze Age, Early Iron Age. RACE AND GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION. --A. C. Haddon, _Races of Man_ and_The Wanderings of Peoples_ (best short outlines to work from); fullerdetails in J. Deniker, A. H. Keane; and, for Europe, W. Z. Ripley. Seealso Brit. Mus. Guide to Ethnological Collections. SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND LAW. --J. G. Frazer, _Totemism and Exogamy_*;L. H. Morgan, _Ancient Society_*; E. Westermarck, _History of HumanMarriage_*; E. S. Hartland, _Primitive Paternity_; A. Lang, _The Secretof the Totem_; N. W. Thomas, _Kinship Organization and Group Marriagein Australia_; H. Webster, _Primitive Secret Societies_. RELIGION, MAGIC, FOLK-LORE. --J. G. Frazer, _The Golden Bough_* (3rdedit. ); E. S. Hartland, _The Legend of Perseus_ (esp. Vol. Ii); A. Lang, _Myth, Ritual and Religion_, * _The Making of Religion_, etc. ; W. Robertson Smith, _Early Religion of the Semites_*; F. B. Jevons, A. C. Crawley, D. G. Brinton, G. L. Gomme, L. R. Farnell, R. R. Marett, etc. MORALS. --E. Westermarck, _Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_*;E. B. Tylor, _Contemp. Rev. _ xxi-ii; L. T. Hobhouse, _Morals inEvolution_; A. Sutherland, _Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct_. MISCELLANEOUS. --Language: E. J. Payne, _History of the New World calledAmerica_, * vol. Ii. Art: Y. Hirn, _Origins of Art_. * Economics: P. J. H. Grierson, _The Silent Trade_. B. DESCRIPTIVE AUSTRALIA. --B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, _Native Tribes of CentralAustralia_, * _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_; A. W. Howitt, _Native Tribes of South-east Australia_*; J. Woods (and others), _Native Tribes of South Australia_; L. Fison and A. W. Howitt, _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_; H. Ling Roth, _Aborigines of Tasmania_. OCEANIA AND INDONESIA. --R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_*; B. H. Thompson, _The Fijians_; A. C. Haddon (and others), _Report ofCambridge Expedition to Torres Straits_; C. G. Seligmann (for NewGuinea); G. Turner, W. Ellis, E. Shortland, R. Taylor (for Polynesia);A. R. Wallace, _Malay Archipelago_; C. Hose and W. McDougall (forIndonesia). ASIA. --J. J. M. De Groot, _The Religious System of China_; W. H. R. Rivers, _The Todas_*; and a host of other good authorities for India, _e. G. _Sir H. H. Risley, E. Thurston, W. Crooke, T. C. Hodson, P. R. T. Gurdon, C. G. And B. Z. Seligmann (Veddas of Ceylon); E. H. Man, _Journ. R. Anthrop. Instit. _ xii (Andamanese); W. Skeat (for Malay Peninsula). AFRICA. --South: H. Callaway, E. Casalis, J. Maclean, D. Kidd. East:A. C. Hollis, J. Roscoe, W. S. And K. Routledge, A. Werner. West: M. H. Kingsley, A. B. Ellis. Madagascar: W. Ellis. AMERICA. --A vast number of important works, see esp. _SmithsonianInstitution_, _Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology_ (J. W. Powell, F. Boas, F. Cushing, A. C. Fletcher, M. C. Stevenson, J. R. Swanton, C. Mindeleff, S. Powers, J. Mooney, J. O. Dorsey, W. J. Hoffman, W. J. McGee, etc. ); L. H. Morgan (on Iroquois), J. Teit, C. Hill Tout; C. Lumholtz, _Unknown Mexico_; Sir E. Im Thurn, _Among the Indians of Guiana_. EUROPE. --Ancient: L. R. Farnell, _Cults of the Greek States_; J. E. Harrison, _Prolegomena to Greek Religion_; W. Warde Fowler, _ReligiousExperience of the Roman People_; _Anthropology and the Classics_, etc. Modern: G. F. Abbott, C. Lawson (to compare modern with ancient), Folk-lore Society's Publications, etc. C. SUBSIDIARY C. Darwin, _Descent of Man_ (Part I); W. Bagehot, _Physics andPolitics_*; W. James, _Varieties of Religious Experience_*; W. McDougall, _Introduction to Social Psychology_. * And in this seriesGeddes and Thomson, Newbigin, Myres, McDougall, Keith. INDEX Adultery, 195 Africans, 41, 100, 118, 127, 158, 193, 194, 195, 199 Age-grades, 176 Alpine race, 106 Altamira, 52 Americans, 40, 97, 100, 110-114, 124, 128, 133, 138-147, 157, 163, 174, 192, 199 Andamanese, 160, 188, 193 Anglo-Saxons, 193 Animatism, 230 Animism, 228, 230 Anthropo-geography, 23, 84, 95-101, 115, 129 Anthropoid apes, 23, 37, 76-79, 81, 84, 111, 115, 117 Anthropology, 7-30, 186, 204, 227, 242, 244 Asiatics, 37, 59, 82, 99, 105-111, 114-118, 120-122, 128, 132, 133, 142, 150, 160-162, 183, 188, 194, 216-219 Athapascan languages, 112 Atlantic phase of culture, 102 Aurignac, 48 Australians, 39, 49, 51, 52, 54, 118, 120, 127, 147, 157, 162, 167, 174, 190, 191, 198, 207, 219-227, 231, 244-250 Bagehot, W. , 84, 185, 187, 201 Baiame, 249, 250 Balfour, H. , 40 Basque language, 55, 132, 134 Biology, 10, 13 Bison, 49, 51, 79, 100 Blood-revenge, 189-194 Boas, F. , 75, 85 Borneo, 101, 184 Brandon, 56, 59 Bronze-age, 32, 55, 107 Bull-roarer, 125-128, 207, 226, 231 Burial, 35, 79, 177, 202, 206, 248 Bushmen, 39, 81, 87, 108, 119, 126, 160 Butler, S. , 66 Buzz, 128 Calaveras skull, 40 Cannibalism, 37 Cartailhac, E. , 34 Carthage, 105 Caste, 144, 179 Cave-paintings, 21, 47-53, 221 Chelles, 77 China, 106, 108, 115, 142 Chukchis, 110 Clan, 161, 171, 175, 189, 197, 203 Class (matrimonial), 172 Climate, 83-86, 101, 103, 117, 156 Cogul, 53 Collective responsibility, 189, 192 Colour, 82-86 Commont, V. , 33 Confederacy, 174 Consanguinity, 163 Conservatism of savage, 113, 124, 183, 184, 213, 245 Counting, 25, 148, 150 Cranial index, 74 Cranz, D. , 191 Creswell Crags, 47 Cro-Magnon, 80 Custom, 38, 183-187, 213-215, 223, 227, 238, 245, 247 Dahomey, 158, 194 Dairy-ritual, 216-219 Daramulun, 207, 226, 249 Darwin, C. , 8-11, 22, 64, 65, 69, 132, 157 Demolins, E. , 98, 111 Differential evolution, 121 Dog, 118 Dubois, E. , 76 Duel, 191, 195, 198 Egypt, 102, 105, 107, 115 Endogamy, 165, 173 Environment, 69, 70, 75, 93, 94-129 Eoliths, 41-48 Eskimo, 39, 111, 190, 191 Eugenics, 63, 70, 93, 95 Eurasian region, 106-110 Europeans, 33-59, 75, 77-82, 93, 102-105, 108, 109, 124, 126, 127, 133, 185, 193, 202, 230, 241 Evans, Sir J. , 42, 124 Evolution, 7-12, 14, 22, 61-72, 136, 205 Exogamy, 159, 161-165, 168, 169, 172, 173, 220 Experimental psychology, 23, 88 Family, 159, 160, 164, 171, 178, 196 Family jurisdiction, 196 Flint-mining, 56, 57 Folk-lore, 186, 210 Frazer, J. G. , 163, 172, 200 Freedom, 130, 154, 181, 185, 238, 241 Fuegians, 138-140, 145 Galley Hill skull, 46, 80 Gargas, 47-50 Genealogical method, 147 Gesture-language, 134, 149 Ghosts, 229, 230, 248 Gibraltar skull, 78 Greece, 127, 157, 172, 185, 241 Greenwell, W. , 56 Grime's Graves, 56 Haddon, A. H. , 88, 127 Haeckel, E. , 118 Hand-prints, 49 Harrison, B. , 41, 44 Head-form, 73-82, 107 Head-hunting, 185 Heidelberg mandible, 77 History, 11, 13-15, 30, 97, 156, 227, 242 Hittites, 107 Hobhouse, L. T. , 160 Holophrase, 140-152, 239 Horse, 37, 50, 100, 108 Howitt, A. W. , 163, 231, 246 Humility, 212 Ice-age, 21, 33, 36, 38, 46, 106, 112, 132 Icklingham, 38 Imagination, 28, 213, 223, 234 Incest, 189, 200 India, 115 Individuality, 29, 241-250 Indo-European languages, 133 Indonesia, 116, 118, 121, 184 Initiation, 127, 174, 176, 211, 224-227, 246-250 Instinct, 23, 68, 71, 89-91 Intichiuma ceremonies, 51, 167, 220-223 Iron-age, 40, 119 Jacks, L. P. , 246 James, W. , 247 Jersey, 32, 36, 45, 243 Kellor, F. A. , 91 Kent's cavern, 46 Kingship, 194, 195, 200, 202 Kinship, 163, 177 Knappers, 57, 58 Koryaks, 110 La Chapelle-aux-Saints, 79 Lamarck, J. B. , 64, 65 La Naulette mandible, 78 Lang, A. , 187, 226 Language, 24, 130-152 Lapps, 110 Law, 26, 181-203 Lecky, T. , 102 Le Moustier, 38, 45-47, 79 Le Play, F. , 98 Levy-Bruhl, L. , 138 Lineage, 165, 168 Lloyd Morgan, C. , 238 Local association, 177 Luck, 167, 200, 213, 215 McDougall, W. , 90 Madagascar, 114, 158 Magic, 27, 51, 177, 202, 208-210, 224, 245, 247 Malaya, 114, 122, 126 Malthus, T. , 69, 157 Mammoth, 37, 78, 111, 132 Man, E. H. , 188, 198 Mas d'Azil, 54 Masks, 53 Matriarchate, 166 Matrilineal, matrilocal, matripotestal, 165, 196 Medicine-man, 246-250 Mediterranean race, 104, 109, 119 Melanesians, 116, 121, 128 Mendelism, 67 Mentone, 35 Military discipline, 192, 199 Miscegenation, 93 Mob-psychology, 92, 201, 239-241 Moieties, 175 Morality, 29, 235-241 Mother-right, 166, 169, 197 Myres, J. L. , 102 Nation, 174 Natural selection, 68-71, 84 Nature, 15, 82, 155, 211, 230 Neanderthal race, 37, 39, 77-81, 87, 120, 206 Negative rites, 216-219, 234 Negritos, 81, 116-118, 120, 160, 188 Negro race, 80, 91, 116, 120 Neolithic age, 40, 53-59, 81, 104, 109 Niaux, 50-53 Nordic race, 109 Ordeal, 191, 195 Pacation, 192, 195 Painted pebbles, 54 Palaeolithic age, 40, 43-54, 108, 124 Papuasians, 116 Patagonians, 114 Patrilineal, patrilocal, patripotestal, 165, 196 Payne, E. J. , 138 Persecuting tendency, 187 Perthes, Boucher de, 43 Phantasm, 229 Philosophy, 15-17, 72, 154, 223 Phratry, 172 Pictographs, 51 Pithecanthropus erectus, 76, 115 Policy, 17-19 Polynesians, 121, 128, 183, 194 Positive rites, 219-224, 234 Pottery, 33, 55 Pre-Dravidians, 120 Pre-historic chronology, 34 Pre-history, 21, 31, 97, 111 Pre-natal environment, 94 Prestwich, Sir J. , 42 Profane vessels, 217 Property, 179, 192, 195, 198 Proto-history, 31, 97 Quartz crystals, 248-250 Race, 22, 59-94, 96, 99 Ratzel, F. , 98 Reincarnation, 167, 221, 224 Reindeer, 37, 55, 78, 106, 110 Religion, 27, 49, 127, 166-168, 204-235, 246-250 Ridgeway, W. , 107 Rites, 212, 219-224, 234 River-phase of culture, 102 Rivers, W. H. R. , 147, 216, 219 Rutot, A. , 41, 46 Sacramental meal, 222 Sacredness, 28, 52, 127, 168, 203, 213, 217, 218, 224, 226 St. Acheul, 33, 45, 46 Sanction, 195, 203 Savagery, 11, 158 Science, 12-15 Secret Societies, 177 Seligmann, C. G. And B. Z. , 161, 243 Sex-totems, 176 Shaw, B. , 66 Slander, 198 Slavery, 179 Smith, W. Robertson, 213 Snare, F. , 57 Social organization, 24-26, 152-181 Solutre, 47, 108 Spear-thrower, 231 Spencer, B. , and Gillen, F. J. , 39, 163, 175, 220, 244 Spirit, 228, 229 Steinmetz, S. R. , 197 Stratigraphical method, 31-36 Suggestion, 233-235, 237-240 Survivals, 186 Sutherland, A. , 157 Sympathetic magic, 126, 233 Synnomic phase of society 236 Syntelic phase of society, 236 Taboo, 200-203, 215, 218 Tasmanians, 39-44 Thames gravels, 38-44, 46 Theft, 198 Todas, 210-219 Torres Straits, 88 Totemism, 160, 166-168, 175, 189, 220-223, 250 Tribe, 173 Tylor, E. B. , 184, 228-230 Use-inheritance, 64, 93 Variation, 66-68 Veddas, 120, 160, 243 Wallace, A. R. , 69, 118, 184 Wealden dome, 43 Weismann, A. , 65, 66 Westermarck, E. , 235 Witchcraft, 202, 210 The Home University Library _of Modern Knowledge_ Is made up of absolutely new books by leading authorities. The editorsare _Professors Gilbert Murray_, _H. A. 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By GISBERT KAPP, Professor Of Electrical Engineering, University ofBirmingham. 54. The Making of the Earth. By. J. W. GREGORY, Professor of Geology, Glasgow University. 38 mapsand figures. Describes the origin of the earth, the formation andchanges of its surface and structure, its geological history, the firstappearance of life, and its influence upon the globe. 56. Man: A History of the Human Body. By A. KEITH, M. D. , Hunterian Professor, Royal College of Surgeons. Shows how the human body developed. 74. Nerves. By DAVID FRASER HARRIS, M. D. , Professor of Physiology, DalhousieUniversity, Halifax. Explains in non-technical language the place andpowers of the nervous system. 21. An Introduction to Science. By PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, Science Editor Of the Home UniversityLibrary. For those unacquainted with the scientific volumes in theseries, this would prove an excellent introduction. 14. Evolution. By PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON and PROF. PATRICK GEDDES. Explains to thelayman what the title means to the scientific world. 23. Astronomy. By A. R. HINKS, Chief Assistant at the Cambridge Observatory. "Decidedly original in substance, and the most readable andinformative little book on modern astronomy we have seen for a longtime. "--_Nature_. 24. Psychical Research. By PROF. W. F. BARRETT, formerly President of the Society for PsychicalResearch. A strictly scientific examination. 9. The Evolution of Plants. By DR. D. H. SCOTT, President of the Linnean Society of London. Thestory of the development of flowering plants, from the earliestzoological times, unlocked from technical language. 43. Matter and Energy. By F. SODDY, Lecturer in Physical Chemistry and Radioactivity, University of Glasgow. "Brilliant. Can hardly be surpassed. Sure toattract attention. "--_New York Sun_. 41. Psychology, The Study of Behaviour. By WILLIAM MCDOUGALL, of Oxford. A well digested summary of theessentials of the science put in excellent literary form by a leadingauthority. 42. The Principles of Physiology. By PROF. J. G. MCKENDRICK. A compact statement by the Emeritus Professorat Glasgow, for uninstructed readers. 37. Anthropology. By R. R. MARETT, Reader in Social Anthropology, Oxford. Seeks to plotout and sum up the general series of changes, bodily and mental, undergone by man in the course of history. "Excellent. So enthusiastic, so clear and witty, and so well adapted to the generalreader. "--_American Library Association Booklist_. 17. Crime and Insanity. By DR. C. A. MERCIER, author of _Text-Book of Insanity_, etc. 12. The Animal World. By PROF. F. W. GAMBLE. 15. Introduction to Mathematics. By A. N. WHITEHEAD, author of _Universal Algebra_. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 69. A History of Freedom of Thought. By JOHN B. BURY, M. A. , LL. D. , Regius Professor of Modern History inCambridge University. Summarizes the history of the long strugglebetween authority and reason and of the emergence of the principlethat coercion of opinion is a mistake. 55. Missions: Their Rise and Development. By MRS. MANDELL CREIGHTON, author of _History of England_. The authorseeks to prove that missions have done more to civilize the world thanany other human agency. 52. Ethics. By G. E. MOORE, Lecturer in Moral Science, Cambridge. Discusses whatis right and what is wrong, and the whys and wherefores. 65. The Literature of the Old Testament. By GEORGE F. MOORE, Professor of the History of Religion, HarvardUniversity. "A popular work of the highest order. Will be profitableto anybody who cares enough about Bible study to read a serious bookon the subject. "--_American Journal of Theology_ 50. The Making of the New Testament. By B. W. BACON, Professor of New Testament Criticism, Yale. Anauthoritative summary of the results of modern critical research withregard to the origins of the New Testament. 96. A History of Philosophy. By CLEMENT C. J. WEBB, Oxford. 35. The Problems of Philosophy. By BERTRAND RUSSELL, Lecturer and Late Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge. 44. Buddhism. By MRS. RHYS DAVIDS, Lecturer on Indian Philosophy, Manchester. 46. English Sects: A History of Nonconformity. By W. B. SELBIE, Principal of Manchester College, Oxford. 60. Comparative Religion. By PROF. J. ESTLIN CARPENTER. 88. Religious Development Between Old and New Testaments. By R. H. CHARLES, Canon of Westminster. Shows how religious and ethicalthought grew between 180 B. C. And 100 A. D. LITERATURE AND ART 73. Euripides and His Age. By GILBERT MURRAY, Regius Professor of Greek, Oxford. 81. Chaucer and His Times. By GRACE E. HADOW, Lecturer Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; Late Reader, Bryn Mawr. 70. Ancient Art and Ritual. By JANE E. HARRISON, LL. D. , D. Litt. "One of the 100 most importantbooks of 1913. "--_New York Times Review_. 61. The Victorian Age in Literature. By G. K. CHESTERTON. 97. Milton. By JOHN BAILEY. 59. Dr. Johnson and His Circle. By JOHN BAILEY. Johnson's life, character, works, and friendships aresurveyed; and there is a notable vindication of the "Genius ofBoswell. " 58. The Newspaper. By G. BINNEY DIBBLE. The first full account, from the inside, ofnewspaper organization as it exists to-day. 62. Painters and Painting. By SIR FREDERIC WEDMORE. With 16 half-tone illustration. 64. The Literature of Germany. By J. G. ROBERTSON. 48. Great Writers of America. By W. P. TRENT and JOHN ERSKINE, of Columbia University. 87. The Renaissance. By EDITH SICHEL, author of _Catherine de Medici, Men and Women of theFrench Renaissance_. 101. Dante. By JEFFERSON B. FLETCHER, Columbia University, An interpretation ofDante and his teachings from his writings. 93. An Outline of Russian Literature. By MAURICE BARING, author of _The Russian People_, etc. Tolstoi, Tourgenieff, Dostoieffsky, Pushkin (the father of Russian Literature), Saltykov (the satirist), Leskov, and many other authors. 40. The English Language. By L. P. SMITH. A concise history of its origin and development. 45. Medieval English Literature. By W. P. KER, Professor of English Literature, University College, London. "One of the soundest scholars. His style is effective, simple, yet never dry. "--_The Athenaeum_. 89. Elizabethan Literature. By J. M. ROBERTSON, M. P. , author of _Montaigne and Shakespeare, ModernHumanists_. 27. Modern English Literature. By G. H. MAIR. From Wyatt and Surrey to Synge and Yeats. "One of thebest of this great series. "--_Chicago Evening Post_. 2. Shakespeare. By JOHN MASEFIELD. "One of the very few indispensable adjuncts to aShakespearean Library. "--_Boston Transcript_. 31. Landmarks in French Literature. By G. L. STRACHEY, Scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge. "It isdifficult to imagine how a better account of French Literature couldbe given in 250 pages. "--_London Times_. 38. Architecture. By PROF. W. R. LETHABY. An introduction to the history and theory ofthe art of building. 66. Writing English Prose. By WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, Professor of English, Columbia University. "Should be put into the hands of every man who is beginning to writeand of every teacher of English that has brains enough to understandsense. "--_New York Sun_. 83. William Morris: His Work and Influence. By A. CLUTTON BROCK, author of _Shelley: The Man and the Poet_. WilliamMorris believed that the artist should toil for love of his work ratherthan the gain of his employer, and so he turned from making works ofart to remaking society. 75. Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle. By H. N. BRAILSFORD. The influence of the French Revolution on England. OTHER VOLUMES IN PREPARATIONHENRY HOLT AND COMPANY34 West 33d StreetNew York